That seems to be what the disaster is being officially called. Some of my own thoughts on the events, divided into a few categories:

Civil Order / Looting

Many commentators, particularly in Asia, have noted how civilized the Japanese have acted and how little looting there is. Most people cite it as evidence of their superior educational system and the way their culture frowns upon individualism. But that’s a shallow and general observation that doesn’t satisfy. What would be interesting are concrete examples of how the Japanese are taught differently and how their system is set up that delivers these results.

This article from Slate gives a meatier perspective. It explains the phenomenon as a natural outcome based on the incentives that exist in Japanese society. It turns out that in Japan, people who find lost property and hand it in to the police and entitled to a finder’s fee of between 5 to 20 percent of the object’s value. If the owner of the property doesn’t turn up to claim it within six months, then the finder gets to legally take possession of the lost object. It seems that finding a lost object and turning it in to a police station is a rite of passage that every Japanese child goes through.

The flipside of course is that failure to do so is taken seriously by Japanese police, punishable by anything from a few hours of interrogation at the police station to 10 years in prison. The Japanese take a similarly no tolerance approach to all sorts of minor crimes.

Nuclear Safety

One obvious outcome of the events is naturally far greater skepticism about nuclear energy. The industry had been undergoing a bit of a renaissance in recent years but this Hindenburg moment seems likely to set it back for decades at least. Personally, I’m a bit torn on the issue.

On the one hand, it seems clear that when things do go wrong with nuclear power plants, the potential scale of the catastrophe is frighteningly immense. While modern plants are supposed to be very safe, there’s always the human factor. Over time, people get sloppy and lazy about adhering to all of the safety protocols, or governments with stressed budgets try to cut budgets. Remember that at least one of the Fukushima reactors was due to be decommissioned this year but the Japanese had decided to extend its life. It also doesn’t help that governments have traditionally been very secretive about the scale of their nuclear disasters and have tended to downplay their seriousness until years or even decades after the event.

On the other hand, Japan has used nuclear energy for decades safely and cleanly before this disaster and many other countries do as well. France is possibly the best example. Nearly 80 percent of the energy generated in France comes from nuclear plants and even that is only because France also exports nearly 20 percent of its electricity to its European neighbors. This gives France the cheapest energy in Europe and in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, the cleanest as well.

It’s also worth pointing out that you take nuclear power out of the equation, you’d have to fall back to fossil fuels. Aside from the fact that fossil fuels don’t last forever, the environmental damage from burning fossil fuels easily exceeds the damage that the world has seen from nuclear disasters, as dramatic as they are when they occur. Plus, it’s not like the fossil fuel industry isn’t prone to large-scale disasters of its own. Remember the Deepwater Horizon oil spill? The spill damaged up to 500 km of shoreline in the US.

Finally, as callous as it sounds, it seems to be that the designers of the Fukushima reactors did their job well enough. The disasters that the reactors had to face were far in excess of the design specifications. You could always say that this meant they didn’t set their specifications high enough, but it’s impossible to account for every possibility. Should the reactors have been designed to withstand an asteroid strike as well? And then what about simply building nuclear plants in areas that are not prone to earthquakes and tsunamis?

Economic Effects

Some people have commented that the disaster might turn out to be a good thing for the Japanese economy, which has been stagnating for more than 20 years now. The reasoning is that all the reconstruction work would act as a huge stimulus. Mainstream economists however are dubious. The Japanese government has been quite happy to stimulate the economy for years with pointless construction work, tearing a huge hole in their finances, with nothing much to show for it.

Gloomier commentators have even noted that this might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for Japan. Government debt is already unsustainably high and borrowing more funds for reconstruction work must surely give investors pause. Over the long-term, given the demographic realities of the country, this could very well spur even more offshoring of manufacturing to lower-cost countries. If your factories were damaged in the earthquake, why fix them when you could just build a cheaper one in China where all your customers are anyway? Even industries that haven’t been damaged need to cut back production due to the shortage of power in the country. If manufacturers ramp up production in other factories to compensate, who’s to say that the increase won’t be permanent?

As dramatic as it sounds, this does look like it could be a watershed moment for Japan, and not in a good way.