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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.
02:04The Fukushima Daiichi Media
02:07The erklären
02:15So yeah, I managed to find my portfolio 25th of January 2011, so about two months before
02:25it 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 heart
02:41I'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.
03:01Japan has a very distinct and very interesting society and a very rich culture, so it's a
03:09great 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.
03:51And the reason I came to like it is not so much because of the place, but because of the
03:56people who were really warm and welcoming.
04:07Riyoko Endo was a nursing assistant.
04:10I was born in Tokyo, where I was in Tokyo, and I was married for a long time.
04:24I was married to be in Tokyo, and I was married for a long time.
04:34There was a house in the sea where my wife was in the sea.
04:41My wife and my wife, and my wife,
04:45and my children were together with three children.
05:04So 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,
05:12but thought I'd go in anyway.
05:44It was just like any other Friday.
05:47My brother, he was three years old, I think.
05:52So then he was still going to nursery.
05:54I was getting ready for primary school,
05:56and my mom would cycle me.
06:00I loved school a lot.
06:02We had karaoke Friday, which was a thing we had,
06:04in the afternoons that 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
06:23when 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,
06:41is the sprawling city of Sendai.
06:46Weiyu Muroga was preparing for an afternoon,
06:49delivering medical supplies.
06:54We had a very close.
06:57We had a big time now.
06:58We were sitting at the hotel,
07:01and we were living in the hotel.
07:06We'd be walking in the hotel.
07:12We were walking around the hotel,
07:15and we had a little bit of dinner.
07:17We had a great time.
07:18We were waiting for the hotel.
07:18We were waiting for the hotel.
07:20We were waiting for the hotel.
07:21This is a system, and it is a high-quality system, so we can set up a video camera for
07:28the first time.
07:36When I entered the signal at the first time, 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,
08:42as a way to protect. Teacher just said, alright everyone there's no desks, no tables in that room, so just
08:48huddle together in the 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 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 doing a lot of work in Japan.
10:46It was a lot of work in Japan.
10:57and the back of the roof,
11:00and the back of the roof,
11:02and the back of the roof.
11:05It's a little bit of a breeze.
11:09It's been a breeze for 3 minutes.
11:15I thought it was a breeze for me.
11:27when everything just got worse,
11:30it started to drag on for a while
11:32and the shaking became much worse
11:34and then we could see our teachers' expressions
11:36that that's when I think we knew something was wrong.
11:53We didn't realize how bad this was
11:57and how bad it was going to be.
12:00Of course, I worried about my mum and my dad,
12:03but I remember my main worry at the time was my brother
12:07because he was at nursery.
12:10And just, you don't know how your family is.
12:15You don't know if they're safe, if they've been injured.
12:24I mean, the power of the earthquake was extraordinary.
12:27And we in Tokyo felt it as something extraordinary.
12:32But if you were along the coast,
12:34much closer to the epicentre,
12:36it was, for many people, absolutely terrifying.
12:42And right on that coast sat one of the world's largest nuclear power stations,
12:48Fukushima Daiichi.
12:54Decontamination worker Yukio Shirahige
12:56was in a building at the edge of the site.
12:58It was a big part of the building.
13:04Of course, I was working on the building.
13:19So, I was working on the building.
13:22And then suddenly the wind was coming.
13:28In the Uxima area, there was a lot of wind.
13:33So I realized that it was a bit of a storm.
13:37I was thinking that it would be a bit of a storm.
13:42But the wind was getting worse.
13:54When the earthquake hit, safety systems automatically shut down the three active reactors.
14:01So very crudely, the earthquake caused damage to the plant,
14:09but nothing that alone would have caused a crisis.
14:15For example, one part is that it destroyed a pylon and broke the connection that the plant had to the
14:23national grid.
14:25And it's one of the features of nuclear power plants of the type used at Fukushima Daiichi,
14:33that they need electricity to keep the reactors and the spent fuel that's kept in cooling ponds cool.
14:44After the chain reaction has stopped, it needs to be cooled down for a long time.
14:52Even though there was no power coming in from outside,
14:56there were emergency generators starting to kick in
15:01and providing an electricity to pump in 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,
15:31I 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,
15:37yep, that's fine.
15:38So I got my bicycle and I started to cycle to my mum's office to try and find her.
15:46As I'm trying to get up this hill,
15:48I just remember feeling this panic of,
15:52it doesn't matter if something falls on me, it falls on me.
15:55I've just 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
16:11and just feeling this feeling of panic and I need to get to my mum, I need to get to
16:15my mum.
16:16I don't know.
16:23300km north, in coastal Sendai city.
16:28Yuma-roga was still on the road.
16:43It was a very difficult time to experience the flood.
17:04There was still a lot of rain and the rain.
17:13There was a lot of rain and the rain was still shaking.
17:20The rain was still shaking and it was a bit of a concern.
17:35We didn't have any news that we had no idea what was going on, and I didn't really have a
17:43chance to be worried about anyone because everything was just happening all at the same time, and it was all
17:49so surreal that we were kind of just more occupied.
17:53With coping for ourselves, Ryoko 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, so I was
18:39running up the stairs.
18:40And I remember just bursting into her office.
18:45It was such a relief to see her. I just ran straight into her arms, and I think I just
18:52cried.
18:54We cycled home together, and 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, around 80 kilometres east of Ishinomaki.
19:17So the immediate aftermath of the earthquake for us was realising that we were actually not at the centre of
19:27it.
19:29And as soon as the Japanese television was reporting, as they did quite quickly, that the epicentre was off the
19:39coast, then it 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 was issued, then that
20:01meant we should get to higher ground.
20:09So we all moved to a big classroom on the third floor.
20:16There was so much happening that it wasn't really...
20:19My head couldn't cope with everything that was going on, really.
20:45As a journalist, I don't want bad things to happen.
20:52I like reporting good news.
20:55But it was always in the back of my mind that it might be on my watch that a very
21:01large 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.
21:12Because for all we knew in that moment was that we had an earthquake.
21:16But what we didn't realise was 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.
21:46this is a great hour.
21:49I've got the tsunami warning.
21:49Here's a bomb when I was in case of a ship.
21:49Now a storm has been on the ship.
21:49Now a storm is on the ship.
21:55This is a storm.
21:58We said it's quite so heavy.
21:59This is a storm.
22:00The storm has been on the ship.
22:04We carried out by the storm operation.
22:06Here are lots of essentials.
22:07In Sendai, Umarogo was driving across town, more than 2km from the coast.
22:12The first time I saw the tsunami, the tsunami was the first time.
22:23I checked the tsunami from the back of the back.
22:29I was looking at the back of the back, and I was looking at the camera.
22:33Then, the tsunami came from the back.
22:42The road was going to be a bit of a storm.
22:49The road was going to be a bit of a storm.
22:55But at that time, the road was going to be a bit of a storm.
23:02I thought it was still a few minutes.
23:04I thought I was going to be okay, but it was just a few hours,
23:10and the car was going on.
23:15When my car was behind,
23:18I was going to hit the front of my car,
23:19and I was going to hit it.
23:20That's what I was thinking about.
23:36I felt like I was going to die.
23:41I felt like I was going to die.
23:46I felt like I was going to die.
23:56The tsunami struck a long swathe of Japan's east coast.
24:02Swamping harbors, rivers and low-lying areas.
24:45I was still thinking we might be reporting
24:48mainly on deaths from falling buildings.
24:54But from the reports that were coming through from Japanese media,
24:59it was clear that the tsunami was likely to be the real killer here.
25:10Near Ishinomaki, Teruo Kono was sheltering in his office
25:14a few hundred metres from the coast.
25:20I had no idea.
25:29I had no idea.
25:31I had no idea.
25:32I had no idea.
25:34I had no idea.
25:34I couldn't know what the tsunami was.
25:44I couldn't understand the situation.
25:46The small river that the tsunami has been hit by the tsunami.
25:54I first noticed that the tsunami has been here.
25:59Here we go!
26:07Here we go!
26:12The station itself has a great sound.
26:16The building itself has a great sound.
26:17The panels of the building is broken.
26:18The wind is broken.
26:19The wind is broken.
26:29The building was starting to be very difficult to move on.
26:37After that, I thought I was going to run away.
26:42I thought I was going to run away from the front of the door.
26:45I was going to run away from the front of the door.
26:47I was going to run away from the front of the door.
26:58When I was thrown out from the airport, and I was thrown into the tsunami.
27:09I can't remember what I was doing.
27:15I can't remember what I was doing.
27:30My car had the weight balance between 50 and 50, so it was just a little bit of water, so
27:38I had a little bit of water on my car, so I had a little bit of water on my
27:43car, so I had a little bit of water on my car.
27:54theWA and the power of the car.
27:55Are they not protected by the vehicle or the car?
27:59Are they not protected by the vehicle?
28:00At the mind of my mind, I was confused.
28:15The car was slowly running away, and the car was running back.
28:21I was in the building, in the building, and in the building.
28:36The window, the window, the water got into the door.
28:41I thought it was impossible for the car to stop.
28:43It was impossible to get out of the window.
28:45So when you see the window from the window,
28:46you just said the window from the window is straight.
28:58I thought this was a good feeling.
29:00I just realized that it was so high.
29:04I realized that the window was suddenly flowing in water.
29:06I thought it was like this,
29:06I thought I could drink water, but I thought it would be possible.
29:17I thought I was drinking water and I had a feeling that I was drinking water.
29:24I thought I could do something else, and then I could touch the face.
29:27So that I couldn't even...
29:28I had to drink water.
29:32I was trying to breathe in a little while...
29:37I felt like I was just breathing...
29:39I was in the middle of the house.
29:40I was on the side of the house.
29:43I felt like you were on the floor.
29:46If you had anything else, it was not for you.
29:48You had a feeling that you couldn't get out.
29:52I was watching the movies...
29:54I felt like it was dark, so I didn't know what I was going to do with my洗濯機.
30:09But I couldn't move my hands. It was hard to move my hands.
30:17I was probably going to die.
30:22I was talking about my family and having a talk.
30:26So at that time my family were talking to them.
30:29When I averaged my family's face, I saw my hand on my knees and said,
30:36I'm going to go to my head on the ground on my toes.
30:37An example of my hands on my toes.
30:39And he came back to him to my Shuttle's body.
30:48At the end of the day, there was a lot of things that flowed out and caught up with the
30:57tsunami.
31:04Then, I heard a voice from there.
31:08I heard you hear that, and I heard you hear that.
31:13That voice was my eyes, and I realized that I was in my mind,
31:22and I realized that I was my father-in-law,
31:27and that was my father-in-law, and I realized that my father-in-law was in my house,
31:31and I realized that he was a son-in-law, and he said,
31:36In addition to the words, the building of the building was slowly getting into the building.
31:44The building of the building of the building was really hard to do with the building.
31:52I had a journey of building the building on the building of the building of the building at the building.
32:17Thousands had drowned, and thousands more were missing.
32:26There are many stories of people who had lost loved ones,
32:36and very likely because those loved ones had been trying to look after each other,
32:41or trying to find them, rather than just fleeing.
32:46And that's a kind of very human dilemma.
32:54There were people who were having to stand by very close to their neighbours,
33:01whereas sometimes their loved ones being washed out to sea
33:04without anything they could do to save them.
33:13Ryoko Endo hadn't heard from her husband or her three children since before the earthquake.
33:20Kyoko Endo
33:22Kyoko Endo
34:00While Ryoko waited for news, further south Fukushima Daiichi was also directly in the path of the tsunami.
34:09Yukio Shirahige was sheltering on the land side of the site.
34:13If you are at 35m, the tsunami was detected.
34:18The tsunami was detected at the time of the site.
34:19The tsunami was detected at the time of the tsunami.
34:22The tsunami had been seen in the video.
34:25The tsunami hit the storm in the area of the site.
34:36The tsunami hit the storm in the area.
34:44The tsunami hit the storm.
35:02Fukushima Daiichi was protected by a five-and-a-half meter high tsunami defense wall.
35:09You 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,
35:28pushed away all the cars and the other installations around the reactor,
35:35and 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,
35:56like social worker Mizue Kano.
36:03The state of the city in the city and the city,
36:04the main project was developed at the city of Fukuma.
36:04and the grave of the city in Fukuma.
36:07I was working on the south of Fukuma.
36:09There was a lot of time to get to the city and the city.
36:25I was in the city of Fukuma.
36:28I didn't think I was going to be able to do anything right now.
36:40100 kilometres 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.
37:15That was the only 5th of the day of the storm.
37:18I had never seen the storm before it.
37:26I had the storm out of the storm.
37:30The storm, the storm, the storm, and the storm.
37:38I had been in a hurry for about 12 people.
37:42I had been eating it all in the morning.
37:42But I had been getting cold.
37:43The outside was red.
37:47There were a lot of叫bos.
37:49They said,
37:50''助けてくれ!''
37:51The people who have lights on the heli,
37:58they said, ''助けてくれ!''
38:03and 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.
38:39And it started to get 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.
39:15Tero Okono woke up in the house where the tsunami had dropped him.
39:46Tero Okono
39:50There was a lot of noise in my mind, but I don't think there was a lot of noise in
39:58my mind, but there was a lot of noise in my mind, but there was a lot of noise in
40:01my ears.
40:01It sounds like a world of no-one.
40:05It's a beautiful feeling.
40:12There are many people who are looking to find their family.
40:20When it comes to such a tsunami,
40:23it's going to get away from my 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 and went to the building.
41:10Financial Times Bureau Chief Muir Dickey headed for the Disaster Zone
41:19It is a journalist to report the big stories as best we can and I felt that we needed to
41:25go to the area
41:27It was very challenging to get there but that was proud to be on the ground to see what's really
41:32happening to people
41:35Here behind me is a sign put there to show visitors and residents of this area that beyond that point
41:42is at risk of tsunami flooding
41:44But the waters this time came far far further
41:50The earthquake had caused relatively little damage to property
41:59But it was relative normality compared to the sudden shock
42:07If you came down off the hills towards the coast you could see a line drawn across the land
42:15And on one side of it where the tsunami had hit just absolute devastation
42:21It looked to me and to many other people who saw it
42:26As if we had walked into the kind of scene that you see in old newsreel of the Hiroshima or
42:36Nagasaki after the nuclear bomb
42:37And that 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
42:49Trucks picked up carried distances and then dropped on piles of debris
42:53Those who didn't flee in time had little chance
43:02Those who could fled the devastation
43:05Including Mizue who was heading for her family farmhouse in the hills
43:11There was only one road there
43:13There was a lot of cars in there
43:16And there was no gas in there
43:19There was no gas in there
43:19There was no gas in there
43:25There's no gas in there
43:26There was no gas in there
43:28There was other gas in there
43:30At theettle this slowdown
43:35I could end there
43:36You're in the rain
43:36But in the rain
43:36As a flat water just got flat
43:37All the stairs werequs
43:38I wanna put to the mo柄
43:41Of the apaikis
43:44Besides some examples
43:45Finally Mizue had reached a safety of her farmhouse
43:47But the nightmare was far from over.
43:51There was a lot of big noise in the distance.
43:55But at that time, I didn't know what happened.
44:01I turned on TV immediately.
44:03But there was no such information on TV.
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
44:34from editors in Hong Kong saying, call, call, call.
44:40So 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.
44:50Turn 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.
45:17People were scared.
45:20The Prime Minister was scared.
45:24I hadn't seen.
45:26I was wearing a gas mask.
45:29I wore a very bad mask.
45:31I wore a very bad mask.
45:32I wore a pretty bad mask.
45:36I wore a very bad mask.
45:40I wore a very bad mask.
45:48But we were so busy trying to look after ourselves.
45:52He was just crying and shouting.
45:55And I couldn't do anything for him.
46:41And I couldn't do anything for him.
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