Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (37 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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As many as 600 deaths of elderly patients, for example, were designated as ‘disaster related’, a consequence of hurried evacuation from the Fukushima area.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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 the difference is, “Do you want to buy a Nissan or a Toyota?”’
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes politicians seemed to occupy a different planet. Nine days into his job as reconstruction minister – a post that was meant to coordinate rebuilding efforts – Ryu Matsumoto resigned after being caught on video berating a governor of one of the devastated prefectures. The governor’s ‘crime’ was to have turned up for a meeting a few minutes late. Matsumoto jabbed his finger at the poor man, thousands of whose citizens had been swept away by the tsunami, telling him such a breach of etiquette was unacceptable. His supreme insensitivity summed up for many all that was wrong with a ruling
elite that had lost touch with reality. Six months after waves crashed into the northeast coast, Kan’s government too had crumpled.

The Democratic Party’s third and final prime minister was Yoshihiko Noda, a man who hardly inspired the highest expectations by likening his role as leader of Japan to that of a bus driver. To be fair, Noda did get a few things done. His government passed supplementary budgets, bringing to more than $200 billion the amount set aside to rebuild Tohoku. It also began tentative talks, very controversial among protectionist lobby groups at home, on joining the Trans Pacific Partnership, a high-level free trade agreement of which the US is a prospective member. Just as potentially far-reaching was the passage of legislation to double sales tax by 2015 in what some saw as the first serious attempt to tackle the debt problem in years. In his typically earthy language, Noda had warned that European-style defaults of the type seen in Greece were ‘not a fire on the other side of the river’. Still, raising taxes was hardly a vote-winner. Even some economists thought it was premature, more likely to tip the economy into yet another recession than to repair the nation’s financial health. Passage of the bill was secured by a promise to hold an early general election, which went ahead at the end of 2012. The Democratic Party duly lost, handing back power to the Liberal Democrats after only three years in the wilderness. Noda’s bus had careered over the precipice.

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It was not only the Democratic Party that had disappointed. A deeper dissatisfaction had set in with the political class in general. The national response to the tsunami seemed to crystallize an idea that had been forming for decades. ‘Each individual Japanese showed extraordinary strength, but as a collective unit I think we’ve been in a mess,’ Toshiaki Miura, the commentator at the
Asahi
newspaper, told me. A country we often think of as strong collectively but weak individually had shown itself to be the exact reverse, he said. Japan, it turned out, was a nation of strong individuals and a weak state. I thought of what my friend Shijuro Ogata had often told me. ‘Japan is a country of good soldiers but poor commanders.’ Sawako Shirahase, a sociologist at Tokyo University, had arrived at a similar conclusion.
‘It’s very strange,’ she said of the carousel of forgettable prime ministers. ‘Japanese society used to be characterized as very top down. But we have learned that we can survive without a leader.’

There were multiple ways in which Japanese people were learning how to ‘live without a leader’ or, to put it another way, to organize themselves. You could call it the slow, but steady, formation of a civil society in a country whose people had a reputation, not entirely undeserved, for being passive and too respectful of hierarchy. It was also recognition of real changes. Japan Inc no longer looked after people as it once had. More Japanese were in casual work with no lifetime job prospects. More were living on the margins of a society that had regarded itself as uniquely egalitarian among advanced nations. Hama said that even the language had changed. She pointed to Hatoyama’s inauguration speech back in 2009 when he had referred to the electorate as
shimin
, or ‘citizens’, in the style of the French Revolution, not the word that was usually used –
kokumin
, in her translation, ‘people who belong to their country’, or
shain
, ‘people who belong to the company’. Citizens belonged to no one. Civil society was, she said, slowly ‘emerging from the ranks of subjects and salarymen’.

In many walks of life, there were signs of people taking matters a little more into their own hands. One was the volunteer sector. Progress since the Kobe earthquake of 1995 – the so-called ‘Year One of the Volunteer Age’ – was palpable. In January 1995, more than a million volunteers had rushed spontaneously to the stricken city to help. The upsurge in popular support took the country by surprise. Volunteers were widely praised for their show of civic responsibility and most were warmly welcomed in Kobe itself. Many of them, though, were not properly organized. A few who arrived at the earthquake zone without food or any idea of where they might sleep were characterized as
meiwaku borantia
, ‘nuisance volunteers’.
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Kobe marked the stirrings of a new spirit of social solidarity and collective action, but for the most part it was amateurish. By the time of Japan’s next huge disaster in 2011 it was very different. On the eve of the tsunami, there were at least 40,000
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registered non-profit organizations in the country. The sector was more professional, better financed and better coordinated. Some of the volunteer organizations had financial
backing from big business through widespread ‘corporate responsibility’ programmes. When disaster struck, volunteers were rapidly dispatched to the stricken coast to distribute food, medical care and counselling. Private businesses sent thousands of their own employees, both as humanitarian volunteers and as logistical help to get factories up and running again. Manufacturing supply chains were restored, sometimes at almost miraculous speed, over the ensuing weeks and months.

The government made efforts to coordinate these groups, within days of the disaster appointing a well-known former activist, Kiyomi Tsujimoto, co-founder of the Peace Boat group, as prime ministerial aide in charge of disaster volunteering. Her appointment won praise, though in practice her role wasn’t always clear. In the worst affected parts of the country, it was common to hear the government bureaucracy roundly lambasted while volunteers were praised. Typical was the comment of Shigemitsu Hatakeyama, an oyster fisherman nearly drowned by the tsunami in the town of Kesennuma in Miyagi prefecture. ‘Since the earthquake, I haven’t got a single thing from the government,’ he told me contemptuously. ‘It was the volunteers who gave us food.’ It was volunteers, too, he said, who had provided him with concrete advice about how to restart his devastated oyster business. He planned to build tourist accommodation and to set up a little restaurant where visitors could enjoy his Miyagi oysters fresh out of the sea. Others talked of the friends they had made among volunteers who had streamed to Tohoku, whether to refurbish buildings, sort through debris or salvage waterlogged possessions. An academic who has studied the Japanese voluntary sector concluded that, in the years since Kobe, it had ‘reached a new kind of professionalism, organisation, social legitimacy and institutionalisation’.
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