![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Chernobyl.png.webp\" "\\"Chernobyl\\"")
An image of the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear power plant.<\/p>\nAn image of the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear power plant.<\/p>\n
The last two months have seen the anniversaries of the two worst civilian nuclear catastrophes in history. Indeed, as of Sunday, April 26, it has been 40 years since the Chernobyl disaster, which happened in the former Soviet Union. And last month, on March 11, it was 15 years since the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which happened in Japan.<\/p>\n
Both disasters are remembered as\u00a0cultural exceptions, either due to Soviet communism or to Japanese \u201cgroupism\u201d\u2014the latter representing the tendency to act as members of a group. While culture certainly played an important role in the governance of the Fukushima disaster, framing nuclear catastrophe as mere cultural exception is highly misleading. Doing so normalizes nuclear catastrophes by depicting them as mere accidents that arise from poor managerial cultures. Furthermore, it prevents these\u00a0events from being framed as global threats that can happen anywhere in the world.<\/p>\n
The cultural exceptionalism of nuclear accidents started with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. While academics\u00a0have\u00a0demonstrated that the causes of this disaster are complex, a specific narrative that highlights Chernobyl as a purely\u00a0Soviet accident<\/a>\u00a0continues to hold a grasp on our global imagination. Sonja Schmid<\/a>, associate professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, says that Chernobyl represented an important\u00a0wake-up call for the nuclear lobby<\/a>,\u00a0alerting them to how a major nuclear disaster with global consequence was a possibility.<\/p>\n In response, members of the nuclear lobby stressed the notion of a so-called\u00a0\u201csafety culture<\/a>,\u201d claiming that Chernobyl was the result of a\u00a0low safety culture<\/a>\u00a0associated with biased Soviet ideology.\u00a0Rather than depicting nuclear technology as problematic, this notion represented nuclear accidents as the byproduct of Soviet culture. The counterpart was that a disaster like Chernobyl could not happen in the West, which had a safety culture untainted by communism.<\/p>\n In this context, Fukushima was a nuclear disaster\u00a0that was never supposed to happen. Rising out of the radioactive ashes\u00a0of World War II\u2019s atomic bombings, Japan was the poster child for the\u00a0Atoms for Peace Program<\/a>, the US propaganda program dedicated to promoting the peaceful pursuits of nuclear energy. Far from Soviet managerial culture, Japan embodied the values of the post-war liberal world order that supposedly sustained an unparalleled nuclear safety culture. Fukushima crushed the myth that major nuclear accidents like Chernobyl could not happen outside the old Soviet Russia.<\/p>\n However, when the disaster happened, Fukushima\u00a0rapidly became wrapped in yet another \u00a0cultural explanation. For instance, in the executive summary of the\u00a0Official Report of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission<\/a>, which was\u00a0a commission set up by the Diet of Japan to\u00a0investigate the causes of the disaster,\u00a0the Chairman of the Report famously reported that Fukushima was a disaster \u201cMade in Japan.\u201d The report went on to stress that the causes of this disaster were found in the \u201cingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to \u2018sticking with the program\u2019; our groupism; and our insularity.\u201d<\/p>\n While the Japanese version of the Report does not contain mentions of a disaster \u201cMade in Japan,\u201d the cultural explanation of the English-based report was rapidly mobilized by proponents of nuclear energy. This explanation gained momentum by blaming\u00a0Japanese culture itself<\/a>, rather than nuclear infrastructure. By stating that\u00a0Japanese cultural traits<\/a>\u00a0had caused Fukushima, this narrative aimed to show that nuclear accidents are preventable with the proper safety culture. What was once deemed unimaginable quickly became perceived as a disaster that\u00a0was preventable in a kind of post-Nostradamus fashion. Much like what happened for the Soviets, this narrative argues that it was no surprise that the disaster happened in\u00a0Japan. After all, weren\u2019t the Japanese prone to group thinking? This surely explains their misfortune!<\/p>\n![\"repurposed](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Atomic-power-slogan-ouside-Fukushima.jpg.webp\")
Yuji Onuma had come up with the slogan for the gate that orginally hung above the entrance to his home village of Futaba, north of the reactors at Fukushima. It said, \u201cAtomic Power: Energy for a bright future.\u201d After the disaster, he went back, with a new, handwritten correction in red, \u201cAtomic Power: Energy for a DESTRUCTIVE future.\u201d Image courtesy of Yuji Onuma<\/p>\n