In the Sept. 8 Kyodo article "Suicide consultations in Tohoku disaster areas on the rise: report," The Japan Times contents itself with the banality of statistics. The paper should help the reader understand why so many disaster victims in the Tohoku region feel so desperate. Do people there think the Abe government has abandoned them? Are they fed up with the sluggard recovery efforts? Are they anxious about the true extent of the radiation dangers in the region?

Funny how Japanese taxpayers are being screwed twice over Fukushima. First they paid for building atomic reactors just a few meters from a major tsunami zone and nearly on top of an earthquake fault. Now, taxpayers must pay for cleaning up Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s mess. Meanwhile, the government controls all of the information; it keeps the public in the dark — like a nation of well-fed mushrooms.

If the Japanese public fully understood how dangerous it would be to continue business as usual at those 48 idle nuclear power plants across Japan, there would be such a sh-t storm of protest that all the plants would face immediate decommissioning. Furthermore, the Liberal Democratic Party would be told to hit the road, again. Voters would not support Prime Minister Shinzo Abe if they fully understood his love affair with Tepco's officials and the nuclear village people.

I wish Tepco's entire executive staff had to live just outside the "exclusion zone" in Fukushima and drink the local water

robert mckinney
otaru, hokkaido

The opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Japan Times.