Jeff DavidPublic Health Preparedness II Prof. Sumner March 5, 2015

Catalysts and Promulgation: Gaps in Public Health Risk Communication and the Nuclear Crisis at Fukushima Dai-Ichi

Introduction:

On March 11, 2011, the Japanese mainland was struck with a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the northeast coast. Dubbed "The Tohoku Earthquake-Tsunami," "The Great East Japan Earthquake," or more simply "3.11," this natural disaster had thrown the Japanese government and its people into disarray. This event is particularly anomalous because the Japanese nation has prided itself on being well prepared for natural disasters installing grand measures to make its megacities like Tokyo relatively earthquake-proof. In fairness, the sheer magnitude of the 3.11-earthquake far exceeded Japanese expectations and preparations only to be exacerbated by the far more damaging tsunami. The unprecedented synergy of the 3.11-earthquake challenged and stretched both the public health capacities as well as the organizational structure upon which the Japanese government actualizes emergency response. A variety of hazards in flooding, infrastructure destruction, property damage were evident and expected. However, what was most unexpected was a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi Power plant. Nonetheless, no matter the degree of the devastation, the nature of the hazard, nor the application of resources at hand, the most crippling aspect for many response plans is communication. Only through communication can a robust, malleable and adaptable "all hazards" response plan be realized, a fact which was unfortunately at a loss to Japanese officials. In the case of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear disaster, it can be said that the disaster was a result of the unprecedented synergy of the 3.11-earthquake but the ensuing burden on the Japanese people was critically catalyzed by a mismanagement of information. The profound irony in the role of public health workers beyond the scope of responders was their role in the creation of an unfortunate communication dynamic. Since the context of radiological hazards from nuclear power plants is a matter controlled by the government, the responsibility of public health communications fell entirely upon the government. The most damning aspect of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi Nuclear Disaster was not the event itself. Rather the breakdown, misinformation, mismanagement of communications coupled with failures to maintain a sustainable "safety culture" to the public was the factor which truly promulgated this Japanese public health disaster. Furthermore, the development of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear disaster concretely proved the importance of how risk communication is created and the importance of public health to assume more assertive role in its foundation.

Challenges in Communication – The Hazard and the Context

In many ways, the hazard of radiological contamination has historically needed to be illustrated in euphemistic and unrealistic ways. The promise of nuclear energy is a tantalizing source of energy which can revamp and revitalize both the economic and social spheres of society. Installing nuclear reactors on Japanese land has been a rigorous and calculated public relations campaign in favor of installation. This media and government facilitated promotion by

concocting the “Myth of Absolute Safety” and perpetuating it on the principle that the sophistication of current Japanese technology reduces the risk of significant radiological contamination to near zero. The mindset of this relatively grand notion of “absolute safety” was “deemed necessary to overcome strong anti-nuclear sentiments” with the expectation that an efficient energy source and promise of advancing technology would be enough to insulate the Japanese public from harm (Funabashi 2012). Nuclear power had political will and Japan as a nation had the capacity to build in addition to an imminent need for energy. However, in promoting government-industry crafted safety protocols as being “absolute,” the Japanese government and TEPCO had inadvertently adopted more responsibility than they could have ever prepared for. By communicating in this fashion of allaying fears by reducing perception of risk, citizens had no choice but to defer to the mutual contract and assign trust to the state. From the onset, the creation of this “Myth of Absolute Safety” is a fundamental misstep in risk communication which comprehensively but detrimentally suppressed dissent on the uncertainties of nuclear power. Not only did this perpetuated myth suppress dissent, it also incentivized its preservation. After all, to make any sort of changes or drastic alterations “would be an admission that existing safety precautions and regulations were insufficient” undermining the initial goal to attain comprehensive acceptance of nuclear power in addition to the reputation of the government to represent what is best for the people (National Academy of the Sciences 2014). This initial campaign to communicate to the public is profoundly reflective of how the communication of risk and the historic intentions for such campaigns predate the crisis of a hazardous event.

In the aftermath of the 3.11-earthquake and resultant tsunami, the “Myth of Absolute Safety” was unfortunately put to the test. Much of the prose on the issue of nuclear power in Japan demonstrates a troublingly close association of the government with that of industry. The hazard of radiological contamination is a field mired in highly technical content but is a profoundly damaging hazard in terms of both environment and pathogenesis. A significant amount of public health concerns saw the contamination of water, topsoil and the further dissemination of radiological contamination via wind or sea was posed. Since the Myth of Absolute Safety was perpetuated by the Japanese government, it can be said that its communications representatives effectively acted as public health workers in handling and mishandling of relevant public health information. That being said, the Japanese government was arguably thrown into a public health quagmire that would pervade classical public health concerns from food-water safety, environmental contamination and policy development.

Managing Public Expectations and a History of Ameliorating Public Fear: The Collapse of a Myth

In adhering to the “Myth of Absolute Safety,” a precarious culture was cultivated between citizens, the government and industry. This culture had been marked by a successfully calmed citizenry who held high expectations that the purported “technologically superior” government was both capable to act and mitigate any threats of nuclear disaster. The Japanese public rightfully expected a response and was aware of the technical nature in nuclear meltdown. The very fact that “citizens and doctors outside Fukushima had high expectations that the incident would be explained by a radiology expert” is indicative that the public had a sense of the nature of the problem (Kohzaki et al 2015). Though the population has a sense of the hazardous nature of uncontrolled nuclear disaster, it was clearly up to the government to provide and

explain the specificities of this event in addition to posing a plan for the future. In the time-sensitive urgency that characterizes nuclear hazard containment, the debilitating effect of such distorted communication was their unfortunate incorporation into the decision-making.

In many ways, the “Myth of Absolute Safety” had to be specifically “proven.” One of the specific technical mechanisms to prove government capability was the SPEED1 system which was marketed to be able to run predictive software on distribution of environmental dosages in incidents like nuclear disaster. Specifically crafted for the purpose of making informed evacuations the SPEED1 mechanism was based upon “forecasts for diffusion during a nuclear event” (Funabashi and Kitazawa 2012). To some extent, the finances and resources taken to develop such a sophisticated system was its own proof of the technical superiority principle that helped insulate the Japanese public. Ironically unused, subsequent neglect of the SPEED1’s reliability in prediction lends to the overall confusion in preparedness planning leaving the government to arbitrate, rather than systematically piece out, their response plans at Fukushima Dai-Ichi. What was once a platform to simply quell the fears of nuclear disaster instead proved to be a bullet point proving deeply entrenched inefficiency at effective risk and response communication. SPEED1 demonstrated a need for integrative communication between research and policy making.

In light of the obscure, inconsistent and constantly changing information coming from Fukushima Dai-ichi, it is understandable that a public fraught with anxiety would turn to any source of information. The persistent use of “Interim explanations, while appearing necessary, may sometimes erode trust. Ongoing faithful explanations at a personalized level are essential for forging a relationship of mutual trust.” (Kohzaki et al 2015). When this mutual trust is compromised, it leaves the public endlessly wondering about the nature of the disaster and especially on how it will impact them individually. This renders the primary source of public health information as unreliable because it is giving information that is neither productive nor consistent. In times where the primary source, the government, cannot properly nor concisely communicate the hazard event, the people will turn to “nongovernmental or alternative sources” (National Academy of the Sciences 2014). When the communication lines are as disrupted as they are, alternative sources accrue their own interpretations of the event producing messages which only prove to exacerbate or distort the critical information coming out of Fukushima Dai-ichi. In many instances, these messages could exaggerate, conflict or complicate preexisting information. One example that best represents the interference in communications was an unnerving use of the word “unanticipated” when describing risk. “TEPCO was using [ the word “unanticipated”] to describe the height of March 11…TEPCO perpetuated the safety myth and did very little to back-fit the existing nuclear systems” (Funabashi and Kitazawa 2012). By attempting to downplay their responsibilities in procuring safety for employees and residents affected by Fukushima meltdown, TEPCO’s description of the situation as “unanticipated” further destabilized the anxiety of the people and added to the collapse of the Myth of Absolute Safety. To further the complexity, the relatively arbitrary nature of decision-making in evacuation boiled down to “men wearing white protective uniforms arriv[ing] at a house and order[ing] residents to evacuate” doing so in a manner of “without explaining the reasons for evacuation” (Funabashi and Kitazawa 2012). As the situation further devolved, it became clear that risk/responder/planning communications had jointly created its own quagmire leaving an anxious public no longer insulated and reviving rightful dissent on an overwhelmed Japanese government.

Information Mismanagement and Government Arbitration Breeding Public Mistrust

Mismanagement of information is not limited to the prose, intent or manner in which a message is sent out to the public. Rather, many of the gaps in communication in the mishandling of Fukushima Dai-ichi existed internally, a characteristic the public was very receptive to. The platform of public trust in the government was beginning to erode at the foundation rendering an initially precarious bond to a quickly degrading point of division. Concomitant with the compounding erosion of trust was a subsequent polarization and galvanization of the Japanese public. With these series of events considered, it becomes increasingly clear that there is neither a unified nor consistent front in the information management of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi disaster.

To some degree, the public expects unilateral agreement and singular consistency to prevail in emergency situations. In one case such pressures were political in nature while other cases were technical in nature. For the internal political pressures, the subsequent reemerging galvanization of the Japanese public on nuclear hazards in Fukushima amplified tendencies towards secrecy and silencing. In contrast to the ideal purposes of public health policy, the assessments of the nuclear hazards of Fukushima Dai-Ichi proved to hamper and inhibit meaningfully responsive policy development. Instead, the political pressures of a galvanized public incentivized the creation and passage of a law that “imposes a 10 year prison sentence on those who leak state secrets; a law that journalists fear could be used to silence Fukushima whistleblowers” (VICE 2014). Considering that policy development is its own form of public health communication, the mechanisms of political communication to the public have been compromised. Not only does this new law communicate the criminalization of information dissemination on risk and hazards, rather it suppresses the necessary political will in the Japanese government who are meant to help represent the people in the National Diet. Compounded with compromised political will, criminalizing risk/hazard communication in this manner blocks the ability of politicians to be informed and to act. However, the political nature of risk communication to the public does not only exist internally. For the case of a “consistent political message” the trustworthiness of the Japanese government was further placed into scrutiny when on March 16 “a recommendation [was] issued by the US Department of State that Americans located within 80 km of Fukushima” should evacuate which is derived from concerns that “the situation could worsen” (National Academy of the Sciences 2014). Naturally, when a country like the United States is administering such a warning to its nationals, the Japanese locals have reasonable expectations that their own government might either respond in kind or present a rationale. The fact that the Japanese government had made no such recommendation exacerbated an already tense and anxious public. Mismanagement of information and communications begs the question of “what is the appropriate role of foreign authorities in providing recommendations?” especially in cases where such “recommendations are contradictory to those made by the host country government” (National Academy of the Sciences 2014). The external political messages, those deriving from foreign or international bodies, only exacerbated the public health situation at Fukushima. In this sense, the critical misstep was the Japanese government’s relative silence on the matter. Mistrust and public health communication in this way demonstrated not in a traditional form of an “overt misstep” in conveying messages as seen in TEPCO’s use of the word “unanticipated.” Rather, the misstep in communication is illustrated as overt silence or incentivizing the silencing of the communication lines as the primary mission of government policy unduly remanding to the public to remain complacent and compliant.

In addition to policy changes, it was becoming clearer that the silence encouraged in politics was to patch the quickly degrading Myth of Absolute Safety. In one incident, VICE was allowed access to Fukushima Dai-Ichi and accompanied by a representative of the Ministry of Economic Trade and Industry whom was presumed to be “on a mission to show everyone that there is nothing to be worried about. (VICE 2014). To do this, the representative refused all protective gear even when the VICE crew was advised to put on protective gear. Upon arrival, TEPCO employees who had been wearing personal protective equipment intervened to demand that the VICE crew and the representative immediately leave the area. This interplay between an alternative media source, the government representative and the intervention of TEPCO employees demonstrates the complex interference of communications surrounding the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear disaster. It demonstrates that the public, both domestic and international, have a vested interested in investigating the real conditions at Fukushima. The government, in the form of the Ministry representative, has its own mission to exude an atmosphere of overarching control while the abrupt intervention of industry, in the form of TEPCO, acknowledges that there is something severely beyond control. These three messages of industry, government and the public are continually colliding with one another as the agents of public health seem to have their own vested interests that lie contrary to the mission of public health.

In terms of technical pressures, the specific and “invisible” nature of radiological contamination characterized the devolution of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and integrated it into the public and government conscious. For instance, in the SPEED1 data was later used but at a point wherein its primary mission in creating informed/dose-dependent evacuation plans would be irrelevant in the face of previously arbitrated evacuation. The reasons for SPEED1’s initial disuse in the wake of the Fukushima disaster were out of the “MEXT being reluctant to release predictions based on what government officials called ‘unreliable emission source term’” (Funabashi and Kitazawa 2012). SPEED1 data was provided to the Prime Minister’s Office on March 23, 12 days after the beginning of the disaster in an event wherein time and geographical scope needs predictive software the most. This disuse and time-inappropriate application of SPEED1 demonstrates a profound technological disconnect between government and industry despite the two appearing to be intertwined. In relation to technical pressures and the dissenting Japanese public, it became clear that the widening of the Fukushima nuclear disaster prompted investigations as well as desires to keep the public informed of radiation levels. One of the government responses was to institute a series of monitoring posts which function as local Geiger counters which would reside near residential areas, schools, hospitals and public areas. While conceptually helpful in conveying notions of transparency, it was evident that the consequences of the collapse of the Myth of Absolute Safety had profoundly penetrated the public’s conscious best represented by the fact that “many locals believe the government had only cleaned up the immediate area around them” rendering this entire system suspect (VICE 2014). In an effort to resolve the technical disparities between the public and government, local investigations would reveal that the readings immediately around the post would be true, but areas just beyond the monitoring ranges show significant levels of radiological contamination that would be more than twice the monitor’s readings. Aside from attempts to placate the public, even official technical communications made by the Japanese government were in constant flux. While dose-dependent relocation protocols instituted by the Japanese government were less than arbitrary, their importance was by no means effectively communicated. In order to find a rationale to evacuate considering the scale of the nuclear disaster, “the government started

communicating relocation and sheltering orders” at a “threshold radiation dose of 20 mSv/yr” which is an anomalous threshold considering that 20 mSv/yr is “20 times higher than the allowable dose limit for public exposures resulting from normal nuclear plant operations” (National Academy of the Sciences 2014). Ironically, this threshold is at the upper limit of the International Commission on Radiological Protection’s range of exposure thresholds lending some validity in the selection of this dosage. However, the technical details on why there is an allowable dose at all in even normal conditions, confused the public who seemed to be convinced that there is an “all-or-nothing” relationship in environmental dosages. Not only are the expectations of the public, founded in the Myth of Absolute Safety, contributing to the interference and resultant panic in communications, it is putting previous safety standards on trial thus undermining the authority of the government in the interest of public health.

Despite the politics and technicality of nuclear hazards, it is undeniably clear that they present a public health burden and the slow revelation of that burden is breeding this mistrust. From the lens of food safety, it has long been evident that contaminated food has detrimental effects but in the case of Fukushima Dai-Ichi, this is complicated by the fact that the Sendai region’s primary industry is agriculture. One media investigation led by VICE interviewed a farmer in the Fukushima region comprehensively illustrating the public health burden of radiological hazards. VICE revealed that, while the mandated safe level is 10 Bq/kg, the interviewed farmer was allowed to continue the sell the produce as usual. The farmer had “been growing produce that measured 3000 becquerels without even knowing it” and the farmer felt “the only safe vegetables are the ones without any measurements” demonstrating a damning gap in risk communication for food safety with the expectations of the public (VICE 2014). However, the story only devolves to the point where the farmer begins to elaborate a new frontier of the mental health and psychological vulnerabilities that come from mismanaging relevant hazard communication. “Selling such produce to the markets made me feel severely guilty” says one farmer who goes on to say “finding out that he had been selling highly contaminated produce, [ the farmer’s father ] was consumed with guilt” to the point that he had committed suicide (VICE 2014). With this story, it is evident how penetrative the burdens of communication mismanagement become as it pervades daily life, industry and the mental health of those affected. This particular unfortunate chain of events ultimately begins with the Japanese government having allowed this farmer to continue producing crops utilizing public trust but acutely catalyzing its degradation.

Communication Chains – Japanese Top-Down vs. American Bottom-Up

Communication chains in times of emergency need to adapt and adopt alternative pathways that need to veer from their inherently custodial nature. As such, “the key to effective crisis management is the speed with which bureaucratic machinery can be shifted” lending credence to the notion that bureaucracies need to be functionally diversified (Funabushi and Kitazawa 2012). Therefore, information gathering and communication management can structurally manifest as “top-down” or “bottom-up.” The fundamental difference between these two is the distribution of power or responsibility which subsequently determine the quality and prose of the information.

In the US, disaster response is structured as “bottom-up” while Japanese disaster response is “top-down.” Essentially, the US and its inherent communication structure is oriented to gather on-site data so that it might ascend to the local/state government who can provide more

immediate action employing the federal government when further resources are required. Japanese communication structures relies on the central government and its abilities to coordinate or distribute national resources to respond which encompasses command of resources in the local/state government. Fundamentally, both structures are equally viable as well as functional for disaster response and distinctly bear their advantages and disadvantages. However, the differential distribution of responsibilities within each organizational structure create the framework for the communication dynamic.

For the case of a compounded and synergistic catastrophe like the 3.11 Earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, it becomes apparent that the fundamental differences between “top down” to “bottom up” and their resultant communication structures prove to be the determinants of the efficiency of response. The efficiency of response itself is itself confounded by the quality of the infrastructure. In the wake of the 3.11 Earthquake “responses to the earthquake and tsunami diverted emergency response teams that could have otherwise focused on responding to the Fukushima Dai-Ichi accident” (National Academy of the Sciences 2014). The ultimate challenge lay within the quick decision making and the versatility of the responding agencies in light of new information; these two facets being the essential purpose of effective disaster response.

Based on the principle that the national resources to respond were scarce and faced with “overwhelming relief demands of unexpected scale” critical decisions needed to be made but acquisition of pertinent information was critically slow. Compounded with the scale of disaster was to preserve the Myth of Absolute Safety to procure the future of the Japanese energy industry once the Fukushima nuclear disaster had been resolved. In many respects, the intentions in dealing with Fukushima had been marred with intentions that are unjustly prospective rather than centered around responding to the situation at hand. After all, “the problems were not with the law or the manual, but with the humans who formulated the ‘anticipated’ risks that fell in line with corporate and political will but did not represent the actual risks the nuclear plant faced” and the “top-down” structure only proved to predispose the Japanese government to negate its bureaucratic capability to resolve nuclear disaster (National Academy of the Sciences 2014). Aside from the uncertainty in applying preemptively crafted predictive software like in SPEED1, real-time issues surrounding the nuclear disaster in Japan needed to make a slow ascent to even be acknowledged as an issue. If communication structures are oriented in this fashion, it can only mean that time is wasted on a time-sensitive issue because as information makes its ascent to be officially acknowledged, the government needs to take its own time to evaluate in the midst of balancing the complicated political interplay it has faced itself with. Even when a decision is made, it makes a slow descent into actualization and implementation since its kinetic wholly depends on the internal processes of the Japanese central bureaucracy. The caveat of hazardous events like nuclear/radiological contamination is that the area of contamination becomes exponential with time and a government preoccupied with decision-making will ultimately be rendered with exponentially decreasing capacities to make a restorative change.

The Expertise Deficit – Cultural Barriers to Communication Management

In one sense, the barriers to effectively managed communication are a result of how culture and technology foster the context from which communications come from. Judging from the exceedingly intertwined nature of Japanese government with that of Japanese industry it is most evident that the nature of “who is in charge” severely impacts the expertise which impacts

the decisions made and the conduct in which it is conveyed to the public especially considering the extant “top-down” communication chain. Communication management as a result of culture is a compounding of structure and how it accommodates a specific norm. In this way, the acutely needed communication of any risk during the catastrophe or even the development/assurance of preemptive safety development at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant was intrinsically broken; arguably a consequence of the overarching communication system rather than the specific plant itself.

The managerial practices and personnel transition of the Japanese nuclear power/ energy industry has been described as a “revolving door” of sorts most exemplified in the practice of “amukudari” and “amaagari” (National Academy of the Sciences 2014). Amakudari “refers to the practice of hiring retired, high-profile public officials for private-sector jobs” while Amaagari refers to the “movement of experts from the private sector into government/government advisory positions” (National Academy of the Sciences 2014). These two practices worked in tandem to make the availability of unbiased nuclear energy technology difficult to attain since amukudari effectually instituted a nepotistic culture while amaagari perpetuated a cycling of nuclear energy advisory staff biased in favor of the private sector. This dynamic between private sector and public sector was made with the intent to have “Japanese government and industry take advantage of each other’s technical knowledge” (National Academy of the Sciences 2014). However, the cultural practices interfered with the unbiased real-time communication necessary to resolve the Fukushima nuclear disaster because the interplay of amukudari and amaagari only proved to unfortunately prioritize private interests in regulation/disaster response over public health. Thus, subsequent communications to the public will be characterized in accordance to the prevalent cultural characteristic; that of an insular, conservative and reactionary nature that the Japanese public had been conditioned to become accustomed.

The issue with this intimately cultural bridging of industry to government/regulation is uniquely problematic in the case of a “top-down,” centralized, and tradition-oriented Japanese management structure. What is most concerning is the results of an intimate coupling of legal and industrial expertise which institutes a dynamic that subordinates one to advance the agenda of the other. For example, regulatory agencies tasked in nuclear safety like NISA were nonfunctional by being “unable to answer questions posed by response team” and equally reticent to “offer proposals to bring the accident under control” (Funabashi and Kitazawa 2012). Instead, NISA simply became a vassal communicator to the industry in the form of TEPCO which only demonstrates how the extant communication pathways are only feeding back into itself to persist itself at the expense of resolution and public health.

In the sociopolitical environment, one where silence and secrecy is reinforced, cultured by the Fukushima nuclear disaster reignites dormant dissent or scrutiny, the calls for transparency are systemically compromised. The intention of informing the public about hazardous exposures needs to persist in a relatively unbiased manner whereas the a government , assuming the role of a public health coordinator, who is intimate with the industry prolonging an incident is working against the public health mission. Cultural practices predating the occurrences of a hazardous event inherently compromise the nature of all communication either predisposing it for bias and distortion or orienting towards facilitating corrective and fair reassessments.

Lessons Learned I – Fostering a “Safety Culture”

Given the importance of culture within lines of risk communication, it is important to create a “safety culture” that needs to be integrated bilaterally. The safety culture for seemingly remote events like nuclear meltdown needs to be formulated in such a way that communication lines between public to private are both evident and objective. Judging from the initial crafting of the “Myth of Absolute Safety,” the safety culture that most effectively conveys risk cannot be one which inspires unrealistic or sensationalistic expectations. Rather, there needs to be a committed and concise rationale which elucidates how the benefits outweigh the risks. A step in the right direction for the Japanese government was the fact that “safety culture deficiencies at TEPCO and its regulator have been explicitly acknowledge in Japanese government reports” lending to a gradual realization of the importance of communication transparency within an effective safety culture (National Academy of Science 2014). To foster a “safety culture” is to simultaneously acknowledge the importance of culture in the public health communication framework in addition to standardizing an alignment towards public health over private interests. In approaching the cultural aspects of communication the unspoken or mutual dynamics, like those found in amukudari and amaagari, can be addressed to ensure that an unbiased voice that can convey the needs of the public could participate in discussion of safety in nuclear energy. Cultivating a safety culture needs to be done in such a way that there is an equal representation of industry, government and public which is only attainable through the establishment of a normalized dialogue or communication line. This “safety culture” facilitates the underlying conditions of effective communication across public and private groups rather than actively intervening against such practices. By fostering a safety culture, the culture and communication dynamic becomes resilient in the face or scrutiny, regulation and most importantly disaster recovery. Not only does the institution of a “safety culture” strengthen communicational ties in a public health framework, it also strengthens intra-institution communication framework which encompasses protection of workers/responders/volunteers. This resilient communication framework that could exist both within and beyond participants in public health responses, like those desperately needed in Fukushima, is fundamentally undermined by the intangible nature of culture.

Lessons Learned II –A Need for Transparency

In furtherance of establishing a safety culture, communications must persist as transparent and unbiased. By rendering communications between industry, regulation, government and public to be “transparent,” such notions introduces the important capacity for both assessment and reevaluation. The gap in communications, debilitated by the internal structure of Japanese nuclear energy industries, rendered the nuclear industry as “untouchable.” Reinforced by the precarious Myth and coddled by the preeminence of nuclear power in Japanese economic revitalization, incidents prior to the Fukushima Dai-Ichi disaster were rendered “immune to scrutiny by civil society” (National Academy of the Sciences 2014). Additionally, to eschew communication transparency is to inspire efforts to manipulate regulatory pressures or predispose decision-making for cover-ups. In this way, the recent predilection for secrecy and silence in the Japanese handling of the Fukushima nuclear disaster should raise a precedent for prioritizing transparency in crafting future communicational structures. Thus, in the Fukushima case, any resultant significant communications were a heavily diluted account of the real situation going on in Fukushima Dai-Ichi. In this light, any efforts,

public health or not, were heavily hampered because the information available to act and evaluate were severely insufficient. Responders, workers, residents, regulators and contaminators alike are all on the same page in a structure which highlights the importance of information transparency. When the communication structures allow for pertinent information on a rapidly developing situation, like the one found at Fukushima Dai-Ichi, it optimizes each individual’s ability to carry out their unique roles in controlling any radiological contamination event and beyond. When there is no transparency, the situation at Japan profusely illustrates that a debilitating prevalence of anxiety, gridlock, mistrust and interference in all levels of an affected society or nation.

Lessons Learned III – The Need for a Consistent Standard and its Relation to Communicating Real-Time Information

The concerning practice of amakudari and amaagari demonstrated the irony of a regulatory body being intimately involved with that of industry. This irony in “regulation [as] entrusted to the same government bureaucracy responsible for promotion” indicates that communications must be “standard” in a sense that it is “comprehensively consistent” (National Academy of Sciences 2014). It can be concluded that the value of transparency is ultimately dependent on the level of consistency. While it might be unreasonable to expect overarching consistent message, especially in the uniquely sociopolitical issue of nuclear power/radiological contamination and the scale of the 3.11 Earthquake, it is reasonable to proclaim that the public health elements of communication need to have consistency. This notion should pervade all fields of the public health sector since much of the public health functions relies on the principle of having a common mission in society. It goes to show that a consistent standard is important internally, which is evident in American public health organizational/managerial and communicational structures like Incident Command System. The idea of keeping a consistent standard conveys a sense of authority and reliability in the face of prevalent interference that was seen in the risk communication of Fukushima. These standards do not have to be limited to groundwork in response protocols or mitigation plans, they need to be extended into technical fields of which it’s significance must be conveyed to the public. In the case of Fukushima, a highly technical issue in dosimetry and the significance of threshold doses was a great factor for confusion in the affected population. The idea that the concept of threshold dosages itself was controversial conflicts with the public’s notion of what constituted “contamination” in the environment. In this manner, communication lines between public health representatives and the public itself must bear its own consistent standard to properly convey or elucidate critical messages especially in a rapidly developing situation like Fukushima.

While the Fukushima nuclear disaster demonstrates the inadequacies of top-down structures, the US should treat the disaster as a lesson in the emerging complexities in highly technical disasters. Technical disasters like, but definitely not limited to, nuclear meltdown is an esoteric field which is understood by the few and not culpable to the many. It can concluded from the Japanese handling of Fukushima Dai-ichi that a top-down structure orients governments towards arbitration in times of urgency which is a self-defeating mechanism in the nature of nuclear crises. However, the simple premise that a top-down approach is less efficient than the bottom-up approach does not absolve countries like the US from the communication quagmire seen in Japan. Acquisition of real-time information is what differentiated efficiency of response. Best represented by the notion that there was a “lag-time” in decision making for the Japanese

responses at Fukushima, the nuclear disaster shows that the quality of interdepartmental/intragovernmental integration in the form of “bureaucratic machinery” is a primary determinant in a comprehensive public health response. The idea that this “machinery” needs to have alternate pathways to deal with emergency situation requires that there needs to be recognition that an organizational/communicational structure that is effective for peacetime is not equivalent to one effective for emergency. In this way only does the US “bottom-up” approach to emergency response truly bear a distinction over the Japanese “top-down” approach. Real-time information significantly alters the course of an emergency and if the responding structures need extended time to process its significance, then it undermines the capacity to intervene on an emergency. To some extent, the importance of real-time information indicates that response opportunities for a rapidly developing situation have an intrinsic half-life. Acknowledging that the opportunities to produce meaningful response bear its own urgency and expiration dates highlights streamlining the integration of real-time information in decision-making. While it is evident that the inefficiencies of the Japanese public health infrastructure continue to place a costly burden on the people, the US needs to investigate streamlining of technical information to avoid a similar situation. If the existing communication and managerial structures are not oriented towards acquiring both technical and non-technical data or if they disproportionately favor one over another, a similar public health quagmire could equally open up in the US in spite of the “bottom-up” structure it has tactically constructed.

Lessons Learned IV – The Consequences of Conserving a Myth and Silencing Communication

Communication lines are important to grasp the impact, both hypothetical and emerging, or the risk expected in a specific course of action. From this notion, to silence or placate the messages that result from communication lines is to create either an infrastructure that undermines or paralyzes public health functions. Since the public health field pervades many aspects of civil life, this infrastructure is implicitly synthesized preemptively and the specific way in which it is made will predispose it to unique challenges. It was clear from the onset that making the public health dialogue of Japanese nuclear energy nucleate around a “Myth of Absolute Safety” was to predispose the resultant communication infrastructure to a precarious balance of the technical with the social. Concomitant with the precarious bond, communication structures and their resulting political interfaces were oriented conservatively or to preserve this “Myth” at the expense of public health. To conserve a myth is to render the public health infrastructure perilously close to private agendas which will run subsequent functions to secure conditions conducive to private enterprises rather than conditions for a healthy community. From the gradual creation and conservation of the “Myth of Absolute Safety” it becomes clear that communication must render public health infrastructure to be familiar but not biased and to be separate but not insular from the emergent socioeconomic issues in society. Application of this lesson will allow public health communication to be set up in a way that it can knowledgably participate, preventatively intervene or efficiently respond to “all hazards” both technical or non-technical.

Another critical lesson found in communication pieces of Fukushima nuclear disaster was the government’s predilection of silencing which simultaneously demonstrates how the foundation of public health dialogue interfaces with responses to emergency/mitigation. Demonstrating that the desire for silence transcends all spheres of society, seen in the case of instituting government Geiger counters all the way to passing legislation criminalizing state

information, the Japanese public health consciousness had entrenched its bureaucratic mechanisms to preserve the “Myth of Absolute Safety.” The consequence of silencing communication only paralyzes effective response because it negates the critical pieces of information needed for an effective mitigation/disaster response. The elements of emergency communication including acquiring real-time information, the creation of a consistent standard and allowing for necessary scrutiny all but inhibit responses in urgent crisis. Moreover, the negation of communication itself will impact how risk is communicated in long-term impacts of disasters or a “next generation effect” (Kohzaki et al 2015). Specific to the Fukushima nuclear disaster are those of thyroid cancer, infant-child health, maternal health, food-water contamination and occupational safety (VICE 2014). Precisely how impacts of resultant radiological contamination might manifest remains unclear for the Japanese people but it is expected that there are no expected “next generation impacts” (Kohzaki et al 2015). However, in an analogous situation at the Soviet Polygon nuclear test site, many birth defects, genetic abnormalities and co-occurring cancers seem to be markers of a “next generation effect” on the people affected in this manner of radiological contamination(VICE 2014). The effects of radiation on the public’s health are still rendered unclear and it will only exacerbate factors of incidence/prevalence if communication lines are silenced in a way that manifestation of relevant burdens cannot be addressed. Therefore, to bear the propensity to silence has lessons that extend beyond the concepts of operational efficiency or communication consistency as it penetrates into health issues that are important but cast out of the public eye when a disaster is deemed to be “resolved.”

Conclusion and Limitations

In both precise and comprehensive ways, the public health competency of “communicate and manage information” was poorly demonstrated in the Fukushima Dai-Ichi disaster in the wake of the 3.11 Earthquake-Tsunami. Much of the public health infrastructure and communication lines were intrinsically broken and inefficient. The Fukushima Dai-Ichi disaster emphasized that much of public health communication is essentially management/mismanagement of the public’s trust. Equally so, much of this management/mismanagement is reliant on the orientation of the bureaucratic structure it is founded upon in addition to how it relates itself to private industry. Just as much as it is important to instill public trust, transparency is critical because the manner in which public trust is attained determines the resiliency of the people/public health infrastructure to deal with rapidly emerging situations. The consequences of misinformation and mismanagement tend to be prevalent confusion, communication interference to a rapid degradation of public trust. Since many of the successes of public health response is a function of how public health represents both the public and regulates the enterprises that are undertaken, it demonstrates that the most compromising of public health communication exist prior to a disaster. In the field of public health communication, the management of information is important to consider in light of there being many dimensions of public health issues and an equal amount of sources of interference of risk/hazard communication. If the purposes of public health communication and disaster/emergency response are indeed “all-hazards response” then it should be said that adhering to such a principle is an emphasis on communication. With this emphasis should it be said that public health needs to take on a characteristic assertiveness in its function and do so in a manner that seem warranted or fair in the perspective of both industry and the public. Only

through communication does a robust public health response become possible which is the primary determinant in subsequent resilience in the face of disaster or crafting fair regulation to procure public health in peacetime.

Sources

Funabashi, Yoichi and Kitazawa, Kay (2012) “Fukushima in review: A complex disaster, a disastrous response” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 0(0) SAGE publisher 

http://bos.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/02/29/0096340212440359.full.pdf+html

Masaoki Kohzaki, Akira Ootsuyama, Takashi Moritake, Toshiaki Abe, Tatsuhiko Kubo and Ryuji OkazakJournal of Radiological Protection Vol 35 01 doi:10.1088/0952-4746/35/1/N1

National Academy of the Sciences (2014). Lessons Learned from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident for Improving Safety of U.S. Nuclear Plants. Committee on Lessons Learned from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident for Improving Safety and Security of U.S. Nuclear Plants; Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board; Division on Earth and Life Studies; National Research Council. Washington (DC).

VICE. "VICE on HBO Season 2: Playing with Nuclear Fire and No Man Left Behind." Online video clip. Youtube. 23 May 2014. Web. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYynn9B7uns

Vice. “Vice on HBO Season 2: Pink Gang Rebellion and Genetic Passport.” Online video clip. Youtube 2 May 2014. Web. https://youtu.be/YMnpnd0T4gE