Japan drops ‘screaming wife’ nuclear safety advert

A JAPANESE research agency has dropped a controversial campaign aimed at educating women about nuclear safety which compared radiation to the voice of an angry wife.

The Japanese Atomic Energy Agency devoted a page on its website to an effort to “make the hard words used in the nuclear power industry” easier to understand, particularly for women.

The page, which included a cartoon of an angry, fist-waving wife and her cowering husband, compared the wife’s yell to radiation. It said the women’s increasing agitation could be compared to “radioactivity”, while the wife herself was comparable to“ radioactive material”.

The webpage was dropped on Monday after the agency received dozens of complaints.

“We would have deleted the page earlier had we known about it,” said Yusuke Uehara, a spokesman for the government nuclear agency. “This discriminates against women.”