Nuclear Investigative Panel Head: Not About Who
Dunnit
By Yoree Koh
The committee probing the causes of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident will not conduct a witch hunt in an attempt to name and shame those responsible for the ongoing crisis, its head said on Monday.
Yotaro Hatamura, the head of the committee, said that becoming mired in tracking down those to be held accountable could compromise the committee’s main objective to determine what led to the disastrous consequences at the nuclear power plant.
“We will not take activity that is designed to reveal the location of the responsibility or with whom the responsibility lies,” said Mr. Hatamura at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo on Monday. “If identified, then possibly that information could be taken outside of the investigative committee to other parties and could lead to actions taken as a criminal case or even beyond that as a civil case.”
The 70-year-old scholar said that past investigative committees charged with the dual responsibility of identifying individual responsibility and causation usually do so at the expense of thoroughly examining the latter. Instead, it’s more about the state of mind.
“We are here to conduct a probe into what went on in the minds of certain individuals as they partook in certain activities, how they observed (the situation), what was their impression and how did they understand the situation,” he said, a professor emeritus of engineering at Tokyo University. Mr. Hatamura is known for his work in mistakes, coining the discipline “the study of failure”.
And if the government wants to seriously explore and penalize individuals who were responsible for the events that transpired, Mr. Hatamura says a separate committee should be formed. Some lawmakers both within and outside of the ruling party are trying to set up an investigative commission within parliament that would give it legal power, but it is unclear whether the proposal will materialize.
Mr. Hatamura even articulated that “pursuing individual responsibility is not our objective” as one of the eight main tenets of the committee’s goals.
Created by Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s cabinet in late May, Mr. Hatamura is leading the 10-member body comprised of other academics, attorneys, a mayor of one of the affected towns in Fukushima prefecture and a novelist. The body will look at actions taken by Tokyo Electric Power Co. decision makers as far back as four decades ago to get a full understanding of what happened on March 11. There have been critics of the committee from the start, saying the body lacks the legal authority to force non-government workers to testify or disclose information. But Mr. Hatamura said he doesn’t view it as a problem. He said on Wednesday that international attention and the sheer scale of the accident would make it undesirable for people to reject the committee’s requests.
The group’s interim report is expected to be released by the end of the year and the final report expected to be finished sometime next year.
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