Human Security and Japan's Triple Disaster

Responding to the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear crisis

Paul Bacon, Christopher Hobson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317747468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Japan has been one of the most important international sponsors of human security, yet the concept has hitherto not been considered relevant to the Japanese domestic context. This book applies the human security approach to the specific case of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident that struck Japan on 11 March 2011, which has come to be known as Japan's 'triple disaster'. This left more than 15, 000 people dead and was the most expensive natural disaster in recorded history.

The book identifies the many different forms of human insecurity that were produced or exacerbated within Japan by the triple disaster. Each chapter adds to the contemporary literature by identifying the vulnerability of Japanese social groups and communities, and examining how they collectively seek to prevent, respond to and recover from disaster. Emphasis is given to analysis of the more encouraging signs of human empowerment that have occurred. Contributors draw on a wide range of perspectives, from disciplines such as: disaster studies, environmental studies, gender studies, international relations, Japanese studies, philosophy and sociology.

In considering this Japanese case study in detail, the book demonstrates to researchers, postgraduate students, policy makers and practitioners how the concept of human security can be practically applied at a policy level to the domestic affairs of developed countries, countering the tendency to regard human security as exclusively for developing states.

1 Human security comes home

Responding to Japan’s triple disaster

Paul Bacon and Christopher Hobson

Taigan no kaji

Taigan no kaji is a Japanese expression that translates approximately as ‘the fire across the river’, and means that, even though a danger or problem can be seen, nothing is done about it because it is far enough away that it can be ignored or avoided: the people on this side of the river are safe. This kind of thinking has long been present in the way Japan has understood the human security doctrine. While the country has been one of its biggest international supporters, there has been an underlying assumption that human security is a concern for others. Yet one of the most important elements of the human security approach is the recognition that grave threats to the safety and well-being of people can be found everywhere. Just because Japan is an industrialized, wealthy democracy does not mean it is free of human insecurities. Certainly the kind of vulnerabilities people face will vary depending on the context, but human security’s core concern with promoting ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom from want’ is meant to have universal validity.

The relevance of the human security approach for Japan was demonstrated with horrible force on the afternoon of 11 March 2011, when a magnitude 9 earthquake occurred off the coast of Japan, triggering a massive tsunami that inundated the Tōhoku coastline. After the black waters of the tsunami had receded, left in its wake was a tragic scene of death and destruction that had left more than 15,800 dead, another 3,200 missing, whole communities destroyed and approximately $177 billion worth of damage (Japan Reconstruction Agency 2013, pp. 1–2). The tsunami also overwhelmed the inadequate defences of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, resulting in a complete loss of power, with meltdowns subsequently occurring in three of its six reactors. This would ultimately become the second worst nuclear accident in human history, with ‘Fukushima’ now assuming a similar place to ‘Chernobyl’ in the global lexicon. As of November 2013, 1,605 people from Fukushima had died of indirect causes relating to the evacuation following the nuclear accident, and still more than 154,000 people remain evacuated from the region, with some having to abandon any hopes of returning to their homes (Mainichi 2013b; Japan Reconstruction Agency 2013, p. 15). More than three years later, the massive human, economic and environmental costs are still being counted, and Japan struggles with the difficult process of rebuilding.

In this book we argue that what has become known as Japan’s ‘triple disaster’, comprising the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident, has forced a reconsideration of the way human security should be understood, and an acknowledgement of its applicability in the Japanese domestic context. After 3/11, human security was not just a concern for developing countries; it was not simply a problem ‘across the river’. The purpose of this book is thus to use human security as a way of identifying the kind of vulnerabilities that were created and exacerbated following the triple disaster, as well as for considering how people have maintained their agency or been empowered during these difficult circumstances. In addition, almost all of the contributors live and work in Japan, and on a more basic level, it is a response to a tragedy by which we have all been directly affected. In looking at the specific case of the 2011 tsunami and nuclear accident, the book also contributes to the further development of the human security approach. It does so in two main ways. First, it is focusing on human security in the context of a stable, wealthy democracy, thereby countering the aforementioned tendency to regard it as only being of relevance for developing countries. Second, the book extends and refines the approach by applying it to a major natural disaster, which stands in contrast to the tendency to focus on insecurity generated by conflict or underdevelopment. In this regard, it builds on the work undertaken in the companion volume, Human Security and Natural Disasters, which provides a more extensive conceptual discussion on human security as well as a series of case studies (Hobson et al. 2014).

The introduction commences by outlining in more detail the human security approach and its relevance for considering natural disasters. It is suggested that the simple move of placing humans at the heart of our analysis is an important corrective, one that encourages a concern with the way vulnerabilities are constructed or reduced through social practices. After the human security approach has been introduced, the chapter will briefly apply it to the triple disasters, illustrating the different kinds of vulnerabilities that were created and exacerbated, while also identifying certain ways that people maintained their agency even in these incredibly difficult circumstances. The final section provides summaries of the chapters that follow.

Human security

The human security approach, as the name suggests, commences with a basic, but important assumption: that our primary focus should be directly on the safety and well-being of people. It is based on an ‘expanded understanding of security where the protection and empowerment of people form the basis and the purpose of security’ (UNSG 2010, p. 6). In itself this may seem rather self-evident, but it represents a valuable corrective to the longstanding habit of prioritizing state security. As the UNDP observed, for too long ‘forgotten were the legitimate concerns of ordinary people who sought security in their daily lives’ (UNDP 1994, p. 22). For most people, the greatest threats to their well-being do not come from war between states, but from problems such as hunger, disease, displacement, civil conflict and environmental degradation. This approach thus seeks to realign our understanding of security with the actual threats that most severely and most commonly impact people. It is in this sense that human security is meant to entail the ‘protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the pattern of our daily lives’ (UNDP 1994, p. 3). The ultimate goal is that people can be free from ‘fear’ and ‘want’, a situation in which people can live their lives with dignity.

Human security, as first set out in the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report, is meant to offer a holistic perspective, one that places equal weight on vulnerability caused by physical violence and that triggered by other factors, such as poverty, underdevelopment or natural disasters. Some have critiqued this as being overly broad, instead arguing that the remit of human security should be limited to a concern with physical violence. Yet doing this would largely defeat the purpose of adopting a human security approach in the first place. As noted, a fundamental premise underlying the doctrine is that vulnerability caused by hunger, disease or environmental damage can be just as detrimental to the safety and well-being of people as direct physical violence. In the case of natural disasters, in many ways the human consequences are not that dissimilar to those caused by war: widespread death, massive destruction, extensive displacement and heightened vulnerability. If the objective of human security is to reorientate ‘our understanding of security towards incorporating the most severe and immediate threats that people face, it makes little sense to arbitrarily prioritise one kind over the other’ (Hobson 2014a, p. 22).

In considering Japan’s triple disaster, this volume is clearly adopting a ‘broad’ definition of human security, which corresponds to the way it has been understood in all the landmark texts: the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report, the 2003 Commission on Human Security report and the UN Secretary-General’s reports of 2010 and 2012. Furthermore, these texts all explicitly identify natural disasters as posing a significant threat to human security. Indeed, the Commission on Human Security noted that natural disasters, along with economic crises and conflict, ‘inflict the greatest shocks on society and people’s human security’ (Commission on Human Security 2003, p. 73). To date, however, those working with a ‘narrow’ definition have focused on threats emerging from war and conflict, while those that have adopted a ‘broad’ understanding have tended to look more at developmental issues. This book builds on the work undertaken in the accompanying volume, Human Security and Natural Disasters, which demonstrates in detail the theoretical and empirical ramifications of natural disasters for the human security agenda (Hobson et al. 2014). It does so by providing an in-depth analysis of a significant case study of human insecurity, one explicitly noted in the UN Secretary-General’s most recent report on human security (UNSG 2012, p. 5). Given that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent as a result of climate change, Japan’s experience may be a harbinger of what future disasters will look like.

One distinct advantage of the human security approach for understanding natural disasters is its emphasis on the direct and immediate role people play in creating, exacerbating or reducing vulnerability and risk. Natural disasters are never completely natural: human behaviours and social structures shape the way they unfold. In this regard, when considering the triple disaster there has been a tendency to draw a distinction between the natural disaster (earthquake and tsunami) and the man-made one (the nuclear accident). This separation is misleading, however, as it obscures the fact that the human element was present throughout. For the nuclear accident it is more obvious: the tsunami, a natural event, interacted with grossly inadequate preparations and poor decision-making to cause meltdowns in three of the reactors (NAIIC 2012). Yet this combination of human and natural elements was also present in the case of the tsunami: while it was unusually powerful, inadequate preparation also played an important part in what happened. Factors such as complacency over the risks posed by tsunamis, misplaced confidence in sea walls that proved to be not high enough and insufficient disaster training all contributed to the high death toll (Parker 2012). In this regard, a human security perspective accepts that it may be impossible to completely prevent natural hazards, but adequate preparation and planning can help limit the damage caused. This point is expressed by the Commission on Human Security: ‘the infrastructure of protection may be imperfect, but it can help to counter threats, mitigate their force, support people threatened and create a more stable environment’ (CHS 2003, p. 11).

In unpacking human security, it is valuable to return to the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report, which identifies four main elements of the approach:

• Human security is a universal concern.

• The components of human security are interdependent.

• Human security is easier to ensure through early prevention than later intervention.

• Human security is people-centred. (UNDP 1994, pp. 22–3)

In addition to these main elements, seven key areas of threat to human security are identified: economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security and political security. When combined, these four core components and seven major threats provide a useful framework for understanding how human security is threatened, protected or reduced. This is covered in detail in the accompanying volume (see especially Bacon and Hobson 2014, pp. 4–13), but it is helpful to recap some of the main points here.

Universal

According to the 1994 Human Development Report, ‘human security is relevant to people everywhere, in rich nations and in poor’ (UNDP 1994, p. 3). Certainly the nature and extent of insecurity will vary depending on the context, but all people are liable to experience vulnerability. This observation was reaffirmed by the UN Secretary-General: ‘people throughout the world, in developing and developed countries alike, live under varied conditions of insecurity’ (UNSG 2012, p. 5). This insecurity is reinforced by the increasingly rapid onset of climate change, which is resulting in more frequent and extreme weather events, as well as making existing infrastructure increasingly obsolete for dealing with these risks. Developing states are certainly much more vulnerable, but as Japan unfortunately discovered, even a highly industrialized and stable democracy can be profoundly affected. Indeed, the assumption that a country like Japan is essentially devoid of human security threats can lead to such issues being overlooked. For instance, the media narrative of affected Japanese maintaining a ‘quiet dignity’ in the face of considerable hardships after the tsunami (Daily Mail 2011) obscured cases of violence, rape, looting and theft that took place (Goldenberg 2011; Polaris Project 2011). These problems were certainly not as widespread as in some other post-disaster contexts, but it is important to recognize that these threats to personal security could also be found in Tōhoku.

Interdependent

The human security approach emerged in the 1990s, when globalization was the zeitgeist (Rosenberg 2005). In that context, the reference to interdependence in the 1994 document simply meant that human security threats do not respect state boundaries. Neither the Commission on Human Security, nor the UN Secretary-General’s reports on human security greatly elaborated on this aspect of the approach. Yet as we argue in the accompanying volume, ‘interconnectedness is not only about threats combining and interacting across global borders, it is also about how they compound within a specific local context’ (Bacon and Hobson 2014, p. 6). Indeed, one of the greatest potential contributions of the human security approach is providing a lens through which to examine the way different forms of vulnerability interact. Utilizing the different categories of human security threat it is possible to ‘look for “threat multipliers” – where insecurities are reinforced – and “solution multipliers” – where it may be possible to address more than one threat at the same time’ (Bacon and Hobson 2014, pp. 6–7). This is particularly relevant for natural disasters, in which a myriad of threats appear and interrelate. Examples of the interdependent nature of threats will be provided below when examining the seven main categories of threat to human security.

Prevention

Human security is easier to ensure through early prevention than later intervention: the most effective way of addressing a threat is dealing with it beforehand. The Hyogo Framework for Action, a document that exemplifies what a human security approach should look like, conveys this point well: ‘the promotion of a culture of prevention, including through the mobilization of adequate resources for disaster risk reduction, is an investment for the future with substantial returns’ (UNISDR 2007, p. 5). This concern with prevention leads to an emphasis on the role people can play in actively reducing their vulnerability.

Prevention is relevant to disaster risk reduction in general, and the Japanese triple disaster in particular, in at least three significant ways: in mitigating the immediate physical impact of earthquakes and tsunamis on people and infrastructure; in provoking more transparent and comprehensive debate on the impact of earthquakes and tsunamis on nuclear plants, and the risks of nuclear energy in general; and in creating better social policy for populations affected by disaster in the response and rebuilding phases.

The importance of prevention was made particularly clear by the nuclear accident. After the triple disaster, a government-appointed panel of experts determined that the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) was ill-prepared for a crisis and that its workers and their managers were inadequately trained to cope with an emergency situation (Hatamura 2012). The Kurokawa report was even more damning:

There were many opportunities for taking preventive measures prior to March 11. The accident occurred because TEPCO did not take these measures, and NISA [the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency] and the Nuclear Safety Commission (NSC) went along.

(NAIIC 2012, p. 16)

These issues are explored in depth in Jeff Kingston’s chapter, where he demonstrates how a failure to properly prepare created a situation of extreme human insecurity. The terrible experience of the Fukushima accident has also led the Japanese public to turn against nuclear power, as they have become sceptical over claims that it is possible to adequately prepare for future earthquakes and tsunamis. As Bacon and Sato consider in their contribution, public sentiment increasingly supports the argument that the best way to prevent a nuclear accident is by abandoning nuclear power completely.

People-centred

On a basic level, stating that human security is ‘people-centred’ reflects the underlying assumption that security should be defined directly in relation to the well-being of people. This may seem like an obvious injunction, but too often it is not followed. TEPCO’s behaviour offers a particularly egregious example of this. As the reactors at Dai-ichi went into meltdown, TEPCO tried to delay for as long as possible the use of seawater to cool the reactors, as this would render them unusable in the future (Maeda 2012). And in the months that followed, TEPCO avoided dealing with the problem of contaminated groundwater at the plant because of concerns over how the stockmarket would assess this considerable financial liability (Asahi Shimbun 2013b). In situations such as these, TEPCO repeatedly prioritized its own interests ahead of the people that had been affected, and the government failed to regulate it to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Human security comes home: responding to Japan’s triple disaster
• 2 The politics of human security in Japan
• 3 Mismanaging risk and the Fukushima nuclear crisis
• 4 Hidden insecurities: the workers of Fukushima Dai-ichi
• 5 Human security as a military security leftover, or as part of the human condition?
• 6 Human security and life recovery: lessons from the 1995 Kobe Earthquake and the 2011 triple disaster
• 7 Towards a people-centered housing recovery after the triple disaster
• 8 An ageing society and post-disaster community security
• 9 Post-disaster recovery and the cultural dimension of human security
• 10 What role for nuclear power in Japan after Fukushima? A human security perspective
• 11 Towards human security: climate change and the military role in humanitarian assistance and disaster response
• 12 Life after the triple disaster: human security and the future
• Index