William Pesek is an award-winning Tokyo-based journalist and creator of “Japanization: What the World Can Study from Japan’s Misplaced A long time.”
There’s something oddly telling about Carlos Ghosn’s associates being dropped at justice the identical week Japan commemorates the tenth anniversary of the Fukushima disaster.
Why? As a result of extra individuals have gone to jail over a Nissan Motor CEO allegedly padding his pay than the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. This Tohoku-sized hole in accountability, a decade on, speaks to how key classes from Japan’s magnitude 9.0 Mar. 11, 2011 earthquake stay largely unlearned.
It irks Japan one thing terrible that Ghosn, who escaped from home arrest in December 2019, is thumbing his nostril on the Tokyo institution from exile in Beirut. Therefore blanket information protection of two Individuals that allegedly helped Ghosn flee being extradited to Tokyo to face jail time.
If solely this identical institution have been as involved in regards to the numerous Fukushima-area residents nonetheless displaced by 3/11. If solely prosecutors have been one-tenth as eager to carry Tokyo Electrical Energy Co. Holdings executives to justice. Or the Tokyo bureaucrats who enabled Tepco’s security lapses and swept hopes for a post-Fukushima course correction below the tatami mat.
Historic historical past? Not when you think about what occurred on Feb. 13, 2021, when one other sizable trembler hit. Tokyoites instantly puzzled in regards to the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant simply 240 kilometers away. Was it broken? What of the spent uranium gasoline rods nonetheless imperiling the Tohoku area? Seems, the geniuses at Tepco had not bothered to restore two damaged seismometers on the website.
Cue Homer Simpson jokes. Final month’s quake was a stark reminder that Tepco nonetheless appears in no higher palms than the fictional Springfield Nuclear Energy Plant, the place on The Simpsons, Homer heads security. Solely, that is no laughing matter.
Earlier than the 2011 radiation disaster that put Tokyo liable to evacuation, regulators regarded the opposite method on Tepco’s lax security requirements for years. Heads hardly rolled in 1999, for instance, after employees in Tokaimura mixing radioactive supplies in buckets brought about a nuclear incident. Years of fabricating information? No downside. Placing all of the Fukushima backup mills underground in a spot that invented the phrase “tsunami?” Belief us, the nuclear village foyer informed us.
There was a second in 2011 when a reckoning appeared attainable. On the time, Tokyo stunned many by commissioning a U.S.-style impartial Fukushima inquiry. Much more stunning was the selection of a medical physician to diagnose what occurred on 3/11.
If Japan Inc. hoped for a whitewash, Tokyo College’s Kiyoshi Kurokawa didn’t present it. In a 641-page report back to then-Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda in July 2012, Kurokawa dismissed arguments that 3/11 was an “act of God” that nobody envisioned. He referred to as it a “profoundly human-made catastrophe,” highlighting the “groupism” and “insularity” plaguing Japanese society. He slammed a system that allowed Tepco to “manipulate its cozy relationship with regulators to take enamel out of regulation.”
In 2021, depend the methods by which the issues that Kurokawa’s post-mortem are nonetheless alive and nicely as Japan Inc. stumbles anew.
Think about if Noda’s successor, Shinzo Abe, had gone the opposite method in late 2012. Abe took energy 656 days after Japan’s 126 million individuals had turned solidly in opposition to reactors in one of the crucial seismically imperiled nations. Slightly than make a daring and job-creating pivot towards a renewable-energy innovation growth, Crew Abe labored to restart Japan’s 54 nuclear crops one after the other.
As an alternative of going inexperienced, Tokyo pivoted to coal, swelling its carbon footprint. Abe’s Liberal Democratic Occasion stepped up efforts to promote nuclear know-how abroad, together with to seismically weak India and Turkey.
The trust-us delusion explains the rise and fall of Abenomics. In pledging to tighten company governance, telling ladies they’d quickly “shine” and hiring a brand new Financial institution of Japan chief, Abe was speaking that “we have now received this.” The joke, although, is on the Japanese individuals as Nissan picks up the items, Tokyo’s gender-equality rating plunges and deflationary forces return.
The 2020 Olympics? Belief us, it’s going to be even greater and higher than 1964. And will probably be executed sustainably, competently and affordably. Hardly, as complete Tokyo neighborhoods received pressured makeovers. Hardly, as Olympics chief Yoshiro Mori’s sexism scandal attest. Hardly, as the value tag for a number of weeks of Olympic occasions sprints towards $25 billion.
COVID-19? Belief us, present Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga says. By no means thoughts Japan’s coronavirus testing capability and vaccination rollout lags friends. To Temple College’s Jeff Kingston, it’s inconceivable to not join the dots to the occasions 10 years in the past.
“There was no accountability,” Kingston says, pointing to Fukushima, “lives turned the wrong way up, communities have been lowered to ghost cities.” Now, he explains, Suga is saying, “however hey, belief us — we are going to get it proper this time. And people bureaucratic silos that impeded efficient authorities response? We now have seen the identical issues with the response to COVID-19, too.”
The Olympics and COVID have since fused into a brand new delusion: Don’t worry, we are able to nonetheless do the Olympics in July — and do it safely. Written between the strains in daring font: Please ignore the brand new virus variants popping up round Japan. Ignore the very fact Japan has not begun vaccinations. Ignore, too, that we are going to not require 80,000 athletes and employees arriving from the 4 corners of the globe to be vaccinated both — presumably, Ghosn associates, too. We received this.
Significantly? Because the globe’s consideration returns to the Fukushima area, the place 22,000 died or disappeared, discussions are inclined to give attention to what has modified. In actuality, not almost sufficient.