Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
90
The Responsibility Trap
Some of the aforementioned cultural explanations are present in the Daiwa blog, an unofficial
virtual space started two months after the disaster in which information, media sources and
forum discussion on the Fukushima case are updated daily. The general tone of this blog is of
overt opposition to both the government and Tepco (the nuclear energy company managing
the Fukushima plant). In particular, in a number of blog entries the writer suggests a
psychological and cultural explanation for local people’s choice to stay in Fukushima instead
of evacuating.
A blog dated 22/4/2012 develops what seems a cultural explanation to this question.
According to the Japanese author, Japanese people would not accept the idea of having to
move out of contaminated lands on the basis of a shared sense of ‘responsibility’.
Responsibility is, according to the author, built in two ways: by avoiding to ‘hurt others and
to hurt oneself’ (blog 22/4/2012). Here, the meaning of responsibility is very close to that
given in the Commission’s report; it is linked to the value of ‘not causing any conflict’
(harmony). The blog entry adds that culture ‘has a smooth and responsible face for outsiders,
but inside [people] are in agony and self-tortured. The Japanese mind-set is just like that of a
person afflicted by self-injurious behavior’. These two aspects, responsibility towards the
outer world and self-abusive behavior in the inner world, would be extremely well balanced
in the Japanese psychological mindset, causing the one to affect the other in a directly
proportional relation.
The responsibility trap, which has a slightly more accentuated psychological impact
than the above mentioned ‘regulatory capture’, has similar cultural origins. Here is how
Daiwa, in another blog entry, titled ‘Self-hypnosis model’ (14/3/2012) introduces these
origins. In a simple but insightful diagram, the blogger introduces a four-dimensional
explanatory model of Japanese behavior, again focusing on why local people would not leave
the contaminated areas. The four dimensions are called: ‘bias to underestimate the radiation
risk’, ‘financial problem’, ‘faith in penance’ and ‘group mind’. The first two are contingent
explanations, related to the good standards of living conditions of the average Japanese who
do not want to envision a different life-style (or the need for it) or who would simply attribute
financial reasons to the decision to evacuate. The latter two are overtly cultural explanations.
‘Group mind’ is the same as that given in the English executive summary and it is, as I have
mentioned above, one of the most famous anthropological paradigms with reference to
Japanese society. ‘Faith in penance’ is described as ‘a unique sense of value for the Japanese
