The Japanese have lots of credits on environmental issues: it's one of the cleanest country I've ever seen, so I'm willing to trust them if they say the waste water dumping plan is safe.
Yes. It's a matter of national interest. Because Japan is a relatively small, cut off archipelago nation with very few natural resources. It needs to be able to generate its own energy with less raw material imports or it won't have as much power as it needs. It doesn't have tons of space it can afford to pollute. Japan wants to be able to use large amounts of renewable electricity to generate tons of value that it can trade for materials it needs to build and maintain renewable energy facilities, and for food and goods. The stuff about the environment makes for really good, convenient PR and possibly revenue stream of external funding for initiatives. If Japan can game the international green system and pull out of this population nose dive without importing an unmanageable demographic collapse into itself, it will become a superpower again and have another shot at world domination, this time through imposing world peace. If it comes to our world, Pax Japonica will be a sterile, depressing, conformist utopia where we pretend to work all day, then surround ourselves with bright colourful toys to feel awake, while drinking ourselves to sleep. It will be too much civilization; business as usual.
Edit: Hey, look, somebody wrote a book with the latin thing I said as its title, whose contents I probably summarized the thesis of without even reading.
>The Japanese have lots of credits on environmental issues
I wouldn't rely on that alone. I'd say they are more clean than concerned about ecology. You don't see thrash in streets or in forests, that's true. But their recycling is almost non-existant, they burn almost all the waste. They use (thick) packaging in absurdly high amounts (to an european eye). They have fishery and whaling issues…
All over half a century ago, but there are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Big_Pollution_Diseases_of..., cases where the Japanese government didn’t come out well (e.g. Itai-Itai disease was known in 1912, but according to Wikipedia, “Medical tests started in the 1940s and 1950s”, and for Minamata disease “The Kumamoto and Kagoshima prefectural governments conducted a joint survey in late 1960 and early 1961 into the level of mercury in the hair of people living around the Shiranui Sea. The results confirmed that organic mercury had spread all around the inland sea and that people were still being poisoned by contaminated fish. Hundreds of people were discovered to have levels greater than 50 ppm of mercury in their hair, the level at which people are likely to experience nerve damage. The highest result recorded was that of a woman from Goshonoura island who had 920 ppm in her sample.
The prefectural governments did not publish the results and did nothing in response to these surveys. The participants who had donated hair samples were not informed of their result, even when they requested it”
It's a tough issue, because it's also the Japanese gov and TEPCO who brought this all mess, their trade-offs on how much to secure that plant didn't pay off, to say the least.
We're relying on mostly the same people, minus the pragmatic ones who went to bluer skies, to now make trade-offs related to how much Japan's willing to pollute the surrounding seas relative to the economic and politic situation.
Edit: Hey, look, somebody wrote a book with the latin thing I said as its title, whose contents I probably summarized the thesis of without even reading.
https://www.amazon.com/PAX-JAPONICA-Resurrection-Takeo-Harad...