Tuesday 6 September 2011

The Killing Propaganda

I’m writing this like Jack Kerouac on Benzedrine, without stopping except to drink beer and smoke tabs. I’m not doing any research. What I have to say all Japanese (except those still hiding out in the jungle in South East Asia waiting for the Emperor to tell them they have won the war and can thus come home) know. They know it because the facts have been continuously repeated by the media. The same media that are telling the people to ignore the facts and move back to their homes in the areas near the out-of-control nuclear power plants.

These facts are that reactors 1 and 3 at Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant are still emitting large amounts of radiation. All can see the pictures that one of them is a mangled mess of melted metal. There are so many holes in the casing for the reactors that there is no effective barrier stopping the radiation from escaping. It is also a well known fact that TEPCO have said it will take 20 years to completely stop all the radiation leaks. Just last week company officials announced that compensation claims for loss of revenues to fishermen and farmers would be unlimited. In other words, they expect to be paying out trillions of yen over the coming years. Thus, they expect lots of farm produce and fish to be exposed to high levels of radiation for the next 20 years.

These are not hidden facts. Even though most people have no idea how much a millisievert of radiation is or how much they can safely be exposed to over a long period of time, they do know that radiation is bad. That it leads to cancer, leukemia and premature death. They know only too well the horrors of radiation from being continually taught at school that the Japanese were victims in the war (ha) of 2 nuclear attacks.

And yet night after night the fucking media are spreading the killing propaganda that some Japanese are somehow doing a shameful thing by fleeing the villages in the vicinity of Fukushima nuclear power plant.

I watch the news every night in Japan. Hoping for some news of progress. Hoping very much against hope that they will announce that they have plugged the holes; that they have turned off the reactors; that the spent fuel rods have been removed and sold to the Chinese. No all we get after nearly 6 months is that they have got some robots inside the one reactor and at the other that they are installing an air cleaning system to let workers get into the damaged core area. None of this amounts to a ‘turn around point’; a point where they can honestly say that the worst is past. The news escaped recently that they tested kids for radiation in the thyroid gland just after the nuclear disaster. These were kids living near the Fukushima Nuclear Power Station. These kids had 50% of the legal limit of radiation in their thyroid glands. That was just after the disaster. What do the kids measure now? Why did they wait so long to tell people this?

These are not questions the media ask. Instead they interview factory bosses who proudly say that they are keeping their factories open although half the workforce have fled. They keep it open for the workers and for their village; that they have a responsibility to their workers. What the fuck? They are encouraging their workers to be exposed to high levels of radiation just so they can have a laugh during their lunch break and can bring home a pitiful paycheck at the end of the month. These factory bosses are like captains going down with their ships and commending the bravery of the crew who decide not to take to the lifeboats. Are they mad? Do they have no compassion? Or is that they have the ability to blatantly deny reality? If so they  qualify for the diagnosis of criminally insane.

The media interview farmers who have been forced to stop cattle farming within so many tens of kilometers of the blistering seeping wounds that are the nuclear reactors. These farmers say they want to stay and continue their work. Are they homicidal? Do they not only want to kill themselves and their families but also produce food that will poison the Japanese people?

The media interview mayors of villages who say they are decontaminating their areas and that they want people to return so they can all be happy and together again. The mayors want their congregation back in their boot wearing, radish munching utopia. Are these mayors on some dangerously reality distorting drugs? They may scrape off the top layer of soil but as soon as they do more radiation falls to contaminate the newly exposed soil. You cannot effectively decontaminate until the radiation stops.

It is as if this word ‘decontaminate’ has got in the way of people thinking clearly for themselves. It’s as pernicious as ‘friendly fire’ or ‘pre-emptive strike’. Such is the faith that the Japanese people have in their system (not their politicians, but in the system) that they cannot get in their heads around the idea that there is no solution. That they simply cannot go back to their villages; that they must make their own decisions to go somewhere else and start again. Every day we see pitiful morons in community centers waiting to be told that they can go home. They cannot break away from the mother’s tit that is the Japanese system. They must grow some balls and take themselves and their families away. The government, the army, the beloved mayor can do nothing more for them.

People are always comparing (irritatingly so) Japan to a communist country not because everyone is equal but because people are so effectively molded into good citizens (or comrades), all reading from the same sheet of paper, all pulling together for the grand ideal. What utter and unadulterated shit! Many of the rich fled to foreign countries within hours of March 11th 2011. They certainly sent their kids away to get educated abroad. It is this sad dependence on being told what to do that killed many people during the actual tsunami and that is now killing those people living next to Chernobyl Japan. They are not told to leave so they stay.

And to make it worse the media is suggesting that those (mostly the younger less stupid generations) are somehow traitors for leaving their bucolic paradise of a village in Fukushima. These people should be lauded as sensible and more worthy of emulation than a bunch of bucktoothed factory ladies exposing themselves to dangerous levels of alpha, beta and gamma rays.

The myth of a homogenous Japan is killing Japan and what the media are doing at the moment is tantamount to encouraging suicide and infanticide.

Watch this short movie. Fiction speaks more eloquently than blogging.


THE DOOR - Short Film from Octagon Films on Vimeo.