How Have Safety Standards Been Constructed? by Takehiko Hashimoto (review)

We rarely show much interest in the basis of safety standards, although the safety of almost everything in society is built on them. The reason is simply that we assume these standards to be based on robust science. As a result, complex real-world elements have become obscured behind safety standards, and myths about safety continue to be held. We tend to regard something as perfectly safe as long as it satisfies its safety standard, and perfectly dangerous when it falls short. This attitude often results in overreactions in response to mass media reports pointing out a failure to comply with standards. Safety standards, however, are not criteria based purely on science that invariably separate safety from danger, but instead are artificial creations obliged to balance benefits and risks. Knowledge of the assumptions and processes behind the making of various safety standards is one part of the basic literacy of living successfully in this complex modern society. Based on these ideas, I started a graduate course at the University of Tokyo on how to set regulatory standards, and in 2014 I and three colleagues published a book explaining the processes of various kinds of standards. It focused on safety in foods, drinking water, air quality, and radionuclides, although it covers traffic-safety-related standards as well (Murakami et al. 2014).

The book How Have Safety Standards Been Constructed?, edited by Takehiko Hashimoto, was also written for a related motive: to visualize past, buried memories about the processes and disputes in developing various safety standards. It is based on the final reports of a four-year, joint research project that started in 2012 and was published in 2017, and it consists of nine chapters by eleven authors. It has two distinctive features compared with our previous works. One is its focus on such engineering fields as aviation, marine vessels, firefighting, river dikes, and nuclear facilities; the other is its adoption of a historical approach. Based on a large body of historical materials, some chapters indeed go back beyond World War II.

This book is also a collection of case studies on real "regulatory science" (even though this is not a term the authors use). Over forty years ago, Alvin Weinberg (1972) advocated the concept of "trans-science" and defined it as the "questions which can be asked of science and yet which cannot be answered by science." The constructing of safety standards is clearly a trans-scientific activity, not something achieved solely by science, containing as it does many assumptions and inferences. Economic considerations must be included. Weinberg pointed to "engineering judgment" as one example of trans-science and stated that the compelling reason for defining it as a trans-science was that "the engineer works against rigid time schedules and with a well-defined budget" (210).

Unlike the concept of trans-science, which tends to emphasize the fact that science cannot answer all of the questions raised by policy, the concept of regulatory science, advocated in late 1980s, emphasizes the idea that science can try to answer questions raised by policy, although both look to the gap between science and policy. Activities for constructing safety standards in the field of medicine started being called "regulatory science" in the 1990s, and more recently the concept of regulatory science has been spreading to other fields, such as chemicals and food.

This book consists of nine fascinating case stories on real regulatory science in Japan, with a focus on engineering. The nine stories are divided into four categories: transport, disasters, health, and international standards.

The first addresses the development of aviation and maritime safety standards, focusing on the first half of the twentieth century. Both fields have in common that insurance companies played a critical role in developing safety standards at an early stage and that international negotiations inevitably accompanied the process.

The second section addresses the development of safety standards for mitigating fire, flood...