4 Implications for “Resilience”: Beyond Cultural
Essentialism
This situation should cause a serious contradiction—random-walking of policy and
practice of nuclear power utilization, while more and more rigorous regulation without
strategic and effective safety upgrade program. Past discussions on this issue, trying to
sort out the incoherence, have focused on the cultural background of Japanese society
that was described above, and tend to suggest ways to “redress” it to comply with
“global standard” of separation of prosecution and investigation [6, 12]. This tendency
shows interesting consistency with Kurokawa’s “Made in Japan” theory. However, the
author would like to discuss further implication of this responsibility issue to deepen
and broaden the discussion centering on the concept of “resilience.”
Indeed, retributivism and martinetism could be interpreted as particularly
prominent characteristics of East Asian societies. It should be admitted that these
“cultural” differences are observed and need to be considered. Separation of prosecution and investigation is still essentially important to make accident investigation
effective, reliable and just, in principle. We should call for careful arrangement
when we think about institutional and legal harmonization with international
standards such as multilateral treaties on utilization of nuclear and other advanced
technologies.
Nonetheless, the author would argue that this issue should become more and
more global, and more and more difficult to cope with. It can no longer be trivialized as a local issue caused by particular “cultural” context. It should become
more and more unsolvable even in other societies that have been considered as not
so “retributivistic” or “martinetistic” so far.
As a series of studies including the ones on the cases of nuclear accident have
shown, the contribution of so-called human factors has increased both in causes of
accidents and amplification of damages by them, inversely proportional to the
improvement of reliability of advanced technological system [4]. This trend is
perhaps an irreversible and historically inevitable tendency. It must become one of
the most central questions in many fields of contemporary society to cope with the
problems that are relevant to human factors to prevent or to improve the “resilience”
to possible disasters. Every leading nuclear engineer knows that the most dominant
and variant factor in the PRA (probabilistic risk assessment) is human factor. For
this very reason, it is still under discussion how to appropriately include it to make
the PRA method reliable and suggestive. After the long history of engineering
efforts to improve technologies in “technical” sense, human factors are coming back
to the core of the discussion about the success and failure of our artifacts.
On the other hand, accident always creates its victims in some sense, regardless of the
nature of the cause of accident. This proposition has been unchanged since ancient times.
Rather, the more society become advanced and deeply interconnected with technological
systems, the more diversified types of “damage” and “victim” to be compensated and
cared. Some of those must trigger big public outrage that could never been soothed so
easily. We always have to face the issue of social justice: to remedy damaged and
violated rights of them.
Why Is It so Difficult to Learn from Accidents?
163
Essentialism
This situation should cause a serious contradiction—random-walking of policy and
practice of nuclear power utilization, while more and more rigorous regulation without
strategic and effective safety upgrade program. Past discussions on this issue, trying to
sort out the incoherence, have focused on the cultural background of Japanese society
that was described above, and tend to suggest ways to “redress” it to comply with
“global standard” of separation of prosecution and investigation [6, 12]. This tendency
shows interesting consistency with Kurokawa’s “Made in Japan” theory. However, the
author would like to discuss further implication of this responsibility issue to deepen
and broaden the discussion centering on the concept of “resilience.”
Indeed, retributivism and martinetism could be interpreted as particularly
prominent characteristics of East Asian societies. It should be admitted that these
“cultural” differences are observed and need to be considered. Separation of prosecution and investigation is still essentially important to make accident investigation
effective, reliable and just, in principle. We should call for careful arrangement
when we think about institutional and legal harmonization with international
standards such as multilateral treaties on utilization of nuclear and other advanced
technologies.
Nonetheless, the author would argue that this issue should become more and
more global, and more and more difficult to cope with. It can no longer be trivialized as a local issue caused by particular “cultural” context. It should become
more and more unsolvable even in other societies that have been considered as not
so “retributivistic” or “martinetistic” so far.
As a series of studies including the ones on the cases of nuclear accident have
shown, the contribution of so-called human factors has increased both in causes of
accidents and amplification of damages by them, inversely proportional to the
improvement of reliability of advanced technological system [4]. This trend is
perhaps an irreversible and historically inevitable tendency. It must become one of
the most central questions in many fields of contemporary society to cope with the
problems that are relevant to human factors to prevent or to improve the “resilience”
to possible disasters. Every leading nuclear engineer knows that the most dominant
and variant factor in the PRA (probabilistic risk assessment) is human factor. For
this very reason, it is still under discussion how to appropriately include it to make
the PRA method reliable and suggestive. After the long history of engineering
efforts to improve technologies in “technical” sense, human factors are coming back
to the core of the discussion about the success and failure of our artifacts.
On the other hand, accident always creates its victims in some sense, regardless of the
nature of the cause of accident. This proposition has been unchanged since ancient times.
Rather, the more society become advanced and deeply interconnected with technological
systems, the more diversified types of “damage” and “victim” to be compensated and
cared. Some of those must trigger big public outrage that could never been soothed so
easily. We always have to face the issue of social justice: to remedy damaged and
violated rights of them.
Why Is It so Difficult to Learn from Accidents?
163