Naoto Kan
Naoto Kan was prime minister for fifteen months, eleven of which nobody remembers, and he spent the other four deciding whether to evacuate Tokyo. He was unusual before he was famous: a patent lawyer from a salaried family with no political dynasty behind him, who came into politics through citizens' and environmental movements and lost four elections before winning one. His reputation was made in 1996 as health minister, when he ordered his own officials to search for files they had told him did not exist, found them within days, and published proof that the ministry had known that untreated blood products were infecting haemophiliacs with HIV and had let the sales continue. A minister who used his department against itself was close to unprecedented, and it made him a national figure. He became prime minister in June 2010, in the middle of the brief period when the opposition party held power after half a century of almost unbroken rule by the other one, and inherited a divided parliament and a party that had already burned through one leader. Then, on 11 March 2011, an earthquake off the north-east coast produced a tsunami that killed nearly twenty thousand people and knocked out the cooling systems at a nuclear station on the coast. What followed was three reactor meltdowns and a week in which the government did not know what was happening inside them. Kan flew to the site, shouted at the operating company's executives when they appeared to be preparing to abandon the plant, and told them that withdrawal was not an option. He later said that he had been given a worst-case assessment requiring the evacuation of the capital and had understood that the country as a functioning state was at stake. He was criticised heavily for interfering in the technical response and for the government's poor public communication, and he resigned that August. He came out of it converted: the man who had been a supporter of nuclear power spent his remaining career campaigning to abolish it.
- Lived: 1946 CE – ?
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: head_of_government
