Amazingly, he is retracting everything he ever said in favour of the nuclear industry in plain language. He says all the claims made by the nuclear industry in favour of nuclear power are lies. It is not cheap, it is not safe, and it is not sustainable. He goes through it in great detail as to why all those claims are lies, and forcefully makes the point that the electrical companies, the nuclear industry and the unions for the electrical companies, and therefore the politicians who receive political donations are too close to see it.
Mr. Koizumi says it is possible for Japan to completely abandon nuclear power. It can be done, it should be done, and all it would take would be for a Prime Minister to decide it is his cause. After Fukushima, Japan in fact did it without any nuclear power for four and a half years before they started up one of the plants. Germany by contrast has declared it is down to zero, but is still using eight nuclear plants as they wind them down.
When asked about his historic involvement with nuclear power back to the 1970s, he says he deeply regrets believing what the industry representatives presented to government. He was given genuine assurances from all the presenters dating back to the 1970s that it would be "cheap, safe and clean" - a claim he says is so deceitfully wrong, he simply has to speak up now. It's frustrating to read that because I remember those discussions in the 1970s when I was still a kid, and thinking how in the name of all that is good can these politicians believe nuclear power is safe after Three Mile Island? Reading the change in position by Mr. Koizumi today is devastating because it was known back in the late 1970s that nuclear power was not cheap, safe or clean. Really, I was a kid and I knew it.
I guess it's a case of better late than never. It's truly frustrating.
There is a generation of people in Japan that became apolitical and stayed apolitical in the late 70s through to the moment of Fukushima. As if a great political and scientific amnesia covered Japan, and they simply forgot the risks until it all went pear-shaped. The stupid thing is that had they thought about it before, they would have known the risks that emerge out of catastrophic failure are catastrophe itself. Even Mr. Koizumi and his LDP cohorts must have known on some level back in the 1970s.
In his rationalisation, Mr. Koizumi offers the context of the oil shock of the 1970s as giving great impetus to move nuclear energy as quickly as possible. While it is true that nuclear power freed Japan from dependence on oil, it put it right on course for Fukushima. Even so, you sort of wonder why these heads could not balance up the risks against those benefits. It's humiliating to read Mr. Koizumi wants 100% renewables in Japan, and that he is arguing his case to the LDP hard. In many ways, it's too fucking late. I appreciate he saw the light, but he could have done it as Prime Minister, had he known back then; and he could have known back then. It's not like the information to do with the risks were hidden out of sight.
It's an amazing interview. I believe he's seen the light. It's still much too late.
Still Living In The Shadow Of Kakuei Tanaka's World
The LDP rule in Japan between 1955 and 1993 had many strange effects. One of them was how government bureaucrats stopped distinguishing between government business and LDP party politics. This was because they were in power so long, and so dominantly that there simply was no point in talking to the opposition parties. This has led to some strange outcomes in Japanese politics, namely, when the opposition has managed to claw its way into power, the bureaucrats have been hostile to the Socialists or the Democrats that formed government from the merger of opposition parties. This has meant factional politics of the LDP were much more important than the actual business of the Japanese Diet.
The leading kingpin of the kind of factional politics led by graft and bribery was Kakuei Tanaka, who essentially railroaded the nuclear industry into Japan. He did so because the nuclear industry has ancillary costs, all of which could be diverted to constituents. By building expensive nuclear power plants, and paying off the local residents to host these plants in their neighbourhoods, the LDP were able to retain the rural votes. If you add in all the favours and tenders that involved bribes, too many people benefited to question the risks.
The other problem of factional politics is that the people in safe seats wielded far more power than politicians in marginal seats. Kakuei Tanaka made sure he bribed the politicians in marginal seats regardless of party affiliation, so that he could wield extra-party influence. When you combine all this together, you have a structure where the politicians in marginal seats and the bureaucrats of particular ministries with rural offices become intimately entwined in an exchange of favours and bribes.
If we are to be fair to Junichiro Koizumi's time as Prime Minister, he used up all his capital in dismantling this structure by privatising out the postal services of Japan. Asking him to dismantle nuclear power plants would have been next to impossible given the priority of privatising the postal services. In the interview, Junichiro Koizumi describes the privatisation as dismantling Kakuei's legacy. It sounds easy, but there were a lot of vested interests that got sent packing. The interesting thing is that it never got explained to the public that was what was happening. It's only after the fact that we can now understand the full meaning of that privatisation.
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