Dogs and Demons - Керр Алекс - Страница 30
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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 Kaizen, «improvement,» a form of corporate culture in which employers encourage their workers to submit ideas that will polish and improve efficiency. The writers on Kaizen, however, overlooked one weakness in this approach, which seemed minor at the time but has seriously impacted Japan's technology. Kaizen' s emphasis is entirely on positive recommendations; there is no mechanism to deal with negative criticism, no way to disclose faults or mistakes – and this leads to a fundamental problem of information. People keep silent about embarrassing errors, with the result that problems are never solved. Kato Hisatake, professor of ethics at Kyoto University, argues that the Tokai fission disaster came about because although people knew for years that the wrong procedures were being followed nobody said a word. In the United States, he said, "in the case of the Three-Mile Island accident, whistle-blowing helped prevent a far worse disaster."
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 Kaizen still looks bright and shiny but inside, an accretion of bad information is gumming up the works.
On February 17, 1996, the Mainichi Daily News ran an article headlined «DA [Defense Agency] chief richest among Cabinet ministers,» and then listed his and other ministers' assets. However, they were not valued at actual market prices, ministers are not culpable if they give false reports, and the assets did not include business interests. In other words, the official numbers had near-zero credibility – yet the newspaper diligently computed rankings and averages for the group, and publishes similar rankings every year.
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 with sugi monoculture and paying the enormous interest on debts piled up by the Forestry Agency in this ill-fated project. Money spent on solar- and wind-power generation came to only ?90 billion. «The report is not ideal in terms of representing the current state of affairs,» an Environment Agency official admitted. Indeed, the agency's report inflated the true numbers by a factor of 120.
Skewed numbers are endemic in every field, and as we have seen, the discrepancies can be huge. Official estimates of the bad debt crisis went from ?27 trillion in the early 1990s to ?35 trillion in ]996,?60 trillion in 1997, and?77 trillion in 1999 – and even then MOF was far from admitting the true figure, which might he double that amount. The national budget, as solemnly announced every spring by the press, is not all that it seems. There is a «second budget,» called Zaito (or FILP, Fiscal Investment and Loan Program), out of which MOF distributes funds independently of parliamentary control. Zaito, which is almost never reported in the newspapers – indeed, many people have never even heard of it – amounts to as much as 60 percent of the official budget. We shall have more to say about Zaito in chapter 6.
In the case of medical costs, Japan's expenditures appear to be far below those of the United States-but that's because published costs do not include the payments of ?100,000-200,000 that patients customarily hand to their doctors in plain white envelopes when they have surgery. There is no way to calculate how much under-the-table money boosts Japan's national medical bill. Indeed, medicine is a statistical Alice in Wonderland where the numbers verge on comedy As for drug testing, the Ministry of Health and Welfare has never enforced scientific protocols, and payoffs from drug companies to doctors are commonplace, with the result that Japanese medical results have become a laughingstock in world medical journals.
It is no exaggeration to say that no technical or academic field in Japan stands on firm factual ground. In November 2000, Mainichi Shimbun revealed that Fujimura Shinichi, Japan's leading archaeologist, had been caught red-handed burying prehistoric artifacts at an excavation site. He later «discovered» these artifacts and used them as evidence that human habitation in Japan occurred one hundred thousand years earlier than previously thought. Fujimura had worked on 180 sites; the scandal undoes much of the work of prehistoric archaeology in Japan over the last fifteen years. No one knows how the mess can ever be cleaned up.
In short, everywhere you look you find that information i n Japan is not to be trusted. I will admit to a twinge of fear myself, for this book is filled with statistics whose accuracy I cannot gauge.
Sapio magazine calls Japan Joho Sakoku , "a closed country f or information." This blockage-or screening-of information about the rest of the world happens not just because of overt government controls but because of systemic bottlenecks encountered everywhere. News arrives in Japan, and then, like a shipment of bananas held up at port, it rots on the dock. With the exception of a few industrial areas where it is vitally important for Japan to acquire the latest techniques from the West, information rarely makes it into daily life, beyond the television screen or the newspaper headline. This is because for new concepts from abroad to be put into practice, certain prerequisites must be met.
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