The disastrous truth about Fukushima – and how it changed Japan forever

As a firefighter in one of the most earthquake-prone countries on the planet, Kenji Takeda was an expert in game-planning for apocalypses. Yet in all his years in the Special Disaster Unit of Japan’s Tokyo Fire Brigade, there was one piece of kit he never thought he’d need in real life – a lead-panelled truck for dealing with nuclear accidents.  “We had trained with it, but I never imagined we’d actually have to use it,” he says.

His confidence was hardly surprising. As one of the world’s most technologically advanced nations – and a victim of atomic bomb attacks in World War II – Japan’s nuclear plants were presumed among the safest in the world. Then, mid-afternoon on a Friday in March 2011, came a disaster beyond even Takeda’s worst imagination.

Nearly 50 miles out to sea, a massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake shunted a Belgium-sized chunk of the earth’s crust about 50 metres. The tremor alone was Japan’s most powerful on record, terrifying a population long used to seismic shocks. But the tsunami that followed was far worse – a wall of water as high as 40 metres in some places, which flooded Japan’s eastern seaboard up to six miles inland. Within minutes, more than 300,000 buildings would be wrecked, leaving the landscape as devastated as the aftermath of Hiroshima. Nearly 20,000 people would die.

On TV screens in his HQ’s incident room, Takeda watched footage of ships being tossed onto buildings and people desperately fleeing the oncoming tide in their cars.  Then reports came in that at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, located on the stricken eastern coast, the floodwaters had knocked out the electricity supply used to control the reactors. “With the loss of power at that plant, it was clear that we were in a worst-case scenario,” Takeda says.

Technically, it was a worst-case scenario that the plant’s owners had anticipated. A six-metre-high anti-tsunami seawall was already in place. But the wave that hit Fukushima was 15 metres high and simply swept over and through the wall, scattering its concrete blocks and wrecking the plant. Without power to pump water to cool its fuel rods, Fukushima was on course for a Chernobyl-style meltdown that could have rendered much of eastern Japan and Tokyo uninhabitable. Over the next four days, the containment chambers around three of the plant’s four reactors ruptured due to build-ups of hydrogen gas, sending up radioactive mushroom clouds 1,000 feet high.

The story of how Takeda and others then stabilised the plant, braving soaring radiation levels, is now being retold by Netflix, whose new drama The Days recreates the disaster’s first week. Co-directed by Hideo Nakata, the man behind the acclaimed Japanese horror film Ring, it seeks to emulate the success of the HBO/Sky mini-series Chernobyl, which won a raft of awards in 2019.

As with Chernobyl, the story has villains as well as heroes. Just as Soviet bureaucrats botched the Chernobyl response through dithering and denial, high-ups at Fukushima did not acquit themselves well either. Thanks to Japan’s traditionally deferential culture, where seniority confers authority, warnings that the plant’s seawall was far too low had long been ignored. And when disaster struck, the plant’s owners, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) tried to dictate the response from their Tokyo HQ, rather than leaving it to staff on the ground.

The eight-part Netflix drama focuses on the character of Masao Yoshida, the plant’s on-site manager, whose defiance of his bosses helped save the day. He disobeyed direct orders from HQ not to use seawater to cool the reactors – the only way he could see to stop an all-out meltdown. Other figures recreated by the all-Japanese cast include the country’s then prime minister, Naoto Kan, who visited the plant by helicopter the morning after the tsunami to try to take personal charge.

According to some reports from the time, the presence of the abrasive politician – his nickname was “The Irritable Kan” – helped knock heads together at HQ. He allegedly even tried to order Fukushima workers to stay at the plant. However, according to other reports, he merely got in the way and delayed the response: five months after the disaster, he resigned, amid criticism of his handling of the crisis. The Netflix show recreates everything from the devastation caused by the tsunami itself through to the tense meetings and furious phone calls as plant workers, bosses and politicians try to work out a response.

Today, Yoshida and Takeda are celebrated as members of the “Fukushima 50” – the group of plant technicians and rescue workers whose bravery saved Japan from disaster. The group (in fact far more than 50) were also dubbed the “nuclear samurai” – modern, boiler-suited versions of Japan’s ancient warriors, willing to lay down their lives for the nation. For as Takeda recalls, when his crew first got asked to go to Fukushima, six days after the earthquake, none knew if they’d come back alive.

“The despatch team said it was up to each member to decide whether they wanted to go,” he says. “But nobody said ‘no’. My family said ‘take care’ and wished me luck, but I don’t think they really understood the full scope of what we were being asked to do. Other members of the team asked their closest friends to promise that they would look after their children and elderly parents if they did not come back.”

On the 200-mile drive north to Fukushima, the scale of the damage grew ever worse. Bridges were destroyed, cars strewn everywhere. Trees were washed across roads. At one point, Takeda noticed his legs shaking with nerves. Nearing Fukushima itself – where welcome signs say “Nuclear Power – The Energy for a Better Future” – there was barely a living soul, save for livestock and abandoned pets wandering the roads. At the plant itself, the stricken reactor buildings were still smoking.

The greatest hazard, though, couldn’t be seen. Radiation levels were so deadly in certain parts of the plant that workers couldn’t stay in them for long, even with protective clothing on. “I had a strong sense of an invisible danger,” Takeda says.

At one point, while helping to spray water on what remained of the reactors, his own Geiger counter bleeped warnings at him to get out. “It didn’t usually get up into the danger zone, but it was sounding the entire time that we had to stay there.”

Cooling the reactors required the workers to pump hundreds of tonnes of water onto them every hour, a task normally done using the reactor’s stocks of chemically pure fresh water. But with the plant’s pumping systems in disarray, plant manager Yoshida decided the only quick-fix solution was to turn to the limitless supply in the nearby ocean.

This ultimately spared Japan from an all-out meltdown. But at the time, Yoshida’s bosses at TEPCO in Tokyo were more worried about the future of the plant. Using unpurified salt water, they knew, would corrode the reactor’s innards and render the multi-billion-dollar facility inoperable for good. Couldn’t Yoshida wait until fresh water could be sourced?

A more compliant Japanese employee might well have demurred. Yoshida, though – a chain-smoking 56-year-old known for his bluntness – was a maverick.  “We don’t have the option to use fresh water, that will cause further delays,” he retorted. As he saw it, the choice was to either risk the future of the plant, or risk the future of Japan itself.

Three months later, Yoshida was formally reprimanded by his bosses. Subsequent official inquiries, though, found that his act of insubordination was crucial in bringing the meltdown under control. A parliamentary inquiry published the following year concluded: “What must be admitted – very painfully – is that this was a disaster ‘Made in Japan’. Its fundamental causes are in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority.”

Over a decade on, a 12-mile exclusion zone remains around Fukushima, although some of the 160,000 residents originally evacuated have been allowed to return to less contaminated areas.  Like Chernobyl, part of the zone is now a “dark tourism” attraction, with visitors touring abandoned, overgrown ghost-towns.  Lowly-paid itinerant labourers known as “nuclear gypsies” are also employed to clean up remaining radioactive debris – some allegedly employed by front companies for Japanese Yakuza gangsters.

Despite fears at the time, there have been no fatalities conclusively linked to radiation poisoning among either locals or the “Fukushima 50”. Yoshida, who was subsequently hailed as a national hero, died of throat cancer two years later, but this was attributed to his 40-a-day cigarette habit.

In 2019, three former TEPCO executives – including Ichiro Takekuro, who had told Yoshida not to use sea water – were acquitted of professional negligence. The three had allegedly been warned as far back as 2002 to increase the plant’s seawall defences, although prosecutors had long feared the charges would be hard to prove.

For many, the verdict showed that for all the handwringing over Fukushima, not much has really changed in Japan, where middle-aged men in suits still rule largely unchallenged.

But Noriko Hama, a professor at Japan’s Doshisha Business School, believes Fukushima has still left its mark. “Japan likes to think of itself as a very safe place where nothing ever happens, so it used to be almost taboo to imagine the worst,” she says.

“That comes partly as a result of our post-war history, where we wanted to show the world we were bouncing back, and that everything was plain sailing. The younger generation has started to question deference to authority, though, and people are much more wary of big power firms and big tech.”

Or are they? In Fukushima’s immediate aftermath, opposition to nuclear power surged beyond 50 per cent, with the government pledging to phase it out altogether. But as memories of the disaster have faded, and pressure to meet carbon reduction targets has grown, the country has U-turned. Last year, Japan’s government announced plans to build a new generation of reactors.

“For five years after Fukushima there was a big debate about the risks of nuclear power stations in a country that sits on such massive geological fault lines,” says Dr Bryce Wakefield, of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, who has studied Fukushima’s wider political impact. “Opposition has now waned, but I think that’s more because of a belief that nuclear power is a greener option rather than faith in Japanese technological prowess.”

Yet Takeda, now 51, is confident that having learned its lesson the hardest possible way, Japan could cope were the worst to happen again. “What happened at Fukushima made us all fearful, but we were forged into a team at Fukushima, and there is nothing now that we couldn’t do to protect people’s lives,” he says. “I know if it happened again, we’d be ready.”

The Days is on Netflix now