The Fukuchiyama Line derailment: putting safety above profit (2005)

The pressure toward efficiency, and safety as a premise

At the heart of this decision was the work of lifting safety — which had slipped into the background while the company competed on profit and punctuality — back to the very top of management. In the wake of an accident that took 107 lives, JR West went beyond piecemeal measures such as installing ATS and rethinking its training: it wrote safety into every year’s management plan and built a structure, open to outside eyes, to uphold it. The weight of the reform lies in this — that a company that had put efficiency first set out to rework its priorities through both its institutions and its culture. Measured against the scale of the loss, no set of measures can be called sufficient; yet resetting the very premise on which the company was run was no small thing.

Even so, holding safety up as the first priority is not the same as rooting it in every corner of the organization. The criminal responsibility for the accident could not be pinned on any individual even after successive presidents were compelled to stand trial, and the courts showed how hard it is to reduce an organization’s negligence to a particular executive. The weight of the duty to keep people safe — and the question of who is to bear it, and how — was left unresolved by the verdicts. Under a premise that runs safety and diversification side by side, will the pressure toward efficiency once again push safety into second place? The question the Fukuchiyama Line posed remains, twenty years on, a standing task of management.