In its coronavirus response, Japan must not repeat the mistakes of its handling of the Fukushima nuclear disaster

Japan may have opted to conduct only limited tests for Covid-19 to bolster the chances of the Olympics going ahead. Continuing this policy would be foolish
The government was criticised for its opacity and mishandling of data after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown. It must not repeat these mistakes

Peter Wynn Kirby

Published: 10:00pm, 16 Apr 2020

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At root, the Japanese government has not approached the current pandemic as an epidemiological crisis. Instead, it has sought to manage it as an economic crisis and as a perilous public relations liability for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government. This reactive, obstructionist approach is dangerous at a time when Japan needs real leadership to preserve lives.

In recent months, when the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games were expected to go ahead, Japan garnered some international sympathy for attempting to put a brave face on the Covid-19 outbreak in the country, which threatened to upend years of careful planning and investment. Yet three weeks after the Olympics’ postponement, the government continues to operate from the same cynical PR playbook.

There is a clear official reluctance to test aggressively for Covid-19, although Japan has the same technological and medical capability to do so as South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong, which have been so successful at using testing and contact tracing to blunt the spread of the coronavirus.

Without robust testing, it is impossible to determine the scale of the outbreak, let alone reverse its toll.

Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso (right), seated next to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, adjusts his face mask during an upper-house parliamentary session in Tokyo on April 1. Photo: Reuters

Japan’s national broadcaster NHK reported over 482 new cases on April 14, bringing the total to about 8,173. These figures leave out the 712 infected on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in what has widely been viewed as a Japanese quarantine fiasco.

After the disease was allowed to spread easily on the ship for weeks, some passengers who were allowed to disembark casually hailed taxis and rode public transport in Yokohama, possibly leading to further contagion.

For months, Japan appeared to have Covid-19 relatively under control, with significantly lower rates of infection than other countries despite having recorded its first case as early as January 16.

The nation had a number of in-built advantages, with a population long squeamish about germs and accustomed to social distancing and containment measures — wearing masks, bowing from a distance, washing hands and gargling when arriving home, even sometimes using gloves and sanitary wipes when in public.

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Japan has a robust national health system. It also benefited from some lucky outcomes, such as the coronavirus spreading at the height of the flu season, which seemed to cushion the spread of Covid-19.

Yet intentionally limited testing, possibly to put the nation’s best foot forward for the Olympics, gave Japanese a false sense of security. The Abe government mandated that just a small number of public health facilities could test for the virus, and only five approved companies were allowed to process the samples.

As of April 15, South Korea had conducted 534,522 tests, a staggering 10,351 tests per million citizens. By contrast, Japan had done 94,236 tests, or 745 tests per million citizens, about 7 per cent of South Korea’s.

Moreover, the current figure of 178 dead is almost certainly an undercount and misleading. The government hasn’t released the figures on recent pneumonia fatalities, a critical metric both for assessing the pandemic and the state’s handling of the crisis.

Is Japan acting boldly or simply muddling through?

Amid the fog of official messaging, it’s impossible to know for sure. Due to a lack of transparency on critical data regarding the pandemic and government decision-making, it is difficult to determine whether the current policy is a valiant, but unspoken, attempt to instil “herd immunity” in the population or whether this is simply a risk-averse, deer-in-the-headlights response to large-scale disaster, so reminiscent of the government’s reaction to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis.

At the time, the state seemed incapable of admitting the true scale of the challenge posed by the tsunami and the power plant’s radioactive fallout.

The extent of the radioactive threat to communities was played down to avert panic and deflect blame. Evacuation orders and the very dimensions of the exclusion zone were minimised to avoid affecting large nearby cities, such as Koriyama, with expensive and debilitating measures.

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However, radiation is far easier to measure and assess from afar than viral infections like Covid-19. A radioactive plume was detected by American warships located off the coast of Fukushima.

The presence of particular radioactive isotopes in the air told foreign observers that nuclear fuel rods had melted down and breached reactors’ containment just days after the tsunami, even though it took the Japanese government months to admit this to its angry citizenry.

The current crisis lacks such stark, devastating signalling. Nevertheless, it is clear the Japanese state has reverted to the same reflexes of distorting science to influence the data.

Last week, the government announced a plan to battle overseas “misinformation” with artificial intelligence-driven algorithms, analysing social media traffic on platforms like Twitter and responding with “correct” information. Rather than trying to control the international narrative, it would be far better for Japan to use AI to analyse epidemiological data to improve the nation’s response to the spread of the coronavirus.

During the early months of the outbreak, control has been illusory. While Tokyo struggled to hold onto the Summer Olympics, Covid-19 spread. Now, across the world in America, New York has paid prisoners to dig mass graves for infected corpses, and over 80 refrigerated container trucks are used to store the bodies of deceased patients at overwhelmed hospitals.

Japan must stop playing games with the data and start displaying bold leadership to avert such carnage in Japan’s capital.

Peter Wynn Kirby is a Japan specialist at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan

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