The Tokyo Broadcasting Service's main nuclear energy pundit is Muneo Morokuzu, a University of Tokyo professor who used to work for Toshiba. Earlier this week, while a commentator on the morning show "Asa Zuba!," he was asked by host Monta Mino about Tokyo Electric Power Company's scheduled blackouts (keikaku teiden), which have been playing havoc with customers' lives in the Kanto region. "These problems always have the greatest effect on the most vulnerable people," Morokuzu said.
His remark seems to be true, though perhaps not in the way he intended it. Since Tepco implemented power outages to save electricity after the failure of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear reactor caused by the earthquake/tsunami of March 11, certain areas of the Kanto region have been purposely subjected to occasional blackouts. The outages are supposed to be planned and announced in advance, but so far they've been sporadic. Announcements are made and then changed on an almost hourly basis. Originally, the idea was to have "rolling blackouts" (rinban teiden), meaning that each targeted area would have its electricity cut off in succession, which sounded like the fairest way to do it. However, it never happened that way, and now the official name of the scheme is "scheduled blackouts." The affected areas cover Tokyo and eight prefectures, with the blackout plan collecting disparate neighborhoods into five "groups." But the neighborhoods were never specified clearly, and even if your neighborhood was targeted for a scheduled blackout, you often didn't know if it was really going to happen until the designated hour arrived.