‘The Days’ Ending Explained: What Happened During the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster?

Welcome to the Ending Explained for The Days, a new Netflix series coming straight from Japan, dealing with the disaster that occurred over a decade ago. The series is based on the work of reporter Ryusho Kadota, who took upon himself the job of documenting the experiences of more than 90 people who worked and experienced the disaster in several ways. The series takes those records and recreates a very real depiction of the disaster and everything in the middle. The Fukushima Daiichi disaster left a big scar on the country, one that is still being felt everywhere in Japan.

Hideo Nakata, and Masaki Nishiura take the director’s chairs and do a pretty good job at creating the right atmosphere for the miniseries. We are talking about a show that tries to show how Japanese bureaucracy slowed the response to the emergency to a crawl and how they were generally not prepared to deal with a disaster of this nature.

This comes as a surprise, as Japan is basically the only country that has dealt firsthand with the horrors of nuclear power. You would expect that they, more than people from any other country, would be ready to take on a challenge like this one. This becomes a perfect show for anyone who wants to learn about the incident.

The following paragraphs contain spoilers for The Days. Read at your own risk.

What Happened During The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster?

The Days has eight episodes, each of which takes place in one day during and after the incident. And so we can follow the progress of the different task forces as they try to find a solution to the problem. However, as they will soon find out, there is not an easy solution to the issue at hand.

On the contrary, there is probably no solution at all. The miniseries begins by following the day-to-day of the workers at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. The reaction gives power to many cities in its surrounding area, including Tokyo, which is famous for its huge amounts of energy consumption.

However, on March 11, 2011, the normalcy of day-to-day labor was interrupted by an earthquake. A big one. Japan has been famous for being located on top of a very active tectonic area, so they have transformed their infrastructure so that they are prepared for earthquakes as much as they possibly can.

This earthquake is different, and it will bring a new set of problems that no one is prepared for. At first, we can see that the reactor seems to be acting normally, but then soon enough, it seems the quake has affected the reactor’s core and is cooling too quickly. The operators find this strange but don’t understand what could happen.

Later, while some workers are beginning to inspect the reactor in search of damages, the worst happens. The earthquake from some hours ago has created a tsunami, and a big wave is coming directly upon the reactor.

The wave is unstoppable and hits hard at the reactor and damages it. On top of that, the water also floods the reactor and its entire facility. This damages the controls at the command center, and the operators are left blind. They don’t know what is happening. They only know that many electrical services have fallen, and the reactor might soon collapse.

The government is notified regarding the situation, but their inability to know what is happening, added to their incompetence slows things down to a crawl. No one is making the decisions that should be taken, and the people of Fukushima don’t even know they are on top of a time bomb. The government only initiated the evacuation and took the families out of Fukushima. It is a complete disaster, and the decision to let the gas out of the reactor is made, and the entire area becomes a biohazard zone.

Do The Government And Its Different Agencies Manage To Solve The Problem At Fukushima Daiichi?

What follows is a race against the clock. The reactor’s core is heating up constantly, and because there is no power to start the countermeasures, everything needs to be done manually. That means that many power plant workers will have to risk their lives by getting inside radioactive areas in order to fulfill their duty.

It is a powerful echo of what the Soviet Union suffered during the Chernobyl incident. The conditions are deplorable, and what becomes increasingly frustrating with each passing episode is that the government, and basically all the agencies under it, cannot work without having to report constantly to each other.

There is something to be said about the incredible amount of order that Japanese society can achieve. They have a system that seems to have worked somewhat consistently for many years. However, the present situation shows that the system can work in some situations and not in others.

Sadly, Japanese bureaucrats, politicians, and even low-end managers don’t know how to make decisions at the moment without relying on the chain of command. This slows things down to a crawl, and as the situation worsens, the operatives wait for a permission order to actually act upon what they know must be done.

A perfect example of this comes near the end of the miniseries when the workers are trying to operate a truck to pump water into the reactor to cool it. However, the operation of the machine and its components is very complex, and the workers executing the work don’t have the necessary experience to do the job in the middle of the night.

When Yoshida, one of our main characters, contacts one of the experts who knows how to operate the machine, he first asks how the machine can be operated. The expert says that it would be impossible to explain over the phone that he offers his services to go and operate the machine, as he has many years of experience with it. The expert is refused entry because they cannot permit him to enter the area.

In the end, the system has to be broken and rules taken down to do what needs to be done, even if there are no higher-ups who can give you the form you need to fill out to ask for formal permission. As the series draws close, the teams manage to cool down the core enough that it doesn’t go out of control.

However, hundreds of thousands of people are evacuated from Fukushima, and the houses remain abandoned to this day. Wildlife has overtaken the town, and the agencies are still trying to dismantle the power plant, even when they don’t know how to remove the radioactive material from it or get rid of it.