Fukushima, One Year On

Aren't They Angry Yet In Japan?

It's been a year since the Greater East Japan Earthquake, the Tsunami and the Nuclear disaster at Fukushima. I thought I would have a better picture of how Japan would recover from the triple punch, but inevitably it is taking time. If one thing is clear, the entire sequence of events exposed how the system was beyond the control of the government executive. Reading of the events that took place in the days after the events, it is clear that incorrect information was presented to the executive branch of the Japanese government, and this delayed and confused the response no end. In other words, it looked like there was a functioning system until it got blown to bits by the sequence of events, and what was left was just totally inadequate.

The most notable of these misinforming of Prime Minster Naoto Kan was the Nuclear Energy Agency of Japan not telling him there had been multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima plant. In fact radioactive Caesium had been found outside of the plant as early as the 13th of March 2011, and the only conclusion that could be drawn from this was that the reactors must have exploded. By the time the Prime Minister got his facts straight - that there had been meltdowns, there were already people in place on the assumption that the meltdowns had not happened.

The institutional resistance of both the bureaucrats and TEPCO executives was also a factor in making things worse. And the irony of all things is that Naoto Kan had made his name fighting such bureaucratic complacency and the kind of injustices that come from these; now that he was Prime Minister, he had no way of dealing with these people who viewed him with an institutionalised suspicion. The vested interests all stuck together - from the bureaucrats to the TEPCO brass to even the media and essentially chased Naoto Kan into resignation through their intransigence. To illustrate just how awful the vested interests were, the media lined up to criticise Kan for yelling at the TEPCO brass who came to tell him they wanted to pull out. It is clear that Prime Minister Kan did the right thing by making TEPCO hold their ground. He might have made many a mistake  in other aspects of dealing with the enormous chaos that ensued the triple-disaster, but he got one decision right.

Indeed, if TEPCO personnel weren't going to stay on, just who was going to go in and shut down the reactors?

For me, it was absolutely logical and de rigeur of a condition of his Prime Ministership that he had to yell at them to make them stay. The media in Japan reported it as Naoto Kan losing decorum and therefore being unfit for his office. It was infuriating.

As I read news-sites from Japan, the overwhelming and prevailing position mounted by the old newspaper bodies is that the current DPJ government in its incompetence has made everything an insurmountable problem. It strikes me that this is self-serving balderdash dished out by a Japanese media that has a relationship that can only be described as being too cozy with the bureaucrats. In my view, the problems that brought about the triple disaster finds itself in the absence of the sense of responsibility,  the further you go up authority structures in Japan. What really depresses me about is that this might actually be something cultural.

The media are trying to characterise the triple disaster as the "second time" of losing a war. That is to say, the collective failure of government and industry and "The System" that parallels the leadership that led Japan to lose World War II. If indeed that is the case, then I would posit that the kind of absentee leadership endemic in Japan got played out in exactly the same way as the way they worked out in World War II. The British used to laugh at the Imperial Japanese Army for their predictable strategems, but they rated the NCOs of Japan very highly for their ability to make tactical decisions stick - Even the bad ones.

In exactly the same manner, the top brass of TEPCO turned out to be predictably incompetent, but the actual people on the ground exhibited incredible courage, endurance and guile to bring the reactors back under control. Old men who had once worked at the site but retired, came out of the woodwork to offer themselves up to the dangerous task. The people on the ground made the best of a bad situation through typical Japanese valor and dedication and self-sacrifice. Sort of like the incredible selflessness of the Kamikaze pilots who gave their lives on the orders of an incompetent command group.

To see this pattern repeated brought nothing but a numbing, glum, dark, disgust.

Maybe because I have a firsthand feel for how things are couched and how things are decided and how things are done in Japan that I can't help but see problems not only with the elites who come from top universities, but the system that decided these ethical midgets, these moral cowards, these mandarins of no personal responsibility were the people to promote.

The worst thing is that these bureaucrats as a block, form a massive vested interest in how the government of Japan works and how it is run. And the only prime minster in the last 50years who had a shot at changing things had to be buried by the triple disaster, and then the bad advice of these 'elites'.

It's an awful business that shows no sign of getting better.

Irritable Kan

A Bit Of Spine

It's been a few years since a Japanese PM showed some spine, even if it's to a bunch of reporters. New PM, Naoto Kan's nickname is "Ira-Kan", which is sort of an abbreviation for "Irritable Kan". He made his statement on becoming PM earlier:

"Our country's outstanding public debt is huge," the centre-left leader said in his first policy address since taking office Tuesday. "Our public finances have become the worst of any developed country."

After decades of stimulus spending and feeble tax receipts, Japan's public debt is now nearly double its gross domestic product, forcing the government to issue ever more bonds to pay for hefty outlays.

"It is difficult to continue our fiscal policies by heavily relying on the issuance of government bonds," said Kan, the former finance minister.
"Like the confusion in the eurozone triggered by Greece, there is a risk of collapse if we leave the increase of the public debt untouched and then lose the trust of the bond markets."

Kan has in the past advocated increasing Japan's sales tax, although he has not specified plans that may prove unpopular with voters ahead of upper house elections planned for July 11.

"It is unavoidable to launch a full reform of the tax system," he said, also calling for the establishment of a bipartisan panel "to review fiscal rehabilitation and engage in constructive debate together".

"If we maintain the current level of issuance of new bonds, outstanding debt will surpass 200 percent of GDP in a few years," he said.

Mr. Kan was then accused of running away from a challenge by the opposition Liberal Democrats when he refused to extend the Diet's meeting period.

Here's the article:

なぜそんな批判が出ているんですか？」「全部聞いてました？」―。菅直人首相は１１日夜、記者団の問いに逆質問を連発、声は荒らげないものの、短気ですぐ怒る“イラ菅”の片りんをのぞかせた。

記者団が「会期を大幅延長しないことに野党が『逃げるな』と批判している」と聞いたのに対し「党首討論も大いにやりたい。逃げるようなことをしていないのに『逃げるな』と言われること自体よく分からない」と不快感をにじませた。

さらに「所信表明演説に具体的な数字が少なかった」との指摘には「もっと大変なことを言った。皆さんには踏み込んだ内容だと理解されると思って、分かりやすく言ったつもりだ」と「理解できないのか」と言わんばかりに反論した。

What's cool about that is that he returned fire to the reporter asking "Weren't you listening?" and then said, "I do want a leader's debate. It's hard to comprehend this accusation of running away when I'm not doing anything of the sort." When pointed out that there werne't numbers mentioned in the statement, he also returned fire saying, "I thought I said something a lot more grave. I thought you would understand it as having a more profound content", implying "don't you understand?"

You can just see the offended little journalist. Screw him, I say.

It's good to see a PM who can shoot back at the venal political reportage in Japan. Mr. Koizumi had spine, but never made the toughest decisions. In that sense he was more style than substance. The 4 men who filled the role since then - Messers Abe, Fukuda, Asou and Hatoyama - have all been awful, passive, gormless and clueless PMs. They've also come from families that have made being politicians a family business. All of them came to power with a sense of entitlement and none of them seemed to want to fundamentally contribute to what was necessary. It's hard to say what they thought they were contributing but in many ways, they simply ran the country on autopilot or in the case of Mr. Hatoyama, unlicensed, hands off the wheel and looking out the window.

Stretching the driving metaphor, I don't know if Mr. Kan can really steer Japan back from the brink. He has to radically raise the consumption tax and restructure taxation as a whole; that is to say, inflict serious pain on the public, but his party is hampered by the election promise the previous PM made whereby the Democrats would not raise the Consumption tax for 4 years. It might be too late by then. However, if he could bust through the mold and the traditions and the trappings of Japanese politics, and actually do the painful yet necessary reforms, I doubt people who would come to write him in history would mind that he was known as an irritable bastard.