No containment can contain a meltdown, if it wasn't built to do so. The BWR containments, as used in Fukushima Daiichi, just weren't, because it wasn't deemed necessary. Nureg/CR-6042 made it pretty clear that the focus back in the early 1960ies was on definitively preventing "catastrophic deaths". Preventing contamination just wasn't the goal. From the perspective they had, it was sufficient if meltdowns were unlikely. This has changed, but at least in the US and Japan, the power plants weren't changed to accomodate this.
And I'm not cherrypicking my sources. Any of the well known and often discussed reports like Wash-1400 or Nureg-1150 make it very clear that such BWR containments would overpressurize and leak soon after a meltdown due to hydrogen generation (hydrogen can't be condensed, unlike water steam), leading to widespread contamination after a meltdown. That's not merely a chance, but a certainty. (Whether a meltdown can be prevented is a different matter.) All three also clearly state that flooding and tsunamis (in Wash-1400 "tidal waves") are a potential cause for a meltdown, despite the redundancy of safety equipment, because they cause a full station blackout.
All this is quite different in other containments. Pressure water reactors typically have a large dry containment, that is capable of containing a meltdown, at the very least long enough for most contaminants to settle down in the containment and not outside of it. (Without power to run any pumps, it takes some 20 hours for 99% of the Cesium to settle down. With power, you can run containment sprays and do it in a bit more than half an hour. BWR Mark I/II containments generally don't have such sprays.) Newer BWR containments are also much larger and much more capable of containing a meltdown.
Other countries such as Sweden, France and Germany fitted filtered containment vents to their nuclear power plants in 1980(Sweden) and 1988 (Germany/France). Which would have prevented any significant fallout, because the containments wouldn't overpressurize.