Three other views on the Japanese catastrophe
Here are tfhree articles that might have escaped your attention about the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear reactor meltdown. The first two deal with the weakness of the Japanese government and the flak issuing from the utility that owns the reactors, which is beginning to enrage the domestic and international public. They are loading down the media with information and data, presented in incomprehensible forms. But they do not answer the questions vital to the public.
Last, the view of the tragedy from Hiroshima, where several anti-nuclear activists were interviewed. One person interviewed was the incomparable reporter from The Chugoku Shimbun, Akira Toshiro, who has specialized in stories on nuclear power for 30 years. Tashiro's book, Discounted Casualties: The Human Cost of Depleted Uranium, asked the question: what is the cost of sheathing bombs with depleted uranium, the cost to land, water, civilians and soldiers alike? His investigations and interviews took place in the US, the UK, Iraq and Yugoslavia.
Badlands Journal editorial board
3-16-11
The New York Times
Flaws in Japan’s leadership deepen sense of crisis
No strong political class has emerged to take the place of bureaucrats and corporations
By KEN BELSON and NORIMITSU ONISHI
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42114871/ns/world_news-asiapacific/
TOKYO — Never has postwar Japan needed strong, assertive leadership more — and never has its weak, rudderless system of governing been so clearly exposed or mattered so much.
Japan faces its biggest challenge since World War II, after an earthquake, a tsunami and a deepening nuclear crisis struck in rapid, bewildering succession. The disasters require nationwide mobilization for search, rescue and resettlement, and a scramble for jury-rigged solutions in uncharted nuclear territory, with crises at multiple reactors posing a daunting array of problems. Japan’s leaders need to draw on skills they are woefully untrained for: improvisation; clear, timely and reassuring public communication; and cooperation with multiple powerful bureaucracies.
Postwar Japan flourished under a system in which political leaders left much of its foreign policy to the United States and its handling of domestic affairs to powerful bureaucrats. Prominent companies operated with an extensive reach into personal lives; their executives were admired for their role as corporate citizens.
But over the past decade or so, the bureaucrats’ authority has been eviscerated, and corporations have lost both power and swagger as the economy has floundered. Yet no strong political class has emerged to take their place. Four prime ministers have come and gone in less than four years; most political analysts had already written off the fifth, Naoto Kan, even before the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.
Two years ago, Mr. Kan’s Japan Democratic Party swept out virtual one-party rule by the Liberal Democratic Party, which had dominated Japanese political life for 50 years. The Japan Democratic Party pledged to transform government, challenge the entrenched bureaucracy, and usher in new transparency with citizens. But the lack of continuity and governing experience have left Mr. Kan’s party particularly hobbled. The only long-serving organization within the government is the bureaucracy, which has been, at a minimum, mistrustful of the party.
“It’s not in their DNA to work with anybody other than the Liberal Democrats,” said Noriko Hama, an economist at Doshisha University.
.“In the past, bureaucrats would have been issuing orders without even consulting with politicians,” said Takeshi Sasaki, a political scientist at Gakushuin University. “Now the bureaucrats are no longer involved, and the government keeps holding news conferences, but there is no evidence I can see that it is doing anything beyond that. Japan has never experienced such a serious test. At the same time, there is a leadership vacuum.”
The lack of leadership is compounding the uncertainty felt in Tokyo. Fearing the widening effects of the nuclear accidents up north, many companies are keeping their employees at home, foreigners are fleeing the country and aftershocks continue to rattle buildings. Underscoring the gravity of the crises, the emperor, Akihito, appeared on television for the first time ever to urge the nation to persevere and “to never abandon hope.”
The emperor’s words contained echoes of the most famous speech delivered by his father, Emperor Hirohito. On Aug. 15, 1945, Hirohito made a radio broadcast to tell the Japanese to “endure the unendurable” in his surrender broadcast — an act that stripped him and the imperial system of all political power, ushering in Japan’s postwar system.
Disaster at a glance
Size, magnitude
A massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake — fifth largest since 1900 — struck at 2:46 p.m. local time (12:46 a.m. ET) on March 11, centered approximately 100 miles east of Sendai city on Japan’s main island, Honshu.
Tsunami
The quake generated a tsunami of at least 23 feet that swept boats, cars, buildings and tons of debris miles inland in Japan. Smaller swells struck other Pacific Rim countries and even the United States, causing serious but far less extensive damage.
Casualties
Police have confirmed more than 4,000 deaths, but government officials have estimated that at least 10,000 people have been killed.
Nuclear plants
The fuel rods at three nuclear reactors at the Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima Dai-ichi plant are believed to be in various stages of melting, and a container for spent fuel at a fourth reactor has been damaged and was leaking radioactivity. Authorities have ordered the evacuation of a 19-mile radius around the plant.
Other impacts
More than 452,000 people are staying in temporary shelters. Transportation and communications systems were largely paralyzed in the immediate aftermath of the quake, but air and ground travel are said to be near normal. Still, many roads were severely damaged and travel within the hard-hit areas remains difficult. Large swaths of the country remain without power — estimates range from 1.2 million to 4 million households. Rolling blackouts have been imposed to conserve power around Tokyo and northern Honshu. Some commodities, including gas, are scarce. The Japanese government estimates that 1.4 million households have no access to safe drinking water.
.In the decades after the war, the country’s mostly anonymous bureaucrats, not its politicians, were the ones credited with rebuilding the nation. During the OPEC-led oil embargo in the early 1970s, for instance, unelected bureaucrats minimized electricity use by directing rolling blackouts among companies.
The payoff for their often unheralded leadership was high-paying, post-retirement jobs in corporations and industry associations, a practice known as amakudari.
Perhaps no sector had closer relations with regulators than the country’s utilities, particularly when it came to nuclear power.
Bureaucrats and executives were keen to reduce Japan’s heavy reliance on fossil fuels. The regulators and the regulated worked hand in glove to offset the public’s deep ambivalence to nuclear power, a vestige of the country’s singular experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only cities ever subjected to atomic attack.
Left-leaning news media outlets were long skeptical of nuclear power and its backers, and the mutual mistrust led power companies and their regulators to tightly control the flow of information about nuclear operations so as not to inflame a broad spectrum of opponents that include pacifists and environmentalists.
“It’s a Catch-22,” said Kuni Yogo, a nuclear power planner at Japan’s Science and Technology Agency.
He said that the government and Tokyo Electric Power, or Tepco, the operator of the troubled nuclear plant, “try to disclose only what they think is necessary, while the media, which has an antinuclear tendency, acts hysterically, which leads the government and Tepco to not offer more information.”
The wariness between the public and the nuclear industry and its regulators has proven to be costly during this nuclear emergency. As the problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant unfolded, officials from Tepco and the Nuclear and Industry Safety Agency have at times provided inconsistent figures or played down the risks to the reactors and the general public. No person from either side has become the face of the rescue effort.
Politicians, relying almost completely on Tepco for information, have been left to report what they are told, often in unconvincing fashion. Neither Mr. Kan nor the bureaucracy has had a hand in planning the rolling residential blackouts in the Tokyo region; the responsibility has been left to Tepco. Unlike the orderly blackouts in the 1970s, the current ones have been carried out with little warning, heightening the public’s anxiety and highlighting the lack of a trusted leader capable of sharing information about the scope of the disaster and the potential threats to people’s well-being.
“The mistrust of the government and Tepco was already there before the crisis, and people are even angrier now because of the inaccurate information they’re getting,” said Susumu Hirakawa, a professor of psychology at Taisho University.
Undoubtedly, gathering accurate information at the plants has been difficult because the explosions and high levels of radiation have kept most workers at a distance. Politicians, bureaucrats and company officials may also be trying to avoid alarming jittery citizens.
But the absence of a galvanizing voice is also the result of the long-standing rivalries between bureaucrats and politicians, and between various ministries that tend to operate as individual fiefdoms. This has hampered the establishment of a structure that would allow leaders to step forward, coordinate relief efforts and reassure the public.
“There’s a clear lack of command authority in the current government in Tokyo,” said Ronald Morse, who worked in the departments of Defense, Energy and State in the United States and worked in two ministries in Japan. “The magnitude of it becomes obvious at a time like this.”
Mark McDonald contributed reporting.
3-16-11
New York Times
Dearth of Candor From Japan’s Leadership
By HIROKO TABUCHI, KEN BELSON and NORIMITSU ONISHI
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/world/asia/17tokyo.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Prime Minister Naoto Kan, second from right, arrived at a news conference in Tokyo. His inexperience has shown in the crisis.
TOKYO — With all the euphemistic language on display from officials handling Japan’s nuclear crisis, one commodity has been in short supply: information.
When an explosion shook one of many stricken reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on Saturday, power company officials initially offered a typically opaque, and understated, explanation.
“A big sound and white smoke” were recorded near Reactor No. 1, the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, announced in a curt memo. The matter “was under investigation,” it added.
Foreign nuclear experts, the Japanese press and an increasingly angry and rattled Japanese public are frustrated by government and power company officials’ failure to communicate clearly and promptly about the nuclear crisis. Pointing to conflicting reports, ambiguous language and a constant refusal to confirm the most basic facts, they suspect officials of withholding or fudging crucial information about the risks posed by the ravaged Daiichi plant.
The sound and white smoke on Saturday turned out to be the first in a series of explosions that set off a desperate struggle to bring four reactors under control after their cooling systems were knocked out by the earthquake and tsunami.
Evasive news conferences followed uninformative briefings as the crisis intensified over the past five days. Never has postwar Japan needed strong, assertive leadership more — and never has its weak, rudderless system of governing been so clearly exposed. With earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis striking in rapid, bewildering succession, Japan’s leaders need skills they are not trained to have: rallying the public, improvising solutions and cooperating with powerful bureaucracies.
“Japan has never experienced such a serious test,” said Takeshi Sasaki, a political scientist at Gakushuin University. “At the same time, there is a leadership vacuum.”
Politicians are almost completely reliant on Tokyo Electric Power, which is known as Tepco, for information, and have been left to report what they are told, often in unconvincing fashion.
In a telling outburst, the prime minister, Naoto Kan, berated power company officials for not informing the government of two explosions at the plant early Tuesday morning.
“What in the world is going on?” Mr. Kan said in front of journalists, complaining that he saw television reports of the explosions before he had heard about them from the power company. He was speaking at the inauguration of a central response center of government ministers and Tepco executives that he set up and pointedly said he would command.
The chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency said late Tuesday in a press conference in Vienna that his agency was struggling to get timely information from Japan about its failing reactors, which has resulted in agency misstatements.
“I am asking the Japanese counterparts to further strengthen, to facilitate, communication,” said the agency’s chief, Yukiya Amano. A diplomat in Vienna familiar with the agency’s operations echoed those sentiments.
“It’s so frustrating to try to get good information” from the Japanese, the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to antagonize officials there.
The less-than-straight talk is rooted in a conflict-averse culture that avoids direct references to unpleasantness. Until recently, it was standard practice not to tell cancer patients about their diagnoses, ostensibly to protect them from distress. Even Emperor Hirohito, when he spoke to his subjects for the first time to mark Japan’s surrender in World War II, spoke circumspectly, asking Japanese to “endure the unendurable.”
There are also political considerations. In the only nation that has endured an atomic bomb attack, acute sensitivity about radiation sickness may be motivating public officials to try to contain panic — and to perform political damage control. Left-leaning news outlets have long been skeptical of nuclear power and of its backers, and the mutual mistrust led power companies and their regulators to tightly control the flow of information about nuclear operations so as not to inflame a spectrum of opponents that includes pacifists and environmentalists.
"It's a Catch-22,” said Kuni Yogo, a former nuclear power planner at Japan’s Science and Technology Agency. He said that the government and Tepco “try to disclose only what they think is necessary, while the media, which has an antinuclear tendency, acts hysterically, which leads the government and Tepco to not offer more information.”
The Japanese government has also decided to limit the flow of information to the public about the reactors, having concluded that too many briefings will distract Tepco from its task of bringing the reactors under control, said a senior nuclear industry executive.
At a Tepco briefing on Wednesday, tempers ran high among reporters. Their questions focused on the plumes of steam seen rising from Daiichi’s Reactor No. 3, but there were few answers.
“We cannot confirm,” an official insisted. “It is impossible for me to say anything at this point,” another said. And as always, there was an effusive apology: “We are so sorry for causing you bother.”
“There are too many things you cannot confirm!” one frustrated reporter replied in an unusually strong tone that perhaps signaled that ritual apologies had no place in a nuclear crisis.
Yukio Edano, the outspoken chief cabinet secretary, has been one voice of relative clarity. But at times, he has seemed unable to make sense of the fast-evolving crisis. And even he has spoken too ambiguously for foreign news media.
On Wednesday, Mr. Edano told a press conference that radiation levels had spiked because of smoke billowing from Reactor No. 3 at Fukushima Daiichi, and that all staff members would be temporarily moved “to a safe place.” When he did not elaborate, some foreign reporters, perhaps further confused by the English translator from NHK, the national broadcaster, interpreted his remarks as meaning that Tepco staff members were leaving the plant.
From CNN to The Associated Press to Al Jazeera, panicky headlines shouted that the Fukushima Daiichi plant was being abandoned, in stark contrast to the calm maintained by Japanese media, perhaps better at navigating the nuances of the vague comments.
After checking with nuclear regulators and Tepco itself, it emerged that the plant’s staff members had briefly taken cover indoors within the plant, but had in no way abandoned it.
The close links between politicians and business executives have further complicated the management of the nuclear crisis.
Powerful bureaucrats retire to better-paid jobs in the very industries they once oversaw, in a practice known as “amakudari.” Perhaps no sector had closer relations with regulators than the country’s utilities; regulators and the regulated worked hand in hand to promote nuclear energy, since both were keen to reduce Japan’s heavy reliance on fossil fuels.
Postwar Japan flourished under a system in which political leaders left much of the nation’s foreign policy to the United States and domestic affairs to powerful bureaucrats. Prominent companies operated with an extensive reach into personal lives; their executives were admired for their roles as corporate citizens.
But over the past decade or so, the bureaucrats’ authority has been greatly reduced, and corporations have lost both power and swagger as the economy has floundered.
Yet no strong political class has emerged to take their place. Four prime ministers have come and gone in less than four years; most political analysts had already written off the fifth, Mr. Kan, even before the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.
Two years ago, Mr. Kan’s Japan Democratic Party swept out the virtual one-party rule of the Liberal Democratic Party, which had dominated Japanese political life for 50 years.
But the lack of continuity and inexperience in governing have hobbled Mr. Kan’s party. The only long-serving group within the government is the bureaucracy, which has been, at a minimum, mistrustful of the party.
“It’s not in their DNA to work with anybody other than the Liberal Democrats,” said Noriko Hama, an economist at Doshisha University.
Neither Mr. Kan nor the bureaucracy has had a hand in planning the rolling residential blackouts in the Tokyo region; the responsibility has been left to Tepco. Unlike the orderly blackouts in the 1970s, the current ones have been carried out with little warning, heightening the public anxiety and highlighting the lack of a trusted leader capable of sharing information about the scope of the disaster and the potential threats to people’s well-being.
“The mistrust of the government and Tepco was already there before the crisis, and people are even angrier now because of the inaccurate information they’re getting,” said Susumu Hirakawa, a professor of psychology at Taisho University.
But the absence of a galvanizing voice is also the result of the longstanding rivalries between bureaucrats and politicians, and between various ministries that tend to operate as fiefdoms.
“There’s a clear lack of command authority in the current government in Tokyo,” said Ronald Morse, who has worked in the Defense, Energy and State Departments in the United States and in two government ministries in Japan. “The magnitude of it becomes obvious at a time like this.”
3-15-11
CNN.com
Nuclear crisis recalls painful memories in Hiroshima By Eve Bower
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/14/japan.hiroshima/
Osaka (CNN) -- In Hiroshima, recent images of razed villages and burning shells of buildings in Japan's quake-damaged northeast are recalling painful memories of a time sixty-five years ago when an atomic bomb created similar effects in their town.
But it is the less visual aspect of this disaster the threat of nuclear fallout that has activists in Hiroshima sounding the call for a change in Japan's approach to its supply of electricity.
"It's like the third atomic bomb attack on Japan," said Keijiro Matsushima, an 82-year-old survivor of the atomic bombing at Hiroshima. "But this time, we made it ourselves."
Japan has 54 nuclear power plants nationwide, and about one-third of its electricity comes from nuclear energy. When many of these plants were built, they were designed to be in operation for thirty years, but as Japanese power companies face increasing public resistance to the construction of new plants, these plants will be operating for forty to fifty years, says Akira Tashiro.
Radiation and human health
'Very high' risk of radioactive material
Navigating a radiation cloud in Japan Tashiro, a Hiroshima newspaper journalist, has specialized in stories related to nuclear energy and the effects of radiation for over 30 years. His employer, The Chugoku Shimbun, actively advocates for the elimination of nuclear weapons and has a tradition of reports that focus on issues related to nuclear power.
"This might be a good turning point," Tashiro said about the concern over damaged nuclear plants in northeastern Japan. Tashiro is calling for the Japanese government to increase their investment in research of renewable energy resources.
"I hope Hiroshima will take a lead on this because of our own experience with the atomic bomb," he said.
Matsushima, the bomb survivor, is worried about the people exposed to the radiation in recent days, but doesn't see long-term viable alternatives to nuclear energy. "Unfortunately, this is a small country. Japan doesn't have much energy. It may be a necessary evil."
Shoji Kihara, of the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center, believes the Japanese government is not being fully forthcoming with information about the risks facing people close to the affected nuclear plants.
"Survivors of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have lived their whole lives worrying about their health, and these people will have to live the same way." Kihara's parents and siblings are survivors of the atomic bomb.
Kihara has written a letter to the Chugoku Power Company and asked them to suspend their plans to build a new nuclear power plant at Kaminoseki, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Hiroshima. He has written many letters to the power company over the years about this project, but he says he is optimistic that this will be his last.
Matsushima also believes this crisis will prove a turning point for the country as a whole. "Perhaps Japan can't get along without nuclear power stations in the future. But Japanese power companies will have a harder time building new nuclear power plants from now on."