The Japanese are not evil. They're just far too trusting of their government and their electric utilities. And now they're paying a very steep price for that misplaced trust. And it's not over yet. When the Japanese government couldn't figure out a way to keep Japanese kids within the legal limit for nuclear exposure they simply raised the limit and whistled their way around the corner.
This is
way off the thread topic so it will be my last reply on the matter.
Sorry for my emotional reply, but your comment made it seem as if all of the blame for global radioactive contamination lied with the Japanese. For the record, I'm American.
I'm certainly not trying to make excuses for TEPCO's and the Japanese government's responsibility for and bungling in the handling of the crisis. I don't agree with your assessment of 99% of Japanese having been compliant sheep, ignorant of their crimes prior to the quake though. Plenty of people here distrusted the government, opposed nuclear power and worried about the safety of reactors in tsunami zones and over active faults, including industry experts and whistleblowers. Not enough people, obviously, but certainly more than 1%.
As for raising the exposure limits, I hadn't heard about that but was very glad to read last week that even initial testing on 900 residents of Minami-Soma (a small town 25km north of the Fukushima Daiichi Reactor) showed very low internal radiation exposure. Yes, all exposure, especially internal is bad, however obviously the less the better.
If anything positive has resulted from the whole disaster it is that that trust of the government is completely gone now, as is the future of nuclear power in this country.
Unfortunately, as is often the case in human history, real change doesn't occur until disaster necessitates it.
