The power companies have a lot of catching up to do in the public relations battle. A slim booklet by a woman from a small town on the southern island of Kyushu, for one, has sent shock waves through a spontaneous network of housewives and mothers.
Taeko Kansha, wife of a Zen priest in Nijo-machi, near the city of Fukuoka, heard Hirose speak at a seminar two years ago and was so disturbed that she wrote a long, open letter to friends to air her maternal worries about radioactive food. A Tokyo publisher printed the letter under the title "Is it Too Late?" The book has sold 450,000 copies, and is now available in English translation.
'Left in the Dark'
"We've been left in the dark," Kansha said. "Until I heard Mr. Hirose's talk, I had no idea there was a problem, that things had gone this far. I wanted to reach out to people and express my feelings from a mother's point of view."
Ironically, the public's traditionally passive acceptance of nuclear energy has contrasted with its attitudes about nuclear weapons. As the only people ever to be attacked with atomic weapons, the Japanese have what is often described as "nuclear phobia" and vehemently disavow the manufacture and deployment of nuclear warheads on their own soil. But they have embraced the concept of atoms for peace.
"People were hoping that this terrible weapon could be turned into something useful for humanity," said Aileen Smith, an environmental activist in Kyoto. "It was the other side of the coin of their awareness of what a horrible thing atomic energy could be."
The recent re-examination of the nuclear power industry also has raised questions about the effect that nuclear plants have on rural economies, as local opposition is often overcome by promises to improve roads, create new jobs and raise tax revenues. The result can be heavy dependence on a plant in depressed fishing towns whose youth have fled to urban employment centers.
"It's not just a problem of potential pollution by radioactivity," said Tetsuen Nakajima, a Buddhist priest and anti-nuclear activist in Obama, in the center of the "Nuclear Ginza" strip north of Kyoto where three new reactors are under construction.
"It's spoiling rural societies with all kinds of unnatural flows of money," Nakajima said. "People's hearts are being warped, and locals are depending so much on money from the nuclear power plants that it becomes a drug that traps them."
There are signs that these dynamics could be changing, however. In the coastal town of Hikigawa on the Kii Peninsula, voters in July elected a mayoral candidate who campaigned in opposition to the construction of a local nuclear power plant. This came 12 years after Kansai Electric Co. reportedly helped to rescue the town from an economic crisis by buying $1 million worth of land.
"The message is that it is getting difficult to build nuclear power plants in depopulated areas by distributing money," the Asahi newspaper wrote in an editorial. "The electric companies must accept the public's strongly held distrust of nuclear power plants."
New Dimension
In Tokyo, a group called the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center added a new political dimension to the controversy last month by starting a petition drive calling for a law that would freeze construction of new reactors and eventually phase out operating plants.
"I think we've turned the tide against the new plants," said Jinzaburo Takagi, head of the center. "The problem now is what to do with the ones that already exist."
So far, Takagi admits he has received only tentative signs of interest from Parliament members, but he hopes for nonpartisan sponsorship when legislation is drafted.
"We've talked a little bit," he said. "Things are going to start getting really serious from now on."
