At the moment CNIC has 9 paid staff, but like any shoestring NGO trying to save the world, we depend largely on volunteers: volunteers to help gather and analyse the information, volunteers to help disseminate the message and volunteers to help us with our regular office work. Here are a few areas where volunteers make a big difference to our work:

Translation and Interpreting (Japanese-English, English-Japanese, etc)

Proof reading

Mail out

Whistle blowers

This isn't meant to be a comprehensive list, of course, but it might give you a few clues.

Translation, proof reading and interpreting

Japanese-English translators are required for our bi-monthly newsletter Nuke Info Tokyo and also for occasional books and pamphlets on major nuclear issues in Japan. Ideally, we need native English speakers with good writing skills who are able to read difficult Japanese, but non-native speakers can also be a great help, as long as they can produce clear and understandable first drafts which can then be sent to native proof readers.

Proof readers really must be native speakers. It is their job to make sure our documents are readable and fluent.

English-Japanese translators are needed to help us disseminate important articles that come in from overseas. We receive a huge volume of mail. We couldn't dream of translating it all, but sometimes there are articles whcih we would like to disseminate more widely. For that matter, if we had Japanese versions of some of this material, it would save a lot of time for our Japanese staff. We are all bi-lingual, but it always takes much longer when it isn't your first language.

We need interpreters for conferences and when foreign guests visit the office. Obviously a very high level of proficiency in both languages is required. We don't at the moment have anyone with professional interpreting skills on our staff.

This has all been written as if English was the only language other than Japanese that matters in the world. That is obviously not true. If the skills were available to us, the above comments could all be applied to other languages too.

Mail out

As you can imagine, this is a huge task. You don't have to speak a foreign language to put newsletters in envelopes, but such volunteers make an immeasurable difference to our work. For one, they free up time for paid staff to get on with their other work. That doesn't mean we leave it all to volunteers, however. One of the joys of our job is working together with our volunteers. Mail out time is a time for everyone to pitch in and help.

Whistle blowers

The area that we are working in is one where the industry can only survive by keeping the public ignorant of what is really going on. That doesn't mean it's always illegal, but if you browse through this web site, you'll see that sometimes it is. Looked at from this point of view, you can see that inside information is hugely important.

We are not soliciting spurious leaks from people with a chip on their shoulder, but we welcome information from people of conscience, who are genuinely concerned about what is happening. As for our capacity to respond, that depends on all sorts of circumstances, including our work load. But feel free to get in touch.

Contact us at the following address if you think you might be able to help:

Citizens' Nuclear Information Center
3F Kotobuki Bldg., 1-58-15 Higashi-nakano, Nakano-ku, Tokyo 164 Japan
Tel: 81-3-5330-9520; Fax: 81-3-5330-9530
Email