Three weeks after watching a massive wave smash into the Fukushima nuclear plant, Hiroyuki Kohno is heading back to the disaster zone to join crews struggling to avert a meltdown.
The 44-year-old radiation controller, who has worked in the nuclear industry since his late teens, has taken on a job many others have declined, with a clear understanding that the mission will likely be the last of his career.
"To be honest, no one wants to go," Kohno, who is soft-spoken and bespectacled, told AFP at the evacuation centre in the city of Kazo north of Tokyo that has been his home since the March 11 disaster.
"Radiation levels at the plant are unbelievably high compared with normal conditions. I know that when I go this time, I will return with a body no longer capable of work at a nuclear plant."
Kohno, who was employed at the now-crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant for a decade, left northeastern Japan soon after the quake and tsunami, but a fortnight later he received an email he had been half expecting.
"Attention," read the email from his company, a subcontractor of plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. "We would like you to come work at the plant. Can you?"
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Single and without a family of his own, he felt it was his duty to accept the assignment.
"The work rotation is becoming increasingly difficult, and my friends have families to return to," he said.
But Kohno is not just a company employee. He is also the eldest son in his family, and when he broke the news of his return to the plant to his parents, he did his utmost to downplay the risk.
They were not fooled. His father, who also worked many years as an electrical engineer at Fukushima Daiichi, told him to follow his heart. His mother's reaction was simpler: "Come back as soon as possible."
Kohno said he will be assigned to the plant's headquarters located in a quake-resistant tower, where he will be exposed to the same amount of radiation every hour that ordinary people experience in a whole year.
He will be joining a team that has been lauded worldwide, with media affectionately dubbing the core unit the "Fukushima Fifty", but he said heroics were not his motivation.
"There's a Japanese expression: 'We eat from the same bowl.' These are friends I shared pain and laughter with. That's why I'm going," he said.
He expects to work without pause for several days before taking two or three days of rest. And like his workmates, he will probably get by on a diet of canned food and energy bars.
"We tell each other that Japan was utterly destroyed in World War II. Now Japan has once again been burnt to the ground. Although the battlefield is different, we are the modern-day kamikazes," he said.
"Kamikaze" refers to suicide pilots who flew planes filled with explosives into Allied ships at the end of the war, and in modern Japan the word carries connotations of sacrificing one's life when ordered to.