Preserving memory demands tireless resistance against zealot-driven deception.

On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake struck northeastern Japan, triggering a massive tsunami that wiped out towns along more than 600km of coastline and killed over 18,400 people. Yet in German media this human catastrophe was effectively erased and replaced by the incitement of nuclear panic, weaponized to force a historic energy policy reversal and deliver an electoral victory to the Green Party, while the actual victims froze in the rubble. This essay, After the Wave, is a first-hand account from Tokyo and an indictment of a media–political apparatus that ignored the survivors’ fate and systematically exploited the 18,400 dead for political and, perversely, self-righteous moral gain.

Ground Zero in Tokyo 

The magnitude 9.1 earthquake that struck Japan on Friday, March 11, 2011, was the most powerful ever recorded in Japanese history and the fourth largest worldwide since 1900. Instrumentally recorded earthquakes in and around Japan number on the order of 5,000 per year, most of them very small. Around 1,500 are noticeable to the public, yet the vast majority are minor and cause no damage. Significant earthquakes capable of causing damage occur several times a year, although truly destructive events, such as those in Kobe 1995, Niigata 2004, Kumamoto 2016 and on the Noto Peninsula 2024, are far less frequent.

The 2011 earthquake was a defining event that nobody who lived in Tokyo, and much more so in the north of Japan, will ever forget. I experienced it while sitting in a train that had just stopped at an elevated station, roughly fourteen meters above the ground at the end of a bridge. While most passengers fled outside, the shaking was so violent that it was impossible to keep standing. People crawled on the floor or grabbed a swaying fence along the platform. I instinctively checked what was above me. In an earthquake, things come smashing down, so after confirming that the framework of the metal baggage rack would protect me, I stayed in my seat. As the tremor intensified and went on for what felt like six eternal minutes, my main concern was that the train would be thrown off the tracks and crash down. Nearby high-rises swayed like bamboo in the wind.

Mobile phones and landlines jammed immediately. All trains and subways in Tokyo and its surroundings stopped. Stranded halfway to my destination, I managed to get on a bus to a friend who lived about four kilometers away. He shared his apartment with his mother, Chiyo, who was 96 years old but remarkably agile and lucid. In 1923, her parents' home had been spared by the firestorms that scorched large areas of Tokyo in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake, which claimed approximately 138,000 lives. When I arrived, she told me that she had never been more frightened since then.

Surprisingly, the internet still worked. I began contacting my wife, Keiko, and my friends by email. By Sunday evening, I had finally confirmed that everyone I knew was safe.

It took nearly two days for the true scale of the disaster along the northeast coast to filter through. A tsunami of immense destructive power had smashed into the shoreline, the retreating water dragging entire villages into the sea. 

In places along the Sanriku coast, the deeply indented Pacific shoreline of the northeastern part of Japan's main island, the tsunami's surge reached heights of over forty meters. On the Sendai Plain it advanced more than five kilometers inland. In many parts of the Miyagi and Fukushima coastlines, the water rose between ten and twenty meters above ground level, and a roughly two-thousand-kilometer stretch of Japan's Pacific seaboard was affected. Out in the deep ocean the waves raced across the Pacific at speeds of around seven hundred kilometers an hour, before slowing and rising up as they struck the coast.

One coastal town of 17,000 reported almost 10,000 residents missing, presumed dead. Along a stretch of more than 600 kilometers, whole towns had been wiped off the earth.

 

The next morning after the earthquake,, I finally arrived home and was reunited with Keiko. There was no electricity, and although the house was cold and dark, there was no damage. In supermarkets, batteries, rice, milk, and eggs had quickly disappeared from the shelves, but we had a roof, kerosene heating, and enough food. Gasoline also became scarce, and long lines of cars formed at the pumps. By Sunday, gas stations had closed for lack of supplies. The prospect of this halting food supplies to a metropolitan area of some 34 million people was frightening. At that point, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, about 220 kilometers from Tokyo, was not a primary concern.

In the seven days following the initial tremor, 262 aftershocks of magnitude 5 or greater were registered—a record even in Japan’s busy seismic history. Three of those aftershocks measured magnitude 7 or above. According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, the first month alone saw hundreds of significant tremors that kept the region in a state of constant alarm. We never knew whether these were foreshocks and an even more disastrous event was still ahead of us. The ground moved roughly every ten minutes. Living in Tokyo in those days felt like being on a huge houseboat moored to the bank of a busy river, rocking each time another vessel passed.

In the north, the scale of human suffering was staggering. Millions of survivors were without water, food, or shelter in subzero temperatures. Roads were cracked open or buried under debris, oil refineries were destroyed, and infrastructure had collapsed across an enormous area. Tens of thousands were dead or missing.

This was the real catastrophe—one that would soon be obscured, at a distance, by another kind of manufactured disaster:a media narrative that turned Japan’s emergency into a German morality play.

Virtual Journalism

While in the north the survivors fought for their lives in the cold winter, the German media had found its story. And that story was not the tsunami and its victims.

The first feature I read in the German press was on Spiegel Online, written by a journalist based in Thailand. The subtitle read: „Tokyos Massen verkriechen sich in ihren Häusern.“ Translated literally: “Tokyo’s masses are crawling into their houses.” It was changed shortly afterward, presumably after complaints about its racist framing, including from me. At that point, the catastrophic dimension of the tsunami in the north had not yet registered.

This was not an isolated lapse. It reflected a structural problem. Most German media organizations have no correspondents based in Japan, and many articles are written by journalists with limited or no experience of the country. The result is what I call “virtual journalism”—reporting from far away about unfamiliar places, producing perceptions based on preconceptions that differ markedly from reality on the ground. News is constructed in editorial offices according to preconceived guidelines, and journalists are expected to deliver material that feeds existing tropes rather than challenging them.

The nuclear element compounded everything. In Germany, nuclear energy has always been a viscerally emotional issue. Chernobyl had left a deep collective trauma. With decisive state elections imminent in Baden-Württemberg the following Sunday, the smoking ruins of the Fukushima reactor buildings offered an irresistible political opportunity. The Green Party exploited it remorselessly and won control of Baden-Württemberg for the first time in a German state election.

The year 2011 was also the 150th anniversary of German-Japanese friendship.

When the earthquake struck, I was on my way to take a final photograph for a brochure titled German Champions—a project about successful German companies in Japan, intended to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the friendship between my country of birth and my chosen home. That celebratory context made what followed all the more despicable.

Watching the reaction of my compatriots and colleagues in Germany from Tokyo felt like an appalling betrayal, both as a German and as a journalist. I was overwhelmed by a burning sense of shame. What was so repugnant was the sheer narcissism of the fear‑mongering: while millions of people in northern Japan had lost everything and thousands had lost their lives or were missing, people in Tokyo—though far less affected—were dealing with constant aftershocks, power cuts, cold and scarcity. The panic-stoking reporting forced foreign residents to spend their time and energy consoling frantic families and friends in Germany and elsewhere. Our scarce resources—time, bandwidth, electricity—were being cannibalized by catastrophe onlookers who had worked themselves into a hysteria ten thousand kilometers away, a hysteria that bore no relation to what was actually happening around us. It was a bizarre reversal: the victims had to comfort the television spectators.

This fury was shared by other Germans in Japan. Writing in Die Welt, Matthias Heitmann documented “hair-raising” reports of Tokyo supermarkets being raided—in a city where cellars or freezers to store such hauls were uncommon. While German television conjured images of chaos, Germans in Tokyo saw only discipline. Many stayed because they felt a professional and moral obligation to stand by Japan. They watched with disgust as German politicians instrumentalized Fukushima for their own “survival programs,” noting that the actual victims of the tsunami had been pushed aside because a reactor catastrophe was “more sexy” for the evening news. For many, the behavior of their countrymen made them “ashamed to be German.”

Roland Tichy, then editor-in-chief of WirtschaftsWoche, published a withering open letter of apology to the Japanese people. Writing from Frankfurt, he expressed deep shame at a German public buying iodine tablets and Geiger counters while hundreds of thousands in Japan mourned their dead in snow and cold.

He accused German public television of conjuring the apocalypse with what he called a “pleasant shudder” (wohliger Schauer). He apologized for Green Party leader Claudia Roth, describing her as barely concealing her electoral excitement while participating in a human chain protest. Germany, he wrote, was “dancing on the graves of the not-yet-found dead.” He accused his own profession of being unable to distinguish facts from speculation, and concluded that the German response was that of “naughty children”: egoistic, egocentric, and heartless.

A polemic by Burkhard Müller-Ullrich in Achgut.com captured the moral obscenity of the moment: an “outdoor anti-nuclear party” taking place while thousands were being swept away in a dirty soup of debris. He compared the German protesters to onlookers at a horrific car crash who, while the road is strewn with the dead and the injured are being cut from the wrecks, stand on the side holding signs demanding lower speed limits. He noted the “monstrous” irony of German media reporting with disapproval that the Japanese seemed less interested in nuclear risks than in the fate of their missing relatives—while German activists “grinned into television cameras” at anti-nuclear rallies, celebrating the spring weather with yellow balloons. He attributed this “piety-free” behavior to a pre-packaged political machine. With the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl only weeks away, the speeches were already written and the films already edited. The Japanese tragedy was simply the spark that lit a “firework of agitation” already in place.

On Tuesday, four days after the initial quake, a particularly violent aftershock above magnitude 7 rattled my house. This jolted me out of my role as a silent observer. I wrote the following message and asked my agent in Germany to circulate it to my clients, including several news agencies:

“The irresponsible reporting about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan—especially and foremost by the German media—has become extremely annoying. More important, it takes away from our time and leads to jamming the already overloaded communication system that we need for survival and organizing help. Bad news sells, and there are always plenty of catastrophe voyeurs. But to incite mass hysteria and fear with clueless and badly researched articles, in this situation, is nothing short of criminal. And much worse, using this calamity to score election points and further political agendas as is happening now in Germany is simply disgraceful, if not plain racist. These so-called journalists, who wouldn’t be able to explain how an oil stove works, are trumping each other with speculation and horror scenarios about nuclear meltdowns. That leads to bizarre consequences whereby people here in Japan have to calm down their worried families, relatives and friends overseas. By focusing only on an unsubstantiated nuclear apocalypse, you deflect attention from the REAL catastrophe: Whole towns have been wiped out. Tens of thousands of people are missing. Millions are without water and food for days. Many are without shelter, exposed to the freezing cold in northern Japan. Please stop the fear mongering and start to do your job. Learn at least the difference between the technology of the Chernobyl reactor and the one in Fukushima. Read before you write. If you want to write about your feelings, then write poetry, not news.”

The message went viral. It was picked up by the Guardian—not as a comment but incorporated into a news article. It appeared in company blogs and online forums; the last sentence circulated widely on Twitter. The feedback was greater than for anything I have published before or since.

I was also contacted by Andrew Woolner, a Canadian who had created The Journalists’ Wall of Shame. Andrew framed the project as a desperate response to a professional class that makes the world a worse place to live in. For him, the reporting was not merely a mistake but an act of incitement. It triggered global panic, traumatized foreign residents, and forced families to flee Japan—not because of actual danger, but because their relatives back home were so stricken by the “OH MY GOD WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE” narrative that they had to leave to provide comfort. It also had economic consequences: Foreign companies pulled staff and discussed shuttering offices “due to radiation.” Andrew’s indictment focused on three core failures: a catastrophic illiteracy in science, a total lack of cultural depth, and a reliance on exaggeration. He argued that any journalist suggesting Fukushima could be “another Chernobyl” should be made to retake ninth-grade science. He asked me to contribute a German section. It eventually grew to be almost as large as all the international material combined.

The broader failure of that period’s reporting had a recognizable signature. Apocalyptic, turgid language combined with a condescending tone toward people trying their best to deal with an overwhelming situation. The baroque style and mushrooming fantasies about nuclear affairs suggested that many of those who wrote it might have found their true calling in fiction.

The clearest example of German reporting abandoning journalism for gothic fiction was Wieland Wagner’s dispatch in Der Spiegel. It is doubtful it was written with feet on the ground. Writing on March 22, Wagner characterized Tokyo not as a functioning city managing a crisis, but as a “sick girlfriend” whose “shocking decay” made him want to turn and run. The darkening of the Tokyo Tower and the extinguished neon signs of Shinjuku—practical measures of setsuden (power saving)—became symptoms of a city that had “resigned” and lost its soul. He painted a picture of “spectral emptiness” in which Dior and Chanel salesclerks stared out of windows like “mannequins” and the population lived in “apathy.” Wagner reached a crescendo of absurdity by linking the Fukushima repair efforts to “Kamikaze pilots,” suggesting that the firefighters cooling the reactors were being coerced by a “robot-like” government. He mourned that Tokyoites would soon have to “forgo their beloved sushi” and thus lose their “last joy.” A foreign correspondent treating a national tragedy as a backdrop for his own literary pretension.

Against this backdrop, Lars Nicolaysen of the dpa (Deutsche Presse-Agentur) demonstrated what honest reporting looked like. His dispatches from Sendai focused on the actual victims of the natural disaster rather than the theoretical victims of a nuclear one. He described thousands of Japanese citizens waiting in the bitter cold for water tanks that often ran dry. When helpers bowed and apologized for the empty tanks, no one murmured or complained. Behind them, televisions played images of the damaged Fukushima reactors—but almost no one watched. The survivors were too busy boiling water over improvised wood fires and caring for the elderly who were freezing in schools where ice had formed on the inside of the windows. Fourteen elderly patients died not from radiation, but from the trauma of being moved from a hospital in Fukushima to a shelter. Two died on the bus. While Berlin talked about a “national emergency” in Germany, the real emergency was in Miyagi, where students were forming rice balls to share their dwindling rations.

NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, operated according to a different philosophy entirely. As Chico Harlan reported in the Washington Post on March 27, 2011, NHK gives its reporters an earthquake and tsunami coverage manual instructing them in how not to stir panic. Certain words are prohibited—“massive,” “severe.” Anchors report with “virtually no adjectives.” This restraint was not improvised. Long before March 11, NHK had set up 460 remote cameras across the country for immediate footage of any disaster site, and mandated that a certain number of anchors live within five kilometers of the studio so they could reach it on foot. Every night after the final newscast, the Tokyo bureau ran a mock disaster drill; the same drill ran nightly at the Osaka bureau, in case Tokyo became unreachable. Tamaki Imai, NHK’s executive managing director, was unambiguous: “We see it as our social role to prevent further damages.” In a crisis of this magnitude, the value of that restraint was self-evident.

Even within the German media landscape, voices of dissent emerged. On March 23, the news agency dapd featured Mutsuko Tomita, a prominent Japanese language teacher in Berlin. Tomita abandoned her characteristic restraint to condemn the coverage as “panic-inducing,” describing it with a biting play on a popular reality television show: “It all looks like Deutschland sucht den Super-GAU” (Germany’s Next Top Super-GAU). She noted that the relentless speculation had caused her to feel fear herself, despite her direct contact with friends and family in Tokyo. She used the crisis as a teaching moment for her German students, explaining the Japanese concept of gaman—enduring the seemingly unendurable with patience and dignity—and contrasting it with the “hysteria” of the German press. While her students organized benefit concerts for the victims, the media they consumed was busy erasing those victims in favor of a “voyeuristic compulsion” toward nuclear ruin.

That voyeuristic compulsion proved as shallow as it was intense. I had been in contact with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) regarding an interview. The cancellation notice was curt and revealing: “Unfortunately we have to cancel the interview… because Libya is now in the foreground again.” I sent a dry note to Andrew:

Live ticker from Tokyo: Nuclear media cloud stopped by Libya! Interviews by the European press with Tokyo residents cancelled. Thank you, Mr. Gaddafi.

The journalists had never been interested in the reality of Japan. They were interested in a spectacle. When a new spectacle emerged, they packed up their apocalyptic scripts and moved on, leaving the real victims behind in a sudden, indifferent silence.

The Japan Times reported on March 21, 2011, that the JPquake website had already compiled nearly 70 documented examples of irresponsible foreign media coverage. Some of it was merely reckless; some bordered on the farcical. Certain reports fanned fears of a deadly radiation cloud turning residents into walking zombies. America’s FOX News broadcast a map that included the Shibuya Eggman—a live music venue—as a nuclear reactor. In the United Kingdom, The Sun screamed: “Get out of Tokyo Now!”

Most Germans, when confronted with this, will deflect by claiming the hysteria was a global phenomenon. This is classic whataboutism. There is a fundamental difference between sensationalist idiocy and systematic instrumentalization. While The Sun or FOX News were guilty of incompetence for the sake of a headline, the German media’s output was a targeted, consistent, and self-righteous project. The international press was guilty of a stochastic failure—random, noisy, driven by the crude pursuit of profit. The German press was deterministic. They were not just getting the facts wrong; they were selecting the apocalyptic, toxic narrative that best served a pre-existing domestic agenda. The Shibuya Eggman as a nuclear reactor was an embarrassing mistake. In German reporting, the errors were intentional.

Der Spiegel pulled its veteran correspondent Thilo Thielke out of Japan entirely; he then reported on “Japan’s Chernobyl” from Bangkok. Meanwhile, the BBC and The Guardian flew in additional personnel. All of this happened against the backdrop of the 150th anniversary of German-Japanese friendship—a year-long series of planned events designed to strengthen bilateral relations.

Sir John Beddington, the UK Chief Scientific Adviser, briefed the British community in Tokyo by video conference and stated unequivocally that comparing Fukushima to Chernobyl was “wholly wrong.” Chernobyl had emitted a radioactive cloud 30,000 feet into the air over an extended period. In the worst credible scenario at Fukushima, a plume would reach a maximum height of 500 meters. A 20-kilometer exclusion zone was entirely appropriate. The US government aligned itself with Japanese government guidance and did not recommend that Americans leave Tokyo. German experts advising the German Embassy privately agreed with this assessment. The Embassy nonetheless urged German nationals to consider leaving.

Caroline Graham, US editor of the Mail on Sunday, flew into Tokyo on March 18, 2011. Her report, published two days later, opened with the observation that for a ghost town supposedly on the brink of imploding, “Tokyo was rocking”. She had expected devastation; she found teeming streets, packed restaurants, and a crowded subway. Scores of Japanese people shook her hand and thanked her for not abandoning their city. One businessman told her: “Thank you, the British, for coming here to tell it as it really is.” Walking through Shinjuku at night, strangers smiled warmly, and a girl asked to pose for a photograph “so I can show my mum that not all Westerners have gone.” In a yakitori restaurant, diners applauded her entrance and thanked her in Japanese for not running away. Her conclusion after two days on the ground: “The earth may shake, but Tokyo is far from being shaken.”

What was never acknowledged by those who drove the panic was the very real physical cost of the stress they imposed. The people of Japan were already dealing with aftershocks, power cuts, cold and scarcity. On top of that, they were subjected to a torrent of extreme speculative coverage that traumatized their families and friends abroad, who then transmitted that trauma back to them. That stress has measurable physiological consequences. The inability—or unwillingness—to recognize this reveals exactly the self-serving narcissistic mindset of those who exploited this disaster for political and rhetorical gain, without the slightest consideration for the very real human consequences of what they were doing.

While the German and Swiss embassies urged their nationals in the Tokyo metropolitan area to flee the country, the United States remained steady. White House press secretary Jay Carney stated that Americans should simply follow the same guidance the Japanese government was giving its own citizens. This official solidarity mirrored what I saw from American friends. Even people I hadn’t contacted in years reached out immediately, offering money, shelter, and support. The America that Europe so often likes to bash was precisely the one that showed up when disaster struck.

The U.S. military launched Operation Tomodachi (‘friendship’)—one of the largest humanitarian relief efforts in history. It deployed about 24,000 personnel, 190 aircraft, and 24 ships, including the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan. Despite radiation risks, these crews provided vital search-and-rescue support and delivered hundreds of tons of food and millions of liters of water to survivors in the north. TIME magazine sent photographer James Nachtwey to the hardest-hit regions, providing a factual and gut-wrenching record of the tsunami’s destruction. Individual Americans took their own initiative: one acquaintance in Kobe simply loaded his minibus with food and blankets and drove north to help. For the Americans, Japan was not a “sick girlfriend” or a set piece. It was a nation in pain that needed a hand, not a lecture.

Operation Tomodachi left a lasting legacy in Japan, significantly strengthening the emotional bond between the two populations. It stood in stark contrast to the media cloud and the diplomatic retreats of the European embassies, showing that while others were theorizing about a ‘Super-GAU,’ the Americans were focused on the survival of the people on the ground.

The behavior of Tokyo’s population stood in surreal contrast to the hysteria being broadcast from Germany. Cars stretched back hundreds of meters at petrol stations, but there was no aggression, no pushing, no complaints. Supermarket shelves were partly empty. Schools stayed open. Most people went to work. Bars and restaurants remained open. Two memories are unforgettable. The first was the postman delivering mail as usual on his moped the morning after. The second was the victory of finally scoring milk—the first I had seen in four days—after lining up for half an hour before the store even opened. It disappeared almost instantly; the delivery was small, but the line was orderly. There was no ‘panic,’ no ‘apathy,’ and certainly no ‘resignation.’ There was just the task at hand.

This was the Tokyo the journalists filing from Osaka, Bangkok, and elsewhere couldn’t see—and instead conjured a virtual reality serving their agendas: a city of over 30 million people calmly waiting their turn, conserving energy, and looking after one another.

Less than a week after 3/11, I was asked by the office of Anne Will, then Germany’s most influential television discussion moderator, to take part in a discussion about Fukushima. I explained, with controlled patience, that in Tokyo we were sitting for hours each day without electricity, in the cold and the dark, and that when the power returned our priorities were survival information, contact with each other, and managing the aftershocks that continued to hit in short intervals. We were not available as entertainment for her German audience. I attached that morning’s radiation measurement from central Tokyo: 14 counts per minute, 0.155 microsieverts. Normal.

Ian Buruma, one of the most respected Western scholars of Japan, offered a cultural explanation for what foreign observers were witnessing. The discipline and solidarity of the Japanese population—no looting, no riots, no violence—was not surprising to anyone who understood the country’s centuries-long intimacy with natural catastrophe. Shinto, Japan’s earliest native religion, is composed of rituals to appease the forces of nature. Buddhism, with its profound awareness of the fleetingness of life, proved congenial to a people living under the constant threat of disaster. Fatalism, Buruma wrote, does not make life cheap—on the contrary, it can make people appreciate their time on earth all the more. What comes down can be rebuilt. The Japanese have always known this.

The racist framing of the Fukushima coverage was not accidental, and it was not new. In a 2016 paper published by Osaka University, American scholar Trane DeVore documented what he called the ‘yellow peril’ underpinnings of fringe and mainstream media reporting on the Fukushima disaster, tracing a continuous line from nineteenth-century anti-Asian imagery through to the apocalyptic radiation narratives of 2011. DeVore identified three recurring rhetorical tools: the deliberate misrepresentation of scientific data dressed in the language of authority; the paranoid construction of spurious connections between unrelated facts; and the appropriation of Christian apocalyptic thinking as a framework for imagining the consequences of radiation release.

The specific tropes he documented—Japan as the source of an invisible, unstoppable contamination spreading its tentacles westward toward Europe and America—are variants of racist discourses that circulated most strongly during the period surrounding the Second World War, and before that in the yellow peril imagery of the late nineteenth century.

This framework enabled a narrative in which a nuclear cloud, released thousands of miles away, was depicted as a direct and existential threat to Europe, and specifically to Germany. The distance was irrelevant; the ‘cloud’ served as a psychological bridge, allowing domestic political actors to instrumentalize a Japanese tragedy as a local German emergency.

The visual template for this anxiety has a specifically German origin. In 1895, Kaiser Wilhelm II commissioned a painting—Völker Europas, wahrt eure heiligsten Güter (Peoples of Europe, Guard Your Dearest Goods)—depicting a threatening cloud rising from the East, with the nations of Europe summoned to defend Western civilization against the Asiatic threat. He had copies made and distributed to European monarchs. The image of the cloud from the East sweeping into Europe, carrying invisible destruction, is not a neutral metaphor. In 2011, that symbolic cloud simply changed its label to radioactive plumes, but its function was identical: to turn fear of the East into moral capital at home.

In the German media coverage of Fukushima—the radiation plume drifting toward the continent, the calls to flee, the hysteria about contamination—its unconscious echo is unmistakable.

What was happening on German television had a name, even if no one used it at the time: nuclear disaster porn. Frank Rauscher, writing in the Weser Kurier on March 17, 2011, catalogued it with controlled disgust. Within days of the earthquake, German talk shows had abandoned the tsunami and its victims entirely. Anne Will asked: “Catastrophe in Japan—the possible super-meltdown and its consequences.” Sandra Maischberger: “The spirits we conjured: nuclear power out of control?” Frank Plasberg: “Japan’s tragedy, Germany’s fear—is this now the final nuclear exit?” Maybrit Illner: “A turning point for us too—does Japan change everything?”

Rauscher diagnosed it precisely. This was not reporting, but a domestic German debate dressed up as disaster coverage—ein mit Betroffenheit getarntes Polemisieren: polemicizing disguised as concern. When Illner interviewed Pia Tomoko Meid, managing director of the German-Japanese Society in Düsseldorf, the response was quiet and devastating: „Das kränkt. Weil man eigentlich hofft, Solidarität zu bekommen.“ That hurts. Because one actually hopes to receive solidarity.

The ruthlessness was driven by a visible Schadenfreude. Seven days after the disaster, Green parliamentary leader Renate Künast told Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen on live television: „In gewisser Weise freue ich mich ja, dass Sie die Wende jetzt machen müssen.“ (“In a way, I am glad that you are now forced to make the Wende.”) She used the word Wende—the “turn”—a term loaded with historical gravity in Germany, usually reserved for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. By using it here, she framed the nuclear exit not as a policy change, but as a moral obligation. A politician publicly expressed satisfaction over a situation created by a catastrophe that killed thousands, simply because it forced a political turn she had sought for decades, while the tsunami survivors were still searching for their dead.

Winfried Kretschmann became Baden-Württemberg’s first Green Minister-President in the election the following Sunday and has himself acknowledged that he owes his position to Fukushima. He got there because his party walked without scruple over 18,400 corpses, instrumentalized a monumental catastrophe for political gain, and systematically linked the tsunami dead to the reactor accident, manipulating and lying to advance their ideology.

This was not a temporary lapse in the heat of the moment. The conflation of the tsunami and the reactor became a permanent fixture of German public memory. On the second anniversary of 3/11, Green Party chairwoman Claudia Roth posted on Facebook: „Heute vor zwei Jahren ereignete sich die verheerende Atom-Katastrophe von Fukushima … Insgesamt starben bei der Katastrophe in Japan 16.000 Menschen.“ (“Two years ago today the devastating nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima occurred … In total 16,000 people died in the catastrophe in Japan.”)

The 15,900 confirmed deaths plus approximately 2,520 missing presumed dead — over 18,400 in total — were all caused by the tsunami. The reactor accident caused no deaths among the public. The sole confirmed radiation-related death came seven years later: a plant worker whose lung cancer was officially recognized as an occupational case. No member of the public died from radiation exposure.

The resulting outcry about Roth’s post forced an apology—it came not from Roth herself, but from her office, signed “Team Roth,” blaming “the brevity of the text.” The national broadcaster’s flagship news program, Tagesschau, made the identical error the same evening. Jürgen Trittin, chairman of the Green parliamentary group, was only marginally more careful, stating in an interview: „19.000 Menschen starben bei Tsunami und Reaktorkatastrophe“ (“19,000 people died in the tsunami and reactor catastrophe”). He conflated the two without the slightest factual basis.

The Legacy

What happened after 3/11 was not an aberration caused by shock. It was the activation of a pre‑existing ideological machinery that had been built over decades.

There was a deeper irony that the German media never paused to acknowledge. Japan was the only country in the world to have suffered atomic bomb attacks. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had shaped the national consciousness in ways that made the Japanese relationship with nuclear energy uniquely complex and informed. As Buruma observed, Emperor Hirohito had described the atom bomb as a “new and terrible weapon” that would lead to “the total extinction of human civilization.” The postwar Japanese pacifist tradition grew directly from that experience. Yet it was Germany—a country that had never experienced nuclear destruction—that appointed itself the world’s conscience on nuclear danger. Meanwhile, the people who had actually lived through Hiroshima and Nagasaki absorbed the shock of Fukushima with discipline, rebuilt their communities, and got on with their lives. Buruma’s conclusion, written in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, proved correct: Japan did not just bounce back; it came out stronger.

In 2013, a United Nations report concluded that it was doubtful whether anyone had died, or would die, as a result of radiation from the damaged Fukushima reactors. Hans Mathias Kepplinger of the University of Mainz investigated the reception of this report in Germany. It had been, in his words, “silenced by almost all German media.”

The anti‑nuclear bias in German media was not a response to Fukushima; it had been building for decades. Kepplinger’s research documented that German journalists turned against nuclear energy in 1974—a full decade before Chernobyl and 37 years before Fukushima. Public opinion followed the media trend with a delay of one to two years. In the United States, even after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, media coverage remained predominantly positive about nuclear power. After Chernobyl in 1986, French media emphasized the high safety standards of French reactors. Germany, as the French government adviser Brigitte Sauzay observed, “was seized by a veritable panic.”

Sauzay identified the deeper cultural root: after the successful reconstruction of the 1960s, many Germans returned to a specifically German tradition that treats nature as the goal of culture and technology—especially nuclear energy—as a metaphysical threat to that order, making anti‑nuclear activism the motor of the ecology movement. Within this worldview, the Fukushima panic of 2011 was not a rational policy response. It was the activation of a long‑standing reflex to expel contaminating abstraction and restore organic purity.

A decade before Fukushima, the German statistician Walter Krämer and science journalist Gerald Mackenthun had already diagnosed this machinery in clinical detail. In their 2001 book Die Panik‑Macher (The Panic‑Makers), they documented how the Greens and large parts of the SPD had spent two decades elevating nuclear power to the embodiment of all civilizational evil. They identified precisely why the fear intensified after the Soviet collapse removed nuclear war as the primary threat object: the political need for an apocalypse did not disappear; it shifted. The authors called this lustvolle Angsterzeugung (pleasure‑seeking fear generation) driven by Erlösungssehnsucht—a hunger for redemption that is quasi‑religious rather than political in any rational sense. The specific tools they documented were equally recognizable a decade later: a small cluster of ideologically committed scientists dominating media coverage far beyond their scientific standing; state governments stacking “independent” commissions with known anti‑nuclear activists and then citing those commissions as authoritative; and a rhetorical trap built into the grammar of every public debate—the claim that danger “cannot be excluded” (nicht auszuschließen). This made any factual reassurance structurally unanswerable. Fukushima did not create this apparatus. It simply switched it on again.

After Fukushima, the pattern repeated itself with systematic precision. German media made between nine and eighteen times as many calls for a nuclear exit as British and French media. Journalists called predominantly on experts who confirmed the necessity of a nuclear exit. When surveyed, 70% of German journalists said Fukushima had “definitively proved” that nuclear risks were unacceptable. The government’s own reactor commission meanwhile concluded in a special report that an event like Fukushima was “practically impossible” in Germany and that German nuclear plants were safer than the Fukushima reactors. It made no difference.

Against this factual backdrop, Angela Merkel’s decision to exit nuclear power was, by any honest assessment, an opportunistic political calculation driven by media pressure rather than scientific evidence. Two days after the tsunami, Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen declared: “We need a different energy supply.” Three days after the tsunami, Merkel announced a three‑month moratorium. Three months later, on June 9, 2011, she declared in a formal government statement that nuclear energy use in Germany would end by 2022. She spoke of destruction of “apocalyptic dimensions” and declared that Fukushima had shown that “something considered impossible by scientific standards could nonetheless become possible.” Jürgen Trittin of the Greens later acknowledged in an ARD documentary that Merkel had stolen the Greens’ defining issue: “The ground was pulled from under us the moment Merkel decided on the moratorium.” Kepplinger’s assessment was blunt: “In Germany, Fukushima became a portent that demanded consequences.” The nuclear exit was a media‑driven political decision, not a scientific one.

The deeper cultural explanation had been provided years earlier by Brigitte Sauzay: Germany is a country whose prosperity is built on technology but which simultaneously mistrusts technology—a tension that finds its resolution, repeatedly, in the politics of apocalyptic fear.

In August–September 2012, researchers examined radiation dose rates in three areas neighboring the restricted zones around the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The additional exposure attributable to the accident amounted to 1.66 millisieverts per year for residents in the Haramachi area of Minamisoma City. A peer‑reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014 confirmed what scientists had long expected. Normal background radiation in Japan is approximately 2 millisieverts per year, giving Haramachi residents a total of around 3.7 millisieverts—less than the average background dose sustained by a resident of the United States, which runs to approximately 3.1 millisieverts and is typically doubled voluntarily through medical scans. The study’s conclusion was unambiguous: the increased cancer risk to local residents over their lifetime would be so small as to be epidemiologically undetectable. It will never be possible to attribute any cancer case to Fukushima. Since no one suffered sufficient exposure to develop radiation sickness, the total radiation death and injury count from Fukushima stands at zero.

The honest scientific reckoning took years to reach the public. Writing in Popular Mechanics for the fifth anniversary of the disaster, radiation expert Andrew Karam concluded that no member of the public would likely receive enough radiation to cause health problems. This finding was echoed by the IAEA, the WHO, and UNSCEAR. Yet the human cost of the response was devastating: evacuation‑related stress and displacement claimed over 2,300 lives—more than the number killed in Fukushima prefecture by the earthquake and tsunami themselves. The measures meant to ensure safety proved deadlier than the accident itself.

This pattern of secondary harm extended to Europe. Germany’s nuclear shutdown now causes over 1,100 additional deaths annually from air pollution as coal production fills the void. Between 2011 and 2017, Japan and Germany together could have prevented 28,000 air‑pollution‑induced deaths by maintaining their nuclear fleets. In contrast, Fukushima’s radiation caused exactly one confirmed death: the worker who succumbed to lung cancer seven years later. There were no cases of acute radiation syndrome among other workers or the public.

The gravest long‑term health consequences of the disaster were not radiological. As Zeit Online reported on the fifth anniversary, the worst health effects observed after both Chernobyl and Fukushima were anxiety disorders, depression, and alcohol or drug addiction—psychological damage caused largely by the evacuations and by fear, not by radiation. Among the 60,000 evacuees from the 30‑kilometer zone around the Fukushima plant, nearly 15% reported anxiety disorders, guilt, or depression, compared to just 3% in the general population.

I remain emotional about it fifteen years later. I have been writing about it ever since to digest what happened. I am still struggling with the fact that a political party made up of younger and often sympathetic people with good intentions, operating in a country with highly educated citizens, could be so ruthless in instrumentalizing a monumental disaster—with over 18,400 dead from the tsunami—for rhetorical and ultimately political gain.

The narcissism of ideologues is ruthless and kills—whether green, brown, or red.

Coda

I posted a link to this essay with a brief summary in the forum of Freelens, Germany’s largest association for photojournalists and photographers. A colleague responded by calling the synopsis a “peculiar conspiracy theory” and then, when I suggested that one ought to read the whole article first and look at the documentation before passing judgment, replied that after my statements in the summary I had no “Anspruch” – no legitimate claim – to expect that. The refusal was not simply disinterest; it was the assertion that curiosity itself was an impertinence. That exchange crystallized something I had been observing in German intellectual discourse for a long time. Curiosity about dissenting narratives is not only an unwelcome deviation but met with hostility and actively suppressed; being aligned with the “correct” narrative is a sign of Gleichschaltung — the systematic coercion of all thought and expression into ideological conformity. To ask others to suspend judgment long enough to examine a first‑hand account of 3/11 which does not conform to the prevalent portrayal is treated not as a civic norm, but as subversive overreach. In a culture dominated by risk-aversion and sanctioned storylines, the very act of saying “read first, then condemn” is recoded as an illegitimate claim – a breach of etiquette rather than a minimal condition of insight. That this exchange took place in an organization of media professionals is not incidental. Commercial and fashion photographers may openly practice persuasion; a photojournalist without curiosity, by contrast, is an oxymoron – or a propagandist.

Curiosity requires tolerating uncertainty, open questions, and risking the discomfort of discovering you were wrong. A society that has lost curiosity has been conditioned on final answers rather than better questions and real inquiry. Ideology fills the vacuum. Curiosity is inherently subversive. It asks why and what if the premise is wrong.

Sources and further reading:

Core scientific and disaster references

Magnitude of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake
Initial Japanese and US estimates put the moment magnitude at 8.9–9.0. Later recalculations by international seismological agencies revised it to Mw 9.1, now the standard value; some Japanese documents still use 9.0, reflecting earlier estimates rather than substantive disagreement.
U.S. Geological Survey [usgs.gov]

Earthquake frequency in Japan
Japan Meteorological Agency data show that about 5,000 earthquakes are recorded in and around Japan each year, most of them too small to be noticed. Public guides based on JMA data estimate that around 1,500 quakes annually are strong enough to be felt by people. [voyapon]

Mori, N., Takahashi, T., Yasuda, T., & Yanagisawa, H. “Survey of 2011 Tohoku earthquake tsunami inundation and run-up.” Geophysical Research Letters 38, L00G14 (2011). American Geophysical Union. [pnas]

Pletcher, K., & Rafferty, J. P. “Japan earthquake and tsunami of 2011.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, last updated 4 March 2026, accessed 5 March 2026. [japanamerica.blogspot]

Tsubokura, M. et al. “Radiation dose rates now and in the future for residents neighboring restricted areas of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(10): E914–E923 (2014). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1315684111. [pnas]

UNSCEAR. UNSCEAR 2013 Report, Volume I: Sources, effects and risks of ionizing radiation – Report to the General Assembly, Scientific Annex A: Levels and effects of radiation exposure due to the nuclear accident after the 2011 Great East-Japan Earthquake and tsunami. United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, 2013. [bertelsmann-stiftung]

IAEA. The Fukushima Daiichi Accident. Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 2015. [reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac]

Karam, A. “Five Years Later, Cutting Through the Fukushima Myths.” Popular Mechanics, 11 March 2016. [popularmechanics]

German media / “nuclear disaster porn”

Heitmann, M. “Deutsche in Japan fühlen sich verhöhnt.” 23 March 2011. [welt.de]

Tichy, R. “Trauer um Opfer – Liebe japanische Freunde,” Wirtschaftswoche Nr. 12, 21 March 2011.

Müller-Ulrich, B. “Deutsche Protestkultur nein danke.” 14 March 2011. Achgut. [achgut.com]

Rauscher, F. “Die Katastrophe in Japan mündet vor allem im Talk-TV in eine innerdeutsche Debatte.” 17 March 2011. [Weser‑Kurier]

ARD Mediathek entries for:
– Anne Will: “Katastrophe in Japan – der mögliche Super‑GAU und die Folgen”.
– Sandra Maischberger: “Die Geister, die wir riefen: Atomkraft außer Kontrolle?”
– Hart aber fair: “Japans Tragödie, Deutschlands Angst – Kommt jetzt das endgültige Atom-Aus?”
– Maybrit Illner: “Zeitenwende auch für uns – Verändert Japan alles?”

Wagner, W. “Stadt im Bann von Angst und Apathie.” Der Spiegel, 22 March 2011. [spiegel.de]

Media effects and “instrumentalization” of Fukushima

Woolner, A. “Journalists’ Wall of Shame” (web project documenting Fukushima media coverage), March 2011–2012.

“Foreign media take flak for fanning fears.” The Japan Times, 21 March 2011. [japantimes.co]

Kepplinger, H. M., & Lemke, R. “Instrumentalizing Fukushima: Comparing media coverage of Fukushima in Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Switzerland.” Political Communication 33(3): 351–373 (2016). [bertelsmann-stiftung]

Kepplinger, H. M. “The Failure of Media to Do Its Job.” In: The Failure of Media to Do Its Job. Bertelsmann Stiftung, ca. 2015–2016. [bertelsmann-stiftung]

Meiner, B. “The Fukushima Disaster and the ‘Clash of Risk Cultures’.” Global Media Journal – German Edition 9(2) (2019). [ssoar]

Media practice, NHK, panic vs. restraint

Harlan, C. “In Japan disaster, NHK stays calm while foreign media comes under criticism.” The Washington Post, 27 March 2011. [reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac]

“Providing Information or Spreading Panic? Fukushima Crisis – Media Messages International vs. Japanese Media.” Hokudai OpenCourseWare, Hokkaido University, 2011–2012. [ocw.hokudai.ac]

British government and media reaction

GOV.UK, Foreign & Commonwealth Office “Japanese earthquake update – Government response”. 16 March 2011. [www.gov.uk]

Graham, C. “‘We have a stiff upper lip – like you British’: Tokyo residents show their true grit amid nuclear chaos.” Daily Mail, 20 March 2011. [dailymail.co.uk]

Operation Tomodachi and U.S. response

“Operation Tomodachi.” Reference entry (e.g. USFJ / open reference), summarizing ~24,000 personnel, ~190 aircraft, 24 ships (12 March–4 May 2011). [wikipedia.nucleos]

USFJ / Pentagon press releases on Operation Tomodachi (deployment figures, dates).

White House press briefing, March 2011 (Jay Carney urging Americans to follow Japanese government guidance).

German nuclear risk culture / fear machinery

Krämer, W., & Mackenthun, G. Die Panik‑Macher: Angst, Panik, Abzocke – wie wir manipuliert werden. Munich: Econ/Rowohlt, 2001. [idw]

Sauzay, B. Essays on German–French perceptions of technology and nuclear energy, early 2000s (German technophobia vs. French technophilia; “nature as goal of culture” vs. “correcting nature”).

Beck, U. Risikogesellschaft. Suhrkamp, 1986 (for broader German risk‑culture context).

“Yellow peril” and racialized radiation narratives
DeVore, T. “Fukushima, Fringe Media, and Radiation as the New Yellow Peril.” In: 言語文化共同研究プロジェクト (Joint Research Project on Language and Culture), Osaka University, 2016, pp. 89–100. [ir.library.osaka-u.ac]

Hull, I. V. Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany. Cornell University Press, 2005 (for Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Völker Europas, wahrt eure heiligsten Güter).

Psychological and evacuation harms

UNSCEAR 2013 Report (as above).

Japanese Reconstruction Agency / Fukushima Prefecture reports on “disaster‑related deaths” (evacuation‑related mortality ≈2,300).

Fukushima Prefecture, Reconstruction and Livelihood Support Division. Disaster‑related death counts for evacuees from Fukushima Prefecture, revised 2020 (2,320 disaster‑related deaths; indirect deaths exceeding direct earthquake–tsunami fatalities in the prefecture).
[Fukushima Prefecture]

Zeit Online, “Die schweren psychischen Folgen von Atomkatastrophen.” 31 July 2015. [zeit.de]

Quantified air‑pollution harms vs. Fukushima radiation

Jarvis, S., Deschenes, O., & Jha, A. “The Private and External Costs of Germany’s Nuclear Phase-Out.” National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper No. 26598, 2019; later published in the Journal of the European Economic Association 20(3): 1311–1346 (2022). The study estimates that Germany’s nuclear phase-out led to more than 1,100 additional deaths per year from increased SO2, NOx, and particulate matter, with hard coal plants responsible for roughly 80% of the increased mortality impact. [Ucsb]

Luderer, G. et al. “Implications of energy and CO2 emission changes in Japan and Germany after the Fukushima accident.” Energy Policy 132: 647–653 (2019). The authors conclude that Japan and Germany together could have prevented about 28,000 air‑pollution‑induced premature deaths and 2,400 Mt CO2 emissions between 2011 and 2017 had they reduced fossil fuel power instead of nuclear. [ScienceDirect]

For Fukushima health outcomes, see WHO and other international reviews noting a single officially recognized worker death from radiation-induced lung cancer and no cases of acute radiation syndrome among other workers or the general public. [WHO]

German political quotes and Facebook posts

Künast, R. Statement „In gewisser Weise freue ich mich ja, dass Sie die Wende jetzt machen müssen.“ in Maybrit Illner: “Zeitenwende auch für uns – Verändert Japan alles?”, ZDF, 17 March 2011. [welt.de]

Reinhardt, P. “Kretschmann: „Ohne Fukushima wäre ich kein Ministerpräsident“.” Mannheimer Morgen, 26 July 2021. [mannheimer-morgen.de]

Roth, C. Facebook post, 11 March 2013: “Heute vor zwei Jahren ereignete sich die verheerende Atom‑Katastrophe von Fukushima … Insgesamt starben bei der Katastrophe in Japan 16.000 Menschen.”

Tagesschau main broadcast, 11 March 2013 (same conflation).

Trittin, J. Interview, ca. 2013: “19.000 Menschen starben bei Tsunami und Reaktorkatastrophe.”

Merkel, A. Government statement on energy policy, Deutscher Bundestag, 9 June 2011 (Plenarprotokoll).

Röttgen, N. Statement “Wir brauchen eine andere Energieversorgung”, Bundespressekonferenz, March 2011.

Cultural and intellectual framing

Buruma, I. Early 3/11 essay (e.g. “A Tsunami of Self‑Pity”, Project Syndicate, March 2011), source of Hirohito quotation and fatalism argument. [japanamerica.blogspot]

DeVore, T. (as above). [ir.library.osaka-u.ac]

Japan Meteorological Agency: annual earthquake statistics and Great Kanto Earthquake data.

Fire and Disaster Management Agency (Japan): official casualty figures for the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake (~138,000 deaths).

In Rikuzentaka survivors find their house lot, 18 March 2011, ZUMA Press/Alamy

Operation Tomodachi by the US military, March 2011; Alamy

The Yellow Peril, sketch by Wilhelm II, executed by Hermann Knackfuss, 1895

Protesters in Berlin, 11 March 2017, 6th anniversary of 2011 Tohoku Earthquake