This essay sharply condemns the incompetence and confusion of the Kan Naoto administration during the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, while also questioning the responsibility of Asahi Shimbun for having supported that government.
The author argues that Kan Naoto was the principal figure who turned Fukushima into “Fukushima,” and states that a paper by Rui Abiru perfectly proves that this recognition was entirely correct.
The essay further insists that the Constitutional Democratic Party is nothing more than the ghost of the Kan cabinet, and urges the Japanese people to face squarely the damage and responsibility of Asahi Shimbun.

2019-03-13
It is an unmistakable fact that it was Asahi Shimbun that not only created the Democratic Party government but also made Kan Naoto prime minister.
Kan Naoto, whom everyone regards as the worst prime minister in history, moreover had, unbelievably, an Italian Marxist, an Italian whose ties to China and the Korean Peninsula were suspected, serving as a special adviser while Kan was in office as prime minister, and that fact must have shocked people still more.
The enormous damage Asahi Shimbun inflicted on Japan…。
Through reporting carried out for China’s sake, more than 100 trillion yen was stripped away by China.
As already noted, from 1910 for 36 years, Japan invested more than 20 percent of its national budget and rapidly modernized the Korean Peninsula, which had been one of the poorest regions in the world, and not only left those assets, worth tens of trillions of yen, intact, but also paid 500 million dollars, more than twice South Korea’s national budget at the time, out of foreign reserves then standing at 1.8 billion dollars, and thereafter continued to provide enormous amounts of capital and technology.
The Japanese state and the Japanese people must demand from Asahi Shimbun the total of all of this…。more than 100 trillion yen.
If Asahi cannot pay, then this newspaper company must immediately be abolished.
In practical terms…。all citizens who still continue to subscribe to Asahi must cancel immediately.
That alone is now the urgent duty of the Japanese people.
As readers know, I was the first in the world to point out, in the Internet, the greatest library in human history, that it was Kan Naoto who turned Fukushima into “Fukushima.”
Rui Abiru is not merely, in name only, a junior of Masayuki Takayama, but one of Japan’s finest active journalists.
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 Japanese citizen must read and engrave in his heart.
A well-read friend of mine, like Mr. Abiru, was furious from the bottom of his heart as to why the reporters of each company who were then Kantei press club chiefs had never conveyed to the people the true nature of Kan Naoto.
I feel so strongly about this article that I want to send it out every day.
Subscribers to Asahi Shimbun should remember that Hiroshi Hoshi, then a leading figure at Asahi Shimbun, repeatedly carried articles praising Kan Naoto’s wife…。and with large amounts of space, too…。
At the time, I was appalled and thought, Is this Hoshi Hiroshi Dōkyō or what.
In 2011, when I was suffering from the same grave illness as Rikako Ikee and spending seven months in hospital, there were times when I was temporarily discharged to refresh myself.
I went to Jingo-ji, the temple where Kūkai was first made to reside in Kyoto.
Even for a strong and healthy person, the stairs there are hard on the body…。
I was so angry that I said to my companion, “You make people walk such a terrible path and then charge an admission fee…。Build an elevator.”
But after visiting many times, I came, on the contrary, to feel all the more deeply that it was indeed a temple associated with Kūkai.
I began going to the back mountain, where almost no tourists go…。
Because there is the grave of Wake no Kiyomaro there…。
Jingo-ji was in truth the temple of Wake no Kiyomaro.
One day, as I was joining my hands before his grave in prayer for his repose and in gratitude to him…。I sensed the presence of something and turned around in surprise.
There stood a deer of magnificent bearing, staring fixedly at me.
When I said, “Oh, you are Wake no Kiyomaro,” and stepped toward him, he darted away in an instant across a tremendously steep slope.
I, Rui Abiru, and Masayuki Takayama are, for Japan, Wake no Kiyomaro living in the present.

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

“The greatest suffering of the Democratic Party government era, and what I feel most sorry for, was the nuclear accident.
Could we not have responded better.
We do reflect on that.
But at the same time, was not the previous Liberal Democratic Party government also responsible.”
Okada Katsuya, former deputy prime minister of the Constitutional Democratic Party group, snapped back in this way at the House of Representatives Budget Committee on February 12, reacting to Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s earlier description at the LDP convention of the “nightmare-like Democratic Party government.”
When the Great East Japan Earthquake struck on March 11, 2011, Mr. Okada was secretary-general of the Democratic Party.
It is fine that he looked back on that time and admitted there were shortcomings.
But even so, this reflection is still far from sufficient.
At the time of the disaster, the author was serving as Sankei Shimbun’s Kantei press chief and was stationed full-time at the Prime Minister’s Office.
And because the Kan cabinet’s disaster response, which I personally witnessed, covered, and heard reported by fellow journalists, was precisely a “nightmare” itself.

Unable to trust others, flying into irrational rage.

It is not a past I much wish to recall, but as a lesson in what an outrageous ordeal befalls a nation when it fails in choosing its leader, I wish to look back on that time.
At the greatest national crisis of the postwar era, the Great East Japan Earthquake, which brought unprecedented damage, Mr. Kan Naoto understood neither the relative weight of things nor priorities, became a mass of suspicion and distrusted bureaucrats under him, repeatedly staged popularity-seeking performances, and, flustered and tearful, lashed out at those around him.
Not only did Japan’s highest responsible leader fail to function, he became an obstacle to recovery and reconstruction and to bipartisan cooperation in confronting the national crisis, so what else can one call this if not a “nightmare.”
At that time, I heard one of the prime minister’s secretaries, dejectedly, say the following.
“Normally, when such a major disaster occurs, the prime minister and his secretaries become as one body, but in fact after the disaster the distance between the prime minister and the secretaries grew even greater.”
In fact, because Mr. Kan yelled so meaninglessly and so often, the secretaries were said to whisper to one another, when passing each other and the like, by parodying radiation exposure.
“Today I was exposed to 40 milli-Kan-sieverts.”
Mr. Kan trusted no one, and regarding measures for the TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, he interfered in everything down to professional questions and technical details.
In the end, whenever advice or proposals exceeded the range of what he himself could understand, he flew into rage and rejected them.

A leader incapable of decision.

“How on earth did the Japanese people end up with 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, a specialist in nuclear reactor condensers, who had been offering advice and proposals to the Prime Minister’s Office from immediately after the nuclear accident broke out.
Mr. Uehara, who from long ago under Fukuda Takeo and more recently under Abe Shinzo had been asked by many prime ministers for views on energy policy in general, said he was utterly appalled by Mr. Kan.
The sequence of events was as follows.
Upon the outbreak of the accident, Mr. Uehara immediately urged the Prime Minister’s Office to restore the cooling system and also sent drawings for installing an external cooling device.
On March 16, he was summoned to Tokyo by Hosono Goshi, then special adviser to the prime minister at the integrated accident response headquarters.
He also met with Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio and Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Kaieda Banri, both then in office, and then returned once to Saga City, where his office was located, to proceed with arranging the machinery needed for the work.
“Yet no matter how much I spoke with senior Kantei officials, all they said was, ‘The prime minister will not make a decision. He will not decide. Since the prime minister is the final decision-maker, there is nothing we can do.’” (Mr. Uehara)
At the time, one government-related person lamented, “The prime minister has absolutely no broad perspective. On the contrary, he obsesses over trivial matters he happens to know, and he is always two days late in making a decision,” and that exact pattern was unfolding.
On March 20, former Democratic Party Internal Affairs Minister Haraguchi Kazuhiro and former Cabinet Office parliamentary secretary Ogushi Hiroshi gathered at Mr. Uehara’s office to discuss the nuclear accident response.
There, when Mr. Haraguchi contacted Mr. Kan by mobile phone and passed the phone to Mr. Uehara, the following exchange took place.
Mr. Kan: “I have looked over your report, but I cannot understand it technically.
Where is the external cooling device to be attached.
I cannot make a decision without knowing where I am to attach it.”
Mr. Uehara: “That is not something the prime minister ought to be thinking about.
Even if you do not understand the technicalities, you can still decide whether to proceed or not.”
At that, Mr. Kan suddenly exploded, shouting, “What did you say!” and then screamed on and on in words one could hardly tell were Japanese.
Mr. Uehara later recalled to me in an interview as follows.
“I was shocked, and truly frightened.
I felt that if the prime minister of a country was in such a condition, the country was in danger.”

The source of reputational damage.

According also to the private accident investigation commission report, when it became clear that the diesel generator serving as the emergency power source at Fukushima Daiichi had broken down and substitute 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 length and width,” and “How much does it weigh,” and eagerly took notes.
According to a government-related source, whereas an ordinary politician would first think, “What should be done about this situation,” Mr. Kan was abnormally interested in “why the diesel generator broke down,” and discussion did not easily move forward.
At the time, a National Police Agency-related person cited four patterns of supreme commanders: ① capable and active ② incapable and inactive ③ capable and inactive ④ incapable and active, and said flatly:
“You already know which one Prime Minister Kan falls under.
He is the worst pattern, the incapable-but-active type, trying to do what he cannot do.
That is the hardest of all to deal with.”
Here we have a classic example of bad “micromanagement,” in which, despite being incompetent, one excessively manages and interferes in the work of subordinates.
A half-informed man, unaware of his own limits and deficiencies, tried to control everything and inevitably committed many blunders.
That was likely the essence of the Kantei’s accident response.
This was a man-made disaster caused by Mr. Kan.

Aid to victims was delayed as well.

The fact that the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred while Mr. Kan was in office is often compared with the fact that the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake occurred during the time of Socialist Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi.
Among those involved, some, like former Nuclear Safety Commission chairman Haruki Madarame, who continued to be shouted at by Mr. Kan, came to think, “Was it not divine punishment because such a man had been made prime minister.”
But a bureaucrat who handled disaster response under both the Murayama cabinet and the Kan cabinet says the two were completely different.
“Mr. Murayama knew his own incompetence and said, ‘Leave it all to you. I will take responsibility.’
By contrast, Mr. Kan would not admit his own incompetence and said, ‘Do everything only after satisfying me. If it fails, it is your fault.’”
From character, judgment, and political ability to the capacity for self-recognition, he was in no way fit to be prime minister.
What was particularly problematic in Mr. Kan’s disaster response, though it has not been much pointed out until now, was the delay in assistance to disaster victims.
A source familiar with conditions at the Kantei Crisis Management Center at the time testified as follows.
“Because of the prime minister’s crazy fixation on the nuclear plant, aid to disaster victims was delayed by ten days.
The prime minister issued none of the instructions that should have gone to the National Police Agency or the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, and moved absolutely nothing.”
On this point, I also heard this terrible story from a bureaucrat at the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy.
One week to ten days after the earthquake struck, he suddenly received a call on his mobile phone from Mr. Kan, whom he had never even met.
As he put the phone to his ear to find out what it was about, a shouted voice came at him at once.
“Oil, oil, oil…。○×▼■ (unintelligible) It’s your fault, your fault.”
Since gasoline shortages in the disaster area were beginning to be seen as a problem at that time, the bureaucrat inferred that this was a call telling him to do something about it, but he was not in the responsible department or anything of the sort.
He said:
“Mr. Kan had absolutely no idea which button in the ministries had to be pushed.
And when things did not move forward, he would then start saying it was bureaucratic sabotage.
There was nothing to be done.”
What made a deep impression on me was that at the time, the Kantei press chief of a certain national newspaper said this to me.
“If we write the truth about the present state of the Kan Kantei, readers will not believe it.
They will say, ‘Surely it cannot be that terrible.’”
The common sense and good sense of the people themselves were blinding their eyes so that they could not see the facts.
I repeat, it was an age of “nightmare,” without exaggeration.
The fact that media such as Asahi Shimbun, which was on good terms with Mr. Kan, did not report straightforwardly the miserable reality of Mr. Kan’s true figure also helped the Kan cabinet.

What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.

The purified form of the Kan cabinet = the Constitutional Democratic Party.

Now then, that very Kan cabinet has now achieved a revival as the leading opposition party.
The principal members of the Constitutional Democratic Party are the very same as those of the Kan cabinet, which may be called the symbol of failure.
Mr. Kan has settled into the position of the party’s supreme adviser, Mr. Edano, who was chief cabinet secretary in the Kan cabinet, is the representative, Mr. Fukuyama Tetsuro, who was deputy chief cabinet secretary, is secretary-general, and Ms. Tsujimoto Kiyomi, who was a special adviser to the prime minister, is chair of Diet affairs…that is the situation.
Prime Minister Abe, when the Kan cabinet was launched, called it “an extremely insidious left-wing government,” and it may be said that the Constitutional Democratic Party is the Kan cabinet further purified, and, with the ease of being in opposition, even more tilted to the left.
As proof of that, the Constitutional Democratic Party formed a unified parliamentary group with the Social Democratic Party in the House of Councillors.
In the summer House of Councillors election, it is also set to join hands and cooperate with the Communist Party.
Mr. Edano likes to call himself a conservative, but what kind of conservative joins forces with the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party, which claim that the Self-Defense Forces violate the Constitution.
If the Constitutional Democratic Party becomes one with the Social Democratic Party, that is nothing other than the revival of the former Socialist Party.
Even if it raises Socialist Party-like policies such as anti-nuclear power, shouts opposition to everything the government does, and does nothing but pursue scandals, it will not gather the people’s expectations or interest, and will not be able to return to power.
And yet, within the Constitutional Democratic Party, said to be under “Edano’s overwhelming dominance,” observations are spreading such as, “Mr. Edano is the little king of his hill. That is probably comfortable for him,” and “Edano and his close aides decide everything. Perhaps Edano thinks the present state is fine.”
Certainly, the position of ruling the party as the dictator of the perennial number one opposition party, and merely continuing criticism of the government and ruling coalition, may be an easy one.
But such an opposition contributes nothing to the national interest.
Japan has no need for the ghost of the Kan cabinet, which goes on feeding on members’ salaries and various allowances paid for by the people’s taxes.