Hakodate and Fukushima is not that far apart.

A torii gate washed all the way to Oregon. https://japanesegarden.org/the-gates-of-hope/

> Experts have speculated

Yes. Are experts the only ones who are allowed to speculate ?

> Mass mortality events can also occur when there are sudden drops in the water temperature

If we’re enumerating things that can occur…

I mean, there’s no evidence for those two scenarios these experts have speculated on either right? It wouldn’t be speculation otherwise.

> fisheries agency said

You mean the same people who have a vested economic interest?

> "“There have been no abnormalities found in the results of water-monitoring surveys,”

The very premise of conspiracy theorists is that authorities are not to be trusted. There’s no intellectual debate to be had if you’re presuming the authorities to be definitive.
It’s dogmatism.

This comes a day after cabinet members resign over fundraising fraud.

> immediately leap to conspiracy theories

Why are you immediately leaping to the conclusion that they are conspiracy theories? Japan is no stranger to cover ups. We don’t have to talk about war crimes. Just look at Carlos Ghosn.

You can call it scientific or healthy skepticism, too.

The real question is why is there a growing level of distrust? Governments are telling people central banks are working to their benefit and the economy is doing great, meanwhile real wages have declined and wealth disparity widens. In a country where salary raises are 1%, maybe, and now everyday items at the convenient store are going up a ten yen coin or two, it doesn’t take Chinese propaganda to make even Japanese people grow skeptical of authorities. It FEELS like the BOJ’s actions prioritize corporate and the asset-wielding class’ interests first.

The media only covers Japanese people support for one particular American stance on a current geopolitical issue. I’ve not seen this on the ground, but have seen people here holding pickets for the exact opposite stance. Japan ranks pretty poor on freedom of the press. https://amp.dw.com/en/why-japan-ranks-poorly-in-press-freedo...

> proliferation of information that’s not based on scientific evidence

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - Karl Popper, philosopher of science.

Speaking about the lack of evidence, there’s not much evidence of the facilities on Ōkunoshima because the staff were instructed to destroy it all.

I’ve been to all 47 prefectures of Japan atleast 3 times over now, and the most dystopian place is Gunkanjima. It’s controversial that a place of industrialists could be considered a world heritage, even by local Japanese people, but Mitsubishi Heavy Industry has good lobbyists. It was and still is a company town, where they control the narrative. It’s what I imagine a tour in North Korea would be like. Meanwhile, the one museum in the city to discuss slave labor was barraged with Google reviews for being a conspiracy.

As far as the Japanese academic institutions are concerned, Nanjing is a conspiracy that never happened and never taught. One of the largest shrines in the country enshrines convicted war criminals where annual festivals drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors occur. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasukuni_Shrine

Here’s a list of museums in Japan that right-winged Japanese people consider conspiracies and leave 1 star reviews for:

- Oka Masaharu Museum, Nagasaki

- Okunoshima Poison Gas Museum (where I learned that locals didn’t know poison gas was being experimented. They were sure to place it far away from Tokyo because they didn’t want to contaminate rich/city people)

- Kyoto Museum for World Peace (as a rule of thumb, if a museum in Japan mentions Peace, it’s some kind of propaganda, whether left or right)

- Bonus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimizuka. This one is not a disputed controversial or conspiracy, but just find it interesting that it’s on some random unassuming street without anyone noticing, despite being in walking distance of the most crowded tourist areas in Kyoto

You can’t even get most Samsung products in this country, maybe except a few flagship phones, because Samsung replaced Japanese emojis with Korean ones. https://blog.emojipedia.org/samsung-puts-japan-back-on-the-m.... The relevance here is that these countries will do things out of dysfunction, pettiness, malice and/or incompetency, and rarely out of nobility and honor. Maybe you’re influenced by this Western-centric depiction and Hollywood trope: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=giBmzgW-iOk