Eitan Oren
For a week after a massive earthquake hit northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011, the Japanese Prime Minister Kan Naoto slept in his office. As he was trying to close his eyes, images of the devastating tsunami and the escalating nuclear accident raced through his mind. Over the next days, as nuclear meltdown fears mounted and the potential for mass casualties loomed, Kan began to contemplate evacuating the entire Tokyo metropolitan area including the Imperial Palace and state institutions. Despite the palpable sense of danger, or perhaps because of it, he kept this apocalyptic scenario for himself. “This situation was so grave I felt I had to use the utmost discretion when putting it into words,” he wrote in his memoir “My Nuclear Nightmare: Leading Japan through the Fukushima Disaster to a Nuclear-Free Future” (2017).
Kan’s recollections of the aftermath of the triple disasters contain a few visceral descriptions of the dangers he felt during those dramatic days. And like other leaders who faced grave danger before, his subjective account of what it felt like to experience danger is helpful in gaining a crucial perspective on leaders, threat perception, and international relations. Over the past years, I examined many such ‘danger-descriptions’ given by leaders embedded in different cultures and contexts.
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