Photo: Former NHK anchor Jun Hori. (TEDxKyoto/Flickr Creative Commons)
Nuclear Scientist: I have not trusted the information from beginning… “The worst scenario I predicted has happened”
PRI’s ‘The World’, Oct 17, 2014: Japan’s timid coverage of Fukushima led this news anchor to revolt — and he’s not alone — No one is telling [evacuee] Shiga Kamematsu the truth
- Complaints about censorship… continue to this day… Evacuees don’t trust the gov’t or Tepco… they’re blaming the media for not holding them both accountable… Criticism goes beyond a lack of investigation. Journalist Jun Hori says his news agency prevented him from accurately reporting what happened… It restricted what he and other journalists could say about Fukushima [like] how much radiation was spreading.
- Jun Hori. NHK news anchor: “I couldn’t tell the true story on my news program… It was very frustrating… A lot of people kept asking me, ‘Why didn’t you tell us earlier about what is happening?’… My superiors said NHK was getting complaints from politicians…They told me I had to stop… The Japanese thought someone was [giving them accurate information] — companies, the government, someone. But once you peeled back the cover, you saw that nobody was doing it.”
Jun Hori at TEDx Kyoto: ‘Do not create panic, do not fuel public anxiety, do not impair national interests, do not compromise the interests of our sponsors’… There is a plethora of information available on the web, one cannot learn the truth from watching TV or reading newspapers… Drastic changes need to be made… A man [wanted] to see what is really going on in the nuclear plants… The recordings he sent us a few months later were shocking and overwhelming.
Asahi Reporter: “Tepco declined… access of the complete recordings… Footage has not yet been released… There are much more shocking parts… Workers have been told… they’d receive 100 millisieverts [a day] of radiation exposure.“
Dr. Uzi Even, nuclear scientist: “I do not trust the reporting system… In fact from the beginning of this crisis… Japanese authorities were trying to play down the danger… The worst scenario that I predicted happened… I claimed from the beginning that the information given to the public is either erroneous or misleading… The first few days they said, ‘Everything is under control, nothing will happen, you don’t have to be worried.’ I doubted it from the moment of the earthquake.”
