For the same pay as an office clerk, one young man has sacrificed any hope of a normal life, writes DAVID McNEILL
ATSUSHI WATANABE is an ordinary 20-something Japanese man, about average height and solidly built, with the slightly bemused expression of the natural sceptic. Among the crowds in Tokyo, in his casual all-black clothes, he could be an off-duty postman or a construction worker. But in fact he does one of the more extraordinary jobs on the planet: helping to shut down the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Watanabe (a pseudonym) has worked as a maintenance worker at Daiichi since he left school more than a decade ago. By the time he was a child growing up in the 1990s, the intense discussions and protests sparked by the decision to build the plant, which began operating in 1971, had faded. When he left school, there was little debate in his family about where he would work.
“It was seen as a perfectly natural choice,” he says. “The plant was like the local air. I wasn’t afraid of it at all.”
His job involved checking pressure inside pipes and operating valves. He liked the work, which he felt was important. “I thought we were on a mission to provide safe power for Japan, for Tokyo. I was proud of that.”
It paid 180,000 yen (about €1,600) a month. Since April, when he agreed to go back inside the Daiichi plant gates, he has been paid the same amount – plus what he calls “lunch money” of 1,000 yen (€8.90) a day.
On March 11th, he was inside the nuclear complex when the earthquake disabled the plant; he watched in terror as pipes hissed and buckled around him. He spent a week in a refugee centre, waiting for the call from his boss to come back to work.
When it came, he immediately said he would return. Everyone was given a choice, though there was inevitable, unspoken sympathy for the married men with children.
“There are only some of us who can do this job. I’m single and young and I feel it’s my duty to help settle this problem,” he says.
As subcontractors to the Daiichi operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), he and his colleagues are well down the plant’s employment food chain.
Full-time Tepco employees are mostly white-collar university graduates with better pay and conditions. Tepco managers, including company president Masataka Shimizu, who disappeared and became a national laughing stock during the nuclear crisis, are considered desk-bound eggheads: too much head and no heart, unlike the blue-collar grunts who kept the plant running.
“[Shimizu] had never worked on-site before or experienced any problems, so when trouble hit his instinct was to run away,” says Watanabe. He says he feels no contempt for the company boss, only sympathy. “If you pushed a guy like that too hard, he might commit suicide.”
Initially, he says, some day labourers got big money for braving the lethally poisoned air at the power plant.
“At 100 millisieverts a day you could only work for a few days, so if you didn’t get a month’s pay a day it wasn’t worth your while. The companies paid enough to shut them up, in case they got leukaemia or other cancers later down the line.”
Does he worry about radiation? “I’m fine now, but nobody can foresee what will emerge in five or 10 years’ time.”
Whatever happens, he has abandoned any hope of getting married. “I could never ask a woman to spend her life with me. If I told her about my work, of course she will worry about my future health or what might happen to our children. And I couldn’t hide what I do.”
Why do people do dangerous, potentially fatal jobs? Out of a sense of responsibility or loyalty to their colleagues; and because so few others can or are willing to do them. Some, as Watanabe does, might consider it a duty to ‘“nation” or “society”. No doubt there is an element of bravado too – he compares himself to the young wartime kamikaze pilots who saw themselves as the last line of defence against invasion and disaster.
Whatever his reasons, Watanabe displays infinitely more humility, humour and concern for humanity than the men who run his industry. For roughly the same take-home pay as a young office clerk, he and his workmates have sacrificed any hope of a normal life. He has never met the prime minister, the local prefectural governor or even the boss of Tepco. He will never have children and may die young. In another world, he might be paid as much as a Wall Street trader, an idea that makes him laugh.
“I’ll probably get a pen and a towel when I retire,” he says. “That’s the price of my job.”