Masayuki Takayama’s “Nihon Keisei” examines Western colonialism, Korea’s technological history, major South Korean accidents, North Korea’s graphite reactor, light-water reactors, and the nuclear fuel cycle, while sharply criticizing the Asahi Shimbun’s description of Japan’s plutonium as “equivalent to 6,000 atomic bombs.”

August 14, 2020.
The following is an excerpt from Masayuki Takayama’s regular column “Nihon Keisei,” published in the monthly magazine THEMIS.
The article was titled: “The Falsehood of the Asahi Shimbun Editorial Chief Who Stirs Fear with ‘Enough for 6,000 Atomic Bombs’: Writing Ill of Japan with No More Intelligence than Anti-Nuclear Activists.”
In this essay, Takayama contrasts Western colonial rule with Japanese rule in Korea and proceeds through questions of technology transfer, major accidents in South Korea, nuclear technology, North Korea’s graphite-moderated reactor, light-water reactors, the nuclear fuel cycle, and the Asahi Shimbun’s description of Japan’s plutonium stockpile as “equivalent to 6,000 atomic bombs.”
The text contains extremely severe characterizations of peoples and individuals; it is reproduced below as Takayama’s own argument and language, faithfully as a historical text.
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s regular column “Nihon Keisei,” published in the current issue of the monthly magazine THEMIS under the title, “The Falsehood of the Asahi Shimbun Editorial Chief Who Stirs Fear with ‘Enough for 6,000 Atomic Bombs’: Writing Ill of Japan with No More Intelligence than Anti-Nuclear Activists.”
Masayuki Takayama is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
This essay, too, is essential reading not only for every Japanese citizen but for people throughout the world.

North and South Korea Grew Under Japanese Imperial Rule

Atsuji Matsumoto’s The Origins of Korean Anti-Japanese Nationalism is truly fascinating, drawing extensively on the writings of researchers not only in Japan and Korea but also in Europe and the United States.
For example, there is the observation by Professor A. Kohli of Princeton University concerning Western colonies.
“A colony was a system constructed so that the ruling country could obtain economic benefits. Therefore, railways and ports for transporting extracted products, as well as the living environment for white people, were thoroughly developed.”
Indeed, when one visits places such as Dalat in French Indochina or Fraser’s Hill in Malaya, one finds beautiful towns for white residents, complete with tennis courts and other facilities on cool highlands.
They were like another world, making the heat, humidity, filth, and stench of the lowlands seem unreal.
By contrast, the living conditions of the indigenous population below were hardly improved at all.
Rather, whenever indigenous people “acquired technology themselves and attempted to industrialize, they were without exception prevented from doing so.”
This passage reminds me of Yoshihiro Kyotani of the Japanese National Railways, who went to Pakistan, a country plagued by frequent railway accidents, to provide technical guidance.
Kyotani is known as one of the fathers of JR’s superconducting maglev.
He taught elite executives who strutted about in white gloves that “accidents can be reduced only when you willingly get covered in oil yourself.”
A bust of Kyotani erected by his students still stands in a corner of the Lahore railway yard.
One of those students told Kyotani a story about his grandfather.
The grandfather, an eager researcher, studied the workings of British locomotives while maintaining them with his colleagues and, after ten years, completed a locomotive one-fifth the size of the real thing.
When they ran it before the British, instead of praising them by saying, “Well done,” the British frowned, and eventually all of the engineers involved were executed on unrelated charges.
“For a colonial subject to acquire the technology and knowledge of white people was a grave crime.”
“Colonial subjects were forced to remain ignorant.”
This, Matsumoto says, is what is meant by their attempts being “prevented without exception.”
In that sense, the people of North and South Korea, during what they themselves call Japanese imperial rule, were able to receive extensive knowledge and technological instruction from the ruling country.

A People Careless and Distant from Technology

Moon Jae-in would do well to reflect upon Professor Kohli’s words: “Perhaps even today there is no former Western colony that reached the level Korea had attained at that time.”
Yet perhaps because of national character, despite such a favorable environment, Koreans did not possess the same enthusiasm for research as the Pakistanis.
The Japanese also earnestly taught construction technology.
Every Japanese was a Yoshihiro Kyotani.
Yet in October 1994, the central section of Seongsu Bridge over the Han River in Seoul, built by Korean students of the Japanese, collapsed together with its girders.
Buses and passenger cars fell thirty meters into the river, killing thirty-two people.
Half a year later, the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul collapsed, killing 502 people.
During Japan’s Muromachi period, King Sejong of the Joseon dynasty sent envoys to ask how to build waterwheels for raising water.
They returned home and tried to build one, but all the water they raised leaked away.
They lacked the precision required to join pieces of wood without gaps.
They came back twice more to learn woodworking techniques, but the waterwheel was never completed.
The two disasters in Seoul demonstrated, according to this argument, that their carelessness had made no progress from the Muromachi period to the present.
Perhaps they are simply a people far removed from technology.
Nevertheless, they claim falsely that “Japanese imperial rule also took away our technology.”
Then such a country announced that it would build power-generating nuclear reactors, far more complicated than a waterwheel.
Japan lies geographically downwind.
I wished, if possible, that they would refrain.
They themselves appear to have recognized that they could not build one properly on their own.
South Korea therefore completed a pressurized-water light-water reactor through a joint venture with the Swedish-Swiss company ABB around the time Seongsu Bridge collapsed.
One reason to assume it was reasonably safe, Takayama argues, is that Westinghouse, a long-established maker of pressurized-water reactors, sued over alleged theft of intellectual property.
In other words, he argues, its contents were almost identical to those of Westinghouse.

Kiyoki Nemoto Resembles Moon Jae-in

North Korea, meanwhile, also knew that it could not manage on its own and had the Soviet Union build it a five-kilowatt experimental reactor.
It was, however, a graphite-moderated reactor.
Such reactors are known less as power-generating reactors than as reactors capable of producing plutonium-239 for nuclear weapons.
The plutonium used in the Nagasaki atomic bomb was also produced in reactors of the same general type at Hanford.
As expected, North Korea began using it in its nuclear weapons program, causing grave concern around the world.
The United States and Japan held consultations, sought to stop the graphite reactor, and in exchange decided to provide two South Korean-made light-water reactors.
This was the project commonly known as KEDO.
Why light-water reactors?
Their spent fuel also contains plutonium, but it contains substantial amounts of plutonium-240, which complicates its use in a nuclear explosive chain reaction.
Separating only plutonium-239 is extremely difficult.
Takayama therefore argues that nuclear weapons cannot practically be made from ordinary light-water-reactor fuel.
If they could, he argues, no one would have offered North Korea two light-water reactors.
Yet there are people of poor quality in the world.
One example, Takayama writes, is Kiyoki Nemoto, an Asahi Shimbun editorial executive.
He is anti-nuclear power.
Moreover, Takayama says, he has no more intelligence than an anti-nuclear activist.
For that reason, he hates the nuclear fuel cycle, which Takayama regards as indispensable for resource-poor Japan.
Out of that hostility, he wrote an editorial on May 14 titled “Break with an Irrational National Policy.”
It stated: “Japan now possesses 46 tons of plutonium, equivalent to 6,000 atomic bombs.”
This refers to plutonium reprocessed from spent fuel from Japan’s nuclear power plants so that it can again be used as reactor fuel.
Japan’s commercial nuclear power plants, however, are light-water reactors.
Takayama therefore argues that this material cannot simply be equated with weapons material and calls the claim completely false.
Around the same time, a full-page article titled “Is a Reprocessing Plant Necessary?” appeared under the byline of reporter Yuki Kotsubo, and it too referred to “plutonium equivalent to 6,000 atomic bombs.”
A week later, after the Nuclear Regulation Authority approved progress at the Rokkasho reprocessing plant, science reporter Toshio Kawada wrote of “plutonium convertible into nuclear weapons, enough for 6,000 bombs.”
Takayama asserts that the reporters know they are being made to write something false.
He speculates that Nemoto may have pressured them by saying, “If you do not like it, there are plenty of other reporters who can replace you.”
He does not fear falsehoods.
Does Nemoto not resemble Moon Jae-in, Takayama concludes, with his claim that “our country’s technological development was obstructed because of Japan”?