The camera is focused on the door, waiting for a man to come in. He looks nervous and is squeezing out some tears. The camera follows him as he comes up to the bar, and sits down, then moves in for a close-up on his tears. He looks up and confesses that he has just been mugged... Making it even more suspicious was the man's claim to have been beaten, struck several times in his face, which had not a mark on it. His face was as clean as a baby's behind. Then we learn he had had his money and clothes and Amtrak [train] ticket stolen, even though he is carrying a beautiful new bag that wasn't taken. And Amtrak doesn't come through Missoula. It doesn't come anywhere near Missoula.

Yarase documentaries and government misinformation do succeed to some extent in quelling people's misgivings about their country but unfortunately some pretty scary skeletons are hidden in Japan's bureaucratic closets. At a sinister agency called Donen, the hiding of information becomes downright terrifying. Donen, a Japanese acronym for the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, manages Japan's nuclear-power program.

At Monju, the fast-breeder nuclear reactor near Tsuruga, which suffered a major leak of liquid sodium from its cooling system in 1995, Donen officials first stated that the leakage was «minimal.» It later turned out to be more than three tons, the largest accident of its type in the world. But they could easily remedy the trouble by hiding the evidence: Donen staff edited film taken at the scene, releasing only an innocuous five minutes' worth and cutting out fifteen minutes that showed serious damage, including the thermometer on the leaking pipes and icicle-like extrusions of sodium.

Donen's attitude to the public at the time of the Monju scandal says much about officials who take for granted that they can always hide behind a wall of denial. The day after the accident, the chairman of the Tsuruga city council went to visit the Monju plant – and Donen officials simply shut the door in his face. Kishimoto Konosuke, the chairman of Tsuruga's Atomic and Thermal Energy Committee, said, «Donen was more concerned with concealing the accident than with explaining to us what was happening. That shows what they think of us.»

Still, there was widespread public anger and concern over Monju (which remained shut down for the rest of the decade), yet the same scenario repeated itself in March 1997, this time when drums filled with nuclear waste caught fire and exploded at a plant at Tokai City north of Tokyo, releasing high levels of radioactivity into the environment. In May 1994, newspapers had revealed that seventy kilograms of plutonium dust and waste had gathered in the pipes and conveyors of the Tokai plant; Donen had known of the missing plutonium (enough to build as many as twenty nuclear bombs) but did nothing about it until the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) demanded an accounting. To this day, Donen claims to have no idea where the plutonium is clustered or how to remove it. «We know that the plutonium is there,» an official said. «It's just held up in the system.»

Given that several nuclear bombs' worth of plutonium dust were lost somewhere inside the Tokai plant, there was great public concern over the Tokai fire. Yet Donen's initial report was a shambles, in some places saying, «Radioactive material was released,» and in others, «No radioactive material was released»; claiming that workers had reconfirmed in the morning that the fire was under control, though they had not (managers had pressured the workers to change their stories); misstating the amount of leaked radioactive material, which turned out to be larger than reported by a factor of twenty. Incredibly, on the day of the explosion, sixty-four people, including science and engineering students and foreign trainees, toured the complex, even visiting one building only a hundred meters from the site of the fire – and nobody ever informed them of the accident.

Several weeks later, Donen revealed that it waited thirty hours before reporting a leak of radioactive tritium at an advanced thermal reactor, Fugen. This was an improvement, though, because in eleven cases of tritium leaks during the previous two and a half years, Donen had made no reports at all. Reform, however, was on the way: Donen was «disbanded» and renamed Genden in May 1998, supposedly to appease an angry public. Today, under this new name, the nuclear agency continues to operate with the same staff, offices, and philosophy as before.

Nor is it only government agencies such as Donen-Genden that are falling behind in nuclear safety. The same problems beset private industry. The troubles at the Tokai plant came to a head at 10:35 a.m. on September 30, 1999, when employees at a fuel-processing plant managed by JCO, a private contractor, dumped so much uranium into a settling basin that it reached critical mass and exploded into uncontrolled nuclear fission. It was Japan's worst nuclear accident ever – the world's worst since Chernobyl – resulting in the sequestration of tens of thousands of people living in the area near the plant. The explosion was a tragedy for forty-nine workers who were exposed to radiation (three of them critically) but at the same time a comedy of errors, misinformation, and mistakes. It turned out that Tokai's nuclear plant had not repaired its safety equipment for more than seventeen years. The workers used a secret manual prepared by JCO's managers that bypassed safety regulations in several critical areas: essentially, material that workers should have disposed of via dissolution cylinders and pumps was carried out manually with a bucket.

Measures to deal with the accident could be described by no other word than primitive. Firefighters rushed to the scene after the explosion was reported, but since they had not been told that a nuclear accident had occurred they did not bring along protective suits, although their fire station had them – and they were all contaminated with radiation. In the early hours, no local hospital could be found to handle the victims even though Tokai has fifteen nuclear facilities. There was no neutron measurer in the entire city, so prefectural officials had to call in an outside agency to provide one; measurements were finally made at 5 p.m., nearly seven hours after the disaster. Those measurements showed levels of 4.5 millisieverts of neutrons per hour, when the limit for safe exposure is 1 millisievert per year, and from this officials realized for the first time that a fission reaction was still going on! Many other measurements, such as for isotope iodine 131, weren't made until as many as five days later.

The accident at Tokai came as a shock to other nuclear-energy-producing nations. The director of the China National Nuclear Corporation commented, «Improving management techniques is the key lesson China should learn from the Japan accident, since the leak happened not because of nuclear technology but because of poor management and human error.» And, indeed, poor management, combined with official denial, was at the root of the disaster. «Oh no, a serious accident can't happen here,» a top Japanese nuclear official declared some hours after the fission reaction at Tokai had taken place.

The level of sheer fiction in Japan's nuclear industry can be gauged from the story of how Donen misused most of its budget for renovation work between 1993 and 1997. The problem lay in 2,000 drums of low-level radioactive waste stored at Tokai, which began rusting in pits filled with rainwater. Records show that the problem dated to the 1970s, but only in 1993 did Donen begin to take action, asking for money to remove the drums from the pits and to build sheds for temporary storage. So far so good. Four years and ?1 billion later, ponen still had not taken the drums out of the pits or built the sheds. Nobody knows where the money went-semipublic agencies like Donen are not required to make their budgets public – but the suspicion was that Donen secretly spent it doing patchwork waterproofing in the pits to hide evidence of radioactive leakage. There is no problem, the agency said. One official remarked, «The water level has not dropped, so radioactive material is not leaking outside.»

Donen went on to request more money for 1998, stating that renovation was going smoothly, and asking for ?71 million to remove the sheds it had never built! It even attached drawings to show how it was reinforcing the inner walls of the storage pits. The Donen official in charge of technology to protect the environment from radioactive waste said, «It's true that the storage pits will eventually be reinforced. So I thought it would be all right if details of the project were different from what we had stated in our request for budgetary approval.»

When Donen gets money from the government to remove sheds it never built and shore up the walls of pits it never drained, we are definitely moving into the territory of Escher and Kafka. A final surreal touch is provided by an animated video produced by Donen to show children that plutonium isn't as dangerous as activists say. «A small character named Pu (the chemical symbol of plutonium), who looks like an extra from 'The Jetsons,' gives his friend a glass of plutonium water and says it's safe to drink. His friend, duly impressed, drinks no less than six cups of the substance before declaring, 'I feel refreshed!' »

There is a lesson to be learned from Donen's madness, and it is that if you disguise the truth long enough you eventually lose touch with reality yourself. This happened at MOF, which can no longer figure out the true state of bank finances, and it happened to the nuclear industry, which doesn't know the standard techniques of nuclear-plant management common elsewhere in the world. Why invest in technology when with a stroke of the pen an official can bring fires under control and make leaks dry up? At Tokai in 1997, so unconcerned were Donen officials that seven maintenance employees played golf on the day of the fire – and went back to play another round the day after.

Japan is like the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The computer Hal runs all life systems aboard the ship with benevolent wisdom, speaking to the crew through the public-address system in a resolutely calm and cheerful manner. Later, when Hal goes mad and starts murdering people, he continues to placidly assure crew members in an unwaveringly upbeat voice that all is well, wishing them a good day. In Japan, articles in magazines paid for by the bureaucrats who cement over rivers and lakes assure the public that their natural environment is still beautiful. Bureaucrats at Donen instruct children that plutonium is safe to drink. Every day in Japan we hear the soothing voice of Hal telling us not to worry. Since 1993, the government has predicted economic rebound every year, despite an ever-deepening recession. In February 1999, as the nation prepared to inject $65 billion into the banks, with the prospect of even larger bailouts ahead, Yanagisawa Hakuo, the chairman of the Financial Revitalization Committee, announced, «By the end of March, the bad loans will be completely cleared and we will have confidence at home and overseas.» Problem over, have a good day.