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fukushima days that shocked the world s01e01
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00:07Friday, March 11, 2011, started as a very ordinary day.
00:16The feeling that the world is being seen in the world, I feel like it's a quiet feeling.
00:21It's like the quietness of the嵐 in front of the sky.
00:28There was this big, deep, bass rumbling.
00:37We had no idea what was going on.
00:45I was really scared of the揺れ.
00:53And then we were just watching this wave, thinking, oh my goodness, this is really bad.
01:19The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, one of the workers, was handling radioactive waste, and all the lights go out.
01:38Suddenly we were at the center of the world's biggest story.
01:41?
01:43...
01:43?
01:44?
01:44?
01:44?
02:10?
02:15I managed to find my portfolio 25th of January 2011, so about two months before it happened.
02:28I was nine years old.
02:30I was born in Japan.
02:32So even though my mum and dad are French and English, I would say sort of in my heart,
02:36because I lived there for 13 years, I was born there, I grew up there, I would say at
02:40heart, I'm Japanese.
02:47I was the Tokyo bureau chief for the Financial Times newspaper.
02:52I'd been working there for a few years, having been a correspondent in China and Taiwan, in
02:58the region as well.
03:02Japan has a very distinct and very interesting society and a very rich culture.
03:08So it's a great place to live and work.
03:17Around 300 kilometres north of Tokyo lies the coastal city of Ishinomaki.
03:27Richard Halberstadt taught English at the University.
03:31I was born in Reading in the UK, but I've lived in Japan for over 30 years now, here in
03:39Ishinomaki
03:39City.
03:43Ishinomaki is the very typical small city.
03:49Its main industry is fisheries and the reason I came to like it is not so much because of
03:55the place, but because of the people who were really warm and welcoming.
04:07Riyoko Endo was a nursing assistant.
04:11Riyoko Endo was born here in the UK.
04:14My husband was born here in the New York area.
04:16My husband was born here in Tokyo.
04:19He was born here in Tokyo and before he married to Tokyo.
04:27I started to see my husband.
04:34Where he married to Tokyo.
04:41I lived with my wife, my mother, and three children.
05:01March 11th is spring vacation for the university, so we weren't teaching or anything like that.
05:07But for some reason, I don't know why, when I woke up,
05:10I didn't really have much to do at the university, but thought I'd go in anyway.
05:16I was working at a hospital in the city.
05:19I had to go to the hospital before the kids get out of the hospital.
05:25I had to go to the hospital.
05:26I had to go to the hospital and get out of the hospital.
05:29After that, the kids gave their power and gave their power to the school.
05:44It was just like any other Friday.
05:47My brother, he was three years old, I think.
05:51So then he was still going to nursery.
05:54I was getting ready for primary school.
05:56And my mum would cycle me.
06:00I loved school a lot.
06:02We had karaoke Friday, which was a thing we had in the afternoons
06:06that I was really looking forward to.
06:07It was really fun.
06:16It had actually been a fairly quiet period for news in Japan.
06:20And one of my colleagues was wondering when things would heat up again
06:24and we'd start getting articles in decent places in the paper.
06:30We had no idea what was going to happen next.
06:37Along the coast, 40km west of Ishinomaki, is the sprawling city of Sendai.
06:46Where Yu Muroga was preparing for an afternoon, delivering medical supplies.
06:53I had an administrator for a lot of people to find their cars who were close to during this job.
07:00Even the airport was Defense-Manage,從 hvad
07:17This is a system that can be recorded for 24 hours, and it is also a high-quality system for
07:25a video camera.
07:36When I entered the first signal, the car was going to hit the button.
07:58I was sitting at my desk in our office building on the 21st floor in the Hibiya business district and
08:08suddenly I felt the rattling and the beginning of the sway.
08:27It started to tremble, it started to shake, all the way from nursing we would do drills, we would practice
08:36going underneath the tables, going to frames like door frames as a way to do it.
08:44The teacher just said, all right, everyone, there's no desks, no tables in that room, so just huddle together in
08:49the middle of the room and we'll just wait for it to pass.
09:08When the shaking started, then it was just so bad that I had to just clutch hold of my desk
09:17to just stay standing.
09:27All the books were flying off my shelves, which was pretty terrifying.
09:38And when it goes by and it's still continuing to shake and then the trembling gets worse and worse and
09:45stronger.
09:47I had a fan that was above my head and a screw came loose and so it was just flinging
09:53and this, that one screw that was left.
09:56And I was thinking for myself, I hope that doesn't fall on me.
10:06It was very quickly apparent that this was a powerful earthquake and it was growing in power.
10:24The magnitude 9 earthquake was the strongest ever recorded in Japan.
10:30Local government officer Teruo Okono was working near Ishinomaki.
10:35I was working near the city of the city of the city of the city of the city.
11:05I've never experienced a lot, and I think it's been a long time for 3 minutes.
11:25That's when I think, when everything just got worse, it started to drag on for a while and the shaking
11:33became much worse.
11:34And then we could see our teachers' expressions, that that's when I think we knew something was wrong.
11:53We didn't realise how bad this was and how bad it was going to be.
12:00Of course I worried about my mum and my dad, but I remember my main worry at the time was
12:06my brother, because he was at nursery.
12:10And just, you don't know how your family is. You don't know if they're safe, if they've been injured.
12:24I mean, the power of the earthquake was extraordinary. And we in Tokyo felt it as something extraordinary.
12:32But if you were along the coast, much closer to the epicentre, it was, for many people, absolutely terrifying.
12:42And right on that coast sat one of the world's largest nuclear power stations, Fukushima Daiichi.
12:54Decontamination worker, Yukio Shirahige, was in a building at the edge of the site.
12:59The power of the earthquake was the main framework of the monument.
13:05Of course I joined the site of the building of the equipment tax-like cedro, but it did not really
13:19work in the middle of the church.
13:25When the earthquake started, there was a storm.
13:28There was a storm in the Uxima region.
13:33I realized that it would be a storm.
13:39It would be a storm.
13:43It was a storm.
13:46It was a storm.
13:47It was a storm.
13:47It was a storm.
13:53you're there. When the earthquake hit, safety systems automatically shut down the three active
13:59reactors. So very crudely, the earthquake caused damage to the plant, but nothing that alone would
14:12have caused a crisis. For example, one part is that it destroyed a pylon and broke the connection
14:22that the plant had to the national grid. And it's one of the features of nuclear power plants of the
14:30type used at Fukushima Daiichi that they need electricity to keep the reactors and the spent
14:40fuel that's kept in cooling ponds cool. After the chain reaction has stopped, it needs to be cooled
14:49down for a long time. Even though there was no power coming in from outside, there were emergency
14:57generators starting to kick in and providing an electricity to pumping the coolant of the reactor.
15:09With diesel generators keeping the fuel cool, plant operators hoped the worst was over.
15:18But the six minute long quake left the whole country on edge.
15:25When the shaking eventually stopped, I think the teachers were trying to figure out what to do.
15:34I'd asked my teachers if I could be let go and they said, yep, that's fine. So I got my
15:39bicycle and I
15:40started to cycle to my mum's office to try and find her.
15:46As I'm trying to get up this hill, I just remember feeling this panic of it doesn't matter if something
15:54falls on me, it falls on me. I've just got, I've got to get to my mum's office.
15:59I wasn't sitting on my bicycle, I was standing, trying to get there as quickly as possible.
16:07Trying to dodge through people who are coming out into the streets as well and just feeling this
16:12feeling of panic and I need to get to my mum, I need to get to my mum.
16:23300km north, in coastal Sendai city, Yuma-roga was still on the road.
16:43It was just a thing that we experienced before.
16:49100km north of the road.
16:51At the moment when the road was Polsce on edge, there was an unfortunate runiren.
16:58The only way you are now on edge.
16:59The Others of the road were on edge.
17:00It's just a few different things that people lived through.
17:00The river burned and towers.
17:04There was still a bit of a震, and a little bit of a震.
17:14The big震 was a bit of a震, so I got a lot of a震.
17:35We didn't have any news, we had no idea what was going on, and I didn't really have a chance
17:43to be worried about anyone, because everything was just happening all at the same time, and
17:49it was all so surreal that we were kind of just more occupied with coping for ourselves.
17:56Ryoko Endo was on the fifth floor of the hospital.
18:30My mom's office is on the fourth floor of the office building, but the lifts aren't working,
18:38so I was running up the stairs. And I remember just bursting into her office. It was such a relief
18:47to see her. I just ran straight into her arms, and I think I just cried. We cycled home together,
18:56and I remember seeing my brother, and that feeling of, thank goodness he's all right.
19:08The earthquake's epicentre was traced to the ocean floor,
19:12around 80 kilometres east of Ishinomaki. So the immediate aftermath of the earthquake for us
19:21was realising that we were actually not at the centre of it. And as soon as the Japanese television
19:34was reporting, as they did quite quickly, that the epicentre was off the coast, then
19:42it became possible that a damaging tsunami could be on the way.
19:50We were all gathered together, first in the university canteen, and then when the tsunami warning
19:58was issued, then that meant we should get to higher ground.
20:09So we all moved to a big classroom on the third floor. There was so much happening that it wasn't
20:18it wasn't really, my head couldn't cope with everything that was going on, really.
20:45As a journalist, I don't want bad things to happen. I like reporting good news. But it was always in
20:56the back of my mind that it might be on my watch that a very large disaster might happen.
21:06One of the first things we did was to switch on the television and see what on earth was going
21:11on. Because for all we knew in that moment was that we had an earthquake. But what we didn't realise
21:18was that it was so big that then it had caused a tsunami.
21:28And that's when I remember just seeing the wave making its way to that northern coast,
21:38thinking, oh my goodness, this is, this is really bad.
21:42The tsunami news is on the ground.
21:47The tsunami news is on the coast.
22:06In Sendai, Yumurogo was driving across town, more than two kilometers from the coast.
22:20This is the first time the tsunami came.
22:27I checked it from the mirror, and I took the camera on the back.
22:33Then, the tsunami came from the front.
22:55But at that time, I thought the road was going to be going to be a bit of a wave.
23:00I thought it was still possible for the first few seconds.
23:07But the car was running slowly, and I thought it was possible for the first few seconds.
23:19I thought it was possible for the first few seconds.
23:56The tsunami struck a long swathe of Japan's east coast.
24:02Swamping harbours, rivers and low-lying areas.
24:44I was still thinking we might be reporting mainly on deaths from falling buildings.
24:53But from the reports that were coming through from Japanese media, it was clear that the
25:00tsunami was likely to be the real killer here.
25:10Near Ishinomaki, Teruo Okono was sheltering in his office a few hundred meters from the coast.
25:46The small river that the tsunami is facing the sky,
25:52and that the tsunami has come to see the first sight of the tsunami.
25:59Here we go!
26:05Here we go!
26:07The car is coming from the front door.
26:12The building itself has a lot of loud noise.
26:16The panels of the building is broken.
26:18The wind is broken.
26:20The wind is broken.
26:46建物が異常な振動をし始まって、そうしているうちに実は我々は逃げようと思った瞬間に、その真正面の実はドアのところから水が2階を襲ってきた。
26:50There was a big black wave that came to me.
26:57I was able to throw out the tsunami that I was in the middle of the scene.
27:06I was able to throw out the tsunami that I was in the middle of the scene.
27:12I was able to see what I was thinking about.
27:29My car had the weight balance between 50 and 50, but it was almost impossible to see it in my
27:40car, but it was almost impossible to see it in my car.
27:51I was thinking about how to protect the car in a car or how to get rid of the car.
28:00I thought I was afraid of getting rid of the car in a car.
28:06Maybe I was afraid of getting rid of the car.
28:14The car was running back, and it was running back, and it was in the building.
28:21It was in the basement of the house.
28:36The window from the window, the water came into the window.
28:40I thought it was impossible for a car in the middle of the car.
28:43I can't understand why I was looking at the window, and I was able to fly away from the window.
28:50So I managed to move the window from the window, and in the middle of the window, I was able
28:55to fly away from the window.
28:58A few days later, I was able to fly away from the window.
29:03I am sorry to say, but I was so tired when I was in the middle of a day.
29:07I thought I was able to fly away from the window.
29:17I thought it was another thing that I shouldn't take.
29:19When I was like, I was drinking water and accidentally
29:21I was talking to my hand whenever I was living there.
29:24So I used to think that I was going to work hard
29:26and then some of the things I could do could be
29:27and then it was me thinking about why I could do it.
29:32I was drinking water, it was fine,
29:37I had to drink it and then I sat down the water,
29:41It was a big one, and it was a big one.
29:46I was like, I'm not going to go.
29:47I'm not going to go.
29:49I'm not going to go.
29:54I'm not going to go.
30:01I'm going to go.
30:09I was able to move my hand and my body.
30:14I was able to move my hand and my hand and my hand.
30:15It was hard to get my hand.
30:18I was able to die and I was able to die.
30:23I was talking about my family and my family.
30:27My family's face is like,
30:31I was thinking, I'm sorry, but I was able to move my hand and my body.
30:37I was able to move my body to the top of my head and go to the top of my
30:43head.
30:44and the wind came out.
30:48At the end, the building of the building was a lot of people who were caught.
30:56They were caught up with the tsunami of the flow.
31:05So, I heard that,
31:07I was like, I'm going to go.
31:13I got my mind.
31:15I was like, I'm going to go.
31:19I had a vision of my husband's mother and father, and he told me that my mom's mother and dad
31:29is in the house.
31:31So, he said, he said, and he said, and he said, and he said, he said, and he said, and
31:38the house was going on.
31:38It's a little bit closer to my son's house.
31:44I've learned a lot from my son's words,
31:49but I've learned a lot from my son's house.
31:53I've learned a lot from my son's house.
32:17Thousands had drowned
32:19and thousands more were missing.
32:26There are many stories
32:30of people who
32:33had lost loved ones
32:36very likely because those loved ones
32:38had been trying to look after each other
32:41or trying to find them
32:42rather than just fleeing.
32:46And that's a kind of very human dilemma.
32:55There were people who were having to stand by
32:59very close to their neighbours
33:01sometimes their loved ones being washed out to sea
33:04without anything they could do to save them.
33:08There were people who had lost their loved ones
33:09and had lost their loved ones
33:12and had lost their loved ones
33:12and had lost their loved ones.
33:13Ryo Koendo hadn't heard from her husband
33:15or her three children
33:17since before the earthquake.
33:20Ryo Koendo
33:22Ryo Koendo
34:00while Ryo Koendo
34:02waited for news
34:02further south, Fukushima Daiichi was also
34:05directed to the police
34:06directly in the path of the tsunami.
34:09Yukio Shirahige was sheltering
34:11on the land side of the site.
34:14Ryo Koendo
34:15Ryo Koendo
34:15Ryo Koendo
34:19Ryo Koendo
34:20Ryo Koendo
34:21Ryo Koendo
34:45Ryo Koendo
34:49Ryo Koendo
34:50Ryo Koendo
34:51Ryo Koendo
35:06Ryo Koendo
35:07Ryo Koendo
35:07Ryo Koendo
35:07Ryo Koendo
35:08You know tsunami is not just like a wave
35:12it is like a rise of the sea level with a very strong force.
35:19So tsunami came over the defense shield, flowed into the power plant, pushed away all the cars and the other
35:32installations around the reactor and then it hit the reactor building.
35:42No one knew if the plant could survive a direct hit.
35:51Meanwhile, the extent of the damage to coastal communities was dawning on residents, like social worker Mizue Kano.
35:58Ryo Koendo
36:00Ryo Koendo
36:04Ryo Koendo
36:06I was working at a time when I was working on a lot.
36:09I felt that it was a difficult thing to do.
36:14I was able to get to the tsunami of the tsunami.
36:19I was able to get a phone call.
36:23I was able to call the phone call.
36:31I didn't think it would be good to be able to do it.
36:40100km north, residents of coastal cities like Sendai and Ishinomaki
36:45were facing a freezing night without power.
36:50The whole central area of the city had been flooded
36:54and that meant I couldn't get back into the central area
36:57either to where I live or to anywhere else I wanted to go.
37:01So I ended up just sleeping at the university
37:05with many of the other staff.
37:09Yu Muroga took refuge in a warehouse above his wrecked van.
37:14There were a lot of waves in the 5th and 5th of the day.
37:17The air is still cold.
37:20There were 12 people who were gathered and spent a day
37:25and I spent a day living in the morning.
37:26But it was cold.
37:29It was cold.
37:30The water, the cars, the cars, the other they were talking about.
37:40I was in the middle of the night, but the outside was red.
37:47There was a叫び声.
37:49They said, ''助けてくれ!''
37:51The lights were in the helicopter.
37:58They said, ''助けてくれ!''
38:11I hated sleeping and going to sleep because at least if I were awake, then I could quickly
38:21move or find my parents or get to safety.
38:26And so when aftershocks would happen in the middle of the night, I'd have to run down
38:30the corridor to find my parents, but I always had this sense of anxiety and it started to
38:40get worse and worse.
38:42And even through all of that, I've always wanted to protect my brother.
38:48I think even though I've overcome all the events, thinking about him is still the thing
38:58that gets me the most upset, I think.
39:15Teruo Okono woke up in the house where the tsunami had dropped him.
39:24As the enemy of the U.S.
39:25By the end, the fear of depression is still coming, but when the dopamine of the U.S.
39:38I think that the fear of the fear of the world was scared.
39:48I don't think I can hear what sound is going on.
39:53I don't think I can hear a lot of things.
40:00I think it's a very different world.
40:02I think it's a real world that I can't see.
40:06It's a real world that we've seen.
40:12It's a real world that we've seen in the world.
40:12The world that we've seen in the world is a lot of people who are looking for our family.
40:20If we've seen that the world is a huge amount of tsunami,
40:23we've seen our family and we've seen our family.
40:33When I was in the morning, I had a little bit of water in the middle of the morning.
40:42I went to the bottom of the window, and I went to the building of 12 people.
40:53The road was broken, and the road was broken.
40:55I didn't know where the path was.
40:58Then, everyone said to me,
41:00I'm going to go back home, and I went back to everyone.
41:10Financial Times Bureau Chief Muir Dickey
41:13headed for the Disaster Zone.
41:17We have a responsibility as a journalist to
41:21report the big stories as best we can.
41:24And I felt that we needed to go to the area.
41:27It was very challenging to get there,
41:30but that was prior to to be on the ground
41:32to see what's really happening to people.
41:35Here behind me is a sign put there to show visitors
41:38and residents of this area that beyond that point
41:42is at risk of tsunami flooding.
41:45But the waters this time came far, far further.
41:50The earthquake had caused relatively little damage to property,
42:00but it was a relative normality compared to the sudden shock.
42:07If you came down off the hills towards the coast,
42:11you could see a line drawn across the land.
42:15And on one side of it, where the tsunami had hit,
42:19just absolute devastation.
42:20It looked to me and to many other people who saw it
42:26as if we had walked into the kind of scene
42:30that you see in old newsreel of the Hiroshima or Nagasaki
42:36after the nuclear bomb,
42:37that kind of levelling of whole towns.
42:43The evidence is everywhere of the incredible power of the tsunami.
42:47Buildings have been mashed and mangled beyond repair.
42:50Trucks picked up, carried distances and then dropped on piles of debris.
42:54Those who didn't flee in time had little chance.
43:02Those who could fled the devastation,
43:06including Mizue, who was heading for her family farmhouse in the hills.
43:11There were a few other people on the hill.
43:13There were lots of car cars,
43:16but there were gasoline.
43:20And there were not to be a gas station.
43:22It was here.
43:26TheGoodCity experience has been listening to the Bits
43:27with a lot of energy stream in the hills.
43:29There was a lot of energy stream in the hills,
43:33so the water flow was on the top.
43:36The water flow of the wind,
43:36the spacers, the river flow was on the mountain.
43:38I had a very scary feeling.
43:44Finally, Mizue reached the safety of her farmhouse, but the nightmare was far from over.
44:10My colleague and I were driving into southern Fukushima Prefecture.
44:17We weren't actually in communication with the outside world.
44:22And we went through an area which did have mobile signal.
44:29And I saw my BlackBerry light up with multiple messages from editors in Hong Kong.
44:38Saying, call, call, call. So I rang and I heard the line which felt like something out of a movie.
44:47They said, there's been an explosion at the nuclear plant. Turn the car around and drive south.
45:04It was sort of a Chernobyl moment.
45:07My view was that, oh, this is not the worst case yet.
45:13There was a lot of fear in Japan. People were scared. The Prime Minister was scared.
45:24I haven't seen any gas masks. I was wearing a huge mask. I was wearing a very strong mask. I
45:32was wearing a nice mask.
45:33I was wearing a nice mask. I was wearing a nice mask.
45:48I was wearing a nice mask. But we were so busy trying to look after ourselves.
45:52He was just crying and shouting. And I couldn't do anything for him.
45:59That was why I was wearing a nice mask.
46:02I was on my hands.
46:03I was looking for the same mask.
46:06And we knew that I was wearing a nice mask.
46:11I was looking for the same mask on the whiteboard.
46:38Transcription by CastingWords
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