Kazutoshi Yokoyama

Kazutoshi Yokoyama is a nuclear-plant worker whose name gives the investigation a promising lead and, later, reveals the means by which Tadao and Hiromi tried to survive. The apparent worker in old employment records and the man whose identity Tadao assumes are not the same person: Yokoyama is killed by Hiromi while attempting to assault her, and Tadao uses his name after staging his own death. The name binds an elusive labor history to the family’s desperate flight and its aftermath.

Identity and Investigation

Years after Yokoyama’s work at a nuclear plant, investigators find his name in an old work roster. A former crew leader at Hamaoka Nuclear Power Station remembers him as resembling a police sketch and estimates that he would have been about fifty at the time. The witness had known him only at work, so the roster provides a name without much personal history.

The name also appears in radiation-registration records. Yokoyama’s recorded address and legal domicile were in Nagoya, but his residence certification had been deleted without a recorded notification of a move. Investigators consequently have no current address. He had been married twice and divorced twice; his parents had died, and his older sister had moved after marrying.

The investigation finds that Yokoyama spent more than half his career at Onagawa Nuclear Power Station. His listed employer was Hakuden Engineering, headquartered in Tokyo, but investigators suspect that he was actually hired through a local company much farther down the subcontracting chain. His apparent career therefore fits the dispersed employment structure that makes his identity difficult to follow.

Work in the Nuclear Industry

The difficulty is not simply the passage of time. Companies are required to retain employee documents for three years only for full-time staff, while short-term workers can disappear from the surviving record. Nuclear-plant work is often passed through long chains of contractors and subcontractors; workers may be hired under false names, and residence documents can be forged. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, many smaller firms withdrew from the industry, further complicating the search. Police across Japan help the task force by contacting employers, crew leaders, and former workers, but the scattered structure of the work leaves substantial gaps.

A man using Yokoyama’s identity describes a mobile, temporary existence to Tadao and Hiromi. He is on his way to Fukushima after inspection and maintenance work at the Mihama plant in Wakasa, joking that he is a migratory bird in the nuclear industry. He says workers move between sites, living for a couple of months at a time in company dormitories provided by subcontractors. He has been doing this kind of work for four years and describes the workers as day laborers, many carrying personal difficulties of their own.

The same man explains that inspection and maintenance at Mihama involved clearing radiation from contaminated areas. His assigned work was scrubbing with cloths and brushes. The contrast between the plants’ advanced technology and maintenance that depends on manual cleaning gives the job a concrete physical routine, while the wider investigation points to workers’ unstable employment and fragmented records. The narrative’s account of Yokoyama’s work is inseparable from an industry in which responsibility and information are distributed across layers of intermediaries.

The Booklet and the Hidden Identity

At the restaurant, the man produces a Radiation Dose Management Booklet and places it before Tadao. The booklet carries a headshot and the handwritten name Kazutoshi Yokoyama. He says that a residence certificate was all he needed to apply for one, and warns Tadao not to lose it. The document offers an official-looking identity, but the man is unsure of his own current residence status.

The booklet becomes the tangible link between the worker the investigators are seeking and the name Tadao will later use. It is not merely a clue in the police inquiry: within the family’s story, it is a portable credential that makes continued employment and movement between plant sites possible. The name on it can survive even when the person’s home, employer, and current whereabouts cannot be reliably established.

Death and Assumed Name

The truth behind the name emerges from Hiromi’s encounter with the man at the restaurant. He approaches her with an offer of money and, later, attempts to assault her. In her struggle to get away, she grabs the chopsticks and strikes him. He collapses, and Hiromi pushes him off her. The man is the person whose name appears on the Radiation Dose Management Booklet.

Tadao then turns the death into a plan to escape his own circumstances. He tells Hiromi that a body will be found at the foot of a cliff and instructs her to identify it as his. He has placed the dead man’s fingerprints on the belongings in his bag and made him grip its handle, intending to substitute the body for himself. Tadao had planned to leave the inn while Hiromi slept and jump from the cliff; the man’s death gives him a way to fake his own death instead. He expects that the debt collectors will stop pursuing him and that local authorities will take responsibility for Hiromi, likely placing her in an orphanage.

The substitution does not make their difficulties disappear. Hiromi is placed in an understaffed institution, where she faces isolation and bullying, though she receives support from Seizo Naemura and Motoko Yoshino. She knows that her father’s decision made her life possible, and the knowledge that he is enduring hardship gives her strength, even as she often cries herself to sleep.

A month after Hiromi arrives at the orphanage, Tadao’s first letter reaches her under the sender name Kyoko Kondo and a Fukushima Prefecture address. He writes that he is working at a nuclear power plant, cleaning up radiation, and tells her to address replies to Kazutoshi Yokoyama. Hiromi understands that her father has taken the name of the man she killed. The name that first seemed to identify a missing worker now carries the secret of their survival, their separation, and the burden of what happened at the restaurant.