I was in Kobe when a powerful earthquake flattened the port city in Hyogo Prefecture in January 1995. My house in Kobe didn't collapse, but neighboring areas across a river were reduced to rubble. Several days after the quake hit, I walked around the city to search for my friends.
I was in Kobe when a powerful earthquake flattened the port city in Hyogo Prefecture in January 1995. My house in Kobe didn't collapse, but neighboring areas across a river were reduced to rubble. Several days after the quake hit, I walked around the city to search for my friends.
News videos showing the devastation caused by the earthquake that hit eastern Japan on Friday and the hardships of the survivors bring back painful memories from that winter to me.
Later, I wrote a novel about a gigantic quake triggering a nationwide catastrophe in Japan, in part to encourage greater disaster prevention efforts.
It was predicted that a huge quake off Miyagi Prefecture would occur with a probability of 99 percent within 30 years or so. In a sense, Friday's quake came as no surprise.
I was shocked by the destructive force of a huge tsunami, recorded and broadcast in such vivid footage for the first time in Japan. But some of the consequences of the quake were predictable, such as soil liquefaction, fires at oil storage tanks and large-scale public transport disruptions that made it difficult for a large number of people to return home.
But the accident that is taking place at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. was unimaginable.
In my personal opinion, the responses to the accident have been late.
I was once a researcher at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, currently the Japan Atomic Energy Agency. I have some acquaintances who work in the nuclear power industry. They are all brilliant experts firmly committed to their jobs.
But they tend to be too sensitive to reactions from local governments and news media and less willing than they should to communicate their problems to people outside their organizations.
Requests for aid and cooperation from other organizations like the Self-Defense Forces should have been made at an earlier stage of the crisis. The measure of cooling down the reactor containment vessels with seawater could and should have been taken earlier.
Nearly 30 employees of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency take turns to deal with the situation at the Fukushima plant. They must be working around the clock without sleeping or resting. The work must be putting enormous mental and physical strains on these workers.
Human errors must be avoided at any cost in such operations. An effective support system to provide enough manpower and other resources to help the efforts should be established.
As things have come to this pass, both TEPCO and the government should consider the real-time release of all relevant raw data to seek counsel of a wide range of experts including those overseas. To avoid confusion, the people responsible for containing the crisis must make decisions themselves, taking advice from those experts into account.
Japan's nuclear power industry, which has been promoted by the government as the centerpiece of its energy policy, will not be able to recover from this disaster for a long period of time.
With oil and other fossil fuel sources limited in amount, nuclear power generation is vital for the economic future of this nation.
I used to think that Japan, which boasts high levels of nuclear power technology and safety standards, should take the lead in the international efforts to expand nuclear power generation. But that is no longer possible. There will be stronger doubts and skepticism about atomic power in Japan.
The nuclear safety systems and measures need a sweeping review. At the Fukushima plant, the cooling pumps and the emergency core cooling system failed to work due to disruptions in power supply. The power sources and other reserve systems, rather than the reactors themselves, must be reviewed fundamentally.
It is also essential to improve the skills and abilities of people involved in the operations of nuclear power plants. They should be better trained to deal effectively with a crisis.
It is, for instance, necessary to promote research efforts to develop a comprehensive training and education program including psychological elements for nuclear power workers.
A gigantic earthquake and a consequent towering tsunami like the one that devastated eastern Japan takes place at intervals of 100 years or so. It is therefore difficult to hand down experiences and lessons from such disasters to the next generation.
The region along the Sanriku coast that has been ravaged by the latest quake experienced a devastating tsunami in 1896 during the Meiji Era and again in 1933 in the early Showa Era. But I wonder how much of what was learned from these disasters had been handed down through generations to people living in the region today.
Videos and newspaper articles reporting the devastation caused by the latest quake should be kept and viewed repeatedly in the coming years. We must keep it in mind that Japan is an earthquake-prone nation.
(This article was compiled from an interview by Hideyuki Kaneshige.)
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Tetsuo Takashima is a novelist and former nuclear scientist. He won a Suntory Mystery Fiction Award in 1999. His published works include "M8" and "Tsunami."