Prime Minister Naoto Kan: “In the Worst Case, Eastern Japan Will Be Ruined”

At last, the prime minister of Japan faced up to the inconvenient truth.  Had he done so from Day 1, and based his evacuation plan on the possibility of this worst case scenario, it would have been possible to evacuate tens of millions more people, in orderly fashion, than we can now.  The criminal government of Japan, instead, wasted the precious time so dearly bought by the great personal sacrifice of the heroic nuclear emergency workers battling to cool down the fuel rods at Fukushima 1.  By the way, in the latter part of the video below, it is reported that the prime minister is now blaming TEPCO alone for the lack of the sense of urgency, thus trying to exculpate himself.  That just ain’t so.  As he boasted himself, he knows a thing or two about the science and engineering of nuclear power.  He, a reformist student activist during the sixties, actually graduated from Tokyo Tech with a degree in applied physics before going on to become a patent attorney and then pursuing a political career.  So he can’t plead ignorance.  He knew, from Day I, what could and would happen if TEPCO continued to fail to cool the rods, but he refused to tell the truth to the people and act accordingly, in time. — Ed.

Special Advisor to the Cabinet Kiyoshi Sasamori, at a press conference on the night of the 16th, revealed that in a conversation with him, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said: “[If the worst case scenario of the Fukushima 1 Nuclear Power Plant accident comes true,] we must consider the possibility that eastern Japan will be ruined.”


This video was released by TBS on 16 March 2011.  The text below the video is a translation of the first 21 seconds of the video.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).


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