tamaopia.blogg.se

In both corporate cultures there was too much emphasis on political damage control - emphasis that often comes at the expense of good engineering. I saw a similar unwillingness to squarely face reality at General Public Utilities back at Three Mile Island in 1979. It’s not like they can just give up their corporate face for a few weeks or months while necessary things get done.

Embarrassment, either corporate or personal, is a huge deal in Japan. In this nuclear accident the situation is complicated by an extra party - Tokyo Electric Power Company - with its corporate personality and internal agendas. But the Fukushima nuclear accident is a very different story. That part of the lesson was learned: when this earthquake happened, Japan was quick to accept such assistance and thousands of lives were probably saved as a result. In Kobe what was on offer were mainly trained dog teams to sniff-out survivors. This lesson was learned to some extent during the Kobe earthquake of 1995 when Japan waited several days before even responding to international offers of assistance - days during which Japanese citizens were still dying under rubble. The Japanese would like for us to have helped them - to gain the benefits of our assistance without the embarrassment of admitting they need help or the complications of arranging to accept it. But it’s like those people I meet on airplanes who find out what I do for a living and tell me they would really like to write a book: what they mean is that they would like to have written a book. You’d think they’d want our help, and they do to a certain degree. For a country known for advanced technology, Japan is astoundingly resistant to outside ideas, as the current earthquake and nuclear crisis show yet again. Throughout those 20 years I have been astounded by the energy and discipline of Japanese industry, and by its turgid impenetrability.

For years I flew to Tokyo once a month, generally in my role as giver of bad news, which I could get away with as an American. I have been doing business in Japan for 20 years, consulting for big and small companies, speaking at conferences, writing for Japanese publications, and helping both American and Japanese companies do business with each other.