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Counterpunch March 30, 2011
On the Edge
Gambling in Japan

By JOHN FEFFER

The great kabuki actor Mitsugoro Bando VIII was a fan of fugu, or
blowfish. Fugu is a rather bland, unremarkable fish except for one
thing: its internal organs, particularly the liver, are highly
toxic. Japanese chefs have to acquire a special certificate to
prove that they know how to remove all traces of toxin before
preparing the dish. Nevertheless, a couple of people die every
year from eating it, which givesthe fish an exotic reputation.
Diners enjoy the slight tingle that fugu sushi imparts to the
tongue and lips. Bando, however, wasn't satisfied with this slight
tingle. A daredevil eater, he relished bowls of soup made from
fugu liver and in this way built up a certain resistance to the
toxin. But on January 16, 1975, Bando ate not only one bowl of
this liver soup for dinner but also the three bowls that his
friend wisely declined. That night he suffered respiratory failure
and died.

On the outside, Japan appears to be a clean, well-ordered place.
The Japanese are, stereotypically, risk-averse. According to the
Japanese adage, deru kugi wa utareru: the nail that sticks out
will be hammered down. This apparent preference for order and
conformity helps explain the patience with which the Japanese have
responded to the triple disaster — earthquake, tsunami, and the
partial meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear facility — that has
afflicted the country. There's probably been more panic in
California as people buy up potassium iodide pills out of fear of
contracting thyroid cancer from radiation drifting over the Pacific.

Beneath this façade of conformity, however, lies a more
interesting reality. Like Mitsugoro Bando VIII, the Japanese have
become almost inured to calamity. They've accepted — and in some
cases courted — extraordinarily risky behavior.

Consider Japan's dependence on nuclear energy. No other country in
the world has had a direct experience of nuclear attack. And few
other countries sit atop such seismically active tectonic plates.
Yet, even as earthquakes repeatedly struck the island and hundreds
of thousands of hibakusha struggled with the after-effects of
radiation exposure from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Japan
embarked on a massive nuclear energy program. It built 54 nuclear
reactors, which generated nearly 30 percent of its electricity
needs. The government planned to increase the share provided by
nuclear energy to 40 percent by 2017 and 50 percent by 2030.

The reasons for this dependency were clear. Japan built a
world-class economy, with huge manufacturing capacity, on an
island with few natural resources and almost no indigenous
supplies of energy. The country was heavily dependent on oil and
natural gas imports. More recently, the government rationalized
the expansion of the nuclear industry by claiming that it would
reduce the country's carbon footprint. Japanese leaders
consistently sold nuclear power as a safe alternative to fossil fuels.

But nuclear power was only as safe as the government claimed
because the country's leading electrical utilities were lying all
along. In 2002, Tokyo Electric admitted to falsifying repair
reports at its nuclear facilities for two decades. Then, in 2007,
it confessed again that it continued to conceal what had been
going on, including six emergency stoppages at the Dai-ichi
nuclear power station in Fukushima and a seven-hour-long
"critical" reaction at Unit 3, one of its six reactors.

In 1997 and 1999, accidents at the reprocessing plant at Tokaimura
exposed dozens of workers to radiation. Two workers died after the
1999 incident. In 2004, at the Mihama nuclear plant, steam
released from a broken pipe that hadn't been checked once during
its 28 years of operation killed five workers.

But perhaps worst of all, the Japanese government knowingly
constructed structurally inadequate nuclear facilities. The
world's largest nuclear facility, the Kashiwazaki Kariwa, sits on
a fault line that generates three times the seismic activity it
can withstand. Dai-ichi could withstand only a 5.7-meter tsunami,
not the 7-meter wave that eventually overwhelmed it. The
regulators should have known how high earthquake-generated waves
could rise at that stretch of coast. In other words, Japan's
nuclear facilities have always been ticking time bombs.

Embracing nuclear power isn't Japan's only risky behavior. For
years, the Japanese government has boasted of a "peace
constitution" that restricts the country to a defense-only
posture. But this constitution hasn't prevented Japan from
amassing one of the world's most powerful militaries, confronting
China and Korea over disputed islands, cooperating with the United
States on a missile defense system that destabilizes the region,
and playing host to dozens of U.S. military bases that endanger
human lives and the surrounding environment. (Even now, in the
middle of a huge humanitarian crisis, the Japanese government has
been building a $600,000 wall in Okinawa near where the United
States wants to construct a new military base over the objections
of the locals. "The United States should get out of Okinawa and
hand over all those big bases to the tsunami's survivors," one
elderly resident told Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor
Jon Mitchell in Postcard from…Henoko. "They're the ones who really
need housing right now.")

Then there's Japan's economic behavior. It's common to talk about
how risk-averse Japanese citizens are by noting that they kept
much of their savings in post office accounts that were secure but
paid virtually no interest. The Japanese government, on the other
hand, wasn't so careful. Twenty-five years ago, the Japanese
government and financial sector anticipated the current economic
crisis by creating a bubble economy marked by unbridled
speculation, unparalleled greed, and unbelievable corruption.
Financial deregulation led to skyrocketing land values: at one
point the land occupied by the Imperial Palace in the middle of
Tokyo was reportedly worth the entire country of France. Japan has
never really recovered from the pricking of this speculative bubble.

Meanwhile, during the current humanitarian crisis, Tokyo has taken
unacceptable risks with those most vulnerable to the effects of
radiation, argues FPIF contributor Alexis Dudden. "The Japanese
government, in its effort to reassure the population, has in fact
placed more people at greater risk, particularly children," she
writes in Little Silver Riding Hoods. "In an era when Japan's
greatest challenge is its declining population, the government
should go to greater lengths to safeguard this future."

Is there somehow a contradiction between the stereotypical
conformity of the average Japanese and this tendency to court
disaster in the economic, military, energy, and humanitarian sectors?

When I lived in Japan in the late 1990s, it wasn't uncommon late
at night to come upon office workers passed out on the street,
vomiting in alleyways, or being carried home by their equally
inebriated colleagues. Excessive drinking after work was part of
the salaryman culture. Indeed, it could be awkward for a
businessman to demur from such rituals. When such behavior becomes
the norm, then engaging in risky activities becomes just another
way of conforming.

Of course, it's only a sector of Japanese society that drinks to
excess. Just as it's only a sector of the society that constructs
nuclear plants on active fault lines, builds up a powerful and
potentially aggressive military machine in a region that is still
deeply suspicious of how Japan uses its power, and deregulates the
economy to create a kind of pachinko capitalism that rewards the
few and impoverishes the many. In this sense, an oligarchy of
gamblers holds sway over the majority of cautious Japanese.

This is no time to blame the victims. The earthquake and tsunami
and nuclear meltdown were all tragic surprises. But thanks to
risk-takers who have taken to nuclear energy and military weaponry
much as Mitsugoro Bando VIII took to fugu, Japan has been on the
edge for some time now.

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the
Institute for Policy Studies and writes its regular World Beat
column, where this article originally appeared.

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