JAPAN_BY_RICH_READ_20558467.JPG

The Onagawa nuclear plant survived last year's earthquake and tsunami virtually intact, largely thanks to Yanosuke Hirai, who insisted that the plant exceed design requirements.

(Rich Read/The Oregonian)

Editor's Note: Reddit picked up this article on Nov. 6, 2013. Richard Read is available within the Reddit comments to answer your questions.

United Nations inspectors marveled this month that the nuclear plant closest to the epicenter of Japan's massive earthquake survived virtually intact, averting a Fukushima-style meltdown.

"With the earthquake of this magnitude, we would have expected the plant to have more damage," said Sujit Samaddar, leader of a U.N. nuclear watchdog team, at a

. "This indicated there were significant margins in the designs."

Why would the plant in Onagawa, Japan, endure the same tsunami and stronger ground shaking while Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors melted down in the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl?

According to a retired civil engineer I interviewed in March, there's one man to thank for averting a catastrophe worse than Fukushima, which spewed radiation across an area where 100,000 people still can't return home.

He is Yanosuke Hirai, who died 26 years ago, too soon to witness the disaster and too early to become a national hero. But the story of this tenacious man is inspiring, especially because he bucked convention in a society known for pounding the nail that sticks up. Hirai's example transcends the nuclear arena, where Japanese regulators coddled powerful companies, to offer lessons on corporate excesses and safety problems everywhere.

While

, a year after the tsunami that killed as many as 20,000, I noticed an

in the Mainichi Shimbun, a national newspaper. It quoted his understudy, Tatsuji Oshima, the retired president of a Tohoku Electric Power Co. subsidiary, still very much alive at 82.

My fixer/interpreter, Kayo Matsushita, managed to find Oshima, using her skills as a former foreign correspondent. We drove a couple of hours to meet him over hotel-lobby coffee in his hometown of Sendai, another city hit by the tsunami.

Oshima is a throwback to the World War II generation, a vanishing breed that I encountered sometimes during six years based in Tokyo. An earnest man with a white comb-over and big bifocals, he wore a dark blue suit with a Rotary International lapel pin and tie clip. He asked whether he could smoke.

Oshima used to choose sites for nuclear plants. He opened a sheaf of faded newspaper clippings and family photographs. He showed us pictures of his mentor, Hirai, a stern, straight-lipped man born in 1902 on the coast near Fukushima.

Hirai died at 84. He never forgot visiting a shrine as a boy and learning that it had been clobbered by the Jogan tsunami in the year 869. In 1968, after retiring as vice president of Tohoku Electric Power, he joined a committee planning construction of the company's plant in Onagawa. The plant would be built in a more populous area than Fukushima Dai-ichi, fronting the Pacific Ocean at Onagawa, a fishing town of 10,000.

Hirai said the plant should be built almost 50 feet above sea level. He called for a unique cooling system that would provide water even if a receding tsunami temporarily left the plant high and dry. And Hirai said the plant should be protected by a seawall 49 feet high, not 10 feet as originally designed.

View full size

Colleagues told Tohoku Electric's president that 39 feet would be sufficient. But Hirai, trained by the formidable Yasuzaemon Matsunaga, known as Japan's king of electric power, disagreed.

"Matsunaga-san hated bureaucrats," Oshima said. "He said they are like human trash. In your country, too, there are probably bureaucrats or officials who never take final responsibility.

"So Matsunaga's attitude was that you've got to go beyond the regulations," Oshima said. "If you just follow the regulations, you end up with what happened at Fukushima Dai-ichi. That's what Matsunaga told Hirai, and Hirai taught me."

Defying authority took courage, especially four decades ago in Japan, even for an expert such as Hirai who advised the utility after retiring. Even today, despite a gloss of anime and independence, Japan remains a place of hierarchy and convention. The nuclear lobby was particularly powerful, swaying politicians and placating the public.

Finally, Oshima said, Tohoku's president agreed to spend more for the higher wall -- before resigning to take responsibility for an electricity rate increase. The wall ended up at 46 feet, according to the team's recent inspection.

Not so at Fukushima Dai-ichi, whose reactors came on line during the 1970s. That plant's seawall was built to withstand a tsunami of less than 19 feet, the inspectors said.

On March 11, 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake rocked the country, merely flooding a basement at the Onagawa plant. The 9-magnitude quake unleashed a 43-foot tsunami that traveled 44 miles from the epicenter to slam into Hirai's seawall. It held.

The plant shut down so safely that it served as an evacuation center in Onagawa, where 827 died. The fishing town, where I spent

after the tsunami, escaped a far worse fate, thanks to Hirai.

The tsunami traveled 112 miles before overcoming Fukushima Dai-ichi's seawall. It knocked out power, causing meltdowns, explosions and the radioactivity releases.

Oshima said Fukushima Dai-ichi's designers at Tokyo Electric Power Co. built it to respond to a spike in electricity demand and to pressure for lower power rates.

"They thought that was their final responsibility," Oshima said of demand and price. "If you don't look at it that way, you'd be too harsh on Tepco."

Experts such as the team studying Onagawa will sift evidence for decades. Already workers have raised the Onagawa seawall to 56 feet.

Nuclear opponents cite Japan's disaster as a compelling reason for a ban. Oshima sees it as a mistake the country can learn from while still improving nuclear technology, which he regards as one of the world's great inventions behind only alcohol and go, an Asian board game.

"Corporate ethics is different from compliance," Oshima said, echoing Hirai. "Just being 'not guilty' is not enough."

Richard Read, who covers international issues for The Oregonian, was based in Tokyo from 1987 to 1994.

--