nuclear-news

Plight of Fukushima’s heroic emergency workers

Nuclear workers in Japan Heroism and humility Meet the “Fukushima 50”, the men on the front line of the nuclear disaster The Economist Oct 27th 2012 | TOKYO |  ACCORDING to his friends, the man in charge of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear-power plant during the 2011 disaster, Masao Yoshida, says it felt like being on Iwo Jima. That is the North Pacific island heroically defended by the Japanese in 1945 but doomed to fall to the Americans.

His two underlings, Atsufumi Yoshizawa and Masatoshi Fukura, do not portray the struggle quite so graphically. In their first interviews since the disaster, they spoke of the sense of responsibility of the so-called Fukushima 50, those who risked their lives to fight the soaring levels of radiation coming out of the plant in the hours and days after the earthquake and tsunami on March 11th last year. They were driven, especially, by a desire to protect the local communities in which many of their families lived.

Yet the Fukushima 50, despite heroic efforts, still suffer from the complex of emotions that soldiers might experience when returning from a losing battle. A sense of shame and stigmatisation lingers. That
much was evident earlier in October when Yoshihiko Noda, Japan’s prime
minister, called them in to thank them. It was fully 18 months after
the disaster, a long time to wait to honour those who, as Mr Noda put
it, saved Japan.
The men gave him snapshots of what it was like during the frantic days
after March 11th: explosions that threatened to kill them; the risk of
electrocution as they sought to restore power in the cold and dark;
radioactive debris; nothing to eat and drink but biscuits and water.
Yet what was striking was that six of the eight men present hid their
faces from the cameras. Far from feeling like heroes, they took pains
to conceal their identities.

Tokyo Electric (TEPCO), which owns the plant, long resisted all
requests to interview these men. But the crippled utility has now been
taken over by the government, which told it to allow two of them to
talk to The Economist, a first. Heroism is a tricky subject in a
group-oriented culture like Japan’s—all the more so when it comes to
talking to employees of TEPCO, which is deeply reviled. More than
100,000 people have been evacuated from towns and villages around,
perhaps permanently…… The men express in different ways the
conflicted feelings that linger on. Mr Yoshizawa choked with emotion
when he explained how the men fought a losing battle to save their
local towns and villages. Then he added: “But in Japanese society,
many view us as the perpetrators.”

That view is particularly strong among the evacuees from Fukushima,
but it is also true of the country at large. Japanese soldiers felt a
similar sense of stigmatisation after returning from defeat in 1945.
Mr Fukura has no time for talk of heroism—or stigmatisation, for that
matter. He says that because most of the men work for TEPCO, they
cannot separate their sense of responsibility from that of the
company. That sounds like an admirable Japanese trait, but it was not
shared by all of TEPCO’s bosses. Only in October, after arm-twisting
by the government, did the company admit it had underplayed the risks
it faced at Fukushima Dai-ichi.
http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21565269-meet-%E2%80%9Cfukushima-50%E2%80%9D-men-front-line-nuclear-disaster-heroism-and-humility

October 26, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics, social effects