This essay, dated March 10, 2019, sharply denounces the confusion and irresponsibility of Naoto Kan’s administration in its response to the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, drawing on Ruhi Abiru’s article.
Centered on the testimony of a journalist stationed inside the Prime Minister’s Office, it depicts the absence of prime-ministerial judgment, distrust of bureaucrats, excessive intervention, and the emotional rejection of proposals beyond his understanding, concluding that the period was nothing less than a nightmare.

2019-03-10
In the end, he flew into a rage at advice and proposals beyond the range of his own understanding, and rejected them.

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, suffering from the same grave illness as Rikako Ikee and enduring seven months of hospitalization, was occasionally allowed 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 author 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 he 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, the author 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.
In the end, he flew into a rage at advice and proposals beyond the range of his own understanding, and rejected them.
To be continued.