主题：【原创】关于日本的一些杂感：规范 -- 铁手

http://www.economist.com/node/18441111

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Still, the road out of this mess will be breathtakingly hard. That is not just because it will take many months to dig through a tangle of steel and concrete that stretches for hundreds of kilometres. And put aside the difficulties of choosing whether and how to rebuild on such a treacherous coast.

It is also because Japan has a political system so set in its ways that it has trouble adapting to creeping change, let alone emergencies on a biblical scale. Too often, the flip side of Japan’s deference is an establishment able to blunder on without fear of protest and social strife.

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And so people camped in refugee shelters in Kesennuma have only rice and hot soup. Red Cross staff say the soup lines are swelling with “food refugees”, people who may have their homes but have no food, for the shops have run out.

The problem is bewildering. Along a 17-hour drive from Tokyo to Kesennuma, cars snaked in a line out of almost every petrol station. Hundreds of kilometres from the disaster area, restaurants and shops were shut. Petrol-pump attendants said fuel was being diverted to the tsunami-hit coast. Yet in Kesennuma, some waited a whole day and got just a 20-litre ration at the end of it.

For this, bureaucratic inflexibility is partly to blame. Shortly after the tsunami, Kouta Matsuda, an opposition senator and former boss of a nationwide coffee chain, drove a four-tonne lorry to his constituency in Miyagi prefecture, where Kesennuma is located. He had to battle with authorities for permission to use trunk roads that were closed except for emergency vehicles. He said he found plenty of food at his destination, but no means of distributing it to the hardest-hit areas.

Later he used a friend’s helicopter to fly food, medicines and mobile-phone chargers to Miyagi, but was refused permission to land. He asked if he could drop the supplies at the airport, hovering just a metre above the ground. Again, he was told this was against the rules.

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Yet Mr Kadono acknowledges that because of increased refining elsewhere in Japan, the overall supply of fuel was never short. That makes the fuel queues all the more bewildering. Part of the problem is a law requiring oil companies to keep 70 days’ worth of fuel in reserve. It took ten days to relax this to 45 days. The ministry may use only “administrative guidance” to encourage companies to release fuel; it cannot order them to do so. It has also been slow in dispatching tanker lorries along the empty highways north.

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