Does anyone else here have any subject that is covered way too much by horrortubers in general that you could live without hearing again? For me, it's the Max Headroom Incident, blank room soup, and Obeythewalrus. These are easily the most covered topics in this circle, and some schmuck puts out a new video that includes one or the other every other week. We all know about these things, we don't need any more coverage on them with scant commentary.
Among horror channels that also focus on disasters, the
1999 Tokaimura nuclear accident gets done to death, but the problem there is it's not that everyone's talking about it, but that they're constantly regurgitating misinformation about it.
To sum it up, this was Japan's worst nuclear accident until the Fukushima meltdown in 2011. The greed of the company operating a plant which produced nuclear fuel for other reactors around Japan meant that three technicians carried out a process that was meant to be carefully controlled in such a way that all three were dosed with exceptionally high amounts of radiation after they poured huge amounts of uranyl nitrate into a breeder reactor which proceeded to reach criticality.
Of the three technicians, two died, and the one who suffered the highest dose, a man by the name of Hisashi Ouchi, went through an absolutely horrific decline over three months, one that had him go through such terrifying incidents as having his skin melt off, his heart stopping over and over again (only to be restarted every time) and eventually ended in his death when his heart stopped and couldn't be restarted. However, both he and his family wished for his survival, and as he hadn't given an advance directive, the doctors (who also wanted to do their best to see if he could pull through) kept on trying to save his life, even administering brand new (and sometimes experimental) treatments that had yet to be intensively used in a human setting. Although it came at a horrible cost, not just for Ouchi himself, but for his family and his doctors, who went through the trauma of seeing his decline up close, the data gathered from the experimental treatments did prove their efficacy, and many of them are in active use today and have undoubtedly saved lives.
Now, this is where the horrortuber slop comes in. Since this case is full of gruesome details, and can easily be twisted to match the details of grimdark and edgy body horror stories, a lot of channels like to reframe this as the doctors torturing Ouchi, or his family refusing to let him die, when neither of these stories are correct. Perhaps Ouchi and his family should have thought ahead to a scenario where the treatments failed to work, and whether it would be worth continuing to allow him to live in such a horrid state, but optimism is capable of clouding judgement like many other emotions can. Pretty much until the end, even when a heart attack inflicted so much damage that it left Ouchi unresponsive, everyone was praying that a miracle would happen, and that's a detail which I think tends to get left out the most by these channels, as it doesn't fit their little narrative that they've come up with.
This misinformation gets repeated so often, that even some more reputable channels such as Shrouded Hand have reiterated it, likely due to the misinformation being proliferated to the point that it drowns out stuff like the actual coroner's report, or documentaries from Japan which tell the real story about how things went down. If you want to see something without the BS these channels have written, I personally recommend this
2009 documentary from Japan, produced around the 10th anniversary of the incident. (in Japanese, but with English CC as an option) It features interviews with the doctors involved with the case, as well as photographs of medical documents and logs that were written during Ouchi's treatment, showing just some of gruesome data something like this would produce.
