"As any bureaucrat (or, in the case of Jun, former bureaucrat), or commission chairman knows, the forewords and executive summary are what deadline-pressed reporters are going to cite and therefore what the vast majority of the population will hear as the take-home message."

As any journalist (or, in the case of Rick, a...
journalist), or editor knows, you never cite the foreword, in Japan at least, because it's the chairman's message and is not signed by the entire committee. I did check the Yomiuri just to be sure, and it specifically cites from the main text of the executive summary.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/politics/news/20120705-OYT1T00
537.htm

Actually, it may have been, like summaries for most government reports, an administrative, not executive, summary. And given the production process, it's unlikely that the commission members ever read it, even after the public release. (In fact, there are rough spots in the main text that lead me to wonder... no, say it ain't so...) Notwithstanding, Still, that's still a lot of pages for reporters to read before the deadline, no? Near impossible, even for speed readers, no? (Keyword: embargo. And most likely another,
micro-summary.) And if it's an English language summary, there's an even greater chance that it's an administrative summary, to which Dr. Kurokawa affixed a somewhat different foreword. I'd be extremely surprised to hear that any of the other commission members except, maybe Ambassador Oshima, ever read that summary; you can be sure that the Japanese media could care even less, except for its boomerang effect.

One last thing. I don't buy the "Cultural Crap" myself, but if you read the report--I had to read part of it, and it'll be surprisingly good reading for you if you enjoyed the O.T. (use you imagination and the human drama bubbles up between the lines)--you'll see that Japan was miles, say three miles, behind Europe and the United States in taking severe accidents seriously, and the report gives surprisingly good details on what appears to be TEPCO's curious mix of what I think is hubris and fear of public sentiment. (You'll be surprised to know why TEPCO didn't build that seawall), as well as NISA's weakness in the face of TEPCO stonewalling (which when you think about it is worse than the "collusion" that is making the rounds of the commentariat, or so Dante would say). Is that cultural?
Or, to put it another way, does it help any to use that word to explain why Japan (or more specifically, TEPCO as the primus inter regional monopolies), as it turned out went wrong? But I can see why Dr. Kurokawa, with his ten best years spent in the US medical academia, vented.

That's it for now. Have a nice weekend.