Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival Page 34
The nuclear industry also had deeply suspect labour policies, making it a microcosm of the two-tiered labour market that had taken hold since the bubble burst. Much of the dangerous work was done by contract workers, paid less and exposed to higher levels of radiation than regular employees. In the case of Fukushima Daiichi, nearly 90 per cent of workers in the year to March 2010 were employed by contractors, subcontractors and sub-subcontractors. The ‘nuclear gypsies’, who roamed from plant to plant, were brought in to clean up radiation during regular maintenance shutdowns. Often they used nothing more sophisticated than mops and rags. They were drawn from the ranks of underemployed construction workers, local farmers, itinerant labourers and homeless people, some of them hired by yakuza gangsters.14 Even after the meltdown, Tepco continued to employ hundreds of contract workers. Day labourers were lured back with offers of up to $1,000 day. Two subcontracted workers were hospitalized after stepping in radioactive water. Many others were exposed to far higher doses of radiation than normally permissible. Katsunobu Onda, author of Tepco: The Dark Empire, claimed that over the years, tens of thousands of contract workers had received unsafe levels of radiation.15
So pervasive was the ‘safety myth’ that many nuclear plant operators never broached the subject of evacuation with local residents living in the shadow of power stations. To do so would have meant admitting the possibility of an accident. Journalists who wrote about radiation leaks were ridiculed for not understanding the science. After an earthquake in Niigata in 2006, a giant plume of black smoke rose out of the Kashiwazaki nuclear complex. (Firemen couldn’t put out the blaze because – surprise, surprise – water pipes had been ruptured by the earthquake.) But journalists were told not to be alarmist. People living around the plant would apparently be exposed to one-millionth of the radiation experienced during a round-trip flight from Tokyo to New York. Like the owners of the Titanic who did not install sufficient lifeboats because they believed the ship could never sink, the operators of Fukushima did not have enough buses on hand to evacuate staff at the time of the tsunami. Regulators, concluded Kurokawa’s inquiry, had been ‘captured’. Far from pushing operators to improve safety, they helped them skirt the rules.
Evidence that nuclear regulation was a sham had been hidden in plain sight for years. A series of accidents and cover-ups demonstrated clearly that the industry habitually took short cuts and then lied about it. In 1995, there was a cover-up over the extent of an accident in the Monju fast-breeder reactor. Four years later, two poorly trained workers at the Tokaimura reactor died of organ failure due to acute radiation sickness after mixing uranium in buckets. In 2002, Tepco admitted that it had been faking safety data relating to cracks in its nuclear plants for two decades. The subsequent regulatory ‘crackdown’, rather than punishing Tepco, seemed more intent on helping it extend the use of ageing plants. At the time of the accident, Fukushima had been running for forty years. One investigative reporter described the ageing and worn-out network of pipes inside the plant as being like ‘the veins of a monster’ waiting to burst.16 In 2004, four workers were killed and seven injured at a plant in Mihama when superheated steam gushed out of a broken pipe. In July 2007, an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale jolted the enormous Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear complex, the biggest in the world. It was later revealed that the plant had not been built to withstand anything like that magnitude of quake. To make matters worse, it may have inadvertently been built directly on top of an active faultline.
It should have come as little surprise, then, that the response to the emergency at Fukushima also lacked transparency. Tepco consistently denied there had been a meltdown and industry sympathizers blamed the foreign media for reckless scaremongering when they used the ‘M’ word. But there had been a meltdown. Tepco later admitted that fuel rods in three reactors had melted into little clumps of uranium, a meltdown even under the narrowest of definitions. Tapes reveal officials had been fully aware of the possibility just days into the disaster. An announcement over loudspeakers stated, ‘The fuel has been exposed for some time now, so there is a possibility of a meltdown. Repeat, there is a possibility of a fuel meltdown.’17 Tepco also prevaricated about injecting seawater into the reactors, possibly because to do so would mean scrapping billions of dollars of equipment for good. Masao Yoshida, the plant operator, bravely took matters into his own hands by injecting seawater anyway. Not everyone was so decisive. In the days after the accident, Masataka Shimizu, Tepco’s president, disappeared for days. He was hiding in his office while the catastrophe unfolded.
The most interesting part of the voluminous parliamentary report came on its first page. In his ‘Message from the Chairman’, Kurokawa blamed the disaster not on particular individuals – although the report made clear some people had been terribly at fault – but rather on Japan’s entire culture. ‘This was a disaster “Made in Japan”,’ he said. ‘Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to “sticking with the programme”; our groupism and our insularity.’
Kurokawa’s list of supposed ‘cultural faults’ was a sort of anti-Nihonjinron, the study of ‘Japanese essence’ whose treatises still have dedicated sections in some bookstores. While most Nihonjinron authors made a fetish of what they claimed were the country’s uniquely superior traits – the elevation of the group above the individual, of feeling above logic and of tacit understanding above spoken words – Kurokawa turned the discipline on its head. The national characteristics of which the Japanese were so proud, he suggested, were in fact fatal flaws. ‘Had other Japanese been in the shoes of those who bear responsibility for this accident, the result may well have been the same,’ he concluded. That was because the ‘mindset’ that supported the catastrophic decisions around Fukushima ‘can be found across Japan’.
Kurokawa’s sweeping cultural pronouncement invited obvious rejoinders. One was that, by blaming society as a whole, he had cleverly let individuals off the hook. If one were minded, one could even draw parallels with the collective assessment of Japan’s wartime responsibility: everybody was guilty, and no one was guilty. Gerry Curtis, an expert on Japan at Columbia University, was one of many to take exception to Kurokawa’s conclusions. ‘One searches in vain through these pages for anyone to blame,’ he wrote in a stinging editorial.18 ‘To pin the blame on culture is the ultimate cop-out.’ Individuals matter, Curtis said. Tepco’s president had made the situation worse by being hopelessly uncommunicative. Yoshida, the heroic plant manager who had defied orders by flooding the reactors with seawater, possibly saved the day. He was anything but a yes-man blindly following orders in the interests of groupism or ‘sticking with the programme’. The culture of collusion inside the ‘nuclear village’ was hardly unique to Japan, Curtis continued. Hadn’t there been pretty much the same collusion in the US between bankers and their regulators, who turned a blind eye as some of the country’s biggest financial institutions led the nation towards the brink of financial ruin? If Japanese culture put the interests of the organization above the interests of the public, Curtis concluded, ‘then we are all Japanese’.
If one takes the view that culture is immutable, Kurokawa’s cultural explanations were, indeed, next to useless. To view culture as fixed and unchangeable borders on geographical and racial determinism. But Kurokawa may have been trying to say something quite different. Few who have lived in Japan would deny they recognize some of the national traits he identified – a tendency to look inwards, to defer to authority, to play down the importance of the individual. No serious observer of Japan, however, would pretend this was the whole story. In a thousand ways, Japanese people, individually and collectively, are constantly challenging and subverting such norms. The characteristics Kurokawa outlined, then, were not so much a description of ‘culture’. They were a critique of Japan’s post-war institutions and norms. If that is what he meant by
culture, the implication was that it could be changed.
Kurokawa said the same organizational features that helped Japan engineer its post-war miracle had become the worst traits of the ‘nuclear village’. Elite bureaucratic planning, corralling state funds into favoured projects and limited consultation with the electorate had all been elements of post-war success. But they contained the seeds of catastrophe. The guardians of the country’s nuclear industry felt as though they were on a national mission to ramp up nuclear power at any cost. That made them ‘an unstoppable force, immune to scrutiny by civil society’, Kurokawa wrote. Such accepted norms could and should be questioned, he implied. That was the very opposite of cultural determinism. ‘We should reflect on our responsibility as individuals in a democratic society,’ he said of the collective failure at Fukushima. That meant strengthening what he called ‘civil society’. Viewed in this light, Kurokawa’s remarks were not a case of letting people off the hook. They were a call to individual and collective action.
• • •
Before the tsunami, Japan had been one of the most nuclear-dependent economies on earth. After the tsunami, everything was different. By May 2012, fourteen months after the triple meltdown, not a single nuclear plant was left operating. For a few months, until one plant at Oi in western Japan juddered back to life, the country was entirely nuclear-free for the first time in half a century. The first thing to note about this dramatic shift in energy policy is this: the lights stayed on. Japan did not shut up shop. From the first months after the tsunami knocked out substantial amounts of nuclear power, Japan learned to live with less electricity. Car manufacturers staggered production across a seven-day week so they did not all suck power from the grid at the same time. Toyota made cars from Wednesday to Sunday. In the cities, offices set air-conditioner thermostats at higher temperatures. Buildings closed earlier, depriving salarymen of hours of late-night overtime. In the summer of 2011, even press conferences at Tepco, one of the world’s largest power generators, took place with the lights off and the windows open to let in the breeze. Whenever a bullet train thundered along the nearby elevated track, the sound drowned out much of what was being said.19 By that stage, few people were listening to Tepco anyway.
For many Japanese, saving energy became fashionable. There was widespread questioning of the nation’s previous addiction to its super-electrified existence. Tokyo’s ranks of brightly lit vending machines were dimmed, by order of the governor, to a modest glow. Even the emperor and empress, according to palace spokesmen, were doing their bit by using candlelight at night.20 Conservation had an immediate impact. In the summer of 2011, even with temperatures rising past ninety degrees, peak electricity usage fell by almost a quarter from the previous summer. Some thought the costs to Japan were too high. ‘Everywhere living standards have degraded,’ complained Yukio Okamoto, a former career diplomat, sweat pouring down his face in his stuffy office. Just as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 had marked a turning point in US history, he said, so Japan would never be the same after 3/11. ‘The shortage of electricity will become a trait of civil and industrial society.’21 Okamoto wasn’t just talking about personal discomfort. Like many, he feared that unstable electricity supply and higher prices could be the final straw for Japanese industry.22 Companies were, he said, already battling against a disastrously strong yen, high corporate taxes, unrealistic carbon emissions targets and inflexible labour laws. Japanese manufacturers were being destroyed by Korean rivals that benefited from a cheap currency and tariff-free access to foreign markets thanks to free trade agreements that protectionist Japan had been unable to sign. If you added higher electricity prices to the mix, he wondered how on earth Japanese manufacturers would survive at all.
There were other costs. Conserving energy could achieve only so much. To compensate for the loss of nuclear power, Japan had to import more oil and liquefied natural gas. That pushed up CO2 emissions. The swelling energy bill also zapped Japan’s trade surplus, pushing the country into deficit for the first time in three decades.23 Although Japan still had a current account surplus, thanks to financial returns on its huge investments abroad, many worried that a permanently higher energy bill could endanger even that. If the country were to move sharply into deficit, economists questioned its ability to maintain its astronomical public debt. Yoshito Sengoku, a senior politician, had no doubt about what it would mean for Japan. He compared abandoning nuclear power to ‘group suicide’.24
Many industrialists agreed. They said replacing nuclear power with renewable energy was a fantasy. ‘Can we close down nuclear power? My answer is no,’ said Minoru Makihara, former chairman of Mitsubishi Corporation. ‘Somewhere in the mix, nuclear power has to come into play.’25 Nobuyuki Idei, who once ran Sony, was of similar mind. ‘Nuclear power is one of the most important technologies for the future,’ he said. ‘We shouldn’t give it up.’26 Even Kazuo Inamori, legendary founder of a company that pioneered the Japanese manufacture of solar panels, thought alternative energy was too unstable. Until ways were found of storing vast amounts of energy collected when the sun was shining or the wind was blowing, he said, Japan would be foolish to ditch nuclear power.27
Advocates argued that nuclear power was not only cleaner and more stable, it was also cheaper. Before the tsunami, nuclear power was said to cost Y5–7 a kilowatt hour against Y11 for wind power, Y12–20 for geothermal and Y47 for solar. After the tsunami, critics of nuclear power took a harder look at the numbers. The supposed cost of nuclear generation, they said, didn’t take into account the hidden costs, such as the subsidies – little more than bribes – paid to local communities where nuclear plants were built, or the cost of disposing of spent fuel. Even leaving aside the billions of dollars that would be needed to clean up after Fukushima, Kenichi Oshima, an energy specialist at Ritsumeikan University, calculated that nuclear energy actually cost Y12.23/kWh. That made it more expensive than either thermal power or hydropower.28 No less a figure than Jeff Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, one of the pioneers of civil nuclear power and the company that helped build the Fukushima Daiichi plant, argued that the economics of nuclear power were crumbling. Discovery of huge amounts of shale gas in the US and elsewhere had turned energy costs upside down, making electricity produced from gas-fired power stations much cheaper. That was happening just as, in the aftermath of Fukushima, demands for higher safety standards would inevitably raise the cost of nuclear power. ‘They’re finding more gas all the time. It’s just hard to justify nuclear,’ Immelt said. ‘Gas is so cheap and at some point, really, economics rule.’ In the future, he said, ‘some combination of gas, and either wind or solar . . . that’s where most countries around the world are going’.29
Taro Kono, one of the few Liberal Democrat MPs who had been a long-time opponent of nuclear power, argued the ‘nuclear village’ deliberately stunted the development of renewable energy. In 2000, he said, supporters of nuclear power stymied a bill to introduce a ‘feed-in tariff’ that would have guaranteed a competitive price to alternative-energy producers. It took the Fukushima disaster to persuade the government to set a generous feed-in tariff, obliging electricity companies to buy unlimited quantities of renewable energy from independent generators.30
About 8–9 per cent of Japan’s electricity comes from renewable sources, most of it from hydro, with only about 1 per cent from wind and solar. That compares with about 25 per cent in Germany, which has incentivized renewable energy much more aggressively. In theory, a feed-in tariff could change Japan’s incentives too, though advocates of renewable power said the new law was too narrow in scope. Kono, speaking from his dimly lit, energy-saving office, said Japan had the world’s third-highest geothermal potential and its sixth-largest tract of ocean, a boon for offshore wind power. Once a pioneer in solar power, he fumed, Japan had almost deliberately thrown away its lead.
Masayoshi Son, the founder of telecommunications company Softbank and one of Japan’s bol
dest entrepreneurs, quickly threw his weight behind renewable energy. His company said it would build at least ten large-scale solar-power plants to form an ‘Eastern Japan Solar Belt’. Son reckoned that, if he could persuade regulators to make a fifth of unused farmland available for solar-power stations, he could generate as much power as Tepco itself.31 ‘We are going to spread natural energy throughout Japan,’ he told an audience at the launch in Kyoto of his first solar project, which duly opened in July 2012.32 Son hoped he could galvanize others to act. Even Lawson, a convenience store operator with no experience of electricity generation, said it would install solar power in 2,000 of its outlets. It would sell spare capacity to the grid.33 The new mood was captured by Hiroshi Mikitani, the internet entrepreneur, who registered his anti-nuclear credentials by resigning from Keidanren, the powerful business lobby. Explaining his decision to quit – his resignation was sent out on Twitter, no less – Mikitani said Keidanren was blindly pro-nuclear. His own company Rakuten, an online shopping mall, had been able to cut electricity usage by 35 per cent through simple measures, he said. He was sceptical about the dire warnings that the country could not survive without nuclear energy.34