Legacies of Fukushima: 3.11 in Context

By University of Pennsylvania Press

It was an unlikely convergence of events. A 9.0 magnitude earthquake, the largest in Japanese memory and the fourth largest recorded in world history; a tsunami that peaked at forty meters, devastating the seaboard of northeastern Japan; three reactors in meltdown at the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima; experts in disarray and suffering victims young and old. It was, as well, an unlikely convergence of legacies. Submerged traumas resurfaced and communities long accustomed to living quietly with hazards suddenly were heard. New legacies of disaster were handed down, unfolding slowly for generations to come.

The defining disaster of contemporary Japanese history still goes by many different names: The Great East Japan Earthquake; the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami; the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster; the 3.11 Triple Disaster. Each name represents a struggle to place the disaster on a map and fix a date to a timeline. But within each of these names hides a combination of disasters and legacies that converged on March 11, 2011, before veering away in all directions: to the past, to the future, across a nation, and around the world. Which pathways from the past will continue, which pathways ended with 3.11, and how are these legacies entangled?

Legacies of Fukushima places these questions front and center. The authors collected here contextualize 3.11 as a disaster with a long period of premonition and an uncertain future. The volume employs a critical disaster studies approach, and the authors are drawn from the realms of journalism and academia, science policy and citizen science, activism and governance—and they come from East Asia, America, and Europe. 3.11 is a Japanese legacy with global impact, and the authors and their methods reflect this diversity of experience.

Contributors: Sean Bonner, Azby Brown, Kyle Cleveland, Martin Fackler, Robert Jacobs, Paul Jobin, Kohta Juraku, Tatsuhiro Kamisato, Jeff Kingston, William J. Kinsella, Scott Gabriel Knowles, Robert Jay Lifton, Luis Felipe R. Murillo, Başak Saraç-Lesavre, Sonja D. Schmid, Ryuma Shineha, James Simms, Tatsujiro Suzuki, Ekou Yagi.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Apr 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812298000

Book preview

Legacies of Fukushima

CRITICAL STUDIES IN RISK AND DISASTER

Kim Fortun and Scott Gabriel Knowles, Series Editors

Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster explores how environmental, technological, and health risks are created, managed, and analyzed in different contexts. Global in scope and drawing on perspectives from multiple disciplines, volumes in the series examine the ways in which planning, science, and technology are implicated in disasters. The series also engages public policy formation—including analyses of science, technology, and environmental policy as well as welfare, conflict resolution, and economic policy developments where relevant.

Legacies of FUKUSHIMA

3.11 in Context

Edited by

Kyle Cleveland, Scott Gabriel Knowles, and Ryuma Shineha

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-5298-9

CONTENTS

Foreword. Fukushima’s Special Message

Robert Jay Lifton

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Kyle Cleveland, Scott Gabriel Knowles, and Ryuma Shineha

PART I. LEARNING FROM DISASTER

Chapter 1.    What Was Learned from 3.11?

Scott Gabriel Knowles

Chapter 2.    Unfulfilled Promises: Why Structural Disasters Make It Difficult to Learn from Disasters

Kohta Juraku

Chapter 3.    Fukushima Radiation Inside Out

Robert Jacobs

Chapter 4.    Has Japan Learned a Lesson from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident?

Tatsujiro Suzuki

Chapter 5.    The Developmental State and Nuclear Power in Japan

Jeff Kingston

PART II. PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE AND PUBLIC TRUST

Chapter 6.    The Road to Fukushima: A US-Japan History

James Simms

Chapter 7.    Media Capture: The Japanese Press and Fukushima

Martin Fackler

Chapter 8.    The Politics of Radiation Assessment in the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis

Kyle Cleveland

Chapter 9.    Nuclear Labor, Its Invisibility, and the Dispute over Low-Dose Radiation

Paul Jobin

Chapter 10.  Food and Water Contamination After the Fukushima Nuclear Accident

Tatsuhiro Kamisato

Chapter 11.  Suffering the Effects of Scientific Evidence

Ekou Yagi

PART III. POSSIBLE FUTURES

Chapter 12.  Building a Community-Based Platform for Radiation Monitoring After 3.11

Luis Felipe R. Murillo and Sean Bonner

Chapter 13.  The Closely Watched Case of Iitate Village: The Need for Global Communication of Local Problems

Azby Brown

Chapter 14.  Describing and Memorializing 3.11: Namie and Ishinomaki

Ryuma Shineha

Chapter 15.  Renegotiating Nuclear Safety After Fukushima: Regulatory Dilemmas and Dialogues in the United States

William J. Kinsella

Chapter 16.  International Reactions to Fukushima

Sonja D. Schmid and Basak Saraç-Lesavre

Notes

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Legacies of Fukushima

FOREWORD

Fukushima’s Special Message

Robert Jay Lifton

The Fukushima nuclear energy disaster was by no means the largest we have encountered. The Chernobyl meltdown twenty-five years earlier retains that distinction. But Fukushima Daiichi was unique in two ways: It revealed the vulnerability of nuclear power to geophysical events such as earthquakes and tsunamis. And it provided a powerful psychological association to the use of a nuclear weapon on an inhabited city, a city that happened to be just about five hundred miles away.

When people in or close to Fukushima—and many quite far away—identified themselves with Hiroshima survivors, they were asserting not only their proximity to the atom-bombed city but their sense that they had been subjected to the same highly destructive, and in many ways mysterious, technology. Fukushima, that is, rendered false the constant assertion on the part of advocates that nuclear power was entirely different from, or even had nothing to do with, nuclear weapons.

Atomic bomb survivors I interviewed in Hiroshima were profoundly fearful of what I came to call invisible contamination. Within hours or days or weeks after the bomb fell, many experienced or observed in others grotesque symptoms that included severe diarrhea and weakness as well as bleeding from all the body orifices and into the skin (the dreaded purple spots), often leading to quick and terrifying death. For those who survived, the fear of invisible contamination extended indefinitely as, over years and decades, evidence accumulated of an increased incidence of a variety of cancers, and even of the potential transmission of radiation effects to the next generation.

People in and around Fukushima did not experience acute radiation symptoms. But high radiation levels were recorded, leading to extremely difficult evacuations that took their own heavy toll on the health of many people. And researchers project future vulnerability to different forms of cancer. One writer observed a fallout of fear, and psychiatrists recorded subclinical problems that, while not requiring hospitalization, greatly affected everyday life.

The remarkable creation by a group of women who had no scientific background of a reliable mother’s radiation laboratory was surely an admirable expression of civil society. But it also reflected the deep distrust of the government and nuclear plant spokespeople, a distrust earned by their distortions and lies in minimizing or denying dangers to the population.

That constellation of behavior, involving widespread nuclear fear and denial of danger by authorities, has been present in every breakdown of nuclear reactors anywhere and must be seen as characterizing all situations involving radiation danger from nuclear technology. The same constellation has been observed at Hanford, Washington, in connection with the nuclear waste from the production of the Nagasaki bomb; in Rocky Flats, Colorado, after decades of nuclear weapons production; and at test sites at Nevada and elsewhere after US soldiers were exposed to radiation following atomic bomb tests.

The Three Mile Island reactor meltdown is a revealing example as well. It came to be seen as borderline in terms of actual radiation danger, but people I interviewed there saw themselves as having been exposed to a hidden poison that could strike them down at any time, and they had their own distrust of the assurances of authorities.

We may say that any significant exposure to radiation can create, psychologically, nothing less than a permanent encounter with death.

Moreover, there is no getting rid of the poison. Even when nuclear reactors are closed down for safety or economic reasons, as was the case with the Pilgrim reactor in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the Vermont Yankee reactor, the accumulated waste must remain at the site, always dangerous and virtually immortal. After four decades of trying, we have been unable to develop safe permanent repositories for nuclear waste. That is both because the waste is so difficult to contain safely and because people don’t want the waste in their neighborhood. There is also the recognition, not lost on people who live near nuclear plants, that the reactors could lend themselves to potential weaponization—which in turn makes them a tempting target for terrorists.

The meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi was a dreadful event, but it can have great value to us in its puncturing of the nuclear mystique. That mystique has been exploited from the time of the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower, with its vision of atoms for peace that embraced the technology that threatens the human future to instead provide endless amounts of cheap energy for everyone. That vision in turn goes back to the days of Marie Curie, the pioneering nuclear physicist who, like so many others, was enchanted with radiation—and who died from the effects it had upon her.

For solving our energy problems, proponents still embrace nuclear technology as clean, in contrast with the dirtiness of oil, natural gas, and coal. But Fukushima makes clear that nuclear energy, with its invisible contamination from irradiation and dangerously undisposable waste, may be considered the dirtiest of all.

ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction

Kyle Cleveland, Scott Gabriel Knowles, and Ryuma Shineha

An Unlikely Convergence

It was an unlikely convergence of events: a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, the largest in Japanese memory and the fourth largest recorded in world history; a tsunami that peaked at forty meters, devastating the seaboard of northeastern Japan; three reactors in meltdown at the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima; experts in disarray; and suffering victims young and old.

It was, as well, an unlikely convergence of legacies. Submerged traumas resurfaced, and communities long accustomed to living quietly with hazards suddenly were heard. New legacies of disaster were handed down, unfolding slowly for generations to come.

The defining disaster of contemporary Japanese history still goes by many different names: the Great East Japan Earthquake, the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, and the 3.11 Triple Disaster. Each name represents a struggle to position the disaster on a map and fix a date to the timeline. But each of these names hides an unlikely convergence of disasters and legacies that met on March 11, 2011, before veering away in all directions: to the past, to the future, across a nation, and around the world.¹

The scale of the 3.11 disasters in the Tōhoku region of northeastern Japan defied government control. Almost 18,000 people were killed or remain missing. Three prefectures in particular—Miyagi, Iwate, and Fukushima—were the most affected. Deaths in Miyagi Prefecture alone reached almost 10,000. Still reeling from the earthquake and tsunami damage, the national government was soon fighting a war on two fronts—dealing with the recovery of bodies and evacuating, sheltering, and meeting the medical needs of the survivors, while at the same time confronting an escalating nuclear crisis. At the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima Prefecture, a facility under the control of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the staff frantically tried to recover power after the tsunami put much of the facility under fifteen meters of water. The Fukushima prefectural authorities pressed urgently for guidance from the national government and TEPCO. The plant blackout and pace of events conspired to prevent effective communication: the emergency backup generators were swamped by the tsunami on the afternoon of March 11; the reactor cores began melting down within hours from the loss of power; and by the morning of March 12, pressure inside the reactor core containment vessel had risen to 2.5 times the design limits, threatening a catastrophic explosion that would have jeopardized populations across the entire nation.

After a frustrating delay in venting reactor number one, a situation that pitted Prime Minister Kan Naoto against the recalcitrant TEPCO management, TEPCO’s assurances that the situation was under tenuous control were soon undermined by the spectacle of a dramatic explosion of the outer (secondary) containment structure of the reactor. This explosion broke windows three kilometers away from the plant and led the plant manager and nuclear authorities watching from afar to believe that a catastrophic failure of the primary containment structure had blown apart the main pressurized reactor vessel. The plant staff at this point faced potentially lethal doses from releases of radiation and scarcely knew how bad the situation was in the confines of the darkened nuclear plant. Instrumentation knocked out by the tsunami was partly restored overnight, but it was once again lost as the unit number one building exploded. Evacuations of people near the plant hurriedly commenced, with little government guidance and no information to help guide Fukushima prefectural authorities in their actions.²

Local evacuations gave rise to rumors of an evacuation of metropolitan Tokyo’s forty-four million residents. Protection from radiation exposures nearby was an immediate priority, but the fear of more distant pollution transmitted by air, water, and food quickly made Fukushima an international concern, and a word that then—and now—stands for the fear of radioactivity, just as surely as does Chernobyl, Hiroshima, or Three Mile Island. Debates over the implications of the Fukushima disaster for the future of nuclear energy revolve around technical and institutional deficiencies such as the archaic reactor design, the lack of a functional regulatory structure, and TEPCO’s inability to anticipate the events that led up to the disaster. Concerns over the social consequences of the evacuations have perhaps proven the most vexing. When the radioactive plume escaped the Daiichi plant and pushed the nearby population into a chaotic evacuation, it took with it any semblance of normalcy in the Tōhoku region, eroding the collusive pact between the government and the nuclear industry and calling into question the viability of nuclear energy in Japan and beyond. After a temporary respite, as the utility brought the reactors to a cold shutdown, the true nature of the disaster gradually became known. Journalistic and scholarly scrutiny of industry insiders and government reports revealed a culture of dysfunction. Authorities have tried to cast the disaster as a black swan event that never could have been reasonably anticipated or controlled.³ But even under a cursory examination, the Fukushima nuclear crisis today looks all too predictable.

Figure I.1. Earthquake and tsunami damage, Onagawa, April 1, 2011. Jeff Kingston (author of Chapter 5 in this volume) visited Onagawa on April 1, 2011, and parked in front of the hospital, which is built on a fourteen-meter embankment. The first floor was heavily damaged. Kingston chatted to the parking lot attendant and asked about the cars teetering on rooftops of what used to be three-story buildings. The man pictured said that his car had been parked where he and Kingston were standing but had been carried away by the tsunami, and he pointed to the silver car upside down on the rooftop to the left. Copyright Jeff Kingston.

Figure I.2. Namie-town, Fukushima Prefecture, October 5, 2014. The shrine was destroyed by the earthquake and left in ruins with a radioactivity monitoring post in place. This was a common site in the region for years following 3.11. Copyright Ryuma Shineha.

The Japanese government estimated as early as three months after the disaster that the total losses for homes, factories, public infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries, and other major economic sectors would reach an almost unimaginable 16.9 trillion yen ($157 billion); and current government estimates predict that at least 32.5 trillion yen ($302 billion) will be spent on reconstruction projects by 2025.⁴ Japan’s entire fleet of fifty-four nuclear reactors was shuttered after 3.11. Over twenty-five million tons of rubble and general waste were generated. Metaphors are difficult to find for this degree of destruction. Perhaps a war zone is the only image that resonates with the scale of the devastation in places like the coastal areas of Fukushima Prefecture, where the full force of the earthquake, tsunami, and radiation were felt in combination, rendering spaces of utter desolation.

In general, towns that sustained the most serious injuries had aging populations that were composed of farmers and fishermen and were poorer than metropolitan regions. In addition to the huge damage of the earthquake and tsunami, evacuation zones were set up after the Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, and thousands of people were forced to leave their homes—particularly in the Futaba area of Fukushima Prefecture. In 2017, researchers polled evacuated residents of seven communities in the coastal area of the prefecture. The results were staggering: 58.8 percent of respondents overall answered, I will not return/I cannot return. The rate was even higher among people younger than age sixty-five (61.7 percent) than among older people (55.9 percent). Families with children gave that answer at a higher rate (64.6 percent) than those without children (57.5 percent). Relationships have suffered, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is common. Many residents expressed anxiety over their economic losses and lingering vulnerabilities, as well as anger over the compensation schemes put in place by TEPCO and the national government.⁵ The hardships of evacuation varied according to the socioeconomic characteristics of evacuees, and some difficulties have persisted for years—including the treatment and care of evacuees outside of the evacuation zone and the long-term planning for return in towns close to the Daiichi plant.

At Fukushima Daiichi, 6 workers were exposed to radiation levels exceeding safe lifetime levels, and an additional 175 received significant radiation doses. It is estimated that over 1,600 deaths resulted from the evacuation of 160,000 people from the region. Within the 143-square-mile exclusion zone around the plant, an estimated 43,000 people have not yet returned. To give some context, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 killed 30 workers due to radiation sickness within weeks. Estimates from the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation indicate that as many as 6,000 local residents died from thyroid cancer attributable to the disaster within thirty years after the event. Approximately 200,000 local residents were evacuated, and a 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone still surrounds the facility.

Those inclined toward antinuclear views are deeply suspicious of TEPCO’s and the Japanese government’s claims that the situation is well under control today. Those inclined toward pronuclear views, such as the nuclear industry and its supporters, dismiss these concerns as alarmist and unfounded. The debate involves a complex of highly contested questions cutting to the core of public trust in government officials and nuclear experts. At dispute have been the shifting official narratives about the magnitude of the disaster in its early days, the protective actions taken (and those not taken) by government authorities, the variable rationales provided for evacuation, the quality and effectiveness of decontamination efforts, the temporary location and long-term plans for radioactive debris and soil, and the return of residents to evacuated villages on an accelerated timeline to be finished in time for the 2020 Olympic Games.

Ten years into an ongoing nuclear disaster, Japan was preparing to host the 2020 summer Olympic Games—eventually postponed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Olympic torch relay began inside the previous nuclear disaster evacuation zone, and the baseball games were planned for Koriyama, the largest city adjacent to the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Japan’s selection as the host nation of what was billed as the Reconstruction Olympics enabled a narrative of resiliency, not only with regard to the people of Tōhoku who endured the worst, but also for the entire Japanese nation. The alloying of the disasters of 3.11 and the globalized mega-event of the Olympics transformed an ongoing crisis into a profitable realignment of Japan’s dark present with a bright future. It is ironic, but hardly surprising, that this kind of political alchemy presented the suffering of the victims of the disaster as a symbol of long-suffering Japanese fortitude. Despite multiple disaster investigations, evidence is mixed as to the extent that significant lessons were learned from the disaster. Technocracy persists, and the restoration of public trust in Japan’s disaster experts remains incomplete. Among those most directly affected by the disasters, there has been a withering, retrospective accounting of disaster management after 3.11 and long-lasting suspicions about the state’s ability to protect public health while promoting reactor restarts under the guise of recovery on an Olympics timeline.

Legacies of Disaster

Sadako Sasaki was a young child when the atomic bomb destroyed her hometown of Hiroshima in 1945. As a hibakusha (atomic bomb–affected person) Sasaki would never escape the social stigma of radiation exposure, and more devastatingly, her body would not escape the impact of that exposure. In 1950 she was diagnosed with leukemia. As she suffered, she also took up an amazing and now very famous task: she set to work meeting a challenge of Japanese legend: folding a thousand paper cranes, which is supposed to grant a wish of the diligent folder. Sasaki died in 1955, and her acts of bravery in the name of peace and health for all hibakusha, and children everywhere, has proven to be a durable testament to the fact that radiation disasters (or any disasters, for that matter) do not end when the debris is cleared away. The paper crane became a symbol of Hiroshima. People from around the world have been folding cranes since 1955 as a tribute to Sasaki and for all victims of nuclear war, nuclear weapons testing exposures, and nuclear power disasters—indeed, for victims of all types of disasters.⁶

The American psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton was the first researcher to undertake a major set of interviews with the hibakusha of Hiroshima. Out of this work Lifton published the pathbreaking book Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima in 1968. The story of Sasaki was well known to Lifton, whom he refers to as the Hiroshima equivalent of an Anne Frank legend.⁷ In the case of Sasaki and other hibakusha, Lifton found a grinding feature of postdisaster life: not only were they at higher risk for leukemia and other cancers, but also these conditions could come on very slowly, and as a result survivors tend to see themselves as endlessly susceptible…. Nor are the fears of hibakusha limited to their own bodies, they extend to future generations.⁸ The ever-present memories of an unspeakable set of August 6 and August 9, 1945, horrors, followed by the fear of a creeping disease within, social stigma and silence, and the possibility of genetic mutations—this was the death in life for the hibakusha. It is what Lifton calls (in his foreword to this volume) a permanent encounter with death.

Starting in 2011, the power of the cranes was directed to a new generation of sufferers. Hibakusha from Hiroshima and Nagasaki reached out, gave interviews describing their own fear and pain, made visits to comfort victims, and offered both aid and political pressure—all to link the experience of the 3.11 sufferers to their own. It is a political movement that connects two avoidable disasters. Today, a paper crane sculpture—made of steel recovered and recast from the World Trade Towers—sits in a park in Koriyama, Fukushima.⁹ It is not just a sign and symbol of hope but also a form of protest and a warning for future generations. The Great East Japan Earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster revealed not only that Japan was poorly prepared for such a combination of events, but also that in crucial ways the nation had not yet reckoned with its nuclear past. Indeed, the censorship and segregation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims—especially by the postwar American occupying force—led to the silencing of national discussion and debate and delayed the healing that might have taken place in that moment. In the 1960s and 1970s, when the first nuclear power plants were built in the country, this brutal history with nuclear radiation was not available as a cultural or political force to slow down, urge caution about, or shape the nuclear regulatory apparatus. The available lessons of disaster from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were never learned.

Figure I.3. Protesters on August 6, 2015, at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, in Hiroshima. The top of the banner reads Fukushima and Hiroshima, vice versa, and the bottom reads, What happens to one today may happen to another tomorrow. The symbolism of the protest taking place on the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was powerful. The connection of the two disasters raises complicated issues for survivors, some of whom may prefer to keep the issues separate. Copyright Scott Gabriel Knowles.

A myth of safety emerged in Japan in those decades, a carefully crafted narrative of hope and possibility to be delivered through nuclear power, offered as a palliative against the dark side of nuclear weapons. Public understanding of the risks of nuclear power was limited to information made available by the Japanese and United States governments, and public trust was grounded in the beliefs that rebuilding the nation was the first priority and that public officials had the best interests of citizens in mind. Reflecting on this history in the days after the Fukushima disaster, Hirotami Yamada, a Nagasaki bombing victim, observed that the bureaucracy, industry and the media were able to shut our eyes to the danger of nuclear power…. We let them fool us, even in this country that was the victim of the atomic bomb.¹⁰ Masahito Hirose, another Nagasaki bombing survivor, put it in a different context, asking: Is it Japan’s fate to repeatedly serve as a warning to the world about the dangers of radiation?¹¹ It is a powerful question, one that extends the value of disaster victims’ experience beyond the boundaries of a single city or nation. Hirose’s question becomes one of a struggle—a form of victim-led protest—to avoid the replication of his experience anywhere in the world and explore possible futures rooted in an honest relationship with a disastrous past.

Legacies of Fukushima

What are the legacies of Fukushima—the inheritances of the past and the premonitions of possible futures? They include nuclear power, intended to modernize a nation destroyed by war; a nuclear village of experts and policy makers, passing down their knowledge and their professional protocols from one generation to the next; coastal populations tied to the traditional economic activities of the farm and the sea; and disasters in memory—tsunamis, war, earthquakes, famine—filling the storehouse of imagination that holds fear and the knowledge of risk in artifacts that cannot be scientifically measured. These legacies flowed down through a perilous Japanese century into a new century intent on the privatization of public goods like energy and the embracing of urbanization and globalization. The disasters of 3.11 exposed these legacies and immediately initiated a process of sense making and recovery. But how does a person, community, or nation recover from a triple disaster that caused massive evacuations, brought back horrific memories of nuclear attack, and shone a harsh light on the insufficient safety preparations of the world’s most disaster-prepared technocracy? Reckoning with those realities of 3.11, and still mourning the dead, the legacy of Fukushima is now racing forward in time. Which pathways from the past will continue to be followed, which ended with 3.11, and how are these lines of history entangled together?

Legacies of Fukushima: 3.11 in Context places these questions front and center. The authors whose work is collected here have each tried to contextualize 3.11 as a disaster with a long period of premonition and an uncertain future. The volume engages with the complex and nonlinear trajectories of policy making, risk management, and cultural formation that precede, flow through, and follow as legacies of the 3.11 triple disasters. Our authors are intentionally drawn from the realms of journalism and academia (across disciplines), science policy and citizen science, and activism and governance—and they come from East Asia, America, and Europe. If 3.11 is a Japanese legacy with global impact, we believe that the authors in this book and their methods should reflect the greatest degree of diversity possible. We want our contribution to the legacy of Fukushima to be these new modes of analysis and this spirit of inclusion—a contribution to an understanding that is crucial, but never complete.

We utilize a critical disaster studies methodology in this volume. Not inherent in a single discipline, it is an approach recently described by the historians Jacob A. C. Remes and Andy Horowitz as primarily rooted in the conviction that disasters are political. As social constructs, disasters, vulnerability, risk, and resilience shape and are shaped by contests over power.¹² Scholars working in this mode break with research traditions that present disasters as unwanted natural events to be managed and quickly overcome. The approach is a correction to the idea that the pursuit of a de-contextualized condition of resilience is the best way to prepare for the worst. Critical disaster studies work also pays close attention to temporal and scalar concerns, central to which is the slow disaster concept. The traditional definition of a disaster describes an overwhelming event in time, defined by tightly bounded spatiotemporal limits and with clear cause-and-effect relationships. The idea of a slow disaster makes it possible to think about disasters not as atomized events but as long-term processes linked across time…. The slow disaster stretches both back in time and forward across generations to indeterminate points, punctuated by moments we have traditionally conceptualized as ‘disaster,’ but in fact claiming much more life, health, and wealth across time than is generally calculated.¹³ The experience of hibakusha and now of the victims of 3.11 and its overlapping traumas is the best evidence of the need for a way to see disaster playing out over time as a process, often in ways that powerful interests would rather disregard.

Though disciplinarily diverse, the authors in this volume work from two crucial premises: first, disasters are never singular moments in time, nor are they bounded by strict geographical boundaries; and second, disasters reflect existing power relationships and simultaneously create new ones. To conceive of 3.11 as an event of a few days, weeks, or months is to miss crucial contexts fundamental to seeing it as a culmination and continuance of processes long under way. These processes were in some respects as routine and documentable as governance and expertise, but also as contingent and ephemeral as national and global imaginations of risk. What defines the 3.11 experience is a sense that we are dealing with legacies—which can refer not only to the wealth or privileges handed down from one generation to the next, but also to the pathologies handed down as well. The use of comparative analysis is also crucial to understanding 3.11: it is not a single event, it occurred across a vast Japanese geography, and that geography became global as the earthquake and tsunami gave rise to the nuclear explosions and release of radiation.

This volume is organized by parts to explore three major themes related to 3.11, from a critical disaster studies perspective. The first part of the book (Learning from Disaster) interrogates the ever-present epistemological promise that significant knowledge is produced in the aftermath of disaster, especially through expert investigation. After all, how could a modern society not learn from disaster? But who learns, how they structure their questions, and which findings lead to significant change are not matters of simple forensic ability. A crucial concept here is the structural disaster idea advanced by the sociologist Miwao Matsumoto, an early advocate and stalwart friend of this project.¹⁴ Matsumoto’s close attention to inherited institutional practices and patterns, especially bureaucratic complexity and secrecy, are especially useful. The authors in this part (Knowles, Juraku, Jacobs, Suzuki, and Kingston) provide cases demonstrating the nuances involved in learning from Japanese disasters, both within and outside the country. These chapters are informed by policy history, the history of technology, and science and technology studies (STS) methods that expose the rhetorics of technical competency as artifacts for analysis, reflective of broader disputes over risk and society. Factors of history have shaped the ways that disaster learning is framed, who is allowed to ask questions, and which political outcomes are feasible.

The second part of the book centers on the theme of Public Knowledge and Public Trust. Here we are keyed into long-standing debates in media studies, communication, and STS around public understanding of science and the ways that scientific technocracy itself shapes the terms of risk debates in society. The authors in this section (Simms, Fackler, Cleveland, Jobin, Kamisato, and Yagi) carefully chart the ongoing struggle over time within the Japanese public for information about the realities of risk in their society. From the early postwar years, through the rise of the nuclear village, and into the aftermath of 3.11, the role of public scrutiny is evident yet often mediated through the actions of expert intermediaries in the press or the scientific establishment. Fukushima demonstrated a rupture in trust that has often been characterized as a novel development in Japanese society, but this part of the book provides the background necessary to hear the echoes of earlier eras in contemporary debates. What seemed to begin on March 11, 2011, actually has a history that goes back at least as far as World War II—and even longer, if one considers the history of seismicity and tsunami in Japan. This section weaves together not only the current methods of research used by analysts of risk and disaster but also the very human stories of disaster survivors and nuclear workers. Story, history, and expertise are intertwined as social forces in Japan—forces that are harnessed simultaneously by policy makers to move the nation forward from 3.11 and by victims and their advocates to hold onto the disaster and address its injustices.

In the third part of the book, we examine the Possible Futures that flow from the 3.11 disasters. In this part we engage with cutting-edge scholarship of citizen science, internationalization, and the role of emergency management and planning to intervene in the normal logics of disaster and recovery. The authors here (Murillo and Bonner, Brown, Shineha, Kinsella, and Schmid and Saraç-Lesavre) present multiple perspectives on the ways that people ranging from local residents to international nuclear experts have sought to memorialize, institutionalize, and activate a new and safer world post-3.11. Case studies across multiple domains show the advantages of comparative analysis crucial to critical disaster studies work. Even when Fukushima is considered in the context of other disasters, it is rooted in a complicated historical ground, the event itself is still under dispute, and its future is uncertain. Thus, the cases in this part of the book provide tools to understand those different temporal and geographical scales and analytic methods with which to unpack and contextualize expert disputes over what happened and what to expect next.

Legacies of Fukushima: 3.11 in Context emerges from eight years of interactions among interested disaster research collaborators, travels and site visits, meetings with sufferers and experts (and experts who are also suffering), research workshops, and scholarly efforts among a wide range of writers who bring a critical disaster studies perspective to bear on 3.11. It is fair to say that September 11, the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina brought new legions of researchers into disaster work. Fukushima capped this tumultuous decade of disasters and forged a truly multi- or interdisciplinary, international disaster studies community. The chapters in this