Japanese Official Resigns Over Radiation Joke

[nofurylike]

By Martin Fackler
September 10, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/world/...ister.html

TOKYO — Just over a week after he took office, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda of Japan suffered his first political setback on Saturday when the new minister of trade and industry resigned after a joke about radiation caused a public uproar.

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The problem began on Thursday, after Mr. Hachiro returned from a trip to evacuated areas around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. According to Japanese newspaper reports, Mr. Hachiro, who was wearing protective clothing, moved as if to wipe his sleeve against a reporter and jokingly said, “Look out, radiation!”

The jest caused outrage largely because Mr. Hachiro’s ministry, which was in charge of promoting as well as regulating nuclear power, has been widely blamed for lax oversight that allowed the Daiichi plant to operate without adequate defenses against tsunamis. (emphasis mine) The plant was crippled by a huge earthquake and tsunami on March 11, causing the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.

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Earlier on Thursday, Mr. Hachiro had raised eyebrows by calling the evacuated communities around the plants “dead towns,” a statement seen as insensitive to the approximately 80,000 people who had been driven from their homes by the nuclear accident.

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