Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (35 page)

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.
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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.
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Management made an announcement over loudspeakers asking workers to ‘please understand’ they were being exposed to levels of radiation far above normal.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The nuclear industry also had deeply suspect labour policies, making it a microcosm of the two-tiered labour market that had taken hold since the bubble burst. Much of the dangerous work was done by contract workers, paid less and exposed to higher levels of radiation than regular employees. In the case of Fukushima Daiichi, nearly 90 per cent of workers in the year to March 2010 were employed by contractors, subcontractors and sub-subcontractors. The ‘nuclear gypsies’, who roamed from plant to plant, were brought in to clean up
radiation during regular maintenance shutdowns. Often they used nothing more sophisticated than mops and rags. They were drawn from the ranks of underemployed construction workers, local farmers, itinerant labourers and homeless people, some of them hired by
yakuza
gangsters.
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Even after the meltdown, Tepco continued to employ hundreds of contract workers. Day labourers were lured back with offers of up to $1,000 day. Two subcontracted workers were hospitalized after stepping in radioactive water. Many others were exposed to far higher doses of radiation than normally permissible. Katsunobu Onda, author of
Tepco: The Dark Empire
, claimed that over the years, tens of thousands of contract workers had received unsafe levels of radiation.
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So pervasive was the ‘safety myth’ that many nuclear plant operators never broached the subject of evacuation with local residents living in the shadow of power stations. To do so would have meant admitting the possibility of an accident. Journalists who wrote about radiation leaks were ridiculed for not understanding the science. After an earthquake in Niigata in 2006, a giant plume of black smoke rose out of the Kashiwazaki nuclear complex. (Firemen couldn’t put out the blaze because – surprise, surprise – water pipes had been ruptured by the earthquake.) But journalists were told not to be alarmist. People living around the plant would apparently be exposed to one-millionth of the radiation experienced during a round-trip flight from Tokyo to New York. Like the owners of the
Titanic
who did not install sufficient lifeboats because they believed the ship could never sink, the operators of Fukushima did not have enough buses on hand to evacuate staff at the time of the tsunami. Regulators, concluded Kurokawa’s inquiry, had been ‘captured’. Far from pushing operators to improve safety, they helped them skirt the rules.

Evidence that nuclear regulation was a sham had been hidden in plain sight for years. A series of accidents and cover-ups demonstrated clearly that the industry habitually took short cuts and then lied about it. In 1995, there was a cover-up over the extent of an accident in the Monju fast-breeder reactor. Four years later, two poorly trained workers at the Tokaimura reactor died of organ failure due to acute radiation sickness after mixing uranium in buckets. In 2002, Tepco admitted that it had been faking safety data relating to cracks in its
nuclear plants for two decades. The subsequent regulatory ‘crackdown’, rather than punishing Tepco, seemed more intent on helping it extend the use of ageing plants. At the time of the accident, Fukushima had been running for forty years. One investigative reporter described the ageing and worn-out network of pipes inside the plant as being like ‘the veins of a monster’ waiting to burst.
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In 2004, four workers were killed and seven injured at a plant in Mihama when superheated steam gushed out of a broken pipe. In July 2007, an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale jolted the enormous Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear complex, the biggest in the world. It was later revealed that the plant had not been built to withstand anything like that magnitude of quake. To make matters worse, it may have inadvertently been built directly on top of an active faultline.

It should have come as little surprise, then, that the response to the emergency at Fukushima also lacked transparency. Tepco consistently denied there had been a meltdown and industry sympathizers blamed the foreign media for reckless scaremongering when they used the ‘M’ word. But there
had
been a meltdown. Tepco later admitted that fuel rods in three reactors had melted into little clumps of uranium, a meltdown even under the narrowest of definitions. Tapes reveal officials had been fully aware of the possibility just days into the disaster. An announcement over loudspeakers stated, ‘The fuel has been exposed for some time now, so there is a possibility of a meltdown. Repeat, there is a possibility of a fuel meltdown.’
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Tepco also prevaricated about injecting seawater into the reactors, possibly because to do so would mean scrapping billions of dollars of equipment for good. Masao Yoshida, the plant operator, bravely took matters into his own hands by injecting seawater anyway. Not everyone was so decisive. In the days after the accident, Masataka Shimizu, Tepco’s president, disappeared for days. He was hiding in his office while the catastrophe unfolded.

The most interesting part of the voluminous parliamentary report came on its first page. In his ‘Message from the Chairman’, Kurokawa blamed the disaster not on particular individuals – although the report made clear some people had been terribly at fault – but rather on Japan’s entire culture. ‘This was a disaster “Made in Japan”,’ he said. ‘Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions
of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to “sticking with the programme”; our groupism and our insularity.’

Kurokawa’s list of supposed ‘cultural faults’ was a sort of anti-
Nihonjinron
, the study of ‘Japanese essence’ whose treatises still have dedicated sections in some bookstores. While most
Nihonjinron
authors made a fetish of what they claimed were the country’s uniquely superior traits – the elevation of the group above the individual, of feeling above logic and of tacit understanding above spoken words – Kurokawa turned the discipline on its head. The national characteristics of which the Japanese were so proud, he suggested, were in fact fatal flaws. ‘Had other Japanese been in the shoes of those who bear responsibility for this accident, the result may well have been the same,’ he concluded. That was because the ‘mindset’ that supported the catastrophic decisions around Fukushima ‘can be found across Japan’.

Kurokawa’s sweeping cultural pronouncement invited obvious rejoinders. One was that, by blaming society as a whole, he had cleverly let individuals off the hook. If one were minded, one could even draw parallels with the collective assessment of Japan’s wartime responsibility: everybody was guilty, and no one was guilty. Gerry Curtis, an expert on Japan at Columbia University, was one of many to take exception to Kurokawa’s conclusions. ‘One searches in vain through these pages for anyone to blame,’ he wrote in a stinging editorial.
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‘To pin the blame on culture is the ultimate cop-out.’ Individuals matter, Curtis said. Tepco’s president had made the situation worse by being hopelessly uncommunicative. Yoshida, the heroic plant manager who had defied orders by flooding the reactors with seawater, possibly saved the day. He was anything but a yes-man blindly following orders in the interests of groupism or ‘sticking with the programme’. The culture of collusion inside the ‘nuclear village’ was hardly unique to Japan, Curtis continued. Hadn’t there been pretty much the same collusion in the US between bankers and their regulators, who turned a blind eye as some of the country’s biggest financial institutions led the nation towards the brink of financial ruin? If Japanese culture put the interests of the organization above the interests of the public, Curtis concluded, ‘then we are all Japanese’.

If one takes the view that culture is immutable, Kurokawa’s cultural explanations were, indeed, next to useless. To view culture as fixed and unchangeable borders on geographical and racial determinism. But Kurokawa may have been trying to say something quite different. Few who have lived in Japan would deny they recognize some of the national traits he identified – a tendency to look inwards, to defer to authority, to play down the importance of the individual. No serious observer of Japan, however, would pretend this was the whole story. In a thousand ways, Japanese people, individually and collectively, are constantly challenging and subverting such norms. The characteristics Kurokawa outlined, then, were not so much a description of ‘culture’. They were a critique of Japan’s post-war institutions and norms. If that is what he meant by culture, the implication was that it could be changed.