Tag Archives: TEPCO

Language and nuclear disaster — the Japanese language’s use of honorifics may reveal a parallel tendency to defer taking charge 0

Is our barbarians’ English better suited to efficient, emergency communication? Read what Minae Mizumura said in regard to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster: One unlikely side-effect of the Japanese crisis has been a new critique of our use of honorifics. One tends to associate honorifics with social hierarchy, but they play another critical role: they [...]

The arrogance of thinking we know it all — Tokyo Electric Power Company did not even consider the possibility of a tsunami hitting its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant 0

“Tsunami, here, in Japan?” After Japan’s 9.0 magnitude quake, I wondered why anyone would position a nuclear power plant in a violent earthquake zone, where a tsunami might hit it. It turns out the planners and regulators were just categorically stupid: Yukinobu Okamura, a prominent seismologist, warned of a debilitating tsunami in June 2009 at [...]