Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (34 page)

In the aftermath of the rape, the US agreed to reduce its presence on Okinawa by a fifth, amalgamating some bases and pulling back about 8,000 marines to Guam, a US territory in the Western Pacific. The Marine Corps’ Futenma Air Base, dangerously situated in the middle of a dense city, was to be shifted to a more remote part of the island, with a runway jutting out into the sea. The plan to move Futenma, however, became ensnared in interminable negotiations over its environmental impact, and the noise and danger it would bring to its new location. There was also the broader question of who would pay for the redeployment. Washington wanted Tokyo to foot the bill. To make matters more complicated, this was not just a two-way discussion between Tokyo and Washington. Okinawans had their say too. With each new local election cycle, the prospect of building the new air base waxed and waned. Some senior US officials were scathing in their condemnation of a Japanese government that could allow the sentiments of a small island to obstruct the vital matter of national and international security. Not for nothing had an American ambassador once compared Okinawa to a bone stuck in the throat of the alliance.
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The disagreement over Okinawa reflected deeper problems in a post-war US–Japan relationship that had been tricky from the start. In one sense the alliance between victor and vanquished, what the scholar John Dower had called a ‘sensuous embrace’, was a miracle of twentieth-century diplomacy. The ties were mutually beneficial. Washington got a sturdy, and increasingly wealthy, ally in the Pacific. Japan snuggled under the US nuclear umbrella, releasing it from the burdens of diplomacy and the expense of self-defence. That allowed it to concentrate on the business of getting rich. Such ‘free-riding’ even became the name of a credo, the so-called Yoshida Doctrine, named after Shigeru Yoshida, who was prime minister for eight years after the war. ‘Just as the US was once a colony of Great Britain but is now the stronger of the two,’ he said, ‘if Japan becomes a colony of the US it will also eventually become the stronger.’
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Subservience to America, however, had lasted far longer than Yoshida might have imagined. Japan had never stepped far out of line and critics had gone so far as to call it America’s ‘client state’.
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Such an unequal relationship had bred resentment not only among the left, which tended to want American bases out, but also among the right. Shintaro Ishihara, the former governor of Tokyo and co-author of
The Japan that Can Say No
, a book urging greater Japanese independence, resented that his country was ‘at the beck and call of the US’.
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The view of Japan as a client state had infiltrated popular culture too. In 2005, Takashi Murakami, one of Japan’s best-known modern artists, curated an exhibition of subculture in New York called
Little Boy
. The title referred to the codename for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. But Little Boy could also be shorthand for Japan’s stunted development as a state and its lopsided relationship with Washington. According to the exhibition notes, Murakami sought to explore ‘Japan’s military and political dependence on the US; and the replacement of a traditional, hierarchical Japanese culture with a disposable consumer culture ostensibly produced for children and adolescents’. Little Boy, it said, referred to ‘the infantilization of the Japanese culture and mindset’, the result, in Murakami’s view, ‘of Japan’s economic and political dependence on the west’.

Hatoyama tried to tap into this vein of dissent, with the issue of bases on Okinawa as his chosen battleground. He had recklessly promised the Okinawan people that he would scrap the plan to relocate Futenma to another part of the island and, instead, move it off Okinawa altogether. Unfortunately, his plan had not been squared with Washington, nor with his own bureaucrats in the foreign ministry who sought to undermine him by privately advising their US counterparts not to budge. He had spent months desperately seeking an alternative location on the Japanese archipelago. Unsurprisingly, it was proving difficult to find a community willing to accept noisy helicopters in their midst. Hatoyama was eventually forced to fly to Okinawa to tell angry crowds that he couldn’t fulfil his pledge. A replacement for Futenma would have to be built on Okinawa after all. The decision had been ‘heartbreaking’, he said, but in the end he had to prioritize national security and the deterrence provided by US
Marines. His apology was not accepted. In Okinawa he was greeted by bright yellow signs that said simply ‘Anger’, and by jeering crowds who urged him to ‘Go Home’.
²²
The word on everybody’s lips was ‘betrayal’.

Within a few weeks of his humiliating climbdown, Hatoyama had resigned. By June 2010, he was gone. His tenure of just eight-and-a-half months was short even by the fleeting standards of Japan’s prime ministers. His own view of a normal nation had been just as difficult to execute as Abe’s. His grandiose vision of forming an ‘East Asian Community’, modelled on the European Union, had gone precisely nowhere. Of his attempt to put Japan’s relations with the US on a more equal footing, he said in a tearful resignation speech, ‘Someday, the time will come when Japan’s peace will have to be ensured by the Japanese people themselves.’
²³
That day, evidently, had not come yet.

•   •   •

Standing up to the US over Okinawa had done nothing to further Hatoyama’s other principal policy goal of building a better relationship with China. Beijing was slow to respond to his overtures, perhaps because it had sensed, correctly, that his power base was weak in Japan. The country’s merry-go-round of now-you-see-them now-you-don’t prime ministers made it hard for foreign capitals to take any particular administration’s proposals seriously. Hatoyama’s Democratic Party lacked deep contacts in China, which had over many decades got used to doing business with the more conservative Liberal Democrats.

It was ironic that under the Democratic Party, which had held out an olive branch to Beijing, Sino–Japanese relations should actually deteriorate. The new battleground was not Yasukuni or textbooks, but something more tangible: islands.
²⁴
Called the Senkaku by Japan and the Diaoyu
²⁵
by China, the five uninhabited islands and three rocky outcroppings covered a total area of less than three square miles and were too small to figure on most maps. But they were a proxy for national pride and unresolved wartime animosities. They were located in the East China Sea, a little over 100 miles northeast of Taiwan and 250 miles west of Okinawa. The Chinese claimed that they had discovered the islands in ancient times and that they had appeared on Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) maps as Chinese territory. According to Beijing, the islands were war booty stolen during the
1895 Sino–Japanese War. As such, they should have been returned according to the dictates of the Potsdam Declaration of 1945, which issued the terms of Japan’s surrender. This stipulated that ‘Japanese territory shall be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine.’ According to Beijing, that clearly meant Japan was supposed to give up the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands along with Taiwan, South Korea and other territory seized in war.

The Japanese argued that the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, which incorporated the Potsdam Declaration, did not include the Senkaku. The reason, it said, was that the islands had not been seized in war at all but had instead been legally annexed on 14 January 1895. ‘From 1885 on, our government conducted on-site surveys time and again, which confirmed that the islands were uninhabited and there were no signs of control by the Qing Empire,’ Tokyo said.
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That meant they were ‘terra nullius’ when Japan found them – land belonging to no one – and thus available under international law to be claimed by Japan. The upshot of the San Francisco Treaty was that the islands, rather than being ‘returned’ along with Taiwan, fell under US administration as part of Washington’s control of Okinawa. Tokyo said Beijing had not objected at the time, although, in fairness, China was not present at San Francisco nor a signatory to the treaty. Beijing began to voice its claim, Tokyo said, only when, in the late 1960s, it was discovered there may be oil around the islands. In 1972, the US ‘returned’ the islands to Japan along with Okinawa over China’s objections.

In subsequent years, there were periodic clashes between Japanese fishermen and those from China and Taiwan who also fished around the islands. The territory, however, remained under effective Japanese administration and Tokyo refused to concede even that there was a dispute over their ownership at all. The first intimation that the tussle over the islands was getting more serious came in September 2010 when Zhan Qixiong, a fishing boat captain from Fujian province, rammed his boat into two coastguard vessels. Some evidence later came out that he had been drunk. Zhan and his fourteen-member crew were arrested and Japan indicated that prosecutions would follow. Beijing called for their immediate unconditional release. ‘We
demand Japanese patrol boats refrain from so-called law-enforcement activities in waters off the Diaoyu islands,’ the foreign ministry thundered.
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Tokyo said the matter was for the courts to decide. As the stand-off worsened, Beijing retaliated by placing an informal ban on the export of ‘rare earths’, vital to Japan’s electronics industry. Within days, Japan buckled, releasing the crew and the captain. It was a humiliating climbdown.

Yoichi Funabashi, the former editor of the left-leaning
Asahi
newspaper, who considered himself a friend of China, called the incident the ‘Senkaku shock’. It was worse, he said, than the ‘Nixon shock’ of 1971 when Richard Nixon, the US president, normalized relations with China behind Japan’s back. In an open letter entitled ‘Japan–China Relations Stand at Ground Zero’, he wrote that Japan’s half-hearted actions, including its decision not to prosecute the Chinese captain, revealed its weakness. ‘One cannot help but concede that Japan is either still clumsy in its diplomatic efforts or simply a poor fighter. In comparison, the various measures taken by the Chinese government to apply pressure on Japan can only be described as a diplomatic “shock and awe” campaign.’ The clash, he wrote, exposed the fantasy of trying to forge ‘a mutually beneficial relationship based on common strategic interests’, the official policy between the two countries since an aborted rapprochement in 2006. Instead, Japan would have to cut its losses and discard its naïve dreams of normalizing relations with Beijing. The relationship would be in constant danger of rolling completely out of control, he argued. ‘If China continues to act as it has, we Japanese will be prepared to engage in a long, long struggle.’
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Funabashi’s was a pessimistic analysis. Normalizing relations with China, he implied, was – at least for the foreseeable future – a lost cause.

In their different ways, both Abe and Hatoyama had sought to make Japan a more normal nation. Abe had wanted Japan to throw off its war guilt and its pacifist constitution and become again a ‘beautiful country’ that could hold its head high in the international community. He resented what America had done to Japan at the end of the war, but saw little alternative to maintaining a strong alliance with its powerful western ally. Hatoyama’s normalization had been more subtle, though ultimately more confused. He had attempted
to ‘triangulate’ the relationship with the US and China, drawing slightly away from Washington in order to be friendlier with Beijing. It didn’t work. The deep historical rift with China could not be fixed with a little diplomatic repositioning. Japan was still isolated in Asia. Diplomatically, it remained lost, a prisoner of its geography and of its history.

After the Tsunami

Fukushima Fallout

It looked like any other provincial Japanese town. There was the Shiga Hair Salon, with its red, white and blue barber’s pole, offering cuts and ‘iron perms’. Next door was the Watanabe Cake Shop, doing business since 1990 and housed in a two-storey mock Tudor building. Outside the nearby Jokokuji temple, a tiny granite stone Buddha figurine stood at the entrance, dressed in a weather-worn pink ceremonial shawl. The traffic lights clicked on and off, from red to orange to green and back again. Korean pop music erupted from unseen speakers, breaking what had been a fetid silence. The only thing missing in this town of Odaka, located less than ten miles north of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, was people.

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.’
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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.
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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 different 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.’
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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.
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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.