Now, at fifty-four, Ito’s hard work had finally paid off. The president of Japan Atomic Power Ltd. had personally recognized his loyalty and hard work. Ito Watanabe was now the general manager of the power plants that helped to send power to Tokyo itself.

Over the years, Ito had assured himself that without nuclear power, Japan would be at the mercy of a band of thieving desert sheiks. The Japanese industrial giant had grown because of nuclear power, not imported oil. The work of Ito Watanabe, he told himself, is partially responsible for the economic victories of Japan over America. I am like a soldier in battle. Ito Watanabe is a hero of Japan.

His portrayal of himself as a man of some achievement was no idle boast. Japan, after all, had fifty-four nuclear power plants in various stages of construction. Of these, Ito thought, forty-nine are operating nuclear plants that produce 18,859 megawatts of electricity—thirty percent of our nation’s electric power. The facilities were clustered on the southern coastal areas of the island of Kyushu; on the island of Shikoku; along the Pacific Coast of Honshu, the principal Japanese island; from Shizuoka, south of Tokyo; then north of Tokyo to Ibaraki, Fukushima, and Sendai. Directly across from Tokyo on the Sea of Japan facing Korea were the Kansai Electric Power Company’s installations in Fukui. In short, in Japan, nuclear power was in reach of everyone. And Ito was one of those who managed an important piece of this empire of power.

In 1995, Ito’s company sent him and a group of its top engineers to Kiev in the Ukraine. Next, they went to Chernobyl. There, he learned firsthand of the cooling pipes that had ruptured, the warning devices that had failed, and the explosion of the Number Four reactor, which released into the atmosphere thirty to forty times the radioactivity of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He traveled into Belarus and saw abandoned villages. He learned that nine years after the disaster, three million people were living in contaminated areas. But nothing had etched the tragedy more vividly in his mind than a conversation he had had with a little boy in Belarus named Sasha. Sasha’s uncle had fought and survived the Afghan war. On his return home, he was ordered to go to the Chernobyl clean-up. He died a hideous death from exposure to the radiation from the reactor.