¶ Norimitsu Onishi and Martin Fackler have a story, certainly, but is “In Nuclear Crisis, Crippling Mistrust” the best title? Nowhere do the reporters demonstrate that the response of Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan to the Fukushima disaster was actually crippled by his decision to bypass a bureaucratic apparatus that he had good reason to mistrust. The closest argument for hampered effectiveness concerns the use of an Education Ministry weather-analysis system that would have advised civilians not to take refuge in an area covered by the reactors’ radioactive plume.

Mr. Kawauchi said that when he asked officials at the Ministry of Education, which administers Speedi, why they did not make the information available to the prime minister in those first crucial days, they replied that the prime minister’s office had not asked them for it.

This makes us even more sympathetic to Mr Kan’s misgivings. The reporters seem to be under the impression that speed and “decisiveness” are invariably good things in a crisis. This leads them to step over the real story, which concerns plant manager Masao Yoshida’s heroic insubordination.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2011 at 10:30 am.