Japanese officials say no link between mysterious mass fish deaths and Fukushima release

Around 1,200 tons of dead fish wash ashore and crowd about kilometre-long stretch of coastline

Japanese officials have junked reports that linked the deaths of tons of fishes along the shoreline in Hokkaido with the release of treated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Around 1,200 tons of dead sardines and mackerels washed ashore and crowded about a kilometre-long stretch of the coastline in Hakodate city last week, leaving marine experts baffled.

The city administration was inundated with dozens of enquiries about the dead fish and requests to volunteer for collecting and disposing of the remains, government officials said.

While no official statement has been shared by Tokyo, a report in the British newspaper Daily Mail blamed the fish deaths in the northern prefecture on the water discharged from the decommissioned Fukushima nuclear plant. The Daily Mail suggested that the fish died three months after the controversial release of treated water from the nuclear power plant.

“We are concerned about the unsubstantiated information,” the fisheries agency said.

Its propagation promotion division said: “There have been no abnormalities found in the results of water-monitoring surveys. We are concerned about the proliferation of information that is not based on scientific evidence.”

Fishes sometimes wash up ashore in massive numbers when the waters they are in experience sudden change in temperature or when they are fleeing from predators like dolphins, according to the Hokkaido Research Organisation’s Hakodate fisheries experiment station.

The fishes found on the beach were likely a part of a school migrating towards south at this time of the year, the station said, reported Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.

The dead fishes were being disposed of from the coastline using heavy machinery, city officials said, adding that the cleanup will go on till the end of December given the volume.

Photos of the incident showed thousands of tons of sardines and some mackerels on the shore, creating a sliver blanket along a stretch of beach about a kilometre (0.6 mile) long.

In August this year, thousands of tons of treated water was released from the Fukushima nuclear plant by the Tokyo Electric power company. The Fumio Kishida administration said it needed to discharge the water as part of a key step of its critical process of decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi plant, including the removal of molten fuel.

The government later defended the accusations of unsafe water and said no radioactive anomalies were found in the released water.