Chapter Six
From Hiroshima to Fukushima

GODZILLA IS AN animated monster, much loved by Japanese children of all ages. In a popular 1984 feature film, The Return of Godzilla, the United States and the Soviet Union offer to atom-bomb the monster as it marches on Tokyo, lightning flashing off its slippery reptilian scales, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Japan’s prime minister refuses, invoking Japan’s three non-nuclear principles.

Godzilla and the prime minister are fictional, but the principles are not. Drafted after the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, they resolved that Japan will neither possess nor manufacture nuclear weapons, nor allow them to be introduced into Japan. They reflect the repugnance at the time of the Japanese community towards the destructive power of nuclear weapons; a generation later, prime minister Eisaku Sato forcefully restated them in the Japanese Diet in 1967 during a debate over the return of Okinawa to Japan.

Fine sentiments, but Japan’s anti-nuclear principles were more honoured in the breach rather than the observance, and increasingly eroded as time went by. Successive Japanese governments knew — but refrained from asking about the fact — that many American naval vessels routinely entered Japanese ports carrying nuclear weapons. Japan quickly developed a nuclear industry of its own, ostensibly for the generation of nuclear power, but with an increasingly significant potential weapons capability. As if to give such research legitimacy, conservative Japanese politicians increasingly asserted that despite its peace constitution, Japan had a right to develop its own nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

Things were very different in the immediate postwar period. One of general Douglas MacArthur’s first directives as Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP) in 1945 prohibited Japan from pursuing any form of nuclear technology. So suspicious were MacArthur’s military bureaucrats about Japanese nuclear-research capabilities that they destroyed four fast-particle cyclotrons which various Japanese universities were using in medical, biological, metallurgical, and chemical research. Scientists attached to Chinese and Australian occupation forces in Japan were scandalised — they had covetous eyes on the cyclotrons as part of their war reparations.

While the survivors were picking through the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, general Thomas Farrell, director of post-nuclear bomb studies in the American Occupation Force, called a press conference in Tokyo to deny that, apart from the 200,000 people who had died of flash burns and blast waves at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a large number of people had also succumbed to a mysterious radiation ‘plague’. His denials were discredited by the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, who wrote a devastating report from Hiroshima two days after the attack. Published in the London Daily Express on 5 September 1945, under the headline ‘Atomic Plague’, it was the first eyewitness account to reach world audiences.

Until November 1945, SCAP authorities also denied Japanese doctors access to the destroyed cities to see for themselves. When SCAP relented, hundreds of Japanese doctors from the Military Medical School and Tokyo Imperial University went to Hiroshima to examine the evidence. By April 1946, a horrific picture had emerged of thousands of lingering deaths caused by exposure to lethal levels of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation (on top of tens of thousands of deaths from heat and blast). During the ten long years that followed, the hibakusha, or nuclear survivors, were socially ostracised, treated as little more than guinea pigs, and offered no assistance by the Japanese government. In 1957, however, to their relief, the new Atomic Bomb Victims Medical Care Law provided them with palliative care and some return to a bearable life.

Not that the hibakusha or their families were capable of capturing much public sympathy in Japan for their predicament. Following the country’s surrender in September 1945, the Japanese population turned its collective attention to the massive task of national rehabilitation — the reconstruction of shattered cities and industries, transport and communications, education and health services. In this process, the hibakusha were shunned by many either as an embarrassing reminder of defeat or, worse, a potential source of genetic abnormalities.

It was not until 1954, when the United States conducted a series of hydrogen-bomb tests in the Marshall Islands, that community outrage in Japan at the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, long suppressed, found a strong national voice. Codenamed Operation Castle, the tests were conducted at Bikini Atoll from March to May 1954. The first detonation was of a fission–fusion hydrogen bomb, many times the explosive power of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because of changes in wind direction, the detonation spread radiation well beyond the 85-kilometre exclusion zone designated by the United States Navy. A Japanese long-line tuna boat, Daigo Fukuryū Maru (Lucky Dragon Number Five), operating outside the zone at the time, was showered with radioactive ash. When the boat returned to port, the radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, was hospitalised, and died soon after from acute radiation sickness. In the months following the test, four other crew members died of acute leukaemia and various organic cancers. By August 1954, the crews of 96 other Japanese fishing vessels and 236 Marshall Islanders were also identified as having suffered from radiation-induced sicknesses. How many of these subsequently died from radiation-induced illnesses was neither investigated nor recorded.

International reaction to the Bikini tests was vehement. The Belgian diplomat Paul-Henri Spaak declared that if something was not done to divert nuclear technology from weapons, ‘America is going to be synonymous in Europe with barbarism and horror’. The Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, declared that US leaders were ‘dangerous self-centred lunatics’ who would ‘blow up any people or country who came in the way of their policy’. Eisenhower himself told the National Security Council in May 1954 that ‘Everybody seems to think that we are skunks, sabre-rattlers, and warmongers.’ His secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, complained, ‘Comparisons are now being made between ours and Hitler’s military machine.’

Criticism was fiercest in Japan. Housewives in Tokyo’s Suginami ward began circulating petitions against hydrogen bombs. Public indignation quickly spread. By 1954, 32 million people — of whom one million were from Hiroshima prefecture — had signed an anti-nuclear petition. The movement gave rise to the first World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, held in Hiroshima in August 1955. The public flocked to join anti-nuclear organisations set up by progressive movements, trade unions, and left-wing political parties such as the Japanese Communist Party and Japan Socialist Party. An April 1956 survey, conducted by the United States Information Service office in Tokyo, found that 60 per cent of Japanese believed that nuclear energy would prove ‘more of a curse than a boon to mankind’. The Mainichi Shimbun blasted any attempt to whitewash the destructive power of nuclear fission: ‘First, [we had] baptism with radioactive rain, then a surge of shrewd commercialism in the guise of “atoms for peace” from abroad.’ The newspaper called on the Japanese public to ‘calmly scrutinise what is behind the atomic energy race now being staged by the “white hands” [Americans] in Japan’.

In an attempt to calm this wave of public resentment, the Japanese government quickly went into damage control. The Science Council of Japan set up a liaison committee to examine the fallout and its medical and biological effects, including on fisheries. Earnest, dark-suited bureaucrats from the ministries of education, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, transportation, and welfare trooped along to hearings in Tokyo, along with functionaries from the Fisheries Agency, Maritime Safety Agency, and Meteorological Observatory, and members of the Japanese Red Cross. At the end of proceedings, the chairman of the committee declared that the Bikini incident had cast a widespread shadow over all aspects of human life, and demanded total cooperation ‘to ensure the safe development of peaceful applications for atomic energy’.

The American government did its best to diffuse Japanese anger over the Bikini incident. The embassy in Tokyo played back president Eisenhower’s famous ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech of 8 December 1953. The first part of his speech had outlined some horrible facts — that the US nuclear-weapon stockpile was already many times the explosive equivalent of all the conventional bombs that fell on Germany and Japan through all the years of World War II. But the second part was devoted to the ‘hope’ for the creation of peaceful international atomic cooperation. ‘It is not enough’, Eisenhower had said, ‘to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers. It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.’ He promised that the United States would disseminate ‘peaceful’ nuclear technology and donate research reactors to almost any country in the free world that asked for them.

The US Information Service (USIS) strenuously reinforced Eisenhower’s rhetoric. A USIS exhibition welcoming the peaceful atom to Japan was opened in Tokyo on 1 November 1955 with a Shinto purification ceremony and a message from Eisenhower declaring it ‘a symbol of our countries’ mutual determination that the great power of the atom shall henceforth be dedicated to the arts of peace.’ He concentrated on how nuclear technology could diagnose and treat illnesses, control pests, preserve food, drive ships and aircraft, excavate ports and harbours, and generate electricity. He avoided mentioning nuclear weapons.

To some extent, the pro-nuclear campaign paid off. Many Japanese attended the exhibition in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and even Hiroshima. USIS officials exultantly claimed that the change in opinion on atomic energy from negative to positive was remarkable. Such claims were a bit premature; but through the 1950s, it seemed, the public were gradually allowing themselves to be persuaded to accept the benefits of this dark science.

To back its campaign, the US embassy turned to a popular public figure, Matsutaro Shoriki, a prewar impresario who, despite increasing public hostility to foreigners, had brought European boxing champions, and American baseball and tennis stars, to Tokyo. In 1934, he brought out an American team of baseball players called the Major League All-Stars, including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmie Foxx, and organised a series of games between them and his Yomiuri Shimbun team, including one at the Meiji memorial stadium. For ‘defiling’ the stadium by holding a game with the Americans, Shoriki was attacked in a Tokyo alley by a group of young fascists and left for dead. He recovered and, two days after Pearl Harbour, delivered a keynote address at a huge Tokyo rally called to ‘Crush the United States and Britain’. Shoriki went on to become a leader of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association which replaced Japan’s political parties.

Following Japan’s defeat, Shoriki was locked up in Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison by SCAP as a suspected war criminal. After two years, he was released without trial (being a vociferous anti-communist helped), and in turbulent postwar Japan became a television mogul and press baron. His sudden conversion to nuclear energy occurred at a spectacular international conference on nuclear science and technology in Geneva in 1955; and on his return to Tokyo, he invited two American nuclear-power experts, John Jay Hopkins of General Dynamics and Lawrence Hafstad of the Chase Manhattan Bank, to come and lecture on the new atomic age. He joined the Liberal Party of his old friend Ichiro Hatoyama, Japan’s first postwar prime minister, also an advocate of nuclear power. Hatoyama gave Shoriki a choice of portfolios in his new government, and he chose atomic energy. He became first minister of state for atomic energy and first chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, which was created by the Atomic Energy Basic Law of December 1955.

Shoriki’s philosophy was simple and direct — import the best of foreign nuclear technology and copy it. But he was not the only prominent Japanese promoting an as yet unproven technology. A majority of Japan’s politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen already believed that the enormous financial investment required was a gamble worth taking. Their collective psychological mindset and what essentially drove them is worth examining.

Throughout the Shōwa era (1926–1989), those in charge of nurturing the new industrial society had to wrestle with economic crises generated by boom-and-bust conditions, much of it beyond their power to tame. First was financial panic over the Wall Street crash in 1927. This was followed by a series of economic disruptions initially caused by the diversion of funds to finance the invasion of Manchuria in 1931; then a home-grown fascist attack on Japanese capitalism throughout the 1930s; war with China from 1937 to 1941; the Pacific War and complete collapse of the economy in the 1940s; recession after the Korean War in 1954; trade liberalisation in the early 1960s; another recession in 1965; capital liberalisation between 1967 and 1976; a health and safety crisis in the early 1970s; and the first ‘oil shock’ of 1973. All of these, especially the oil shock, in which six oil-supplying Middle Eastern countries unilaterally raised their petroleum prices by 21 per cent per barrel, drove home to the bureaucrats that Japan was an industrialised country almost bereft of natural resources — especially energy.

Despite these challenges, Japan experienced double-digit growth from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. Its GNP passed that of the UK in the early 1950s, France’s in 1963, and Germany’s in 1966, and was bigger than France’s and Britain’s combined by the late 1970s. Its industrial output eclipsed that of the Soviet Union in 1976. Such growth broke all records. It was first outlined in a comprehensive two-part article in The Economist on 1 and 8 September 1962. Entitled ‘Consider Japan’, the articles were brought out in Japan the same year as a book called Odorokubeki Nihon (Amazing Japan). The Japanese miracle was later mythologised by P. B. Stone in Japan Surges Ahead (1969), Herman Kahn in The Emerging Japanese Superstate (1970), Ezra Vogel in Japan as Number One (1979), and Chalmers Johnson in MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982).

But two salient problems hindered any satisfaction that Japanese bureaucrats and industrialists may have felt. The first problem was that Japan was almost totally dependent on imported energy. World oil prices had doubled between 1970 and 1973, and they doubled again in October 1973 following the Yom Kippur War. Most of the country’s thermal and metallurgical coal had to be imported. The second problem was that throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese cities had suffered from the worst atmospheric pollution and most intense inner-urban congestion of any advanced industrial country. In view of these harsh realities, nuclear power seemed to be a miraculous source of renewable and clean energy.

On 3 March 1954, a conservative politician, Yasuhiro Nakasone, introduced into the Diet a budget for nuclear development. Ambitious, autocratic, intelligent, and pugnaciously patriotic, Nakasone shared many of Matsutaro Shoriki’s characteristics. Supported by politicians from all parties, as well as senior bureaucrats and industrialists, Nakasone’s bill proposed ¥300 million for the promotion of nuclear science, ¥235 million for the construction of a nuclear reactor, and ¥15 million for uranium exploration within Japan. The bill became law on 3 April. On 1 January 1955, the Atomic Energy Commission, with Shoriki as its head, was established in the Prime Minister’s Office. By July, a research agreement was signed with the United States allowing the importation of enriched uranium into Japan. This was ratified the following November, when the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute was established to import uranium.

After this rudimentary nuclear bureaucracy was established within the Prime Minister’s Office, it was quickly expanded to include other agencies. With its connections with heavy industry, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) asserted its right to be involved in the new science, and promptly established its own nuclear budget committee. And the Science Council of Japan, offended that Nakasone had submitted a budget for the development of nuclear science without consulting its scientific members, also insisted on being involved.

An unwieldy bipolar structure quickly emerged. On the one hand, under MITI’s leadership was a group of reorganised zaibatsu companies with immense industrial power. They included the Mitsubishi Atomic Power Committee, which was allied to the American company Westinghouse; the Tokyo Atomic Industrial Forum, which included 16 companies, including Hitachi and Showa Electric; the Sumitomo Atomic Energy Commission of 14 affiliated companies; the Nippon Atomic Industry Group, which included Mitsui and Toshiba in alliance with General Electric; and the First Atomic Power Industry Group, comprising 25 companies formerly affiliated to the Furukawa and Kawasaki groups. Also in the MITI stable were the ten private electric-power companies of Japan, each with its own designated territory within which it had monopoly powers to generate and distribute electricity.

On the other hand, a scientific group led by the Science and Technology Agency (STA) was established in the Prime Minister’s Office. With its research focus, the STA group included academic physicists and chemists. But its relevance was weakened by the perception that nuclear-power technology had moved beyond the theoretical stage, into the province of the engineers. Already in other countries, researchers in nuclear physics and chemistry had become marginalised from large-scale power reactors promoted by the private industrial sector. Tension between MITI and the STA became institutionalised, but in most respects MITI called the shots. The speed, form, and consequence of Japan’s postwar economic growth cannot be explained without reference to MITI’s guidance. Supporting neither free trade nor mercantilism, socialism nor capitalism, the private sector nor the public sector, MITI’s control was a fusion between state and big business, unique among the world’s developed economies at that time. For it was MITI which drew the blueprints for industrial activity.

Just as shipwrights, armourers, and strategists in Meiji Japan had set out for Europe after 1868 to acquire the best in military technology to arm the new Japanese army and navy, so the new atomic bureaucrats under MITI’s guidance went abroad to acquire the most advanced nuclear technology. In preparation for his nuclear budget, Nakasone had already visited the Lawrence Livermore nuclear laboratories at Berkeley in California in 1953, and had been deeply impressed with reactor research into electricity generation. Like Nakasone, the delegation of bureaucrats found American technology very attractive, but they were also interested in British technology, especially a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor at Calder Hall in Cumbria that produced plutonium for the British atomic-weapons program at Windscale (later renamed Sellafield). The reactor’s technology could be adapted to power generation, and it was enthusiastically promoted by Sir Christopher Hinton of the UK Atomic Energy Authority during a visit to Tokyo in May 1956. This prompted a follow-up mission to Britain in October–December the same year.

Blueprints for a Calder Hall–type reactor were subsequently purchased, and the reactor was constructed on reclaimed-forest land at Tokai in Ibaraki prefecture, north of Tokyo. It joined a cluster of three research reactors and a small (12.5 MW) prototype electricity-generating boiling-water reactor already built under licence from the United States. Run by the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, the Tokai complex was criticised on environmental grounds by some scientists as being within an earthquake zone and close to an American artillery firing range at Mito. Tokai nonetheless became the early nuclear ‘capital’ of Japan.

With 166 MW of electricity-generating capacity, the Tokai reactor went critical on 4 May 1965 and began commercial operation on 25 July 1966. It was backed up with British technological support from UK General Electric within the framework of an Atomic Energy Agreement signed by Japan with Britain on 16 June 1958. But suspicion about the plant soon grew. Already, on 10 October 1957, a fire had broken out in the graphite-moderator blocks of the reactor at Calder Hall, releasing a large amount of radiation into the English and Scottish countryside. In December 1969, brittle fractures were discovered in the pressure vessel of the Tokai reactor, which sharply reduced its safe operational output to 130 MW. These incidents irretrievably damaged British nuclear technology in Japanese eyes. The Calder Hall–type reactor was the only British reactor Japan ever bought, and one of only two ever exported (the other went to Italy). From then on, Japanese reactor technology was exclusively American.

It began with several boiling-water reactors (BWRs) bought from General Electric. The first of these was constructed in 1970 at Mihama in Fukui prefecture, 320 kilometres west of Tokyo, for the Kansai Electric Power Company. Another was built in 1971 in Fukushima prefecture, 250 kilometres north of Tokyo, for TEPCO at what was to become a six-reactor complex known as Fukushima Dai-ichi. Within a few years, the Japanese companies Hitachi and Toshiba were making GE-designed BWRs with modifications of their own. The other light-water technology that became popular was the pressurised-water reactor (PWR), which the Japanese originally purchased from Westinghouse, and Babcock and Wilcox. Mitsubishi soon acquired a licence for PWRs and began to build them with its own design modifications.

Explosive economic expansion and demand for energy drove a nuclear-reactor-building frenzy in Japan throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and well into the 1990s. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, 54 nuclear-power reactors were supplying nearly 30 per cent of Japan’s electricity requirements. These were grouped in 19 clusters, in Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku, and Hokkaido, with each cluster owned and managed by one of the ten private electric-power utilities of Japan. The largest of these is the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the largest power utility company in the world. The others are the Kansai Electric Power Company (servicing the Osaka–Kobe industrial area); the Chugoku Electric Power Company (servicing the southern part of Honshu, including Hiroshima); the Chubu Electric Power Company, Tōhoku Electric Power Company, and Hokuriku Electric Power Company (servicing the rest of Honshu); the Kyushu Electric Power Company (servicing Japan’s main southern island); the Shikoku Electric Power Company (servicing Shikoku); the Hokkaido Electric Power company (servicing Japan’s main northern island); and the Okinawa Electric Power Company (the smallest, servicing Okinawa and nearby islands).

The dream of MITI bureaucrats was that Japan’s nuclear industry would be self-sustaining. But painstaking exploration had unearthed little in the way of Japanese uranium resources. Teams of mineralogists from MITI’s Geological Research Agency had ransacked the country in 1954. They found traces of uranium ore at Ningyō-tōge, on the border of Tottori and Okayama prefectures, and at Tōnō, in Gifu prefecture, but no commercial deposits.

In response to this unwelcome news, the Atomic Energy Commission’s long-term plan of 1966 opted for an independent and complete nuclear-fuel cycle. This would include the importation of natural uranium, but would be backed up by a steadily increasing feedstock of reactor-grade plutonium (through the commercial development of fast-breeder reactors), ownership wherever possible of overseas uranium deposits, development of uranium enrichment and reprocessing in Japan, and stockpiling of the nuclear-fuels-enriched uranium and plutonium. The Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute and a new Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation within the prime minister’s Science and Technology Agency were responsible for this ambitious technical program.

In mid-1982, the government launched another long-term program, which envisaged 30 per cent of Japan’s electricity being generated from nuclear reactors by 2000; by 2010, plutonium would be employed in fast-breeder reactors, and mixed-oxide plutonium-uranium fuel in light-water reactors. The meltdown of a reactor at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986 did not dampen Japanese ambitions, although a new long-term plan emphasising reactor safety was hastily published to reassure the public. An advanced thermal reactor and a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor of exclusive Japanese design were built and commissioned in northern Honshu.

By the 1990s, the headlong rush in Japan towards nuclear sustainability had gone even further. Russia, France, and the United States had already experimented with fast-breeder reactors (FBRs), but all had been shut down because of daunting technological problems. Unfazed, the Japanese constructed their first experimental sodium-cooled fast-breeder reactor using plutonium oxide at Tokaimura. Called Joyo, it reached criticality in April 1977 and provided technical data for Monju, a commercial-scale FBR also using liquid sodium as a coolant. Construction of Monju (named after the bodhisattva of wisdom and intellect) began in Fukui prefecture on the Japan Sea coast in 1985. Allegedly designed to withstand enormous earthquakes, Monju had seven times the thermal output of Joyo. It reached criticality in April 1994, with full operation anticipated by December 1995.

Both reactors generated more nuclear fuel — weapons-grade plutonium — than they consumed. Experimentally, this was sometimes mixed with another weapons-grade fuel: enriched uranium. But the liquid-sodium coolant tended to ignite if exposed to the atmosphere; stresses on metal components were enormous; and operating temperatures were extreme. Joyo was shut down in 1999 when an accident showered hundreds of workers with radiation, killing two. But spurred on by the vision of completing the nuclear-fuel cycle, Japan persisted with its FBR program until August 2010, when a 3.3-tonne fuel-loading gantry became jammed in the mouth of the Monju reactor vessel. The manager of its fuel-exchange program committed suicide, and Monju has never been restarted.

A further breathtaking adventure is Japan’s nuclear-fusion program. So far, nuclear fusion has only been created in thermonuclear or hydrogen bombs. Using an atomic bomb as a trigger enclosed in a blanket of tritium, a hydrogen bomb bombards inertially confined fusion fuel with X-rays at enormous temperatures, causing the fuel to implode with immense kinetic energy and heat. The theory is that, like fission in a light-water nuclear reactor, fusion of light nuclei through plasma heated to the temperature of the sun (approximately 100 million degrees Celsius) can be slowed down enough to generate lasting heat. Together with the EU, India, China, Russia, South Korea, and the United States, Japan is participating in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor program involving an advanced experimental tokamak nuclear-fusion reactor, at Cadarache in southern France.

Until Friday 11 March 2011, when the earthquake-generated tsunami off north-eastern Honshu engulfed the nuclear-fission reactor complex at Fukushima, Japan’s nuclear bureaucracy and heavy-industrial companies were proceeding as rapidly as they could with the expansion of their nuclear-reactor fleet, their nuclear-reactor export program, and breeder research. Much of their endeavours were centred on Rokkashō, a nuclear complex north of Fukushima, in Aomori prefecture. The world’s largest nuclear complex, Rokkashō includes facilities for enrichment, reprocessing, fuel fabrication, waste processing, and storage. It is designed to convert 800 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel into reusable mixed-oxide fuel every year. It is the nation’s most ambitious and costly nuclear complex. Despite a number of nuclear accidents throughout the years at various nuclear plants, many of them kept from public knowledge, the program was amply funded, popularly supported, and well on course.

Have the events at Fukushima changed things? Will the Japanese nuclear bureaucracy dig in its heels, wait out the crisis, and persist with its programs? Or will there be a radical change in Japan’s energy-generating program to concentrate, like Germany and some other European countries, on renewable-energy programs?