Dear Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Yukio Edano and Environment Minister Goshi Hosono,
The rise of the Internet has allowed more and more people to turn to nontraditional media, such as blogs, feeds or wiki forums, for information. While there is often a heightened need to scrutinize and corroborate information from such sources, these new media sources serve an important role when traditional sources disappoint.
In post-Fukushima Japan, the government and nuclear industry "expertitioners" often claim that bloggers and tweeters monitoring the crisis have fanned the flames of mistrust and impeded reconstruction and recovery efforts. Yet, in too many cases, nontraditional sources were the only ones that revealed the extent of contamination in certain areas, the severity of the Fukushima disaster, the consequent risks, and the presence of food contamination the government's own monitoring failed to detect.