On the evening of March 12, the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant’s oldest reactor suffered a hydrogen explosion and risked a complete meltdown. Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan asked aides to weigh the risks of injecting seawater into the reactor to cool it down.
At this crucial moment, it became clear that a prime minister who had built his career on suspicion of the collusive ties between Japan’s industry and bureaucracy was acting in the dark.
He had received a confusing risk analysis from the chief nuclear regulator, a fervently pro-nuclear academic whom aides said Kan did not trust. He was also wary of the company that operated the plant, given its history of trying to cover up troubles.
Kan did not know that the plant manager had already begun using seawater. Based on a guess of the mood at the prime minister’s office, the company ordered the plant manager to stop.
However, the manager did something unthinkable in corporate Japan: He disobeyed the order and secretly continued using seawater, a decision that experts say almost certainly prevented a more serious meltdown and has made him an unlikely hero.
The convoluted drama has exposed the underlying rifts behind Japan’s handling of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, which eventually resulted in explosions at four of the plant’s six reactors. Mutually suspicious relations between the prime minister’s aides, government bureaucrats and company officials obstructed smooth decision-making.
At the drama’s heart was an outsider prime minister who saw the need for quick action, but whose well-founded mistrust of a system of alliances between powerful plant operators, compliant bureaucrats and sympathetic politicians deprived him of resources he could have used to make better-informed decisions.
A onetime grass-roots activist, Kan struggled to manage the nuclear crisis because he felt he could not rely on the very mechanisms established by his predecessors to respond to such a crisis.
Instead, he turned at the beginning only to a handful of close, overwhelmed advisers who knew little about nuclear plants and who barely exchanged information with the plant’s operator and nuclear regulators.
Struggling to manage a humanitarian disaster caused by the tsunami, Kan improvised his government’s response to the worsening nuclear crisis, seeming to vacillate between personally intervening at the plant and leaving it to the operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO).
“There were delays. First of all, we weren’t getting accurate information from TEPCO,” said Kenichi Matsumoto, an adviser to Kan.
However, Matsumoto added that the prime minister’s deep distrust of TEPCO and bureaucrats “interfered” with the overall response.
The early disarray alarmed the US government enough that it increasingly urged the Japanese to take more decisive action and to be more forthcoming in sharing information. Making matters worse was Kan’s initial reluctance to accept the help of the US, which offered pump trucks, unmanned drones and the advice of US nuclear crisis experts.
“We found ourselves in a downward spiral, which hurt relations with the United States,” said Manabu Terada, a lawmaker who served as an aide to Kan at that time. “We lost credibility with America, and TEPCO lost credibility with us.”
LACK OF EXPERIENCE
Even some supporters say that Kan could have moved faster and more decisively if he had used Japan’s existing crisis management system.
The system was created in 1986 and subsequently strengthened by Japanese leaders who had sought more power for the prime minister. Modeled on crisis management in the White House — even down to the Situation Room under the prime minister’s office — the system brought together bureaucrats from various ministries under the direct command of the prime minister, said Atsuyuki Sassa, the head of the Cabinet Security Affairs Office in the late 1980s.
Critics and supporters alike said Kan’s decision to bypass this system and instead rely on a small circle of trusted advisers with little experience in handling a crisis of this scale, blocked him from grasping the severity of the disaster sooner. Sometimes those advisers did not even know all the resources available to them.
This includes the existence of a nationwide system of radiation detectors known as the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or Speedi. Terada and other advisers said they did not learn of the system’s existence until March 16, five days into the crisis.
If they had known earlier, they would have seen Speedi’s early projections that radioactive materials from the Fukushima plant would be blown northwest, said one critic, Hiroshi Kawauchi, a lawmaker in Kan’s own party. Kawauchi said that many of the residents around the plant who evacuated went north, on the assumption that winds blew south during winter in that area. That took them directly into the radioactive plume, he said — exposing them to the very radiation that they were fleeing.
Kawauchi said that when he asked officials at the Ministry of Education, which administers Speedi, why they did not make the information available to the prime minister in those first crucial days, they replied that the prime minister’s office had not asked them for it.
“It’s more of an emotional thing,” Matsumoto said of Kan. “He never trusts bureaucrats.”
That is a legacy from Kan’s stint as health minister in the mid-1990s, when he became wildly popular after exposing his own ministry’s use of blood tainted with HIV, which led to hundreds of hemophiliacs dying of AIDS. Kan found that bureaucrats and pharmaceutical company officials had long known of the tainted blood.
To Kan, the nuclear establishment — with politically connected utilities abetted by bureaucrats in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and compliant academics — represented the worst example of this kind of collusion between Japanese industry and bureaucracy, Matsumoto said.
IGNORING ORDERS
The seawater example is telling.
In testimony in parliament late last month, Kan said that he asked advisers to weigh the risks that the seawater injection could cause “recriticality,” a phenomenon in which nuclear fission resumes in melted nuclear fuel lying on the floor of a storage pool or reactor core. Kan’s aides said they grew worried after Haruki Madarame, the chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission, a nuclear regulator in the prime minister’s office, warned that the “possibility of recriticality is not zero.”
On March 12, about 28 hours after the tsunami struck, TEPCO executives had ordered workers to start injecting seawater into reactor No. 1. However, 21 minutes later, they ordered the plant’s manager, Masao Yoshida, to suspend the operation. They were relying on an account by the TEPCO liaison to the prime minister, who reported back that he seemed to be against it.
“Well, he said that was the atmosphere or the mood,” TEPCO’s executive vice president Sakae Muto said at a news conference.
Sassa said: “Mood? Is this a joke? Making decisions based on mood?”
However, Yoshida chose to ignore the order. The injections were the only way left to cool the reactor, and halting them would mean possibly causing an even more severe meltdown and release of radiation, experts said.
Yoshida had the authority as the plant manager to make the decision, said Junichi Matsumoto, a senior official at TEPCO. And indeed, guidelines from the International Atomic Energy Agency specify that technical decisions should be left to plant managers because a timely response is critical, said Sung Key-yong, a nuclear accident expert who participated in the agency’s recent fact-finding mission to Japan.
After revealing last month that he had ignored the order, Yoshida explained himself to a television reporter by saying that “suspending the seawater could have meant death” for those at the plant.
According to friends, Yoshida, 56, is a square-jawed, hard-drinking and sometimes rough-talking man who is a straight shooter. He practiced kendo in high school, but he also quotes from author Raymond Chandler and enjoys cooking Italian food.
“In class, if a teacher didn’t explain something properly, he’d push for an explanation that satisfied him,” said Masanori Baba, a childhood friend.
His candor impressed Kan, who met him the day after the tsunami when he took a trip on a military helicopter to the plant. They shared a willingness to buck the system, as Kan had when he uncovered the tainted blood scandal. And, in a country where alumni ties are extremely important, they found they had attended the same college, the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
“One or two days later, Mr Kan said Mr Yoshida was the only one he could trust inside TEPCO,” Matsumoto said.
Last week, TEPCO gave Yoshida its lightest punishment of a verbal reprimand for defying the order.
DISTRUST AND DISTRACTION
Kan’s critics and supporters alike say his suspicions of TEPCO were well-founded. In the early days after the March 11 disaster, TEPCO shared only limited information with the prime minister’s office, trying instead to play down the risks at the plant, they said.
TEPCO declined to make senior executives available for this article. Matsumoto said at a news conference that the company had provided information as best as it could. He declined to comment on Kan’s reported lack of trust of TEPCO.
Yet the Kan government essentially left the handling of the nuclear crisis in the crucial first three days to TEPCO, focusing instead on relief efforts for the hundreds of thousands left homeless by the tsunami, Terada and other aides said. Then March 14, the gravity of the plant’s situation was revealed by a second explosion, this time at reactor No. 3, and the startling request that night from TEPCO president Masataka Shimizu that TEPCO be allowed to withdraw its employees from the plant because it had become too dangerous to remain.
When he heard this, Kan flew into a rage, said aides and advisers who were present. Abandoning the plant would mean losing control of the four stricken reactors; the next day, explosions occurred at the two remaining active reactors, No. 2 and No. 4.
“This is not a joke,” the prime minister yelled, according to the aides.
They said Kan convened an emergency meeting early in the morning of March 15, asking advisers what more could be done to save the reactors.
Then he gave TEPCO barely two hours’ warning that he planned to pay a visit to the company.
At 5:30am, Kan marched into TEPCO headquarters and stationed one of his most trusted aides, Goshi Hosono, there to keep tabs on the company.
Kan gave a five-minute impromptu pep talk in the company’s situation room, his aide Terada said.
“Withdrawing from the plant is out of the question,” Kan told them.
Advisers said the placement of Hosono in TEPCO was a turning point, helping the prime minister to take direct control of damage-control efforts at the plant.
“For the first time, we knew what TEPCO was debating, and what they knew,” said one adviser, who asked not to be identified.
Even Kan’s supporters acknowledge that the move came too late.
“We should have gone in faster,” said Masanori Aritomi, a nuclear engineer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and an adviser to Kan.
Aritomi said that even with Hosono stationed inside TEPCO, the company still did not disclose crucial information until the middle of last month, including final confirmation that three of the plant’s four active reactors had melted down.
STRAINS WITH AN ALLY
The poor flow of information and ad hoc decision-making also strained Japan’s relationship with the US, which has about 50,000 military personnel stationed in Japan.
While Japan was quick to accept the US military’s offers to help victims of the tsunami, the perception in Washington in the early days, that it was being rebuffed and misled in the unfolding nuclear disaster, had created “a crisis in the US-Japan alliance,” said Akihisa Nagashima, a former vice minister of defense.
Within 48 hours of the earthquake, officials from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission arrived in Tokyo, but they were unable to get information or even arrange meetings with Japanese counterparts.
Meanwhile, Washington became convinced that Tokyo was understating the damage at the plant, based on readings that the Americans were getting around the plant from aircraft and satellites normally used to monitor North Korean nuclear tests, said one US official, who asked not to be named.
According to this official, US President Barack Obama’s administration made a decision “to lean on the Kan government” to share more information. On March 16, US officials, including the ambassador to Japan, John Roos, informed their Japanese counterparts that the US would advise its citizens to evacuate an area 80km around the plant — much larger than the 30km voluntary evacuation zone then established by Japan.
The Americans also began voluntary evacuations of nonessential personnel at US bases and hinted at more drastic steps, even pulling out some essential military personnel, if Tokyo did not share more information, said this US official and Japanese officials, including Terada.
To show Washington and an increasingly anxious Japanese public that utmost efforts were being made, Kan deployed military helicopters to drop water into the reactors, Terada and other Japanese advisers said, adding they knew this would have only a limited effect on cooling them. On March 17, on live television, the helicopters dropped water from the air, though strong winds clearly blew much of the water off course.
Still, Terada said that Kan personally called Obama to tell him the operation was a success. Later that day in Washington, Obama paid a visit to the Japanese embassy to sign a book of condolences — a gesture seen in the prime minister’s office as a nod of approval by the US president.
Nagashima said the demands from the US to be better informed ultimately improved Japan’s own response. On March 20, he brought a proposal to Kan for a daily meeting between US and Japanese officials to coordinate information and discuss responses to the nuclear accident.
The first such meeting was held a day later at the prime minister’s office. Nagashima said the meetings lasted an hour-and-a-half, and usually involved about 50 people, including officials from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the US embassy and the military, as well as a far larger Japanese group of political leaders, people from five ministries, from nuclear agencies and from TEPCO. The meeting was led by Hosono, who by then had become the prime minister’s point man on the nuclear response.
Nagashima said that even more important was what happened before the Americans arrived: The Japanese met an hour beforehand to discuss developments and to work out what they were going to tell the Americans. Nagashima said the meeting brought together the various ministries and TEPCO, with politicians setting the agenda, for the first time since the nuclear crisis began.
“The Japanese side needed to gather everybody in the same room,” Nagashima said. “US irritation became a chance for Japan to improve its disaster management.”
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY KANTARO SUZUKI
For three years and three months, Taiwan’s bid to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) has remained stalled. On Nov. 29, members meeting in Vancouver agreed to establish a working group for Costa Rica’s entry — the fifth applicant in line — but not for Taiwan. As Taiwan’s prospects for CPTPP membership fade due to “politically sensitive issues,” what strategy should it adopt to overcome this politically motivated economic exclusion? The situation is not entirely dim; these challenges offer an opportunity to reimagine the export-driven country’s international trade strategy. Following the US’ withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Two major Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-People’s Liberation Army (PLA) power demonstrations in November 2024 highlight the urgency for Taiwan to pursue a military buildup and deterrence agenda that can take back control of its destiny. First, the CCP-PLA’s planned future for Taiwan of war, bloody suppression, and use as a base for regional aggression was foreshadowed by the 9th and largest PLA-Russia Joint Bomber Exercise of Nov. 29 and 30. It was double that of previous bomber exercises, with both days featuring combined combat strike groups of PLA Air Force and Russian bombers escorted by PLAAF and Russian fighters, airborne early warning
Since the end of former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration, the Ma Ying-jeou Foundation has taken Taiwanese students to visit China and invited Chinese students to Taiwan. Ma calls those activities “cross-strait exchanges,” yet the trips completely avoid topics prohibited by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), such as democracy, freedom and human rights — all of which are universal values. During the foundation’s most recent Chinese student tour group, a Fudan University student used terms such as “China, Taipei” and “the motherland” when discussing Taiwan’s recent baseball victory. The group’s visit to Zhongshan Girls’ High School also received prominent coverage in
India and China have taken a significant step toward disengagement of their military troops after reaching an agreement on the long-standing disputes in the Galwan Valley. For government officials and policy experts, this move is welcome, signaling the potential resolution of the enduring border issues between the two countries. However, it is crucial to consider the potential impact of this disengagement on India’s relationship with Taiwan. Over the past few years, there have been important developments in India-Taiwan relations, including exchanges between heads of state soon after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s third electoral victory. This raises the pressing question:
RSS