Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (36 page)

Kurokawa said the same organizational features that helped Japan engineer its post-war miracle had become the worst traits of the ‘nuclear village’. Elite bureaucratic planning, corralling state funds into favoured projects and limited consultation with the electorate had all been elements of post-war success. But they contained the seeds of catastrophe. The guardians of the country’s nuclear industry felt as though they were on a national mission to ramp up nuclear power at any cost. That made them ‘an unstoppable force, immune to scrutiny by civil society’, Kurokawa wrote. Such accepted norms could and should be questioned, he implied. That was the very opposite of cultural determinism. ‘We should reflect on our responsibility as individuals in a democratic society,’ he said of the collective failure at Fukushima. That meant strengthening what he called ‘civil society’. Viewed in this light, Kurokawa’s remarks were not a case of letting people off the hook. They were a call to individual and collective action.

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Before the tsunami, Japan had been one of the most nuclear-dependent economies on earth. After the tsunami, everything was different. By May 2012, fourteen months after the triple meltdown, not a single nuclear plant was left operating. For a few months, until one plant at Oi in western Japan juddered back to life, the country was entirely nuclear-free for the first time in half a century. The first thing to note
about this dramatic shift in energy policy is this: the lights stayed on. Japan did not shut up shop. From the first months after the tsunami knocked out substantial amounts of nuclear power, Japan learned to live with less electricity. Car manufacturers staggered production across a seven-day week so they did not all suck power from the grid at the same time. Toyota made cars from Wednesday to Sunday. In the cities, offices set air-conditioner thermostats at higher temperatures. Buildings closed earlier, depriving salarymen of hours of late-night overtime. In the summer of 2011, even press conferences at Tepco, one of the world’s largest power generators, took place with the lights off and the windows open to let in the breeze. Whenever a bullet train thundered along the nearby elevated track, the sound drowned out much of what was being said.
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By that stage, few people were listening to Tepco anyway.

For many Japanese, saving energy became fashionable. There was widespread questioning of the nation’s previous addiction to its super-electrified existence. Tokyo’s ranks of brightly lit vending machines were dimmed, by order of the governor, to a modest glow. Even the emperor and empress, according to palace spokesmen, were doing their bit by using candlelight at night.
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Conservation had an immediate impact. In the summer of 2011, even with temperatures rising past ninety degrees, peak electricity usage fell by almost a quarter from the previous summer. Some thought the costs to Japan were too high. ‘Everywhere living standards have degraded,’ complained Yukio Okamoto, a former career diplomat, sweat pouring down his face in his stuffy office. Just as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 had marked a turning point in US history, he said, so Japan would never be the same after 3/11. ‘The shortage of electricity will become a trait of civil and industrial society.’
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Okamoto wasn’t just talking about personal discomfort. Like many, he feared that unstable electricity supply and higher prices could be the final straw for Japanese industry.
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Companies were, he said, already battling against a disastrously strong yen, high corporate taxes, unrealistic carbon emissions targets and inflexible labour laws. Japanese manufacturers were being destroyed by Korean rivals that benefited from a cheap currency and tariff-free access to foreign markets thanks to free trade agreements that protectionist Japan had been unable to sign. If you added higher electricity
prices to the mix, he wondered how on earth Japanese manufacturers would survive at all.

There were other costs. Conserving energy could achieve only so much. To compensate for the loss of nuclear power, Japan had to import more oil and liquefied natural gas. That pushed up CO
₂
emissions. The swelling energy bill also zapped Japan’s trade surplus, pushing the country into deficit for the first time in three decades.
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Although Japan still had a current account surplus, thanks to financial returns on its huge investments abroad, many worried that a permanently higher energy bill could endanger even that. If the country were to move sharply into deficit, economists questioned its ability to maintain its astronomical public debt. Yoshito Sengoku, a senior politician, had no doubt about what it would mean for Japan. He compared abandoning nuclear power to ‘group suicide’.
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Many industrialists agreed. They said replacing nuclear power with renewable energy was a fantasy. ‘Can we close down nuclear power? My answer is no,’ said Minoru Makihara, former chairman of Mitsubishi Corporation. ‘Somewhere in the mix, nuclear power has to come into play.’
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Nobuyuki Idei, who once ran Sony, was of similar mind. ‘Nuclear power is one of the most important technologies for the future,’ he said. ‘We shouldn’t give it up.’
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Even Kazuo Inamori, legendary founder of a company that pioneered the Japanese manufacture of solar panels, thought alternative energy was too unstable. Until ways were found of storing vast amounts of energy collected when the sun was shining or the wind was blowing, he said, Japan would be foolish to ditch nuclear power.
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Advocates argued that nuclear power was not only cleaner and more stable, it was also cheaper. Before the tsunami, nuclear power was said to cost Y5–7 a kilowatt hour against Y11 for wind power, Y12–20 for geothermal and Y47 for solar. After the tsunami, critics of nuclear power took a harder look at the numbers. The supposed cost of nuclear generation, they said, didn’t take into account the hidden costs, such as the subsidies – little more than bribes – paid to local communities where nuclear plants were built, or the cost of disposing of spent fuel. Even leaving aside the billions of dollars that would be needed to clean up after Fukushima, Kenichi Oshima, an energy specialist at Ritsumeikan University, calculated that nuclear energy
actually cost Y12.23/kWh. That made it more expensive than either thermal power or hydropower.
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No less a figure than Jeff Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, one of the pioneers of civil nuclear power and the company that helped build the Fukushima Daiichi plant, argued that the economics of nuclear power were crumbling. Discovery of huge amounts of shale gas in the US and elsewhere had turned energy costs upside down, making electricity produced from gas-fired power stations much cheaper. That was happening just as, in the aftermath of Fukushima, demands for higher safety standards would inevitably raise the cost of nuclear power. ‘They’re finding more gas all the time. It’s just hard to justify nuclear,’ Immelt said. ‘Gas is so cheap and at some point, really, economics rule.’ In the future, he said, ‘some combination of gas, and either wind or solar . . . that’s where most countries around the world are going’.
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Taro Kono, one of the few Liberal Democrat MPs who had been a long-time opponent of nuclear power, argued the ‘nuclear village’ deliberately stunted the development of renewable energy. In 2000, he said, supporters of nuclear power stymied a bill to introduce a ‘feed-in tariff’ that would have guaranteed a competitive price to alternative-energy producers. It took the Fukushima disaster to persuade the government to set a generous feed-in tariff, obliging electricity companies to buy unlimited quantities of renewable energy from independent generators.
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About 8–9 per cent of Japan’s electricity comes from renewable sources, most of it from hydro, with only about 1 per cent from wind and solar. That compares with about 25 per cent in Germany, which has incentivized renewable energy much more aggressively. In theory, a feed-in tariff could change Japan’s incentives too, though advocates of renewable power said the new law was too narrow in scope. Kono, speaking from his dimly lit, energy-saving office, said Japan had the world’s third-highest geothermal potential and its sixth-largest tract of ocean, a boon for offshore wind power. Once a pioneer in solar power, he fumed, Japan had almost deliberately thrown away its lead.

Masayoshi Son, the founder of telecommunications company Softbank and one of Japan’s boldest entrepreneurs, quickly threw his weight behind renewable energy. His company said it would build at
least ten large-scale solar-power plants to form an ‘Eastern Japan Solar Belt’. Son reckoned that, if he could persuade regulators to make a fifth of unused farmland available for solar-power stations, he could generate as much power as Tepco itself.
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‘We are going to spread natural energy throughout Japan,’ he told an audience at the launch in Kyoto of his first solar project, which duly opened in July 2012.
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Son hoped he could galvanize others to act. Even Lawson, a convenience store operator with no experience of electricity generation, said it would install solar power in 2,000 of its outlets. It would sell spare capacity to the grid.
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The new mood was captured by Hiroshi Mikitani, the internet entrepreneur, who registered his anti-nuclear credentials by resigning from Keidanren, the powerful business lobby. Explaining his decision to quit – his resignation was sent out on Twitter, no less – Mikitani said Keidanren was blindly pro-nuclear. His own company Rakuten, an online shopping mall, had been able to cut electricity usage by 35 per cent through simple measures, he said. He was sceptical about the dire warnings that the country could not survive without nuclear energy.
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Most strikingly, popular opinion turned sharply against nuclear power. Opinion polls, though erratic, showed that at least half of people were in favour of the eventual elimination of nuclear power altogether, with just a quarter saying it should remain.
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Anti-nuclear sentiment was slow-burning. In the first months after the Fukushima disaster, it was noticeable that protests halfway round the world in Germany had been much bigger than those in Japan. But as time went on, the numbers of anti-nuclear protesters began to swell. By the summer of 2012, regular demonstrations outside the prime minister’s office attracted tens of thousands of people.
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In July, Kenzaburo Oe, a Nobel laureate who had written about the after-effects of the nuclear bomb in his essay
Hiroshima Notes
, gave an anti-nuclear address. The crowd in Yoyogi Park was the biggest since mass protests in 1960 against the renewal of the US–Japan Security Treaty. Organizers claimed 170,000 people came to the ‘Sayonara Nukes’ protest and even police conceded that 75,000 people had attended.
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NHK, the official broadcaster, still ready to ply the official line, barely covered an event within walking distance of its headquarters.
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Crowds were motivated by fear of radiation as well as by outrage at the arrogance and incompetence behind the disaster. Anger had also been stoked by a cynical display that showed the ‘nuclear village’ had lost none of its deceitfulness. In an effort to restart a nuclear plant in Kyushu, the local operator had sought to rig ‘town-hall meetings’ by flooding them with pro-nuclear messages from seemingly ordinary members of the public. When the subterfuge was discovered, the public outcry ensured the plant remained shut down indefinitely. Although some communities around nuclear plants had become addicted to subsidies, local sentiment swung against the industry. That was especially true in towns and villages that were near a plant, but too far away to benefit from state transfers. Local politicians began to tap into the anti-nuclear sentiment, making it harder for the central government to orchestrate the firing up of idle plants. ‘I’m not buying this claim that we have to have nuclear power because there’s not enough electricity,’ said Toru Hashimoto, the populist Osaka mayor. ‘There’s generally more than enough.’
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Naoto Kan, the prime minister who had contemplated evacuating 30 million people from Tokyo – an act that would have ‘come to within one inch of the end of this nation’ – led the anti-nuclear charge.
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As 2011 wore on, sensing the end of his own premiership, he decided to take the nuclear industry down with him. He launched a wholesale review of national energy policy that opened the possibility of abandoning nuclear power altogether. It was clear where Kan stood. ‘Our nation should aim to become a society that can manage without nuclear power,’ he said. Kan ordered a series of ‘stress tests’ designed to ascertain whether nuclear reactors could survive extreme situations. Tepco was nationalized. Plans were set in motion to abolish the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, the regulator that had been found so badly wanting. The new regulator would be prised away from the pro-nuclear trade ministry, and housed instead in the ministry of environment. There was talk of ending the power industry’s stranglehold on generation and transmission, a monopolistic set-up that had allowed it to charge some of the steepest electricity prices in the world. Kan’s anti-nuclear fervour outlasted him. In September 2012, against the opposition of industry, the government adopted the formal policy of phasing out all nuclear power by 2040.

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Driving much of the debate was fear of radiation. The Japanese, victims of two nuclear bombs, harboured a special loathing for its invisible dread. The Godzilla films, which started in the 1950s, were a depiction of the monstrous power let loose by nuclear explosions. After the crisis at Fukushima, which hurled radiation into the atmosphere and pumped it into the oceans, the public quickly learned a whole new radioactive nomenclature of millisieverts, Becquerels and caesium. Bottled water disappeared virtually overnight from supermarkets after the government announced that levels of iodine-131, a radioisotope, in Tokyo’s water supply was double the recommended limit for infants. In April, small fish, called sand lance, caught in waters south of Fukushima, were discovered to contain 526 Becquerels of caesium per kilogramme, above the legal limit of 500. In subsequent months many varieties of fish, vegetables and rice were found with higher than normal levels of radiation. Cows from ranches around Japan had been fed with rice straw from contaminated areas, leading to a panic about beef. Even two minke whales caught off the coast of Hokkaido showed traces of radioactive caesium, though fisheries officials pronounced them safe to eat.
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The government warned parents not to feed milk from contaminated areas to young infants. When, fifteen months later, a seventy-foot dock from Japan washed up in Oregon it too was tested for radiation. It was part of more than 1 million tonnes of debris expected to float to America’s Pacific coast.