As Japan’s most capable nuclear engineers are siphoned off to neighboring countries, this essay argues that the nation has already been given a clear answer—yet refuses to act, abandoning both reason and responsibility.

2016-08-27
The following essay was originally published on 2012-05-31.

If you sit by and watch as the most outstanding nuclear engineers in our country are taken away to neighboring nations like looters in a fire,

There, the answer already exists.
There is no answer more definitive, for no book has ever written so clearly what the state must do in times such as these.
People of the nation. While your heart is still pure white, at your own white table, subscribe to Akutagawa’s book. Read it.
Tell those around you. Then Japan will change.
Why, you ask.
Because you, and those around you, will all become discerning judges, and you will change this country.
As things stand, nothing will change. It will not change through outward appearances alone. Outward appearances have changed. They have improved splendidly.
Next comes the inner self, your reflection. Put your intellect to work. Not for yourself.
For human beings. For humankind.
Then the ultimate folly—calling only within Japan for opposition to nuclear power and immediate prohibition—will surely disappear.
Yesterday it was CO₂ reduction, today it is something else.

As I have said many times, if this were truly a matter of life and death, then immediately confront neighboring countries and the world, and have all forms of nuclear power abolished—right down to nuclear submarines.
If that cannot be done, then think about what should be done.
If you do not even think, and merely watch as the most capable nuclear engineers of our nation are taken away to neighboring countries like looters in a fire, then you are no longer even Japanese.
You are nothing more than an individual concerned only with yourself.