Japan has a long history of disaster narratives, and this chapter considers five related to a single historical event, the 1985 JAL flight JL123 crash, which remains the world’s deadliest single plane crash. The chapter reviews relevant literature in relation to how dramatizations portray “the truth” while seemingly needing to fit with disaster narrative conventions. The chapter analyzes the way in which five dramatizations handle aspects of the JL123 crash and its aftermath. While the focus is on the JL123 crash, the methods used in this chapter could be applied to other events in the same way.

Introduction

Just as “fake news” has been discussed in relation to reporting, so it is pertinent to think about dramatizations and the degree to which they present “the truth” about events. This chapter addresses this topic by considering the media representation of a single event that occurred in 1985 in Japan. On 12 August 1985, JAL flight JL123 crashed in Ueno-mura, north-west of Tokyo. The crash remains the world’s deadliest single plane crash, with an official death toll of 520. Miraculously, four survivors were found when search and rescue teams reached the site the next morning. Naturally, news media covered the aftermath of the crash in the days and weeks that followed, but there have also been books, documentaries and dramatizations over the years. The scale and other aspects of the crash have ensured that significant interest remains in the disaster.

By focusing on the dramatizations relating to the JL123 crash, this study allows for a detailed analysis of disaster narratives. Japan has a long tradition of disaster movies, with the Godzilla franchise being the most well-known. To frame the study, the chapter begins with a review of the relevant literature to understand the role of dramatizations in portraying “the truth” together with their need to fit with conventions that disaster narratives include. The rest of the chapter analyzes the way in which five dramatizations handle aspects of the JL123 crash and its aftermath.

THE PARKER REPORT of February 1986 entitled ‘Speaking for the Future’ highlighted the need in the long-term national interest to expand the study of Japanese language, history, economy and culture. In the light of this report the University Grants Committee agreed to fund the establishment of new posts. One objective was to ensure that Japanese could be studied at degree level at a number of universities where Japanese had not hitherto been taught at this level.

The time was right, if not overdue. The Japanese economy was expanding fast and there was increasing interest in Japanese management techniques. Japanese investment in Britain was bringing significant benefits to the UK economy. There had been a Japanese presence in Wales since the early 1970s but its importance grew in the 1980s.

Cardiff University, or the University of Wales, Cardiff College, as it was then called, recognized the importance of Japan to the development and prosperity of Wales. In 1987 the new Cardiff Business School was established. At the first meeting of the School Board it was agreed that the School should bid for funding to appoint new lecturers in Japanese studies as well as staff to teach the Japanese language as there were already a number of staff in the Business School who were researching aspects of Japanese management and Japanese investment in the UK. The bid was successful.

In 1989 the Cardiff Japanese Studies Centre was established as part of the Cardiff Business School. Its director was Douglas Anthony who came to Cardiff from the Japanese Studies Centre at Sheffield University. Based on his experience at Sheffield, he concentrated on establishing a number of joint honours programmes and other combined degrees. In 1990 the Cardiff Japanese Studies Centre accepted its first students who were able to choose from one of six degree programmes combined with Japanese: business, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Law. Despite the subsequent deflation in the Japanese economy and a reduction in the level of Japanese investment in Wales, Cardiff University continued to attract a good number of students throughout the 1990s, many of whom were attracted to the Centre by the presence in the school of prominent academics such as Gaye Rowley and Mark Teeuwen as well as Douglas Anthony.

Puzzling over gaps between practice and declared principles in government and public services

It is often said that high officeholders in government, both elected and appointed, live chronically time-pressured lives with many urgent and competing claims crowding in on their limited time and attention. Such individuals often, indeed routinely, declare that they want to focus on the big picture and on the pursuit of their grand visions, and that they are mainly concerned with achieving results that bring substantive social value rather than with small-print details of process and structure or with the trivialities of day-to-day media gossip.

Yet careful analysis of how those high-level officeholders in government use their limited time often reveals that they spend a remarkably large proportion of it – 50 per cent or more, on some estimates – on matters of media presentation and that they often devote a surprising amount of their time as well to small-print details of legislation and government organisation.

When the builder of the world's first steamship, Henry Bell, sent the British Admiralty details about his ideas for this epoch-making maritime development, their naval Lordships treated the information with ‘cold neglect’, seeing steam propulsion as irrelevant to the future of naval warfare (Mitchell 1971: 131). When information emerged about a near-meltdown at the US Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in 1978, engineers and managers at the Soviet Chernobyl nuclear plant dismissed it as a product of capitalism's inherent tendency to sacrifice safety for profit (as compared to in the Soviet Union, where no nuclear accidents were ever reported), and declared that their own installation could have nothing to learn from the US failure (Hawkes et al. 1986: 110). When, only a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tony Blair's New Labour Government in Britain adopted a system of targets to apply to every part of the public services, well-known problems of performance target systems – ratchet effects, threshold effects, output distortion – that had been carefully documented by Soviet historians and economists since the 1950s were wholly ignored, only to be rediscovered the hard way as all of those problems emerged in the British target system (Hood 2006).

So can knowledge and action be effectively brought together in government and public services? It's easy to slip into earnest clichés about the importance of evidence-based policy or better statistics for good governance and to gloss over the formidable social and cultural gulf that so often yawns between ‘knowers’ and ‘doers’.