“Japanese government playing down disaster” - Japanologist

The Japanese government insists it is not withholding any information about the radiation levels or how dangerous the situation is at Fukushima-1 nuclear plant.

However, an American writer and an expert on Japanese culture, Alex Kerr, says the government is attempting to play down the whole scale of the disaster. “There is a long tradition within the nuclear industry in Japan of hiding or at least twisting or missing evidence” Kerr says. “I think that it is completely unpredictable. I think what we can be sure of is this mess will take weeks, maybe months to clear up. It is really very serious, much more then the government is letting us know.”Now the fate of millions of Japanese lies in the hands of just a few dozen who are working at the plant trying to cool the reactors and prevent a meltdown.

The fate of millions of Japanese now lies in the hands of just a few dozen.They're known as the “Faceless Fifty” – a team of workers putting their lives on the line to stop nuclear disaster at the Fukushima plant. Randall Thompson, a member of the clean-up team following the Three Mile Island power plant accident, says nobody knows what these people are going through right now.“My only real regret is that the entire area was not evacuated earlier, as soon as the evolution started,” he said. “That’s what I am really disappointed about.”