When a specially-designed robot dies within 3 hours of being exposed to Fukushima's radiation, it is clear something is not quite as propagandized in Japan; and today, as SCMP reports, extremely high levels of radiation have been discovered in a children's playground in Tokyo. While two hours of exposure to a child would be equivalent to the maximum does allowable in a year, Japanese officials say they do not think it is connected to the disaster at Fukushima. We are not sure whether that is supposed to reassure or terrorize locals?

As The South China Morning Post reports,

Soil underneath a slide at the children's playground in the northwest of the Japanese capital showed radiation readings of up to 480 microsieverts per hour, the local administrative office said.

The radiation level is over 2,000 times that at which the national government requires soil cleaning in areas around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where reactors melted down after the March 2011 tsunami.

Anyone directly exposed to this level would absorb in two hours the maximum dose of radiation Japan recommends in a year.

"Many children play in the park daily, so the ward office should explain the situation," Kyodo News quoted a 62-year-old local woman as saying.

...

Officials were made aware of the contamination after a local resident reported it on Monday and say they do not think it is connected to the disaster at Fukushima. "Because the area in which we detect radioactivity is very limited, and readings in surrounding parts are normal, we suspect radioactive materials of some kind are buried there," local mayor Yukio Takano said in a statement.

The park was built in 2013, two years after the Fukushima nuclear crisis, a local official said, on what was previously a parking lot for Tokyo's sanitation department. Top soil at the lot was replaced before the land was turned into a park, said the Toshima official.

Many families in eastern Japan continue to survey the levels of radioactive contamination around their houses, distrustful of government assurances that most places had not been affected by the Fukushima nuclear meltdown.

Such efforts have led some people to discover radioactive materials that had been dumped in their neighbourhoods.