Sicherheit in Nordostasien

Japan's Nuclear Village
by Jeff Kingston

The "nuclear village" is the term commonly used in Japan to refer to the institutional and individual pro-nuclear advocates who comprise the utilities, nuclear vendors, bureaucracy, Diet (Japan's parliament), financial sector, media and academia. This is a village without boundaries or residence cards, an imagined collective bound by solidarity over promoting nuclear energy. If it had a coat of arms the motto would be "Safe, Cheap and Reliable". There is considerable overlap with the so-called 'Iron Triangle' of big business, the bureaucracy and Liberal Democratic Party that called the shots in Japan from the mid-1950s, and the evocative moniker 'Japan, Inc.', a reference to cooperative ties between the government and private sector. The nuclear village is convenient shorthand to describe a powerful interest group with a specific agenda, one that it has effectively and profitably promoted since the 1950s. (McCormack 2011)

On the eve of March 11, 2011 Japan had 54 nuclear reactors generating nearly one-third of its total electricity supply, evidence of just how influential this interest group was in promoting its agenda. Over the years, as Japan's nuclear sector grew, so did the nuclear village's power and influence. (Hymans 2011) There has been a proliferation of vested interests in nuclear power that benefit from its expansion ranging from the companies directly involved to lenders and investors in nuclear energy-related firms and extending down to grant-seeking academic researchers. The nuclear village is not monolithic on policy, and there are disagreements between members over various issues that are bitterly contested, but these are the squabbles of a gated community where cooperation and reciprocity prevail. The Village shares a common commitment to nuclear energy, and that means ostracizing naysayers and critics and denying them the access and benefits that "members" enjoy. This modern version of the traditional practice of murahachibu (village exclusion) has been the stick, while access to vast resources and corridors of power are the carrot. Researchers who don't support the Village consensus on the need, safety, reliability and economic logic of nuclear power don't get grants and are denied promotions. Journalists who criticize the nuclear village are denied access and other perks, while politicians seeking contributions, and media companies eager for a slice of the utilities' massive advertising budgets, trim their sails accordingly. Crossing the nuclear village carries consequences just as support has delivered benefits; during the Fukushima crisis the chairman of TEPCO was in China treating favored members of some of Japan's largest media organizations to a luxury junket.

Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (before)

Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (after)

Regulatory Capture and the Culture of Safety

Regulatory capture refers to the situation where regulators charged with promoting the public interest defer to the wishes and advance the agenda of the industry or sector they ostensibly regulate. Those with a vested interest in specific policy or regulatory outcomes lobby regulators and influence their choices and actions. Frank von Hippel, a nuclear physicist and expert on nuclear policy at Princeton University, argues that in the US, "Nuclear power is a textbook example of the problem of 'regulatory capture' — in which an industry gains control of an agency meant to regulate it." (von Hippel 2011) In Japan, nuclear regulators have also long been regulating in the interests of the regulated. (Ramseyer 2012)

Three investigations into the Fukushima disaster reveal that regulatory capture was at the heart of the nuclear