Kirk here with a clam scam update. When I posted about this issue earlier, I wrote that “this was all a well-known secret until TBS quite publicly spilled the beans”:
https://www.facebook.com/Kumamotoi/posts/6817247441681963
(If you missed it, this post contains a link to the original expose video [in Japanese] that lit the fuse of the current controversy.)
This article is confirmation of the “well-known secret” aspect of the current scandal.
Many years ago I read a book by a guy named Karel van Wolferen called “The Enigma of Japanese Power.” One of the things he wrote was that people in the media are often well aware of issues that are not being reported but, for whatever reason, they agree not to report about these matters to the general public. Then, when some event or some brave media outlet brings some such matter to the attention of the public, a media frenzy ensues where everyone reports on it as though they are learning about it for the first time.
In this sense, I’m interested in this issue as much for what it says about the media (and, or course, government) in Japan as for what it teaches us about food safety and the environment.
