This article looks back critically on the response of Naoto Kan’s cabinet during the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, and argues that the same political character has been carried over into today’s Constitutional Democratic Party.
Using an essay by Rui Abiru as its point of departure, it questions the confusion inside the Prime Minister’s Office, the delays in responding to the nuclear crisis, the sluggish support for disaster victims, and the responsibility of media organizations such as the Asahi Shimbun and NHK for failing to convey the full reality of the Kan administration.
It further argues that because leading members of the Constitutional Democratic Party, including Yukio Edano, Tetsurō Fukuyama, and Kiyomi Tsujimoto, were central figures in the Kan cabinet, the party represents a purified continuation of that same administration.
It is a passage that seeks to engrave the historical lesson of the Great East Japan Earthquake, the Fukushima accident, Naoto Kan, Rui Abiru, and the Constitutional Democratic Party.

2019-03-13
When the Kan cabinet was launched, Prime Minister Abe called it “an extremely insidious left-wing government.”
That, in fact, proved that Prime Minister Abe was a rare politician, a statesman of uncommon realism who saw things with precision.

The chapter I posted on 2019-03-11 under the title,
“This is precisely the passage that every Japanese citizen must read every day and must never forget as true reporting,”
has entered the official hashtag ranking at number 34 for Hanshin.

This is precisely the passage that every Japanese citizen must read every day and must never forget as true reporting.

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 Naoto Kan who turned Fukushima into FUKUSHIMA.
Rui Abiru is not merely Masayuki Takayama’s junior for nothing, but one of the finest active journalists in Japan.
The essay he published in this month’s issue of Seiron perfectly proves that my own observation was one hundred percent correct.
It is an essay that every Japanese citizen must read and engrave upon the heart.

A friend of mine, one of the most voracious readers I know, was just as furious as Mr. Abiru that the reporters of the various newspapers who were then assigned as Kantei press chiefs never conveyed to the people the true nature of Naoto Kan.
I feel as though I would like to publish this essay every single day.
Subscribers to the Asahi Shimbun 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, no less.
At the time, I could only stare in disbelief and think, Is this man Dōkyō.

It was when I was living through a seven-month hospitalization with the same grave illness as Rikako Ikee, and had temporarily been allowed out for refreshment on several occasions.
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 punishing.
I was so angered that I said to my companion, “Do they really mean to make people walk such a terrible path and then charge an admission fee.
Build an elevator.”
But after visiting repeatedly, 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 the grave of Wake no Kiyomaro is there.
Jingo-ji was in truth a temple of Wake no Kiyomaro.
One day, while standing before his grave with my hands together in prayer for his peace and in gratitude to him, I sensed a presence behind me and turned around in surprise.
There stood a magnificent deer, gazing fixedly at me.
When I stepped toward it and said, “Oh, you are Wake no Kiyomaro,” it ran in an instant across an extraordinarily steep slope.
Rui Abiru, Masayuki Takayama, and I are, for Japan, Wake no Kiyomaro living in the present.

A Great Earthquake Brought On by an Incompetent Government.
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 dealt with it better.
We have reflections.
But at the same time, was not the previous Liberal Democratic administration also responsible.”

On February 12, at the House of Representatives Budget Committee, Katsuya Okada, former deputy prime minister of the Constitutional Democratic Party group, bit back at Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who had earlier described the Democratic administration at an LDP convention as “a nightmare-like Democratic government,” and responded in this way.

At the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, Okada was secretary general of the Democratic Party.
It is fine that he looked back on that time and admitted there had been deficiencies.
But this still shows reflection to be far from sufficient.

At the time of the earthquake, the writer was serving as Sankei Shimbun’s Kantei press chief and was stationed at the Prime Minister’s Office.
And because the disaster response of the Kan cabinet, as I personally witnessed it, reported on it, or heard about it from fellow reporters, was nothing less than a “nightmare” itself.

Trusting no one and exploding in rage.

It is not a past I particularly wish to recall, but as a lesson in what terrible things happen when a nation fails in choosing its leader, I want to look back on that time.
At the greatest national crisis of the postwar period, the Great East Japan Earthquake, which brought unprecedented devastation, Naoto Kan understood neither the relative weight of matters nor their priority, became a mass of suspicion, trusted none of the bureaucrats under him, repeatedly engaged in popularity-seeking performances, and, shaken and near tears, lashed out at those around him.

Not only did Japan’s highest leader fail to function, he became an obstacle to recovery and reconstruction, and a hindrance to the ruling and opposition parties working together to confront the national crisis.
If that is not a “nightmare,” then what is.
At that time, I heard one of the prime minister’s secretaries, looking utterly worn down, say the following.

“Ordinarily, when a disaster of this magnitude occurs, the prime minister and his secretaries become of one mind and one body, but in this case the distance between the prime minister and his secretaries only grew wider after the disaster struck.”

In fact, because Mr. Kan shouted at people so meaninglessly and incessantly, the secretaries reportedly whispered things like this to each other when they passed one another in the corridors, parodying radiation exposure.

“Today I was exposed to forty milli-Kan-sieverts.”

Kan trusted no one, and when it came to measures regarding the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, he interfered in everything down to specialized issues and technical minutiae.
In the end, whenever advice or proposals went beyond the range of what he personally understood, he exploded in rage and rejected them.

A leader unable to decide.

“To think that the Japanese people ended up with such a foolish prime minister.
So 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 giving advice and making proposals to the Kantei from immediately after the nuclear accident occurred.
Professor Uehara had been consulted by many prime ministers, from Takeo Fukuda in earlier days to more recently Shinzo Abe, on energy policy in general, but he said he had been left utterly appalled by Mr. Kan.
The sequence was as follows.
Upon the accident, Uehara immediately urged the Kantei to restore the cooling system and even sent drawings for the installation of an external cooling device.
On March 16 he was summoned to Tokyo by Goshi Hosono, then a prime ministerial aide in the integrated accident response headquarters.
He also met with Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano and Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Banri Kaieda, then returned once to his office in Saga City and proceeded with arrangements for the machinery required for the work.

“Yet no matter how much I spoke with the senior officials at the Kantei, all they said was, ‘The prime minister just won’t decide, he won’t make a judgment.
Because the prime minister is the final decision-maker, there is nothing we can do.’”

At the time, one government official lamented, “The prime minister has absolutely no sense of the larger picture.
On the contrary, he obsesses over petty matters he happens to know something about, and is always two days late in making a decision,” and that was precisely the pattern now unfolding.

On March 20, former Internal Affairs Minister Kazuhiro Haraguchi and former Cabinet Office parliamentary secretary Hiroshi Ogushi, both of the Democratic Party, gathered at Uehara’s office and discussed the nuclear accident response.
Haraguchi then contacted Mr. Kan by mobile phone and passed the call to Uehara, and the following exchange took place.

Kan.
“I read your report, but I cannot understand it technically.
Where exactly is the external cooling device to be attached.
I cannot make a decision without knowing where it is to be attached.”

Uehara.
“That is not something the prime minister should be the one to think about.
Even without understanding the technical details, surely you can decide whether to do it or not.”

At that, Kan suddenly flew into a rage, shouting “What!” and then rambling on at length in words that could scarcely be recognized as Japanese.
Uehara later recalled to me as follows.

“I was shocked and truly frightened.
I felt that if the prime minister of a country was in such a state, the country itself was in danger.”

The source of reputational damage.

According to the report of the private accident investigation commission, when it became clear that the diesel generator serving as the emergency power supply at Fukushima Daiichi had failed and that substitute batteries were needed, Kan took bizarre action.
Using his own mobile phone, he directly questioned those in charge, asking “What size is it,” “How many meters in length and width,” “How much does it weigh,” and eagerly took notes.

According to one government official, whereas an ordinary politician would first think, “What should be done about this situation,” Mr. Kan became abnormally fixated on “Why did the diesel generator break,” and discussion made little headway.

At the time, one official in the National Police Agency, listing four types of supreme commander.

1. Capable and active.
2. Incapable and inactive.
3. Capable but inactive.
4. Incapable yet active.
   said flatly as follows.

“You already know which one Prime Minister Kan falls into.
He is the worst type, the type who is incompetent yet tries to do things he cannot do.
The incapable-but-active type.
That is the most troublesome of all.”

Here we have the very model of vicious micromanagement, in which a man, though incompetent, cannot resist excessively controlling and intervening in the work of those beneath him.
A half-educated man, unaware of his own limits and deficiencies, tried to run everything himself, and inevitably committed one blunder after another.
That, perhaps, was the essential nature of the Kantei’s accident response.
This was a man-made disaster caused by Mr. Kan.

Support for the disaster victims was also delayed.

The fact that the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred during Kan’s tenure is often compared with the fact that the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake occurred during the tenure of Socialist Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama.
There were even people, like Haruki Madarame, former chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission, who, after being shouted at continuously by Mr. Kan, came to feel, “Perhaps this was divine punishment for having made such a man prime minister.”
But a bureaucrat who dealt with disaster response under both the Murayama cabinet and the Kan cabinet said the two men were utterly different.

“Murayama knew he was incompetent, and he said, ‘Leave it all to you.
I will take responsibility.’
Kan, by contrast, never admitted his own incompetence, and said, ‘Make sure you convince me of everything first.
If it fails, it is your fault.’”

In personality, judgment, political ability, and even self-awareness, he was in no way a man fit to be prime minister.
What was particularly problematic in Mr. Kan’s response to the disaster, though it has not been much pointed out until now, was the delay in support for the victims.
A person familiar with the state of the Kantei Crisis Management Center at the time testified as follows.

“Because of the prime minister’s crazy fixation on the nuclear plant, support for the disaster victims was delayed by ten days.
He issued none of the instructions that should have gone to the National Police Agency or the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, and did not move them at all.”

On this point, I also heard a terrible story from a bureaucrat at the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy.
Seven to ten days after the earthquake, he suddenly received a call on his mobile phone from Mr. Kan, with whom he had never even been acquainted.
As he brought the phone to his ear wondering what it was about, a shout burst forth.

“Oil, oil, oil.
Slash, dot, circle, cross, triangle, square.
It’s your fault, it’s your fault.”

Since gasoline shortages in the disaster area had begun to be treated as a major problem, this bureaucrat assumed it was a call telling him to do something about that, yet he was not even in the relevant department.
He said.

“Kan had absolutely no idea which buttons to push in which ministry.
Then, when things failed to move, he began to say it was bureaucratic sabotage.
There was nothing to be done.”

What remains particularly vivid to me is what one Kantei press chief from a nationwide newspaper said to me at the time.

“If we write the truth about the actual state of the Kan Kantei, readers simply will not believe it.
They say, ‘Surely it cannot be that terrible.’”

The common sense and decency of the people themselves were blinding them to the facts.
I repeat, it was, without exaggeration, an age of “nightmare.”
The fact that media such as the Asahi Shimbun, which had been close to Mr. Kan, did not directly report his miserable true figure also helped keep the Kan cabinet afloat.

What follows is the continuation of the previous chapter.

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

Now then, that Kan cabinet has today made a comeback as the leading opposition party.
The principal members of the Constitutional Democratic Party are the very same figures who symbolized the failures of the Kan cabinet.
Kan himself sits as the party’s supreme adviser.
Edano, who was chief cabinet secretary in the Kan cabinet, is party leader.
Tetsurō Fukuyama, then deputy chief cabinet secretary, is secretary general.
Kiyomi Tsujimoto, then a prime ministerial aide, is chair of the Diet affairs committee.
That is the reality.

When the Kan cabinet was launched, Prime Minister Abe called it “an extremely insidious left-wing government.”
That, in fact, proved that Prime Minister Abe was a rare politician, a statesman of uncommon realism who saw things with precision.
One can say that the Constitutional Democratic Party is the Kan cabinet further purified, and, aided by the ease of being in opposition, even more inclined to the left.
As proof of this, the Constitutional Democratic Party formed a unified parliamentary group in the House of Councillors with the Social Democratic Party.
In the summer House of Councillors election, arrangements were also in place to join hands and cooperate with the Communist Party.

Mr. Edano likes to call himself a conservative, but what kind of conservative teams up 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, then it is nothing other than the revival of the old Socialist Party.
Even if it raises policies like anti-nuclearism in the manner of the Socialists, and does nothing but shout opposition to the government and chase scandals, it will never gather the people’s hopes or interest, and surely will not regain power.

And yet inside the Constitutional Democratic Party, where “Edano the one strong man” is spoken of, observations are spreading such as, “Mr. Edano is a king of the hill.
Perhaps he finds that comfortable,” and, “Edano and his close aides decide everything.
Perhaps Edano thinks the present state of things is just fine.”

Certainly, the position of permanently ruling the leading opposition party as its dictator, and doing nothing more than continuing criticism of the government and ruling parties, must be an easy one.
But such an opposition contributes nothing to the national interest.
Japan does not need the ghost of the Kan cabinet, which continues to consume Diet salaries and assorted allowances paid for by the people’s taxes.