Opinion

Crisis Prevention and Management

By CHRISTINE CUNANAN-NOMURA

On Sept. 30, employees at a uranium conversion plant in Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture, accidentally triggered an uncontrolled nuclear reaction. And it changed the lives of the 72 people exposed in the accident forever.

For most other people in Japan, however, the excitement of watching the news is over. They have returned to their ordinary, complacent lifestyles. In other words, life is back to normal. This is also what the Japanese government would perhaps like us to believe.

However, for me, the accident in Tokai has prompted an interesting observation and also raised some serious concerns about living in Japan.

When I first heard about the accident, I immediately tried to determine the seriousness of the disaster and its possible effects on Tokyo, which is not that far from the site. I was most worried about radiation reaching Tokyo directly by air or through water.

At first, I thought I was being overly paranoid. I soon discovered that — at least within the foreign community — I was not alone in worrying about these things. Several foreign friends had rung up their respective embassies for advice, made plans to travel westward for a few days and stopped eating fresh foods from that area until the dangers cleared.

Not a few of us also got calls from concerned friends and relatives outside Japan in the days following the disaster, asking if we had reserved seats on planes out of Japan "just in case."

When I told my Japanese friends about these efforts, many of them thought these foreigners were over-reacting. None of them had made even remotely similar plans. "If it's dangerous or if we need to do something, the government will tell us what to do," said one friend. I found the difference very interesting.

The nuclear accident also raised some serious issues for me as a resident of Tokyo. First, I was very concerned that such a careless and, in the words of International Atomic Energy Agency experts, "primitive" accident could actually take place within such a dangerous environment. It placed ordinary citizens at risk unnecessarily.

It is absolutely inexcusable that there were lax safety procedures and a regular disregard for procedure here — especially since Japan is bent on increasing its dependence on nuclear energy. This is supposed to be a highly efficient First World country.

Second, I found the handling of the crisis appalling. The government took several hours to set up a task force and to evacuate the residents within the area, adequate information was not available right away and proper precautions were not taken to determine the safety of Tokai and surrounding places.

The government declared the entire area safe only two days after the accident, yet independent agencies and Greenpeace found dangerous levels of radiation near the plant. Who are we to believe?

Such responses would have been unsurprising if Japan were a developing country. However, it is not. The nature of the crisis and the response of the government is inexcusable precisely because Japan prides itself on its First World efficiency.

Thinking about the Japanese government's response during the Kobe earthquake, and now during these events in Tokai, I cannot help fearing for what might happen should a more serious disaster strike Japan in the future.

Shukan ST: Nov. 5, 1999

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