This essay argues, based on a column by Ruhi Abiru, that Naoto Kan’s response to the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was not merely incompetent but gravely harmful, deepening a national crisis.
It sharply denounces the true nature of the Kan administration, the responsibility of major media outlets such as Asahi Shimbun, and the reality that the Constitutional Democratic Party is nothing other than the ghost of the Kan cabinet.

2019-03-11
This is precisely the chapter that every citizen of Japan must read every day, and must never forget.

This is precisely the chapter that every citizen of Japan must read every day, and must never forget.
As readers know, it was I who first pointed out to the Internet, the greatest library in human history, that it was Naoto Kan who turned Fukushima into “Fukushima.”
Ruhi Abiru is not merely Masayuki Takayama’s junior for nothing, but one of the finest journalists in Japan among active reporters today.
The article he published in this month’s issue of Seiron perfectly proves that my observation was 100 percent correct.
It is an article that every citizen of Japan must engrave upon his heart and read.
A friend of mine, a truly formidable reader, was, like Mr. Abiru, furious from the bottom of his heart as to why the reporters of the various newspapers, who were then stationed as Kantei press chiefs, had failed to convey to the people the true nature of Naoto Kan.
I feel so strongly about this article that I would like to send it out every single day.
Subscribers to the Asahi Shimbun will surely remember that Hiroshi Hoshi, then one of the paper’s leading figures, repeatedly ran articles praising Naoto Kan’s wife, and with large space devoted to them at that.
At the time, I was utterly appalled and thought, “Is this man Dōkyō?”
This was when I was suffering from the same grave illness as Rikako Ikee and had spent seven months in the hospital, and was occasionally permitted to leave temporarily for refreshment.
I went to Jingo-ji, the temple where Kūkai had first been made to reside in Kyoto.
Even for a strong and healthy person, the stairs there take a toll on the body….
I was so angry that I said to my companion, “You make people walk such a terrible path and still charge an entrance fee….
Build an elevator.”
But after visiting it many times, I came, on the contrary, to be deeply moved, as one would expect of a temple associated with Kūkai.
I began going to the back mountain, where hardly any tourists venture….
Because there lies the grave of Wake no Kiyomaro….
Jingo-ji was in fact the temple of Wake no Kiyomaro.
One day, as I stood before his grave, joining my hands in prayer for his peaceful repose and in gratitude toward him….
I sensed the presence of something and turned around, and was astonished.
There stood a deer of magnificent bearing, staring fixedly at me.
When I stepped forward and said, “Oh, you are Wake no Kiyomaro,” he dashed off in an instant across an extremely steep slope.
I, Ruhi Abiru, and Masayuki Takayama are, for Japan, Wake no Kiyomaro living in the present age.

A Great Earthquake Brought About by an Incompetent Administration.
—The Constitutional Democratic Party Is the Ghost of the Kan Cabinet—

“The greatest suffering of the Democratic Party administration, and what I feel most sorry about, was the nuclear accident.
Could we not have handled it better?
We do reflect on that.
But at the same time, was not the previous Liberal Democratic Party administration also responsible?”

Katsuya Okada, former Deputy Prime Minister of the Constitutional Democratic Party group, made this rebuttal on February 12 in the House of Representatives Budget Committee, snapping back at Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who had earlier described the Democratic Party administration at an LDP convention as “a nightmare-like Democratic Party administration.”
At the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, Mr. Okada was Secretary-General of the Democratic Party.
It is all right that, looking back on that time, he admitted there were shortcomings.
But this still shows reflection far from sufficient.
At the time of the disaster, the writer was serving as the Sankei Shimbun’s Kantei press chief and was stationed in the Prime Minister’s Office.
And because the Kan cabinet’s response to the disaster, which I personally witnessed, covered, and heard reported by fellow reporters, was itself exactly a “nightmare.”

He trusted no one and flew into rage.

It is not a past I particularly wish to remember, but I would like to look back on it as a lesson in the horrific consequences of choosing the wrong national leader.
Faced with the Great East Japan Earthquake, the greatest national crisis since the war, Naoto Kan failed to understand either the relative importance of matters or their order of priority, became a mass of suspicion, refused to trust the bureaucrats under him, repeatedly engaged in popularity-seeking performances, and lashed out at those around him while flustered and on the verge of tears.
Far from the highest responsible authority in Japan functioning properly, he became an obstacle to recovery and reconstruction, and an impediment to the ruling and opposition parties joining hands to confront a national crisis.
If this is not to be called a “nightmare,” then what is?
At that time, I heard one of the Prime Minister’s secretaries say, in dejection, the following.
“Ordinarily, when such a great disaster occurs, the Prime Minister and his secretaries become of one body and one mind, but after the disaster struck, the distance between the Prime Minister and the secretaries only grew wider.”
In fact, Kan shouted so meaninglessly and so constantly that, when the secretaries passed each other, they would jokingly borrow the language of radiation exposure and whisper things like this.
“Today I was exposed to 40 millisieverts of Kan-sievert.”
Kan trusted no one, and in dealing with the Tokyo Electric Power Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, he meddled in everything, including specialist matters and technical minutiae.
And in the end, whenever he was given advice or proposals beyond the range of his own understanding, he exploded in anger and rejected them.

A leader incapable of making decisions.

“It is astonishing that the Japanese people had such a foolish Prime Minister.
As far as I know, is he not the worst Prime Minister in history?”

This was the impression of Haruo Uehara, former president of Saga University, who as an expert on reactor condensers had been offering advice and proposals to the Kantei from immediately after the nuclear accident broke out.
Mr. Uehara, who from as far back as Takeo Fukuda and as recently as Shinzo Abe had been consulted by many Prime Ministers on energy policy in general, said he was utterly appalled by Mr. Kan.
The sequence of events was as follows.
In response to the accident, Mr. Uehara immediately urged the Kantei to restore the cooling system and also sent drawings for the installation of an external cooling device.
On March 16, he was summoned to Tokyo by Goshi Hosono, then Special Adviser to the Prime Minister at the Integrated Headquarters for Accident Response.
He also met then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano and then Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Banri Kaieda, and then returned once to Saga City, where his office was located, to arrange the machinery needed for the work.
“And yet, no matter how much I spoke with high officials at the Kantei, all they said was, ‘The Prime Minister refuses to make a decision.
Because he is the final decision-maker, nothing can be done’” (Mr. Uehara).
At the time, one government official lamented, “The Prime Minister has no broad strategic perspective whatsoever.
On the contrary, he obsesses over trivial things he happens to know, and is always two days late in making decisions,” and that was precisely the pattern unfolding.
On March 20, former Internal Affairs Minister Kazuhiro Haraguchi and former Cabinet Office Parliamentary Secretary Hiroshi Ogushi of the Democratic Party gathered at Mr. Uehara’s office to discuss the nuclear accident response.
There, Mr. Haraguchi contacted Mr. Kan by mobile phone and handed the call over to Mr. Uehara, and the following exchange took place.
Mr. Kan: “I have read your report, but I cannot understand it technically.
Where exactly is the external cooling device to be attached?
I cannot make a decision if I do not know where it is to be attached.”
Mr. Uehara: “That is not something the Prime Minister himself should be thinking about.
Even if you do not understand the technicalities, you can still decide whether it should be done or not.”
At that, Mr. Kan suddenly flew into a rage, shouting “What did you say!” and then continued ranting at length in words that could scarcely even be recognized as Japanese.
Mr. Uehara later recalled to me in an interview.
“I was shocked and truly frightened.
I felt that if the Prime Minister of a country is in such a state, the country itself is in danger.”

The source of reputational damage.

According also to the private-sector accident investigation commission’s report, when it became known that the diesel generator, the emergency power source at Fukushima Daiichi, had broken down and replacement batteries were needed, Mr. Kan behaved in a bizarre manner.
Using his own mobile phone, he directly asked the person in charge questions such as, “What size is it?” “How many meters in height and width?” “How much does it weigh?” and eagerly took notes.
According to a government official, whereas an ordinary politician would first think, “What should be done about this situation?”, Mr. Kan displayed an abnormal concern with “Why did the diesel generator break down?”, and discussion failed to progress smoothly.
At the time, one National Police Agency official set out four types of supreme commander: 1) capable and active, 2) incapable and inactive, 3) capable and inactive, and 4) incapable and active, and declared the following.
“You already know which type Prime Minister Kan belongs to.
He is the worst type, incapable yet trying to do what he cannot do, the incapable-but-active type.
That is the most troublesome kind of all.”
Here we have a textbook case of vicious micromanagement, in which, despite being incompetent, he was eager to overcontrol and interfere in the work of his subordinates.
A half-informed man, unaware of his own limits and deficiencies, tried to manage everything himself, and inevitably committed many blunders.
That was likely the essence of the Kantei’s handling of the accident.
This was a man-made disaster caused by Mr. Kan.

Aid to the disaster victims was also delayed.

It is often said that the fact that the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred during Mr. Kan’s tenure invites comparison with the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake during the time of Socialist Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama.
There were even people such as Haruki Madarame, former Chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission, who had been repeatedly shouted at by Mr. Kan, who came to think, “Perhaps divine punishment befell us because such a man was made Prime Minister.”
But a bureaucrat who dealt with earthquake response in both the Murayama cabinet and the Kan cabinet said the two men were completely different.
“Murayama knew he was incompetent, and said, ‘I leave everything to you.
I will take responsibility.’
By contrast, Kan would not admit his own incompetence and said, ‘Do nothing until you have fully convinced me.
And if it fails, it is your fault.’”
In character, discernment, political ability, and even the capacity for self-recognition, he was utterly unfit for the office of Prime Minister.
What was especially problematic in Mr. Kan’s disaster response, though it has not been much pointed out until now, was the delay in assistance to victims.
A person familiar with the situation in the Kantei Crisis Management Center at the time testified as follows.
“Because of the Prime Minister’s crazy obsession with the nuclear issue, aid to victims was delayed by ten days.
The Prime Minister issued none of the instructions that should have been given to the National Police Agency or the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, and did not move them at all.”
Regarding this point, I also heard the following appalling story from a bureaucrat at the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy.
One week to ten days after the disaster struck, he suddenly received a call on his mobile phone from Mr. Kan, whom he did not even know personally.
As he put the phone to his ear, a shouting voice burst forth at once.
“Oil, oil, oil….
/・○×▼■ (inaudible) It’s your fault, your fault.”
At that time, gasoline shortages in the disaster-hit areas were beginning to be regarded as a serious problem, so the bureaucrat inferred that the call meant he was being told to do something about it, though he was not in charge of that department at all.
He said.
“Mr. Kan had absolutely no idea which button to press in which ministry.
Then, when things failed to move, he would start saying it was bureaucratic sabotage.
He was hopeless.”
I also vividly remember a Kantei press chief from a national newspaper saying this to me at the time.
“If we write the full truth about the actual condition of the Kan Kantei, readers will not believe it.
They will say, ‘Surely it cannot be that bad.’”
The common sense and decency of the people were, in effect, blinding them to the facts.
I repeat, it was an age of “nightmare,” without exaggeration.
The fact that media outlets such as the Asahi Shimbun, which were on good terms with Mr. Kan, did not convey directly the miserable reality of his true character also helped sustain the Kan cabinet.

What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.

The purification of the Kan cabinet equals the Constitutional Democratic Party.

Now then, that very Kan cabinet has today revived as the leading opposition party.
The principal members of the Constitutional Democratic Party are the very same people who symbolized the failures of the Kan cabinet.
Mr. Kan sits as the party’s supreme adviser, Mr. Edano, who was Chief Cabinet Secretary in the Kan cabinet, is its leader, Mr. Tetsuro Fukuyama, who was Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary, is Secretary-General, and Ms. Kiyomi Tsujimoto, who was Special Adviser to the Prime Minister, is Chair of Diet Affairs, and so on.
When the Kan cabinet was launched, Prime Minister Abe called it “an extremely insidious left-wing administration,” and it can be said that the Constitutional Democratic Party is precisely the Kan cabinet made even purer, and tilted even further left, aided also by the ease of opposition status.
As proof of this, the Constitutional Democratic Party formed a unified parliamentary group with the Social Democratic Party in the House of Councillors.
In the summer Upper House election, it was also set to cooperate with the Communist Party.
Mr. Edano likes to describe himself as a conservative, but what kind of conservatism is it to join hands with the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party, both of which insist that the Self-Defense Forces are unconstitutional?
If the Constitutional Democratic Party becomes one with the Social Democratic Party, that is nothing other than the resurrection of the old Socialist Party.
Even if it raises Socialist-like policies such as anti-nuclear power, shouts opposition to everything the government does, and devotes itself only to the pursuit of scandals, it will attract neither the people’s expectations nor their interest, and will surely never return to power.
And yet, within the Constitutional Democratic Party, where it is said that “Edano is overwhelmingly dominant,” such observations have spread as, “Mr. Edano is a little mountain king.
Perhaps he finds that comfortable,” and, “Edano and his close aides decide everything.
Perhaps Edano thinks the present situation is just fine.”
Certainly, it must be easy to rule the party as the dictator of the perennial leading opposition party and simply continue criticizing the government and ruling bloc.
But such an opposition contributes nothing to the national interest.
Japan has no need for the ghost of the Kan cabinet, living on members’ salaries and various allowances funded by the people’s taxes.