At a news conference in July 2012, reporters asked Kiyoshi Kurokawa why the English version of his commission’s report said things the Japanese version did not. His answer, as the Asahi Shimbun reported it: “If you are Japanese, you would understand by reading the original version.”
His commission had just handed Japan’s parliament its verdict on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. It was the first independent commission the Diet had chartered in the history of Japan’s constitutional government. In six months it logged more than 900 hours of hearings and interviews with 1,167 people. About 150,000 people had been evacuated. The finding was blunt: the accident was “clearly ‘manmade.’”
The evidence was in the paperwork. Since 2006, the regulators and TEPCO, the plant’s operator, had known that a tsunami reaching the level of the site could knock out all electricity, and that one larger than the official estimate could wreck the seawater pumps and damage a reactor core. Researchers had warned again and again that tsunamis could exceed what the plant was built for. TEPCO, the commission found, responded with alternative scientific studies and lobbying.
A deadline to check the plant against new earthquake guidelines fell in June 2009. TEPCO moved it, internally and unilaterally, to January 2016. When the earthquake struck on March 11, 2011, none of the reinforcements needed for Units 1 to 3 had been made. The regulator, NISA, knew about the delay and gave no specific instructions.
The body of the report explains why in terms of structure. NISA sat inside the ministry that promoted nuclear power, and the utilities lobbied it through their industry federation. The commission called it a typical case of “regulatory capture,” and said the root causes were organizational and regulatory systems, not the competence of any specific individual.
The English edition opens with something else. In his message there, Kurokawa calls this a disaster “Made in Japan,” rooted in “the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture.” Among them he lists reflexive obedience, reluctance to question authority, groupism and insularity, and he suggests other Japanese in the same positions might have done the same.
The chairman’s foreword to the Japanese report, the version the English edition’s own disclaimer calls official, contains none of that. It also faults a Japanese “mindset,” but ties it to named structures: nearly 50 years of one-party rule, mass hiring of new graduates, seniority, lifetime employment, and the regulatory capture that grew as politics, bureaucracy and business pushed nuclear power as national policy. Kurokawa later said he had made similar points elsewhere in the Japanese text; his signed message in its appendix says the cause may have lain in a mindset that accepted Japan’s social structure.
Bloomberg’s editors wrote that the report “does not identify which men” failed, and that falling back on Japanese “groupism” was “both a copout and a cliche.” People had questioned authority, they noted: citizens and Communist Party legislators had raised concerns about the Fukushima reactors and been brushed aside. Columbia professor Gerald Curtis wrote in the Financial Times: “If culture explains behavior, then no one has to take responsibility.”
Kurokawa did not back down. In September he told the Associated Press he stood by “Made in Japan,” and that his panel had deliberately stopped short of naming culprits. Tokyo prosecutors had just accepted a request from a group of lawyers to look into professional negligence by regulators and the plant’s management. The report may not have the names, Kurokawa said, but the dates and circumstances are there. Investigators only have to check.