Photo/Illutration Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike, right, beams as she tucks into sashimi from Fukushima and Miyagi prefectures for lunch on Aug. 25,, 2023. (Soichi Tsuchidate)

Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike fearlessly tucked into a lunch of raw fish to show her support for fishermen worried about their livelihoods following the release into the ocean of treated radioactive water from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

The promotional effort came a day after the first batch of tainted water was discharged into the Pacific Ocean.

Flanked by high-ranking officials of the Tokyo metropolitan government, Koike feasted Aug. 25 at the metropolitan government cafeteria on sashimi and fried fish caught in the northern Tohoku region prefectures of Fukushima and Miyagi.

“We will conduct reconstruction support measures through a sales promotion campaign in Tokyo, which is a huge consumer market,” Koike told a news conference later in the day. “My lunch was part of such efforts.”

At an Aug. 24 meeting of the National Governors’ Association, Osaka Governor Hirofumi Yoshimura proposed having all prefectural government cafeterias provide seafood caught off the coast of Fukushima as one way of grappling with negative connotations associated with the release into the ocean of treated radioactive water.

The central government insists the procedure is 100 percent safe and plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said tests turned up no abnormalities in water samples taken offshore hours after the first batch of water was released.

Miyagi Governor Yoshihiro Murai, who will take over as head of the association on Sept. 3, called on TEPCO as well as the central government to “fulfill their responsibility to explain to all Japanese, as well as foreign nations, about the safety” of the seafood from the Tohoku region.

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