March 11, 2011. That day will be etched in Japan’s memory for a long, long time. The 9.0 magnitude Tohoku earthquake that happened was the most powerful ever recorded in Japan and the fourth most powerful in the world. It caused a tsunami so strong that Honshu, the main island of Japan, moved 2.4 m east. It also triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Okuma, perhaps, the severest nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.
When the tsunami struck, the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear power plant suffered meltdowns in three of its six reactors. Waves reaching up to 14 metres (46 feet) in height knocked out the plant’s backup power supply, causing fuel inside the reactors to melt. The radiation released in the atmosphere – and this continued for quite a few days after the accident — forced the government to declare a 20-kilometer radius evacuation zone around the plant. The 154,000-odd people who were affected were forced to move away from their homes for ever.
What followed were multiple class-action lawsuits that were filed holding the TEPCO executives and the government responsible for failing to take preventive counter measures. Many civil cases have already resulted in the payment of millions of dollars as compensation to the residents.
The case
The only criminal case, aimed at fixing the culpability of the disaster was filed by 5700 residents of Fukushima in 2015. Interestingly, the government prosecutors were reluctant to begin criminal proceedings against the top executives of TEPCO initially, but they were overruled by the citizen judiciary panel (a system where randomly selected Japanese citizens review prosecutor’s discretionary nonprosecution decisions in criminal cases). The TEPCO bosses were indicted and the trial began in 2017.
This story is from the September - October 2019 edition of Legal Notes.
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This story is from the September - October 2019 edition of Legal Notes.
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