‘Sense of duty’ prevented another Fukushima nuclear disaster

The Mainichi Daily News profiles Yanosuke Hirai, a technocrat in Japan, whose doggedness and sense of personal duty, compelled him to build a breakwater high enough to deflect the March 2011 tsunami and prevented the nucelar power plant at the Onagawa, Miyagi Prefecture, from being subsumed by the same waters that took out the Fukushima power plant.

Hirai was apparently the only person on the entire project to push for the 14.8-meter breakwater, while many of his colleagues said that 12 meters would be sufficient and derided Hirai’s proposal as excessive. Hirai’s authority and drive, however, eventually prevailed, and Tohoku Electric spent the extra money to build the 14.8-meter-tall shield. Some 40 years later, on March 11, 2011, a 13-meter-high tsunami slammed into the coast at Onagawa.