Mike Ives

Thousands of former residents have been barred from the area around the plant for years as crews carried out a large-scale radioactive waste cleanup in the aftermath of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The process of removing the fuel rods from a storage pool had been delayed since 2014 amid technical mishaps and high radiation levels.

The plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power, said in a statement that workers Monday morning began removing the first of 566 spent and unspent fuel rods stored in a pool at the plant’s third reactor. A radiation-hardened robot had first located the melted uranium fuel inside the reactor in 2017.

“Thanks to their training, the work has been going smoothly,” Tomohiko Isogai, the director of the nuclear plant, was quoted as saying by the Japanese broadcaster NHK, referring to workers involved in the fuel cleanup. He added that plant officials were “very sorry” over the delays in the process.

There are 1,573 fuel rods still inside the storage pools of the three reactors that melted down in 2011, the Kyodo News agency reported Monday. Tokyo Electric said that the cleanup at the third reactor would take just less than two years, and that it planned to eventually remove uranium from all three reactors.

Workers at the third reactor are using a remotely operated crane to remove the fuel rods, in a process that occurs underwater to prevent radiation leaks. The rods are dangerous partly because the pools are not enclosed, and they could be vulnerable in the event of another major earthquake.

Tokyo Electric’s announcement comes a few days after people began moving back to Okuma, a town near the ruined plant, after the authorities said that radiation levels there had fallen to a safe level.

Last year, Japan acknowledged for the first time that exposure to radiation at the site had caused a death. The announcement came after a man who had worked mostly at the plant over 28 years died of lung cancer.

The authorities had previously acknowledged that three other Fukushima workers developed leukemia and thyroid cancer after working on the plant cleanup. But experts are divided on whether exposure to radiation can be linked to illnesses among children who lived near the plant.

This article originally appeared in <a id="0138b4f8-2ad3-3870-a8a5-01c11647a032" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/world/asia/fukushima-japan-fuel-rods.html">The New York Times</a>.

Removing fuel rods, Japan hits milestone in Fukushima nuclear cleanup

The operator of Japan’s ruined Fukushima nuclear power plant began removing radioactive fuel rods Monday at one of three reactors that melted down after an earthquake and a tsunami in 2011, a major milestone in the long-delayed cleanup effort.

Jimmy Kawiel, a former official at the tourism department in Tafea province, which includes Dain’s home island, Tanna, confirmed the death. He said the cause was an infection Dain developed after cutting his leg in Port-Vila on New Year’s Eve, but which was not immediately treated.

Martin Butler, one of the two directors of “Tanna,” said Dain had traveled to Port-Vila because he was seeking work as a fruit picker in Australia or New Zealand.

“Tanna,” filmed mostly in Dain’s tribal village and the surrounding jungle, chronicles the fate of two star-crossed lovers who rebel after one is steered into an arranged marriage. The actors were all untrained villagers from the area, and many played themselves.

Butler and his co-director, Bentley Dean, live in Australia and specialize in documentaries. They developed the script for “Tanna” in collaboration with the villagers.

The film’s tragic love story is reminiscent of “Romeo and Juliet.” But Butler said it was loosely based on a true episode from the 1980s in which a couple from Tanna committed suicide because their families did not permit them to marry. Their deaths prompted village elders to agree to accept so-called love marriages.

Dain’s neighbors nominated him for a leading role in “Tanna” because they considered him the best-looking man in the village, Butler said. But he was not a natural actor.

“The whole process of acting was something that he had not thought about,” Butler said. “I don’t think at that stage he had seen a movie.”

However, he continued, Dain improved thanks to patience and enthusiasm, and he ultimately turned in “a really brilliant performance.”

“Tanna” won eight awards at international film festivals and was nominated for best foreign-language film at the 2017 Academy Awards. Dain and other cast members traveled the world to promote it, and Kawiel said he enjoyed his role as the film’s unofficial ambassador.

“This is such a good place, with many buildings, many cars, many people — it’s such a good place,” Dain, smiling broadly and wearing traditional garb, told an interviewer at the 2015 Venice International Film Festival. “But my life here is not as good as my life back at home.”

Tanna, a 45-minute flight from Port-Vila, is one of 83 islands in a remote, impoverished country that has fewer than 300,000 residents. It has roughly one-tenth of the national population and is one of five islands in Tafea, the southernmost of Vanuatu’s six provinces.

Kawiel said Dain was born in 1994 in Yakel, an unelectrified jungle village with a population of around 200.

Terry Adlington, managing director of the Tanna Coffee Development Co., who has worked with people from Yakel for more than two decades, described Dain as “a key participant in the everyday life of his village and the community at large.”

Yakel is one of several villages on Tanna with a sharing economy, in which yams, taro, pigs, pig tusks, woven mats and other items are used as currency, said Henry Dixson, an anthropologist in Auckland, New Zealand, who conducted fieldwork in Vanuatu for a doctoral dissertation.

But it is not untouched by modern life, he added, and some residents own cellphones and other consumer goods.

Dain’s death was first reported internationally by The Guardian. He is survived by his wife, Nancy, two sons and a daughter. One of his sons, Martin, was named after Butler, the film’s co-director.

His death prompted an outpouring of tributes on social media. The cargo plane carrying his wooden coffin was met at the Tanna airport on Sunday by Vanuatu’s deputy prime minister and other senior officials.

After the coffin was loaded onto a truck on the tarmac, throngs of villagers, some weeping, jumped aboard and hugged it, said TJ Feller, a tourist from San Diego who witnessed the scene.

“Gone Too Soon,” a local newspaper headline read the next day.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/obituaries/mungau-dain-dead.html" id="e8963c8e-2898-3804-a5fc-79bff71eaaec">The New York Times</a>.

Mungau Dain, a tribal villager from Vanuatu who starred in “Tanna,” an Oscar-nominated film about his Pacific island homeland, died on Saturday at a hospital in Port-Vila, the country’s capital. He was 24.

Mungau Dain, Unlikely Pacific Island Film Star, Dies at 24

The Chinese state news media were unusually muted about Yuan’s death, perhaps because of sensitivity before the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown next year. But Hong Kong and overseas Chinese news outlets reported that a funeral was held for Yuan on Sunday in Babaoshan, the cemetery in Beijing for senior Communist cadres. The reports did not give a cause of death.

Yuan won fame or notoriety as an ally of Li Peng, who was premier during the Tiananmen crackdown, but he first rose to prominence under Zhao Ziyang, Li’s more liberal rival. By 1983, Yuan was a spokesman for the government, although a brief biography issued at his funeral said he was formally made spokesman for the State Council, which is China’s cabinet, in 1986.

He represented China to the outside world at a time of intense factional battles within the ruling Communist Party and a major restructuring of the Chinese economy.

But Yuan is mainly remembered as the public defender of the government’s response to the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Beijing in June 1989. The repression resulted in the deaths of hundreds of pro-democracy protesters and bystanders, perhaps more, when troops were ordered to open fire on them.

Yuan made the government’s first extensive public comments on the crackdown two days later, playing down the military’s responsibility for the violence and casualties.

That same month, he told Tom Brokaw of NBC News that “not one person” had died in the square on the day it was cleared of protesters.

John Pomfret, an American journalist who covered the Tiananmen Square clashes for The Associated Press, said the claim might have been accurate — but only because the killing happened outside the square.

“It’s a kind of a case study even to this day of how Chinese spokespeople deal with very difficult situations,” said Pomfret, who in 2016 published a history of Sino-American relations. Yuan, he added, was the ultimate “flexible Leninist apparatchik” who survived in a Communist bureaucracy by making enormous compromises.

Yuan Mu was born in January 1928 in Zhaoyang, a town in the eastern province of Jiangsu, the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao reported. He joined underground activities of the Communist Party while studying at Fudan University in Shanghai and was later a journalist at several party-run newspapers before joining Xinhua, the official news agency, according to the Hong Kong China News Agency.

Yuan moved into government work in the 1970s, puttng his journalistic background to use in drafting party and government documents before becoming a spokesman.

As the government’s public face during the tumultuous late 1980s, Yuan had to navigate the leaders’ shifting and divided positions as students and intellectuals mobilized to demand political liberalization and an end to official corruption.

In the early spring of 1989, he spoke sympathetically about the students protesting in Beijing. But a few weeks later, he defended the party leadership’s decision to impose martial law in the city — a prelude to the bloody mayhem when soldiers moved into Beijing and other cities to quell the protests.

James R. Lilley, the U.S. ambassador to China from 1989 to 1991, later told an interviewer that Yuan had been Li’s “hatchet man” against the student protesters. Lilley also wrote in his 2004 memoir, “China Hands,” that Yuan had a reputation among the foreign press corps for being “reptilian.”

After the crackdown, many people in China believed that the number of civilians shot or beaten to death by the military was in the thousands. Yuan, however, told reporters on June 6 that an estimated 300 people had been killed, including “troops, thugs and spectators.” He said the injured included not only 2,000 civilians, but also more than 5,000 soldiers.

As for the international outcry over the bloodshed in Beijing, Yuan said China could put up with any reprisals by foreign governments.

“We are not afraid of this,” he said. “We Chinese people will not allow them to interfere in China’s domestic affairs, either by condemnations or by sanctions.”

Zhang Lifan, an independent historian in Beijing, said of Yuan that the events of June 1989 had “nailed him to the pillory of history.”

“If he had stayed a reporter, he might not have become a high-ranking official,” said Zhang, who left the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences after 1989. “But at least he wouldn’t have become infamous.”

Yuan’s performance in June 1989 did not derail his career. He remained a government spokesman even after the Communist Party leader, Zhao Ziyang, was purged later that year for having supported students during the Tiananmen Square protests.

Pomfret said that Yuan’s ability to “skate over” a factional battle between Zhao, who supported a more liberal version of Chinese communism, and Li, a conservative hard-liner, testified to his instinct for political survival.

Years after the Tiananmen episode, Yuan played down his role in interviews with reporters.

“I don’t much want to mention it — that June 4 disturbance — and I hope people gradually forget it,” he told a Chinese television reporter in 1991.

Yuan finished his career as a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body. He stepped down in 2000.

In 2012, after the mother of a 17-year-old who had died in the crackdown asked Yuan to “come clean” about the government’s armed suppression of protests, he said he did not know much about it.

“Go and ask someone who really understands the situation,” he told Radio Free Asia, a broadcaster funded by the U.S. government.

Chinese state news media have rarely mentioned Yuan over the years, and initial reports about his death were removed from Chinese websites.

Lilley, the former U.S. ambassador to Beijing, wrote in his memoir that Yuan had a daughter who applied for a student visa to the United States. But the Hong Kong China News Agency reported that Yuan had only two sons, citing an interview with one of them, Yang Xiaobei.

That report also said that Chinese leaders, past and present, sent floral tributes to Yuan’s funeral, including Premier Li Keqiang, former President Jiang Zemin, and Li Peng, the former premier whose policies Yuan defended.

“Confronted with grave and complex developments internationally and domestically, he thoroughly promoted the policy directions of the party and government,” an account of Yuan’s life issued at his funeral said, according to the Hong Kong report. “In particular, at a crucial moment, his stance was firm and clear.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/obituaries/yuan-mu-dead.html" id="83bdfe41-121a-3156-a664-98dbc9ad24c0">The New York Times</a>.

Yuan Mu, a Communist Party propaganda official who defended the Chinese military’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters around Tiananmen Square in 1989, died on Dec. 13 in Beijing. He was 90.

Yuan Mu, Face of China's Tiananmen Square Crackdown, Dies at 90

His death, at Prince of Wales Hospital, was confirmed Monday by Tammy Ho, the vice president of PEN Hong Kong, and Yibing Huang, an associate professor of Chinese at Connecticut College. Local news media reported that Meng had been treated for lung cancer.

Meng, whose own writing has been published and translated into many languages, was a co-founder of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, a nonprofit organization formed in 2011 to promote freedom of expression and publication.

Liu, a renegade Chinese intellectual who protected students from encroaching soldiers during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and who won the Nobel Peace Prize years later while locked away, died at 61 in 2017 at a hospital in China while under guard.

Among Meng’s last projects was an anthology of poems in Liu’s memory, published this year in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Last year, as Chinese authorities rebuffed calls by foreign doctors for an ailing Liu to be allowed to go overseas for medical treatment, Meng published an untitled poem — later translated into English by Anne Henochowicz for the website China Digital Times — that began with these lines: "Broadcast the death of a nation/ Broadcast the death of a country/ Hallelujah, only he is coming back to life. Who stopped his resurrection/ This nation has no murderer/ This country has no bloodstain.”

Soon after, Liu became the first Nobel Peace Prize laureate to die in state custody since 1938.

Meng Lang was born in Shanghai in 1961 and participated in unofficial poetry movements in China throughout the 1980s, according a biographical sketch published by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, where Ho is a founding editor.

He later helped edit the book “A Compendium of Modern Chinese Poetry, 1986-1988” and was a writer in residence at Brown University from 1995 to 1998. Huang, of Connecticut College, said that Meng moved from the United States to Hong Kong in 2006 and to Taiwan in 2015.

Meng “played an important, fearless role in championing an unorthodox, experimental and free-spirited poetry in China back in the 1980s,” Huang, who is also a poet, said in an email.

“Although he had been living overseas since 1995, Meng Lang was widely respected and loved by poets, artists and friends in mainland China and overseas,” he added. “He also contributed to the growth of a new diasporic Chinese poetry.”

Meng was a vocal supporter of Yiu Mantin, a fellow Hong Kong-based publisher who in 2014 was sentenced to 10 years in prison by mainland Chinese authorities on charges of smuggling industrial chemicals. Meng was among those who said that the charges were a political vendetta tied to his plans to publish a book critical of President Xi Jinping.

“I’m still convinced that this sentence was so heavy because of political considerations,” Meng said of Yiu, who also goes by the Mandarin Chinese rendering of his name, Yao Wentian. “If you took away the politics, then the sentence would have been much lighter, and Yao Wentian might not have ever been targeted to begin with.”

Since Meng’s death last week, tributes have poured in from an international chorus of writers, translators and free speech advocates.

“The exiled poet Meng Lang has passed away, but he has left behind a lot of poetry, his life’s footsteps,” dissident Chinese novelist Ma Jian, who lives in exile in London, wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “As we walk along the path of these poems, we will see him again, this ‘child of the sky,'” he added, an apparent reference to a refrain in one of Meng’s untitled poems.

Patrick Poon, a researcher with Amnesty International in Hong Kong, described Meng’s death in an email as “a big loss not only to the dissent writers’ community, but to contemporary Chinese literature in China.”

A commemorative reading in Meng’s honor was scheduled for Tuesday night in Hong Kong. A posting for the event on Facebook pays homage to his poem “Encounter in the Black Night,” in which a “lost” generation is likened to two lovers finding their way out of darkness by touching the poles of extinguished street lamps.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/obituaries/meng-lang-dead.html" id="b968619e-7357-3dd9-a30c-ef311d02439a">The New York Times</a>.

Meng Lang, a poet who promoted Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, along with other dissident Chinese writers, died Wednesday in Hong Kong. He was 57.

Meng Lang, Poet Who Promoted Dissident Writers, Dies at 57

His death at Prince of Wales Hospital, was confirmed Monday by Tammy Ho, the vice president of PEN Hong Kong, and Yibing Huang, an associate professor of Chinese at Connecticut College. Local news media reported that Meng had been treated for lung cancer.

Meng, whose own writing has been published and translated into many languages, and he was a co-founder of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, a nonprofit organization formed in 2011 to promote freedom of expression and publication. He was a longtime supporter of Liu’s.

Among Meng’s last projects was an anthology of poems in Liu’s memory, published earlier this year in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Meng was born in Shanghai in 1961 and participated in several unofficial poetry movements in China throughout the 1980s, according a biographical sketch published by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, where Ho is a founding editor.

He later helped edit the book “A Compendium of Modern Chinese Poetry, 1986-1988” and was a writer in residence at Brown University from 1995 to 1998. Huang, of Connecticut College in New London, said that Meng moved from the United States to Hong Kong in 2006 and to Taiwan in 2015.

Meng’s death at Hong Kong’s Prince of Wales Hospital was confirmed Monday by Tammy Ho, the vice president of PEN Hong Kong, and Yibing Huang, an associate professor of Chinese at Connecticut College. Huang, who met Meng in 1985, said he believed the cause of death was lung cancer, which local media had reported he was being treated for.

Meng’s writing has been published and translated into many languages, and he was a co-founder of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, a nonprofit organization formed in 2011 to promote freedom of expression and publication.

He was also a longtime supporter of Liu, a renegade Chinese intellectual who protected students from encroaching soldiers during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and who won the Nobel Peace Prize years later while locked away. Among Meng’s last projects was an anthology of poems in Liu’s memory, published earlier this year in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Meng was born in Shanghai in 1961 and participated in several unofficial poetry movements in China throughout the 1980s, according a short biographical sketch published by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, where Ho is a founding editor.

He later helped edit the book “A Compendium of Modern Chinese Poerty, 1986-1988” and was a writer in residence at Brown University from 1995 to 1998, according to the sketch. Huang of Connecticut College said that Meng moved to Hong Kong from the United States in 2006 and to Taiwan in 2015.

Meng was a vocal supporter of Yiu Mantin, a fellow Hong Kong-based publisher who in 2014 was sentenced to 10 years in prison by mainland Chinese authorities on charges of smuggling industrial chemicals. Meng was among those who said the charges were a political vendetta tied to his plans to publish a book critical of President Xi Jinping.

“The exiled poet Meng Lang has passed away, but he has left behind a lot of poetry, his life’s footsteps,” dissident Chinese novelist Ma Jian, who lives in exile in London, wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “As we walk along the path of these poems, we will see him again, this ‘child of the sky,'” he added, an apparent reference to the refrain in one of Meng’s untitled poems.

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Mike Ives

Articles written by the author

Removing fuel rods, Japan hits milestone in Fukushima nuclear cleanup

Mungau Dain, Unlikely Pacific Island Film Star, Dies at 24

Yuan Mu, Face of China's Tiananmen Square Crackdown, Dies at 90

Meng Lang, Poet Who Promoted Dissident Writers, Dies at 57

Meng Lang, Poet Who Promoted Dissident Writers, Dies at 57

Meng Lang, Poet Who Promoted Dissident Writers, Dies at 57