It was a media label, not a true headcount — the skeleton crew that stayed started around 50 but soon grew into the hundreds, working in rotating shifts of about 50
As radiation spiked, most staff were evacuated and a skeleton crew stayed behind to manually operate valves and monitor equipment in near-darkness. Foreign media dubbed them the 'Fukushima 50,' but the name is a known misnomer: the number who remained was larger than 50 and kept changing — it began around 50, rose into the hundreds within days as reinforcements arrived, and topped a thousand workers, firefighters, and soldiers at the site by late March. The '50' stuck because they often worked in rotating shifts of roughly that size.
