During the two months following the start of wastewater discharge by Tokyo Electric Power’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the Japanese embassy in Beijing has received approximately 1 million harassing phone calls from within China. The Japanese government asked China to address the situation as it was interfering with the embassy’s normal operations, but the problem persists.
The embassy investigated the calls and found that over 40,000 of them were made on August 25th, the day after discharge into the Pacific Ocean began. The volume of harassing phone calls decreased by the end of August. At present, the embassy is still receiving about 10,000-15,000 such calls per day.
Most of the calls involve verbal abuse, silence, or explicit threats against Japan or the Japanese embassy (e.g. threatening to “blow up [the embassy]”). The embassy documented malicious phone numbers and reported them to China’s public security authorities.
At a Japan-China relations forum on October 20th, Ambassador Hideo Tarumi acknowledged the harassing calls and said “rationality” was needed to advance bilateral relations.
Chinese law stipulates that frequent harassing calls interfering with normal life can incur legal liability.
Source: Kyodo News, October 27, 2023
https://china.kyodonews.net/news/2023/10/80198c16ac64.html