Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
86
Cultural Reverberations over Radioactive Threats
On 9 July 2012 the Financial Times published a short and cautious article under the section
Global Insight. The article was titled, ‘Culture blame games are no way to prevent future
crises’ and took inspiration from the official report on the Fukushima crisis issued by the
National Diet of Japan in July 2012. The article commented on the summary produced in
English by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission led by
Kurokawa Kiyoshi which is divided in three sections: conclusion, description of the events,
and future recommendations. The main point of the Financial Times article was that Japan
had offered a dangerous lesson to policy makers from different countries by concluding that
cultural issues are mainly responsible for the failure in dealing effectively and promptly with
the Fukushima nuclear crisis. How this message was conveyed is not adequately clear from
this article but can be extrapolated from the report itself. In what follows I will first analyze
the dialogic style and content of the report in the section which deals with the cultural
features of Japan, looking both at the English summary and at the full report in Japanese.
Then, I will compare the style and contents of the report with those of an unofficial Japanese
blog dealing with this crisis that I shall call Daiwa.
The executive summary in English of the Fukushima report offers to its readers what
anthropologists may term a culturalistic, yet extremely clear message. The nuclear crisis and
its inefficient management, it is suggested, have been produced by a concomitance of cultural
factors that have caused ‘a disaster Made in Japan’. The summary states: ‘Its fundamental
causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive
obedience, our reluctance to question authority, our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’,
our groupism and our insularity’ (Official Report 2012: 9). This statement contains all the
cultural patterns that Ruth Benedict had included and developed in her
The Chrysanthemum
and the Sword
; it does so with such devotion that one might wonder whether its author
actually re-read a copy of Benedict’s book before writing it.
The model introduced by Benedict, and later developed by other famous
anthropologists such as Chie Nakane (1972, 1977), Lebra Takie (1974), De Vos (1985),
psychologist Doi Takeo (1977, 1985) and more recently challenged by Befu Harumi (1980),
Dorinne Kondo (1990) and Joy Hendry (1989, 2012), is called relational model or verticalism
of Japanese society. According to this model, Japanese society is structured on a vertical
framework in which authority (the chrysanthemum, or the emperor, for Benedict) is not
questioned, and is accepted in a hierarchical set of relationships through full obedience and
