Japanese Politician Drinks The (Fukushima) Kool Aid

By Ken Aichi

In a display meant to show the public that treatment attempts were indeed proving successful and water now safe, a man in a position of trust and power downed a glass of decontaminated water in front of an audience of assembled media.

That, of course, was in 1959, when Chisso's president drunk glass of water from a machine he installed to treat water discharged from his chemical plant; you may have heard of the Minamata disease.

History has shown that the machine was completely ineffective (and the company's own records admitted that they knew this) and people continued getting sick throughout the decade following, until the company was finally forced to admit that they were responsible around 1970.

Considering this, WHY is DPJ member Sonoda repeating this trick more than half a century later? His body language indiciated that he wasn't too happy about drinking the decontaminated water collected from inside the Fukushima No.1 reactors.

And from the information available, he had good reason to be nervous. I'm not going to bore you with the details (there are plenty of websites that will do that for you), but the consistent lack of information coming out of the Japanese government is quite irresponsible at best and criminal at worst.

The moral of the story? If you're going to repeat a gesture from the past, at least check that it was a succesful one.

Glug Glug Glug

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