KJ
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WHAT
IF?
Review by Ken Rodgers,
from KJ
#31
The Yomiuri Shimbun
is Japan's largest newspaper, guardian modulator of Japanese conservative
harmonics. When fast-breeder reactor Monju came within millimeters of
unprecedented catastrophe December 8th last year (1995), it took
the Yomiuri 16 days to come up with an editorial chiding the
operating company - not for criminal negligence and unpreparedness,
but for lacking "the ability to handle a crisis properly."
Chronicle: the
Great Hanshin Earthquake*, edited by the Yomiuri Shimbun
(pub. IBH Communications), and released around the first anniversary
of last year's quake, may appear - at first glance -a predictable attempt
to impose Japanese order over unruly Nature, to eulogize Kobe's selfless
endurance of an unavoidable natural disaster. But hey - look again!
Coordinating editor Saito Takashi, an investigative crime reporter from
way back, explores in compelling narrative and objective detail just
what happens when the unleashed force of nature meets the force of circumstance.
A hundred feature articles, culled from first-hand reports and painstaking
follow-up, well-documented with photos, provide a chilling account of
the perils of complacency, in which a sub-element of farce counterpoints
the tragedy:
• Minutes after
the 5:46 a.m. quake, surrounded by collapsed buildings and trapped victims,
TV personality Hazama Kempei tries to borrow a small excavator; the
owner says: "You go driving a bulldozer without a licence and injure
people by mistake, you could be held liable for it later. I don't think
you should do it."
• By 9 a.m. the
president of Daiei supermarket chain has secured two helicopters, eight
water tankers, nearly 1,000 trucks, and a 9,800-ton ferry for relief
supply. It takes five days for the SDF and Hyogo Prefecture to decide
who will pay for urgently needed rescue equipment, before it can even
be ordered, let alone delivered. Meanwhile, 3,333 troops dig practically
bare-handed. Hundreds of trapped survivors die in the ruins.
• Experienced overseas
medical teams rush to Kobe, where they are told that they cannot treat
the injured without Japanese medical licences. The Health and Welfare
Ministry establishes an emergency HQ in the devastated city - one week
after the quake.
• The 19-person
initial government fact-finding mission to Kobe ignores hungry survivors
on streets; scurries into its hotel to eat 5000-yen Kobe Steak dinners.
In Kasumigaseki, Tokyo, bureaucrats respond to overseas aid offers saying
"We don't know if it's needed" - and Kobe City and Hyogo Prefecture
are not informed. On the third day, the Prime Minister appears in Kobe
to show his concern. He visits a hospital for 10 minutes, a refugee
shelter for 6 minutes.
One section, "Seismologists'
Predictions Come to Nothing," reveals that experts had concluded over
decades of study that a major quake in the Kobe area was inevitable.
The city disregarded their explicit warnings, responding that "the vast
amount of money required to implement anti-earthquake measures would
burden generations to come."
Chaos rules.
The Great Hanshin
Earthquake, like the Monju sodium leak, is a powerful reminder that
far from having all the answers, we don't even have all the essential
questions down. The first of these remains "What if...?"
(*
Unfortunately space limitations [in the print issue of #31] prevented
inclusion of an ominous quote from the final paragraph of this editorial,
as printed in translation in the Daily Yomiuri Dec. 25th: "In
order for major technology to take root and become safer, it is necessary
to increase the opportunities for learning from failures.")
Copyright
held by the author
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