For example, Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei) is Japan's leading economic journal. Nikkei gives out technology awards every year, and in 1995 its winners included, along with Windows 95, NTT's PHS handphone and Matsushita's HDTV. Though both were notoriously unsuccessful-PHS is an enormous money-loser, and one could fairly say that HDTV (high-definition television with an analog rather than digital base) ranks as one of the biggest technological flops of the twentieth century-both are favorites of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, so Nikkei dutifully celebrated them.
The most entertaining rooms in the press wing of the Hall of Mirrors are the television studios where producers cook up documentaries. So common is the staging of fake news reports that it has its own name, yarase, meaning literally «made to do it.» Japanese television is filled with faked events. In a mild version of yarase, villagers dress up in clothes they never wear to enact festivals that died out years ago. For truly sensational effect, television producers will go much further, as in reports of young girls tearfully admitting to being prostitutes – in what turn out to be paid acting stints. In November 1999, one of the longest-running and most elaborate yarase came to light when it was revealed that Fuji Television, over a period of six months had paid prostitutes and call girls ¥30,000 per appearance to act as wives on its supposedly true-life series, Loving Couples, Divorcing Couples. Nor is yarase limited to television. In 1989, the president of Asahi Shimbun newspaper resigned after it came to light that a photographer had defaced coral in Okinawa in order to create evidence for a news story on how divers were damaging the reef.
The most elaborate yarase often involve foreign reporting. Here's how Far Eastern Economic Review describes a report on Tibet by NHK, Japan's national broadcasting company: «[In 1992] an NHK documentary on harsh living conditions in the Tibetan Himalayas featured a sand avalanche, footage of a monk praying for an end to a three-month dry spell, and an explanation that his horse had died of thirst. NHK later admitted that a crew member had deliberately caused the avalanche; it had rained twice during the filming; and the monk, whom it paid, did not own the dead horse.»
The common thread in the yarase for foreign documentaries is to show how poor, miserable, seedy, or violent life is elsewhere, with the implied message being that life in Japan is really very nice. For reports on the United States, scenes of low life and violence are obligatory, and a practiced producer can manage to set these up almost anywhere. In 1994, NHK did a special on the city of Missoula, Montana, a state famed for its natural beauty and national parks. Most of the program, however, took place in a seedy bar, which offered just the atmosphere NHK felt was right for America. Here's how the program was filmed, according to a Missoula citizen:
The camera is focused on the door, waiting for a man to come in. He looks nervous and is squeezing out some tears. The camera follows him as he comes up to the bar, and sits down, then moves in for a close-up on his tears. He looks up and confesses that he has just been mugged... Making it even more suspicious was the man's claim to have been beaten, struck several times in his face, which had not a mark on it. His face was as clean as a baby's behind. Then we learn he had had his money and clothes and Amtrak [train] ticket stolen, even though he is carrying a beautiful new bag that wasn't taken. And Amtrak doesn't come through Missoula. It doesn't come anywhere near Missoula.
Yarase documentaries and government misinformation do succeed to some extent in quelling people's misgivings about their country but unfortunately some pretty scary skeletons are hidden in Japan's bureaucratic closets. At a sinister agency called Donen, the hiding of information becomes downright terrifying. Donen, a Japanese acronym for the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, manages Japan's nuclear-power program.
At Monju, the fast-breeder nuclear reactor near Tsuruga, which suffered a major leak of liquid sodium from its cooling system in 1995, Donen officials first stated that the leakage was «minimal.» It later turned out to be more than three tons, the largest accident of its type in the world. But they could easily remedy the trouble by hiding the evidence: Donen staff edited film taken at the scene, releasing only an innocuous five minutes' worth and cutting out fifteen minutes that showed serious damage, including the thermometer on the leaking pipes and icicle-like extrusions of sodium.
Donen's attitude to the public at the time of the Monju scandal says much about officials who take for granted that they can always hide behind a wall of denial. The day after the accident, the chairman of the Tsuruga city council went to visit the Monju plant – and Donen officials simply shut the door in his face. Kishimoto Konosuke, the chairman of Tsuruga's Atomic and Thermal Energy Committee, said, «Donen was more concerned with concealing the accident than with explaining to us what was happening. That shows what they think of us.»
Still, there was widespread public anger and concern over Monju (which remained shut down for the rest of the decade), yet the same scenario repeated itself in March 1997, this time when drums filled with nuclear waste caught fire and exploded at a plant at Tokai City north of Tokyo, releasing high levels of radioactivity into the environment. In May 1994, newspapers had revealed that seventy kilograms of plutonium dust and waste had gathered in the pipes and conveyors of the Tokai plant; Donen had known of the missing plutonium (enough to build as many as twenty nuclear bombs) but did nothing about it until the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) demanded an accounting. To this day, Donen claims to have no idea where the plutonium is clustered or how to remove it. «We know that the plutonium is there,» an official said. «It's just held up in the system.»
Given that several nuclear bombs' worth of plutonium dust were lost somewhere inside the Tokai plant, there was great public concern over the Tokai fire. Yet Donen's initial report was a shambles, in some places saying, «Radioactive material was released,» and in others, «No radioactive material was released»; claiming that workers had reconfirmed in the morning that the fire was under control, though they had not (managers had pressured the workers to change their stories); misstating the amount of leaked radioactive material, which turned out to be larger than reported by a factor of twenty. Incredibly, on the day of the explosion, sixty-four people, including science and engineering students and foreign trainees, toured the complex, even visiting one building only a hundred meters from the site of the fire – and nobody ever informed them of the accident.
Several weeks later, Donen revealed that it waited thirty hours before reporting a leak of radioactive tritium at an advanced thermal reactor, Fugen. This was an improvement, though, because in eleven cases of tritium leaks during the previous two and a half years, Donen had made no reports at all. Reform, however, was on the way: Donen was «disbanded» and renamed Genden in May 1998, supposedly to appease an angry public. Today, under this new name, the nuclear agency continues to operate with the same staff, offices, and philosophy as before.
Nor is it only government agencies such as Donen-Genden that are falling behind in nuclear safety. The same problems beset private industry. The troubles at the Tokai plant came to a head at 10:35 a.m. on September 30, 1999, when employees at a fuel-processing plant managed by JCO, a private contractor, dumped so much uranium into a settling basin that it reached critical mass and exploded into uncontrolled nuclear fission. It was Japan's worst nuclear accident ever – the world's worst since Chernobyl – resulting in the sequestration of tens of thousands of people living in the area near the plant. The explosion was a tragedy for forty-nine workers who were exposed to radiation (three of them critically) but at the same time a comedy of errors, misinformation, and mistakes. It turned out that Tokai's nuclear plant had not repaired its safety equipment for more than seventeen years. The workers used a secret manual prepared by JCO's managers that bypassed safety regulations in several critical areas: essentially, material that workers should have disposed of via dissolution cylinders and pumps was carried out manually with a bucket.