CP, the following is an interesting article which presents the historical and psychological aspect of Japan's notion of 'taking responsibility'...and shows that "Tepco" is only being 'kept in place' so that there's 'something' for people to point fingers at:



less than 50% snip from the Japan Times Sept 16th

Fukushima and the right to responsible government


"... when the government started translating Western legal codes to use for Japanese laws, there wasn’t even a Japanese term that could be used to express the concept of a “right,” so a new one had to be invented. With this cultural foundation, notwithstanding the introduction of Western-style courts and legal codes, the notion of using the former to assert rights under the latter never really took root....

...Japanese bureaucratic organizations are said to base their personnel evaluations on a system of gentenshugi, meaning that advancement in the civil service is generally done in lock-step, with officials losing points for failures rather than gaining them for successes. Full marks are given for doing nothing wrong, or perhaps doing nothing at all...

...Avoiding and obfuscating responsibility seems to have become a very basic feature of Japanese governance...

...This brings us to Tokyo Electric Co. (Tepco).

When reporting on events at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, the Japanese media dutifully refers to it as a Tepco facility, reinforcing the notion that only the troubled utility is to blame. But any normal company in the same situation would have been rendered insolvent ages ago, leaving the whole mess for the government to fix. This would have been a perfectly logical result — Tepco was merely operating the plant in accordance with the government’s energy strategy and supposedly rigorous set of safety regulations....

...Whether Tepco was ever a normal company, it certainly isn’t now that it is majority-owned by the Nuclear Damage Liability Facilitation Fund, a quasi-governmental entity created shortly after the Great East Japan Earthquake, ostensibly to help resolve damage claims arising from the Fukushima meltdown. It has done so by propping up Tepco financially, with critics suggesting that this Fund’s real agenda is to limit claims...And this is the Tepco whose lawyers famously argued in court that since it did not own the radioactive fallout strewn across people’s land, it was not responsible for the resulting damages...

... but what about the people expecting a single company to deal with a problem of such unprecedented magnitude in the first place? If there is still money for things such as bullet trains — and now, Olympic swimming pools — surely fixing Fukushima would be an infrastructure project of similar magnitude worthy of pursuing as a matter of national urgency..."



[link to www.japantimes.co.jp]