May 1, 2015

INTERVIEW/ Yauemon Sato: Fukushima must reclaim energy resources to avoid 'caldrons of hell'

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/views/opinion/AJ201505010047

By TOSHIHIDE UEDA/ Senior Staff Writer

KITAKATA, Fukushima Prefecture--Yauemon Sato, the ninth-generation chief of a sake brewery operating here since 1790, likens the crippled reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant to “caldrons of hell.”

In a recent interview with The Asahi Shimbun, Sato said the nuclear disaster “continues to recur every day,” referring to the huge stockpile of radioactive water that keeps growing--and often leaks--more than four years after the core meltdowns.

Aizu Denryoku, an energy company that he founded in 2013, was his answer to the question of what direction the “Fukushima rebirth” should take after the nuclear disaster.

As a corporate manager, Sato was determined not to be content with a “mere social movement.”

He now runs more than 20 solar power plants.

Sato also plans to venture into micro-hydropower generation and the use of woody biomass, which will allow his business to tap into resources generated by the bountiful water and forests of the Aizu region in western Fukushima Prefecture, where Kitakata is located.

“Aizu has enough energy resources to be self-sufficient,” Sato said. “The water of Lake Inawashiroko and the water of the Tadamigawa river initially used to be ours. It’s probably time to have them returned to us.”

Excerpts from the interview follow:

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Question: What drives you to be so active, including in the use of renewable energy?

Sato: You know the caldron of hell? You will be sent to hell and will be boiled in that caldron if you do evil. And there are four such caldrons in Fukushima Prefecture, at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co.

Q: You mean the No. 1 through No. 4 reactors that succumbed to accidents, right?

A: Yes. And the disaster has yet to end. It continues to recur every day.

More than 300 tons of water, contaminated with intense levels of radioactive substances, are being generated every day at the nuclear plant, right? We have a family business of a sake brewery, with a yearly turnover of about 350 million yen ($2.9 million). We brew about 300 kiloliters of sake, which weighs some 300 tons, every year. More radioactive water is being generated day after day than the amount of sake we produce in a year.

Q: The whole village of Iitate, Fukushima Prefecture, remains evacuated to this day because of the nuclear disaster. You had been supporting Iitate even before the nuclear disaster was triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. Could you elaborate on your work?

A: Everything started when the chamber of commerce and industry in the village asked me to brew sake with rice from Iitate. I agreed to be a “Madei ambassador” to support the village, and the appointment ceremony took place in January 2011. The nuclear disaster broke out only two months later.

Iitate has nothing to do with nuclear power. “I will have to help in some way or other,” I thought to myself.

Q: “Madei,” which means something like “cordially” in the local dialect, is a catchword of Iitate’s community development efforts, right?

A: Yes. Norio Kanno, mayor of Iitate, said at the appointment ceremony that community development of a “Madei village” was almost complete. But all that was ruined by the nuclear disaster.

Why, to begin with, did Fukushima Prefecture host as many as 10 nuclear reactors? Well, it did so to send electricity to Tokyo. But Fukushima Prefecture residents were not asserting themselves loud enough in the face of the central government and TEPCO.

These were some of the ideas I shared with Yumiko Endo, former head of the Fukushima prefectural board of education, and with Norio Akasaka, a Gakushuin University professor of ethnology who is promoting “Tohoku studies.” And the first thing we did was to set up Fukushima Kaigi, a forum for citizens to think about a “Fukushima rebirth,” in the summer of 2011.

Q: That forum gave you an opportunity to get to know Jun Yamada, a senior adviser to Qualcomm Japan, the Japanese arm of the major U.S. chipmaker, right?

A: Yes. Yamada and I discussed what we should be doing from that time on, and we agreed that we were both corporate managers who were by no means living aloof in a world of serious literature. It was no use just cursing the central government and TEPCO. We should not content ourselves with a mere social movement. So we eventually agreed: Why not set up a business?

Q: And the business you set up was Aizu Denryoku, right?

A: Yes. Just imagine, what are the requisites for human lives? You can maintain your life if only water, food and energy are available.

The 17 municipalities of Fukushima Prefecture’s Aizu region have a combined population of 280,000 or so. And the region has enough rice and energy resources to be self-sufficient. The hydropower plants in Aizu alone have enough generation capacity to cover the power demand of all households in Fukushima Prefecture.

Q: But those hydropower plants belong to TEPCO, Tohoku Electric Power Co. and Electric Power Development Co. Most of the electricity they generate is being sent to the greater Tokyo area. What do you think about this arrangement?

A: The rights to use water for generating power are not in our hands. But the water of Lake Inawashiroko and the water of the Tadamigawa river initially used to be ours. It’s probably time to have them returned to us.

The nuclear plants also stand on the soil of Fukushima Prefecture. Why are our resources always being taken away? Let’s go and reclaim what has been taken away from us--that’s what I am saying.

Q: Tohoku Electric has set a maximum limit on the volume of electricity it would purchase from renewable energy sources. What is your approach to the tough job of breaking vested interests?

A: My father began skipping wholesalers and retailers to sell our sake directly to tourists in Kitakata. That sparked terrible outrage from associations of wholesalers and retailers. But when customers, once they had acquired an appetite for our products, began placing orders with retailers, those retailers had to deal in our products in the end. A clientele will never fail to materialize if only you make fine products.

Q: You have a growing circle of like-minded people. Iitate Denryoku, a solar power generation company, was set up in Iitate in September 2014, with you as vice president. How are these efforts going?

A: Another group of people in Tadami, Fukushima Prefecture, is moving to set up a Tadami Denryoku power generation company. Four of the 17 municipalities in the Aizu region--Inawashiro, Bandai, Nishi-Aizu and Kita-Shiobara--decided in March to invest in Aizu Denryoku.

We are aiming to create what we would call a “stock company of a public nature.” We are still facing various challenges, such as the question of rights over the use of water. But we plan to spread micro-hydropower generation, which uses water from rivers and other familiar sources, and the use of biomass, which relies on wood from forests and other sources, in the years to come.

Solar power generation is something we just began with to solidify the foundation of our company.

Q: You are calling on all municipal governments in Aizu to inject capital in your company. What kind of role do you expect governments to play?

A: Community development is up to local people in the private sector, and it is not something that governments are supposed to take into their hands. Governments are there to back up what the private sector does. That’s how the efforts to promote (Kitakata) as a “town of warehouses” and a “town of ramen” really took off and got on track.

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Born in 1951, Yauemon Sato, a graduate of the Department of Brewing and Fermentation at the Tokyo University of Agriculture Junior College, began serving his apprenticeship at the Yamatogawa Shuzoten sake brewery, his family’s business, in 1973.

He was inspired by how his father, Yauemon Sato VIII, scrambled to promote Kitakata as a “town of warehouses” and engaged in architecture preservation efforts of the Japanese Association for Machi-nami Conservation and Regeneration.

Sato, who took over his family business as the ninth-generation chief in 2006, also serves as CEO of the Japan Jizake Cooperative, which organizes local sake brewers, and as chief secretary of an all-Japan association of locally based energy providers, whose founders include power utilities that serve localized areas.

Aizu Denryoku was named after a company that existed before World War II. It was so named in hopes of reviving the tradition of its predecessor, which supplied electricity to local communities.