The four steeplejacks from Hiroshima knew all about the dangers of working at great heights.
The four steeplejacks from Hiroshima knew all about the dangers of working at great heights.
On March 11, 2011, the men were working on the construction of towering chimneys at the Hitachinaka thermal power plant in Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture, a facility operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co.
As we all know now, that was the day the magnitude-9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake struck the northeastern Tohoku region with devastating consequences. Even as far south as Ibaraki Prefecture, the shaking was nerve-wracking.
The men perished when scaffolding set up at the chimney’s highest portions, some 220 meters above the ground, started to collapse like a house of cards.
As sections of the grid-like steel floorboards gave way, the four men fell tens of meters to their deaths.
I visited their bereaved family members in Hiroshima Prefecture.
The first person I met was Hisae Orita, 64, whose son Hiroshi, 29, died that day.
"I have no choice but to accept that it was his fate," she said.
According to Hisae, her son was a mischievous lad during his junior high school days and, as a result, she was frequently summoned to the school.
After he started work as a steeplejack, however, he often called her from the workplaces he had been dispatched to, saying, "How are you doing, mom?" When he returned home, he sometimes cooked "nabe" (Japanese-style hot pot) for her.
"He was an affable child," she recalled. "I wish it was me who died, not him."
Another of the four victims was Takahiro Asajima, 40. After the accident, his older brother Yasunori, 44, began harboring suspicions that the company handling construction of the chimneys may have been partially at fault.
He said a smaller earthquake in the area near the thermal power plant hit two days before March 11. He believes that likely loosened the fasteners on the scaffolding.
An employee of the company told him that workers checked the fasteners at the time and found no problems. But, Asajima reasons, if that is the case, why did such a tragedy occur?
The company said the collapse of the scaffolding was beyond anything it had anticipated.
TEPCO, which had hired the company for the chimney construction, never bothered to dispatch executives to offer condolences to the bereaved families.
Asajima spoke with an employee of the company, telling him, "I'm left with a total feeling of emptiness over the deaths."
The employee, however, did not respond.
Kazunori Kaneshiro, 43, also died that day.
His brother Hideki, 46, was unable to hide his anger.
Though his family obtained compensation through the government-sponsored insurance program for labor-related accidents, it received only 2.5 million yen ($31,000) in support money from the chimney construction company, besides funeral costs.
"I don’t want to talk about money. But the fact is, if the amount (of support money) is so low, what does that say about the dignity of the four who died?" said the brother. "I feel that the price of each of their lives is less than that of a piece of heavy machinery."
Though a year has passed since the disaster, the anger felt by the bereaved families has not dissipated with the passage of time.
"The company only says that it can’t be helped because the accident was caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake," said Hideki Kaneshiro. "I feel that they are trying to escape all responsibility with the words 'disaster caused by the earthquake.' If the accident had taken place without a quake, it would have been big news in the media. I think this accident was due entirely to human error."