how do you say 'holy shit!' in japanese?

they say "no news is good news," but that's obviously a defective dictum when you're in the midst of a nuclear catastrophe. then you have the equally unsatisfactory premise that reassuring nostrums are better than the unpleasant facts. the japanese government has become adept at both diffidence and evasion in its PR surrounding the events at fukushima nuclear theme park. from our friends at the australian newspaper comes word:

"JAPAN was resisting pressure last night to expand the evacuation zone around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
The resistance came despite the UN's nuclear watchdog finding high radiation readings at a village well outside the 20km perimeter."

for the past two weeks, it has been perfectly obvious that spin has supplanted candor in the reporting of this most terrifying accident. in spite of the continual words of comfort and reassurance coming from the vested interests -- who stand to lose their shirts if this were sorted out honestly -- there's no getting around the fact that instead of assuming responsibility and behaving responsibly, we're getting "the same old rub-de-rub"...

it's mighty crazy, when you keep on rubbin' on that same old thang -- lightnin' hopkins

the plant is past saving -- but the government has only just admitted as much. the exclusion zone needs to be doubled, at least, from what's currently mandated, but they're still trying to reconcile themselves with this unpleasantness.

the disaster turns ever more morbid, like the 1,000 mouldering, unburied corpses that lie within the exclusion zone.

as if we need another world-wide asshole on the scene, france's president has made a pilgrimage to japan to add his two-shits worth of wisdom:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy arrived in Tokyo on Thursday in a show of solidarity with the disaster-hit nation, and urged nuclear authorities in the Group of 20 to establish an international safety standard.
"We call on the independent authorities of G20 members to meet, if possible in Paris, to define an international nuclear safety standard" for power plants, he said in a speech earlier in the day at the French Embassy in Tokyo.

leave it to a money-grubbing celebrity politician to respond to the crisis with bureaucratic inertia and more preordained conclusions about the future of nuclear power -- and they haven't even figured out how deeply fucked we are at this plant.

they're going to kill us all before it's over with. this is why the inadvertent misspelling of the nuclear plant in question is so apropos:

fuckushima.