It seems immoral to criticize The Days, a calmly measured and thorough dramatization of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and its aftermath. The ingenuity and courage of the service men at the power station at the hideous moment the calamity struck, who stayed a week after working to avert a much worse catastrophe, deserves our deepest respect. But as a drama, The Days is too reverent: its desire to leave nothing out could cause weary viewers to abandon their posts.
One of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history occurred under the sea off the east coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, disrupting the power supply to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. When a subsequent tsunami inundated the station - located just 10 meters above sea level - it knocked out the site's backup diesel generators. Now completely without power, the plant's reactors could no longer be cooled - only an improvised exercise in damage limitation would prevent a total collapse.
Stars: Kôji Yakusho, Kaoru Kobayashi, Oji Suzuka
Fukushima was the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, and The Days is the first realistic dramatization of a nuclear accident since Chernobyl, the deservedly acclaimed miniseries aired by Sky/HBO in 2019. This show was a stunning recreation of specific events with a thick layer of more universal drama on top, as it explored not just the culture of lies and cover-up that plagued the failing Soviet Union, but the tendency of hierarchical institutions everywhere to stifle morality and independent thought people working within them.
The Days, unfortunately, really only has the "breathtaking recreation of specific events" part. Yes, there are scenes where senior executives and politicians give bad instructions because they are afraid of political backlash, are concerned about their public image or too attached to normal protocol, but they are few and offer no no surprise ideas. Instead, many of the long sequences recall times in Chernobyl when men volunteered to perform essential tasks, knowing it would expose them to life-threatening levels of radiation.
Once the Tsunami Happens - the incredible destructive power of the sea crashing incongruously through land structures is superbly rendered and sets off a haunting miniature disaster movie featuring men trapped in a basement which fills up quickly - factory manager Yoshida (Koji Yakusho) must perform a terrible plate-spinning feat. It has several reactors that require venting, water pumping, or both. As quickly as he and his team conjure up a clever ploy to avoid an explosion here, the readings hit the red zone there.
Yakusho is excellent as a man who slowly transforms from a happily pottery pen pusher, checking everything with calm devotion, to a stubborn poker knocking over trash cans and disregarding direct orders because he can see what that needs to be done, hasn't slept for 80 hours and has no time for anyone's bullshit. He's trapped in a nightmare that keeps getting worse, but the nature of it – more or less the same thing goes wrong, over and over and over, a little worse each time – kills The Days like drama. .
Episode two centers on the valves that must be opened by hand, deep inside a dark and increasingly irradiated building littered with debris and mud. "Please select which personnel will go inside," Yoshida says to the control room supervisor, both tacitly aware that what he means is deciding which of your men could die. The scene where this choice is made is extremely moving, but that impact diminishes as we see variations on the same storyline: something very similar happens in episode seven, and virtually every episode in between. After a while, it's hard to tell which characters are stoically and heroically donning hazmat suits and stepping into the darkness - some of them should have been ruthlessly removed.
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