Am I the only one who thinks it's a little creepy the way NHK is profiling the driver who, it seems to be all but certain, caused Monday's train derailment? We know that he loved sports, played basketball in junior high school, was kind of a party guy, and seemed to have been excited about being hired by JR West. I don't get it. If he were a serial killer, or something, I could understand looking for clues in his background to what animated him. Profiling him as if he'd just won some kind of prize, I don't understand.

There is one way in which information about Ryutaro Takami's breezy personality is possibly meaningful. He overran platforms several times--once by 100 meters!--and had been reprimanded and sent to retraining. According to the conductor's wife, Takami asked him to underreport the extent of Monday's overrun at the station before the derailment, presumably to avoid being relieved of his duties and receiving a more stern reprimand. And it's looking as if he decided on Monday that keeping his personnel record clean was worth risking the lives of his passengers by speeding.

That kind of thing happens all over the world, but it's a particular problem in appearances-are-everything societies like guess-where. One of Takami's colleagues also relates that the company's version of retraining involves mostly scolding by groups of superiors and pointless essay assignments about topics unrelated to railroad work, raising the possibility that JR West is in effect telling employees that avoiding the ire of higher-ups trumps every other priority. It'd be nice if that were more surprising than it is.

Added on 30 April: In the interest of translating ideas rather than words, I rendered 再教育 (saikyoiku: "re-education") as "retraining," since that's normally the word we would use for what goes on in the workplace. Re-education has totalitarian overtones.

It turns out that it might have paid to be more literal-minded. This Asahi story expands on the information in the NHK telecasts we've been seeing:

One great fear among train drivers for West Japan Railway Co. is being forced to take a ``re-education program'' after making a mistake on the job. Drivers are known to skirt safety procedures just to avoid the humiliation and financial loss of taking the program. One driver even committed suicide just after he started the re-education process.

...

Re-education of drivers who commit mistakes is a JR West policy. The mistakes include being behind schedule.

The main component of the re-education process is writing reports about the mistake to reflect on the error and think of ways to prevent a recurrence.

JR West workers who make mistakes are also assigned menial tasks, such as pulling weeds from gardens at JR West facilities, washing windows or painting company buildings.

There are one or two things that are important for context here. One is that, in Japan, those who are hired even at management level spend their first year or two going through "rotations," in which they work alongside people who do sales, clerical work, and other low-level tasks. There are a few reasons for this. One is to give future managers a sense of all the little things that have to get done to keep the organization going. Another is to make them feel a sense of kinship with people at all levels of the hierarchy. Another is to show them the side of the company that customers see. The idea is to keep managers from being out of touch about the practical effects of the policies they set once they're helping to run the place.

Against that backdrop, having people pull weeds or wash windows (or clean toilets, which is a job that's been mentioned on the broadcasts as another common punishment) is not just supposed to shame people into not transgressing again. Rather, it's also supposed to serve as a reminder that the drivers who do the crucial job of running the trains have a whole organization of people with less visible jobs depending on them.

I'd be willing to bet that that's the way the re-education program is officially conceived. There's evidence, though, that the message of humiliation ends up being so disproportionately emphasized that it drowns out the message that the employee should do his job more responsibly:

One driver was so upset at being forced to undergo the re-education program that he hanged himself in 2001. The then 44-year-old man was late by about 50 seconds in pulling out from Kyoto Station.

Bereaved family members sued JR West for compensation. The father claimed that bullying was the cause of his son's suicide.

In February, the Osaka District Court rejected the plaintiffs' request for compensation on the grounds that JR West could not have foreseen that the man would kill himself.

But the court did state that the re-education program caused the suicide.

According to the ruling, the man was forced to write up to seven reports a day about his mistake. He was told by the deputy head of his train district that he was being paid to "just study."

There's no mention of any other suicides in the Asahi article, but there is evidence that the desire to avoid re-education causes drivers to push their trains to the speed limit if they feel they're losing time. Drivers on the Takarazuka Line have apparently developed a practice of charging down the straightaway at full tilt toward Amagasaki Station and then jamming on the brakes so they can make the curve where the derailment happened Monday. It's likely that Takami was attempting such a maneuver and didn't make it.

It's not fiddling while Rome burns, exactly, but it's not unlike it enough to be very comforting:

On the same day that the Fukushiyama Line derailment occurred, employees of JR West's Tennoji Sector (in Tennoji Ward, Osaka) went to a company bowling party. At least 13 of the 43 who attended (including the chief of the Tennoji Sector) were aware that the derailment has caused multiple fatalities and injuries, an internal JR West investigation has revealed. Of those 13, 5 held an after-party at a bar-restaurant near the sector station.

The last several days of Japanese news reports have been full of top JR West managers expressing sorrow and remorse over the derailment. One scene that was played over and over involved an elderly woman mourner at the makeshift memorial who began to heave and keen with grief; she was comforted by a younger woman who appeared to be her daughter. Immediately after--and I don't think there was a camera cut--a JR West executive was shown bowing tearfully, his mouth working with apology.

Of course, tearful remorse is a highly appropriate posture for a company that has just killed over 100 trusting passengers; indeed, it would be highly appropriate for the tearful remorse to go all the way down. Company policies appear to have encouraged the driver, at least tacitly, to endanger his passengers, and it's possible that those who have been appearing as spokesmen on television are genuinely penitent.

But there is no way in hell that anyone who had seen any 30 consecutive seconds of domestic news coverage after, say, 11:30 a.m. two Mondays ago could possibly have thought that the derailment was a minor accident that was under control. The body count was rising all day, and the aerial footage made it clear that several cars had been crushed.

Of course, this is not the first revelation of shocking behavior by JR West personnel the day of the accident. There were two off-duty drivers on the train that derailed who left the scene to go to work:

The information on the workers' actions comes on the heels of news that two JR drivers were on the Amagasaki train when it derailed and smashed into an apartment block, but they left the scene to go to work as usual without helping any of the victims.

It would have been one thing if fire and rescue workers had told them that they would just be in the way, or if their superiors had ordered them to their posts to ensure that no other passengers were endangered on running train lines; in fact, I'm surprised no one thought to cook up that latter excuse, since the cover-up wouldn't have required anyone outside the company.

And--wouldn't you know it?--the derailment appears to have been a signal for employees at other rail companies to work like gangbusters to convince passengers that last week's accident will not look like a fluke for long. In the past several days, one conductor didn't open the doors properly and then opened them past the platform, and a driver admits that he sailed 170 meters past the platform because he was daydreaming while he was supposed to be applying the brakes!

JR West, having done some deep thinking, is going to reevaluate its re-education camps...uh, program:

JR West, after last month's derailment disaster in Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture, unveiled the full contents of its new "Plan for Improved Safety" on 28 May. The plan serves as notice to the Ministry of Land, Transport, and Infrastructure what JR West's fundamental policies regarding safety will be from here on. After a comprehensive review of its reeducation program for drivers "Education for Daily Service," which is regarded as "punitive," the company devised a plan the main pillars of which include the generation of consistent internal safety criteria, revision of the qualifications required of those who sit for driver certification exams, and improvements to its packed train schedules.

Alert readers who know the usual line about Japan may be wondering about that "consistent internal safety criteria" part. Japanese corporate culture is highly regimented and group-oriented--doesn't JR West (and everyone else) already have a company-wide set of standards? The answer is no: the Nikkei article goes on to state that the company plans to create its first such manual as a result of the accident. People identify very strongly with their companies, but often there's little horizontal communication within them when doing day-to-day business. Rotations for management trainees expose them to different facets of the operations, but once they start in their designated departments, for example, marketing people may nearly never communicate even with the salespeople in order to coordinate strategies and approaches.

Policy is often set from the details up. You think about all the little things you have to do and problems that might arise and make rules for dealing with them. What it all adds up to kind of becomes the company's set of basic principles by default. Of course, this avoids the Dilbert-style inanity of meaningless mission statements foisted on the rank and file by out-of-touch top managers. But it also creates massive duplication of effort and the frequent possibility that critical information may escape the notice of people who would know what to do about it. There's always the possibility that JR West's new set of standards will end up turning into nothing but an empty gesture, but if the company seriously rethinks how it trains and supports the people running the trains, it will obviously be a good thing.