[…]
Mr. Kobayashi started reading numerous books on nuclear power and visited areas around the Fukushima Daiichi plant. He said it was particularly painful to see the suffering of Iitate, a town northwest of the Fukushima plant that was bathed with large amount of nuclear radiation carried by the wind. “They had never received nuclear subsidies. But the town was killed. There is nothing worse than that,” Mr. Kobayashi said.
Mr. Kobayashi has a track record of maverick views. He started his manga career as a political satirist in the early 1990s. His first big seller in the political arena was a comic book on the class-action lawsuit brought by people infected with AIDS by contaminated blood products. That work was unpopular with progressives.
Although “Senso Ron” endeared Mr. Kobayashi to nationalists, many abandoned him after he spoke out in favor of a female emperor in 2005.
Read more at Fukushima Watch: Confessions of an Unlikely Anti-Nuclear Convert
♢ Article in Japanese:
♦ フクシマウォッチ：小林よしのりが「脱原発論」を書いたわけ via The Wall Street Journal日本版
The article is not a word-by-word translation of the Japanese article. It is regrettable that the English version does not contain the following sentence that is found in the Japanese counterpart: 「尖閣諸島を何が何でもわが国土だと言うのなら、飯舘村が事実上、失われてしまったことになぜ痛恨の念を持たないのか」と小林は問う。(Kobayashi asks: “While we adamantly claim the Senkaku/Daiyou islands are our territory, our land, why don’t we regret over the loss of Iidate village, our land?”)