Japan’s leaders face the political crisis of public anti nuclear sentiment

In a direct snub to the central government, Mr. Hashimoto has appointed a panel of nuclear engineers and seismologists, who have faulted the stress tests for being conducted even before the government has finished its own inquiry into what went wrong at Fukushima. That criticism has resonated among many Japanese, who say the tests, conducted out of their view, were nothing more than a fig leaf..

Japan’s Leaders Fret as Nuclear Shutdown Nears By MARTIN FACKLER Japan Times, May 3, 2012 OSAKA, Japan — Barring an unexpected turnaround, Japan on Saturday will become a nuclear-free nation for the first time in more than four decades, at least temporarily. Japan’s leaders have made increasingly desperate attempts in recent months to avoid just such a scenario, trying to restart plants shut for routine maintenance and kept that way while they tried to convince a skittish public that the reactors were safe in the wake of last year’s nuclear catastrophe.

But the government has run up against a crippling public distrust that recently found a powerful voice in local leaders who are orchestrating a rare challenge to Tokyo’s centralized power.
As the last of 50 functional commercial reactors is set to go offline Saturday, that local resistance to turning plants back on has confronted Japan’s leaders with a grim scenario: …
The showdown between local and national leaders has played out in recent weeks at a plant in Ohi, near Osaka, which the government of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has set up as a crucial test case of Japan’s nuclear future. Two reactors at the idled plant were the first to pass simulated stress tests meant to show that most reactors, unlike those at the Fukushima plant devastated in last year’s earthquake and tsunami, could withstand similar disasters. The administration trusted that Ohi’s reactors would be back in operation by now, or at least would receive local approval to start up soon.

Instead, the central government has found itself battling an improbable adversary: Osaka’s mayor, Toru Hashimoto,….He has won widespread public support by giving voice to deep-seated public suspicions that the Tokyo government is rushing to promote the interests of the powerful nuclear industry at the expense of public safety — a situation that many Japanese now blame for leaving the Fukushima Daiichi plant so vulnerable in the first place.

Mr. Hashimoto’s ascent — and his success in blocking a quick restart of the Ohi plant — are some of the clearest signs yet that the distrust generated by the government’s handling of the Fukushima disaster is reshaping attitudes in Japan, where people had long accepted Tokyo’s sway over their lives. And the Noda administration’s failure to see Mr. Hashimoto coming, along with its reliance on stress tests even as their soundness was questioned, suggests that the disconnect between the government and its people that opened with the nuclear disaster has only widened.

“The Japanese public is fed up with business as usual, and Mr. Hashimoto has been able to seize on that anger,” said Wataru Kitamura, a professor of government at Osaka University. “Japan is deeply frustrated by its own political paralysis, and many see him as the answer.”…

The uprising of sorts appears to have completely thrown off the government’s strategy for quickly getting Ohi and other plants back online, say political analysts. The government had apparently been hoping for the quick consent of host communities, which have been essentially bought off for years with generous subsidies and tax benefits to allow the plants in their midst, and which will be the first to suffer economically if the plants are shuttered.

If Mr. Hashimoto gets his way, that discussion will need to be broader, taking into account the worries of municipalities much farther from the plants, but likely to be harmed if there were meltdowns and radiation releases of the type that happened at Fukushima Daiichi. For Japan, that type of broad public involvement in decision making would not only be highly unusual, it could also delay restarting reactors for months or even years.