Fukushima Workers Who Fled May Have Received Garbled Orders, Reports Say

TOKYO — About 650 workers who fled the stricken Fukushima Daiichi power plant without permission at the darkest moment of the 2011 nuclear accident may have left because they thought they had been ordered to evacuate and were not knowingly violating orders, according to new details of the episode reported in recent days by Japanese news media.

The Kyodo News agency and two newspapers, The Mainichi Shimbun and The Yomiuri Shimbun, carried new excerpts from the testimony of Masao Yoshida, who was the plant manager during the March 2011 accident. Some of his testimony, which was recorded by government investigators during hours of interviews before Mr. Yoshida’s death last year, was first disclosed in May by another major Japanese newspaper, The Asahi Shimbun.

Mr. Yoshida, who stayed at the Fukushima plant with 68 employees as it seemed to teeter on the brink of catastrophe after being crippled by a huge earthquake and tsunami, came to be viewed in Japan as a hero for preventing the disaster from growing even worse. His 400-page account of the accident, which had been kept secret by the government, is now scheduled to be made public as early as this month, following pressure from shareholders of the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, and from other news agencies after the Asahi scoop.

Like the Asahi report, the accounts published over the last week, which could not be independently verified, appeared to come from copies of Mr. Yoshida’s testimony that were leaked to Japanese news media.

While the new reports carry much of the same information as the earlier Asahi account, they differ on the key point of whether the plant’s workers who fled on March 15 were consciously violating Mr. Yoshida’s order for them to stay where they were. The Asahi report quoted Mr. Yoshida as saying he had never given the order to withdraw, indicating that the evacuation went against his instructions.

However, additional excerpts from Mr. Yoshida’s testimony cited in the new reports suggest a communication failure, not a willful violation of orders by the employees.