![]() Most countries anticipate and prepare for emergencies, said Howitt, who studies crisis management and gave a quick presentation on Japan’s response to Fukushima. “Imagine if President Biden got into Air Force One, flew up to Three Mile Island and started berating the plant owner,” Fackler said, referring to the Pennsylvania plant’s partial nuclear meltdown in 1979. At one point, he even flew up to the plant to confront the manager. But when the rest of the government, including Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency, failed to act, Fackler said, Kan was forced to improvise. “Something similar happened in Tokyo, a meltdown of a sort.”Īt the time, Japan’s Prime Minister was Naoto Kan, known as “Kan, the Irritable.” Kan, who had been in office for less than one year when the earthquake hit, was skeptical of both the military and the country’s traditionally cozy relationship with the U.S. “At the plant, things started to spin out of control,” he said. Plant manager Masao Yoshida was the first to risk people’s lives, Fackler said, sending in a “suicide squad” to vent and cool the reactors. But, based on interviews he’s had with key characters, the journalist has pieced together the story of the aftermath - a story of paralysis and disorganization but also heroics. To this day, a lot of details about Japan’s response remain hidden, Fackler said. “This was an existential crisis,” said Fackler. Both first responders and military personnel would need to risk their lives to secure the facility. (If a meltdown burns hot enough, it can blaze through steel and other barriers and release huge amounts of radioactivity.) “Many of them paid the ultimate price,” Fackler said of the first responders.īut Japan, which has avoided armed conflict and been ambivalent about its military since World War II, was not accustomed to sending its citizens into harm’s way - but it would have to. In the HBO TV series “Chernobyl,” local leaders send in firefighters to try to cool the reactors and prevent an even more catastrophic disaster. Then, the leaking hydrogen detonated, damaging the other three reactor buildings. When the tsunami hit, Fackler said, three of the plant’s six reactors sustained severe core damage and melted down, releasing hydrogen and radioactive materials. More than a decade later, about 30,000 Japanese citizens who lived near the Fukushima plant are still under evacuation orders (the government lifted a few in early April). “When this accident began - and I say began because it’s not over,” Fackler said at the start of his presentation on Japan’s day-to-day response to the crisis. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. The event, called “ Dry Run for War: How Fukushima Changed Japan and Its Place in the World,” was hosted by the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia, the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and Edwin O. On April 20, Fackler joined Arnold “Arn” Howitt, co-director of the Program on Crisis Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, to discuss how the nuclear accident - the second-worst in history, after Chernobyl - irrevocably altered Japan. His team’s coverage earned them a spot as a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. ![]() ![]() He reported on the Fukushima accident for The New York Times, arriving in Japan just one day after the quake struck. ![]() Fackler, a writer, journalist, and Harvard research fellow, has spent two decades covering Asia. The tsunami knocked out power to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, launching a nuclear meltdown whose fallout still affects Japan’s citizens, international relations, and internal politics to this day, according to Martin Fackler. Together, the two natural disasters claimed close to 20,000 lives, making the event one of the deadliest in Japan’s history.īut the crisis didn’t end there. Waves taller than houses slammed against hundreds of miles of the country’s northern coastline one wave measured 33 feet high. The strongest earthquake in Japan’s recorded history triggered a massive tsunami in 2011. ![]()
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