High Court Overturns Ruling against Ex-TEPCO Executives (Update 1)

Jiji Press

12:13 JST, June 6, 2025 (updated at 16:20 JST, June 6)

TOKYO (Jiji Press) — Tokyo High Court on Friday overturned a lower court ruling that ordered four former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. to pay about ¥13 trillion in damages in total over the March 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima Prefecture, northeastern Japan.

Toshikazu Kino, presiding judge at the high court, found the executives unable to predict the tsunami that triggered the triple reactor meltdown at TEPCO’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

In their lawsuit filed in March 2012, TEPCO shareholders demanded that five former executives pay some ¥23 trillion in damages to the company over the nuclear accident.

In July 2022, Tokyo District Court ordered former TEPCO Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, who died in October last year, former President Masataka Shimizu, 80, and former executive vice presidents Ichiro Takekuro, 79, and Sakae Muto, 74, to pay a total of ¥13,321 billion in compensation to the company. The ruling said that the executives had been able to predict the tsunami.

In a separate criminal trial of Katsumata, Takekuro and Muto for their alleged professional negligence resulting in death and injury over the nuclear accident, the ruling that acquitted them became final in March this year.

In 2008, TEPCO estimated a tsunami height of up to 15.7 meters, exceeding the height of the nuclear plant site, based on a long-term evaluation by a government-backed research institute that predicted that a magnitude 8-class, tsunami-causing earthquake could strike off the coast of eastern Japan.

Hearings on the shareholders’ lawsuit focused on the credibility of the long-term evaluation and whether the nuclear accident could have been prevented by measures against flooding.

The shareholders argued that the accident could have been avoided if a measure had been taken to prevent flooding of facilities at the nuclear plant.

The former executives claimed that the long-term evaluation had no scientific credibility and that the accident could not have been avoided even if such a measure had been put in place because the size of the tsunami was very large.

In its 2022 ruling, the district court acknowledged the reliability of the long-term evaluation and pointed out that the former executives neglected to instruct staff to take tsunami countermeasures even though the accident could have been avoided if they did so.

The district court recognized the liability of the four former executives, excluding Akio Komori, a 72-year-old former managing executive officer, who learned of TEPCO’s tsunami estimate eight months before the nuclear accident.

In its Friday ruling, Kino, the high court presiding judge, said the long-term evaluation was not sufficient to obligate the former executives to instruct staff to act promptly in preparation for a possible massive tsunami.