The death of trust

ON MARCH 11th, the first anniversary of the day that turned her world upside down, 13-year-old Wakana Yokoyama will be performing a rice-planting dance for her fellow villagers. It will be a happy occasion, because she will be with old school friends she rarely sees any more. But it will be tinged with sadness, too; because although there are still villagers, there is no longer a village.

On that bitterly cold day a year ago Ukedo (pictured above) took the full force of the tsunami. It killed about 180 of the village's 1,800 residents, including two of Wakana's grandparents. Some might have been saved, but when the first of three reactor buildings at the nearby Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant blew up, the authorities' focus shifted to evacuating the living rather than searching for survivors. Wakana, her family and thousands of others were ordered to drive to evacuation shelters which, although farther away, were directly in the path of the plant's plume of radioactivity.

Wakana now lives in Koriyama, a city 60km west of Fukushima Dai-ichi. She attends a new school without any of her old classmates, and may go outside for only three hours a day because of lingering radiation. As time slips by, it is harder to stay in touch with others from Ukedo, where she grew up breathing the salt smell of the Pacific coast. But her eyes light up as she talks about the folk dances she performs, which are hundreds of years old. Keeping alive the traditions of a village she may never live in again is a strange responsibility for a child, but it is one she understands.

The more edifying part of the story of Japan's response to the disasters of 3/11, as it is known, is one of individual burdens borne, of traditions reinvigorated and of communal self-reliance. It is not the whole story. A whopping ¥14.3 trillion ($175 billion) has been approved in four extra central-government budgets for recovery from a disaster that killed more than 19,000 people and made about 325,000 homeless. The government's Reconstruction Agency, which co-ordinates the way ministries spend money for rebuilding towns and villages, did not open its doors until February 10th, 11 months after the disaster.

So those dislodged from their homes have been thrown back on their own resources. Their response is part of what Hakuhodo, one of Japan's two foremost advertising agencies, dubs “Operation Me”: a growing embrace of autonomy in a country that has traditionally operated through a subtle form of groupthink, with challenges to authority well hidden.

Thanks in large part to the spirit of self-help, a lot of the more obvious damage was cleared up quickly. Immediately after March 11th the tsunami-hit coastline looked like a Dali painting, strewn with the skeletons of buildings, crumpled vehicles and overturned ships; now there are neat roads and traffic lights. But the sunken roads are still liable to flood, and there are almost no houses or shops. The sheer expanse of the emptiness is shocking.

Operation Us

The public cannot fail to notice the contrast between official sluggishness and the emboldened efforts of people doing things for each other. For nuclear evacuees, government health checks have been sporadic—Wakana has undergone only one full-body scan, almost a year afterwards—but citizens' groups have increased their monitoring of nuclear evacuees for thyroid cancer and other problems. Charities have led the way in decontaminating radiation hotspots. An anti-nuclear network called the Citizens' Nuclear Information Centre has streamed Fukushima-related news conferences live on the internet since March 11th, bypassing the self-censoring filter of the mainstream media.

In the tsunami-ravaged regions, volunteers have crowded back to the furusato, or home towns, their parents abandoned years ago. This has been vital in places like Rikuzentakata, a fishing port three hours' drive north of Fukushima, which was almost obliterated. It lost 2,200 people to the wave, about 10% of its population, including 100 municipal workers, about a third of the total payroll. It needs all the manpower it can get. Yet for all the solidarity, many of the volunteers, like the communities themselves, are disappointed with the results.

One official at an aid organisation in the Rikuzentakata area says that the recovery has been plagued by tatewari, the “stove-pipe” thinking of the individual bureaucracies. For instance, in rescuing the fishing industry, the first dose of aid went via the fisheries ministry to the trawlermen; ice-makers, without whom the catch rots, fell under a different ministry and got nothing. “Even after the disaster, the ministries put their own interests ahead of the victims,” says the official. Without non-profit organisations, many victims of the disaster would have fallen through the gaps. “The local NGOs are getting more and more power,” says the official. “This is self-sufficiency, since the government and ministries do not do much of the work.”

And there is much work to do. The tsunami left an estimated 22.5m tonnes of debris scattered across Japan's north-east coast—the equivalent of possibly 20 years of municipal waste. Only 6% of it has been permanently disposed of (see map). Massive mountains of carefully sorted tyres, planks and other detritus rise like burial mounds along the coastline, lapped by a now gentle sea. Much of the farmland is contaminated with sea water; it will take several years for the salt to be washed out. In Rikuzentakata, as in many places, very little rebuilding has begun, other than rows of temporary houses that have commandeered school playing fields. The faint traces of concrete foundations in the earth are a poignant reminder of the town that has been lost.

Disillusion with government is not just felt in the north-east. It spreads throughout Japan, and has origins that go much further back than last year. Something similar was at play when, in 2009, voters ended almost 55 years of uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and subsequently fell out of love with the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) that replaced it. But since March 11th the disillusion has grown a lot stronger. In an annual study released in January, Edelman, a public-relations firm, found that the Japanese people's trust in their national institutions, which had long been flat, had plummeted: it now hovers just above that seen in Vladimir Putin's Russia. The nuclear accident clobbered faith in government officials and power companies. Trust in the media also dived. Even municipal authorities are now openly distrustful of the central government. Three mayors of towns near the Fukushima plant boycotted a meeting with government ministers in February about burying radioactive soil. “The government lies all the time,” said one.

Ask Yoshihiko Noda, the prime minister, about the breakdown of trust and he admits there is a perception that the government's response has been slow. He points to the temporary housing and numerous reconstruction budgets as evidence that the government has in fact “rolled up its sleeves”. The ruling and opposition parties, he says, have worked “shoulder-to-shoulder” to help victims.

Visit the stricken north-east, however, and a different story emerges. Political bickering in Tokyo delayed reconstruction efforts for at least three months, say local officials. For a while the LDP refused even to meet the prime minister in person, in effect obstructing relief efforts in the hope of forcing a snap election. The DPJ was rife with internal tensions that forced out the prime minister of the time, Naoto Kan.

Mr Noda says, appealingly, that it is up to the local communities to decide how the reconstruction money is spent. But projects must fall into one of 40 predetermined categories; the funds are doled out in tranches over time; and the reconstruction agency's policy and guidance manuals run to more than 130 pages. Outdated rules persist. For instance, Rikuzentakata was unable to build a supermarket because of zoning laws aimed at protecting small shopkeepers. As many small shops were engulfed by the sea, coddling them is hardly a pressing matter. What counts is having somewhere to shop. Many rules thwart the recovery, says Futoshi Toba, the beleaguered mayor.

Although people feel anger and frustration towards Tokyo, they know they still depend on it. They doubt their overstretched local authorities are up to the task, and want wise policymaking support from the central government of the sort that, for good or ill, used to be a hallmark of the Japanese state. There is a feeling that they are getting little attention, and that what they do get is from second-rate civil servants—the top brass being too self-important to leave Tokyo.

As for the mainstream political parties, almost everyone in the affected areas sees them as part of the problem. Even now, Mr Noda's political priority has little to do with the tsunami: it is the consumption tax, which he wants to raise to prevent a financial meltdown. Once again, the spectre of parliamentary upheaval looms. If Mr Noda's government is forced to call a general election on the issue, as the opposition is demanding, progress in the north-east may once again grind to a halt.

The fire last time

As acute as these criticisms are, they pale beside the damage that the nuclear crisis has done to people's faith in authority. Mr Noda says, rather blithely, that “everyone has to share the pain of responsibility” for what happened at Fukushima. Indeed, much of society, excluding an anti-nuclear fringe, happily accepted the “safety myth” that enabled Japan to cram 54 nuclear reactors on one of the world's most earthquake-prone archipelagos.

But if people bought the myth, it was because successive LDP governments, ministries, big-business lobbies, media barons and university professors sold it to them. Accidents such as Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 caused barely a flicker of hesitation over the building of more nuclear plants in Japan. For years, safety breaches were covered up and regulators looked the other way. They gave a virtual free hand to powerful regional monopolies like Tepco, the firm that operated Fukushima Dai-ichi.

Within hours of the blackout that left that plant without the power to cool its reactors, it became clear that there was no comprehensive disaster-management plan. Mr Kan, the prime minister at the time, had to improvise, which often involved yelling at regulators and Tepco executives. Mistrust between the DPJ and Tepco, which had long supported the rival LDP, made matters worse. So did Mr Kan's despair at the civil servants around him, many of whom came from the elite University of Tokyo. Mr Kan, who attended the more practical Tokyo Institute of Technology, appears to have found them so unbearable that he appointed his own kitchen cabinet of crisis advisers, some of them friends from university days.

One of those advisers, Hiroshi Tasaka, a former nuclear scientist who served Mr Kan from a few weeks after the disaster, says it was a matter of “luck” that things did not get far worse. A worst-case scenario suggested that parts of Tokyo itself might have had to be evacuated. At the darkest moment, after a third meltdown and a third hydrogen explosion, Tepco prepared to pull out its employees. Only a life-risking effort by 70 brave workers brought things back from the brink.

Mr Tasaka fears lessons have not been learned. If there were another disaster tomorrow, the prime minister still could not call on specially trained experts or employ the full legal powers to cope with it, for example by ordering evacuations. A full review of how to reform regulatory structures is awaiting the conclusion of a string of investigative committees. Given the uncertainties, it is little wonder that 52 of the country's 54 nuclear reactors are now off-line—their power replaced by old thermal plants working at full capacity.

Sounds of silence

Possibly the most sensitive source of popular disquiet relates to information on radiation. This was partly held back to avoid causing panic. In some instances that may have been justified—though experts like Tatsuhiko Kodama, head of the Radioisotope Centre at the University of Tokyo, say there was no excuse for the bogus assurances that there was no risk to public health. “What makes me most angry is the censorship,” he says.

The information that ministries had on the spread of radioactive fallout in the early days of the crisis was not shared with Mr Kan, nor, just as important, with the families of children like Wakana Yokoyama, who were evacuated to areas of even greater danger. Greenpeace, an environmental group, accuses the government of changing its standards on acceptable levels of radiation with no thought for the varying degrees of risk they pose to children and pregnant women. Hospitals were also evacuated, causing many doctors and nurses to leave the area—and therefore making it more difficult to conduct regular radiation checks on children.

Disenchanted as they may be with all this, the Japanese have mostly avoided noisy expressions of protest, other than a spate of anti-nuclear demonstrations. But if Mr Noda calls a snap election over the consumption tax, voters may well start to cast around for alternatives to the DPJ and LDP. In the past year the outspoken pro-business mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto, has caught national attention, and has launched a political party that might field candidates in an election. Mr Hashimoto's rise is not a direct reaction to the tsunami; his support is mostly in the west of the country. But if his party enters national politics, it is likely to cause upheaval. Some worry that his slick style could veer towards shallow populism. Voters may not much mind; he represents change.

The culture of suspicion could have dire consequences. Japan's enormous debts are propped up by its citizens' willingness to buy government bonds. If they stop doing so, who else will? And if a lack of trust keeps the nuclear power plants shut down for lack of convincing regulatory reforms, industrial firms, already squeezed by a strong yen, may accelerate their move out of Japan. Elections or no, the political class needs to be much more serious about restoring the trust it has lost.

In this it might learn from Japan's businesses, which—as the public has noted— have weathered the crisis much better. Large manufacturers agreed to change their operating hours to balance their energy use, and sent teams of engineers to restore supply chains quickly. A government survey showed that there was almost no long-term loss of business from firms switching suppliers after the disruption.

Toyota, the biggest car company, has tapped into the self-help mood by announcing plans to construct its own power plants at a newly built factory in the north-eastern region of Tohoku, which it will feed into the grid to help the local community in the event of power cuts. It is deeply worried about a stable supply of energy because of the closure of nuclear power plants. “We call it self-defence,” says Shinichi Sasaki, its executive vice-president. Aeon, Japan's largest supermarket chain, has set itself much tougher safety standards than the government's to ensure that food is radiation-free. It is conducting its own checks.

With greater self-reliance may come a new vitality. One of the most pressing needs of the country is a revival of the entrepreneurial spirit that emerged after the second world war. If Japan is to phase out nuclear energy, it will need to pour copious human, intellectual and financial capital into new sources of power, while also breaking up the monopolies that dominate the industry today. A willingness to consider politicians from outside the mainstream may bring fresh air into Japan's stuffy politics. And any hints that people are prepared to challenge authority, however quietly, may press more of the elderly men who run Japanese companies to let a younger generation take charge.

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One sign of change is that a few prominent businessmen have bankrolled their own inquiry into the Fukushima disaster. Under their auspices a new think-tank, the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, has gathered leading figures from media, business and technology and produced evidence of what went wrong. In a land where seniority reigns, Koichi Kitazawa, the panel's chairman, notes that the younger experts were able to solicit much better information than their elders.

Change in Japan is usually visible only with hindsight. The mood, as one disenchanted civil servant puts it, recalls the moment before the end of the second world war when many Japanese soldiers and civilians realised the generals were leading their country to disaster, but dared not speak out. The earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident have been the biggest shock to Japan since those dreadful days. But if the people find a voice, there may yet be hope of revival.