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. (Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. 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