Photo/Illutration Hiroyuki Kawai, center, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, criticizes the ruling in front of the Tokyo High Court in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward on June 6. (Masaaki Kobayashi)

The Tokyo High Court on June 6 rescinded a court order for former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Co. to pay the company about 13 trillion yen ($92.6 billion) over the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

In absolving the defendants of responsibility for financial damages caused to the company, the court ruled the giant tsunami that smashed into TEPCO’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011, was “unforeseeable.”

The ruling overturned the Tokyo District Court’s decision in 2022 to order the former TEPCO executives to pay compensation for failing to take measures that could have prevented the “foreseeable” tsunami from causing the triple meltdown at the plant.

“This is unbelievable and unforgivable,” Yui Kimura, secretary-general of the plaintiffs’ group, said of the high court’s ruling.

Hiroyuki Kawai, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said: “This is an extremely unjust and logically contradictory verdict. It allows a recurrence of the nuclear accident, and we will pursue the flaws in this decision at the Supreme Court.”

The plaintiffs--42 shareholders of TEPCO—had demanded 23 trillion yen in compensation to the company from five former executives and others over the damage caused by their failure to take tsunami countermeasures.

The five defendants were: Tsunehisa Katsumata, a former chairman who died in 2024; Masataka Shimizu, a former president; two former vice presidents, Ichiro Takekuro and Sakae Muto; and a former managing director, Akio Komori.

Katsumata’s heirs succeeded him in the lawsuit.

The major issues in the lawsuit were whether TEPCO management at the time could have foreseen the occurrence of such a giant tsunami and whether they could have prevented the disaster by issuing instructions for tsunami countermeasures.

In 2002, the central government released a long-term evaluation of earthquake forecasts that indicated the possibility of a major earthquake followed by a massive tsunami occurring off the coast of Fukushima Prefecture.

The Tokyo District Court’s ruling in 2022 noted that this long-term assessment was scientifically reliable because it was made by top-level Japanese researchers, among other things.

Based on this assessment, the lower court found that TEPCO’s management team could have foreseen the 2011 tsunami, and that the accident could have been prevented if the defendants had ordered the construction of a watertight structure to prevent flooding of the reactor buildings and other facilities.

The tsunami knocked out power to the plant, leading to three reactors melting down and forcing thousands of residents to evacuate from the area.

Based on the decommissioning and decontamination costs incurred and the amount of compensation paid to evacuees, the district court concluded that the former management had caused TEPCO more than 13 trillion yen in damages.

At the appeal hearing, the defendants repeated their argument that “the long-term assessment was unreliable, as it was criticized by seismologists and other experts.”

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