Never has postwar Japan needed strong, assertive leadership more — and never has its weak, rudderless system of governing been so clearly exposed or mattered so much.
Japan faces its biggest challenge since World War II, after an earthquake, a tsunami and a deepening nuclear crisis struck in rapid, bewildering succession. The disasters require nationwide mobilization for search, rescue and resettlement, and a scramble for jury-rigged solutions in uncharted nuclear territory, with crises at multiple reactors posing a daunting array of problems. Japan’s leaders need to draw on skills they are woefully untrained for: improvisation; clear, timely and reassuring public communication; and cooperation with multiple powerful bureaucracies.
Postwar Japan flourished under a system in which political leaders left much of its foreign policy to the United States and its handling of domestic affairs to powerful bureaucrats. Prominent companies operated with an extensive reach into personal lives; their executives were admired for their role as corporate citizens.
But over the past decade or so, the bureaucrats’ authority has been eviscerated, and corporations have lost both power and swagger as the economy has floundered. Yet no strong political class has emerged to take their place. Four prime ministers have come and gone in less than four years; most political analysts had already written off the fifth, Naoto Kan, even before the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.
Two years ago, Mr. Kan’s Japan Democratic Party swept out virtual one-party rule by the Liberal Democratic Party, which had dominated Japanese political life for 50 years. The Japan Democratic Party pledged to transform government, challenge the entrenched bureaucracy, and usher in new transparency with citizens. But the lack of continuity and governing experience have left Mr. Kan’s party particularly hobbled. The only long-serving organization within the government is the bureaucracy, which has been, at a minimum, mistrustful of the party.
“It’s not in their DNA to work with anybody other than the Liberal Democrats,” said Noriko Hama, an economist at Doshisha University.
The absence of a strong leader capable of rallying the nation has never been more obvious than in the management of the efforts to contain the growing nuclear crisis.
“In the past, bureaucrats would have been issuing orders without even consulting with politicians,” said Takeshi Sasaki, a political scientist at Gakushuin University. “Now the bureaucrats are no longer involved, and the government keeps holding news conferences, but there is no evidence I can see that it is doing anything beyond that. Japan has never experienced such a serious test. At the same time, there is a leadership vacuum.”
The lack of leadership is compounding the uncertainty felt in Tokyo. Fearing the widening effects of the nuclear accidents up north, many companies are keeping their employees at home, foreigners are fleeing the country and aftershocks continue to rattle buildings. Underscoring the gravity of the crises, the emperor, Akihito, appeared on television for the first time ever to urge the nation to persevere and “to never abandon hope.”
The emperor’s words contained echoes of the most famous speech delivered by his father, Emperor Hirohito. On Aug. 15, 1945, Hirohito made a radio broadcast to tell the Japanese to “endure the unendurable” in his surrender broadcast — an act that stripped him and the imperial system of all political power, ushering in Japan’s postwar system.
In the decades after the war, the country’s mostly anonymous bureaucrats, not its politicians, were the ones credited with rebuilding the nation. During the OPEC-led oil embargo in the early 1970s, for instance, unelected bureaucrats minimized electricity use by directing rolling blackouts among companies.
The payoff for their often unheralded leadership was high-paying, post-retirement jobs in corporations and industry associations, a practice known as amakudari.
Perhaps no sector had closer relations with regulators than the country’s utilities, particularly when it came to nuclear power.
Bureaucrats and executives were keen to reduce Japan’s heavy reliance on fossil fuels. The regulators and the regulated worked hand in glove to offset the public’s deep ambivalence to nuclear power, a vestige of the country’s singular experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only cities ever subjected to atomic attack.
Left-leaning news media outlets were long skeptical of nuclear power and its backers, and the mutual mistrust led power companies and their regulators to tightly control the flow of information about nuclear operations so as not to inflame a broad spectrum of opponents that include pacifists and environmentalists.
“It’s a Catch-22,” said Kuni Yogo, a nuclear power planner at Japan’s Science and Technology Agency.
He said that the government and Tokyo Electric Power, or Tepco, the operator of the troubled nuclear plant, “try to disclose only what they think is necessary, while the media, which has an antinuclear tendency, acts hysterically, which leads the government and Tepco to not offer more information.”
The wariness between the public and the nuclear industry and its regulators has proven to be costly during this nuclear emergency. As the problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant unfolded, officials from Tepco and the Nuclear and Industry Safety Agency have at times provided inconsistent figures or played down the risks to the reactors and the general public. No person from either side has become the face of the rescue effort.
Politicians, relying almost completely on Tepco for information, have been left to report what they are told, often in unconvincing fashion.
Neither Mr. Kan nor the bureaucracy has had a hand in planning the rolling residential blackouts in the Tokyo region; the responsibility has been left to Tepco. Unlike the orderly blackouts in the 1970s, the current ones have been carried out with little warning, heightening the public’s anxiety and highlighting the lack of a trusted leader capable of sharing information about the scope of the disaster and the potential threats to people’s well-being.
“The mistrust of the government and Tepco was already there before the crisis, and people are even angrier now because of the inaccurate information they’re getting,” said Susumu Hirakawa, a professor of psychology at Taisho University.
Undoubtedly, gathering accurate information at the plants has been difficult because the explosions and high levels of radiation have kept most workers at a distance. Politicians, bureaucrats and company officials may also be trying to avoid alarming jittery citizens.
But the absence of a galvanizing voice is also the result of the long-standing rivalries between bureaucrats and politicians, and between various ministries that tend to operate as individual fiefdoms. This has hampered the establishment of a structure that would allow leaders to step forward, coordinate relief efforts and reassure the public.
“There’s a clear lack of command authority in the current government in Tokyo,” said Ronald Morse, who worked in the departments of Defense, Energy and State in the United States and worked in two ministries in Japan. “The magnitude of it becomes obvious at a time like this.”
Mark McDonald contributed reporting.
This story, "Dearth of Candor From Japan's Leadership," first appeared in The New York Times.