Hubris punished: Japan as nuclear state.

• Author: McCormack, Gavan
• Position: Thinking Politically

The following paper, which draws on and updates a 2007 Japan Focus article, was written for Le Monde Diplomatique, where it was posted online in French early in April 2011. [1]

This article offers a general overview of the nuclear era that began in Japan less than a decade after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and may well have been brought to its close by the events at Fukushima six and a half decades later. The Hirohito imperial broadcast of August 15, 1945 announcing the Japanese surrender and calling on the Japanese people to unite to "endure the unendurable" is now matched by the Akihito imperial television address of March 16, calling on people to unite in the face of catastrophe and help each other through the crisis. Two days after the Akihito address, the government announced that the "Great East Japan Earthquake" disaster was to be elevated from level 4 to level 5, on a par with Three Mile Island, and three weeks later, on April 12, it raised it again to level 7, the maximum on the international scale for nuclear incidents, alongside Chernobyl. [2]

Does the first imperial address on television match the first on radio in signifying radical change? Those at the centre of the Japanese state, on both occasions facing deep crises, seem to have deployed the emperor to similar ends: to soothe public fear and desperation, deflect anger from the pursuit of those responsible into a national sentiment of unity, and confirm the emperor's own place as healer, restorer, and axis for change.

The Akihito address used form and content that subconsciously linked the two occasions in listeners' minds. Through it, the Japanese state implicitly called on the people to appreciate that, beyond the disaster unfolding in northeastern Japan, the country itself faces a shift in direction comparable to that of 1945. Then, Hirohito's role was to shift Japan from militarism and war to the acceptance of defeat and drastic change; now, Akihito's address may be construed as a concession that the nuclear path chosen by post-war Japan, like the militarist path of his father's generation, has ended in catastrophe.

The problem is not just the cluster of reactors in and around Fukushima, but the nuclear system and the mentality that underpins it; Fukushima is far from being exceptional. Seismologists have long said that the fault lines on which the Hamaoka cluster of reactors at Omaezaki in Shizuoka prefecture rest are unstable and at least as prone to disaster. The Hamaoka design contemplated a maximum earthquake of 8.5, which means it could no more be expected to cope with one of 5.6 times greater force (480 M tons of TNT) than was Fukushima. Seismologist Ishibashi Katsuhiko notes that the impact of such an event would be huge: "the US military will also be affected--a disaster at Hamaoka will mean bases in Yokosuka, Yokota, Zama and Atsugi will all be of no use." [3] A Fukushima-type collapse would force the evacuation of 30 million people, signaling the collapse of Japan as we now know it.

Even though no existing reactor has been designed to withstand a level 9 earthquake or its likely accompanying tsunami and therefore all should be closed, it would be unrealistic to demand that. However, to stabilize not just Fukushima, but Japan itself, the disastrous and irresponsible decisions taken by governments over the past half-century to pursue nuclear energy as a sacrosanct national project have to be reversed. The immediate priority must attach to close the Fukushima and Hamaoka (and other extreme high-risk sites including Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in Niigata prefecture, the world's largest nuclear generation complex); [4] to secure, stabilize, and remediate the Fukushima sites; resettling and compensation for the refugee population and rebuilding shattered infrastructure; to cancel all planned and under construction reactor works (including Hamaoka Number 6 and Kaminoseki in Yamaguchi prefecture); to suspend all existing and experimental projects for uranium enrichment, plutonium accumulation, use, and fast-breeding; to stop the planned export of nuclear plants to countries such as Vietnam (personally promoted by Prime Minister Kan as late as October 2010); and to adjust public and private investment priorities to a completely different vision of energy production and consumption.

What is called for, in short, is the reversal of a half century of core national policies and the switch to a renewable energy system beyond carbon and uranium. [5] Such a...