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Japan's timid coverage of Fukushima led this news anchor to revolt — and he's not alone (PRI)
Reporter: Sam Harnett
PRI, October 17, 2014
EXCERPT...
Japanese journalists did what Tajima calls "announcement journalism" in reporting on the crisis. He says they were reporting the press releases of big companies and the people in power. And he's not the only one who thinks so.
“I am a newscaster, but I couldn't tell the true story on my news program," says Jun Hori, a former anchor for NHK, the Japanese state broadcaster.
Hori says the network restricted what he and other journalists could say about Fukushima and moved more slowly than foreign media to report on the disaster and how far radiation was spreading. The attitude in the newsroom was not to question official information
“I was on the ground in Fukushima, and a lot of people kept asking me, why didn't you tell us earlier about what is happening?” Hori says.
Out of frustration, Hori started tweeting uncensored coverage. “I got a huge response,” he says, “but then my superiors said the NHK was getting complaints from politicians about what I was saying. They told me I had to stop.”
CONTINUED w/audio, video...
http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-10-16/frustrated-japans-coverage-fukushima-crisis-japanese-news-anchor-started
24 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Last edited Sun Oct 19, 2014, 12:53 PM - Edit history (2)
Guess you got lucky. 
That's impressive! 
This nice Lady Barbara Judge, a former SEC lawyer and now UK regulator and aristocrat extraordinaire, wants to keep the world safe for nuclear power.
[font color="green"][font size="4"]The mood at Fukushima Daiichi is "fantastic."[/font size][/font color]
Lady Barbara Judge: Japan's smart nuclear weapon
The head of the UK's Pension Protection Fund has been drafted in to help assure the residents of Fukushima that its reactors are safe
MARGARETA PAGANO
The Independent (UK) SUNDAY 17 FEBRUARY 2013
Lady Barbara Judge is just back from inspecting the nuclear plants at Fukushima in Japan, the ones closed down after the devastating earthquake and tsunami two years ago. She visited the control rooms at Daiichi – plant one – where three of the reactors went into meltdown and met many of the men who risked their lives by working during the emergency to cool the over-heated reactors and eventually shut them down.
It's not what she expected but the mood there was " fantastic". "What was astonishing was the optimism and hope shown by the workers that these plants can be made safe, and that they can start operating again," she says. But this was in stark contrast to the mood of the Japanese public, still in a state of shock and strongly opposed to the restoration of the nuclear programme.
Already being hailed as Japan's nuclear saviour, Lady Judge was in Fukushima with the bosses of the plants' owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), which was criticised for its bungled reaction to the catastrophe. It's her first trip since being appointed deputy chairman of Tepco's new Nuclear Reform Monitoring Committee, set up after the disaster to propose a new self-regulatory structure for the industry. If all goes well, Tepco hopes to persuade the new government – said to be more favourable than the last – to restart two of the plants later this year.
SNIP...
It's her long experience of Britain's nuclear industry that attracted the Japanese, who rarely bring in outsiders, let alone a woman. Lady Judge's credentials go back to 2002 when she became a director of the UK's Atomic Energy Authority, and was then chairman for six years until 2010. She is still closely involved with the industry so, a few days after returning from Fukushima, was able to take Tepco executives to the West Midlands' Oldbury site to show how it has been decommissioned using the strictest safety protocols.
SNIP...
Yet there's one group of people who stay stubbornly anti-nuclear – women, especially the more educated ones. Wherever you are in the world, she says, all the focus groups show that it's better-off women who don't trust fission.
CONTINUED...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/lady-barbara-judge-japans-smart-nuclear-weapon-8497747.html
It seems that government service in the United States can open doors to [s]money[/s] opportunity in the United Kingdom. From the comment section at e-news we learn:
weeman
February 17, 2013 at 10:29 am
Tokyo Rose I have named her, just like the second world war the propaganda machine is on full spin cycle and we all know the false lies that they promote and brainwashing of populace.
...
Time Is Short
February 18, 2013 at 2:09 pm
Here's a big reason she was brought in:
'Radioactive Asia: There Will Be 100 Additional Nuclear Reactors in Asia in 20 Years'
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2013/02/radioactive-asia-there-will-be-100.html
If she's working for those that control the majority of the uranium mining/processing, you can see the money involved.
Can't let the murder of 8 billion people get in the way of third-quarter profits, can we?
...
Sickputer
February 16, 2013 at 9:20 pm
Her track record has not always been so cheery:
April 23, 2010
"WASHINGTON—Massey Energy Co., owner of a coal mine where 29 workers were killed this month, on Monday said that the board member responsible for governance had resigned because of the demands of "other ongoing business activities."
Lady Barbara Thomas Judge's resignation, effective immediately, comes amid growing criticism of the management of the Richmond, Virginia, company. For months, shareholders had complained that Lady Judge was unable to devote enough time to the job because she served on too many corporate boards. The complaints about Massey's corporate governance intensified after a coal-mine explosion two weeks ago that was the deadliest in 40 years."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703757504575195070711065984.html
Another article in 2007:
"But questions remain. Why does Lady Judge need so many jobs? How did she land her role at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, when she had no relevant experience? Is it relevant that a female friend was on the selection panel?
Lady Judge bristles. She points out that, as a lawyer, it is her job to master a subject about which she is initially ignorant. To prepare for her role at the Atomic Energy Authority, she even studied her son's physics books. She also has a strategic business role, which she is well equipped to carry out.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-452635/Is-best-connected-woman-Britain
The monied class have zero compunction about irradiating the Northern Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere or any which way they slice up their planet and protect their loot with the nukes We the People have so kindly paid for.
It's getting apparent that us renters are SOL.
An old OP, the story connects a few dots from the present day back to World War II.
War crime, Yakuza, Secret Government. Why not?
Japan’s Nuclear Industry: The CIA Link.
By Eleanor Warnock
June 1, 2012, 10:18 AM JST.
Wall Street Journal Blog
Tetsuo Arima, a researcher at Waseda University in Tokyo, told JRT he discovered in the U.S. National Archives a trove of declassified CIA files that showed how one man, Matsutaro Shoriki, was instrumental in jumpstarting Japan’s nascent nuclear industry.
Mr. Shoriki was many things: a Class A war criminal, the head of the Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan’s biggest-selling and most influential newspaper) and the founder of both the country’s first commercial broadcaster and the Tokyo Giants baseball team. Less well known, according to Mr. Arima, was that the media mogul worked with the CIA to promote nuclear power.
SNIP...
Mr. Shoriki, backed by the CIA, used his influence to publish articles in the Yomiuri that extolled the virtues of nuclear power, according to the documents found by Mr. Arima. Keen on remilitarizing Japan, Mr. Shoriki endorsed nuclear power in hopes its development would one day arm the country with the ability to make its own nuclear weapons, according to Mr. Arima. Mr. Shoriki’s behind-the-scenes push created a chain reaction in other media that eventually changed public opinion.
SNIP…
Mr. Shoriki, backed by the CIA, used his influence to publish articles in the Yomiuri that extolled the virtues of nuclear power, according to the documents found by Mr. Arima. Keen on remilitarizing Japan, Mr. Shoriki endorsed nuclear power in hopes its development would one day arm the country with the ability to make its own nuclear weapons, according to Mr. Arima. Mr. Shoriki’s behind-the-scenes push created a chain reaction in other media that eventually changed public opinion.
CONTINUED...
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2012/06/01/japans-nuclear-industry-the-cia-link/
After President Carter was out of office, it was pretty much full-steam ahead for the Japanese bomb during the Pruneface Ronnie-Poppy Bush years. Hence, Fukushima Daiichi Number 3 and other select Japanese reactors were set up to process plutonium uranium fuels.
United States Circumvented Laws To Help Japan Accumulate Tons of Plutonium
By Joseph Trento
on April 9th, 2012
National Security News Service
The United States deliberately allowed Japan access to the United States’ most secret nuclear weapons facilities while it transferred tens of billions of dollars worth of American tax paid research that has allowed Japan to amass 70 tons of weapons grade plutonium since the 1980s, a National Security News Service investigation reveals. These activities repeatedly violated U.S. laws regarding controls of sensitive nuclear materials that could be diverted to weapons programs in Japan. The NSNS investigation found that the United States has known about a secret nuclear weapons program in Japan since the 1960s, according to CIA reports.
The diversion of U.S. classified technology began during the Reagan administration after it allowed a $10 billion reactor sale to China. Japan protested that sensitive technology was being sold to a potential nuclear adversary. The Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations permitted sensitive technology and nuclear materials to be transferred to Japan despite laws and treaties preventing such transfers. Highly sensitive technology on plutonium separation from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site and Hanford nuclear weapons complex, as well as tens of billions of dollars worth of breeder reactor research was turned over to Japan with almost no safeguards against proliferation. Japanese scientist and technicians were given access to both Hanford and Savannah River as part of the transfer process.
SNIP...
A year ago a natural disaster combined with a man-made tragedy decimated Northern Japan and came close to making Tokyo, a city of 30 million people, uninhabitable. Nuclear tragedies plague Japan’s modern history. It is the only nation in the world attacked with nuclear weapons. In March 2011, after a tsunami swept on shore, hydrogen explosions and the subsequent meltdowns of three reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant spewed radiation across the region. Like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan will face the aftermath for generations. A twelve-mile area around the site is considered uninhabitable. It is a national sacrifice zone.
How Japan ended up in this nuclear nightmare is a subject the National Security News Service has been investigating since 1991. We learned that Japan had a dual use nuclear program. The public program was to develop and provide unlimited energy for the country. But there was also a secret component, an undeclared nuclear weapons program that would allow Japan to amass enough nuclear material and technology to become a major nuclear power on short notice.
CONTINUED...
http://www.dcbureau.org/201204097128/national-security-news-service/united-states-circumvented-laws-to-help-japan-accumulate-tons-of-plutonium.html
Those of who have seen The World at War series on the tee vee are familiar with the black and white footage and great narrative chronicling the main events and figures of World War II. One of those episodes was entitled "The Bomb" and featured an interview with John J. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War to President Roosevelt and President Truman.
Here's part of what Mr. McCloy said about the Atomic Bomb – the use of which he counseled only as a last resort, after warning Japan to surrender (around 7:30 mark of Part 2):
“Besides that, we’ve got a new force, a new type of energy that will revolutionize warfare, destructive beyond any contemplation. I’d said, I’d mention the bomb. Mentioning the bomb, even at that late date, in that select group, was like, it was like they were all shocked. Because it was such a closely guarded secret. It was comparable to mentioning Skull and Bones at Yale – which you’re not supposed to do.”
After the war, McCloy was the United States High Commissioner to Germany, administering the U.S. zone of occupation, making him one of the front-line leaders of the Cold War. In that capacity, one of the questionable things he did was to forgive several NAZI industrialists and war criminals.
The great cartoonist Herb Block, HERBLOCK, depicted McCloy holding open a prison door for a NAZI, while in the background Stalin took a photo (if anyone has a copy or link to the cartoon, I’d be much obliged). About 15 years later, Mr. McCloy served the nation as a member of the Warren Commission.
While he wasn’t a member of Skull and Bones, McCloy certainly worked closely with a bunch of them, including Averell Harriman and Prescott Bush. As a Wall Street and Washington insider, "Mr. Establishment" he was called, Mr. McCloy used the offices of government to centralize power and wealth. That is most un-democratic.
Mother Jones goes into detail:
The Nuclear Weapons Industry's Money Bombs
How millions in campaign cash and revolving-door lobbying have kept America's atomic arsenal off the chopping block.
— By R. Jeffrey Smith, Center for Public Integrity
Mother Jones
Wed Jun. 6, 2012 3:00 AM PDT
Employees of private companies that produce the main pieces of the US nuclear arsenal have invested more than $18 million in the election campaigns of lawmakers that oversee related federal spending, and the companies also employ more than 95 former members of Congress or Capitol Hill staff to lobby for government funding, according to a new report.
The Center for International Policy, a nonprofit group that supports the "demilitarization" of US foreign policy, released the report on Wednesday to highlight what it described as the heavy influence of campaign donations and pork-barrel politics on a part of the defense budget not usually associated with large profits or contractor power: nuclear arms.
As Congress deliberated this spring on nuclear weapons-related projects, including funding for the development of more modern submarines and bombers, the top 14 contractors gave nearly $3 million to the 2012 reelection campaigns of lawmakers whose support they needed for these and other projects, the report disclosed.
Half of that sum went to members of the four key committees or subcommittees that must approve all spending for nuclear arms—the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and the Energy and Water or Defense appropriations subcommittees, according to data the Center compiled from the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. The rest went to lawmakers who are active on nuclear weapons issues because they have related factories or laboratories in their states or districts.
Members of the House Armed Services Committee this year have sought to erect legislative roadblocks to further reductions in nuclear arms, and also demanded more spending for related facilities than the Obama administration sought, including $100 million in unrequested funds for a new plant that will make plutonium cores for nuclear warheads, and $374 million for a new ballistic missile-firing submarine. The House has approved those requests, but the Senate has not held a similar vote on the 2013 defense bill.
CONTINUED...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/nuclear-bombs-congress-elections-campaign-donations
It isn't ironic or coincidental. It is the Establishment, the in-group, the Elite, the One-Percent that’s pretty much gotten the lion’s share of the wealth created over the last 50 years. The same group that’s pretty much had their fingers on the atomic button ever since the Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as profited from the development of nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and the almost continuous state of war since then. For lack of a better term, I call them the BFEE, or War Party.
War crime, Yakuza, Secret Government. Why not?
Japan’s Nuclear Industry: The CIA Link.
By Eleanor Warnock
June 1, 2012, 10:18 AM JST.
Wall Street Journal Blog
Tetsuo Arima, a researcher at Waseda University in Tokyo, told JRT he discovered in the U.S. National Archives a trove of declassified CIA files that showed how one man, Matsutaro Shoriki, was instrumental in jumpstarting Japan’s nascent nuclear industry.
Mr. Shoriki was many things: a Class A war criminal, the head of the Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan’s biggest-selling and most influential newspaper) and the founder of both the country’s first commercial broadcaster and the Tokyo Giants baseball team. Less well known, according to Mr. Arima, was that the media mogul worked with the CIA to promote nuclear power.
SNIP...
Mr. Shoriki, backed by the CIA, used his influence to publish articles in the Yomiuri that extolled the virtues of nuclear power, according to the documents found by Mr. Arima. Keen on remilitarizing Japan, Mr. Shoriki endorsed nuclear power in hopes its development would one day arm the country with the ability to make its own nuclear weapons, according to Mr. Arima. Mr. Shoriki’s behind-the-scenes push created a chain reaction in other media that eventually changed public opinion.
SNIP…
Mr. Shoriki, backed by the CIA, used his influence to publish articles in the Yomiuri that extolled the virtues of nuclear power, according to the documents found by Mr. Arima. Keen on remilitarizing Japan, Mr. Shoriki endorsed nuclear power in hopes its development would one day arm the country with the ability to make its own nuclear weapons, according to Mr. Arima. Mr. Shoriki’s behind-the-scenes push created a chain reaction in other media that eventually changed public opinion.
CONTINUED...
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2012/06/01/japans-nuclear-industry-the-cia-link/
After President Carter was out of office, it was pretty much full-steam ahead for the Japanese bomb during the Pruneface Ronnie-Poppy Bush years. Hence, Fukushima Daiichi Number 3 and other select Japanese reactors were set up to process plutonium uranium fuels.
United States Circumvented Laws To Help Japan Accumulate Tons of Plutonium
By Joseph Trento
on April 9th, 2012
National Security News Service
The United States deliberately allowed Japan access to the United States’ most secret nuclear weapons facilities while it transferred tens of billions of dollars worth of American tax paid research that has allowed Japan to amass 70 tons of weapons grade plutonium since the 1980s, a National Security News Service investigation reveals. These activities repeatedly violated U.S. laws regarding controls of sensitive nuclear materials that could be diverted to weapons programs in Japan. The NSNS investigation found that the United States has known about a secret nuclear weapons program in Japan since the 1960s, according to CIA reports.
The diversion of U.S. classified technology began during the Reagan administration after it allowed a $10 billion reactor sale to China. Japan protested that sensitive technology was being sold to a potential nuclear adversary. The Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations permitted sensitive technology and nuclear materials to be transferred to Japan despite laws and treaties preventing such transfers. Highly sensitive technology on plutonium separation from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site and Hanford nuclear weapons complex, as well as tens of billions of dollars worth of breeder reactor research was turned over to Japan with almost no safeguards against proliferation. Japanese scientist and technicians were given access to both Hanford and Savannah River as part of the transfer process.
SNIP...
A year ago a natural disaster combined with a man-made tragedy decimated Northern Japan and came close to making Tokyo, a city of 30 million people, uninhabitable. Nuclear tragedies plague Japan’s modern history. It is the only nation in the world attacked with nuclear weapons. In March 2011, after a tsunami swept on shore, hydrogen explosions and the subsequent meltdowns of three reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant spewed radiation across the region. Like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan will face the aftermath for generations. A twelve-mile area around the site is considered uninhabitable. It is a national sacrifice zone.
How Japan ended up in this nuclear nightmare is a subject the National Security News Service has been investigating since 1991. We learned that Japan had a dual use nuclear program. The public program was to develop and provide unlimited energy for the country. But there was also a secret component, an undeclared nuclear weapons program that would allow Japan to amass enough nuclear material and technology to become a major nuclear power on short notice.
CONTINUED...
http://www.dcbureau.org/201204097128/national-security-news-service/united-states-circumvented-laws-to-help-japan-accumulate-tons-of-plutonium.html
Those of who have seen The World at War series on the tee vee are familiar with the black and white footage and great narrative chronicling the main events and figures of World War II. One of those episodes was entitled "The Bomb" and featured an interview with John J. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War to President Roosevelt and President Truman.
Here's part of what Mr. McCloy said about the Atomic Bomb – the use of which he counseled only as a last resort, after warning Japan to surrender (around 7:30 mark of Part 2):
“Besides that, we’ve got a new force, a new type of energy that will revolutionize warfare, destructive beyond any contemplation. I’d said, I’d mention the bomb. Mentioning the bomb, even at that late date, in that select group, was like, it was like they were all shocked. Because it was such a closely guarded secret. It was comparable to mentioning Skull and Bones at Yale – which you’re not supposed to do.”
After the war, McCloy was the United States High Commissioner to Germany, administering the U.S. zone of occupation, making him one of the front-line leaders of the Cold War. In that capacity, one of the questionable things he did was to forgive several NAZI industrialists and war criminals.
The great cartoonist Herb Block, HERBLOCK, depicted McCloy holding open a prison door for a NAZI, while in the background Stalin took a photo (if anyone has a copy or link to the cartoon, I’d be much obliged). About 15 years later, Mr. McCloy served the nation as a member of the Warren Commission.
While he wasn’t a member of Skull and Bones, McCloy certainly worked closely with a bunch of them, including Averell Harriman and Prescott Bush. As a Wall Street and Washington insider, "Mr. Establishment" he was called, Mr. McCloy used the offices of government to centralize power and wealth. That is most un-democratic.
Mother Jones goes into detail:
The Nuclear Weapons Industry's Money Bombs
How millions in campaign cash and revolving-door lobbying have kept America's atomic arsenal off the chopping block.
— By R. Jeffrey Smith, Center for Public Integrity
Mother Jones
Wed Jun. 6, 2012 3:00 AM PDT
Employees of private companies that produce the main pieces of the US nuclear arsenal have invested more than $18 million in the election campaigns of lawmakers that oversee related federal spending, and the companies also employ more than 95 former members of Congress or Capitol Hill staff to lobby for government funding, according to a new report.
The Center for International Policy, a nonprofit group that supports the "demilitarization" of US foreign policy, released the report on Wednesday to highlight what it described as the heavy influence of campaign donations and pork-barrel politics on a part of the defense budget not usually associated with large profits or contractor power: nuclear arms.
As Congress deliberated this spring on nuclear weapons-related projects, including funding for the development of more modern submarines and bombers, the top 14 contractors gave nearly $3 million to the 2012 reelection campaigns of lawmakers whose support they needed for these and other projects, the report disclosed.
Half of that sum went to members of the four key committees or subcommittees that must approve all spending for nuclear arms—the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and the Energy and Water or Defense appropriations subcommittees, according to data the Center compiled from the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. The rest went to lawmakers who are active on nuclear weapons issues because they have related factories or laboratories in their states or districts.
Members of the House Armed Services Committee this year have sought to erect legislative roadblocks to further reductions in nuclear arms, and also demanded more spending for related facilities than the Obama administration sought, including $100 million in unrequested funds for a new plant that will make plutonium cores for nuclear warheads, and $374 million for a new ballistic missile-firing submarine. The House has approved those requests, but the Senate has not held a similar vote on the 2013 defense bill.
CONTINUED...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/nuclear-bombs-congress-elections-campaign-donations
It isn't ironic or coincidental. It is the Establishment, the in-group, the Elite, the One-Percent that’s pretty much gotten the lion’s share of the wealth created over the last 50 years. The same group that’s pretty much had their fingers on the atomic button ever since the Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as profited from the development of nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and the almost continuous state of war since then. For lack of a better term, I call them the BFEE, or War Party.
