How the President of Tokyo Electric Became the Invisible Man

In fact, nobody has seen much recently of [Masataka Shimizu] the president of Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, owner of a haywire nuclear power plant just 150 miles from the Japanese capital.

He is the most invisible — and also most reviled — chief executive in Japan.

What should we think about Shimizu’s vanishing act? Our first impulse might be to revile him. But what he was doing was profitable, and nobody had complained before the Fukushima meltdowns (except for some marginal anti-nukers). To revile him is to revile ourselves, since we support(ed) his industry.

Shimizu’s disappearance bespeaks of the nothingness, the “legal fiction,” that is an industrial capitalist corporation. Take away the smoke and mirrors and what’s left? Not a living thinking feeling creature. Not even the Gingrich that Stole Christmas.

What’s left is a bitter memory of believing in something that was all pretend, and that while it pretended pushed everybody around, made the rules, and sucked the profits out of everyone’s hands, something like Enron or Goldman Sachs. A corporation that pretends about everything it offers, doesn’t have to deliver, much less feel guilty about not delivering. Think AIG, Citigroup or BP. It was nothing to begin with. It goes bankrupt and is gone, the destruction it wrought being its legacy (think PCBs in the Hudson River or mercury in the Meadowlands).

At times like this—today as Masataka Shimizu becomes invisible—it’s good to be reminded that multinational corporations are recent invention (about 400 years old), and even more recent is their economic behavior of global ecocide (about two hundred years). Considering that humans are about 150,000 years old, that is a blip.

I try to imagine an economy that is not ecocidal, and recall that Thomas Jefferson was friends with Destutt Tracy, who co-founded the discipline of economics, and was a Physiocrat.

Physiocracy, or the government of nature, derived its name from the fundamental tenet of the sect, that the soil alone was the source of all wealth, its cultivators the only productive class, the rest of the world was designated as classe sterile.

The reason you’ve never heard of the Physiocrats is that their movement drowned in the tsunami of the Industrial Revolution. No matter. I like the idea that “the soil alone is the source of all wealth”: the other ideas not as much.

Soil produces and sustains life. A simple comparison with any legal fiction proves it the superior.

Soil is the source of agriculture, which has provided the fundament of human civilization for 10,000 years. Despite reports to the contrary, agriculture remains the source of all human culture.

We are constantly indebted to soil. The word human is derived from the word humus, or topsoil. It is not derived from corporation, because corporations are all pretend. Unlike soil, which is real like you and me.

Masataka Shimizu hides from his customers, his neighbors he never intended to harm, because—among other things—he has poisoned the soil of Fukushima for at least 300 years.

And as he becomes more invisible with each new radiation leak, Tokyo Electric, the largest power company in Asia, is vanishing too. (Lemon socialism, here we come: “taxpayers bear the cost if things go wrong, but stockholders and executives get the benefits if things go right.”)

Japan’s government is reportedly ready to consider nationalising the operator of the crippled power plant at the centre of the worst nuclear accident in the country’s history.

News that the state could take a majority stake in the Tokyo Electric Power company (Tepco) came after nuclear safety officials confirmed traces of plutonium had been found in soil in five locations in the Fukushima Daiichi atomic complex. …

Tepco’s shares have lost about 70% of their value – or $30bn (£19bn) – since the 11 March earthquake and tsunami, and the cost of insuring its debts against default are 10 times higher than they were before the crisis.

Related posts:

1. a map of radiation levels in Tokyo
2. Revisiting Vermont Yankee
3. Tokyo’s radioactive tea
4. Whatever we do to nature, we do to ourselves
5. What Caused the Fukushima Meltdowns