Hiroshi Matsubara | Tokyo | May 21

Asahi Shimbun - Despite growing international concerns over the state of spent fuel rods at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, two government experts said on May 21 that there are no plans to speed up their scheduled removal by 2015.

Speaking at a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo, the government apparently wanted to get the message out to the world that the No. 4 reactor at the plant, which houses more than 1,500 nuclear fuel rods, could withstand a similar strike to last year's Great East Japan Earthquake.

Tokyo | May 17

AFP - A Japanese bank has halted transactions by the Iranian government after a US court ordered a $2.6 billion asset freeze over the 1983 bombing of US barracks in Beirut, a bank spokesman said on Thursday.

"It is true that we have received the order from the US court," to freeze $2.6 billion of assets, a spokesman for the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ told AFP, declining to give details on the value of Iranian holdings at the bank.

The court order reflects "the amount that the court in 2007 upheld for compensation demands by families of victims of the 1983 attacks on US forces in Beirut," he said.

The bank lodged an appeal against the US court order on Thursday, he said.

"One of the reasons for the appeal is that the US court has ordered a freeze on assets in accounts not only in the United States but also in Japan, which is problematic under Japanese law," the spokesman said.

At what point will the rest of the world tell us to go f*ck ourselves? When will our assets start be seized or frozen because of our atrocities?

Yoko Kubota | Tokyo | May 14

Reuters - Tokyo Electric Power Co posted an annual loss of almost $10 billion as compensation claims for the Fukushima nuclear disaster brought it to the brink of bankruptcy and fuel costs soared after idling all its atomic plants.

Japan's biggest utility said on Monday that its net loss for the year to March 31 was 781.6 billion yen ($9.8 billion), above the consensus estimate of a 692.6 billion yen loss in a survey of three analysts by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Hiroko Tabuchi | Tokyo | May 9

NYT - Japan is ready to nationalize Tokyo Electric Power, the operator of the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, under a 1 trillion yen ($12.5 billion) bailout plan that was approved on Wednesday.

The Japanese government has been scrambling to keep the utility company from collapsing so it can meet the billions of dollars in compensation claims and decommission the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, all while continuing to provide the Tokyo metropolis with stable electricity.

The government is also eager to push through reforms to restore public trust in a company that has played a vital role in Japan’s energy policy but has also admitted safety lapses and cover-ups at its power plants. The $12.5 billion bailout comes at a time when the government itself is carrying a debt burden that has mushroomed to more than twice the size of the economy.

David Batty | May 5

The Guardian - Japan is shutting down its last working nuclear reactor as part of the safety drive imposed after the March 2011 tsunami triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima plant.

The closure of the third reactor at the Tomari plant in Hokkaido prefecture, northern Japan, means all of the country's 50 nuclear reactors have been taken offline, leaving the country with no nuclear-derived electricity for the first time since 1970.

Hokkaido Electric said it started lowering output from the reactor at 5pm (8am GMT). The unit should be shut down completely by the early hours of Sunday.

Hundreds of people marched through Tokyo waving banners to celebrate what they hope will be the end of nuclear power in Japan.

Until last year's earthquake and tsunami triggered radiation leaks at Tokyo Electric Power's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Japan was the world's third-biggest user of atomic energy.

All the reactors have been shut down for routine maintenance. They must withstand tests against earthquakes and tsunamis, and local authorities must give their consent in order for plants to restart.

ENE News, May 1

To: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon

An Urgent Request on UN Intervention to Stabilize the Fukushima Unit 4 Spent Nuclear Fuel

Recently, former diplomats and experts both in Japan and abroad stressed the extremely risky condition of the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 spent nuclear fuel pool and this is being widely reported by world media. Robert Alvarez, Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), who is one of the best-known experts on spent nuclear fuel, stated that in Unit 4 there is spent nuclear fuel which contains Cesium-137 (Cs-137) that is equivalent to 10 times the amount that was released at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Thus, if an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain, this could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cs-137 released by the Chernobyl accident.

Nearly all of the 10,893 spent fuel assemblies at the Fukushima Daiichi plant sit in pools vulnerable to future earthquakes, with roughly 85 times more long-lived radioactivity than released at Chernobyl.

Paul Eckert | Washington | Apr 26

Reuters - The United States and Japan announced on Thursday a revised agreement on streamlining the U.S. military presence on Okinawa that will shift 9,000 Marines from that southern Japanese island to Guam and other Asia-Pacific sites.

The new plan, unveiled days before Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda visits President Barack Obama, helps the allies work around the still unresolved, core dispute over moving the Futenma air base from a crowded part of Okinawa to a new site that had vexed relations for years.

Under the agreement, 9,000 U.S. Marines will relocate off Okinawa: 5,000 to Guam and the rest to other locations such as Hawaii and Australia, U.S. officials said.

The updated version of a long-delayed 2006 plan "outlines an improved U.S. Marine Corps force posture in the Asia-Pacific, one that is more capable and one that is more geographically distributed," said a senior U.S. Defense Department official.

North Korea must have hired Baghdad Bob as a speechwriter:

North Korea is boasting of “powerful, modern weapons” that can defeat in a single blow the United States, which it accuses of plotting a war against it.

Chief of general staff, Ri Yong Ho, gave no further details about the weaponry in his speech to mark the North Korean army's 80th anniversary.

An unprecedented look at the disastrous handling of the accident at TEPCO's nuclear power station explains why Japan still doesn't trust nukes.

By Bill Powell and Hideko Takayama, April 20

FORTUNE -- More than a year has passed since a massive earthquake and a series of tsunamis triggered the worst accident at a nuclear power plant since Chernobyl in 1986, but the epic debacle at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station remains front and center in Japan, at the very core of a historic debate over the future of nuclear energy—one that comes down to a fundamental question: Should nuclear power, which prior to the accident last year generated 30% of the electricity for the world's third-largest economy, have any future at all in Japan?

Brett Smiley | Apr 12

NYMag - South Korean and U.S. intelligence have declared North Korea's rocket launch on Friday a failure. Multiple reports indicate the 90-ton rocket launched at 6:39 p.m. EDT and within a few minutes, broke into four pieces and crashed into the sea off the west coast of the Korean Peninsula.

North Korea, which days earlier moved a three-stage rocket its west coast, had stated that the purpose of the missile launch was to put a weather satellite into orbit. However some experts believe that the launch was just a guise to test its ability to fire a long-range missile.

Manila | Apr 11

Taipei Times - The Philippines’ biggest warship was locked in a standoff yesterday with two Chinese vessels in the South China Sea, reigniting tensions in a decades-long dispute over the resource-rich waters.

The Philippine government said the Chinese ships were blocking efforts by its navy flagship vessel to arrest Chinese fishermen that were found on the weekend to have illegally entered its territory.

In a dramatic day of diplomacy, the Philippines summoned the Chinese ambassador in Manila and lodged a formal protest, but China insisted it had sovereign rights over the area and ordered the Philippine warship to leave.

Philippine President Benigno Aquino III said he was looking to end the standoff through diplomatic means.

“No one will benefit if we have violence,” he told reporters.

Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario said both sides wanted a peaceful resolution, but also cautioned that negotiations were at an “impasse” and his country was ready to defend its territory.

“If the Philippines is challenged, we are prepared to secure our sovereignty,” del Rosario said.

March 30

BBC - Japan is allowing some of the 80,000 people forced to move following last year's Fukushima nuclear disaster to visit their homes again.

Around 16,000 people who lived close to or just inside the exclusion zone will be able to re-enter the area.

Parts of Tamura, Minamisoma and Kawauchi will remain out of bounds because of higher radiation levels.

But it is thought most residents will wait until conditions in the towns improves further before visiting.

David McNeill | Tokyo | Mar 29

The Independent - Latest readings from tsunami-stricken nuclear plant overturn claims that reactors have been made safe

A lethal level of radiation has been detected inside one of the reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, throwing fresh doubts over the operator's claims that the disabled complex is under control.

Engineers for Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) say readings of airborne radiation inside the containment vessel of Reactor 2 showed nearly 73 sieverts per hour this week, the highest since the crisis began following the earthquake and tsunami on 11 March last year. Exposure to radiation at that level is deadly within minutes, according to Japan's public broadcaster, NHK.

Tepco said the find would have "no impact" on the company's long-term plans to decommission the plant's six reactors. "We were not surprised that the radiation was this high because the reading was taken from inside the pressure vessel,"a spokesperson said.

Tepco announced in December that the Daiichi complex had achieved a state of cold shutdown, meaning that radiation emissions are under control and the temperature of its 260 tons of nuclear fuel has stabilised below boiling point. The company plans to remove the fuel and dismantle the plant's steel and concrete structure – a task it estimates will take decades.

But engineers have only a rough idea of where the melted fuel inside three of the six reactors is, or how badly it has corroded the base of the reactors and their containment vessels. Reactors 1 and 3 are too badly damaged to allow close inspection, while engineers had to use modified equipment to peer inside Reactor 2 this week for only the second time since the earthquake.

Tokyo | Mar 29

AFP -

North Korea has begun fuelling a rocket for a launch that the West considers a missile test, a Japanese newspaper reported Thursday, citing a source "close to the government" in Pyongyang.

"The launch is coming closer. The possibility is high that the launch date will be set for April 12 or 13," the source said according to the Tokyo Shimbun in a report from Seoul.

It cited the source as saying that North Korea had begun injecting liquid fuel into the rocket.

The paper also said a diplomatic source had confirmed that North Korea has moved the rocket to a launch pad in Tongchang-ri in the country's far northwest.

** US Suspends Food Assistance to North Korea
** N.Korea Unveils Details of Satellite
** EXCLUSIVE: Activity seen at North Korea launch site(pic)
** NK to allow foreign experts to observe rocket launch
** Japan threatens to shoot down North Korean rocket
** South Korea warns it may shoot down North Korean rocket

It is possible, now that Kim Jong Il is dead, China may finally start to shed the North Korean monkey from her back.

Risa Maeda & Osamu Tsukimori | Tokyo | March 23

Reuters - Japanese firms are looking at building several geothermal plants in a volcanic zone in the area worst hit by last year's nuclear disaster, a project that could gain momentum after the government eased restrictions on drilling this week.

The head of a group of firms that have studied the potential of a geothermal project in Fukushima said on Friday a consortium of about 10 companies would meet local people by early May to explain their plans to build plants with a total capacity of 270 megawatts, which would be Japan's biggest.

The consortium plans to work with local communities, including those who run hotels and inns at hot springs, to develop geothermal energy, Masaho Adachi, the chairman of Japan Geothermal Developers' Council said.

Spengler | Mar 12 | Asia Times

A Japanese government study that should have shaken the psychology profession to its shoelaces went through the news media with a mild degree of titillation last month. Almost a third of Japanese boys aged 16-10 and three-fifths of girls say that they have no interest in sex. That is daunting, for all the world's cultures have believed that women enjoy sex more than men, as the Greek seer Tiresias told the gods according to Ovid.

The hormones of late adolescence evidently rage in vain against some cultural barrier that makes young Japanese "despise" sexual relations, according to the Japan Family Planning Association's report [1]. The whole edifice of liberal social policy should have tumbled upon the news, which refutes Freud's premise that libido is the driving force in human character. For 60 years, the sexual revolution insisted that repressed desire is the root of all evil. It turns out that the ultimate victim of sexual revolution is sex itself.

What makes the Japanese hate sex? The same things that make a growing proportion of Americans hate sex. Joan Sewell's 2007 book I'd Rather Eat Chocolate became the manifesto of American women who don't like sex, hailed at the as "the next wild turn in the female sexual revolution" by Sandra Tsing Loh in The Atlantic Monthly [2].

Pharmaceutical companies are racing to market a pill to revive fading female libido, to no avail: women do not want to be sex objects, and a culture that objectifies women will make them hate sex, as I wrote in this space five years ago [3]. But the problem has gotten worse than I imagined it would.

Somedays Spengler is just confusing to read

Tokyo | Mar 5

AFP - A year on from one of the biggest earthquakes in recorded history, Japanese scientists are warning anew that Tokyo could soon be hit by a quake that will kill thousands and cause untold damage.

Greater Tokyo, home to 35 million tightly packed people, has seen a three-fold increase in tectonic activity since the magnitude 9.0 undersea quake that unleashed a killer tsunami last March.

Every day, an average of nearly 1.5 quakes are recorded in and around the city, one of the most populated places on earth.

But Tokyoites are so used to being shaken in their beds or at their desks that the majority pass almost without comment.

The city is, without doubt, one of the most earthquake-proofed places in the world. Even the monster quake of March 11 last year that struck just 370 kilometres (230 miles) away caused little structural damage.

Public transport was thrown into temporary disarray, leaving thousands stranded, but no buildings collapsed and there were no large-scale casualties.

The University of Tokyo's Earthquake Research Institute says the city, built at the intersection of four tectonic plates, has a 50 percent chance of suffering a major quake -- anything above a magnitude 7.0 -- in the next four years.

"We must prepare for the earthquake that will happen," says Asahiko Taira, executive director of the government's Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

A simulation by the agency suggests that if an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.3 occurred in the northern part of Tokyo Bay on a weekday evening, around 6,400 people would die, with 160,000 injured.

Jun Hongo | Tokyo | February 28

Japan Times - Conflicting authority, mistrust, meddling add to poor preparation

The Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant crisis was caused by Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s lack of preparation for huge tsunami and exacerbated by conflicting levels of authority and downright "distrust and meddling" by high-ranking officials, an independent investigative panel reported Tuesday.

"There were cases of excessive meddling (by the government) toward people working at the site," and such actions did more harm than good, said Koichi Kitazawa, former chief of the Japan Science and Technology Agency.

The investigative group Kitazawa leads, the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, interviewed more than 300 politicians, bureaucrats and workers involved in the Fukushima crisis for its report.

Seoul | Feb 21

AFP - North Korea's delegation left for talks about its nuclear programme with the United States Tuesday, in what will be the first significant contact by the two sides since the death of leader Kim Jong-Il.

The team headed by First Vice-Foreign Minister Kim Kye-Gwan departed to attend "high-level talks" with the US, the state news agency said in a one-sentence report.

Kim will meet Glyn Davies, coordinator for US policy on North Korea, in Beijing Thursday for discussions expected to provide clues about policy directions under Pyongyang's new leaders.

The bilateral meeting will be the third since last July. The two sides had been scheduled to meet in December but the plan was shelved after Kim's death on December 17.

Kim's youngest son Jong-Un has taken over but the regime has warned the world not to expect major policy changes.

David McNeill | Feb 21

The Independent - A year since the Fukushima nuclear plant was destroyed, the fight to prevent disaster goes on. In an exclusive dispatch from the reactors, David McNeill becomes the first European journalist to revisit Japan's ground zero.

The journey to Fukushima Daiichi begins at the border of the 12-mile exclusion zone that surrounds the ruined nuclear complex, beyond which life has frozen in time. Weeds reclaim the gardens of empty homes along a route that emptied on a bitterly cold night almost a year ago. Shop signs hang unrepaired from the huge quake that rattled this area on 11 March, triggering the meltdown of three reactors and a series of explosions that showered the area with contamination. Cars wait outside supermarkets where their owners left them in Tomioka, Okuma and Futaba – once neat, bustling towns. Even birds have deserted this area, if recent research is to be believed.

The reason is signalled by a symphony of beeping noises from dosimeters on our bus. As we drive through a police checkpoint and into the town of Tomioka, about 15km from the plant, the radioactivity climbs steadily, hitting 15 microsieverts per hour at the main gate to the nuclear complex. At the other end of the plant, where the gaping buildings of its three most damaged reactors face the Pacific Ocean, the radiation level is 100 times this high, making it still too dangerous to work there.

Inside the plant's emergency co-ordination building, the air is filled with the sound of humming filters labouring to keep the contamination out. Hundreds of people work here, many sleeping in makeshift beds. Workers in radiation suits and full-face masks wander in and out. A large digital clock showing the current radiation reading inside the building dominates the wall of the central control room, where officials from operator Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) huddle around computers.

"Our main challenge now is to remove the nuclear fuel from the reactors," explains Takeshi Takahashi in his first interview since he took over as plant manager two months ago. "It's a technically very difficult problem, but we cannot hurry." His predecessor Masao Yoshida was forced to quit in December after being diagnosed with cancer – unrelated to his work, insists Tepco.

Tokyp | February 11

AP - Thousands of Japanese people marched against nuclear power Saturday, amid growing worries about the restarting of reactors idled after the March 11 meltdown disaster in northeastern Japan.

Holding “No Nukes” signs, people gathered at Yoyogi Park in Tokyo for a rally Saturday, including Nobel Prize-winning writer Kenzaburo Oe.

Hiroko Tabuchi | Iitate, Japan | Feb 10

IHT/NYT - As 500 workers in hazmat suits and respirator masks fanned out to decontaminate this village 20 miles from the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, their confusion was apparent.

“Dig five centimeters or 10 centimeters deep here?” a site supervisor asked his colleagues, pointing to a patch of radioactive topsoil to be removed. He then gestured across the village square toward the community center. “Isn’t that going to be demolished? Shall we decontaminate it or not?”

A day laborer wiping down windows at an abandoned school nearby shrugged at the work crew’s haphazard approach. “We are all amateurs,” he said. “Nobody really knows how to clean up radiation.”

Nobody may really know how. But that has not deterred the Japanese government from starting to hand out an initial $13 billion in contracts meant to rehabilitate the more than 8,000-square-mile region most exposed to radioactive fallout — an area nearly as big as New Jersey. The main goal is to enable the return of many of the 80,000 or more displaced people nearest the site of last March’s nuclear disaster, including the 6,500 villagers of Iitate.

It is far from clear, though, that the unproved cleanup methods will be effective.

Even more disturbing to critics of the decontamination program is the fact that the government awarded the first contracts to three giant construction companies — corporations that have no more expertise in radiation cleanup than anyone else does, but that profited hugely from Japan’s previous embrace of nuclear power.

It was these same three companies that helped build 45 of Japan’s 54 nuclear plants — including the reactor buildings and other plants at Fukushima Daiichi that could not withstand the tsunami that caused a catastrophic failure — according to data from Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, a watchdog group.

Russ Baker | January 20

Business Insider - After the catastrophic trifecta of the triple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Japan last March—what the Japanese are referring to as their 3/11—you would think the Japanese government would be doing everything in its power to contain the disaster. You would be wrong—dead wrong.

Instead of collecting, isolating, and guarding the millions of tons of radioactive rubble that resulted from the chain reaction of the 9.0 earthquake, the subsequent 45- to 50-foot wall of water that swamped the plant and disabled the cooling systems for the reactors, and the ensuing meltdowns, Japanese Environment Minister Goshi Hosono says that the entire country must share Fukushima’s plight by accepting debris from the disaster.

Malcolm Foster | Tokyo | January 4

AP - Japan's prime minister pledged Wednesday in his traditional new year's press conference to bring "rebirth" to the area around the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said authorities would work to decontaminate the region from radioactive fallout, while ensuring compensation and health checks for those affected by the disaster.

"These three pillars will bring the rebirth of Fukushima," he said. Noda gave no timeframe, and government officials have said it may be years or even decades before many of the 100,000 residents displaced by the disaster can return.