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Tokyo. On the evening of March 12, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant’s oldest reactor suffered a hydrogen explosion and risked a complete meltdown. Prime Minister Naoto Kan asked aides to weigh the risks of injecting seawater into the reactor to cool it down.

At that crucial moment, it became clear that a prime minister who had built his career on suspicion of the collusive ties between Japan’s industry and bureaucracy was acting in the dark.

Kan did not know the plant manager had already begun using seawater. Based on a guess of the mood at the prime minister’s office, the company ordered the plant manager to stop.

However, the manager did something unthinkable in corporate Japan. He disobeyed the order and secretly continued using seawater, a decision that experts say almost certainly prevented a more serious meltdown and has made him an unlikely hero.

The convoluted drama has exposed the underlying rifts behind Japan’s handling of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, which eventually resulted in explosions at four of the plant’s six reactors. Mutually suspicious relations between the prime minister’s aides, government bureaucrats and company officials thwarted a smooth decision-making process.

At the drama’s heart was an outsider prime minister who saw the need for quick action but whose well-founded mistrust of a system of alliances between powerful plant operators, compliant bureaucrats and sympathetic politicians deprived him of resources he could have used to make better-informed decisions.

Struggling to manage a humanitarian disaster caused by the tsunami, Kan improvised his government’s response to the worsening nuclear crisis, seeming to vacillate between personally intervening at the plant and leaving it to the operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., known as Tepco.

“There were delays. First of all, we weren’t getting accurate information from Tepco,” said Kenichi Matsumoto, an adviser to Kan. However, he also said the prime minister’s deep distrust of Tepco and bureaucrats “interfered” with the overall response.

Even some supporters say Kan could have moved faster and more decisively if he had used Japan’s existing crisis management system.

The system was created in 1986 and subsequently strengthened by Japanese leaders who had sought more power for the prime minister. It brings together bureaucrats from various ministries under the direct command of the prime minister.

Critics and supporters alike said Kan’s decision to bypass that system and instead rely on a small circle of trusted advisers with little experience in handling a crisis of this scale blocked him from grasping the severity of the disaster sooner.

Sometimes those advisers did not even know all the resources available to them, including the existence of a nationwide system of radiation detectors known as the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or Speedi. The prime minister’s advisers said they did not learn of the system’s existence until March 16, five days into the crisis.

If they had known earlier, they would have seen early projections that radioactive materials from the Fukushima plant would be blown northwest, said one critic, Hiroshi Kawauchi, a lawmaker in Kan’s own party.

Kawauchi said many of the residents around the plant who evacuated went north, on the assumption that winds blew south during winter in that area. That took them directly into the radioactive plume, he said.

Kawauchi said that when he asked officials at the Ministry of Education, which administers Speedi, why they did not make the information available to the prime minister in those first crucial days, they replied that the prime minister’s office had not asked them for it.

“It’s more of an emotional thing,” Matsumoto said of Kan. “He never trusts bureaucrats.”

That is a legacy from Kan’s stint as health minister in the mid-1990s, when he became wildly popular after exposing his own ministry’s use of blood tainted with HIV, which led to hundreds of hemophiliacs dying of AIDS. Kan found that bureaucrats and pharmaceutical company officials had long known of the tainted blood.

To Kan, the nuclear establishment represented the worst example of this kind of collusion between Japanese industry and bureaucracy, Matsumoto said.

The seawater incident is a prime example .

In testimony in parliament in late May, Kan said he asked advisers to weigh the risks that the seawater injection could cause “recriticality,” a phenomenon in which nuclear fission resumes in melted nuclear fuel lying on the floor of a storage pool or reactor core.

Kan’s aides said they grew worried after Haruki Madarame, the chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission, a nuclear regulator in the prime minister’s office, warned the “possibility of recriticality is not zero.”

About 28 hours after the tsunami struck, Tepco executives had ordered workers to start injecting seawater into the reactor. But 21 minutes later, they ordered the plant’s manager, Masao Yoshida, to halt the operation. They were relying on an account by the Tepco liaison to the prime minister, who reported back that he seemed to be against it.

Yoshida chose to ignore the order. The injections were the only way left to cool the reactor, and halting them would mean possibly causing an even more severe meltdown and release of radiation, experts said. Yoshida had the authority as the plant manager to make the decision, said Junichi Matsumoto, a senior official at Tepco. Guidelines from the International Atomic Energy Agency specify that technical decisions should be left to plant managers because a timely response is critical.

After revealing that he had ignored the order, Yoshida said that “suspending the seawater could have meant death” for those at the plant.

The New York Times