P!
Their "executive branch" governmental leaders were VERY POOR, and SUCKED.
Kind of like the USA these days.
No plan huh. Well, hopefully they will not make that mistake twice.
The American bases on Honshu stayed open for business. The troops stayed put to help recovery and the base commanders monitored the radiation levels with their own personnel.
There was no evacuation of troops and no mandatory evacuation of dependents.
There are a lot of good things to admire about Japan's dedication to harmony "wa", the philosophy of "gaman" (to persevere or tough it out) and "gambaru" (to do your best) -- all of which are pretty much melded together in seikatsu tsuzurikata, most commonly defined as "Japanese pragmatism". This has been a cornerstone of Japanese educational philosophy since the 1920s and 1930s. Japanese schoolchildren are immersed in this ideology from their earliest years, and it shows.
Now, seikatsu tsuzurikata as it is generally understood, is loosely based on five principles. These are: awareness of Japan’s unique nature and national culture, acceptance of one's life role, non-competitiveness (defined as submergence within a group identify and equality within the group), acceptance of reality as it actually exists, and promoting goodwill and receptivity.
Taken together, all of these work to create a body of docile, hardworking, happy people who strive together in harmony -- but what they do not do, in fact what they specifically inhibit, is the identification, cultivation and promotion of strong leadership skills. It's simply not done. Individual success is only prized as a reflection of the overall success of the group.
Now, a lot of that has changed due to cross-cultural exchanges in the years since the end of World War II. But in the highest levels of government and society, it's still the defining code.
Thus, despite his position as the head of government, the Prime Minister of Japan is still a member of a number of groups. His position within those groups is important to him and is automatically reflected in his decision-making processes. It also slows them down because he automatically has to consider, deeply consider, how his actions will be seen by various members of the groups he belongs to.
This, I believe, is why Japan is so bad at reacting to fast-changing circumstances. Give a Japanese person a job that is completely defined, where every possible event has a designated response, and he/she is happy as a clam. Give him a unique situation where he/she is forced to wade into uncharted waters, and he's stuck. He falls back on the group and works to define the problem and develop consensus. That takes time, because no one else in the group wants to stick his/her neck too far above the crowd.
It's perplexing, but that's just the way it is. It's... Japan.
“Nothing was taking place at Fukushima Daiichi in terms of the government solving the problem” until about a week later when Tokyo and Washington launched a joint task force, he said.
You mean when it became crystal clear that the worse case scenario had indeed occurred. Never before in world history have 3 adjacent nuclear reactors simultaneously melted down and escaped their RPV's. Nothing but finger pointing cover stories here. And what exactly have they solved since the end of the first week ? Seems like they only have made the situation worse.
This is the worse cluster puck in history.