Japan: Two Pins

Japan’s disaster toll last week stood at 450 in the Kyushu mine explosion, and 162 in the three-train wreck near Yokohama. As far as anyone could determine, both tragedies resulted from faulty cotter pins, only an inch or two long.

At the Mikawa mine on southern Kyushu island, a cotter pin apparently fell out of a coupling on a string of coal cars halted on a slight incline. One coal car rolled back down into the mine. Gathering speed, it flew off the track on a curve in the tunnel and struck the mine wall, showering the fatal sparks that ignited coal dust in a vast explosion. At Tsurumi, outside Yokohama, another cotter pin evidently sheared off the wheel housing of a southbound freight car. The loose lost wheel caused the last three cars to derail and sprawl across the adjacent track. Seconds later, alerted by a warning flare, a passenger train southbound from Tokyo halted on a clear track beside the freight. At that moment, a northbound commuter train roared up the middle track. The locomotive crashed into the derailed freight cars, did a right angle flip and sliced through the fifth and six coaches of the passenger train. The first rescuers recoiled from the carnage. Recalled one: “There were bodies piled four to six deep. There were legs, arms and heads torn off, all bloody, scattered everywhere. It was a horrible human version of a doll repair shop.”

With national elections being held this week, the Socialist opposition hurriedly tried to make political capital of the tragedies. An official Socialist statement blamed the government, which operates the railways, and the private owners of the mine for “having placed too much emphasis on efficiency and profit and not enough on the safety and security of passengers and employees.”

The mine owners, who used to boast to foreign visitors that the Mikawa was an “underground palace,” could have retorted that government inspectors had found Mikawa to be among the best-equipped mines in the country. The government could point out that the stretch of track where the collision occurred was equipped with modern safety devices—but they proved useless because the entire chain of events, from the derailment of the freight cars to the arrival of the third train, took less than 30 seconds.

Few Japanese had heart to enter the argument; they were too busy burying the dead and worrying about the survivors. Of the 274 hospitalized miners, an alarming 100 were suffering from amnesia. As traffic resumed on the Tokyo-Yokohama line, the trains moved slowly past Tsurumi and sobbing passengers dropped bouquets at the accident spot. Railway workers collected the flowers and reverently arranged them on an embankment beside the track.