Red-faced officials issued an embarrassed apology to Japan’s prime minister on Friday after spelling his name wrong during a high-profile tour of the battered Fukushima nuclear plant.
Shinzo Abe was given a specially printed suit to protect him from radiation during the tour on Thursday, on which he was accompanied by a large press pack.
Yet plant operator TEPCO, which has been lambasted internationally for what critics say is its hapless handling of the catastrophe at Fukushima, used the wrong Chinese character for part of Abe’s name.
The first three of the four characters used to write his name were correct; however, the final one represented the same sound, but had a different meaning.
“It was a typing error,” a TEPCO spokesman said. “We are very sorry for the mistake. We sincerely apologize to the prime minister for printing an inaccurate name.”
TEPCO has repeatedly come under fire for its approach to managing the aftermath of the disaster at Fukushima, with a government minister describing it as akin to someone playing “whack-a-mole.”
The giant utility was pilloried on Twitter over the gaffe on Friday.
User @YuriSakamoto tweeted: “They can’t get anything right, can they?”
“Isn’t it a big deal that TEPCO didn’t think twice about misspelling the name of the country’s prime minister and had him wear it,” @PsychoQueen59 said, while @ShoHgo_chirpy said: “TEPCO cannot even check on something as trivial as this.”
Abe’s visit was part of a public relations push that the government has launched to prove the battered plant is no danger to Japan or to the rest of the world.
Earlier this month, the premier, during Tokyo’s successful pitch to host the 2020 Games, told Olympic chiefs: “Let me assure you, the situation is under control.”
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS