information about Fukushima published in English in Japanese media info publiée en anglais dans la presse japonaise
3 Février 2013
February 3, 2013
Special To The Japan Times
Second of two parts
Next month we will commemorate the second anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, and the ongoing nuclear calamity that ensued. But the personal tragedies it has brought about will remain on the conscience of the Japanese until those in business and government who are responsible for the nuclear disaster own up to their negligence.
Much as after World War II — when guilt was sublimated and liability evaded — the aftermath of the explosions and meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has seen a concerted campaign of obfuscation and coverup by business leaders and government officials in what might be called “The Great Nasuri-tsukeru Hoax,” with nasuri-tsukeru meaning “shifting the blame to others.”
One person who copped a good portion of that shifted blame is Naoto Kan, prime minister at the time. However, with the publication of a book last year, he intends, in a very clear and logically formulated way, to set the record straight. “My Thoughts as Prime Minister on the Tepco Fukushima Nuclear Plant Accident” records blow-by-blow descriptions of events as they unfolded after the megaquake and tsunami struck on March 11, 2011.
Kan immediately realized that the proposal by Masataka Shimizu, president of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), owners and operators of the plant, to withdraw its workers was an invitation to catastrophe.
He called Shimizu to the Prime Minister’s Residence on March 15, telling him, “There will be no withdrawal.” Then he went to Tepco’s head office in Uchisaiwai-cho, a short drive from the Residence, to explain that the headquarters for dealing with the reactors was, with government participation, going to be established there. Tepco owned the plant; they must own the disaster.
“I don’t care how much money it takes,” he told Tepco officials, “Tepco has got to take it on. Withdrawal, when the very existence of Japan is at stake, is out of the question. … People 60 and over can go to the plant. I’m resolved to go myself if necessary.”
“Tepco’s way of dealing with things,” he writes in his book, “was to wait for something to happen and then react. Their logistics weren’t functioning, particularly at the head office. Even some days after the accident they still hadn’t been able to get batteries and necessary equipment to the plant.
“What is being called into question here,” he continues, “is not just technical issues or economic matters; it is people’s way of life, their civilization. The nuclear accident is a calamity that arose due to a mistaken choice made in the culture as a whole. Discontinuing nuclear power generation is not a technical problem: It is something that depends ultimately on the wishes of the people.”
If this is true, then the wishes of the people as of February 2013 can be said to be “confused” at best. Though opinion polls conducted since the accident have shown a distinct majority of Japanese in favor of the methodical abandonment of nuclear power, a similarly distinct majority opted to vote in a government last December that is openly dedicated to the resurrection of nuclear power generation.
Such conflicted majorities attest to a lack of resolve in the populace, a condition that is easily exploited by powerful interests and a media who meekly follow their lead.
And yet Kan is forthright: “I personally experienced the nuclear accidents on and after March 11,” he writes, “and I came to the conclusion that it is fundamentally unnatural for humans to exploit nuclear reactions, and that nuclear energy threatens the existence of the human race.”
As for the issue of his alleged meddling into the affairs of a private company, Kan points out that this was a “severe accident,” and that such a circumstance “comes, without a doubt, under the authority of the prime minister to deal with.”
At 6:14 a.m. on March 12, 2011, he set out by helicopter from the roof of the Residence to visit and inspect the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. What he saw there “was like a wartime field hospital. … The corridors were filled with workers, some sleeping on the floor. Some men had blankets wrapped around them, others were bare-chested. They all had the same vacant stare in their eyes.”
Neither Nuclear Safety Commission Chairman Haruki Madarame nor Sakae Muto, then Tepco’s executive vice president in charge of nuclear issues, could answer his questions about the possibility of hydrogen explosions or whether vents would be used to lessen their probability.
Imagine the result in the community — not to mention the world at large — if the prime minister had left men like this totally in charge of a catastrophe about to happen. Would he not have been roundly condemned, then and forever, for shirking the responsibilities of a head of state?
“It was Tepco that, by all rights, should have had the raw data … but no matter who I asked, no one knew who was making decisions, no one knew who was in charge. Everything was done in an atmosphere of anonymity.”
Unlike an accident at a non-nuclear plant, where the fire eventually goes out and the damage is geographically limited, when one occurs at a nuclear plant, writes Kan, “the damage gets worse with time. … The half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years. … Japan was being occupied by radiation. The enemy was not attacking from the outside. Japan had given birth to its own mortal enemy. There was no escape.”
In the weeks and months following the accident, Kan became convinced that “there is no such thing as safe nuclear energy. The risk of the state collapsing as a result of an accident is just too great.”
Before the accident, there had been a plan to increase the number of reactors by at least 14 by 2030. By the end of March 2011, Kan had resolved to scrap this plan. Now, though, a new and energized pro-nuclear government has announced that plans for new reactors will go ahead.
“In the last 30-odd years,” writes Kan, “wind power and solar power have been scorned as a nuisance by the electric power companies; and, as a result, we have not been able to create developments in these despite our advanced technological know-how. So we are now way behind European countries in this field.
“We should seize the opportunity given to us by the accident to rethink our basic energy plan from the drawing board onward. I want to make natural forms of energy generation, such as those from the wind and the sun, ‘the next generation’ of Japan’s basic energy sources.”
In June 2011, the prime minister spoke in front of a Diet committee on energy.
“Just being against nuclear energy may have some significance,” he said. “But if such a protest is not part of a rethinking on energy strategies as a whole, we will just be left with a pie in the sky. I aim to link the energy issue to the realization of a new paradigm, while pursuing the growth of the nation’s economy at the same time.”
The paradigm of Prime Minister Kan is now buried in the contaminated soils of the northeastern Tohoku region of Honshu, with the new guard standing watch, their backs to the past.
The lessons of March 11, 2011, will have to be learned for us by the next generation of Japanese. Let’s hope time is on their side.
January 26, 2013
First Of Two Parts
Covering the catastrophic series of events that began with the magnitude 9, Great East Japan Earthquake and the tsunami it triggered on March 11, 2011, it is one of the most revealing and insightful books published in Japan in the past decade.
Seeing as it deals with the greatest crisis that this country has faced — and still faces every day — since the end of World War II in 1945, this is also a work that begs to be translated into many languages.
Published in paperback by Gentosha in October last year, “Tōden Fukushima Genpatsu Jiko Sōri Toshite Kangaeta Koto” (“My Thoughts as Prime Minister on the Tepco Fukushima Nuclear Plant Accident”), the book is a highly revealing document of those events as witnessed and written by the person at the very center of decision-making in Japan, the prime minister at the time, Naoto Kan.
The first word of the title — Tōden, the Japanese abbreviation of Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, the company that owns and operates the ill-fated plant — makes it clear that ex-Prime Minister Kan believes Tepco to be at the root of the accident and the concomitant damage it continues to cause as well.
As the true nature of the disaster unfolded in the weeks and months following the earthquake and tsunami, Kan came to see that no one would be safe in Japan until all of the country’s nuclear plants were shut down and decommissioned. How and why he came to this conclusion is the paramount theme of this book.
“It is not for politicians to judge the value of their work and actions as politicians,” he writes in the book’s foreword. “I have no course but to trust that judgment to history.”
He goes on to speak of the catastrophe that befell the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the U.S.S.R. (present-day Ukraine) in April 1986, having studied its aftermath in the accident reports. “But I hadn’t dreamt such a thing could occur in Japan,” he admits.
In fact, the greatest lesson — and one that, it seems, has not been thoroughly learned — is that no one had dreamt of the possibility of such an occurrence in this country. That was not part of the problem: That was, and still is, the problem.
Kan, a graduate of the applied physics department at Tokyo Institute of Technology, was, from the standpoint of prior scientific knowledge, the right person in the right place at that terrible time.
“When I heard that the plant had lost all electricity after the earthquake and tsunami, and that the ability to cool down the reactors had been lost, I felt my face freeze in shock. I knew that what followed was meltdowns.”
It wasn’t hard to make calculations on the scale of the potential disaster. Add to the six reactors and seven pools for spent fuel rods at the No. 1 plant the four reactors and four pools at the nearby No. 2 plant and you get a potentially lethal radiation spill of tens of times the amount emitted at Chernobyl.
“The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency is responsible for dealing with nuclear accidents,” writes Kan, “and yet they could give me nothing in the way of explanation or an estimation of what might transpire. … So I had no choice but to establish a system in the Prime Minister’s Official Residence at a very early stage to gather information.”
Then, in the early hours of March 15, Kan was told of Tepco’s intention to abandon the site of the accident.
“The first week after the accident was a nightmare,” he writes.
“The consequences kept escalating. At 8 p.m. the first night, Reactor No. 1 experienced a meltdown. … The next afternoon, a hydrogen explosion occurred there. Reactor No. 3 went into meltdown on the 13th, and on the 14th it too had a hydrogen explosion.
“I was at Tepco headquarters at 6 a.m. on the 15th when it was reported that a loud boom had been heard coming from Reactor No. 2; and at roughly the same time, Reactor No. 4 experienced a meltdown. … I began to think that we might be facing the worst-case scenario.”
The worst-case scenario that haunted the prime minister was a domino effect of meltdowns inside reactors and fuel-rod pools as repair and maintenance became progressively too dangerous to undertake. The nightmare’s terrorizing eventuality was the evacuation of millions of people from the greater Tokyo zone and the relocation of the organs of government.
Tepco officials have subsequently denied that they were preparing to abandon the stricken plant, admitting only to planning a partial retreat from its most critically affected areas. With the powerful pro-nuclear lobby in business and government behind them, their spin on the story — including “meddling” by the prime minister which, they suggest, stymied necessary action — has gained some credence in the media.
This befuddling story is a key strategic element in the nuclear industry’s relentless campaign to blur responsibility and to re-legitimize nuclear-power generation in these seismically active islands.
Yet the record is unequivocal: Tepco found itself unable to control events as they took one turn after another for the worse; and had the prime minister not intervened to consolidate decision-making and expedite emergency measures, a pall of radiation may very well have descended over the entire Kanto region, where the capital is located.
Kan takes up the narrative: “It was at 3 a.m. when Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Banri Kaeda came to the Residence with the news that Masataka Shimizu, president of Tepco, had put in a request to withdraw from the nuclear plant site.
“If I (had let this happen), 50 million people would have to be evacuated within a few weeks. … The very announcement to evacuate would result in mass panic.”
He goes into great detail regarding the simulation of the nightmare scenario, explaining that it was to prevent — at all costs — it becoming all too real that he took personal charge of the management of the disaster.
In Japanese it isn’t the “buck” that goes around, stopping in front of the person who must take responsibility; it’s the washtub (tarai). Kan grabbed it, contaminated water and all, as it was being passed around and around by Tepco officials. But as for those officials, it serves their purposes, both past, present and future, to perpetrate a notion that the prime minister was the one who continued to dirty the water.
Even now, nearly two years after the fatal calamity, there is a conspiracy of silence among supporters of nuclear power in this country, with the present prime minister, Shinzo Abe, a staunch nuclear-power advocate, acting as Whisperer-in-Chief.
Kan’s perspective is, however, both wide and on the money.
“This was an enemy created by the Japanese themselves, that a major nuclear accident will not occur,” he writes.
“This was a premise established throughout Japanese society, a premise that allowed 54 reactors to be built. The law, the entire system of government, politics, economics, even the culture was acting under this set premise.
“Its conclusion was that we don’t need to prepare for such a thing. It was this attitude that led to a situation in which no one was able to deal with an accident that could occur.”
The aftermath of Tepco’s accident is still very much with us, and will continue to be until the entire truth of what happened in Fukushima in 2011 is recognized by the people in power in Japan today. It is this aftermath that will be the topic of next week’s Counterpoint.
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