I still remember it. The first shock of it. It was just one big hammer.

I turned to my two American friends Danny and Jeff and said, “Earthquake.” They didn’t feel it. They looked at me, and cocked their heads a little bit. And then she hit. We were in a turbine building that is built, for lack of a better term, like Fort Knox. The entire building was shaking.

None of us fell. But everyone got up against a wall, or got up on something. I heard that this earthquake lasted six minutes. But for me, it felt like a lifetime. I’m still living it, 10 months later.

I was working in a contaminated zone. I’ve been working in the nuclear field since 1984, and I’ve always followed good radiological practices. You step in properly. You step out properly. But when the earthquake ramped up, for the first time in my career, I lifted my one leg up and over that boundary and landed my dirty foot on the clean floor. We don’t even hand things across this boundary. Here I am putting my leg over it. And I put my other leg over and I told the guys, “Let’s get out.”

You could feel it under your feet. It was this entire enormous building moving at once. A lot of things were falling. We lost almost every light in the room. The structural steel was moving overhead. The lights were crashing everywhere. There was one young Japanese boy in front of me, still dressed out, and I was coaxing him out and this light came down like a guillotine right next to him. I didn’t know how to say “Look up!” or “Heads up” in Japanese. I wish I did. I was doing my best through charades to tell him, keep your eyes up. Everything was coming down. Thank God this boy didn’t get struck by this light fixture. Because even a light fixture will clean your clock. Or worse.

The crane operator was the toughest one to watch. But I had to keep an eye on him because this crane was just crabbing and jumping. He kept getting up off his chair — putting one leg out of the chair and putting it back in, and I’m thinking, please, please don’t even attempt to get out of there. But I was more in fear of the crane coming down. He had to be a good 30-40 feet up in that cab. It’s a crane that travels the entire length of the turbine deck. He would have put a champion bull rider to shame.

The sounds coming out of this turbine were pretty terrifying. Besides the earthquake and the lights dropping, this turbine was spinning. I had Danny over to the left screaming, “It’s going to blow! It’s going to blow!”

In one nanosecond, the entire floor went black. Every light went out. You would expect some emergency lighting would come on, but there wasn’t a one. And there was this most welcome beam of white light coming from the gap under the door. I made my way over to the door, and the one and only light in the room, it was swinging violently and then at the same time I opened the door it busted free and shattered on the floor. It was pitch black again. I remember thinking, “None of you are getting out of here.”

One of the Japanese guys had grabbed me around the waist. I put my arm up on his shoulder. With every jolt I squeezed his shoulder. I remember praying aloud for him, for all of us. I thought, we’re going to perish in this turbine building. I can still hear the turbine making its most unwelcome sound. I had many thoughts. But one of them was: Good God. I got up this morning just to go to work. And this is how it’s written for me? Dying is a fact of life. We all have to do it sooner or later. But this is how it’s written for me? March 11? On a Friday? On a turbine deck? In Fukushima? At work?  Of course my thoughts went immediately to my family. My two young children.

But then the lights did come back on. The lights were not emergency lights, they were what remained of the lights that didn’t fall. They were peppered about. There were maybe 60 lights on that deck and maybe four came on. It was enough light to see again. I took a look around the deck there. I’ve passed this thing 100 times and never noticed it. But it was an aluminum extension ladder. The most welcome sight I’d ever seen. Because the power was out, the crane isn’t working. This guy can’t drive the crane over to its docking station and get out. Thank God. We got him out of the crane.

—–

After we all got out, I was headed toward my rental car. Then I saw the tsunami coming. I stood there and as it came in I thought, you gotta be kidding me. This thing was huge.

When I first saw it, I saw it as far north and as far south as you could look. It didn’t resemble a wave. It resembled this huge swell of the ocean. This huge hump in the ocean coming your way. It rolled up over everything. It rolled uphill. It did come up over parking lots and took cars away in front of me. The first one receded back and took enough water to expose the sea bed.

It was a beautiful day. Clear, sunny, gorgeous. That’s one of the reasons I parked my rental car so far away, so I would walk in. A meteorologist would have to explain this — I think as a result of so much sea bed being exposed, it must be linked with the atmosphere — it sucked this front down from behind us. This big, black ominous front came rolling down on us, so much so that it began to snow. I’ve never heard anyone mention the snow. I mean, it didn’t snow and accumulate. But it snowed.

And the wind was — it was like a vacuum going by. There’s a harbor in front of Fukushima. And it was totally drained.

When the first wave came in, it just buried the walls to the plant. They were gone. They were all gone. The water just came in, wrapped around the walls and came back out. Units 1, 2, 3, 4 — as everyone knows. It was just an ungodly amount of water.

I was on top of the hill and — you gotta wonder. You gotta wonder about a lot of people. And as it turned out, a lot of people lost their lives in those minutes.

—–

We had a substantial amount of rental cars. We had no choice when they showed up. I think it was the police and maybe National Guard types that showed up, and said, you have to move south or west, and we were on our way. The freeway system was down. We had to take the secondary roads. It was a slow trip. We weren’t the only ones headed south. There were a lot of people headed south. But there were a lot of people headed north, too. I saw a lot of people sobbing, in tears in those vehicles. Maybe they had family north. Who knows what they were driving into? I know I would have done it for my brother, for my sister, or my parents. I would have driven in the opposite direction to help them. It seemed like there were more cars driving in to the zone than there were driving out. But there was a lot of road damage, a lot of cracks in the road. A lot of landslides, a lot of fissures in the ground. We got there after midnight to the train station. Our company had a train chartered from Tokyo. We didn’t get into until 4:30 a.m.

When I heard about the explosion on the turbine deck of unit 1, where I was working — that came as a shock. We heard about that on the bus. Nobody said nothing. We just put our heads down. I remember thinking: Oh, not there. Not this place I was so connected to. You hear about these things happening in the world somewhere, but it really hurt. It hurt to hear that.

I had been in the turbine deck for unit 1 less than 24 hours before. I’ve read that unit 1 was the most badly damaged unit. I don’t doubt that. I felt within the first two to three minutes of the earthquake that this was going to be significant.

—–

This is the first time I’m telling the story in some kind of chronological order. It’s not an easy story to tell. I’m struggling through it. I’m hoping that this helps me and my wife and my two school-age children. The holidays were difficult for me. I didn’t put up decorations. I hardly bought any gifts. Maybe March 11 will help me get past it. I need a year.

The most important thing to me now is people. Like this morning I had a cup of coffee. I watched this exchange outside between two people who didn’t know each other. They both had dogs. It was rather unfriendly and it seemed most unnecessary. That’s just one tiny example in the world. I wish I could take you all by the hand and re-set you with me. That’s what I feel like — I feel like I’ve been re-set. Not that I was all that much trouble before. I’ve always been a decent man. But humbling — that’s the word I’m looking for. This has been a humbling experience. What’s really important, you know?

As told to Alex Chadwick.

But at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the cleanup looks like it has barely begun. Instead, the real work is being done, unseen, deep inside the crippled reactors, where melted fuel remains cool, but whose precise state and location remains a mystery.

The destructive force of three reactor meltdowns is evident as soon as the bus carrying a small group of journalists invited by the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), enters the 20-kilometer (13-mile) exclusion zone imposed after the first reactor building exploded on March 12.

In the town of Naraha, most of the buildings emerged unscathed from the quake, but the streets are deserted. We pass a convenience store with its stock sitting untouched on shelves, and a parking lot dotted with cars that were abandoned in the panic.

During the short journey to the plant from J.Village — a soccer training complex that is now the logistical base for the Fukushima Daiichi cleanup operation — radiation monitors alert us to the invisible enemy that has driven 80,000 people from their homes.

Radiation levels rise and fall, soaring to 35 microsieverts per hour in Okuma, a farming village two kilometers from the plant that could remain uninhabitable for decades.

The abandonment of entire communities is troubling enough, but little can prepare you for a close-up view of Fukushima Daiichi’s damaged reactors.

One is shrouded in a vinyl cover while another appears largely intact, its mottled turquoise and white pattern clearly visible on a cold, but brilliantly sunny winter afternoon. The Nos. 3 and 4 reactors, however, are a tangled mess of steel and debris.

This low-lying area near the coast is by far the most hazardous part of the site. High radiation levels have hampered work to clear the wreckage and inspect the state of the melted fuel. The day before our visit, a robot sent inside reactor No. 2 reactor found 200 millisieverts per hour at one spot.

The reactors proximity to the ocean made them easy targets for the 14-meter (42-foot) tsunami, which effortlessly breached the plant’s protective wall. Along one side of the coastal road, mesh sacks filled with rocks provide makeshift reinforcement; on the other are the exposed innards of the reactors’ turbine buildings, crammed with twisted metal, warped shutters and trucks swept up and deposited by the waves.

But the clutter tells only half the story. From the outside, the appearance is one of utter chaos, but inside, damaged nuclear fuel is being kept cool by vast quantities of water, which is then stored in tanks covering almost every spare patch of ground on the site, before being decontaminated and fed back into the reactors.

Water management is critical to preventing the fuel from heating up again and setting off a potentially catastrophic nuclear chain reaction, says Katsuhiko Iwaki, deputy manager of the Fukushima Daiichi stabilization center.

The current capacity of 165,000 tons of water will reach its limit by April, he says, adding that Tepco is adding space for tens of thousands of tons of additional water.

Work near the damaged reactors is still fraught with danger. “Most of the workers here perform a two-hour shift in the morning and again in the afternoon,” Iwaki said.

“But there are other areas where the dosages are so high they can stay there for only two or three minutes. That’s just enough time to connect a hose before their alarms signal it’s time for them to leave.”

Satoshi Tarumi, whose job is to monitor the health of those workers, arrived at the plant three days after the tsunami. Conditions have significantly improved since then, he says, and despite his relatively young age, 33, he does not fear for his health.

“As part of the Fukushima Daiichi staff I feel partly responsible for what happened, that’s why I want to be involved,” Tarumi said. “My exposure levels are still below the legal limit, and I don’t see any problem working here.”

He is similarly matter of fact when asked about the future of the industry that provides his livelihood: “It’s up to the government to make a decision on nuclear energy. I’m just here to do as much as I can to help stabilize the plant.”

At the apex of the Fukushima Daiichi operation is Takeshi Takahashi, a serious-looking, quietly spoken man who became the plant’s manager last year after his predecessor, Masao Yoshida, took early retirement after being diagnosed with cancer (Tepco says the illness is not related to his work at the plant).

Takahashi concedes that the situation on the ground is still fragile. “We need to avoid major releases of radioactive materials of the kind we saw after the accident,” he said.

“We achieved cold shutdown [a stable state in which reactor temperatures remain below boiling point] in December, but we must ensure we keep making improvements because we still can’t say for sure that the facilities on site are totally trouble-free.”

Those facilities are monitored around the clock by up to 700 Tepco staff ensconced in the emergency control room. Divided into pods depending on their expertise, they are linked to workers in the field and the utility’s headquarters in Tokyo via two enormous screens. Along one wall are messages of support, including a giant Japanese flag bearing the Japanese character for “hope.”

Takahashi made no attempt to deflect criticism of Tepco’s conduct in the early days of the crisis, when information was scarce, and sometimes contradictory. His priority, he says, was to pave the way for a return home for at least some nuclear evacuees.

“We often hear that we didn’t communicate properly, and I am sorry about that,” he said. “It was never our intention to suppress information, but there was a chaotic time after the accident when we tended to neglect efficient communication.

“I’d like to apologize for the troubles and concerns we caused for local people. We need to secure safety in order to bring comfort and relief to the local residents. We are trying our best now to bring those who evacuated from the evacuation zone back to their homes as soon as possible,” he said.

Reports suggest that radiation levels in some areas near the outer edge of the evacuation zone are low enough for a small number of residents to return in the coming months.

They will not include Saori Kanesaki, a resident of Tomioka, a town in the evacuation zone, who until last year guided groups of visitors around Fukushima Daiichi.

“Before the accident it was my job to tell people that nuclear power was safe,” said Kanesaki, who now works at the plant for a Tepco affiliate. “But given the situation, if I were to tell them that now … I would be lying.”

So much so that Japan changed prime ministers last August – now the sixth in five years – amid a pivotal period in the country’s history. Yet the crisis in leadership, lack of transparency and revelations of nuclear safety oversights have also facilitated activism in a civil society that typically emphasizes cohesion over confrontation.

The fallout from Fukushima and the bungled response have spurred an increasing number of citizens to challenge the bureaucracy and nuclear industry as health and safety concerns still linger. Local areas are undergoing a rapid shift toward renewable energy. And citizen groups – many of which are led by women — are also leading the charge for a more direct democracy by attempting to hold what would be an unprecedented national referendum on the use of nuclear power.

The grass-roots effort is partly in response to Japan’s revolving door politics. The current ruling party, the Democratic Party of Japan, swept into power in 2009 following a landslide election that ended nearly a half-century of political rule by the Liberal Democratic Party. But the hope for change quickly turned into a familiar ebb and flow: new leaders taking the reins promising reform, only to fall victim to parliament’s political gridlock. That sense of disenfranchisement and anger over the Fukushima fallout is changing the landscape of Japan’s lackluster civic participation, which has lagged behind other industrialized countries.

Daniel Aldrich, associate professor of political science at Purdue University, said a similiar increase in activism  happened after the 1995 Kobe earthquake.

“I think what we’re seeing right now – just like after past disasters – is a resurgence of Japanese civil society,” he said. “It’s been very hard in the past to bring people out of their homes, very hard to overcome some of their concerns about possible embarrassment or broader group-think.”

Now, however, several community-based initiatives, protests and rallies have sprung up in the past year. Volunteers have set up a popular website where users crowd-source local radiation levels. Mothers are testing school lunches for radiation. And perhaps in a nod to the Occupy movement, antinuclear activists have camped out in front of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Tokyo for more than four months and refused orders to leave. Citizens are also becoming increasingly vocal toward public officials.

“You see people yelling and interrupting these bureaucrats, which I’ve never seen at public meetings,” said Aldrich. “What I’ve been seeing from Fukushima and elsewhere is ‘rituals of dissent’ — local people not willing to be talked down to, not willing to be ignored.”

Others have started referendum campaigns in cities like Tokyo and Osaka to decide whether Tokyo Electric Power Co. and Kansai Electric Power Co. should be allowed to run nuclear plants. In December, the group Let’s Decide Together/Citizen-initiated National Referendum began a petition seeking signatures for a local plebiscite.

While the campaigns have struggled to gain a critical mass, the groups have managed to meet the legal metrics required to hold a referendum. Organizers have collected 55,000 signatures in Osaka and 250,000 in Tokyo from local voters, exceeding the numbers required by law to ask its respective governments to hold a (non-binding) referendum. A separate group led by Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe has also collected more than 4 million signatures in a campaign to abolish all 54 nuclear reactors in Japan.

Successful referendums on nuclear power have recently taken place in Europe, but such initiatives are uncommon in Japan. There have been a few local plebiscites in the past but a national referendum would be unprecedented. No law exists for such a measure. A national vote may be difficult but a local referendum could be possible despite ambivalence from the Osaka and Tokyo leadership.

“The hangenpatsu [antinuclear] movement certainly has, at least right now, the momentum to carry this,” said Aldrich.

What has become evident through the referendum and civic activism is that the public discourse has dramatically shifted from a tacit acceptance of nuclear energy to one that promotes renewable energy.  Going green was previously viewed as a left-wing idea that prevented many from wholly embracing the idea.

Until Fukushima, politicians, local bureaucrats and power utilities held a stronghold on national energy policy for five decades, building nuclear plants in coastal and rural “nuclear villages” that created a network of dependence on atomic energy. Japan was previously the third-largest consumer of nuclear energy with roughly 30 percent accounting for the country’s power. Its 10 regional utilities relied heavily on nuclear power and dominate the market.

But the monopoly appears to be crumbling. For one, public sentiment has changed. A November poll by national public broadcaster NHK showed that more than 70 percent want to eliminate or reduce reliance on atomic energy.

Andrew DeWit, a professor at Rikkyo University who follows energy policy, says profound changes are also happening at the local level. Most notably, he said the landmark feed-in tariff bill passed last year before Prime Minster Naoto Kan’s resignation is helping to provide incentives to local governments, farmers, businesses and households to invest in renewable energy.

“Now it’s become a huge wave of big capital looking at large scale, mega solar projects in conjunction with the prefectures,” said DeWit.

Still, the government is conducting stress tests to gauge the possibility of restarting reactors in lieu of the summer power crunch, a move that has been pushed by the old guard business lobby. Yet only two of the 54 nuclear plants are currently operating in Japan, and momentum may already be leaning the other way.

“The ground is shifting very rapidly,” said DeWit. “If you see the pre-March 11 as solid ground, this is profound liquefaction of the solid ground that the nuclear village used to stand on.”

“To say this is the result of contamination from the Fukushima accident is a stretch, because natural radiation, as well as many other chemical substances in the environment and other factors, can also be mutagenic,” F. Ward Whicker, professor emeritus at Colorado State University’s Department of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences, told AOL Weird News. Whicker admitted that radiation “can” cause these sorts of mutations, but that fall out from Fukushima is unlikely to the be the cause of this (probably anomalous) incident of earlessness.

“With only one video as evidence, it’s impossible to know why the bunny has no ears, said Dana Krempels, a rabbit expert and University of Miami biology professor,” AOL reported.

And the snow white Japanese critter is not the first earless bunny to have hit headlines. In 2008 in the U.K., far from any hazardous nuclear disasters, a rabbit aptly named Van Gogh was born totally healthy, without ears, as the Metro newspaper reported at the time.

And now for the adorable footage: