Mystery of lost Fukushima radiation emails ‘a major cover-up’

23 Mar, 2012 13:19 / Updated 13 years ago

The Fukushima Prefecture government apparently deleted emails with reports on data vital to safely evacuate people from that area, according to fresh appeared revelations. But as Pepe Escobar told RT, it is unlikely Japan will investigate.

It appears that in March 2011 the Fukushima Prefecture requested the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) to send emails with the radiation data registered in the first five days after devastating tsunami. The System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI), which was responsible for analysis, sent emails to Fukushima Prefecture government, but they have all disappeared. There are two possible versions as to might have happened. The first is that officials deleted files because they took too much space on the server. The second, that the prefecture's government deleted the emails while analyzing them.“At the time, everything was in a state of confusion. We can’t confirm who deleted the emails,” an official at the prefecture’s disaster management  headquarters said, as cited by enenews.com. “It sounds, it looks…like a major cover up,” journalist Pepe Escobar told RT. He added it does not take much “to solve this mystery.”“You need one IT-guy. You send this IT-guy to the Ministry of Education, to the Nuclear Safety Tech in Tokyo and to the Fukushima Prefectural headquarters for disaster response. You will find who sent these emails, who received these emails, because there are logs for all this operations.” However, Escobar says, it is unlikely Japanese authorities will ever investigate the case – “everyone will bow and nothing will be solved.”And the reason is in what Escobar calls the “cultural element”. “Japan is really ritualistic and secretive society.” And “considering the fact that nobody in Japan wants to lose face over a monster disaster like Fukushima,” he says, he is not sure “anything is going to happen.”When asked why they never shared it with local governments or the public, the Fukushima prefecture authorities said they did not release the data because it was the job of the national government to give the data to the public and local governments.And the excuse that emails were deleted because of lack of space on servers, Escobar says, is “probably for the late ’80s – early ’90s, but not for 2012.”Anyway, “it is up to Japanese public opinion to ask questions,” Escobar concluded.