In Japan, a well-designed society, everything worked

A blogger named Patrick, evidently an American who works in Japan, explains the triumph of Japanese planning in the tsunami. Skip the first section, “A Quick Primer On Japanese Geography,” in which Patrick assumes that all his American readers are morons who don’t know that Tokyo was not hit or threatened by the disaster, and start at the second section, “Japanese Disaster Preparedness.” Notwithstanding Patrick’s adolescent, know-it-all tone, he tells us a lot of interesting things about how Japanese society is organized to handle disasters. Basically everything worked during the tsunami exactly as it should, including the nuclear plants which are not in any danger at all.

One senses that Patrick is a liberal (he utters a gratuitous crack about American nativism) who despises America and deeply admires Japan. But does he realize that most of the things for which he admires Japan are a rejection of modern liberalism, or at least have nothing to do with modern liberalism, from its strictly maintained racial and cultural homogeneity to its belief in hierarchy to its suppression of individuality?

- end of initial entry -

Mark P. wrote (March 13)

So, the reactors are not in any danger at all?

LA replied (March 13):

That’s what that Patrick guy said, he said that if they explode, that’s ok, that’s part of the plan, because they are contained. But I just heard that one of them exploded and the roof of the containing structure came off. That’s NOT in the plan.

March 14

LA continues:

Here’s a story posted 11:30 a.m. March 14 saying:

An explosion blew the roof and outer walls off one of the reactors Monday, as engineers were pumping seawater to cool down a second reactor to keep its fuel rods from melting.

Top government spokesman Yukio Edano said Monday that the cooling would proceed, and hopefully stabilize the situation.

How the hell can the situation be stabilized, once the containing structure of the reactor has been ruptured?

James B. writes:

You said: “How the hell can the situation be stabilized, once the containing structure of the reactor has been ruptured?”

Simple—what blew up was not the “containing structure,” but the building surrounding it. This building essentially only acts a raincover for the actual cast concrete “dome.” The steam they were venting was pumped into the building, and the hydrogen created by the extreme heat exploded. But the actual containment structure, inside the building, is still intact.

LA replies:

Thanks. The news media did not make this at all clear. As usual, their chief function is to spread confusion and fear.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 13, 2011 08:18 PM | Send