Following the Tohoku earthquake, Kyushu Electric voluntarily sought reapproval with the town of Genkai and Saga prefecture to make sure that there would be no objection to turning the reactors back on.

The meeting was broadcast live on TV and the internet, and viewers were invited to submit their opinions by e-mail or fax.

Later, the Japanese Communist Party paper Akahata learned that the board of the Kyushu Electric Power Company had requested employees of the plant to send emails to this meeting encouraging the restart.

Later it was admitted that not only employees of the utility but the workers of 4 affiliated firms too, more than 1,500 people in total, received such requests.

[5] At the same time as this crisis broke, Prime Minister Naoto Kan unexpectedly requested more stress tests of the reactor.

This seemed to imply, despite the earlier assurances of the national government, that the routine maintenance and additional post-earthquake tests had not been sufficient to clear the reactors for restart, and that the mayor of Genkai had therefore approved the restart without complete information about the reactors' safety.

[7] Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano flew to Saga prefecture immediately to apologize to the governor in person.

The reactor was the first in Japan to resume operations after the March accident at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

After the leak was discovered Kyushu Electric failed to report the troubles in full to the local government.

[13] A citizens' group sued to have the reactors shut down immediately, but the state argued that there is no process in Japanese law that could cause an industry's operations to cease through a civil, rather than criminal, action.