“The Japanese public is fed up with business as usual, and Mr. Hashimoto has been able to seize on that anger,” said Wataru Kitamura, a professor of government at Osaka University. “Japan is deeply frustrated by its own political paralysis, and many see him as the answer.”

Mr. Hashimoto takes pains to say he is not against nuclear power. He is, instead, against the opaque, top-down authority that has characterized Japan’s postwar rise and that many Japanese now blame for the government’s perceived failure to prevent last year’s accident and fully inform the public of the radiation risks it posed. That same attitude apparently led national leaders to underestimate how difficult it would be to persuade local leaders to restart the reactors.

Image Osaka’s mayor, Toru Hashimoto, has defied the central government in his opposition to restarting a plant in Ohi. Credit... Yuzuru Yoshikawa/Bloomberg News

“How can they make a decision like this behind closed doors, without explaining it to the Japanese people?” said Mr. Hashimoto, 42, who set up his city’s own independent panel of experts to look into safety measures at the plant, 55 miles north of here. “The restart issue reveals the flaws of Japan’s current system, and how it is beholden to special interests.”

Mr. Hashimoto has succeeded in holding up the restart partly because this city of 2.7 million is not only the biggest customer of the Ohi plant, but also the biggest shareholder of the plant’s operator, Kansai Electric Power. But Mr. Hashimoto may prove to be a longer-term danger to Tokyo’s leadership if other local officials nationwide follow his lead in demanding more answers before allowing their own nearby plants to start up again.

Already the governors of two other nearby regions, the district including the city of Kyoto and the prefecture of Shiga, also went to Tokyo with demands of their own to strengthen safety at the Ohi plant and to conduct a more thorough investigation into the causes of the Fukushima accident. Even the mayor of Ohi, Shinobu Tokioka, a longtime backer of the plant, which is a major source of jobs in his town, has said the reactors should not be restarted without gaining the support of all of Kansai, the heavily populated region that includes Osaka.

The uprising of sorts appears to have completely thrown off the government’s strategy for quickly getting Ohi and other plants back online, say political analysts. The government had apparently been hoping for the quick consent of host communities, which have been essentially bought off for years with generous subsidies and tax benefits to allow the plants in their midst, and which will be the first to suffer economically if the plants are shut.