The Nation.com on Tohoku Earthquake has shaken Japan Inc.

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Hi Blog.  As Debito.org starts to emerge from vacation mode, I think the focus will be on something very much within this blog’s purview:  How the events since 3/11 have affected NJ residents of Japan.  But before that, here is an interesting piece on a topic that I take up in part in my most recent Japan Times JUST BE CAUSE column (out today, read it here):  How the quakes and the aftermath have exposed the flaws of Japan’s corporatist governance.  Arudou Debito

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Naoto Kan and the End of ‘Japan Inc.’

By Tim Shorrock, Courtesy of TTB

http://www.thenation.com/article/159596/naoto-kan-and-end-japan-inc

On March 13, forty-eight hours after Japan’s Tohoku region was rocked by a catastrophic earthquake, a ferocious tsunami and partial meltdowns at several nuclear power plants in Fukushima, Prime Minister Naoto Kan asked his citizens to unite in the face of “the toughest crisis in Japan’s sixty-five years of postwar history.” Emperor Akihito underscored the gravity of the situation by announcing his “deep concern” for the nation in his first public speech since ascending the throne in 1990. His address brought back sharp memories of his father, Emperor Hirohito, who ended World War II in a famous radio address in August 1945 that asked Japan to “endure the unendurable.”

But even as Japan was reeling from the disaster’s death toll—which is expected to surpass 20,000—and growing increasingly frightened by the crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Company’s nuclear reactor complex, there was growing unease at the lack of straight information from both the government and Tepco, a utility with a troubled history of lies, cover-ups and obfuscation dating back to the late 1960s.

The information gap became an international issue on March 16, when US Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair Gregory Jaczko openly contradicted the Japanese government by declaring that water in one of Tepco’s reactors had boiled away, raising radiation in the area to “extremely high levels.” He recommended evacuation to any Americans within fifty miles of the site—nearly double the evacuation zone announced by the Japanese government (which immediately denied Jaczko’s assertions). TheNew York Times piled on the next day with a major article that pilloried the Kan government. “Never has postwar Japan needed strong, assertive leadership more—and never has its weak, rudderless system of governing been so clearly exposed,” the reporters declared.

To be sure, Tokyo’s response to the disaster has been erratic, and the paucity of information about Fukushima was one of the first complaints I heard about the situation from my friends in Japan. But much of the criticism poured on Japan has obscured the many ways its political system has shifted since a 2009 political earthquake, when the ruling  Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was swept out of power for the first time in fifty years. The changes, particularly to people who remember the government’s pathetic response to the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, which killed nearly 6,500, have been striking.

Back then, “the central government was paralyzed, and the city, prefectural, and national police, fire brigades, water authorities, highway authorities, and Self-Defense Forces were shown to be unreliable,” the Australian historian Gavan McCormack wrote in his seminal 1996 book  The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence. McCormack, who has lived in Japan for decades, documented that only twenty of sixty-two offers of foreign assistance were accepted; a US offer to dispatch an aircraft carrier as a floating refugee camp was refused; foreign doctors were initially rejected because they lacked proper registration; and “sniffer” dogs that could have been searching for victims were held for days in airport quarantine. Japan’s bureaucratic response was “cold and more concerned with the preservation of its own control” than with humanitarian relief, McCormack concluded.

Kan, who rose to fame as an opponent of Japan’s turgid bureaucracy, has been far more decisive. After a few days of delay and confusion—not surprising, given the magnitude 9.0 quake, the largest in Japanese history—his government moved swiftly on many fronts. Military relief helicopters and ships were dispatched to the worst-hit areas. A US Navy armada was welcomed to the coastal areas hit by the tsunami (although the ships have since moved far away to avoid fallout from the radiation). Foreign offers of resources, including medical and relief teams, were welcomed and teams dispatched within days. Kan’s spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, has constantly been on the air, briefing reporters and the public (including on  Twitter). Kan himself flew by helicopter to view the stricken reactors and took personal charge of the nuclear crisis.

As the situation at the reactors deteriorated and Tepco’s explanations became increasingly opaque, Kan quickly lost patience. “What the hell is going on?” he was overheard asking on the phone to Tepco after one frustrating briefing. On March 16 Kan shifted responsibility for the crisis from the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency and Tepco to Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. Tepco “has almost no sense of urgency whatsoever,” he complained. By this time, too, many Japanese had grown weary of the alarmist warnings of foreign governments and journalists. One group even posted an online “Wall of Shame” to document the “sensationalist, overly speculative, and just plain bad reporting” from foreign journalists.

* * *

That reporting, and the fact that so many media organizations had to fly journalists to Japan, underscores how much that country has disappeared from our political discourse since the early 1990s, when Japan’s economic juggernaut was halted by a financial and banking crisis that led to two decades of stagnation. At the same time, some of the US criticism of Kan seems to stem from nostalgia for the years when the LDP ruled supreme through a system in which—in the Times reporters’ words—“political leaders left much of the nation’s foreign policy to the United States and domestic affairs to powerful bureaucrats.”

That is extremely misleading. Beginning in the early 1950s, the LDP was financed heavily by the CIA as a bulwark against the once-powerful Japanese left, and successive LDP governments acted as a junior partner to the United States in the cold war. While Washington provided the weapons (and the soldiers) to fight communism, the Japanese elite provided military bases and profited by funneling economic aid and investments to US allies in South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere.

At home, the LDP and its corporate backers fought ferociously to suppress labor unions and civic groups that organized to protect workers, human rights and the environment. The end result was an LDP-created “Japan Inc.”—an undemocratic, corporatist state in which bureaucrats blessed and promoted nuclear power and other industries they were supposed to regulate, and then received lucrative jobs in those industries upon retirement—a system known as  amakudari.

But during the ’90s the LDP-style of governing came crashing down. A key turning point—and the one that brought Naoto Kan to prominence—came in 1996 over a notorious scandal over tainted blood. The scandal began in the early ’80s, when the US government, warning that blood supplies were corrupted by HIV, licensed the production of heat-treated blood (which killed the virus) for use in transfusions. The Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare learned of the contamination problem as early as 1983 but publicly dismissed the threat to the public. As a result, hundreds of people, primarily hemophiliacs, received transfusions of unheated, corrupted blood; more than 500 died. The Japanese public later learned that the Health Ministry deliberately refused to license heated blood for several years, not out of health concerns but because it was available only from foreign companies (“To have licensed its use before domestic firms had set up production would have significantly affected market share,” the London Independent reported at the time). Worse, the ministry’s chief adviser on blood transfusions and HIV received large sums of money from Green Cross, one of the companies that supplied unheated blood. And, in a classic form of amakudari, Green Cross hired several former high-ranking ministry officials in senior positions while the tainted blood was still an issue.

These facts were unearthed in 1996 by Naoto Kan when he was minister of health and welfare in a brief coalition government of the LDP and several small parties. Outraged by the scandal, Kan forced ministry officials to release documents showing that they had allowed public use of HIV-tainted blood, and he publicly apologized to the victims. As a result, Kan became wildly popular and at one point was dubbed “the most honest man in Japanese politics.” I was working as a journalist in Tokyo at the time and vividly recall how his embrace of accountability and sharp critique of the bureaucracy surprised and delighted the Japanese public.

But Kan, who became prime minister in June 2010, is also unusual because he isn’t part of a political dynasty. Unlike many Japanese politicians, he emerged from a middle-class family and (like President Obama) first made his mark as a civic activist for progressive causes. In 1997 he was elected to lead the Democratic Party, an amalgam of disillusioned LDP members, trade unionists and the remnants of the left-wing Social Democratic Party. As the party leader in 2003, he took on LDP Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi for sending military forces to back up President Bush in Iraq, at one point calling Bush’s war “mass murder.”

Kan’s Democratic Party finally took control of Japan when it scored a landslide victory over the LDP in the August 2009 parliamentary elections. That contest was won by then–party leader Yukio Hatoyama, who campaigned on a plan to strike a line in foreign policy more independent of the United States. His first order of business was to scrap a 2006 agreement with the Bush administration to relocate Futenma, a US Marine Corps air base in Okinawa, to another site on the crowded island, and to send a large contingent of the Marines to Guam. By a wide majority, the people of Okinawa, home to about 75 percent of US bases in Japan, backed Hatoyama’s counterproposal to Washington, which involved removing the Marine base from Japan altogether.

To the Pentagon, however, Hatoyama’s initiative was a nonstarter. As soon as Obama took power, US officials launched a full-court press to dissuade Japan’s new ruling party from scrapping the 2006 agreement. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued relentlessly that the Marine presence in Okinawa (which has been continuously occupied by US forces since 1945) was critical, not only to Japan’s security but to US global strategy as well, and insisted it was particularly important in repelling threats from North Korea and China. Last May, Hatoyama gave in. He withdrew the proposal, reaffirmed the agreement with slight modifications and apologized to Okinawa for failing to remove the base. That cost him the leadership of his party and allowed Kan—who’d resigned as party leader in 2004—to take his place.

Kan has taken a softer line on the US bases, declaring that security agreements with the United States will remain a cornerstone of Japanese policy. But the difficulties of the US–Japan relationship were underscored a few days before the Tohoku earthquake when Kevin Maher, head of the State Department’s Japan desk, was quoted in a speech denouncing the people of Okinawa as “masters of manipulation and extortion”—apparently for their strong opposition to US bases. Maher was quickly removed from his post (he remains at State). But the incident is a sad illustration of America’s Big Brother approach to Japan and symbolizes a bilateral relationship that the lateChalmers Johnson once compared to the servile ties between the Soviet Union and East Germany. With the formerly compliant LDP out of power, US policy-makers are still trying to understand that they’re in a whole new ballgame.

But it’s unclear how Kan and his party will pull through. Just before the quake, Kan’s popularity had sunk to below 20 percent, largely as a result of a scandal involving illegal campaign donations from foreigners and stalled parliamentary negotiations over Japan’s budget; there had even been talk of new elections. In a poll published on March 27, however, Kan’s numbers rose to 28 percent, while a hefty 58 percent approved of his government’s handling of the disaster (but the same percentage disapproved of Kan’s handling of the nuclear crisis, and an astonishing 47 percent urged that atomic power plants be immediately abolished).

Meanwhile, the triple disaster continued to unfold as the smoldering reactors spewed high amounts of radioactivity into the environment and Japan began a rebuilding process that will continue for years. Despite the suffering, the Japanese press on, just as they did after World War II. A week after the earthquake and tsunami struck, my Japanese stepmother, Yasuko, who lived in Tokyo during the war, reminded me that her parents had met as Christian relief workers after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which almost wiped Tokyo off the map. “If it wasn’t for that earthquake, I wouldn’t be here today,” she told me. “Out of darkness, you know, there’s always hope.”

ENDS

7 comments on “The Nation.com on Tohoku Earthquake has shaken Japan Inc.

  • Hoofin Says:
    April 6th, 2011 at 6:40 am

    This article in the Nation is a really good read.

    It’s like I’ve been saying about MacArthur versus the occupation in Europe. In Europe, the allies tried to uproot the fascist weed (taking home a few samples, apparently, to build rockets; and letting a few escape to South America). In Japan, MacArthur basically took a lawn mower to them. Quite a few grew back as anti-communist stalwarts in the LDP.

    -– I think the lawnmower image is a bit misleading (read Dower’s EMBRACING DEFEAT). I think the Reverse Course of 1947 replanted (or rather, allowed to re-root/re-route) similar mechanisms for corporatist/statist control of Japanese society, only this time in the nominal name of anti-communism.

    Reply
  • It is always interesting to see how a nation responds to major national disasters and how it reacts to offers of assistance and help from others. The lack of any harmonised and immediate response form a so-called…”we have plans” for this “we know it shall happen” event did not surprise me one bit. When one has been brought up in the ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups…and you scratch my back I scratch yours, it comes as no surprise that those who should be giving assistance and help no longer have their “support group” to provide the kick back…ergo…what is in it for me.!…leading to a slow and uncoordinated response.

    Looking further afield, look at a similar major disaster in the US. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf.

    The US had 21 offers of aid from 17 countries. However owing to the Jones act, not one was permitted to assist. Yet fifty seven days AFTER the events the USCG announced plans for Jones Act waivers…of course too little too late, and only temporary issues too.

    The Jones Act, like all those other ‘acts’ that exist in the US and Japan et al, serve only the politicans and their “support groups” no one else, period, protection comes in many guises. In times of national disasters, how the bureaucratic machines roll back the “paper work” for the good of the nation and more importantly its citizen is clear to all. They don’t care about their citizens, they only care about the economy and their pockets and control of such via their “groups”. Japan is not alone in its inability accept helps when it cannot control events the way it wishes.

    Reply
  • jjobseeker says:

    Debito! Welcome back. I had computer problems of my own and am now just catching up here. This is a fantastic read. Thanks for sharing. I often have a tough time debating with some Japanese friends as I don’t have specific details (you know some people need “details”) and this piece gives me the historical foundation upon which to base my opinions and arguments–the main gist is about prevention and proaction. Had Japanese learned their lessons from the LDP dominated past, perhaps things might have gone better this time around. PM Kan has done the best he can considering Japan Inc. obviously never had this kind of situation in mind when writing their “manuals.” The real proof of his administration’s effectiveness is how it sets up the methods, means, and philosophy for preventing this from happening in the future.

    Reply
  • jjobseeker says:

    Don’t know if this can qualify, but here’s an article from the Mainichi today. Folks, remind your Japanese family, friends, co-workers how all this could’ve been prevented or at least perhaps been better prepared for had the old LDP government not been in bed with TEPCO and other power companies since long before. They’re trying to stop PM Kan from breaking their nice retirement nest eggs and the like. Make sure they know who should’ve done something about this BEFORE March 11th.

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    Gov’t cracks down on flow of retired bureaucrats to power company jobs
    (Mainichi Japan) April 19, 2011
    http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/national/news/20110419p2a00m0na012000c.html

    TEPCO President Masataka Shimizu bows to Prime Minister Naoto Kan after a House of Councillors Budget Committee meeting in Tokyo on April 18. (Mainichi)
    As the crisis at a Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture continues to rage, the government is taking a new and harder look at the flow of retiring ministry officials to senior positions at the country’s electric companies.

    The first casualty in the new battle against electrical utility “amakudari” — the Japanese term for retiring senior bureaucrats moving into private sector jobs related to their old positions — is TEPCO advisor Toru Ishida, a former official with the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (predecessor to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry), who recently announced his resignation.

    The announcement came in the wake of an order from Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano to the industry ministry to crack down on “re-employment” of officials with major electric firms, prompted by analysis of the Fukushima nuclear accident that placed blame on the “collusive relationship between government and the private sector” for worsening the crisis.

    The first industry ministry official to take a high-ranking job at TEPCO was Takeo Ishihara, a former vice minister who joined the utility as a director in 1962, going on to successive posts including vice president. He was followed by Makoto Masuda, former head of the Agency of Natural Resources and Energy, and Hiroshi Kawasaki and Susumu Shirakawa, both former assistant directors of the energy agency, and one of TEPCO’s six vice president positions is now apparently reserved for former ministry bureaucrats.

    This string of amakudari appointments in the energy sector is not limited to TEPCO, as a total of 45 former industry ministry officials have sat on the boards of Japan’s 10 big power companies, according to materials presented by House of Representatives lawmaker Tetsuya Shiokawa to the Lower House Cabinet Committee. The appointments are apparently made in the expectation that former bureaucrats will be able to influence energy policy.

    Power companies are a highly regulated sector of the economy, with the government’s energy agency and Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) playing a direct role in the formulation of nuclear safety rules and establishing electricity charges. Since the late 1990s, power companies have been anxious about the liberalization of the electricity market, allowing smaller players to shoe in on their businesses, and have strengthened their role in the formulation of energy policy through participation in government committees and the like.

    However, even if the government clamps down on amakudari between the industry ministry and power companies, this is unlikely to solve the “collusion” problem.

    As of December 2009, the ministry oversaw a total of 785 public service corporations — often the first stop for retiring bureaucrats on the amakudari trail. Among these, there are several cases of industry ministry officials moving into top jobs at corporations covered by the energy agency or NISA — corporations which collect funds from the power industry as “membership fees.” In government circles, too, this situation has attracted criticism as a “hotbed” of regulatory body-industry collusion.
    ENDS

    東京電力:石田顧問辞任へ 天下り、なれ合い半世紀 「原発安全規制に緩み」
    毎日新聞 2011年4月19日 東京朝刊
    http://mainichi.jp/select/seiji/news/20110419ddm005020004000c.html

     福島第1原発事故を契機に去就が注目されていた経済産業省OBの石田徹氏が、東京電力顧問を辞任する。「官民の癒着が事故を悪化させた」との批判を受け、枝野幸男官房長官が経産省幹部の電力大手などへの再就職自粛を指示したためだ。政府は、旧通商産業省時代から半世紀近く続いてきた東電への天下りを厳しく監視し、安全規制体制への不信感を払拭(ふっしょく)する考えだ。

     東電による経産省OBの天下り受け入れは、旧通産省時代の62年、石原武夫・元次官が取締役に就任し、副社長などを歴任したのが始まりだ。その後も、増田実・元資源エネルギー庁長官、川崎弘・元エネ庁次長、白川進・元エネ庁次長とほとんど切れ目なく天下り組が就任し、現在は6人の副社長ポストのうち1人は経産省OBの指定席とされている。

     経産省OBの受け入れは他の電力会社も同様だ。塩川鉄也衆院議員(共産党)が衆院内閣委員会に提出した資料によると、電力大手10社に取締役として天下った同省OBは累計で45人に上る。

     電力会社が天下りを受け入れるのは、エネルギー政策への影響力を期待するためだ。電力会社は官庁の規制を強く受け、原発の安全規制や電気料金改定まで、エネ庁や原子力安全・保安院の政策に経営が左右される。90年代後半以降は電力自由化の制度設計が焦点となり、電力会社は政府の審議会などを通じて政策への関与を強めた。今回の事故でも「官民のなれ合いが安全規制の緩みにつながった」(野党幹部)との見方が強い。

     ただ、電力会社への天下り規制を強化するだけでは、なれ合いの構図は消えない。

     同省は09年12月現在、計785の公益法人(財団、社団法人)を所管するが、原子力安全・保安院とエネ庁の所管法人の中には、経産省OBや東電出身者らが理事や監事などで在籍し、業界から会費などの名目で資金を集めて天下りの受け皿になっているケースも少なくない。

     政府内には「公益法人が癒着の温床となっている実態にも切り込む必要がある」との指摘もある。【三沢耕平】

     ◇民主政権、無策浮き彫り

     民主党政権が踏み切った経産省幹部による電力会社各社への再就職自粛は、自公政権下での「退職前5年間の職務と関係の深い業界への再就職は2年間禁止する」措置の復活といえる。「天下り根絶」をうたった民主党政権は、実効性のある対策を全くとれていないのが現状。批判を受けて対策を急ぐ泥縄的対応に追われている。

     枝野氏は官僚の再就職に関し「省庁のあっせんがなければ天下りに該当しない」との立場だった。しかし、18日の記者会見では「原子力という関心の深い問題で強い疑義が持たれた。(再就職が)法律上問題ないとしても、法に反しない範囲でやれる対応をする」と方針転換した。

     官僚OBの天下りは野放し状態となっている。自公政権の再就職禁止措置は、07年成立の改正国家公務員法で「再就職等監視委員会」の設置に伴い廃止。しかし、民主党が委員人事に同意せず、監視委が休眠し、機能していないからだ。

     枝野氏は「法改正が良かったかを含め、抜本的な検証が必要だ」と述べ、所管業界への再就職自体を規制する考えを示唆。一方、他業界への天下りに関しては「国民とともにある企業や業界なら独自で判断するだろう」と述べ、当面は各業界の自主性に委ねる考えを示した。【吉永康朗】
    ENDS

    Reply
  • What Kan should also do is expose the cover ups because of these amakudari arrangements and arward compensation to the victims, real proper compensation.

    Such the 5 deaths in 2004 at the KEPCO 826 MW PWR, after steam pipe reptured, 11 workers badly burnt and 5 died. Since, afterwards, it was shown that this pipe was not inspect EVER in the 28 years of service! So much for quality and safety!

    Or TEPCO, had to “admit” to falsifying cooling-water data on nearly 200 occasions from 1977 to 2002. But this was only admitted in 2007 when “compulsory” Govt inspection were introduced.

    When you have this “level” of corruption it requires serious root and branch changes. Otherwise is shall happen again, not “if’s” or “buts”, but it WILL.

    Without such serious changes, there shall be ZERO, yup, ZERO confidence in the whole nuclear industry here. In requires international independent monitoring to gain any real acceptability. But the same is of course true throughout Japan and it patronage culture and amakudari style within its industry.

    Sources please.

    Reply

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