Room for Error

Ask people what comes to mind when they think of Japanese engineering and they'll immediately answer, "quality." Some folks might go farther than that and mention the exacting standards of Japanese construction and workmanship. This is not surprising, given the Japanese tradition of exactitude. Everything in Japan is measured to the picometer, timed to the nanosecond, and set to the finest point. There are anecdotal stories of Japanese people getting flustered and frustrated by straying from their schedules by a fraction of a second. The Japanese take exact measures to the extreme, and that has allowed them to make the most durable products in the world.

So you have to wonder how Japan feels about the disaster unfolding at Fukushima nuclear power plant. Yes, an American company built the plant, but the Americans - as guests of the Japanese - had to build the plant by strict local standards and codes, and the plant had to be built to withstand the most severe earthquake imaginable. But Japanese engineering, while astonishingly exact, isn't perfect. No one, anywhere, could imagine a 9.0-Richter scale earthquake triggering a tsunami and damaging Fukushima practically beyond the ability of the plant workers to control it and avoid a meltdown.

The Japanese have come to learn this much - namely, that you can't build everything to be fail-safe all the time. It was probably never a good idea to build a nuclear power plant there in the first place. The best anyone in positions of authority can do now is to minimize the damage and do everything possible to avoid a meltdown.

Ironically, the Japanese penchant for exacting standards might help them find a way to do so.