No Restart

Every Friday evening that summer, tens of thousands of people surrounded the Kantei—the Japanese Prime Minister’s official residence in Tokyo—and refused to leave until they’d made their point. The chant was saikado hantai: oppose the restart. Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda had approved the resumption of the Oi nuclear reactors in Fukui Prefecture in June 2012, just fifteen months after Fukushima made a city uninhabitable. The crowd peaked at somewhere between sixty and a hundred thousand people, depending on who was counting. For a country not historically known for this kind of street pressure, it was a startling thing.

What made the protests feel different from the usual political theatre was who showed up. Not just activists and students but salarymen, elderly couples, mothers with strollers—people who had watched a nuclear disaster unfold on live television and were now being told the calculus still worked in favor of keeping the reactors going. The anger wasn’t ideological in any academic sense. It was simpler: you saw what happened, and you’re doing it again.

Noda lost the general election that December. The LDP came back under Shinzo Abe. The protests dissipated. Japan’s nuclear debate ground on through courts and commissions and the slow, unresolvable machinery of a state that had built its entire postwar infrastructure around something the public had decided it didn’t want anymore. Whether any of that pressure actually changed anything is a question I still can’t answer cleanly.