Japanese engineers have a much deserved reputation for efficiency. How else could they have created a car industry that could defeat the U.S industry on its home ground? But the crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant suggests a partial rethink is needed. When it comes to nuclear affairs, maybe they are not as brilliant as they should be.

Some years back I found myself appointed to official committees and councils (shingikai) set up to consider nuclear energy policy and nuclear safety. What I saw and heard then gave me little confidence that Japan was on top of the safety question. The overall impression was one of pervasive, bureaucratic incompetence and complacency.

We were told constantly how Japan's high technical levels and attention to safety meant that accidents like the 1986 Chernobyl reactor explosion in the former Soviet Union or the 1979 Three Mile island meltdown and radiation leakage scare in the U.S. could not happen to Japan. Yet today we are looking at a disaster much worse than Three Mile Island. On the international scale of danger from nuclear accidents, Fukushima is said to be closing in on Chernobyl.