The seismologist Ishibashi Katsuhiko (presently Emeritus Professor at Kobe University) predicted that a nuclear power plant accident like the present one was possible, and issued warnings from the late ‘90s. People had been warning of the danger of earthquake-caused nuclear accidents since the 1970s, but Ishibashi, from the specialized standpoint of seismology, proposed a new concept, which he called genpatsu shinsai [Translator's note: this expression literally means Nuclear-Power-Plant-Earthquake Disaster. As there is no English expression for this (the phenomenon itself is new) in this work we will render it as genpatsu shinsai syndrome.]. By this he meant a situation in which, as the damage from the earthquake widens, the situation is made doubly worse by nuclear radiation damage. It was in the hope of preventing this that he was issuing warnings. Ishibashi wrote many books on this, including Daichidouran no Jidai (The Age of Shifting Earth) (Iwanami Shinsho) and he is a very well-known scholar, so it is impossible that his warnings were unknown to the officials of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

This is Okinawa's Governor Nakaima Hirokazu's speech at George Washington University on September 19, 2011 on the relocation of the Futenma Base and its implications for US-Japan-Okinawa relations. The English version is followed by a Japanese summary, which appeared on the September 20 edition of the Ryukyu Shimpo. 仲井真弘多沖縄知事による９月１９日ワシントンＤＣのジョージ・ワシントン大学での講演の英語版全文を紹介します。２０日の琉球新報に掲載された講演要旨を英語版に続いて下方に貼り付けました。

Hachiro Yoshio ‘s stint as the Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry in the new Noda Yoshihiko administration was not the briefest cabinet assignment on record, but it was certainly one of the most controversial. News outlets reported that it was “public outrage” over two remarks he made which forced Hachiro to quit. In the absence of evidence, we have to take their word for it.

In the six months since the March 11 earthquake tsunami and nuclear power meltdown, a large body of evidence has been produced (and much suppressed) documenting the vast quantities of radiation emitted from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as well as other contaminants from ruined factories and farms: into the air, into the water, and into the soil in the vicinity of the incident, throughout Northeast Japan and beyond. For example, on April 11, the Nuclear Safety Commission announced that the Fukushima Daiichi plant, “in the first hours after the accident, was emitting as much as 10,000 terabecquerels of radiation per hour (one terabecquerel = one trillion becquerels).” On September 9, the Asahi cited a preliminary report by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency that between March 21 and April 30 the plant emitted more than 15 quadrillion becquerels of radioactivity into the sea. The figure was three times that provided earlier by TEPCO. The report concluded further that 11.4 quadrillion becquerels of iodine-131 and 3.6 quadrillion becquerels of cesium-137 had been leaked into the sea.

The capability approach (CA) pioneered by Amartya Sen and developed by many others has become decisively influential over the last two decades as a normative framework for assessing social arrangements, social justice, equality, and quality of life, as well as for designing policies (Robeyns, 2011). The CA has also been seen as a theory of social justice seeking to reduce social exclusion and inequalities and to enhance global justice. The CA is probably best known for having inspired the creation of the Human Development Index (HDI) in 1990 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to annually rank countries by level of human development or well-being. This well-known approach has played a key role in advancing alternative ideas about development and welfare, rather than GDP growth. Thus, evaluated in CA theoretical terms, countries like Japan, for example, may not necessarily be judged to be rich, although on paper, by such measures as GDP and per capita GDP they may rank amongst the world's most prosperous nations.

On August 26, 2011, Prime Minister Kan Naoto resigned from office after a tempestuous fifteen months in power. Since May 2011 a virtual lynch mob egged on by the media bayed for his resignation. Kan's ouster became an obsession of the nation's powerbrokers. This article examines why, in the midst of an unprecedented cascade of disasters, natural and nuclear, the Kan problem trumped all others.