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Hubris Punished: Japan as Nuclear State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Gavan McCormack
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The following paper, which draws on and updates a 2007 Japan Focus article, was written for Le Monde Diplomatique, where it was posted online in French early in April 2011.

This article offers a general overview of the nuclear era that began in Japan less 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.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 9 , Issue 16 , April 2011, e3
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2011

References

Notes

1 “La maison Japon se fissure - Le Japon nucléaire ou l'hubris puni,” Le Monde Diplomatique, Online, April 2011, link.

2 Meaning it was responsible for a major release of at least tens of thousands of terabecquels of radioactivity that was likely to cause “acute health effects” over a wide area.

3 Ishibashi Katsuhiko is one Japanese critic who has consistently made this criticism. See, most recently, his essay, “Masa ni ‘genpatsu shinsai’ da,” Sekai, May 2011, pp. 126-133.

4 Jun Hongo, “World right to slam nuke program mismanagement: expert,” Japan Times, 14 April 2011.

5 Shut down for nearly two years following damage in the Chuetsu earthquake of July 2007.

6 For a Japanese newspaper editorial in similar vein: “Shinsaigo ‘tei-ene’ shakai Nihon moderu wa kano da,” Mainichi shimbun, 16 April 2011.

7 The DPJ government announced on 29 March 2011 that the existing “Energy Basic Plan” would now have to be fundamentally reviewed, and that green sources of energy, including solar, would be part of the review. (“14 ki no genpatsu zosetsu, minaoshi, taiyoko nado jushi e,” Yomiuri shimbun, 29 March 2011. The debate, of course, is just beginning.

8 Robert Alvarez, “Meltdowns grow more likely at the Fukushima reactors,” Institute for Policy Studies, 13 March 2011.

9 For a catalogue of TEPCO's and the Japanese government's technical and other errors in handling the Fukushima disaster and earlier nuclear accidents, see Vaclav Smil, “Japan's Crisis: Context and Outlook,” The American, April 16, 2011.