ur doin it wrong

I was just going to Tumbl this at first, but the more I looked  at it, the more it fascinated me. For reasons that I won’t bore anybody with right now, I was roaming around on the Japan Science and Technology Agency homepage (really, there was a good reason), and I saw a tiny link in the corner for the Failure Knowledge Database. Intriguing, no? Curious as to whether this was an official, Diet-mandated version of Failblog or simply a directory maintained of every occasion throughout history when a Japanese scientist got served, I had to check it out.

Honestly, I wasn’t that far off – it’s pretty much a directory of various technology- and engineering-related fuckups – mostly Japanese, but not exclusively so – with detailed analyses of what went wrong, how it was handled, and what we can all learn from this.

“When we look at the recent high incidence of a diverse variety of failure in Japan, we could be forgiven for thinking that we are witnessing failure on parade,” write the authors of the site in a charmingly loopy introduction, before launching into a description of how it’s possible to cross-link all the various causes and outcomes of failure to better understand and prevent future catastrophes.

That kind of self-awareness is pretty commendable, right? Let’s air our dirty laundry and all that. But not very interesting, right? Wrong.

Each case report gets its own charming little pictograph that depicts just what happened in a cartoonishly abstracted, and inimitably Japanese, style. For instance, “Mass Food Poisoning Caused by Snow Brand Dairy Products“:

Which appears to be illustrating some Cronenberg-esque fable in which unsuspecting milk drinkers have their bowels devoured by malevolent termites lurking in the container.

Some of them have storytelling titles with the tone of cautionary tales, something out of Struwwelpeter, like “Crashing disaster on a construction site – the accident which originated from the inappropriate use of safety belt“:

While others are elegantly blunt – “A construction worker was run over by the tire roller“:

From time to time, their narrative reach exceeds their grasp, highlighting the importance of simplicity in the disaster-cartooning medium:

Now if you guessed here that a train conductor is sternly telling the construction foreman that bringing coffee for dead people may be the sort of thing that’s perfectly acceptable in China – but NOT in Japan… you’d be close, but wrong. Apparently this is shorthand for “The foreigner (illegal worker) overturned at the construction site and he received the weight of the frame scaffold, and he died.” Huh.

However, the site isn’t simply given over to Buster Keaton-stunt-gone-wrong construction site mishaps and chemical contamination incidents (which are rather blandly illustrated with a metal barrel and/or a chemical symbol, although I guess there’s only so much you can do with “Leakage from a crack of a heat exchanger due to corrosion and abrasion at a manufacturing plant of crude copper phthalocyanine blue“).

In fact, there are some that are quite recognizable, even to those of us from outside the risk-management biz. Such as

and

In these cases, both the simple renditions and the dry-as-sawdust technical descriptions of the disasters have an strangely chilling effect; it was weird reading about 9-11 purely from a reductionist what-went-wrong-and-lessons-learned perspective, with an odd Cliffs’ Notes history of Afghanistan appended towards the end as background, as if this was all excerpted from an engineering textbook from the year 2105.

All in all, it’s a very odd site, but not from the sense of being pointless – just in the sense of being an unorthodox combination of tragedy and whimsy that one wouldn’t expect from a technician-oriented data resource.

I don’t know how much traffic this site gets, but I find it comforting that it exists. I just picture a group of frustrated Japanese engineers and architects sitting far underground in their concrete bunker, endlessly toiling away at their failure reports and constantly hoping against hope that the benighted will one day take heed before it’s too late…