Fukushima no accident

From Roy Tars in Tokyo.

The crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan has been spewing out lethal radiation since the region was hit by a massive earthquake and Tsunami in March 2011. Plant operator TEPCO has announced an emergency and is clueless as to what to do. While TEPCO management hide in 24-hour Karaoke boxes, singing poor-quality pop songs and watch vaguely paedophiliac videos of talentless scantily-clad schoolgirls with prosthetic canine teeth. One TEPCO insider, who can't be named for stupid reasons, said "The problem with Fukushima Daiichi was Heavy Rotation." He went on to say "If only they'd listened to AKB48, then none of this would have happened."

Another TEPCO insider who was more than willing to be named as Yuka Oshima said "Staff moral has been given a real boost since management started allowing us to wear schoolgirl uniforms to the office." I asked him what the OLs wore and he said he'd never heard of women working at TEPCO because the work was far too dangerous, even in an office in the middle of Tokyo, hundreds of kilometres from the nuclear plant.

TEPCO has been mildly criticised for its incompetent mishandling of the crisis by Japanese media, though not too much for fear of seeming unpatriotic. Suggestions of contaminated food, especially fish, have been viewed with deep suspicion and thought to be anti-Japanese propaganda originating in China and Korea, and any other victims of Japanese colonialism that have never received an adequate apology. As one rightwing newspaper put it: "If they don't want to eat our contaminated fish, that's great, there's more for us!"

The Japanese government has been equally critical in its mild-mannered bollocking which suggests it is merely paying lip service to the outside world, which doesn't really matter anyway because they're not Japanese. Prime Minister Abe called on TEPCO to fix the situation, well at least while the foreign media was watching, after they'd gone he praised TEPCO for its hard work in protecting the Japanese archipelago with a defensive layer of radiation like in that weird manga he read as a kid, and most of his cabinet members still read during parliamentary debates.

At a political stunt in Fukushima where Mr Abe appeared to eat local produce, the big question was did he spit or swallow? After stuffing one of his faces with a mouthful of local nosh, much to the amusement of local farmers who are desperately trying to offload it onto cheap catering companies that supply kindergartens and elementary schools, Mr Abe appeared to turn around and cough into a Hello Kitty Fukushima souvenir mini-towel. However, one source said the food in question had actually been substituted with safer food from down south, so there was never any risk to our beloved Abe, hero of the Land of the Rising Sun.

Tokyo governor, Shintaro Ishihara, who is an ardent pro-nuclear advocate, said he praised Mr Abe's new defence policy of irradiating Japan to deter its enemies and was disappointed that his Japan Restoration Party hadn't thought of it, saying: "That fuckwit Hashimoto came out with so much crap but he never once said anything like Abe's comments on radiation defence." Mr Ishihara went on to complain how Abe and his cronies are nicking his rightwing spotlight and had forced him to seek political alliances with buffoons like that "utter fuckwit Hashimoto".

In reality, Mr Ishihara has never recovered from his criticism of the manga and anime industries, and his attempts to ban child porn and paedophiliac comics in Tokyo. Even after toning down his rhetoric and compromising his stance by allowing adults (voters) to buy the perverse filth, and only banning minors, he began to be viewed with suspicion. His patriotism and Japaneseness was brought into question and there was even a rumour that his mother was a Korean comfort woman, though Toru Hashimoto later said that had been necessary to boost his own morale.

Back at the Fukushima nuclear plant, everyone is wearing surgical masks. I asked an official looking bloke, who gave his name as Minami Takahashi, whether surgical masks are adequate protection from nuclear radiation and he said: "We Japanese have special blood. Centuries of foreigners have contaminated our blood but we have maintained one nation, one Japan, we are one people." I asked him if TEPCO employed anyone from Hokkaido or Okinawa and he said he'd never heard of any foreigners working  for TEPCO except in the really dangerous jobs.

I posed the same question about surgical masks to a real scientist and he said: "The HEPA micro-mesh is extremely effective at disguising the truth and protects bystanders from the horrendous smell of bullshit that emanates from the mouths of Japanese politicians and nuclear industry officials."