Text|Youth talk about things
Editor|Youth Talks
preface
Even blaming the failure of Japan's leadership on a shift in gender roles does not change the fact that its decline is visible to the naked eye. At the same time, just complaining without a policy response represents a failure of the leadership in itself, since it is no longer possible to return to the pre-war era of "good wives and good mothers".
Japan 3.11 incident
Japan's political leaders today are incomparable to those of Shigeru Yoshida, Ishibashi Zhanzan, and Isato Ikeda, who led Japan out of the ruins of the early postwar period. Even the aforementioned morally controversial Nobusuke Kishi (who served as Minister of Munitions in Hideki Tojo's cabinet, became Prime Minister after the war, and forcibly instilled in the Diet the legal basis for Japan's obedience to the United States), his wisdom, ability, and worldliness are all lacking in his grandson, current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. One might say that there were similar gaps between Sarkozy and de Gaulle, George W. Bush and Eisenhower, but that still did not alleviate the magnitude of Japan's problems.
Shinzo Abe
The problem of leadership in Japan is not limited to politics, and today's Japanese entrepreneurs and executives can have the boldness and vision of Soichiro Honda, Akio Morita, Norio Ohga, Konosuke Matsushita, Yoshihiro Inayama, Kazuo Inamori, and others, but they can no longer run Japan's big business. At the same time, the senior officials of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Finance were forced to rebuild their destroyed economies in the early postwar period, with little to rely on but their own wisdom, in contrast to their cautious and demoralized successors.
Soichiro Honda
Events since March 11, 2011, and the nuclear leakage crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant have exposed the world's core leadership to corruption. The catastrophe is like a fiery blade inserted head-on into Japan's long-corrupt political framework. Just as swarms of cockroaches find a place to hide when the lights in a dirty room are turned on, the "fat bugs" that suck the public good flee in panic when disasters such as the Chernobyl nuclear crisis, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial tsunami exposed to the public the complicity, malfeasance and incompetence of the leadership.
That's what came with Fukushima. As we all know, the event began with a terrible earthquake and the tsunami it caused. Tsunamis are highly destructive and destroy everything in their path, including nuclear power plants, as has happened in history. Thousands of years ago, a larger earthquake struck this coast.
Japan tsunami
TEPCO failed to protect against this one-in-thousandth risk factor, which should have been completely excluded when constructing and operating these facilities, given the consequences of a nuclear meltdown. It turned out that the first facilities of the nuclear power plant were destroyed not by a tsunami but by an earthquake. People can escape tsunamis by staying away from the coast, but in Japan it is impossible to escape earthquakes.
In the period following the disaster, events gradually showed that Japan's choice to rely on nuclear energy was actually dancing with the devil. TEPCO's top management collapsed almost completely. Despite the government's blatant distortions, cover-ups, and even outright lies in the mainstream media through its mouthpieces, Tokyo itself was in crisis. A Chernobyl-style gas cloud could easily force 30 million people to evacuate, and that would mean the end of the modern Japanese state.
Japan earthquake
There are two versions of what happened. One version is that then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan flew to Fukushima by helicopter when he learned that TEPCO might abandon the entire plant, asking TEPCO to do everything it could to save the plant, even at the expense of the lives of some managers and workers. Another version is that Kan's intervention was self-defeating, causing the situation that had been gradually under control to deteriorate again.
No one can be sure which version is true, although the first version is more believable. Kan has good reason not to trust companies like TEPCO and their protectors and coordinators in the bureaucracy. Kan first came to national attention 16 years ago when he held the post of Minister of Health and Welfare in the coalition cabinet. He found that blood preparations that provincial officials allowed certain Japanese pharmaceutical companies to sell had been told they were infected with HIV. As a result, there have been dozens of cases of AIDS infection in hemophilia patients in Japan. Kan was advised not to make the scandal public. In Japanese official circles, the reputation of a province and the well-being of its associates are often more important than the lives of ordinary people. But Kan chose to go public anyway.
Japanese nuclear power plants
The course of March 11 was similar, although the scale of the disaster was unparalleled. General Electric, the original designer of the plant, warned TEPCO that there were serious flaws that needed to be fixed, but those warnings were ignored. Acting on warnings would be tantamount to acknowledging that nuclear power plants may be risky, which would contradict information from TEPCO's "Atomic Energy Village" and by advocates of nuclear energy in academia, politics and bureaucracy, who consistently claim that nuclear energy is a clean, risk-free technology.
Repairing a working nuclear power plant, or moving backup power equipment to a place that cannot be reached by a tsunami (above the sea wall built to protect the plant), is an admission that the risk has not been eliminated. This is reminiscent of the Bank of Japan, which did not set aside capital for loan losses. If a certain percentage of loans turn bad, it is an admission that some lending decisions may be flawed.
nuclear power plant
Of course, the leadership of the country has become so selfish and addicted to its own propaganda that it is possible to destroy the country it leads, and this is not unique to Japan. You only have to look at the British military in World War I, which constantly sent British youth to the guns of German machine guns, or look at the Soviet elite under Brezhnev, or the rising MBA class in the United States today, who hunted everywhere and screwed up the world economy
Japan's "Uniqueness"
However, Japan has its own unique features. In this case, the so-called "uniqueness" is the way in which Japan's leadership has become so incompetent and dangerous. Japanese companies have difficulty writing off sunk costs, but the problem is not only business and money. The Japanese system has extraordinary difficulties in acknowledging and confronting its strategic mistakes. Individuals can be condemned and even sacrificed. The titular leaders of Japanese institutions are caught up in scandals for one reason or another, for which they routinely apologize and resign, tactics that the world has become accustomed to. Many of these actions are just for show, and those involved are compensated behind the scenes and return to power after the storm.
Japan
Nevertheless, it is admirable that countless Japanese do have a willingness to take responsibility for mistakes or worse. They won't hide behind their lawyers, as many Americans do, ashamed to stand up and admit that they made a mistake to avoid taking responsibility for the mess they caused. However, at the level of the Japanese system, mistakes cannot be admitted and drastic changes are forced to be carried out, and we can see from the Japanese business discussed in the previous chapter, but we are not limited to this. This can be seen everywhere, from what the Imperial Japanese Army did during World War II to public works that were approved and almost impossible to cancel, even though there was overwhelming evidence of cost overruns and horrific collateral damage.
World War II period
These projects are like zombies or vampires, because they are signed by a powerful government department or its client, and to cancel them altogether is to admit that the government department has made a mistake.
This unconfessed style may be traced back to the semi-sanctified atmosphere surrounding the Japanese system. We talked about the fact that the Tokugawa shogunate deliberately gave absolute authority to Japan's institutional order, which was not only promulgated by a sacred entity (such as divine imperial authority), but was itself sacrosanct. As we have seen, the sanctity of this system not only survived the fall of the shogunate, but was also strengthened by the Meiji government and used as a basis for constructing nationalist ideas and uniting the Japanese people so that Japan could survive as an independent nation-state under the Hobbesian global order of the late 19th century.