January 23, 2012
from
WashingtonsBlog Website
Too Much
Radiation to Cover Up
As I’ve pointed out since day one, the Japanese government and Tepco
have covered up the extent of the radiation released by Fukushima
and its health effects on the Japanese and others. See
this and
this.
The New York Times
notes:
The government inspectors declared
Onami’s rice safe for consumption after testing just two of its
154 rice farms.
Then… more than a dozen [farmers] found unsafe levels of cesium.
An ensuing panic forced the Japanese government to intervene,
with promises to test more than 25,000 rice farms in eastern
Fukushima Prefecture, where the plant is located.
***
The repeated failures have done more than raise concerns that
some Japanese may have been exposed to unsafe levels of
radiation in their food, as regrettable as that is.
They have also had a corrosive
effect on public confidence in the food-monitoring efforts, with
a growing segment of the public and even many experts coming to
believe that officials have understated or even covered up the
true extent of the public health risk in order to limit both the
economic damage and the size of potential compensation payments.
Critics say… the government can no longer pull the wool over the
public’s eyes, as they contend it has done routinely in the
past.
“Since the accident, the
government has tried to continue its business-as-usual
approach of understating the severity of the accident and
insisting that it knows best,” said Mitsuhiro Fukao, an
economics professor at Keio University in Tokyo who has
written about the loss of trust in government.
“But the people are learning
from the blogs, Twitter and Facebook that the government’s
food-monitoring system is simply not credible.”
***
“No one trusts the national government’s safety standards,” said
Ichio Muto, 59, who farms organic mushrooms in Nihonmatsu, 25
miles northwest of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
The Japan Times
reports:
The government buried a worst-case
scenario for the Fukushima nuclear crisis that was drafted last
March and kept it under wraps until the end of last year,
sources in the administration said Saturday.
After the document was shown to a small, select group of senior
government officials at the prime minister’s office in late
March, the administration of then Prime Minister Naoto Kan
decided to quietly bury it, the sources said.
“When the document was presented
(in March), a discussion ensued about keeping its existence
secret,” a government source said.
In order to deny its existence, the
government treated it as a personal document of Japan Atomic
Energy Commission Chairman Shunsuke Kondo, who authored it,
until the end of December, the sources said.
It was only then that it was actually recognized as an official
government document, they said.
“The content was so shocking
that we decided to treat it as if it didn’t exist,” a senior
government official said.
Major Japanese broadcaster NHK
purportedly
stopped a reporter in mid-sentence on March 12th
as he was discussing the exposure of the nuclear fuel rods above the
cooling pool, telling him:
They say you mustn’t read this
draft.
Finally, the
Economist and
Boing Boing
note that a Canadian journalist was grilled about who he spoke with
at Fukushima, and:
Held, threatened, and shaken down
for bribes before being detained without counsel or a phone
call. He says he was eventually deported, though not before
being ordered to sign a falsified confession and being
threatened by an official at gunpoint.
(Many journalists and nuclear experts
are alleged to have been
monitored, harassed or
blocked by the
Japanese government.)
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