In any chain of command situation anywhere, it was nothing less than insubordination. In a Japanese context, what Yoshida did is practically unthinkable. Hierarchy is everything in Japan. It literally dictates how low you should bow when meeting someone else. (In late November, Yoshida stepped down as site manager, having been hospitalized with an undisclosed illness.)
Yoshida's decision in the face of crisis speaks volumes as to just how desperate the situation was then. "It was exactly the right thing to do," says Sato, the consultant.
Into the Fire
In the first hours and days following the earthquake and tsunami, investigators have found TEPCO personnel made also critical mistakes—a couple of which are still unexplained.
One involved a critical piece of equipment, known as an isolation condenser, which keeps the water level in the reactor constant even if offsite electricity is lost. On the night of March 11, TEPCO operators at the plant site belatedly recognized that the system was not functioning, and then once they did, tried and failed to open up manually a valve that had been closed.
The assumption that the system was working delayed the decision to "vent", or depressurize, the reactor unit, a mistake that, in the eyes of the government's interim report, led to the first huge hydrogen explosion at reactor one the afternoon of March 12.
The independent Funabashi report also questions why it took seven hours from the time Prime Minister Kan approved the plan to vent to the first attempt to execute it. All the while, more hydrogen was leaking into the reactor building.
Conditions inside the plant—and confusion just outside of it— may have precluded swifter action.
Yoshida had ordered his team to make preparations to vent reactors one and two shortly after midnight, and Kan, the Prime Minister, approved the plan at around 1:30am.
But there was no procedure to operate the vent valves without power, so Yoshida's operators had to figure out on the fly how to do so manually—and then take potentially fatal risks to try to make it work.
At the same time, the government wanted to make sure residents who still remained in the area around of the plant were evacuated. It would be several hours before that happened, in part because the residents had no idea in which direction they were to flee.
Shortly after 9 in the morning of March 12, Yoshida dispatched the two teams. Both had volunteered to go into the reactor, knowing that radiation levels were dangerously high. Each headed to different sections to open critical valves.
