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Acknowledgments

SEIZE THE TRUTH WHILE IT’S HOT!

MARCH 11, 2011. When the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (NPS) accident took place, I listened to the news on TV with a feeling close to praying.

“Please let them reverse it.”

A news bulletin came on.

“The news is that the power just came back on and the reactor is headed toward cooling.”

Japan had beaten the nuclear crisis and had bounced back … For a time, I entertained the dream of a phoenix-like Japan. Turning the tables was Japan’s rebirth strategy. I was convinced that at the end of the “lost decades,” turning the tables was the only strategy if Japan was to be rebuilt.

However, there was no reversal. The game was over before we knew it. That fact was brought home on March 14. There was no way a reversal was possible.

This was a nuclear power plant accident waiting to happen. Was not the nature of the crisis in the government and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) responses to the Fukushima Daiichi NPS accident the very nature of the crisis of Japan’s “lost decades”? That was how it should be regarded.

As well as ashamed of my own ignorance, I was ensnared by the idea of investigating and verifying the background and cause of the accident.

At the end of March 2011, I learned that the government was going to set up a commission to investigate the accident. It was only to be expected that the government would look into the causes of the accident. Naturally, a government report would only be made from the standpoint of the government.

However, the citizens and people of Japan should not have lessons from the government imposed on us. We should be the principals, verifying the response to and the cause of the accident itself, extracting our own lessons to be learned, confronting the government with our findings, and monitoring the government.

I thought we needed an independent, private-sector investigation commission free from the government and the power industry, from politics and the nuclear village, a commission that could investigate and verify from an unfettered position.

To that end, I established, with a group of like-minded individuals, a think tank called the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation and launched a commission on the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, chaired by Professor Koichi Kitazawa. I was in charge of what would come to be known as the Independent Investigation Commission while serving as its program director.

As it moved forward with its investigations, the Independent Investigation Commission conducted interviews with more than three hundred people, including parliamentary members of the Kantei at the time of the accident.

We attacked the myth of safety that pervades nuclear power and the structure of the nuclear village, focusing mainly on the lead-up to the accident and the damage, the government and TEPCO responses, an analysis of historical and structural factors, and the global context.

The commission published its Survey/Investigation Report on February 28, 2012, and was disbanded. A revised English version of the report later became commercially available as The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Disaster, Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation (Routledge, 2014).¹

As a matter of course, the report placed its emphasis on investigating the cause of the accident and analyzing its historical and structural background, but in the process, I became interested in the struggle of individuals to overcome the crisis. I wanted to get a hold on the truth of Japanese society—and human society—in a time of such crisis.

How did we face the fight when Big Technology and the absolute laws of physics became a lethal force capable of destroying human society and nature?

I would once again track the Fukushima Nuclear Power Station crisis, focusing on that cruel month of March 2011. I would portray this tragedy in the form of a detailed chronology of the origins of the severe nuclear accident and the crisis response. It is not only the nuclear reactors that are to be questioned. Both something and everything triggered an unexpected meltdown at that time. I want to delineate exactly how it happened.

After the report was published, I went back to being a reporter and started to interview. In the process, I was able to hear the stories of many people (the interview list can be found at the end of the book).

During the interviews, I asked whether memos existed, but only a few had written notes of the events. There was nothing for it but to get the parties involved to refresh their memories. I would re-create the situation and use that to trigger their recollections. Sometimes this involved a process of triangulation, cross-checking the memory of each person, which created a complex web, like Rashomon, to ascertain the facts.²

Statements within quotation marks were made at the time by the various parties. Text that is italicized represents the thoughts of the various parties. Of course, the italicized text is also based on the testimony of the parties and interviews I conducted. I learned at this time that in many cases people have a clearer recollection of their thoughts than of their actual words.

I also learned something else. In the eight months from March 2012, when I started interviewing for this book, the recollections of the parties involved changed slightly. As the investigation report of each ministry was announced, inconvenient truths that clashed with those reports faded away. I wondered whether a script was being written with an eye to countering trials and litigation, but after the release of these reports, they would start to be spoken of as the truth.

It is said, “Strike the iron while it’s hot,” but in this case, “Seize the truth while it’s hot.” This was brought home to me with a vengeance.

Countdown Meltdown (Japanese title of Meltdown) was awarded the Otoya Soichi Non-Fiction Award, given to Japan’s best works of nonfiction. One of the committee members commented, “This is a war record of the Fukushima nuclear crisis.”

Without intending to, I had written a war record. What covered the scene was not the fog of the battlefield, but the fog of crisis and its deep veils. I wanted to share with the people of the world the human, social drama that unfolded as the crisis developed in the depths of that fog. It was an unexpected pleasure when the Brookings Institution decided to publish an English version at this time.

I am indebted to former Brookings Institution president Strobe Talbott, as I was when I published The Peninsula Question: A Chronicle of the Second Korean Nuclear Crisis, after spending a year at the institution as a distinguished guest scholar. I would like to express my sincere thanks. I would also like to express my gratitude to Bill Finan, director of the Brookings Institution Press, for his hard and meticulous work.

The English version to be published at this time is a new revision of the Japanese version, incorporating new reports and materials announced later as well as subsequent interviews with many parties. The main new reports/materials that are referenced frequently throughout are as follows:

1) TEPCO, “A Summary of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident and Nuclear Safety Reform Plan,” March 29, 2013³

TEPCO announced its Fukushima Nuclear Accident Investigation Report on June 20, 2012, but did not provide sufficient analytical overview of the reasons why the accident could not have been prevented. It was also criticized as an exercise in self-defense from start to finish. TEPCO then set up a new task force and published the above report, which compiled a Nuclear Safety Reform Plan based on its Reflections on the Fukushima Nuclear Accident. Here they acknowledged for the first time that the accident was “man-made” and that the fundamental problem was a matter of management.

2) Fukushima Nuclear Power Accident Record Team, Tomomi Miyazaki and Hideaki Kimura, A Record of 49 Hours of TEPCO’s Fukushima Nuclear Accident Videoconference (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2013)

This is a document recording, in the wake of the accident, the real-time videoconferences from March 12, 11:59 p.m., to 12:06 a.m. on March 15, between TEPCO Head Office, Fukushima Daiichi, and Fukushima Daini Power Plants, among others.

3) Investigation Committee on the Accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations of Tokyo Electric Power Company (Government Investigation Commission), “Hearings Report” (also known as the Yoshida Testimony), July–November 2011⁴

This is a report of the thirteen interviews with (then) Site Supervisor Masao Yoshida, conducted by the Government Accident Investigation over a total of twenty-nine hours from the summer to the winter of 2011. In September 2014, the Japanese government released the full text of this transcript on the web, despite the interviews having been conducted on the premise of “non-disclosure.” (Government Investigation Commission Hearing Records, online: https://www8.cao.go.jp/genshiryoku_bousai/fu_koukai/fu_koukai_2.html [Japanese only])

In this, Yoshida speaks frankly and in detail about his battle of life and death with the severe accident that “had no answer,” caused by the total loss of power supply. This live account in Yoshida’s voice—often confused and cloudy—is an irreplaceable testimony of human society’s battle during a nuclear crisis. (In February 2015, RJIF published Anatomy of the Yoshida Testimony: The Fukushima Nuclear Crisis as Seen through the Yoshida Hearings.)⁵

In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, the Government Investigation’s Interim Report, the Independent Investigation’s Report, the Diet Investigation’s Report, and the Government Investigation’s Final Report were released in close succession.⁶ There was no precedent for the government, Diet, and an independent investigation virtually competing with one another to draw lessons from Japan’s national crisis and its response. I am proud that the Independent Investigation played a part.

The fruits of the joint research and serious discussion between members of the working group and the committee are impossible to measure. Without such valuable experience, this book would not have been possible. Once again, I would like to express my thanks to each and every one involved, including Lauren Altria, Takuya Matsuda, Patrick Madaj, Takuma Hirai, and Romeo Marcantuoni for their critical research support.

However, we were also touched by sadness. Professor Koichi Kitazawa, who was chairman of the Independent Investigation Commission, died in September 2014. He was seventy-one years old. Without the vision, insight, and leadership of Professor Kitazawa, a global scientist, the Independent Investigation would not have seen the light of day. I remember well his gentle but stern gaze when facing the truth. May he rest in peace.