Koichi Nakagawa* sometimes wonders if he should have bailed out on his friends and other employees at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant a lot earlier.
Maybe he should have left the day he worked to restore electricity to the plant wearing his regular work clothes while others wore hazmat suits. Or the day he watched as a pink mushroom cloud formed over the plant after Reactor Unit 3 blew up.
Or maybe he should have driven away on March 11, 2011, when he felt the earth move at 2:46 p.m. Hard pavement started undulating like waves on water, windows shattered, and a female employee was frantically shouting on the public-address system: "Please evacuate! Please evacuate!" Soon hundreds of workers rushed toward the headquarters where Nakagawa was standing petrified.
Forty minutes later, they watched as the entire ocean ebbed, only to be mesmerized minutes later as a 14-meter tsunami flooded the six reactors standing along Japan's northeastern coast. The entire plant lost power, except the headquarters building.
Nakagawa could have evacuated that day--after all, he was a subcontractor who just happened to be at the plant conducting regular maintenance and inspections. But he thought his job would be in jeopardy if he left: "I couldn't say no to them, because they'd give my company work in the future."
Nakagawa and other workers also had no idea the reactors were in such a precarious state. Information wasn't getting out to the workers in the plant amid the chaos following the earthquake and tsunami. Nakagawa says he wasn't aware of the extent of the radiation levels where he was working in the days after the twin natural disasters turned into a nuclear disaster, until a Newsweek reporter pointed it out. "Really? Gee, I didn't know that," he says.
And finally, he didn't want to look like a coward.
Instead, Nakagawa would become a hero, one of a group of workers dubbed the "Fukushima 50" by the global media in search of a cogent way to cover an indescribable tragedy. In the coming days and weeks, hundreds more would join the effort, living off packaged food and sleeping in jampacked conference rooms to deal with a crisis that would soon become the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.
Like the firefighters who rushed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, the workers were called the heroes of last year's triple disasters, known as 3/11 in Japan. The international media quickly lionized them as the "faceless heroes" who stayed behind, and the Japanese press also latched onto the meme. But now in Japan, these men are mostly forgotten.
