Eisaku Satō (佐藤 栄佐久 Satō Eisaku) was the governor of Fukushima Prefecture of Japan from 1988 and 2006.
He was initially an enthusiastic supporter of nuclear power, swayed like his predecessors after the government and Tepco brought his prefecture jobs, subsidies and a chance to contribute to the national good. In 1998 he conditionally agreed the controversial use of mixed oxide plutonium uranium fuel (MOX) at the plant. But he withdrew it after discovering a cover-up of reactor malfunctions and cracks.
Between 2002 and 2006, 21 problems at the Fukushima plant were reported to his office. The whistleblowers, including some employees at the plant, bypassed both Tepco and Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) because they feared, rightly, that their information would go straight to Tepco. Sato became an increasingly bitter critic of the plant and Japan's entire energy policy, directed by NISA's powerful government overseer, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI).
In 2006, he was forced to step down and was prosecuted and convicted in 2008 on bribery charges that he claims were politically motivated. Embittered, he wrote a biography called Annihilating a Governor explaining his concerns about nuclear power and how he was set up and wrongfully convicted by the prosecution. Largely ignored until Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster March 11, the book became the top of the sales list.
|
|||||