Cruel fate of gentle folk

A visit to Japan with nuclear industry representatives turns into a close-up view of disaster for Lord O’Neill.

On Friday March 11, at around 2.15pm, I sat down with three colleagues for lunch in a Tokyo café. Half an hour later we left the table and rushed into the street.

The stoic reaction of our Japanese fellow diners to the earth tremor changed as the vibrations increased and the quaking became more prolonged. After all, Japan experiences in excess of 200 earthquakes a year.

Little did we know that this one, at 8.9 on the Richter scale, was the sixth-highest recorded. We were situated outside the Shujuku rail station, a commuting and metro centre which was in the heart of a major shopping precinct.

The thousands who spilled out of the shops and came up from the underground station stood watching the scenes of national disaster unrolling on the massive TV screens.

No longer were rail services and bland news and weather headlines being transmitted. Graphic listings of the size and scale of the quakes were depicted and then, almost as it happened, shots of the approaching tsunami were shown.

Some were of such a character that had they not been live, then they would surely have been edited out. One harrowing scene recorded the efforts of a wretched car driver trying to race ahead of the horrendous wave but being consumed by the faster, omnivorous tsunami.

Mobile phone systems by this time were overloaded and I had to find a landline to reassure my wife that I was safe. It was only then, some two hours after the tremors, that I began to appreciate how this event was being watched across the globe. Gradually coverage was extended to the ailing Daiichi nuclear power station at Fukushima.

I had been visiting Japan on a study tour with a group of colleagues from the UK Nuclear Industry Association to observe the latest techniques in nuclear station construction. Within our ranks were some of our most distinguished and experienced power engineers.

They gave an informed commentary on what was happening all the time, confirming by e-mail with colleagues across the world the likely causes of the explosions and fires on the site.

We had been visiting facilities under construction which were vastly superior in design and safety to the 1961 Fukushima station, but we had been driving along the narrowroads which skirted the sea and which we noted could be vulnerable to high tides.

Our concern had been the possibility of unpleasant floods, but nothing like that caused by a tsunami. As reports of the worsening situation came on to the screen we realised that the discomfiture suffered by us in Tokyo was as nothing compared to the poor people who lived in the remote towns and villages we had driven through only two days before. Indeed, had we been on these roads on Friday afternoon, we would not be alive today.

The memory of these polite, gentle folk, with their good manners and willingness to help visitors, only enhances one’s sadness and grief at their fate. What should have been a tourist meal break after a tiring but most productive visit became the last memory of a world which, for all too many, will never be the same again.

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