Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

by Pilling, David

  Odaka was evacuated the day after the tsunami of 11 March 2011 set off the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl. In those frightening, confusing days, all 12,800 residents were told to leave, just some of the 150,000 people evacuated from the towns around the plant during the triple nuclear meltdown. So haphazard were the arrangements in what is usually one of the world’s most ordered societies that many people left without realizing there had been a nuclear accident at all. Some fled with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. They left valuables and medical records, as well as the pets they were forbidden from taking. ‘We didn’t know there was a hydrogen explosion at the plant, so we couldn’t guess why we had to evacuate,’ one Odaka resident later told a parliamentary inquiry.1

  After the massive explosion on the afternoon of 12 March, which blew apart the reactor’s steel and concrete building but mercifully left its core intact, the radius of the evacuation zone was doubled to twelve miles. In subsequent days, those just outside the exclusion zone were told to remain indoors for safety. Some must have wondered quite how safe they really were given that American sailors on board the USS Ronald Reagan had pulled back 200 miles for fear of radiation.

  Odaka had been a ghost town ever since the evacuation. Almost everyone had left, although a few did defy the official order, saying they’d prefer to be radiated than live in some miserable school gymnasium or crowded shelter. Other families sneaked back into town to check on their homes and abandoned pets. For months, packs of mud-splattered dogs were said to have roamed the streets in search of food. When I visited in 2012, a year after the tsunami, the vegetation on the side of the tarmac road was unkempt and weedy. Only when you saw it did you realize just how immaculately tended was the rest of Japan. Inside the display room of an auto-parts shop, wild grasses and bushy plants had pushed up through cracks in the floor. A school baseball field was overgrown and a telephone line sagged under the weight of more than two dozen midnight-black crows that had massed there to caw into the heavy summer air. (Someone from a coastal town further north had told me that, in the days before the earthquake, dozens of crows had mysteriously gathered. When the earthquake struck, but before the tsunami arrived, the crows vanished, never to be seen again.) In some side streets of Odaka, a couple of houses had collapsed from the force of the earthquake, their tile roofs crumpled on the ground like heaps of bones. More than two miles from the ocean, Odaka was spared the full rage of the tsunami. But even here, there were signs of water damage.

  The ‘dead zone’ around the nuclear plant was quietly surreal. Volunteers had planted rows of yellow sunflowers after scientists suggested hopefully that the plants might be able to draw radioactive contaminants from the soil. Just outside a roadside checkpoint, manned by sweating police officers in heavy blue uniforms, sat a lone vending machine, the sort you might see on any street corner in this consumer wonderland. Behind the glass screen were rows of hot drinks in little plastic bottles, cardboard cartons or half-sized cans: Georgia Black Coffee, Georgia Emerald Mountain Blend, Espresso Blux and several types of Hot Green Tea. Below them were cold drinks: Coca Cola, Lohas Natural Mineral Water, Grape Fanta, Aquarius Sports Drink and Aloe Vera White Grape Juice. The machine was just outside the exclusion zone in supposedly ‘safe Japan’. But it sat within feet of ‘contaminated Japan’, where radiation levels were considered too high for human habitation. Who would buy a drink from a machine in the shadow of Fukushima? For now, it was a moot point. The company had placed a discreet white sign on the glass: ‘Sales suspended’.

  Iitate, another nearby town, lay well outside the exclusion zone. It had, though, been designated a ‘hot spot’, an area where radiation had settled in high quantities like an invisible mist. Although it sat twenty-five miles from Fukushima Daiichi, Iitate was one of six places where traces of plutonium had been detected in the soil. Now it was practically deserted, save for the orange-jacketed men who patrolled the empty houses. The world was rightly impressed with the order and discipline of ordinary Japanese in the tsunami’s aftermath. There were, as some surprised TV anchors from foreign media noted, no recorded acts of looting. This was not New Orleans. Yet crime was not entirely absent either. Someone living a few miles from Fukushima Daiichi told officials, ‘It is such a disappointment every time we are briefly allowed to return home only to find out that we have been robbed again.’2

  The lights of Iitate’s old people’s home were still on. When the town was evacuated, authorities judged it would be too traumatic to move the elderly residents. Besides, they would almost certainly die years before the effects of any radiation poisoning showed up. As the young fled Iitate, the elderly were lining up to get in. So scarce are places for retirement homes in Japan there was now a waiting list of a hundred or so people hoping to move to the Iitate facility. Unlike the young or those with families, they were willing to spend their remaining years in the eerie calmness of the dead zone.

  In recent months, groups of men wearing futuristic protective clothing and white masks had been scraping off the topsoil from gardens, and blasting the walls with high-pressure water hoses. They were trying to clear the area of radiation. In a nearby field, industrial-thickness bags of soil lay neatly stacked, each bearing a little ticket: 4.5 μSv/h, 7.32 μSv/h, 7.67 μSv/h. The runic inscription indicated how many microsieverts of radiation the soil was emitting. The bags were labelled kari kari kari okiba – ‘temporary, temporary, temporary storage’. These makeshift piles were no permanent fix. Locals doubted much good would come of all this hosing, scraping and bagging. With each new rainfall, radiation levels shot up again as fresh contamination was washed in from the surrounding hills. A woman who worked in the retirement home by day now commuted to work from a town many miles away. Asked if she would one day bring her young children back to live in Iitate, she slowly shook her head.

  By my own crude reckoning, radiation levels did seem to have dropped. When I came to this same place, in the summer of 2011, my dosimeter was as if possessed, going off every twenty seconds. ‘Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep.’ Now, in March 2012, it was practically silent. On that trip the previous summer, I had come across Yosuke Saito, a 34-year-old trucking-company worker, on a deserted street. It had been a shock to see another living person. It was Obon, the festival of the dead, and he had returned to his abandoned home to light incense for his ancestors. In Iitate, only the very old and the ghosts of the dead lingered on.

  • • •

  The triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi was the worst nuclear accident in a quarter of a century. Like Chernobyl in 1986 it was rated ‘seven’, the highest level on the International Atomic Energy Agency scale. Three Mile Island, a partial nuclear meltdown at a plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, was a ‘five’. The catastrophe at Fukushima, a sprawling site of six nuclear reactors overlooking the ocean, had an impact all over the world. It shook some governments’ faith in the safety, even the viability, of nuclear power. Within weeks of the accident, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said her country would phase out all nuclear power within a decade.3 The Japanese establishment had long ago hitched the country’s economic fortunes to the nuclear wagon despite the fact that Japan was the only country to have suffered nuclear destruction. Now, even here, cracks began to emerge in the long-held consensus.

  The accident exposed in a flash – quite literally – some of the worst traits of ‘old Japan’, with its elitist and secretive bureaucratic culture. That culture had served Japan reasonably well in the post-war years when it was driving economic catch-up. But it was deeply flawed. According to a withering parliamentary inquiry, Fukushima was not a natural disaster at all, but a ‘profoundly manmade’ catastrophe, the result of ‘wilful negligence’. The inquiry, led by Kiyoshi Kurokawa, a medical doctor who had once been president of the Science Council of Japan, found that the regulators, the government and the Fukushima operator had all ‘betrayed the nation’s right to safety from nuclear accidents’. It was quite a dif
ferent story from the one told by Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), the private company that ran Fukushima. It had blamed the cascading crisis on a millennial freak of nature, a tsunami of such force it had been impossible to predict or counteract.

  The parliamentary commission strongly disagreed. The accident had been foreseeable, its 641-page report concluded. There was plenty of evidence to suggest that tsunamis of the height of 11 March had struck Japan before. Tepco had chosen to ignore it. Its negligence, the inquiry said, was the result of systematic collusion between Tepco and the agencies that were supposed to be regulating it. Both sacrificed safety in their blind enthusiasm for nuclear power and their arrogant faith in Japanese technology. Because they had not planned for disaster, when it struck they were woefully unprepared. Video footage shot inside the plant in the days after the disaster shows scenes of desperate confusion. After two explosions, the site manager begs his superiors for supplies and reinforcements. ‘The site is in shock,’ he says. ‘We’re doing what we can but morale is slipping.’4

  At first, it had seemed that the plant would survive the assault of nature. When the ground started heaving violently at 2.46 p.m. on 11 March, the three reactors in operation did what they were supposed to do. They shut down.5 Neutron-absorbing control rods sprang from the floor, halting nuclear fission. Power to the plant had been cut off, but there were back-up generators to keep emergency systems running. Yet, when the violent shaking stopped, there was much worse to follow. The complex had been built on the coast between the ocean and the surrounding hills. All that stood between the nuclear plant and the massive tsunami that was now barrelling towards it was a nineteen-foot sea wall. When the full force of the wave arrived some fifty minutes later it was forty-six feet high.

  Once the wave had breached the sea defences, water rushed towards the plant, sweeping cars and debris before it. The wave flooded the plant’s back-up diesel generators – housed, of all places, in the basement of the turbine buildings between the plant and the ocean – plunging the complex into darkness. The core cooling system quickly stopped. Attempts to get the power back on were haphazard to say the least. Tepco tried to get a generator truck to the site, but when it eventually arrived its plugs did not match the plant’s sockets. The biggest nuclear operator in Japan was like an ill-prepared traveller who had forgotten to pack an adaptor. Within a few hours, a back-up condenser that had been keeping things going at reactor Number One failed. Now there was nothing to prevent the uranium fuel rods heating the water to boiling point, producing a build-up of steam and an eventual explosion of radioactive gas. Pressure did indeed build up in the ensuing hours to twice the allowable threshold, forcing Tepco’s panicked officials to make an agonizing decision. To prevent a full-fledged explosion and large radiation leak, they would have to engineer a smaller leak themselves, by venting radioactive steam into the atmosphere. Even that wasn’t straightforward. The valves had jammed and technicians, armed only with flashlights, spent hours fumbling around in the dark trying to open them by hand.

  The venting finally started at 10 a.m. on Saturday, the morning after the tsunami. It was a last-ditch gamble, but it proved inadequate. Hydrogen began seeping into the air creating a combustible gas. At 3.36 p.m. there was an almighty explosion. Millions, including me, watched on television as the building holding the nuclear reactor tore apart, flinging debris into the air. For a while no one knew whether the core had survived the blast. It had, but now two other reactors were in difficulty. By Monday, technicians were venting radioactive steam from all three problem reactors and pumping seawater into the cores to cool them down. That was a desperate measure that meant the reactors could never be used again. Still it wasn’t enough. Late on Monday morning, two days after the first explosion, an even bigger blast ripped through reactor Number Three. Problems had now spread to a storage tank containing ‘spent’ uranium fuel. Spent or not, without circulating water, the rods began to get critically hot. By Tuesday morning a fire had broken out in a storage pool. Meanwhile fuel rods in reactor Number Three had melted, and there was a third explosion, releasing radiation at 10,000 times normal levels.

  As the crisis escalated out of control, Tepco pulled out many of the 800 technicians working at the plant. That left just a few dozen essential staff – the so-called ‘Fukushima 50’ – battling to contain the worst civil nuclear catastrophe in Japan’s history. There was later speculation that Tepco’s management had discussed abandoning the plant altogether. In those dark hours, the government secretly considered contingency plans to evacuate Tokyo, the world’s biggest metropolis.6 However, Kurokawa’s parliamentary inquiry, critical in almost all other respects, found no evidence that Tepco had ever intended to pull out everyone from Fukushima Daiichi.

  Whether it had or not, by the following day, 300 operatives were back at their station. They were working in the grimmest of conditions, snatching a few hours of sleep on lead-lined floors and sharing meagre rations of tinned food. At one point, managers apologetically asked workers to lend the plant money so it could dispatch a team to buy water, food and fuel.7 Normally, workers were not permitted to receive a radiation dose of more than 100 millisieverts in any five-year period. At that level, cancer risks are believed to rise. In a desperate effort to keep the crisis-containment effort on track, the limit was temporarily raised to 250 millisieverts, five times the level permitted for US nuclear industry workers.8 Management made an announcement over loudspeakers asking workers to ‘please understand’ they were being exposed to levels of radiation far above normal.9

  Efforts to bring the situation under control became almost farcical. Military helicopters scooped up water from the sea and dropped it into the hole created by one of the explosions. Most of the water scattered in the wind. Fire engines brought to Fukushima from around the country doused the reactors with their tiny hoses. When radioactive water from the deluge started leaking into the sea, Tepco’s highly trained technicians sought to plug the cracks – using newspapers and nappy-like absorbent cloth.10 As the weeks went by, the plant lurched from one crisis to the next. In April, Tepco dumped 10,000 tonnes of contaminated water from plant storage tanks into the sea to make room for even more highly contaminated water.

  Only by December, nine months after the initial explosion, was the plant finally put into ‘cold shutdown’, a condition of relative security. Even then, there were concerns about the precarious situation of one of the fuel storage pools, which some experts feared could collapse if there were another earthquake. That, they said, could lead to an even bigger escape of radiation than in March. It went without saying that the gutted and seawater-deluged Fukushima plant could never be used again. Decommissioning was expected to take decades and cost billions, even tens of billions, of dollars. In Japanese, Fukushima meant ‘Blessed Island’. There was little blessed about it now.

  • • •

  The parliamentary inquiry reserved its harshest criticism for what has come to be known as the ‘nuclear village’, the network of business, bureaucrats and regulators that runs Japan’s nuclear industry. The country started producing nuclear power in the mid-1960s, but the government drastically accelerated the programme after the 1970s oil shocks, which exposed its glaring dependence on foreign energy. Japan’s colonial disasters of the 1930s and 40s were, at least in part, inspired by the notion of grabbing its own resources in a Japanese version of Nazi Germany’s Lebensraum. After the war, Yasuhiro Nakasone, who went on to become prime minister in the mid-1980s, was an early champion of nuclear power. In August 1945, as a young naval officer, he had witnessed from a distance the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. ‘At that moment I sensed that the next age was the nuclear age,’ he wrote later.11 Nuclear power could not only solve Japan’s energy problems, it would also allow Japan to study the technological mysteries behind nuclear weapons. The Asahi newspaper’s Yoichi Funabashi, who became chairman of the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation after the tsunami, said, ‘One of the
most shocking experiences in Japan’s post-war history was China’s nuclear test of 1964. It was the same year as the Tokyo Olympics and some people tended to interpret this as a deliberate attempt to belittle Japan by demonstrating China’s new power.’ Funabashi said that some politicians had wanted Japan to go nuclear in response. The next best thing was to preserve some ‘ambiguity’ by developing the technology behind the nuclear bomb, including the reprocessing of uranium and plutonium.12

  In the 1970s, the stewards of Japan’s nuclear ramp-up embarked on their mission with the zeal that had characterized the nation’s post-war recovery. They started by buying British and American reactors, but rapidly set about transferring know-how to Japan itself. Sites were chosen for nuclear plants, mostly in poorer, less populated regions, such as Japan’s northeast coast, where lavish government subsidies were hard to resist. By the time the March 2011 tsunami crippled the Fukushima plant, no less than 30 per cent of Japan’s electricity was being produced by nuclear power. There were even plans to build fourteen more reactors and raise nuclear power’s contribution to a full half of the national electricity supply by 2030.

  Once nuclear power became a national imperative, it was almost an article of faith that it be safe. How else to justify building fifty-four nuclear reactors, roughly one in ten of the world’s total, in the most seismically unstable country on earth? That imperative bred a culture of denial, arrogance and cover-up that was breathtaking. The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, the body that was supposed to be regulating the operators, was part of the trade ministry, Japan’s most ardent cheerleader for nuclear technology. It was like putting the National Rifle Association in charge of gun control. Academics were funded by the nuclear industry, as was the media via expensive advertising campaigns. Parliament insisted that school textbooks downplayed any reference to nuclear accidents, such as Chernobyl. Many plants built public relations buildings-cum-amusement parks, bearing logos such as smiling uranium atoms. In one Atomic Disneyland, visited by Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times, Lewis Carroll’s Alice was drafted in to make the case for nuclear safety. ‘It’s terrible, just terrible,’ said the White Rabbit in one exhibit. ‘We’re running out of energy, Alice.’ When a robotic Dodo explained there was a clean, safe and renewable alternative called nuclear power, Alice was delighted. ‘You could say that it’s optimal for resource-poor Japan,’ she cooed, presumably before disappearing down a rabbit hole.13