Masataka Shimizu, the president of Tokyo Electric Power, 66, announced his resignation near the darkened command center on the second floor of Tokyo Electric's headquarters where he had disappeared in the second week of the crisis after the March 11 earthquake.
After being briefly hospitalized for exhaustion after the disaster and widely criticized for his lack of leadership, Shimizu had come back for a round of ritual apologies for Fukushima evacuees and the resignation.
"We want to sincerely apologise for our nuclear reactors in Fukushima causing so much anxiety, worry and trouble to society," the outgoing president said.
Tokyo Electric shareholders, including its banks, have lost a combined $36 billion since March 11, but the deal struck by the utility spared them a complete wipeout in bankruptcy.
In a series of interviews, a dozen people involved in the discussions that led to the plan to compensate Fukushima victims announced last week by the government of Prime Minister Naoto Kan, described how the utility widely known as Tepco won a government declaration that it was too big to fail at a time when its survival had been in question.
Their account provides a rare look into a policy decision by the Japanese government in the midst of the nation's most dire peacetime crisis and shows how the consensus hardened around an old-school Japanese approach that appeals to public burden sharing at the same time that it protects powerful financial interests.
In the process, Wall Street banks that had proposed a tougher-line restructuring like the bankruptcy of General Motors by the Obama administration were shut out.
So too were those inside the Japanese government who wanted to see a market-driven restructuring of Tepco or an outright nationalization, according to the people involved in the discussions who asked not to be named.
Part of the calculation was a view that political opponents of the bailout would remain too fragmented to block its adoption in parliament and the Japanese media would not aggressively question a plan that promised to speed payouts to victims of the disaster, one of the principal architects of the plan said.
In the end, Kan - who had exploded in anger at Tepco officials in the first days of the nuclear crisis and promised a more open approach to containing it - was persuaded to support a plan to save the utility that had come together entirely behind closed doors.
Critics of the plan say it leaves the Japanese government on the hook for a higher share of the costs of the Fukushima clean-up, threatens to dampen innovation and new investment by Japan's utilities and opens the door to both higher taxes and higher electricity rates, issues likely to be raked over in the coming parliamentary debate on the plan. Read more.
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