The incident has prompted a vast outpouring of online anger and soul searching as to how so many people could be so callous towards the suffering of a child.

Japanese renewables firms' foreign rivals know it would be hard to object to such subsidies without seeming callous, given the scale of Japan's post-quake crisis.

One doesn't distrust them just out of callous indifference or out of arrogance, but one sees that in order to find out, all authorities must be set aside.