way: Donen was «disbanded» and renamed Genden in May 1998, supposedly to appease an angry public. Today, under this new name, the nuclear agency continues to operate with the same staff, offices, and philosophy as before.
Nor is it only government agencies such as Donen-Genden that are falling behind in nuclear safety. The same problems beset private industry. The troubles at the Tokai plant came to a head at 10:35 a.m. on September 30, 1999, when employees at a fuel-processing plant managed by JCO, a private contractor, dumped so much uranium into a settling basin that it reached critical mass and exploded into uncontrolled nuclear fission. It was Japan's worst nuclear accident ever – the world's worst since Chernobyl – resulting in the sequestration of tens of thousands of people living in the area near the plant. The explosion was a tragedy for forty-nine workers who were exposed to radiation (three of them critically) but at the same time a comedy of errors, misinformation, and mistakes. It turned out that Tokai's nuclear plant had not repaired its safety equipment for more than seventeen years. The workers used a secret manual prepared by JCO's managers that bypassed safety regulations in several critical areas: essentially, material that workers should have disposed of via dissolution cylinders and pumps was carried out manually with a bucket.
Measures to deal with the accident could be described by no other word than primitive. Firefighters rushed to the scene after the explosion was reported, but since they had not been told that a nuclear accident had occurred they did not bring along protective suits, although their fire station had them – and they were all contaminated with radiation. In the early hours, no local hospital could be found to handle the victims even though Tokai has fifteen nuclear facilities. There was no neutron measurer in the entire city, so prefectural officials had to call in an outside agency to provide one; measurements were finally made at 5 p.m., nearly seven hours after the disaster. Those measurements showed levels of 4.5 millisieverts of neutrons per hour, when the limit for safe exposure is 1 millisievert
The accident at Tokai came as a shock to other nuclear-energy-producing nations. The director of the China National Nuclear Corporation commented, «Improving management techniques is the key lesson China should learn from the Japan accident, since the leak happened not because of nuclear technology but because of poor management and human error.» And, indeed, poor management, combined with official denial, was at the root of the disaster. «Oh no, a serious accident can't happen here,» a top Japanese nuclear official declared some hours after the fission reaction at Tokai had taken place.
The level of sheer fiction in Japan's nuclear industry can be gauged from the story of how Donen misused most of its budget for renovation work between 1993 and 1997. The problem lay in 2,000 drums of low-level radioactive waste stored at Tokai, which began rusting in pits filled with rainwater. Records show that the problem dated to the 1970s, but only in 1993 did Donen begin to take action, asking for money to remove the drums from the pits and to build sheds for temporary storage. So far so good. Four years and ¥1 billion later, ponen still had not taken the drums out of the pits or built the sheds. Nobody knows where the money went-semipublic agencies like Donen are not required to make their budgets public – but the suspicion was that Donen secretly spent it doing patchwork waterproofing in the pits to hide evidence of radioactive leakage. There is no problem, the agency said. One official remarked, «The water level has not dropped, so radioactive material is not leaking outside.»
Donen went on to request more money for 1998, stating that renovation was going smoothly, and asking for ¥71 million to remove the sheds it had never built! It even attached drawings to show how it was reinforcing the inner walls of the storage pits. The Donen official in charge of technology to protect the environment from radioactive waste said, «It's true that the storage pits will eventually be reinforced. So I thought it would be all right if details of the project were different from what we had stated in our request for budgetary approval.»
When Donen gets money from the government to remove sheds it never built and shore up the walls of pits it never drained, we are definitely moving into the territory of Escher and Kafka. A final surreal touch is provided by an animated video produced by Donen to show children that plutonium isn't as dangerous as activists say. «A small character named Pu (the chemical symbol of plutonium), who looks like an extra from 'The Jetsons,' gives his friend a glass of plutonium water and says it's safe to drink. His friend, duly impressed, drinks no less than six cups of the substance before declaring, 'I feel refreshed!' »
There is a lesson to be learned from Donen's madness, and it is that if you disguise the truth long enough you eventually lose touch with reality yourself. This happened at MOF, which can no longer figure out the true state of bank finances, and it happened to the nuclear industry, which doesn't know the standard techniques of nuclear-plant management common elsewhere in the world. Why invest in technology when with a stroke of the pen an official can bring fires under control and make leaks dry up? At Tokai in 1997, so unconcerned were Donen officials that seven maintenance employees played golf on the day of the fire – and went back to play another round the day after.
Japan is like the spaceship in
While it runs against the conventional wisdom that Japan is a technological leader, there is no question that Japan has fallen drastically behind in the technology of nuclear-power management and safety. Let's examine what happened at the Tokai plant in 1997 more closely. Workers checked the state of the blaze by looking in the window – they used no other monitoring devices and did not check again. A team of three people, including an untrained local fireman, entered the building with no protection and proceeded to seal it up – with duct tape! Dozens of other workers were sent into or near the site, unprotected by masks, and inhaled radioactive fumes. In the 1999 fission incident at Tokai, rescue workers were not warned to wear protective suits, neither measuring devices nor hospital care was readily available, and national authorities had no disaster plan to cope with the emergency.
What is in the manual for nuclear facilities in Japan has been duct tape or, in the case of the nuclear plant in Hamaoka, in Shizuoka Prefecture, paper towels, which were used to wipe up a hydrogen peroxide solution that had been spilled during cleaning of radioactively contaminated areas there. So many paper towels accumulated by January 1996 that they spontaneously combusted. This is reminiscent of the situations concerning waste removal after the Kobe earthquake (no shields or other safeguards), dioxin (no data), leachate from chemical waste pools (no waterproofing), and oil spills (cleaned up by women with bamboo ladles and blankets).
Since the 1970s, Japanese quality has become a byword, and many a book and article has been penned on the subject of
The problem is endemic in Japanese industry, as is evidenced by a survey made by Professor Kato, in which he asked workers in Tokyo if they would disclose wrongdoing in their company; 99 percent said they would not. A major case of such a cover-up surfaced in July 2000, when police found that for twenty-three years Mitsubishi Motors had hidden from investigators most of its documents on customer complaints. At first Mitsubishi kept its records in a company locker room, but after 1992 it created a state-of-the-art computer system for storing dual records: those to be reported to regulators, and those to be kept secret. Only after inspectors discovered the ruse did Mitsubishi begin to deal with suspected problems, recalling over 700,000 cars for defects including bad brakes, fuel leaks, and failing clutches. A similar scandal arose in June 2000 at giant milk producer Snow Brand, whose tainted milk poisoned 14,000 people, as the result of careless sanitation procedures that had gone unchecked for decades.
At Tokai's nuclear plant, Mitsubishi Motors, and Snow Brand, no worker or manager ever drew attention to a situation dozens or even hundreds of people must have been aware of for many years. Meanwhile, complacent officials meekly took the information they were served and never bothered to investigate. Multiply these stories by the tens of thousands and one begins to get a shadowy view of slowly accumulating dysfunction afflicting almost every field in modern Japan. From the outside, the machine of
On February 17, 1996, the
These small bits of misinformation pile up into mountains of misleading statistics, which lead government planners, businessmen, and journalists to very wrong conclusions. Journalists, beware – reporting on Japan is like walking on quicksand. Take an innocent-looking number like the unemployment rate. With unemployment hovering around 3 percent in Japan for most of the 1980s and early 1990s, it would seem that Japan's unemployment has been far below the 5 or 6 percent reported for the United States.
But was it really? Japan uses its own formula to calculate unemployment, with several important differences. For example, in the United States you are unemployed if you were out of work for the previous month; in Japan, it is for the previous week. While economists differ on the exact numbers, everyone agrees that the Japanese rate would rise by 2 to 4 percent if it were calculated in the American way. Japanese officials publicly admit that employment data are as unreliable as corporate balance sheets; in early 1999, Labor Minister Amari Akira, when pressed to provide realistic information, responded, «It's my corporate secret.» And yet – and this is the notable part of the story – journalists continue to use the Japanese unemployment figures and to compare them with the American ones without warning their readers that they are comparing apples and oranges. Karel van Wolferen writes: «Systematic misinformation is a policy tool in Japan. Unsuspecting foreign economists, especially those of the neo-classical persuasion who must be reassured that Japan, after all, is not embarrassing evidence contradicting mainstream theory, are easy targets... We simply do not know, even approximately, the level of unemployment, the amount of problem loans, assets and debts in most corporate sectors.»
Suppose you were a delegate at the Third UN Convention on Climate Control, which was held in Kyoto in December 1997. You would have been delighted to learn that according to a report issued by its Environment Agency, Japan spent a total of ¥11 trillion for projects aimed at averting global warming. However, if you took a closer look at the agency's report, you would have discovered that of ¥9.3 trillion labeled «finding ways to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide,» ¥8.35 trillion went into the construction and maintenance of roads. The Natural Resources and Energy Agency spent an additional ¥400 billion promoting nuclear energy. Of ¥1.2 trillion listed as spent for «preservation and enhancement of forests,» about half went into labor expended in stripping the native forest cover and replanting it
