(From the “Oinshinbo” manga)

Oishinbo (“The Gourmet”), a manga about a journalist and his partner touring Japan gathering ingredients for the ultimate meal, was suspended last month for depicting its characters in the latest chapter as suffering from nosebleeds after they visited the Fukushima Daiichi power plants damaged in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and local government officials insist that there are no such adverse health effects in the area, and that the storyline creates undue fear about radiation and inflicts “baseless damage,” citing the feelings of the Fukushima residents to be “totally ignored and deeply hurt.”

In a post on his personal blog, Tetsu Kariya, Oishinbo‘s creator, takes full responsibility for the chapter, titled “The Truth of Fukushima,” which ran in the April 28–May 12 editions. For the past two years, he had researched Fukushima and its residents’ exposure to radiation, and the intention of this chapter was to raise awareness of the effects of low-dose exposure to radioactive materials: “I can only write the truth.”

The manga’s editor, Hiroshi Murayama, also defends the chapter: “It’s wrong to ignore the voices of those people just because these are considered in the minority and likely to unsettle others.” He adds: “I decided Kariya’s viewpoint was worth presenting to readers for their opinions . . . We hope the various views on the latest Oishinbo will lead to a constructive debate into assessing our future.”

Shogakukan, Inc., meanwhile, published a special ten-page section in Big Comic Spirits magazine, where Oinshinbo appears, to highlight the chapter’s criticisms, which include messages from the governments of Fukushima Prefecture, the town of Futaba, Osaka Prefecture, and the city of Osaka. As a counterpart to these criticisms, cautionary essays from radiation experts are also included.

Finding meaning in the aftermath of Japan’s nuclear traumas started with the Godzilla films in 1954; continued on to grim meditations such as Shohei Imamura‘s Black Rain, Alain Resnais‘s Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Akira Kurasawa‘s Dreams; and on to recent disaster documentaries responding to the Fukushima catastrophe. With a Godzilla reboot now out and stomping about, and the original 1954 Godzilla restored to its full explicit nuclear allegory, the fascination with Japan’s radioactive fallout won’t diminish soon. What will the next generation of nuclear disaster stories from Japan—as well as the varied responses to them, whether exposing or suppressing truths—look like? Oishinbo, which began its culinary adventures in 1983, gives us, well, a taste. As Kariya notes on his blog: “Trumpeting the safety of Fukushima may have pleased some. But deception is what I abhor most.”