Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival Page 35
Most strikingly, popular opinion turned sharply against nuclear power. Opinion polls, though erratic, showed that at least half of people were in favour of the eventual elimination of nuclear power altogether, with just a quarter saying it should remain.35 Anti-nuclear sentiment was slow-burning. In the first months after the Fukushima disaster, it was noticeable that protests halfway round the world in Germany had been much bigger than those in Japan. But as time went on, the numbers of anti-nuclear protesters began to swell. By the summer of 2012, regular demonstrations outside the prime minister’s office attracted tens of thousands of people.36 In July, Kenzaburo Oe, a Nobel laureate who had written about the after-effects of the nuclear bomb in his essay Hiroshima Notes, gave an anti-nuclear address. The crowd in Yoyogi Park was the biggest since mass protests in 1960 against the renewal of the US–Japan Security Treaty. Organizers claimed 170,000 people came to the ‘Sayonara Nukes’ protest and even police conceded that 75,000 people had attended.37 NHK, the official broadcaster, still ready to ply the official line, barely covered an event within walking distance of its headquarters.38
Crowds were motivated by fear of radiation as well as by outrage at the arrogance and incompetence behind the disaster. Anger had also been stoked by a cynical display that showed the ‘nuclear village’ had lost none of its deceitfulness. In an effort to restart a nuclear plant in Kyushu, the local operator had sought to rig ‘town-hall meetings’ by flooding them with pro-nuclear messages from seemingly ordinary members of the public. When the subterfuge was discovered, the public outcry ensured the plant remained shut down indefinitely. Although some communities around nuclear plants had become addicted to subsidies, local sentiment swung against the industry. That was especially true in towns and villages that were near a plant, but too far away to benefit from state transfers. Local politicians began to tap into the anti-nuclear sentiment, making it harder for the central government to orchestrate the firing up of idle plants. ‘I’m not buying this claim that we have to have nuclear power because there’s not enough electricity,’ said Toru Hashimoto, the populist Osaka mayor. ‘There’s generally more than enough.’39
Naoto Kan, the prime minister who had contemplated evacuating 30 million people from Tokyo – an act that would have ‘come to within one inch of the end of this nation’ – led the anti-nuclear charge.40 As 2011 wore on, sensing the end of his own premiership, he decided to take the nuclear industry down with him. He launched a wholesale review of national energy policy that opened the possibility of abandoning nuclear power altogether. It was clear where Kan stood. ‘Our nation should aim to become a society that can manage without nuclear power,’ he said. Kan ordered a series of ‘stress tests’ designed to ascertain whether nuclear reactors could survive extreme situations. Tepco was nationalized. Plans were set in motion to abolish the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, the regulator that had been found so badly wanting. The new regulator would be prised away from the pro-nuclear trade ministry, and housed instead in the ministry of environment. There was talk of ending the power industry’s stranglehold on generation and transmission, a monopolistic set-up that had allowed it to charge some of the steepest electricity prices in the world. Kan’s anti-nuclear fervour outlasted him. In September 2012, against the opposition of industry, the government adopted the formal policy of phasing out all nuclear power by 2040.
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Driving much of the debate was fear of radiation. The Japanese, victims of two nuclear bombs, harboured a special loathing for its invisible dread. The Godzilla films, which started in the 1950s, were a depiction of the monstrous power let loose by nuclear explosions. After the crisis at Fukushima, which hurled radiation into the atmosphere and pumped it into the oceans, the public quickly learned a whole new radioactive nomenclature of millisieverts, Becquerels and caesium. Bottled water disappeared virtually overnight from supermarkets after the government announced that levels of iodine-131, a radioisotope, in Tokyo’s water supply was double the recommended limit for infants. In April, small fish, called sand lance, caught in waters south of Fukushima, were discovered to contain 526 Becquerels of caesium per kilogramme, above the legal limit of 500. In subsequent months many varieties of fish, vegetables and rice were found with higher than normal levels of radiation. Cows from ranches around Japan had been fed with rice straw from contaminated areas, leading to a panic about beef. Even two minke whales caught off the coast of Hokkaido showed traces of radioactive caesium, though fisheries officials pronounced them safe to eat.41 The government warned parents not to feed milk from contaminated areas to young infants. When, fifteen months later, a seventy-foot dock from Japan washed up in Oregon it too was tested for radiation. It was part of more than 1 million tonnes of debris expected to float to America’s Pacific coast.
About eighteen months after the accident, scientists from the Ryukyus University in Okinawa discovered that butterflies around Fukushima had become mutated with dented eyes and stunted wings. Another study, however, released at around the same time showed that the levels of radiation in humans living around Fukushima were extremely low.42 Inundated with such contradictory information, people had little idea about what was safe and what was not, or what reasonable precautions they should take. Some meticulously avoided buying fish, vegetables or meat from anywhere near Fukushima. Others took precisely the opposite approach, purchasing only from those areas as a show of solidarity with struggling farmers.
In trying to gauge the possible long-term health effects of Fukushima the only real comparison was with Chernobyl. Since the accident at the Ukrainian plant a quarter of a century ago, some 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer, almost exclusively in children under sixteen, had been discovered. So far, only around twenty cases are thought to have been fatal. A study by researchers from Stanford University concluded that additional cases of cancer as a result of the Fukushima accident could be as low as fifteen or as high as 1,300. Its best guess was 130 deaths.43 Some scientists, however, argued that, far from seeking to cover up the real dangers of radiation, Japanese authorities actually over-reacted, exacerbating the situation by sowing panic. Robert Gale, a haematologist and a veteran of Chernobyl, went so far as to suggest that, given what he insisted were relatively low levels of contamination from Fukushima, the fear of radiation might be worse than the radiation itself.44 As many as 600 deaths of elderly patients, for example, were designated as ‘disaster related’, a consequence of hurried evacuation from the Fukushima area.45 Shunichi Yamashita of the Fukushima Medical University also suggested low-level exposure to radiation posed little health risk. He became a hate figure. Internet commentators compared Yamashita to the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele. In truth, Yamashita, whose own mother had survived the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, was taking a brave stand by sticking to what the data were telling him.46
There was also great anger at revelations that some evacuees may have actually been sent into high-radiation zones because the government had not revealed information about changing wind patterns. Officials were slow to release information about ‘hot spot’ areas such as Iitate, which was not evacuated for more than two months after the triple meltdown at Fukushima. Some hot spots were discovered as far away as Tokyo, on the edge of school baseball fields or in piles of composted leaves. Polls in the months after the accident showed that up to four-fifths of Japanese mistrusted the information on radiation that the government was providing. A common accusation was that the authorities were seeking to play down contamination risks because of the massive compensation payments that might ensue. News programmes took to broadcasting live radiation maps like weather reports.
Public anger at the lack of credible information occasionally bubbled over, challenging the common notion that the Japanese were passive and apolitical. If they felt wronged, they could also be obstinate and pugnacious. A few months after the disaster, a group of protesters travelled from Fukushima to Tokyo, where they rallied outside the ministry of education
and technology. Their anger had been roused by fear for their children. The local authority had decided, arbitrarily in the protesters’ view, to raise the radiation limit at which schools in Fukushima were considered safe to open. After the noisy demonstration in which parents held up placards and shouted slogans, the ministry backed down, reversing radiation limits to their previously lower levels.47
When one reporter working for a foreign newspaper went to Fukushima to report on radiation levels in schools, she was handed a letter by Tomoko Hatsuzawa, a mother of two. Addressed to ‘people in the United States and around the world,’ it started:
I am so sorry for the uranium and plutonium that Japan has released into the environment. The fallout from Fukushima has already circled the world many times, reaching Hawaii, Alaska, and even New York. We live 60 kilometers from the plant and our homes have been contaminated beyond levels seen at Chernobyl. The cesium-137 they are finding in the soil will be here for 30 years. But the government will not help us. They tell us to stay put. They tell our kids to put on masks and hats and keep going to school.
This summer, our children won’t be able to go swimming. They won’t be able to play outside. They can’t eat Fukushima’s delicious peaches. They can’t even eat the rice that the Fukushima farmers are making. They can’t go visit Fukushima’s beautiful rivers, mountains and lakes. This makes me sad. This fills me with so much regret.48
The letter, with its mixture of lyrical regret and protest, concluded by asking foreigners to put pressure on the Japanese government to take action.
Not that Fukushima’s residents couldn’t put pressure on by themselves. In one town hall meeting, the audience harangued government officials sent from Tokyo. ‘Answer the question. Don’t we have rights?’ they shouted from the floor as the bureaucrats mouthed platitudes. When the harried officials eventually concluded the meeting and made for the exit, they were chased down the corridor by townspeople waving bottles of their children’s urine, which they demanded be tested for radiation. The meeting ended in disarray with the mandarins surrounded – one suspects for the first and only time in their careers – by protesters chanting, ‘I implore you take this urine.’49
15
Citizens
The government was not trusted to do the right thing about radiation. But then it was no longer really trusted full stop. The performance of Japan’s leaders after the tsunami only soured the public further on a political system in which it had already lost faith. It reinforced the idea, which had been bubbling under the surface for some time, that Japanese people were more competent and reliable than their leaders and that the answers to many of the country’s problems might best be solved outside the political sphere.
Indeed, there had been little belief in the nation’s leaders for most of the period since the bubble burst in 1990. Since then, the ruling party had mostly persevered with its well-honed brand of money politics absent one key ingredient: money. With fast growth a thing of the past, patronage politics was not as easy as it had once been. Trust in bureaucrats, once regarded as the almost infallible guardians of the economic miracle, had also been badly shaken. Too many had shown themselves to be both dishonest and incompetent, an unappealing combination with which people were rapidly losing patience. There had been a brief resurgence of enthusiasm for government, among some at least, during the five-and-a-half years that Junichiro Koizumi was running the show with his rare brand of aplomb and conviction politics. His supporters felt that he had reinvigorated the country, bringing both political and economic momentum and the promise of radical change. But apart from that interlude – exciting for some, destructive for others – most politicians had come and gone almost unnoticed.
In 2009, however, something radically new had happened. Or at least that’s how it had seemed. After half a century of the Liberal Democrats, the centre-left Democratic Party of Japan, a relatively young political grouping led by Yukio Hatoyama, was elected into office. A harbinger of change had come in a mayoral election that summer in Chiba, a rather unprepossessing suburb of Tokyo, when an opposition candidate won on a deliberately gauche ticket of ‘young, inexperienced in politics, and without money’. In the subsequent general election of August 2009, the Democratic Party benefited from the public’s evident cynicism with politics-as-usual by romping home to victory. True, the vote had been more about kicking out the old Liberal Democratic Party, which had sleepwalked through power ever since Koizumi had left office. There wasn’t necessarily much faith that a new set of politicians could do any better. After all, some of the Democratic Party’s leading members were defectors from the ruling party. Like the party that had governed for so long, the Democratic Party contained a hodgepodge of social conservatives and liberals, fiscal hawks and free-spenders, free-marketeers and socialists, nationalists and internationalists.
There was, therefore, not a great deal of public excitement at what, on the face of it, looked like a dramatic political shift. On the night of the election, one foreign television crew was dispatched to the streets of Tokyo to film the celebrations that must surely accompany the end of a half-century of political hegemony. They came back empty-handed: no crowds massed outside the party headquarters, no car horns blared, no fountain was splashed in. Noriko Hama of Doshisha University said the electorate had voted, not out of wide-eyed innocence, but more in the spirit of a calculated gamble. Another friend, remembering the genuine excitement that had led to the election of Barack Obama as US president in 2008, said the Japanese people had opted for ‘change they don’t believe in and a leader they are not all that crazy about’.
Still, on the surface, the Democratic Party did hold out the promise of something new. It had long modelled itself on Britain’s New Labour and had several years before started issuing detailed manifestoes outlining its political creed, a departure in a country where voting had traditionally tended to be more about personal connections than policy preferences. Hatoyama, known as the ‘alien’ for his slightly otherworldly demeanour, almost looked surprised to be leading the country. Such was his lack of triumphalism that, if you had watched his election night victory speech with the sound on mute, you might have thought he had lost. Yet his government had an ambitious agenda. Hatoyama said he wanted to bring policymaking into the public sphere as Koizumi had sought to do, by taming the faceless bureaucrats who had pulled the levers from behind the scenes for so long. His party would rid Japan of the sleazy money-politics that had dominated for decades, initiating instead an era of competent, technocratic rule. It would promote family-friendly policies, and he promised to double child allowance to Y26,000 a month, around $300 at the time, to help boost household spending and reverse the declining birth rate. It would tilt the balance in favour of the consumer and away from big business, particularly the mammoth exporters around which the economy had revolved for decades. It would seek to mend ties with Asian neighbours and develop a foreign policy that went beyond being America’s poodle in the Pacific.
Some political analysts thought that, even if the new government faltered, its victory could perhaps be the start of a healthier two-party system. As in western democracies, the hope was that the electorate would get to choose between competing ideologies. No longer would there be a single party whose rival factions hammered out policy and divvied up the jobs behind closed doors. Rather, there would be two parties that set out clearly defined, alternative visions, allowing voters to choose between, say, a Japan with higher taxes and more social welfare, or one with a leaner state and more room for the free market. It is too early to tell whether the 2009 election marked the beginning of such a two-party system. Both main parties remained ideologically ill defined. Gerald Curtis of Columbia University considered Japan was ill suited to a US type of politics where people tended to pin their allegiance to a political colour. ‘Japanese society isn’t divided. There aren’t fundamental differences or deep cleavages like race or religion,’ he said. ‘In a sense t
he difference is, “Do you want to buy a Nissan or a Toyota?”’1 It was hard to sustain a politics of strong ideological conviction in such an environment.
We can, though, already make a judgement about the Democratic Party’s three ensuing years in office. They were a missed opportunity. The public had voted for a new style of politics. What it got was more revolving-door prime ministers and half-implemented policies. (The Democrats, for example, had to water down their child allowance pledge when the economy contracted sharply after the Lehman shock.) As we saw, Hatoyama lasted barely nine months, brought down largely because of his failure to make good his promise on Okinawan bases. His successor, Naoto Kan, a former patent lawyer, fared no better. It was his misfortune to have been in office on 11 March when the earthquake and tsunami struck, although his government was already on the ropes by then. Kan’s administration initially won some praise for quickly dispatching 100,000 Self Defence Forces to help the rescue operation, but as the Fukushima nuclear disaster unfolded, trust in his administration evaporated as rapidly as water from the pools containing spent nuclear rods. Kan was blamed for poor communication and, perhaps unfairly given the incompetence of Tepco, for mishandling relations between the cabinet and the plant operator. Later there were complaints that the government was too slow to build temporary housing, though it had managed to put up 27,200 units within ten weeks of the disaster.2 More broadly, the public couldn’t understand government infighting at a time of national emergency. In June 2011, when 100,000 people were still stranded at evacuation centres and before the critical situation at Fukushima had been brought properly under control, parliamentarians occupied themselves with preparing a vote of no confidence against Kan. The inability of the political class to rally during a national crisis was symbolized just a few days after the tsunami when Sadakazu Tanigaki, the opposition leader, rejected an offer to join an emergency cabinet as deputy prime minister.3