“Japanese culture puts great weight on ‘face’ and so failure is not acceptable,” Kenji Iino, vice chair of the association, told Reuters in an interview.
“People try to hide their mistakes … But that tends to just make things worse and similar mistakes happen. The basic idea is to explain and analyse openly to prevent the same mistakes being made over and over again.”
Among the disasters the group has analysed are the 1985 Japan Air Lines crash that killed 520 people, as well as previous nuclear accidents. Causes range from ignorance and embarrassment to bad planning and inflexible operations.
“I think nuclear power is a dangerous and scary thing, but it is also very important,” Hatamura said in a 2007 interview.
Hatamura, a professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, will have plenty of scope to exercise his expertise in analysing the disaster at Tokyo Electric Power Co’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, where three reactors melted down after the March 11 tsunami knocked out both the plant’s electric-powered cooling system and its deisel-powered backup generators.
Nearly three months later, engineers are battling to meet what many experts say is an overly optimistic target of putting the damaged reactors into a stable “cold shutdown” by January.
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