{"id":8732,"date":"2011-04-05T04:26:58","date_gmt":"2011-04-04T19:26:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=8732"},"modified":"2011-04-05T04:26:58","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T19:26:58","slug":"the-nation-com-on-tohoku-earthquake-has-shaken-japan-inc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=8732","title":{"rendered":"The Nation.com on Tohoku Earthquake has shaken Japan Inc."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"IN<\/a>
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Hi Blog. \u00a0As Debito.org starts to emerge from vacation mode, I think the focus will be on something very much within this blog’s purview: \u00a0How the events since 3\/11 have affected NJ residents of Japan. \u00a0But 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)<\/a>: \u00a0How the quakes and the aftermath have exposed the flaws of Japan’s corporatist governance. \u00a0Arudou Debito<\/p>\n

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Naoto Kan and the End of ‘Japan Inc.’<\/h2>\n
By\u00a0Tim Shorrock<\/a>,\u00a0Courtesy of TTB<\/div>\n
The Nation.com March 30, 2011<\/strong> |\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0This article appeared in the April 18, 2011 edition of The Nation.<\/a><\/div>\n

http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/159596\/naoto-kan-and-end-japan-inc<\/a><\/p>\n

On March 13, forty-eight hours after Japan\u2019s 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 \u201cthe toughest crisis in Japan\u2019s sixty-five years of postwar history.\u201d Emperor Akihito underscored the gravity of the situation by announcing his \u201cdeep concern\u201d 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 \u201cendure the unendurable.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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But even as Japan was reeling from the disaster\u2019s death toll\u2014which is expected to surpass 20,000\u2014and growing increasingly frightened by the crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Company\u2019s 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\u00a0lies, cover-ups and obfuscation<\/a> dating back to the late 1960s.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s reactors had boiled away, raising radiation in the area to \u201cextremely high levels.\u201d He recommended evacuation to any Americans within fifty miles of the site\u2014nearly double the evacuation zone announced by the Japanese government (which immediately denied Jaczko\u2019s assertions). TheNew York Times piled on<\/a> the next day with a major article that pilloried the Kan government. \u201cNever has postwar Japan needed strong, assertive leadership more\u2014and never has its weak, rudderless system of governing been so clearly exposed,\u201d the reporters declared.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

To be sure, Tokyo\u2019s response to the disaster has been erratic, and the paucity of information about Fukushima was one of the\u00a0first complaints I heard<\/a> 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\u00a0\u00a0Liberal Democratic Party<\/a> (LDP) was swept out of power for the first time in fifty years. The changes, particularly to people who remember the government\u2019s pathetic response to the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, which killed nearly 6,500, have been striking.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Back then, \u201cthe 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,\u201d the Australian historian Gavan McCormack wrote in his seminal 1996 book\u00a0 The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence<\/a>. 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 \u201csniffer\u201d dogs that could have been searching for victims were held for days in airport quarantine. Japan\u2019s bureaucratic response was \u201ccold and more concerned with the preservation of its own control\u201d than with humanitarian relief, McCormack concluded.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Kan, who rose to fame as an opponent of Japan\u2019s turgid bureaucracy, has been far more decisive. After a few days of delay and confusion\u2014not surprising, given the magnitude 9.0 quake, the largest in Japanese history\u2014his 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\u2019s spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, has constantly been on the air, briefing reporters and the public (including on\u00a0\u00a0Twitter<\/a>). Kan himself flew by helicopter to view the stricken reactors and took personal charge of the nuclear crisis.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

As the situation at the reactors deteriorated and Tepco\u2019s explanations became increasingly opaque, Kan quickly lost patience. \u201cWhat the hell is going on?\u201d 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\u2019s Self-Defense Forces. Tepco \u201chas almost no sense of urgency whatsoever,\u201d 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 \u201cWall of Shame\u201d to document the \u201csensationalist, overly speculative, and just plain bad reporting\u201d from foreign journalists.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

*\u00a0*\u00a0*<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2014in the\u00a0Times reporters\u2019 words\u2014\u201cpolitical leaders left much of the nation\u2019s foreign policy to the United States and domestic affairs to powerful bureaucrats.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

That is extremely misleading. Beginning in the early 1950s, the LDP was financed heavily\u00a0by the CIA<\/a> as a bulwark against the once-powerful Japanese left, and successive LDP governments acted as a\u00a0junior partner to the United States<\/a> 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.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u201cJapan Inc.\u201d\u2014an 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\u2014a system known as\u00a0 amakudari<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

But during the \u201990s the LDP-style of governing came crashing down. A key turning point\u2014and the one that brought Naoto Kan to prominence\u2014came in 1996 over a notorious\u00a0scandal over tainted blood<\/a>. The scandal began in the early \u201980s, 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 (\u201cTo have licensed its use before domestic firms had set up production would have significantly affected market share,\u201d the London\u00a0Independent reported at the time). Worse, the ministry\u2019s 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\u00a0amakudari, Green Cross hired several former high-ranking ministry officials in senior positions while the tainted blood was still an issue.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u201cthe most honest man in Japanese politics.\u201d 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.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

But Kan, who became prime minister in June 2010, is also unusual because he isn\u2019t 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\u2019s war \u201cmass murder.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Kan\u2019s 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\u2013party 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\u00a0Futenma<\/a>, 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\u2019s counterproposal to Washington, which involved removing the Marine base from Japan altogether.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

To the Pentagon, however, Hatoyama\u2019s initiative was a nonstarter. As soon as Obama took power, US officials launched a full-court press to dissuade Japan\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014who\u2019d resigned as party leader in 2004\u2014to take his place.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2013Japan relationship were underscored a few days before the Tohoku earthquake when Kevin Maher, head of the State Department\u2019s Japan desk, was quoted in a speech denouncing the people of Okinawa as \u201cmasters of manipulation and extortion\u201d\u2014apparently 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\u2019s Big Brother approach to Japan and symbolizes a bilateral relationship that the lateChalmers Johnson<\/a> 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\u2019re in a whole new ballgame.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

But it\u2019s unclear how Kan and his party will pull through. Just before the quake, Kan\u2019s 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\u2019s budget; there had even been talk of new elections. In a poll published on March 27, however, Kan\u2019s numbers rose to 28 percent, while a hefty 58 percent approved of his government\u2019s handling of the disaster (but the same percentage disapproved of Kan\u2019s handling of the nuclear crisis, and an astonishing 47 percent urged that atomic power plants be immediately abolished).<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u00a0Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923<\/a>, which almost wiped Tokyo off the map. \u201cIf it wasn\u2019t for that earthquake, I wouldn\u2019t be here today,\u201d she told me. \u201cOut of darkness, you know, there\u2019s always hope.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

ENDS<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation.com: But even as Japan was reeling from the disaster\u2019s death toll\u2014which is expected to surpass 20,000\u2014and growing increasingly frightened by the crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Company\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s reactors had boiled away, raising radiation in the area to \u201cextremely high levels.\u201d He recommended evacuation to any Americans within fifty miles of the site\u2014nearly double the evacuation zone announced by the Japanese government (which immediately denied Jaczko\u2019s assertions). TheNew York Times piled on the next day with a major article that pilloried the Kan government. \u201cNever has postwar Japan needed strong, assertive leadership more\u2014and never has its weak, rudderless system of governing been so clearly exposed,\u201d the reporters declared.<\/p>\n

To be sure, Tokyo\u2019s 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\u2019s pathetic response to the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, which killed nearly 6,500, have been striking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,20,26,4,14,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-business-practices","category-history","category-ironies-hypocrisies","category-japanese-government","category-japanese-politics","category-unsustainable-japanese-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}