Japanese media, led by the Asahi Shimbun, portrayed Toshiba as a deeply flawed company, but this view ignores crucial facts.
This essay examines why Bill Gates repeatedly visited Toshiba, the excellence of its small modular reactor technology, and the overlooked realities behind the Fukushima accident.

2016-09-19

What kind of company is Toshiba.
The media, led by The Asahi Shimbun, reported on Toshiba as if it were the worst possible company.
It is time they realized that the truly disgraceful entity is themselves.
The aforementioned Bill Gates visited Toshiba many times.
That was because he knew the excellence of the small modular reactors developed by Toshiba.
Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist of the postwar world, has explained that Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was the first plant to adopt a reactor manufactured by GE, that GE’s personnel had astonishingly poor credentials, that the design contained numerous defects, and that all operational problems were perfectly corrected and managed by Toshiba, Hitachi, and other Japanese corporations that represent the world’s finest engineering teams.
After recognizing a serious flaw in the placement of emergency power systems—fatal to nuclear safety—GE notified all countries operating GE-designed reactors.
Only Japan, under the Koizumi administration, ignored this notice and failed to implement improvements.
That, he explained, is what turned Fukushima into “Fukushima.”
I had inferred that Bill Gates must have been visiting Toshiba while burdened by a sense of moral responsibility.
Of course, more than that sense of guilt, it was the excellence of Toshiba’s small modular reactor technology that led him to visit Toshiba repeatedly.
Most Japanese citizens, and the majority of people around the world, are completely unaware of this fact.
They also do not know that Toshiba employs hundreds of thousands of people on a consolidated basis, and that including affiliated companies, its employment reaches into the millions, just as is the case with Hitachi and eight other Japanese electronics manufacturers of world renown.
I was the first to step forward and state that everything begins with a single individual.
Both Bill Gates and Masayoshi Son, each acting alone, drove tens of millions of Japanese citizens into hardship.
To be continued.