Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [54]
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