Japan nuclear threat: families flee again as meltdown risk increases
The hotel's fire alarm went off. A receptionist banged on my door. "Very sorry," he said. "You have to leave now. There is an emergency. You have to leave right now."
At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the problems for engineers fighting to prevent a serious meltdown had just doubled – and, by the end of the day, were set to treble. A huge explosion had taken place at a second reactor, two days after the first one set the whole country on edge. A third reactor appeared to be heading the same way, with its cooling system failing and its nuclear fuel rods partly exposed.
I and others, some of them already refugees from the plant's 12-mile evacuation zone, found ourselves fleeing again from a danger which seems to keep changing shape: first bad, then better, then worse again and now, it seems, more alarming still.
Officials insist that no reactor's casing has actually been breached, and any radioactive releases have been small. But if they grow larger, Koriyama is probably the first big place they would reach. Here on the front line, the official message of comfort is heard with growing scepticism.
With all the hotels closed, I spent last night in a Japanese family's private home just outside the city. In one of those only-in-Japan moments, a complete stranger stepped forward to offer a tatami mattress bed to a foreigner he'd never even met before.