Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [51]
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