Court denies disclosure of Tepco officials’ testimony about Fukushima disaster

The Tokyo District Court has dismissed an appeal by Tepco shareholders calling for disclosure of a government panel’s records of questioning of executives over the March 2011 crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

“The decision accepted all of what the government claimed and therefore is regrettable,” the shareholders said in a statement following the ruling Tuesday. They said they would file an immediate appeal.

The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission was formed in 2011 to investigate the causes of the nuclear disaster by questioning executives of the utility, now called Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., including Tsunehisa Katsumata, former chairman of the utility, and others.

The questioning was conducted on condition that it would not be used to assign blame.

Only the records of the interviews of those who agreed that their answers would be made public have been disclosed, including Masao Yoshida, the late former chief of Fukushima No. 1.

The shareholders are seeking disclosure of the records on 11 Tepco officials and three officials of the now-defunct Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

“If the records are disclosed, it would be extremely difficult to gain cooperation from related parties in future investigations,” presiding Judge Akihiko Otake said, deciding that the disclosure could disrupt the execution of official duties.

The court also concluded that the undisclosed portion of the records that was not revealed in previous disclosures should be kept confidential.

Initially, the records of questioning of some 770 Tepco and government officials in 2011 and 2012 were all kept under wraps. But following media reports on the Yoshida interview, the government decided to change its policy and disclose them with interviewees’ consent.

Since September 2014, the government has disclosed the records of some 240 interviewees.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/12/27/national/court-denies-disclosure-tepco-officials-testimony-fukushima-crisis/#.WGf-2Fzia-c

1.This Month

How the viewing public was ‘protected’ from seeing what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombing did to people

Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the cutting room floor https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-on-the-cutting-room-floor/ By Thomas Gaulkin, August 5, 2019 Seventy-four years after nuclear weapons were first and last used in war, it can be challenging to conceive of the devastation they cause. But even in the immediate months after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, news accounts offered a view of ingenuity and destruction that often elided the human cost.

The newsreels below [on original] were mainly screened to audiences in 1946 and 1947 and detail the destructive force of the explosions almost entirely through excited accounts of the structural damage to the cities. There’s occasional mention of the lost city populations and the scientific knowledge to be gained from studying their casualties, but hardly any description of what people actually suffered, let alone personal accounts. It’s instructive to look at and listen to these reports today, and contemplate what is missing.

The 12-minute reel below was produced by the US War Department in 1946. “Tale of Two Cities” makes selective use of film that was confiscated from a Japanese filmmaker, Akira Iwasaki—though you wouldn’t know that from the narration, which boasts that “army cameramen have found and filmed pictorial evidence that tells in twisted steel and stone the effect of death-dealing atomic power.” (Some twenty years later, historian Eric Barnouw obtained more of Iwasaki’s footage and produced a remarkably different narrative that documented the horrible physical impact of the attacks on Hiroshima’s citizens.)

Contrasted with the triumphant tone of the news/propaganda made for 1940s audiences, silence changes everything. Made public only decades later, the two films below —one beginning with footage of wounded victims, the other, a full-color glimpse of survivors picking up the pieces of the ruined city—report what those above do not, without a single word.

Nagasaki And Hiroshima (1945)

Harrowing Accounts from Hiroshima Survivors

Hiroshima Bomb to Today | Tour around the Atomic Hypocenter

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