Tokyo, Japan. As America calls its Senate to the White House for a once in a generation nuclear confrontation, Japanese citizens at the new American front prepare for the worst, should the US go to war with North Korea.
The demand for nuclear blast shelters and air purifiers has increased significantly among some Japanese against a backdrop of rising tensions with North Korea, which allegedly has the capability of hitting the country with missiles containing sarin.
Seiki Seisakusho, a company in western Japan specializing in the designing and installation of nuclear bomb shelters located under houses has received eight shelter requests since the beginning of April, said company director Nobuko Oribe.
Oribe Seiki Seisakusho’s advertisement says their shelter is a hermetically sealed tunnel which comes with both radioactive and poisonous gas filters. The room could withstand the equivalent of the atomic bomb that was dropped by the US military in Hiroshima in 1945, should the bomb fall about 660 meters or more from the tunnel.
Japanese anxieties are further fueled by the memories of the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack by a notorious doomsday cult which claimed the lives of 12 people died and left more than 4,000 injured.
This week, two Japanese warships joined the US carrier strike group, the USS Carl Vinson, on its way to the Korean Peninsula in an apparent show of force aimed at deterring North Korea. The military maneuvers coincided with Pyongyang’s preparations to mark the 85th anniversary of the foundation of its military.
North Korea has threatened to sink the US aircraft carrier, which is now on station off the North Korean coast at the orders of US President Donald Trump.