Japanese face painful nuclear
dilemma By Christopher Johnson
NEAR MOUNT FUJI, Japan - In legendary
director Akira Kurosawa's 1990 film Dreams,
almost the entire populace of Japan falls into the
ocean amid tremors, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions
and nuclear explosions.
Kurosawa, who had
experienced the 1923 earthquake and fire swirls
that killed an estimated 100,000 in the Tokyo
area, used one of his final works to scare
Japanese into mistrusting officials who said a
nuclear catastrophe could never happen in a
tremor-prone country.
Japan's not at
Doomsday yet, and most Japanese are trying to stay
calm. But amid rolling blackouts, food and fuel
shortages, and the slow-motion nightmare at the
Fukushima power plant following last Friday's nine
magnitude earthquake and the massive
tsunami it set off, many
foreign residents and Japanese have a
life-and-death dilemma.
Should they heed
the calming words of the Japanese government
telling them to stay put, or foreign governments
such as France, China, the United Kingdom and the
United States, who are evacuating their citizens.
The Russians, who have a proverb saying "an
optimist is a pessimist who hasn't lived long
enough yet", have put it in the strongest language
- they expected a worst-case scenario of
radioactive leakage at the Fukushima plant where
its four reactors are in severe distress. They
should know. They experienced Chernobyl in 1986,
which non-governmental organizations say killed
perhaps 90,000, sickened 500,000 and contaminated
vast farmlands of the Ukraine.
Blitzed
with frantic reports about impending catastrophe
in Japan, Facebook and Twitter are rife with
messages of people overseas worried about loved
ones in Japan, and people in Japan telling them
they are all right and not to worry. Many hardened
Tokyo expatriates are deriding foreign media for
sensationalizing the nuclear threat to 39 million
residents of the Kanto plain which includes
Yokohama, Tokyo, Chiba and Ibaraki, on the border
with Fukushima prefecture and its Number One
(Dai Ichi) nuclear power plant. Others are
lampooning the government's response. As one
comment said on twitter, "Explosions at nuclear
power plant, Japanese told to bring in their
laundry."
In the view of many wary
expatriates, Japan's legendary mind control
machine is in full swing. Japanese TV networks,
led by state broadcaster NHK, are softening the
hardest of news stories. Like the massage chairs
commonly found in Japanese homes, the media
reports are rubbing away the mind's critical edges
with an endless stream of data, with no context or
analysis.
First, it was days of
mind-numbing Meteorological Agency reports about
the size and depth of earthquakes and aftershocks
in numerous localities in central and northern
Japan. Then it was an onslaught of mind-bending
calculations of official death tolls in each
prefecture - six in Ibaraki, 236 in Miyagi and so
on - without an attempt to put two and two
together.
There was no public questioning
how the official national toll could still be
1,800 when local police or municipal officials
were saying they couldn't locate 8,000 people or
more in obliterated cities and towns such as
Otsuchi, Miyako, Ofunato, Rikusen-takata,
Kessenuma and more. These semi-official totals
amounted to more than 45,000 missing, not even
counting the city of Sendai, population more than
a million. Delirious from this shortage of
information, many Japanese just assumed they would
never know, while others suspected the government
was afraid to tell people the death toll might be
above 100,000.
Amid the nuclear crisis,
Japanese viewers are now bombarded with a
mind-blowing list of district-by-district Geiger
counts in several prefectures. They are assaulted
by data about words nobody understands -
microsieverts and millisieverts - when all they
want to hear is whether to stay or go. Overwhelmed
by too much information and disinformation, many
Japanese in Tokyo are tuning out any logical
external advice and hunkering down inside their
own bunker mentalities. Hence escaping foreigners
are startled to see the lack of panic and mass
exodus from Tokyo.
Drilled at school to be
obedient and never question authority, most
Japanese in Tokyo are in effect heeding the advice
of outgoing Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, who
told them to go back to work and carry on life
normally. "Everyone, please feel relieved," he
said on Monday, after ordering his staff to
monitor radiation levels in the city. He also said
that though he felt sorry for tsunami victims, the
disaster was tembatsu (heaven's punishment)
for Japan's greed. "Japanese politics is tainted
with egoism and populism," he said. "We need to
use a tsunami to wipe out egoism, which has rusted
onto the mentality of Japanese over a long period
of time."
Other politicians have not been
as outspoken as Ishihara, who later apologized for
his remarks. Prime Minister Naoto Kan's approach
has been to appeal for calm and release bits of
information at a time, to avoid fomenting mass
panic, while appearing to be out-front on the
issue and chastising power company officials
behind the scenes for withholding information even
from him.
Japanese politicians,
bureaucrats and industrial leaders are simply
doing what they've always done: obfuscate the
truth to evade responsibility and accountability.
Since the sticking up nail will get hammered down,
as the saying goes, no official dares to say what
anti-nuke activists believe: the plant is in a
state of meltdown.
Though Kan only
inherited the nuclear mess created from the
Liberal Democratic Party, which blessed the
plant's construction 40 years ago and overturned
court rulings attempting to ban nuclear plants in
earthquake zones, history will likely associate
him with the crisis, which hit on a day when he
was being pressured to resign over a donation
scandal.
Is he really in charge? The joke
going around Japan is that US President Barack
Obama called Kan and asked if he could talk to
puffy-eyed government spokesman Yukio Edano, who
has been on TV recently even more than pop groups
SMAP or AKB48.
Edana and Kan at least have
more public sympathy than officials at the Tokyo
Electric Power Company, which runs the plant
designed by US giant General Electric. Perhaps
sensing a deluge of law suits and compensation
claims, TEPCO seems to be side-stepping the
reality which viewers can see from media
helicopters outside the 30-kilometer no-fly zone.
While US Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Chairman Gregory Jaczko said on Wednesday "there
is no water in the spent fuel pool and we believe
that radiation levels are extremely high", TEPCO
spokesman Hajime Motojuku denied this, saying "the
condition is stable" at Unit 4, which appears a
burned out shell housing lethal radioactive fuel
rods.
For many independent-thinking
Japanese, this nuclear crisis is the latest
example of Japanese officials and the media
cartels withholding vital information from
citizens. During World War II, Japanese were told
they were always winning battles, when young men
with inferior equipment were in fact being
slaughtered en masse.
Reports about
radiation sickness from atomic bombings were
buried for years, and the government also tried to
cover up information about Minamata, Kashiwazki
and other accidents. The day after the Kobe
earthquake in 1995, NHK was still reporting a
death toll of only a few dozen, when in fact more
than 6,000 were dead. Public trust in officialdom
sank even lower after the previous administration
lost pension records of about 50 million people.
All of this figures into the mind of
people deciding whether to flee Tokyo. On Tuesday,
after the Tokyo metropolitan government said
radiation levels surged to 23 times the normal
level in the capital, there was still no mass
exodus or visible panic, though increasing numbers
of women and children boarded trains out of the
city.
"I need to make money, but life is
more important," said Kenichi Okajima, who was on
his way to get his wife and children and drive
them to the mountains of Toyama. "We have small
children, and we don't want to take any chances
about them getting radiation sickness. We cannot
trust this government. Can you?"
Christopher Johnson
(www.globalite.posterous.com) is author of Siamese
Dreams and the upcoming novel Kobe Blue.
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