Global Research

The lame acquiescence of International Olympic Committee to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s blatant lies about Fukushima radiation leaks being under control” is an act of reckless negligence on the health risk to young athletes aiming for a spot at the 2020 Olympics.

The Olympic hosting rights was stolen from safer and better-off candidate cities Istanbul and Madrid by a well-financed lobbying effort from Japan’s national committee and the Education and Sports Ministry, which provides murky donations for sports programs in developing countries.

 The hidden factor behind Tokyo’s campaign of radiation denial was the quiet support from the global nuclear industry acting through the IOC’s corporate sponsorship program. The political influence and corruption behind this campaign was so obvious that even the semi-governmental NHK television news has raised questions about bribery in the bidding process.

The Nuclear Grip

Many of the big multinationals that finance the IOC are not readily associated with the Olympic goals of good health much less amateur sports. Anyone who believes in the healthy fun meal hype from McDonalds does not comprehend the hazards of obesity and clogged arteries. Besides household names like toothpaste giant P&G and smartphone maker Samsung, some brands on the sponsor list such as Atos are virtually unknown.

Every corporation on the IOC global sponsor list is, in fact, connected with the nuclear industry, and some directly with the melted-down of the Fukushima plant. Here’s a look at the list:

GE (General Electric): builder of Fukushima Mark 1 reactors Nos. 1,2 and 6; and designer of MOX (mixed oxide of uranium and plutonium) shroud for reactors Nos.3 and 4. The tritium-enhanced explosion at Reactor 3 massively contaminated the Kanto region, including Tokyo’s watershed.

Panasonic: Besides televisions and home appliances, this Japanese electronics giant is a manufacturer of radiation measuring equipment used by TEPCO and other atomic energy players, including Iran’s nuclear program.

Atos: A French IT company that provides command-and-control systems for 70 nuclear power plants around the world, and which is also involved in the upgrade of British nuclear power plants recently acquired by Hitachi-GE.

Dow: Along with partner company Graver, the chemical giant produces resins, polishing compounds, cleansers and filters for the worldwide nuclear industry.

Samsung, Builder of nuclear power plants in South Korea and for export, including the Middle East, in partnership with Toshiba, which built reactor No.5 at Fukushima.

P&G: Proctor & Gamble directors Alan G. Laffley is a board member of GE and James McNerney Jr. is a retired top-ranking GE executive.

Omega: The Swiss watchmaker uses its precision timing technology for monitoring instruments used inside nuclear power plants.

McDonalds: Board member Enrique Hernandez is CEO of Inter-Con Security, which provides armed guards for Southern California Edison’s San Onofre reactors and other nuclear plants.

Coca Cola: the soft drink maker’s board of directors includes Jacob Wallenberg, a director of ABB along with Donald Rumsfeld when it sold 2 nuclear reactors to North Korea (under investigation, ABB sold its nuclear division to BNFL in the UK, which has since been taken over by Hitachi and GE); Alexis Hernadez, a lawyer for and board member of Entergy, the U.S. power company with several radiation-leaking plants; and retired senator Sam Nunn, former Secretary of Defense and board member of GE.

It’s no wonder then that Tokyo won the 2020 Olympics, when the voting was actually a litmus test for “nuclear safety”. Radiation denial is key to the expansion of the nuclear industry, as Hitachi, Toshiba and GE are now pushing in Vietnam, Turkey, the UAE, the UK, India and many other countries.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Put on Your Blinders

As if wearing blinders, IOC delegates at Buenos Aires ignored media questions about the thousands of tons of radiation-contaminated water leaking from the Fukushima nuclear plant. Arguably worse is the ash from Tokyo’s incinerators that burned Fukushima combustible waste for two years. The highly radioactive cinders were dumped into landfills in Tokyo Bay, which will be the site of the Olympic Village and most of the sports venues.

The Arakawa River, which flows into Tokyo Bay, is also contaminated in its upper reaches by clouds drifting in from the Pacific. The forests around Tokyo’s watershed in Oku-Tama, which provides drinking water to the capital, are dangerously drenched by radioactive rainfall, and the national food supply is so irradiated that regulators have had to raise the food safety level.

The risk of more clouds of radioactive fallout sweeping toward Tokyo is not hypothetical but an inevitable consequence of uncontrollable meltdowns of hundreds of tons of nuclear fuel at Fukushima. The danger is amplified by recurrent earthquakes along Japan’s major fault lines and consequent volcanic eruptions, which pose a constant threat to the nearby nuclear plants at Hamaoka on the seaside below Mount Fuji, Tokai in neighboring Ibaraki, and the twin plants in Fukushima. Another explosion at any of these nuclear sites would force the evacuation of 50 million residents, or one-third of the population.

A major quake or volcanic eruption, long-overdue in the nearby Nankai Trough and Mount Fuji, and even under Tokyo itself, would close the capital’s airports, forcing thousands of Olympic athletes and spectators along with millions of residents to flee in the opposite direction, directly into Fukushima Prefecture. Tokyo is a killing field waiting to happen.

 Influence Peddling

The Japanese host-city team was led by JOC chief Tsunekazu Takeda, who is the successor to his father Prince Takeda, a cavalry officer in Manchuria who supervised the Unit 703 bioweapons program. An equestrian contestant at the Berlin Olympics, Prince Tsuneyoshi organized the military looting of East Asia and also personally authorized plague-and-virus attacks against Chinese cities and lethal experiments on prisoners. The aristocratic war veteran evaded prosecution for war crimes because the U.S. Army recruited UNIT 731 scientists and was then appointed by Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, founder of Japan’s nuclear weapons program and Abe’s grandfather, to head the bidding for the 1964 Olympics.

The counterpart for the private sector is Masato Mizuno, former chief of Mizuno Sports and CEO of the Tokyo bidding team, who led the outreach to the IOC corporate sponsors.

The bid was originally launched by then Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, whose resignation as alleged in local media reports was due to the diversion of Olympics donations for his provocative visits and attempt to purchase  the disputed Senkaku-Diaoyu islands. These connections are worthy of an Interpol investigation since the IOC is incapable of policing itself.

Backlash Against the Heist

The French cartoon that provoked an angry protest by “chimpira”, slang for punks or yakuza wannabees, is only the start of a worldwide backlash against the Tokyo heist.

The usually timid Japanese media are raising questions about Abe’s lack of credibility on the radiation issue and Japan’s economic health. In contrast to the hype in Buenos Aires about Tokyo’s prosperity, the national debt stands at 10 trillion U.S. dollars, making the Japanese by far the most indebted people on the planet. Even TEPCO officials, including its vice president in charge of Fukushima operations, Zengo Aizawa, have scoffed at Abe’s nonsense and countered that the radioactive water leaks are out of control, despite his team’s best efforts.

Abe is a shameless liar and buffoon, while his pro-nuclear allies among IOC sponsors are only kidding themselves in a black comedy destined to careen into further disaster. The Tokyo bid is a hard act to follow, and the only thing that could equal this bad joke is if Ukraine places a bid to host the 2024 Chernobyl Olympics.

Yoichi Shimatsu, a Hong Kong-based science writer, is former editor of the Japan Times Weekly in Tokyo.