When the boats came to start work on a planned nuclear power plant just off this tiny island, an aging fisher woman named Tamiko Takebayashi carried out a dramatic protest: she lashed herself to the dock.
The move, while reminiscent of a Greenpeace action, was highly unusual in understated Japan. But it was emblematic of the islanders’ nearly three-decade fight against the powers arrayed against them — their own government and the nuclear industry it has championed.
“The sea is our livelihood,” said Ms. Takebayashi, 68, whose family has fished for sea bream, mackerel and other local delicacies for generations. “We will never let anyone sully it.”
The story of Iwaishima’s battle has become something of a touchstone in Japan, especially among those who feel uneasy in the wake of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant for having accepted decades of government assurances that nuclear power was safe. And because the plans to build the plant are closer to approval than any others in Japan, many antinuclear activists see the island’s struggle as their best hope of ending the country’s reliance on nuclear energy.
If the plans are scuttled, they believe, the decision is likely to set a precedent that will end the construction of nuclear plants in Japan.
Iwaishima’s tale of resistance started in 1982. The town of Kaminoseki — made up of Iwaishima, two islets and the Murotsu peninsula off Japan’s main island, Honshu — was one of many backwaters that seemed ripe for the revitalization that the nuclear industry promised.
With no industry to speak of beyond small-scale farming and fisheries, the town struggled to keep up with Japan’s rapid changes in the postwar era.
So in 1982, when the Chugoku Electric Power Company first raised the idea of building a nuclear power plant on the peninsula’s deserted tip, many residents were enthusiastic.
Chugoku Electric wooed them, paying for lavish “study tours” to nuclear reactors around the country — trips that included stops at hot springs, according to residents who participated. It also offered local fishing cooperatives compensation for the loss of fishing grounds that would be filled in to build the 3.5-million-square-foot plant.
“The town needed the money,” said Katsumi Inoue, 67, who led a movement supporting the plant. “Kaminoseki was shrinking. We needed to grow.”
But Iwaishima, an island of about 1,000 people just two and a half miles from the planned site, was not convinced. The island’s fishing cooperative voted overwhelmingly against the plans. On a chilly morning in January 1983, almost 400 islanders cut short their New Year’s festivities to stage a protest march, the men in their fishing boots and the women in bonnets, through alleyways lined with stone walls.
It was the first of more than 1,000 protests the islanders would carry out, some of them involving scenes of high drama to rival Ms. Takebayashi’s 2009 protest.
In one protest this year, a small armada of fishermen raced out to sea to head off the utility’s vessels. “No nuclear power plant here!” they shouted, their boats’ engines in full throttle. “This sea does not belong to you.”
Not even the residents of Iwaishima are exactly sure why they were willing to challenge the establishment when so many of their compatriots were not. The best they can venture is that their livelihoods depend on the sea too much to take a chance, and that if disaster struck, it would be much harder to flee.
Beyond that, many of the island’s men had, over time, left for work elsewhere. Some of them worked in nuclear plants, and they returned home with worrisome stories. They would become part of the front line in the island’s struggle.
Kazuo Isobe, 88, was one of them. He left the island in Japan’s postwar chaos and initially worked at construction sites. But in the 1970s, he started work at the newly opened Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
He worked to clean up radioactive buildup at the plant’s No. 2 reactor, using rags while sweltering in a protective suit.
His radiation records from the time, which he provided, show he received about 850 millirems of radiation during just three months of work — about the amount of radiation allowed for nuclear workers in a year, and more than eight times as much as the limit set for civilians.
When Mr. Isobe heard, on a trip back to Iwaishima in 1982, that Chugoku Electric planned to build a nuclear plant just across the water, he was “terrified.”
“I had seen with my own eyes that radiation is hard to contain,” Mr. Isobe said. “I told everyone in the neighborhood not to agree to anything they said.”
Still, the larger town of Kaminoseki remained supportive of the plans, electing a pro-nuclear mayor in every election since 1983. A majority of the town council’s members are still for nuclear power. In 1994, the central government threw its weight behind the project, designating the plant a “critical source of electricity” for Japan.
For its support, the town was handsomely rewarded. From 1984 to 2010, Kaminoseki received about 4.5 billion yen (about $58 million at current rates) in government subsidies, according to town records. It also received 2.4 billion yen, or $31 million, from the plant operator, according to local news media reports.
But Iwaishima was not ready to give up. The islanders fielded antinuclear candidates for the city council. Iwaishima’s fishing cooperative refused to accept its share of cash gifts from Chugoku Electric, worth about 1 billion yen, or $13 million. And when Chugoku Electric submitted a study of the plant’s environmental impact to the central government, protesters pointed out glaring omissions, like the failure to mention the porpoises that breed in nearby waters.
The islanders also sued the utility, charging that part of the plant would stand on public land; Japan’s Supreme Court threw out that lawsuit in 2008, part of a pattern of similar legal losses for activists against nuclear power. (The islanders, meanwhile, were countersued by the utility for obstructing its construction plans.)
“We did everything we could to throw obstacles in their path,” said Misao Ishii, 68, who fought a nine-year court battle over obstruction charges.
Then in a crushing blow in 2008, Yamaguchi Prefecture, which controls some aspects of plant’s construction, gave Chugoku Electric permission for reclamation work to begin.
Angry islanders built a hut near the construction site to spy on workers. And in September 2009, when Chugoku Electric tried to use buoys to mark off a section of the sea for reclamation, Ms. Takebayashi and her fellow commercial fishers raced into action. While she was tied to the dock, others headed out in their boats to stop the work vessels.
But the next month, the utility’s boats used the cover of night to put buoys in place and declare the start of the reclamation work.
Iwaishima, meanwhile, was losing a completely different kind of battle. As residents aged and the population shrank, the island’s economy suffered. Its elementary and middle schools were closed. By last March, its population had been reduced by half to 479, and the residents’ average age had climbed past 70. The antinuclear protests that used to go on for hours now lasted just 20 minutes, with the frail islanders no longer able to walk the cobbled paths for long.
“It’s getting hard to keep fighting when everybody’s got a cane,” said Hisako Tao, 70.
Then, on March 11, a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami wiped out the defenses at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, setting off one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters.
“That changed everything,” said Mr. Isobe, who had worked at the plant.
Last month, the governor of Yamaguchi Prefecture said he would not renew the license permitting Chugoku Electric to perform reclamation work. Surrounding towns have declared their opposition to the construction plans. Even the mayor of Kaminoseki, Shigemi Kashiwabara, long a proponent of the planned power plant, suggested that it might have to be scrapped.
“We may have to think about building a town with no nuclear power,” he recently told a town council meeting.
Last month, the new president at Chugoku Electric told employees that the company would push ahead with plans for the nuclear plant. Company leaders also assured local politicians that it would be fitted with the latest earthquake-proof technology.
But the company now faces opponents emboldened by Fukushima’s tragedy.
“We are going to stop them completely,” Sadao Yamato, a leader of Iwaishima’s protest movement, said at a recent rally. “It’s the best chance we’ve had in three decades.”
