In Japan, Fumiko Kometani, the wife of American screenwriter Josh Greenfeld and mother of journalist Karl Taro Greenfeld, has a reputation for being a grouch. A longtime resident of the United States, she writes for a number of Japanese publications and very rarely has anything nice to say about either her native country or her adopted one.

In one of the essays in her 2001 collection, "Nan'ya Kore? (What the Hell Is This?)," she compared the nuclear-energy policies of Japan and America. As a Japanese person who lived through the war, she feels acute unease that Japan derives a third of its electricity from nuclear power, given that the country is the only one in the world that has ever suffered a nuclear attack, not to mention the fact that the archipelago is riddled with earthquake faults.

She mentions that an "intellectual weekly magazine" once rejected one of her essays, in which she told an anecdote about getting her son's English-teaching assignment changed because the Japanese junior high school was located near a nuclear power plant. The editor of the journal, which she does not name, implied that the essay was faulty because everyone knew that Japan's nuclear power plants were very safe. "They plant special flowers nearby, which change color whenever there is even the smallest radiation leak," he told her. Kometani wondered what happens in the winter.