TOKYO: Tokyo has asked Beijing to “ensure the safety of Japanese residents in China” after a spate of phone harassment against Japanese companies over the Fukushima sewerage dispute.

China firmly opposed the discharge of Fukushima water filtered and diluted under a plan validated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and notably suspended all seafood imports from Japan.

Calls from China began flooding Japanese companies from Thursday when operator Tepco, which manages the facility and offshore discharge, began draining water used to cool affected nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Hiroyuki Namazu, a senior Japanese diplomat in charge of Asian and Oceanian affairs, urged senior officials at the Beijing embassy in Tokyo to call for calm, according to a statement by Japan’s foreign ministry late Saturday.

Similar incidents have also occurred in China against Japanese entities, Namazu told Chinese diplomats, according to the statement.

– “Ensuring the safety of residents” –

“We urge the Chinese government to take appropriate measures, including urging its citizens to act calmly, and to take all possible measures to ensure the safety of Japanese residents in China and Japanese diplomatic missions in China. “

The Tokyo Embassy in Beijing has specifically asked its nationals not to speak out loud in Japanese.

A Fukushima businessman quoted by the Kyodo news agency said his four restaurants and pastry shops received a total of around 1,000 calls on Friday, mostly from China, prompting his companies to shut down their lines.

Fukushima City Mayor Hiroshi Kohata said in a Facebook social media post on Saturday that the city hall had received around 200 similar calls in two days, and local schools, restaurants and hotels were also affected.

On social networks, Chinese netizens have shared videos showing how to call Japanese numbers.

In total, Japan intends to evacuate more than 1.3 million m3 of tritiated water from Fukushima to the Pacific Ocean, and very gradually – by the early 2050s according to the current schedule.

This water comes from rain, groundwater, and the injections needed to cool the cores of the plant’s three reactors, which melted after the 2011 tsunami.

It was treated to remove its radioactive substances, except for tritium, and then diluted with seawater before being discharged into the ocean so that its radioactivity level did not exceed the target limit of 1,500 Bq/L.

On Sunday, Japan’s Environment Ministry said a new analysis of the water off the coast of Fukushima found no elevated levels of tritium and showed no sign of gamma-rays that could have come from other radioactive materials.