More than a year has passed since tragedy struck the Tohoku region of Japan. A huge earthquake and tsunami left 20,000 people dead and missing, hundreds of thousands homeless, and resulted in a nuclear accident at Fukushima that ranks with Chernobyl among the worst ever.

The tragedy cried out for a rapid policy response: the government failed to meet this challenge. The authorities’ incompetence is chronicled in the report of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, released this month. Its sobering conclusion is that this was not a natural disaster but “a profoundly man-made disaster – that could and should have been foreseen and prevented. Its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response.”

The report documents the failings of Tepco, the power company that ran the Fukushima plant, the bureaucracy with regulatory responsibility for the nuclear industry and the government of prime minister Naoto Kan. It describes a culture of collusion inside Japan’s “nuclear village”, which put the interests of power producers ahead of public safety and wilfully ignored the risks of a major nuclear accident in an earthquake- prone country.