Gavan McCormack, Hubris Punished: Japan as Nuclear State

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 15 August 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 16 March, 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 12 April, it raised it again, to level 7, the maximum on the international scale for nuclear incidents, alongside Chernobyl. 

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.

Successive generations of Japan's bureaucratic, political, corporate, and media elite have insisted that Japan pursue the nuclear power path at all costs. In retrospect, they drove the country forward, as the elite of the Kwantung Army drove it in the pre-war era, towards disaster, ignoring, coopting, or crushing all opposition. Only now, facing the costs-human, environmental and economic-the long-postponed debate opens.

Gavan McCormack is a coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal and an emeritus professor of Australian National University. He is the author, most recently, of Client State: Japan in the American Embrace (New York, 2007, Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing 2008) and Target North Korea: Pushing North Korea to the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe (New York, 2004, Tokyo and Seoul 2006).

Recommended citation: Gavan McCormack, Hubris Punished: Japan as Nuclear State, The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 16 No 3, April 18, 2011.

Fukushima Residents Seek Answers Amid Mixed Signals From Media, TEPCO and Government. Report from the Radiation Exclusion Zone

Mistrust of the media has surged among the people of Fukushima Prefecture. In part this is due to reports filed by mainstream journalists who are unwilling to visit the area near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. But above all it is the result of contradictory reports released by the media, TEPCO and the government.

On the one hand, many local officials and residents in Fukushima insist that the situation is safe and that the media, in fanning unwarranted fears, are damaging the economy of the region.By contrast, many freelance journalists in Tokyo report that the central government is downplaying the fact that radiation leakage has been massive and that the threat to public health has been woefully underestimated. While the government long hewed to its original definition of a 20 kilometer exclusion zone, following the April 12 announcement that the Fukushima radiation severity level has been raised from a level 5 event (as with Three Mile Island) to a level 7 event (as with Chernobyl), the government also extended the radiation exclusion zone from 20 kilometers to at least five communities in the 30-50 kilometer range.

In recent weeks, many Fukushima residents who fled in the first week of the nuclear crisis have begun returning home and attempting to resume normal activities. For example, some local people in Iwaki city, 40-50 km from the Fukushima Daiichi reactor, are convinced that it is now safe to return despite the high radiation levels recorded. Here is one example. This article tells their story from the radioactive front line.

Makiko Segawa is a staff writer at the Shingetsu News Agency. She prepared this report from Fukushima and Tokyo. She can be reached at shingetsunewsagency@gmail.com

Recommended citation: Makiko Segawa, Fukushima Residents Seek Answers Amid Mixed Signals From Media, TEPCO and Government. Report from the Radiation Exclusion Zone, The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 16 No 2, April 18, 2011.

Back from the Brink: A city in ruins looks to the future

As Japan's government gets set to expand a nuclear evacuation area, the mayor of a city inside the radioactive zone speaks about his fears.

Like most Japanese men, Sakurai Katsunobu read apocalyptic comic book stories about the future when he was a boy.  He never expected to live through one of those stories himself.

A common plot sees a modern city reduced overnight to a ghostly husk as fears of nuclear contamination empties it of people.  Businesses shut and food, water and petrol run out.  Old people left behind begin dying. The city mayor makes a desperate televised appeal for help. Such is real life in Sakurai's city of Minami-Soma.

Over 71,000 people lived here before March 11. Today there are fewer than 10,000.  About 1,470 are dead or missing, the remainder are scattered throughout Japan in over 300 different locations, "as far as we can tell," adds Sakurai, who took over as mayor in January. Dangling from his neck are two radiation counters, a reminder that the nightmare that descended on his city last month has yet to end.

David McNeill writes for The Independent, The Irish Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is an Asia-Pacific Journal coordinator. This is a revised and updated version of an earlier article published at The Asia-Pacific Journal.

Recommended citation: David McNeill, Back from the Brink: A city in ruins looks to the future, The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 16 No 1, April 18, 2011.

From the early 2000's onwards, a new kind of trade unionism has been steadily gaining ground in Japan. While the country's major trade unions are stagnating or losing workers, temporary workers, especially young people, have begun to create their own structures.

In contrast with the trend of deunionization prevailing in Japan (and many other countries) since the 1970's, the number of unionized temporary workers rose from 400,000 to 700,000 between 2005 and 2009. Marginal though this may seem - Rengo, the country's main trade union claims 6.8 million members - this trend is breathing new life into a defeated union movement: after membership remained stagnant at just over 12 million between 1975 and 1995, during the "lost decade" from the mid 90's to the mid 2000's labor unions' member base declined by 2 million to level off at 10 million people today. Moreover, the percentage of union members in the labor force declined steadily throughout the entire period from 35  percent in 1975 to less than 20 percent by 2008.

These precarious workers - many of them young people - assemble into rather small organizations. Some of them remain independent, while others affiliate with the major labor unions, which are beginning to seize upon the issue of precariousness in an attempt to curb their decline. That is the case of the Shutoken Seinen Union in Tokyo (SSU), the Tokyo Young Contingent Workers' Union, which is affiliated with Zenroren, the second largest trade union federation in the country, closely linked to the Japanese Communist Party. Shutoken Seinen is among the 

Emilie Guyonnet is a free lance journalist whose has frequently published in Le Monde Diplomatique. She is the winner of the France-Japan Press Association's journalism prize.

Recommended citation: Emilie Guyonnet, Young Japanese Temporary Workers Create Their Own Unions, The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 16 No 4, April 18, 2011.