"Wenn Ich Kultur Höre..."

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, This report from Malcolm Foster of the Associated Press was going so well...

Doctors: Japan nuclear plant workers face stigma
Associated Press

TOKYO – A growing number of Japanese workers who are risking their health to shut down the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant are suffering from depression, anxiety about the future and a loss of motivation, say two doctors who visit them regularly.

But their psychological problems are driven less by fears about developing cancer from radiation exposure and more by something immediate and personal: Discrimination from the very community they tried to protect, says Jun Shigemura, who heads a volunteer team of about ten psychiatrists and psychologists from the National Defense Medical College who meet with Tokyo Electric Power Co. nuclear plant employees.

They tell therapists they have been harangued by residents displaced in Japan's nuclear disaster and threatened with signs on their doors telling them to leave. Some of their children have been taunted at school, and prospective landlords have turned them away.

"They have become targets of people's anger," Shigemura told The Associated Press.

TEPCO workers — in their readily identifiable blue uniforms — were once considered to be among the elite in this rural area 230 kilometers (140 kilometers) north of Tokyo. But after the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami set off meltdowns at the Fukushima plant, residents came to view them as "perpetrators," Shigemura said.

Many TEPCO families in the area now hide their link to the company for fear of criticism, local doctors and psychiatrists say.

Shigemura likens the workers' experience to that of U.S. Vietnam veterans returning home to hostility in the 1960s and early '70s.

"They both worked for (the good of) their countries, but they got a backlash," he said.

(Link)

Wonderful. Sensible. Relevant across national boundaries, showing a commonality of human experience! Excellent contrast with prejudice shown the Hiroshima survivors (today is the anniversary, for those who forget these things).

That members of the public should lash out in frustration against TEPCO workers is understandable. As was the case in the Vietnam protestors' channeling of their frustrations on the blameless Vietnam veterans, the leaders of the organizations responsible for a national, preventable disaster accepted no blame for what had gone seriously wrong on their watches, and the system of representative government, which should have protected to the people and failing that, quickly rectified the problems, instead responded with platitudes and shoddy, dishonest, desultory diddling.

Then, after so much good has been done, someone has to go and shoot the report in the foot:

Culture helps explain some of these dynamics, including the strong Japanese sense of duty and group responsibility.

"People believe the workers share in the responsibility" for the disaster even though they didn't cause it, Tanigawa said.

Ach, ach, ach!

How did one of the co-authors come up with this analysis? Public opinion polling? Interviews with citizens not linked to TEPCO? Post-disaster ethnographies?

Oh, one of the subjects felt as though society was against him (Link). But that is not quite the same thing as society actually being against him, is it?

Can we have some sort of rule here? That when an interviewee from this blessed land cites culture as a reason for a certain outcome, that the questioner ask, immediately, before one more word leaves the interview subject's mouth, "On what data do you base that statement?"

When the interviewee turns out to not have any hard evidence to back up his or her claim, the interviewer should say, "Thanks. I know what you were trying to do. However, it is not helping. Let's stick to what the data says, OK?"

Fukushima Dai'ichi - The Greater Truth Or The Big Lie?

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, As one with a deep and considered faith that former prime minister Kan Naoto led this blessed land through its darkest days of the postwar era with a proper mix of grit, effort and screaming at idiots and liars, Thurday promises to be a very important day:

THE NATIONAL DIET OF JAPAN FUKUSHIMA NUCLEAR ACCIDENT

INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION COMMISSION

TO RELEASE REPORT ON FUKUSHIMA NUCLEAR ACCIDENT

On July 5, Chairman Kiyoshi Kurokawa of The National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC) will deliver its final report to Mr. Takahiro Yokomichi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Mr. Kenji Hirata, President of the House of Councillors

The long-awaited report comes at the end of a six-month investigation into the nuclear accident of March 11, 2011

The Commission, the first of its kind in the history of Japan’s constitutional government, received its mandate from the National Diet to investigate the causes of the accident, the causes of the subsequent damage and the effectiveness of the emergency response.

The Commission was also charged with investigating Japan’s nuclear policies and regulations and to offer recommendations to prevent a similar occurrence.

The Commission held over 900 hours of hearings and interviews with over 1100 people. It was able to use the powers of the legislative body to obtain necessary documents and evidence

The Commission acted on behalf of the Japanese people—independent from any elected member of either House of the Diet, from the restrictions of the government bureaucracy, and from the financial influence of the nuclear power lobby

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

July 5, 2012

Date and Time: July 5, 2012, Thursday, 11:00 start

Venue:

Conference Hall (1F) in the House of Councillors Members Office Building
Address: 2-1-1, Nagata-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo

-11:00-11:10am

Final Commission Meeting confirming the Report (to be broadcasted online with simultaneous English interpretation

Conference Hall (1st floor) House of Councillors Members’ Office Bldg

Open to the public and the press. Attendees must preregister—registration information is available online

-19:00
Press Conference (to be broadcasted online with simultaneous English interpretation

A presentation by the Chairman and all Members of the Commission will be followed by a Q&A session

Conference Hall (1st floor) House of Councillors Members’ Office Bldg

Open to the press only. Attendees must preregister—registration information is available online.

* An English edition of the Executive Summary will be available in a print version and on the website; an English translation of the entire report will be available for downloading at a later date. Past hearings (including those of former Prime Minister Naoto Kan and current METI minister Yukio Edano) and commission meetings can also be viewed in English on our website.

(Source)

A lot of folks, namely the Liberal Democratic Party, the nuclear village and the mass media outlets that reprinted, uncritically, the slanders of their sources inside Tokyo Electric Power and the national bureaucracy, have a lot riding on the report's railroading Kan, the then Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio, other members of the Kan Cabinet and the Democratic Party of Japan's political appointees in government. The committee's lead investigator, corporate mischief maker Nomura Shuya, gave a mendacious and manipulative presentation of what might be the commission's findings on June 9 -- a performance that earned Nomura a veiled rebuke from Dr. Kurokawa in the written review of the meeting.

Dr. Kurokawa will be presenting the findings of his commission in a presumably less fraught environment at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) on Monday, July 9, from from 16:40 to 18:10. Registration for this presentation closes on Friday, July 6. (Link - J)

It is possible that the news media entertainment complex of this blessed land will present the finding of the Comission in a comprehensive, fair and self-critical manner.

Possible, but not likely.

Why Does This Not Shock Me?

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, The Sankei Shimbun, in a bit of title legerdemain, has made it seem as though it has been given an exclusive look inside the Diet commission report on the Tokyo Electric Power's Fukushima Dai'ichi nuclear power plant disaster -- and that the conclusions are damning:

東電の調査報告書案「官邸の介入、無用な混乱助長させた」

"The Draft Tokyo Electric Power Investigation Report: 'The Intervention of the Prime Minister's Office Fomented Needless Confusion'"

Read that headline too quickly and after hearing so much about the Diet-appointed commission investigating the disaster, and you might misassociate the news flash with a leak from the Diet commission draft report.

Only when you read the article do you realize that what Sankei is promoting as an exclusive is a leak from Tokyo Electric Power Company's own internal report that the company is compiling to compete with the Diet commission's report. TEPCO's report find (gasp) that the Kan government's bypassing of TEPCO's information controls interfered with operations at the Fukushima Dai'ichi plant.

(Link)

Why am I not shocked -- at TEPCO's conclusions and the way the Sankei Shimbun has filed this story?

Nomura Shuya's Preemptive Strike

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Does the world know who Nomura Shuya is?

He is a lawyer with Mori, Hamada & Matsumoto, a corporate law firm specializing in M&A, restructuring and finance. He is a professor of law at Chuo University, teaching commercial law, civil law and business law strategy. Just how he has time for any work for his law firm or preparation for his classes is a question, as he has been on 68 different government committees or government report drafting boards since 1998 (J).

Nomura furthermore has a weekly appearance on the Nihon Terebi network's late night newscast. Nihon Terebi is owned by the Yomiuri Shimbun and both have a strong anti-Democratic Party of Japan bias, the television network even more so than the flagship newspaper. Nomura crows about his media appearances on his website (J).

Nomura is also a member of the Diet-appointed Tokyo Electric Power Company Fukushima Dai'ichi Nuclear Power Plant Accident Investigation Committee (Tokyo Denryoku Fukushima genshiryoku hatsuden jiko chosa iinkai), the second official and third major investigation into the government's response to the meltdowns, explosions and release of radioactive materials at the Fukushima Dai'ichi plant.

That being a contributor to Nihon Terebi newscasts during his tenure as a committee member should be considered a glaring conflict of interest has obviously never troubled Nomura's conscience.

The committee held an open hearing on Saturday. Nomura took advantage of his time to read out a series of rhetorical questions, throwing into doubt Prime Minister Kan's decision to by-pass the institutional route of receiving information on the situation at the plant from the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, which would be receiving its information from Tokyo Electric Power Company's Tokyo headquarters, which would be receiving its information from its workers at the plant. Finding this route utterly dysfunctional, due to the NISA's almost amateurish information collection and dissemination capacities and TEPCO's obsessive secrecy, the prime minister and the rest of the Cabinet carried out direct communications with the plant managers.

Nomura seems to have made a calculated bet that the mediasphere would misrepresent his musings as statements of the committee's findings. Some media outlets, such as TV Asahi, found themselves struggling mightily with the gravitational pull of Nomura's presumed authority as the committee's chief investigator, but still maintained some measure of integrity by presenting Nomura's questions and his "there are those who are of the opinion that" gambits as questions, not statements of fact (J - Time Sensitive). Most of the news media succumbed, presenting Nomura's musings as a preliminary release of the findings of the committee, employing casuistry to cover their tails should the conclusions in the final report, due at the end of this month, be at odds with the headlines of Sunday (see the Yomiuri Shimbun's gutless use of the word shiteki in this article - J).

As for the careless non-Japanese news media, members stumbled over themselves to get the story out and wrong. (E)

The takeaway from Nomura's performance, that a desperate government's bypassing of a corporation's executives and the bureaucrats of the agency in charge of promoting the industry in question led to confusion in the response to the emergency, must have the partners at Mori, Hamada & Matsumoto smiling.


Later - This post has been edited for clarity.

Later still - - Damning excerpt from committee chair Kurokawa Kiyoshi's review of the meeting of June 9.

また、危機管理体制の構築、リスクコミュニケーションの在り方等について、第二回論点整理として、現時点の論点を暫定的に示した。なお、論点整理は、国会事故調の論点の全てを示すものではなく、また、国会事故調としての結論を示すものではない。国会事故調の最終的な調査結果については、一括して最終の報告書に反映される

"In addition, as for the structure of the crisis control system, the way of communicating risks, et cetera, the second set of points of contention, the issues at the moment have been indicated in a provisional way. Still, the clearing up the points of contention has not been an indication of all of the points of contention the accident investigation committee is considering, nor is it indicative of conclusions made by the accident investigation committee. As for the final results of the investigation of the accident investigation committee, these will be reflected comprehensively in the final report."

(Link - J)

Much, much later - The Yomiuri Online's dishonest account of the goings-on at the meeting (E), now happily immortalized on the world's data servers.

Ecce Homo

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Today former prime minister Kan Naoto is appearing before the Diet's "Tokyo Electric Power Company's Fukushima Power Plant Accident Investigative Committee" (Tokyo denryoku Fukushima genpatsu jiko chosa iinkai). Kan's testimony is the culmination of the Committee's investigations, which have seen former minister after former minister summoned to tell his version of what happened during the first few hours, days and weeks of the Fukushima Dai'ichi disaster. Former Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio had his day before the Committee yesterday (On a Sunday! The Diet is normally like Melina Mercouri -- never on a Sunday!).

Today, however, is the grand finale, the final act, where the biggest fish in the sea is hauled out and interrogated about his actions and decisions in the most hectic and desperate days this blessed land has known since 1945.

The Committee's chairman is Kurokawa Kiyoshi (bio), a Fellow at National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) and an emeritus professor of Tokyo University. Despite the pointed, possibly highly technical questions it might ask, the Committee is likely to not be the kangaroo court the opposition and members of the news media desire.

Nevertheless, the news media and the opposition will hover like vultures over Kan's testimony, trying to find sentences to misconstrue, quote in isolation and otherwise tease and torture until meaning is drained from them. The colossal politico-media-entertainment squid bought into and promoted a narrative that the PM was an impediment to those who were fighting a panicked and ultimately failed effort to prevent meltdowns, explosions and the release of many terabequerels of radiation. Its members even went so far as to accuse him of initiating cascades of events that worsened the disaster.

So far, the news has accentuated the negative:

Japan refused US offer of nuclear experts in PM office

Edano: PM's office did not block use of 'meltdown'

Japan government spokesman says he didn’t deliberately mislead public on nuclear crisis
(Check out the accompanying photo. Shameless!)

As can be expected, each of the participants has used the occasion of his testimony to exonerate himself (E - photo issue as above). As a consequence, the final report of the Committee is likely to present a braid of different narratives, rather than a definitive chain of causation.

Most desperate to get their version out are the Tokyo Electric Power executives, who were not interviewed for the most recently compiled comprehensive investigation into the Fukushima nuclear disaster, produced by Funabashi Yoiichi's Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation (Link - J). If anybody has had a story to tell (and I do mean story) it is TEPCO executives, particularly as then president Shimizu Masataka checked himself into a hospital less than two weeks into the crisis. (E)

In the end, the report will disappoint those who want someone to blame. A giant earthquake and a towering tsunami hit a nuclear power station designed to resist the greatest natural blow this blessed land had heretofore experienced, not a black swan event. With the main and backup systems gone, everyone, with the possible exception of the TEPCO executives and the unprepared public information service of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, performed heroic ad hoc efforts to bring the nuclear reactors under control and ensure the public's safety.

So while the wire services, the nightly news on the anti-DPJ channels and even the reports the neutral channels, out of a misunderstanding of the concept of fairness, will bore in on the confusion and improvisation in March and early April 2011, and tomorrow's newspapers will echo and elaborate upon tonight's themes, the truth is that individuals like former Prime Minister Kan and plant manager Yoshida Masao, by following their better instincts, led others to do the same, and prevented a disaster from becoming a cataclysm.

Hold up your chin, blessed land, for producing men and women such as these.

That Unanswered TEPCO Question

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Now that the government of this blessed land has taken a majority stake in the technically bankrupt Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), phased in the replacement of the chairman and the president (E) and seen to a housecleaning of the board of directors. (E)

Many questions arise from the government's takeover as the main shareholder and appointer of executives and board members. What intrigues me is what will happen when the government and the new board members, particularly the outside board members, go through the books at TEPCO? Specifically, what are they going to find -- and once they find what they find, what are they going to do about what they find -- when they go through the accounts on how electricity costs are compiled?

From my understanding of the research done by Dr. Paul Scalise (and if Dr. Daniel Aldrich, if your research has identical findings, I apologize in advance for the sin of omission), a stunningly large fraction of the cost of TEPCO electricity cannot be explained by labor, capital or fuel costs. Indeed, if memory serves, the largest fraction of the costs of electricity is listed as simply "Other" -- and the amount listed in this category has remained unchanged, even as the costs of the various other inputs has either declined over time or has fluctuated in line with world energy prices.

What is this "Other"? To this point none of the electric power companies has been very upfront about the contents of this grab bag accounting entity. A certain fraction of this amount has always been assumed to have been payoffs to local communities, farming and fishing cooperatives and other business organizations with their facilities in the vicinity of power plants. Just how much of this other can be accounted for in this way is something the government can now, in theory find out, along with the rest of what has been lumped in to the category of "Other."

Of course, does the government want to know? Does it cut the subsidies to the local parasitic claimants, many of whom no longer can live and work in the vicinity of Fukushima Dai'ichi anyway, in order to lessen or forestall the rate hikes TEPCO has announced (E)? Do they keep them in place, as a sort of disaster recovery fund-by-default? Do they open up the accounts for public debate, or try to bury the truth in order to hide the complicity of regulators and politicians in the payouts? Or what if the government and the new board members find even more damaging reasons for the classing of certain costs as "Other"?

If the government owns TEPCO it not only owns company's problems but its secrets too.

What lies in between the covers of its account books?

Nuclear Follies: A Farce In Many Acts

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, One would think that if one were bringing workers in to the site of a major nuclear power plant disaster, where loads of radioactive material are scattered all over place, that maybe, just maybe, someone was checking up on the backgrounds of the workers.

In the case of the Fukushima Daiichi Power Station, one would be wrong.

Yesterday, it came to light that an expert panel of the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan has recommended that the government establish a rule banning those with criminal records or those who are deeply in debt from working on nuclear plant sites -- this to be in line with similar regulations in North America and Europe.

For some reason, the experts worry about the possibility that individuals with criminal records or huge debts might be liable to whisk away materials that could be used for nuclear terrorism.

Of course, the recommendations of the expert committee have not actually been delivered yet. The report is still in the draft stage, and will remain open for public comment for a month before it will be presented to the government sometime in mid-March. (J)

Yes, it is 11 months to the day after the triple disaster.

No, I am not making the above up.

Of course, if you have been reading Jake Adelstein, you would know all about the wonderful folks who procure the grunt labor force cleaning up Fukushima Daiichi.