Yoshiko Sakurai’s essay exposes how irrational nuclear regulation in Japan has halted life-saving cancer treatment.
It confronts decades of distorted discourse and political weakness that undermined Japan’s national interest and public health.

The essay titled “Cancer Treatment Halted by Regulators” is one that every Japanese citizen must read.
2016-01-04
Since last August, I have compared the false image of Yoshiko Sakurai imposed on Asahi Shimbun readers with her true image, using Bob Dylan’s song “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
Today’s front page of the Sankei Shimbun carried an essay by her that proves this difference one hundred percent.
The essay titled “Cancer Treatment Halted by Regulators” is one that every Japanese citizen must read.
Before introducing that essay, there is something that must be said.
Those who grew up reading Asahi Shimbun and watching news programs on TV Asahi and TBS have long paraded superficial moralism and blind admiration for the West.
They boast of their connections with so-called elite Western intellectuals and, having received a Nobel Prize in Literature, fall under the illusion that they themselves represent Japan’s conscience.
One of the most symbolic figures among them is Gerald Curtis.
At every opportunity, he has slandered Japan and reduced it to caricature.
At the same time, the United States represented by figures like him has continued to indulge China, a one-party communist dictatorship that persists even in the twenty-first century.
As a result, China, without reflecting on its own wrongdoing, has laid bare the laughable ambition of world domination.
Under a constitution hastily cobbled together by GHQ in just two weeks from copied Western documents, designed to weaken Japan,
an abnormal discourse emerged in which even the exercise of self-defense was denounced as “war legislation.”
Within this unprecedented environment, Prime Minister Abe, a genuine politician who understands that protecting the nation is a fundamental duty,
exercised maximum diplomatic and political power as the leader of a country where the “turntable of civilization” is turning, and stopped China’s aggression.
This is a fact that even an elementary school student can understand.
Yet a mere writer, who happens to be older or happens to have won a Nobel Prize, forgot his place and referred to the Prime Minister dismissively as “Abe,” declaring that he had never entrusted his life to him.
I will end by saying just one thing.
Then tell me, Oe, have you entrusted your life to China or to Korea.
You utter fool.