“Do you really care about our children’s health?” one parent shouted. “Why have you acted so late?” said another. Among other concerns: isn’t radiation still raining down on Fukushima? Shouldn’t the entire school building be decontaminated? The entire city? Can we trust you?
“We are doing all we can,” pleaded Tomio Watanabe, a senior official of Fukushima’s education board.
A huge outcry is erupting in Fukushima over what parents say is a blatant government failure to protect their children from dangerous levels of radiation. The issue has prompted unusually direct confrontations in this conflict-averse society, and has quickly become a focal point for anger over Japan’s handling of the accident at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, ravaged in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
At issue are updated government guidelines that allow schoolchildren to be exposed to radiation doses that are more than 20 times the previously permissible levels. That dose is equal to the international standard for adult nuclear power plant workers.
Adding to the anxiety, there is little scientific knowledge of the sorts of radiation dangers that Japan may now be facing. Scientists say readings in most areas are too low to cause immediate illness — even among children, who are more vulnerable — but they have a limited understanding of how low radiation doses over a long period of time can affect health.
“People in Japan want a simple answer: Is it safe or is it dangerous?” said Kuniko Tanioka, a member of Parliament’s upper house, on a recent visit to Washington. But given the state of radiation science, “there is no such thing” as a simple answer, Ms. Tanioka said.
For two months, the children at the Soramame Children’s House, a day care center about 37 miles from the stricken plant, spent their days indoors, windows sealed shut to keep out radiation, their favorite buckets and spades contaminated and strictly off limits.
But when the local authorities made no effort to decontaminate the area, caregivers took matters into their own hands. On the advice of local environmental groups — they said local officials had none to give — a group of parents and teachers donned makeshift protective suits and masks, took up spades and disposed of the playground’s topsoil.
After the topsoil removal, radioactive materials, which tend to be deposited in the soil, fell from about 30 times the levels naturally found in the environment to twice those levels.
“It breaks my heart that they did nothing for the children,” said Sadako Monma, herself a mother of two, who has run the Soramame center for 15 years. “Our answer was to stop waiting for someone to help us.”
On Monday, a group of angry parents from Fukushima staged a rowdy protest outside Japan’s Education Ministry in Tokyo, bearing signs reading “Save our children” and demanding to speak with the minister. They were rebuffed.
Yoshiaki Takaki, the education minister, later stressed that the government would allow children to remain exposed to the updated levels of radiation.
“We will endeavor to bring radiation levels down,” Mr. Takaki told reporters on Tuesday.
Slow action by the government has set off a revolt among the usually orderly ranks of Japanese bureaucrats.
Some smaller towns and cities in Fukushima Prefecture have spurned orders from Tokyo, declaring their schools unsafe and sending in bulldozers to remove contaminated soil from the school grounds. A handful of individual children’s facilities, like Soramame, have done the same. In April, an adviser to Prime Minister Naoto Kan resigned over the new radiation guidelines, saying he would not let his own children be exposed to those levels.
Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting from Washington.