For factual background, read through the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster Wikipedia entry. Now come your specific hypotheticals to address:

a. Assume you are a lawyer in the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs tasked with representing the interests of Korea. How do you analyze the following three problems on the Korean side? The first problem is that the Government of Japan told South Korea nothing about the nuclear accident at the time, instead simply insisting that the situation was well in hand. So the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is somewhat embarrassed that they accepted the Japanese government’s story until journalists uncovered the true extent of the Fukushima accident (at which point they were referred to as Japanese “puppets,” a serious insult in Korean terms, causing the South Korean Foreign Minister to resign from office).

b. The second problem is that Korean fishing trawlers on the high seas in the Sea of Japan traditionally catch and sell valuable fish year-round, but their commercial buyers immediately dried up as soon as the Fukushima accident occurred. After all, who wants to eat radioactive sushi? Assume that six months later the Korean trawlers still cannot catch fish in the Sea of Japan, because retail seafood customers simply reject eating fish from the Sea of Japan (and still make jokes about the fish glowing in the dark).

c. The third problem is that the Inchon, South Korea government water desalinization plant, with water intakes from the Sea of Japan, was forced to close for a month in the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima accident. Scientific monitoring of the Inchon water desalinization plant’s Sea of Japan water intakes revealed unacceptable levels of radiation for the entire month (with a profile matching the Fukushima radioactive pollutants which washed into the sea following the reactor accident).

Does Japan owe any legal responsibility under customary international law to South Korea for any or all of these three problems? (Just ignore any treaty law concerning nuclear facilities and emissions, or questions about liability under municipal law; we only want to know the customary law answer(s), but you should analyze the three problems separately under customary law, understood as limited to the Trail Smelter, Lake Lanoux and Nuclear Test case precedents.)

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