Guest post from Jonelle Patrick
Yes, getting caught red-handed falsifying safety data on the shock-absorbing equipment that’s supposed to keep skyscrapers from falling down in an earthquake is the kind of thing that might warrant a public apology. This week, the KYB Corporation admitted that twenty-eight buildings – including a major Tokyo train station and the landmark 634-meter high Skytree – were constructed using products on which they’d faked the test data. And – oops! – they’ve been doing it for fifteen years.
The Tokyo Skytree. Tallest tower in the world, tallest building in Japan. Their website says the KYB shock absorbers have “no problem with their performance”, and “We are sorry for causing so many worries.”
Japan is well-known as the land of hilariously inadequate apologies, but the company executives responsible for this latest debacle really strapped on their best weaselfaces to deal with this one.
Bowing deeply in front of the requisite number of tangled microphone cords, KYB “senior manager” Keisuke Saito trotted out the short and not-so-sweet:
We would like to apologize for this sort of inappropriate action.
These KYB products look great. No need to test them at all.
You don’t have to be the sharpest red pen on the Sorrywatch desk to spot that putting “would like to” in front of the otherwise righteous word “apologize” immediately deflates the meaning from “we are genuinely sorry” to “we are entertaining the idea of being sorry.” And “this sort of inappropriate action” not only laughably fails to describe the act requiring an apology, it suggests the unnamed transgression is something on the order of “we let slip a silent-but-deadly poot at the dinner table,” not “a two hundred story tourist attraction built with our products might collapse in the next Big One because we faked the test data.”
It gets worse. A spokesman for the Japanese government ministry that failed to oversee KYB’s manufacturing safety compliance joined them in a classic Bad Apology Duet, rising up on his hind legs to declare:
This action, which has brought deep concern to building owners and users, as well as weakening public trust about safety, is extremely regrettable.
No no, it’s not the Leaning Skytree of Tokyo, just an artistic angle.
Regrettable? Failing to call the Emperor “Your Highness” is regrettable. Allowing a company to get away with falsifying data on earthquake safety equipment is something else. Like, maybe, criminal?
And what happened to the essential part of the apology where the contrite parties outline how they plan to fix this mess? The company has been as silent as a heap of earthquake rubble on this subject, leaving the watchdog ministry to waffle, “We don’t know how and why data were falsified and so we have ordered (the companies) to investigate the cause and submit a report on it.”
Well, alrighty then – the corporation responsible for faking their product testing for the past decade and a half is going to be in charge of the investigation into their own wrongdoing.
The difference between this sorryfail and others that have resulted from government and industry working together like shower drains and mildew, is that seven very tall buildings housing government ministries are among the twenty-eight known to be outfitted with KYB earthquake equipment. Which means that despite the lack of any real apology, some of these buildings might actually get fixed.
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When not condemning bad Japanese apologies to death by a thousand cuts, Jonelle Patrick writes novels set in Tokyo, reveals the cost of a beetle funeral and the secret to getting into a host club on her Only In Japan blog, and points out where you can make your own plastic food on The Tokyo Guide I Wish I’d Had</span. She lives in Tokyo and San Francisco.
