The tragedy cried out for a rapid policy response: the government failed to meet this challenge. The authorities’ incompetence is chronicled in the report of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Commission released this month. Its sobering conclusion is that this was not a natural disaster but ‘a profoundly manmade disaster — that could and should have been foreseen and prevented. Its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response’.
The report documents the failings of Tepco, the power company that ran the Fukushima plant, the bureaucracy with regulatory responsibility for the nuclear industry and the government of Prime Minister Naoto Kan. It describes a culture of collusion inside Japan’s ‘nuclear village’ that put the interests of power producers ahead of public safety and wilfully ignored the risks of a major nuclear accident in an earthquake prone country.
But one searches in vain through these pages for anyone to blame. It ‘singles out numerous individuals and organisations for harsh criticism, but the goal is not to lay blame’. Why not? Because, the commission concludes, ‘this was a disaster ‘Made in Japan.’ Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’; our groupism; and our insularity. Had other Japanese been in the shoes of those who bear responsibility for this accident, the result may well have been the same’.
I beg to differ. Had Mr Kan not stormed into Tepco headquarters and tried to exercise some authority over the company’s executives, the situation might have been far worse. If Tepco had had a more competent president, its communications with the prime minister’s office would have been better. People matter: one of the heroes in the Fukushima story was Tepco’s Masao Yoshida, the plant manager who disobeyed orders not to use saltwater to cool the reactors. Incredibly, Tepco’s management initially clung to the hope the reactors might one day be brought back to operation, something that would be impossible once saltwater was injected into them.
To pin the blame on culture is the ultimate cop out. If culture explains behaviour, then no one has to take responsibility. This is indeed what the report concludes when it says that the results would have been the same even with others in charge.
Culture does not explain Fukushima. People have autonomy to choose; at issue are the choices they make, not the cultural context in which they make them. If obedience to authority is such an ingrained trait in Japan, how then is it possible for a group of Japanese to write a report that not only questions but lambasts authority, anything but an example of reflexive obedience? The culture argument is specious.
Prime Minister Noda promised to have a new independent nuclear regulatory commission up and running by April of this year. The parliament’s lower house finally passed a bill to do that just last week. The government has decided to go ahead and restart two nuclear reactors at a plant that services Osaka and surrounding areas despite widespread public opposition. But it is unlikely that any of Japan’s other 51 nuclear power reactors will be brought online until after the commission is established and new safety standards announced. Culture does not explain this painfully slow response; politics do.
Those inside the Japanese nuclear village do share a particular culture but it is hardly uniquely Japanese. What jumps out from this report are the parallels between the manmade causes of and responses to Fukushima and the ‘culture’ that led to the financial meltdown in the US after the Lehman Brothers collapse and that continues to resist meaningful reform and the pinning of responsibility for this manmade disaster on specific individuals.
The Fukushima Commission report ‘found an organisation-driven mindset that prioritised benefits to the organisation at the expense of the public’. Well, if that is Japanese culture, then we are all Japanese.
Gerald Curtis is a Professor at Columbia University.
This article was first published here by the Financial Times.
I agree with the argument that individuals can make a difference, like the manager who ignored the order not to inject saltwater into the reactors, but I think the disaster had more to do with culture than this article suggests. Whilst culture itself is not to blame, the failure to separate culture from responsibility, accountability, and safe operating procedures probably played a large part in the accident.
The foreword in the Japanese version of the report is somewhat different from the English version, and goes into cultural specifics including “batch hiring of graduates”, “age-based pay”, and “lifelong employment” that when combined with very little legal support for whistleblowers (as demonstrated in recent news stories) would deter most employees from rocking the boat, leaving the people at the top free to do whatever they pleased, safe in the fact that the “regulators” were also in their pockets.
To argue that publishing a report such as this is evidence of the fact that over obedience is not a problem is somewhat disingenuous; with the eyes of the world watching after a catastrophe that almost caused (and still might cause) problems on a global scale, releasing anything less than a frank and critical report would have thrown into question just how serious Japan was about learning lessons from this situation and prevent something like it from ever happening again.
With regards to the Wall Street comparison, yes, people are resisting reform there too, but in the case of Fukushima the site of the meltdown has been left in ruins and a large swathe of countryside around it is now uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. This is permanent physical damage that will need constant attention for generations; the people in Wall Street are already able to claim their crisis is over. Had Wall Street itself been rendered unlivable the story would be different.
What the opening in the English version seems to allude to is the fact that culture and nuclear power don’t mix, as summed up nicely by Alex Kerr in his book “Dogs & Demons”…
“Tatemae is a charming attitude when it means that everyone should look the other way at a guest’s faux pas in the tearoom; it has dangerous and unpredictable results when applied to corporate balance sheets, drug testing, and nuclear-power safety reports.”
I hope the message has now thoroughly gotten through.