Yasuhiro Sonoda, a Japanese MP and parliamentary spokesman for the cabinet office, drank water not normally intended for human consumption after it was scooped up from gathered pools inside Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
The politician was visibly nervous as he gulped the water from a glass with shaking hands in a televised press conference in a bid to highlight government confidence in the efficiency of its decontamination procedures.
Collected from beneath two reactor buildings at the plant, the water is decontaminated before being used for tasks such as watering plants, a controversial procedure which has been the subject of safety concerns in the media.
Before drinking the water, Mr Sonoda read out a string of figures relating to its low contamination levels and explained he was drinking in response to journalists repeatedly asking him to “prove” the safety of the plant’s surrounding area.