High up on any list of the worst companies are these two rogue Japanese outfits: Tepco and Takata.

Thanks to poor safety standards, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.'s reactor is still irradiating Fukushima, just a couple of hundred kilometers from the capital, 5½ years after the Great East Japan Earthquake. Its latest Band-Aid to keep the Tokyo 2020 Olympics on track: a huge ice wall to trap radioactive groundwater that even Tepco isn't sure will work.

But the scandal de jour — and Exhibit A for why Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's revival road map has gotten scant traction — concerns deadly air bag maker Takata as it veers toward Chapter 11.