Radiant scars: fallout, trauma, ghosts, and (re)worlding in Fukushima

ABSTRACT

The triple-disasters on and after 3.11 triggered devastation of a messy, intimate, personal kind that confounds centrally organized, large-scale renewal. In time, a whole substrate of human suffering became effectively ignored and interred by the armada of cranes, backhoes, dump trucks, and bulldozers that descended on Japan’s battered coastline to restore ‘normalcy’. Japan’s focus on economic rather than emotional reconstruction—not atypical for any industrialized state—was in many ways very much in character for a country shaped by sociocultural logics of massive-scale development/public works (known as doboku). Nevertheless, Tōhoku’s recovery obscures the poorly-sutured wounds of hard-hit communities.

This article considers the contours of radiance in post-3.11 Japan through a comparison of the bottom-up, impromptu ‘worlding’ processes that sustain recovering Fukushima communities and the top-down apparatuses of efficiency and rationalization mobilized in the post-tsunami reconstruction. The latter included a massive ‘decontamination’ (josen) effort that comprised by far the largest radiation response effort in history, though highly uneven and likewise misleading. Through ethnographic research, the article juxtaposes the official project and rhetoric of renewal with geographies of trauma, anxiety, and endurance in communities to interpret the complex aftermath of the disasters.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• Japan
• nuclear identity
• worlding
• environment
• waste

Introduction

Disaster endures, but along diverse timelines. The triple-disasters widely referred to in Japan as ‘3.11’—the record earthquake, monster tsunami, nuclear meltdowns, and ensuing radiation that bludgeoned the eastern coast of Japan’s main island of Honshū on March 11th, 2011—ushered in two distinct but interpenetrating registers of damage that continue to play out along different trajectories and remain unresolved.

On the one hand, there was immense material destruction. At the time, in the crass accounting of cost and recompense, 3.11 earned the dubious honour of becoming the most expensive disaster in human history, with irradiated Fukushima alone conservatively estimated at over US$200 billion yet whose challenging recovery will probably reach several multiples higher (JCER 2019).¹ In and around Fukushima, radioactive debris from the meltdowns and explosions at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station was strewn over hundreds of square kilometres of what came to be known as the Exclusion Zone and beyond (Cristoudias et al. 2013; Nadesan et al. 2014). All down Japan’s coast, the seismic event and cataclysm destroyed 122,000 buildings, left 283,117 ‘half-collapsed’ (NPA 2021), inundated communities with floodwaters and a residue of toxic sludge, and crippled a wide range of public services. Airports, bridges, port terminals, bullet-train tracks, utilities, factories, seafood processing facilities, transportation corridors, schools, shops and other small businesses—not to mention the service sector broadly—were decimated, if not knocked out of commission entirely. This register of 3.11 damage across engineered landscapes was both visibly shocking and highly telegenic, with international media crews broadcasting the physical aftermath of the disaster and its impact on Japan’s prodigious infrastructure to stunned world audiences.

On the other hand, millions of people’s lives were affected by the 3.11 disasters in a register of damage that was far less visible and tangible. 15,900 people died, with a further 2,523 people declared missing, in the initial cataclysm of the tsunami, along with an additional 3,784 so-called disaster-related deaths (kanrenshi). The widely feared and ill-understood scourge of radiation spilled across the terrain of the region, terrifying in its invisibility. In time, over three hundred thousand people were evacuated from contaminated communities, many of whose lives were significantly disrupted for weeks or months, if not years, which continues for tens of thousands into the present.² Indeed, in the aftermath of the disasters, well over two hundred thousand Tohoku residents—both evacuees and non-evacuees alike—moved away from the region entirely, relocating to other areas of Japan that they saw as safer, as more economically robust, or as for example offering better schools or opportunities for their children, many never to return. Many more around the region have felt acute anxiety over fallout and uncertainty over what the future holds. Those who remain in communities transformed by the 3.11 disasters cope with the grief brought on by those they have lost. Survivors wrestle with the randomness of their reprieve, saved in many cases by blind dumb luck and/or the intervention of strangers. None of these dislocations has been easy. None of these ruptures has been seamless.

The Japanese state responded in mid-2011 by attempting to restore the region, but in doing so it concerned itself much more with the material, tangible register of damage than the other, less conspicuous, less clear-cut toll on Tohoku. Most, if not all, other industrialized nations might have acted more or less along the same lines; yet Japan’s impulse was to respond in a manner that placed enormous rhetorical emphasis on ‘resources’ and circularity, betraying over a century of fixation on putative scarcity (e.g. Sato 2007; Dinmore 2006; Amano 2001; Kirby 2019). To address this telling bias, the present article scrutinizes the apparatuses of efficiency, rationalization, and renewal that were mobilized in the wake of the 3.11 triple-disasters, as well as what was deprioritized, neglected, and ignored. The nuclear meltdowns and subsequent radioactive debris that fouled the territory of Fukushima spawned a distorted ideology of renewal and over-emphasis on relatively superficial reconstruction—what Ōguma Eiji mocked, with biting hyperbole, as ‘ghost town[s] covered in the concrete of public works’ (Ōguma 2013: no page)—which can be productively contrasted against the human toll of the disasters and geographies of coping. A whole substrate of human suffering became effectively ignored, interred, and then resurfaced by the armada of construction vehicles that descended on Japan’s battered coastline and irradiated hinterland to ‘decontaminate’ and restore ‘normalcy’. Indeed, in the wake of the government’s haste to ‘complete’ the reconstruction of the disaster zone, particularly with an eye toward forward-oriented development linked to marquee events like the 2019 Rugby World Cup and the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games (postponed by the pandemic to 2021), hard-hit communities struggled to bounce back and reorient themselves. Peering beyond the smoothed-over coastal real estate, the repaired bridges and thoroughfares, the relandscaped parks, and the new developments, this article³ scrutinizes both the broad-brush reconstruction and the plight of survivors to analyse different registers of anxiety and alienation in areas of the disaster zone and their implications.

Ultimately, Tohoku serves as a fraught arena for competing processes of worlding—in other words the affective meld of relation and meaning that humans create (and ethnographers study—see Spivak 1985; Haraway 2008; Roy & Ong 2011; Stewart 2010). For instance, when people gather in the evening to chat on the street, or amid a ruined cityscape for that matter, they often experience an impression of orienting attachment, of immersive experience—a sense that they share a world, however fleeting. Yet this ongoing process of worlding is fragile. Far and wide, the disasters swept away countless material objects and built structures, systems of monitoring and control, diverse subjective mappings and modes of reckoning, shared constructions of order, enduring pathways of forging and maintaining relationships, and apparatuses of knowing. While not all was obliterated, the intricate, emergent complex of human and nonhuman assemblages that had sustained communities in Tohoku over generations became destabilized, creating historic opportunities for (re)worlding that drew on rival discourses. The government’s sweeping reconstruction and PR effort and communities’ own bottom-up, counterhegemonic affective weavings and strategic adaptations comprise two divergent processes of (re)worlding that, respectively and together, offer ways to understand the shock of the cataclysm and efforts to refashion the vast, blighted terrain of 3.11 at a time of grief, scarcity, and upheaval. (Figure 1)

Figure 1. An example of kōjō moe night photography of a sprawling Japanese factory complex.

Factory infatuation, ruins, and radiance

In the postwar period, Japan transformed into an industrial powerhouse, very much by design. In turn, the era of high-speed growth through the 1980s produced an explosion of elaborate infrastructure and built capital on the archipelago. Japanese cities like Tokyo and Osaka were subject to ongoing demolition and intensive construction in order to create arenas for business, culture, and politics commensurate with Japan’s rising ambition and international clout (Seidensticker 1990). From the 1980s, a corresponding interest in colossal factories, particularly via nighttime tours, made some such sites of intensive engineering into unlikely landmarks within their regions. Fan photography became the main expression of enthusiasm toward these curiosities of the built environment, with gearheads, machinery buffs and engineering aficionados sharing images and tips for achieving photographic effects. The phenomenon came to be dubbed kōjō moe, literally ‘factory infatuation’.⁴ Like-minded photographers, usually on the older side, with tripods and low-exposure film would stalk factories, petrochemical plants, and refineries, particularly at night, to capture the sprawling, austere, futuristic-seeming complexes and to communicate the awe to which their tangles of ducts, plumbing, tanks, derricks, valves, conduits, gangways, and smokestacks gave rise. For enthusiasts, this was development porn—thrilling, licit, and tapping into the ethos of pre-Bubble growth at all costs that was promoted by the state. (Figure 2)

Figure 2. A kōjō moe image of a large factory with Mount Fuji in the background.

The facilities, or ‘factories’, were both the product of intensive human development and yet bereft of human presence, resembling unwieldy spaceships. They represented an odd morphing of science fiction and the capitalist sublime. Keen participation in nighttime tours by particularly older Japanese to experience the peculiar grandeur of these sites comprises ‘an indirect re-affirmation of the postwar system, in which the ruling Liberal Democratic Party encouraged massive investments in steel, petrochemicals … . energy’, and other strategic industries, as well as directing political support to linked constituencies (Amano 2016, 149). Kōjō moe expressed a nostalgia for the comfortable truisms of the high-speed growth period, a time of security and prosperity that, for many tour participants, had given way to greater uncertainty and instability, not to mention bad press and extremely negative impressions regarding dire toxic pollution due to industrial activity from the 1970s (e.g. Avenell 2017).

By contrast, nuclear power stations never attracted the same fascination from machinery aficionados—most nuclear sites are markedly less visually spectacular, and most of the key equipment lies well sequestered from view, not least due to terrorism and proliferation concerns. When the 2011 tsunami knocked out backup generators, at about 3:48pm on 11 March, and the nuclear power station lost all electrical power supply, three of Fukushima Daiichi’s reactors embarked on a path toward meltdown, which Reactor 1’s fuel assembly achieved by 6:50am the next morning. Soon, crippled Fukushima Daiichi went viral, dominating the world’s diverse screens and front pages. Certainly by that afternoon, when Reactor 1’s secondary containment exploded and released radioactive debris that blanketed much of the region, representations of the nuclear power station and the wreckage left by the successive meltdowns and explosions and knock-on effects became almost ubiquitous, but very much for reasons of notoriety. Literally overnight, in a not-incongruent voyeuristic impulse, millions of people were staring at footage of a ‘factory’, waiting to see what would happen next. (Figure 3)

Figure 3. Aerial view of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station complex, days after the record earthquake, tsunami, and meltdowns.

Yet Fukushima Daiichi was no longer so much a ‘factory’ as a ruin (haikyo). Kobayashi Tetsurō (2009, 127) describes ruins as objects of ‘terror’ for Japanese. In the nearly twelve years since 3.11, Japanese have become more accustomed to selective ruination, though those in Tōhoku who experienced the hardship and material pandemonium of tsunami and aftermath tended to find it difficult to be confronted so viscerally with traces of the disaster, whose sedimentation was both psychic and material (Stoler 2013, 2, 10). Even as the state favored the clinical term disaster waste (shinsai haikibutsu) and the detachment it facilitated in promoting reconstruction, regional stakeholders including academics reached along the semantic continuum toward the more sensitive and forward-looking term disaster remains (shinsai ikō). Certain formal and informal memorials now underpin the ‘symbolic architecture’ of the region (Littlejohn 2021: 19). Some remembrance verged on what could be called ‘sacred rubble’ discourse (see Taussig-Rubbo 2011)—with a sharp focus on avoiding desecration of corpses. Living with ruins need not be viewed as negative, as Dawney (2019) explains. Indeed, other commemoration has become more open to new socio-material formation—‘ruptured multiplicity … produced, destroyed, and remade’ (Gordillo 2015, 2, 255).

Nuclear ruins were far more difficult for the state to normalize. Ruins generally tend to exhibit a certain ‘fundamental semiotic instability’ (DeSilvey and Edensor 2012: 468). Yet after 3.11, the tangled wreckage of Fukushima Daiichi was actively spewing radiation, which was terrifying, even uncanny, to many Japanese. The rubble-strewn hulk of the nuclear power station brought on predictable anxieties and uncertainty over fallout in Fukushima, legacy of decades of unease over radiation after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and the fallout from the Castle Bravo detonation in 1954. Along with 3.11, these eruptions of ‘unnatural natures’ (Pohl 2021: 199) have yielded a postwar fascination with narratives and representations of apocalypse that have left an indelible stamp on Japanese culture.

Was nuclear exposure now so widespread as to be inextricable from Japanese identity? A few weeks after 3.11, Emi, a young woman who had lived overseas, proclaimed, ‘We are all hibakusha (people exposed to radiation) now!’ A not uncommon sentiment at the time among more bookish or activist Japanese in particular, the statement referred specifically to human bodies’ trace exposure to radiation in air, foodstuffs, and water (see Jacobs 2022; Alexis-Martin and Davies 2017) but hinted at the durable, if sometimes latent, spectre of radiation in Japan post-1945. There are two distinct ways of writing hibakusha via the wordplay common in Japanese. One way—被爆—references exposure to the 1945 atomic bombings alone. The other uses a homophone character, baku (曝), that replaces the left-side radical for ‘fire’ (火), which is integral to the meaning of ‘explosion,’ with the character for ‘sun’ (日). Instead of detonation, it reads, literally, as ‘burst of sun.’ Following Gabrielle Hecht’s invocation of the polysemic rayonnement—which in French connotes not only ‘radiation’ but ‘sunshine,’ ‘effulgence,’ and even ‘influence’—in her book The Radiance of France (1998), I highlight the grim radiance of Japanese nuclear identity. Significantly, the written character most closely associated with ‘Japan,’ which serves as ideographic shorthand for the nation itself, is ‘sun’—symbolic invocations of which are given prominence on Japanese flags and in all manner of cultural references, including brand names like Asahi, Nikon, Nissan, etc. Especially in the wake of 3.11, this wan radiance reflects how Japanese cope with the taint, and terror, of the Atom in one of the most pro-nuclear states on the planet, where parlous plutonium stocks and spent fuel rods are regarded as a precious energy resource.

The terrain of Fukushima, blighted with a hodgepodge of decaying isotopes, is ‘co-produce[d]’ (Rush-Cooper 2020: 219) through commingling of human and nonhuman bodies and the landscape itself, continually bound together through exposure (Rush-Cooper 2020). These subjectivities bring consequences. Particularly in the worst-hit areas in and around the Exclusion Zone, there is a ‘half-life’ (Morimoto 2022: 71-2) that humans experience when they must grapple with the uncertainty and ambivalence that radiation brings to their communities—an onto-ecology of harm, bound up in the problematic ‘politics of invisibility’ (Kuchinskaya 2014), that was prompted by anxious preoccupation with radiation and an alienation from surroundings. The ambiguities brought on by irreconcilable claims, part of what Ryo Morimoto (Morimoto [forthcoming]) calls the ‘nuclear ghost’, lead to a slippage between lived experiences of exposure in communities and the overwhelming reliance on suspect technoscientific determinations propagated by the state. Radiance expresses this affective, experiential, qualitative dimension to radiation, to feeling out of sorts and destabilized, forced to cope with vagaries of exposure in daily life. When Emi, above, spoke of hibakusha, the radiant irony of her comment was certainly particular to Japanese society—similarly to how Adriana Petryna’s influential notion of ‘biological citizenship’ (Petryna 2002) in post-meltdown Ukraine would make an unwieldy fit with other social contexts that have different histories. While this radiance I describe is an historically and culturally contingent phenomenon that derives from the threat of radiation and harm in Japan, the term radiance can certainly be applied to other dynamic sociocultural spaces, far from Japan, where communities cope with the affective half-life of radiation—the ‘nuclear ghost’ that haunts the contested aftermath of exposure.

Radiant re(worlding)

The Fukushima Daiichi crisis represented a highly conspicuous failure of enlightened officialdom and benevolent political leadership, as well as an emblematic case of nuclear mismanagement that, inevitably, elicited unwelcome details about Japan’s dark postwar history of fatal reactor accidents, poor inspection regimes, coverups, and cozy relations between regulators and utilities that made Fukushima seem less like an outlier or one-off and more part of a system blinking red. (Figure 4)

Figure 4. Unit 3 Reactor Building after explosion. Photo taken on 15/3/2011.

Fukushima, like Ukraine’s Chornobyl in 1986, struggled with highly particular radionuclide contamination, instantiated by distinctive fission products and conditions, that commingled with human and nonhuman surroundings. As with Chornobyl (e.g. Davies, 2013, 2015; Davies and Polese, 2015), Japanese authorities grappled with the singular challenges of the fallout. Regardless of where the blame lay, the state and its industry partners, like TEPCO,⁵ knew that Fukushima broadly could not remain a collection of ghost towns (pace Ōguma 2013). The region had to be restored. Influential nuclear boosters would not tolerate a situation in which a host community suffered enduring harm from having embraced a nuclear facility—this would in fact have presented the diametrical opposite of the time-honoured pattern of nuclear inducements. Host communities for decades had been showered with lavish funding for schools, institutions, and public amenities to reward support (Dusinberre 2012). Moreover, Japan is too crowded, with arable land at too much of a premium, for a large portion of a famously beautiful prefecture to be declared off-limits for generations.

Rather, for Fukushima, the Japanese state attempted to marshal the same reserves of efficiency and rationalization that had served it so well in the past. Of primary importance was the swift restoration of much of the community landscape of the disaster zone.⁶ The most irradiated areas of the Exclusion Zone were not the focus here. These latter areas were simply too contaminated with radioactive debris for intensive clean-up work to make an appreciable difference; the work would have been slow and hazardous, not to mention exorbitant. Even with relatively less blighted portions of disaster-hit Fukushima, it turned out to be impossible to guarantee that all evacuated residents could return to their former homes and previous lives, despite repeated assurances. Instead, the government mobilized to do the best that they could as quickly as they could, however superficially, in order to get Fukushima back on its feet—particularly with the Olympics on the horizon.

In this sense, the reconstruction effort was less a restoration of context than a denial of context. The top-down, centrally organized attempt at large-scale renewal was mostly an effort to re-establish spaces for consumption along with reconfiguration of residential zones, siting of commercial and industrial activity, and renovation of transportation infrastructure. A host of cranes, backhoes, bulldozers, and dump trucks descended on Japan’s battered coastline came to restore ‘normalcy’ and a whole substrate of human suffering became effectively ignored and interred. The technocratic effort to smooth over and resurface the ruined terrain of the disaster zone—both literally and figuratively geared toward the superficial, and unsurprisingly relatively unconcerned with emotional reconstruction—was met with a countervailing bottom-up, impromptu, multitudinous process of (re)worlding. Across the radiant spill of Fukushima’s recovering communities, this was not just customary worlding—‘the always experimental and partial, and often quite wrong, attribution of world-like characteristics to scenes of social encounter’ (Tsing 2010, 47-8) familiar to human connection. Instead, Fukushima communities participated in radiant (re)worlding, a means of coping with dislocation and grief in a contested space rife with skepticism and distrust toward government officials, nuclear executives, and other compromised elites. Such (re)worlding frequently exuded a strain of defiance, a determination to restore what had been taken away. Amid the radiance of the recovering disaster zone, the political valences of (re)worlding and its everyday embroilment in critique—significantly among workers on the front lines of the ‘decontamination’ effort, as I demonstrate in the next section—stood as a form of desultory, grass-roots protest against the technocratic campaign imposed by the state.

Trauma, (re)worlding, affect

Such visions [of 1980s Japanese prodigality] express an extraordinary vigour and confidence and a Promethean energy, akin perhaps to that which marked the launching of crusades and the founding of empires in other times … . Matsushita Konosuke (of National-Panasonic), when advocating the construction of a new island (on such a scale that it would involve levelling 20 per cent, or 75,000 sq.km, of Japan’s mountains and dumping them in the sea to create a fifth island, about the size of Shikoku, as a 200-year national project) argued that the containment and focusing of Japan’s energies in some such gigantic project at home could create the sort of national unity and sense of purpose that formerly had come from wars.

—Gavan McCormack (1997, 122)

A crew of about 20 workers wearing white rubber boots, protective coveralls, gloves, masks, and goggles laboured to bring the radiation levels of a farmhouse and surrounding fields in Tomioka Township, south of wrecked Fukushima Daiichi, in autumn 2015 down to mandated levels. Yet this was also a PR exercise, cleanup for the benefit of foreign visitors. Ministry of Environment officials had invited a colleague and me to witness the comprehensive care and rectitude of the state’s decontamination (josen) effort in and around the Exclusion Zone.⁷ There was a clear labour hierarchy within the crew. As we two researchers and six white-collar officials stood in rubber boots and hardhats to watch the spectacle, some extremely vigorous local middle-aged women not in uniform raked and collected biomass out back as men used strimmers to scythe down radioactive weeds surrounding the building and positioned mesh screens to protect onlookers against projectiles. By the driveway, uniformed male crewmembers scraped irradiated dirt and swept up radioactive twigs. At the top of the josen foodchain, a team of men wearing climbing harnesses hung from ropes above, using specially treated wipes to clean roof tiles, gutters, wall cladding, window sills, panes, mullions, transoms, and so on. Officials took pains to point out the large brown heap behind the observers, nearly as tall as the farmhouse, and two mechanized loaders that would eventually cover the area in ‘safe’ dirt from far inland in an attempt to bring radiation levels down to allow resettlement of the landowners and tens of thousands of other evacuees like them.

Elsewhere, in Nihonmatsu, we followed an operation that was far less stage-managed. A crew of seven men and one woman, clad in similar but more varied head-to-toe protective gear, wielded rakes and shovels to scrape radioactive dirt and vegetal matter from a wooded area around a local shrine just to the west of the Exclusion Zone. The crew laboured to remove enough radioactive debris to bring radiation levels back down toward levels deemed safe by the Japanese government. This involved clipping off low-lying tree branches and clearing away small bushes and undergrowth, as well as twigs and pine cones. (Elsewhere, in similarly marginal Iitate to the north, I have witnessed bark removed so aggressively from tree stumps that they had been whittled down to resemble pencil-stubs gnawed by schoolchildren.) Yet in spite of the serious nature of the job and the tragic backdrop of contaminated Fukushima against which they worked, the crew remained rather grumpy. Their foreman, Nakayama-san, complained about how low their pay rate was, a paltry 720 yen ($6.90) per square metre. Far preferable would have been similar work around residential areas, called jūtaku josen, which was more lucrative since it paid according to weight rather than area—a sign of its relative priority. Having worked before in insurance, the stalwart, outspoken Tohoku native railed against the government’s standards for calculating radiation safety, which he called too lax. ‘They’re using a radiation standard that’s advantageous for them … . but we’re the ones out here on the front lines … . We’re guinea pigs (mormotto)!’ he declared, or test subjects who could be studied for decades. He and his crew worked long and hard to fill huge black bags of radioactive waste for collection as part of a campaign that was called ‘decontamination’, but they were under no illusions that the area would be free of fallout in the years to come. Such workers, from their quotidian vantage, saw the decontamination effort as extremely patchy or non-existent in places, belying the campaign’s very moniker, as I explain below. It also remained far from clear how the problem of radiation stored in these large black bags would ever be adequately resolved.

In this uneven manner, from 2011 the Japanese state and multiple municipalities embarked on by far the largest radiation response effort in history in an effort to restore hundreds of square kilometres covered in radioactive debris. This campaign saw about 70,000 Japanese workers remove over 16 million cubic metres of irradiated dirt (MOE 2019)—scraping topsoil off roadsides, meadows, wooded areas, agricultural fields, school grounds, residential zones, and parklands. Workers garbed in water-resistant protective gear, joined by volunteers, scoured and hosed down streets, pavements, and storm drains in urban and suburban areas. They also wiped down the exterior of houses, apartment buildings, shops, schools, and other public facilities, as above. Wipes and protective clothing were collected for separate incineration. This campaign allowed state, prefectural, and municipal representatives to record ‘safe’ radiation measurements in areas of Fukushima’s disaster zone—a major Japanese policy priority, particularly in preparation for the Tokyo Olympics.

It has been central to the political culture of the reconstruction effort that Fukushima’s various storage sites for radioactive material clearly advertise their transitory nature. For nearly ten years, some 16 million huge black bags (furekon), each about the size of a hot tub and weighing approximately a ton when filled,⁸ have sat in piles scattered around the Exclusion Zone. These furekon bags are filled with radioactive topsoil scraped from the surface of the prefecture’s variable terrain, by crews like that of Nakayama-san, and at first lie in odd, desultory heaps of perhaps two to six bags before being transported by truck to what are known as kari-kari-okiba (third-tier storage, literally ‘provisional-provisional’ depots). For most locals, the accumulation of the bags is a rare concrete manifestation of nuclear radiation, as few understand the nitty-gritty of decontamination and the contents of the bags are seen as unmistakable evidence of the activity (see Morimoto 2020). After a time, sometimes a year or more, workers would move these bags to further, though still provisional, second-tier storage depots (kari-okiba) located throughout the region. All these sites, clearly blazoned as temporary, keep the bags in motion just enough to sell a rationalized system, but in fact the bags still have nowhere to go. An Interim Storage Facility (ISF), its name similarly advertising its impermanence, lies cheek-by-jowl around Fukushima Daiichi in a half-doughnut-shaped site on the coast, but the ISF plan was only signed off on by the prefectural governor on the proviso that all radioactive material stored there must leave Fukushima after 30 years (in 2045), at which time prefectural and central government authorities hope eventually to begin converting the land to a park (cf. Krupar 2020). Caesium-137’s half-life of 30.05 years means that Caesium-laden soil would then have lost more than half its radiation. However, most specialists with whom I have spoken who are independent of the omertà-like code of the Japanese nuclear establishment do not believe that most of the radioactive dirt in the ISF will have reached harmless low radiation levels at the end of the 30 years. Likely for this reason, the state has declared its intention to ‘recycle’ the radioactive dirt (MOE 2018b).

In practice, this now means ridding the state of the burden of such radioactive waste in any way that it can manage. Nuclear waste officials have indicated in interview that most of the waste will be employed in creating massive anti-tsunami berms along the coastline, with ‘recycled’ radioactive dirt comprising the core of these structures for many miles (MOE 2021). Such a strategy is a long way away from what most Japanese, or anyone else, would associate with the term ‘recycling’ (see Kirby 2011, 2018). Under rosy scenarios of public use, the radioactive dirt would be sequestered safely within the berms, but such strategies incur potential risks of contamination of surrounding land and coastal seas, particularly worrisome given the periodic seismic events that jolt the archipelago. In June 2018, the MOE further diverged from long-articulated plans to ‘recycle’ radioactive soil collected in Fukushima. The ministry instead set out to offload radioactive dirt in road-building and agriculture projects in various sites throughout Fukushima (MOE 2018a)—prompting vociferous protests from community groups. For instance, along a 200-metre stretch of road in the town of Nihonmatsu, the ministry proposed to place 500 cubic metres of radioactive dirt underneath the roadway. The ministry maintains that the dirt, having levels of approximately 1000 becquerels per kilogram, would be covered with ‘clean’ dirt to block the radiation—small comfort to local farmers keen to advertise their produce as free of radiation, not to mention concerned homeowners and casual passersby. Furthermore, officials have started to employ radioactive dirt to grow crops in Iitate, and hope to expand this pilot project elsewhere within Fukushima Prefecture. According to the MOE, this ‘recycled’ soil would not, however, yield produce intended for human consumption, representing yet another (unsuccessful) attempt to alleviate the sharp concerns of local farmers and residents.⁹ Under Japanese law, soil of up to 8000 becquerels per kilogram can be used for a variety of purposes, a regulatory flexibility that government stakeholders are attempting to turn, gradually, to their advantage. By contrast, the International Atomic Energy Agency maintains a standard of 100 becquerels per kilogram for material containing Caesium-137 (IAEA 2014). Opposition to the plan from communities in Fukushima demonstrates the chasm between buoyant projections generated by officialdom and what exasperated residents will tolerate. Had an influential postwar leader like Matsushita, author of the epigraph above, lived to see the mismanagement that led to the Fukushima Daiichi crisis and the subsequent deep ambivalence of a not-inconsiderable number of Japanese people to the cleanup, he would doubtless have seen the reconstruction effort as a titanic missed opportunity. Many locals grew to criticize the whole project of decontamination, some of whom I describe below. One notable turn of phrase, josen yori osen, ‘it’s more pollution than decontamination’, caustically juxtaposed ‘decontamination’ (josen) with its near homophone ‘pollution’ (osen).

Morimoto’s conceit of ‘nuclear ghost’ highlights the alienation that radiation brings, but a linked indicator of the region’s unrest was the upsurge of literal ghost sightings. Tohoku is a part of Japan already associated with a rich tradition of folk tales and ghost stories (Yanagita 1910; Ivy 1995), and the thousands of untimely deaths and the tsunami’s horrific aftermath—the large volume of rotting corpses, overwhelming mortician capacities, became a major public health challenge in the weeks after 3.11—certainly offered fertile material for whatever superstitious tendencies existed among the population. Informants, mostly reporting secondhand, described taxi drivers who suddenly noticed strange passengers in the backseat when they didn’t have a paying fare. People walking at night in tsunami-hit communities witnessed strange humanoid spirit apparitions at the edge of the darkness, sometimes along the water. Such reports of spooky, dreamlike encounters seemed, if nothing else, to represent percolations of 3.11 distress and bespoke a society that remained unsettled, attempting to process trauma.

Whatever the significance here of the supernatural, the decontamination campaign could be construed, broadly speaking, as hostile to longstanding notions of Japanese nature. ‘Nature’ in Japan, much idealized and codified, tends to inspire a focus on the fleeting—like the sudden onozukara turning of the autumn foliage into blazing colour each year, or the slow build-up toward the much-vaunted full bloom (mankai) of snow-like cherry blossoms in springtime, which then wither and fall—and leads to cultivation of highly enculturated images of nature and linked enactments; in this way, painstakingly cultivated bonsai trees are not just horticultural curiosities but meant to evoke, say, the essence of a gnarled tree clinging to a cliffside exposed to the elements and mono no aware. Less idealized are customary interventions into the satoyama, or tracts of woodlands near settlements, where rural Japanese regularly collect delicacies like mushrooms and other prized culinary ingredients, pick herbs and flowers, and sometimes engage in hunting of boar and deer. Few details exposed the emptiness at the heart of the state’s ‘decontamination’ campaign more clearly than the claim that rural communities could return to normal life inside islands of decontaminated territory but were forbidden to enter the satoyama—much exalted by prefectural and central governments in recent years as a cradle of Japanese regional identity and authenticity—where radiation levels were often strikingly higher. Take the northern area of Tomioka Township, where we observed the MOE’s ‘decontamination’ of a farm, above. Despite the fact that the evacuation order was lifted in Tomioka on 1 April 2017, northern Tomioka is still designated a ‘difficult-to-return zone’—meaning that, on average, the area continues to emit more than 20 milliSieverts per year of radiation. (For reference, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission mandates a maximum exposure for American communities of 1 milliSievert per year over background radiation [NRC 2017].)

Despite its many failings, this was nevertheless a dedicated campaign of (re)worlding on a grand scale. Or at least it looked like a worlding. Tens of thousands of workers in different crews teemed throughout a vast region, labouring to transform the surface of the land to conform with notions of how, putatively, to mitigate the problem of radioactive debris across a sweep of blighted, depopulated terrain. Huge ziggurats of nuclear waste, comprised of many thousands of furekon bags, stood like henges across the terrain of Fukushima, stark evidence of nuclear radiation in a landscape where it was otherwise invisible. The campaign had its hiccups, and its detractors. Workers and residents alike accused the ministry of rigging the system, for example by discarding the high atmospheric readings as ‘failed’ measurements and retaining only those that served as evidence of progress. But the flawed campaign still attempted to present itself, to collaborators and outsiders, as internally rigorous; it used technical instruments like Geiger counters and industrial scales to maintain standards and record progress, as well as marshalling inspectors and dosimeters and spreadsheets to monitor the many workers who collected and moved radioactive material. The elaborate decontamination campaign, a technoscientific imaginary par excellence, was both ideological and performative. But this cold, cynical execution of (re)worlding is utterly disenchanted, top-down rather than bottom-up, more about disseminating propaganda and collecting a paycheck than reflecting a consistent outlook. It was possible, not to mention common, to work a job dedicated to ‘decontamination’ by day and gripe at night over shōchū liquor about inconsistent policies or arbitrariness or the state’s misguided priorities. Indeed, it was often the people closest to the decontamination work on the ground, like Nakayama’s crew described above, whose critiques were the most vocal and devastating. They had seen firsthand the occasional patchiness of the work, the places where they or others had had to cut corners due to the vagaries of rigid schedules, weather, diktats from higher-ups, and so on. This is corroborated, for example, by The Guardian; Justin McCurry (2019) quotes a clear-up worker describing incidents where his crew was told just to sweep up the leaves on the ground to make a deadline, leaving contaminated soil behind.

In that regard, consider Suzuki and Murakami, two Kōriyama josen entrepreneurs in their thirties who organized volunteers to work scrubbing and hosing down and wiping radiation from city streets, schools, businesses, and homes in the months following the meltdowns. Partial to high-end radiation gear and nifty outfits and having detailed their gleaming white truck with macho flourishes, they earned money from radiation detection and mitigation but complained bitterly regarding the state’s counterproductive unwillingness to take their (privately) collected radioactive waste, as well as about government inconsistencies in measuring radiation and the general futility of ‘decontaminating’ forests, mountains, streams, meadowlands, and varied communities in a multifarious region. Suzuki, a charming and handsome connector type, easily maintained links with moderate antinuclear groups as well as those whom he called ‘kyokutan’ (hardline, extreme). He particularly cultivated young mothers’ community groups in Kōriyama and Fukushima City, with whom his radiation vigilance schtick and status as a father of boys played quite well. We shadowed him on an early evening visit to one of his clients, a housewife who disagreed with her husband about the dangers of low-level radiation in the community. (Suzuki impishly described his elaborate get-up, with spiffy coveralls and boots, a mask, and dangling high-spec radiation sensor connected to a laptop on a harness, as ‘sort of like cosplay’.) Inviting Suzuki in while her spouse was away, the fashionably dressed housewife was soon horrified to learn that the radiation levels in her comfortable, new-looking middle-class home were nearly four times higher in the back of the house, which bordered an overgrown, abandoned lot that retained radiation more easily than, say, a paved parking lot. ‘My baby was just lying on the floor back there!’ she exclaimed. As her bemused husband returned home to discover our motley group and two strange cars in front of his house, his wife pressed some cash surreptitiously into Suzuki’s hand and promised to have him back soon to address mitigation measures, with or without her husband’s blessing.

Radiation, as well as perceived radiation hazards, contributed to shifts of nuance in the undulating patterns of everyday life in varied pockets of the region (cf. Petryna 2011, 2002). The state’s campaign was, broadly speaking, designed to placate anxiety, to eliminate fear, to deny trauma—or at least to brush it under the rug—whereas every neighbourhood in communities like the one we visited with Suzuki had these in spades. Every congregation of parents outside a school gate, chatting and gossiping and worrying about the coming year’s flu season and the pall of fallout that lurked unseen around the city, was a ‘bloom space’ (Stewart 2010, 340)—a worlding, a multiple, generative space of attunement and emergence and potentiality, a scene forever in the making, where a general vibe hung in the air even amid passionate differences, like spouses who disagreed about how much to worry about radiation in the masonry at the back of the house.

There was a great deal of variation in degrees of suffering in the aftermath of 3.11. Most of the rhetoric over the recovery was collective—e.g. ‘C’mon, let’s fight, Fukushima!’—particularly due to the holistic orientation of Japanese society generally. Yet while the suffering was articulated as shared, it was far from clear that the uneven burden of the disasters’ aftermath would improve much in the medium term.

The last thing Moto expected was to be entangled in a drama over radiation about five years after the formal decontamination of his neighbourhood. A long-time resident of a Fukushima suburb, he met with a local city councillor to plead his case against the injustice of a nuclear waste dump that had been improperly greenlighted nearby his family’s home. In the politician’s office, the social niceties, the nostalgic (though calculated) stories about the local high school they’d both attended, the cups of tea, the soothing comments from the politician and his aide, and equally the presence of a foreign ethnographer and his recording device, created a fleeting, though significant, space of affective communication. Moto’s concern and his sensitivity to his wife’s and neighbours’ anxiety and trauma interacted with and informed the skein of narratives that circulated in the surprisingly comfortable tea area in the political headquarters in a drab office building in Fukushima. These helped fashion a partial, transitional encounter of generative relationality—a radiant worlding—that was both there and elsewhere, informed by stories of Moto’s neighbourhood and childhood; by the fashionable Modernist chairs on which we sat, around a low wooden table; by the politician’s candid-seeming descriptions of the City Council deliberations and the peccadilloes of the committee chairman who had hastily approved the nuclear waste dump, surrounded by a bustling residential community; and by the discursive questions to the foreigner—whose presence was also calculated, by Moto—about his linked research.

In this way, the aftermath of the disasters was not simply a matter of moving radioactive dirt, processing messy debris, and smoothing out and rebuilding ravaged business districts to restore sanitized platforms for commerce and leisure. Perhaps not unlike the collaborative exercise of writing linked verse poetry (renku) over saucersful of sake in days of yore, the post-3.11 recovery has, instead, progressed forward as a desultory sequence of radiant improvisations in a ‘felt-world of relations’ (Lorimer 2019)—a processual, multivalent, interpenetrating sequence of (re)worldings that foreground the region’s loss, misfortune, grief, and stuttered renewal. In the end, the nuclear waste depot in question was moved not far away to another, less well-off neighbourhood, prompting Moto’s wife to say, ‘Yes, we are glad that the project will no longer go forward less than a hundred metres from our home, but the people who live [in the other community] are less enfranchised, less able to protest. I feel terrible … . This shouldn’t be happening. They shouldn’t be doing this to local communities in this way’.

Among the most unfortunate of my Fukushima informants were the evacuees, forced to live for years in spartan, pre-fab temporary housing (kasetsu jūtaku). They waited through tedium and dislocation for support, for compensation, and for leave to return, a bleak path fraught with alien memories and dismal prospects. For Mizuhara, a bubbly, charismatic, late-thirties DJ for a shelter radio station in Kōriyama, life after meltdowns, irradiation, and evacuation was up and down, like the tumultuous seas of the still-radioactive Pacific coast where her empty home lay. Referring to the large black bags used for bulk transport in Fukushima, she expressed how the true freight of disaster was affective, not material: ‘The furekon are filled with our tears’. Even so, she broadcast a show nearly every day, a cheery mashup of the news of the day, curious telling tidbits from her quotidian encounters, occasional musings of foreign visitors, and the regular complaints of a few curmudgeonly female shelter-mates who objected loudly outside the studio door every time the radio-show content strayed from radiation and disaster, the misery of shelter life, and the promised path back to their home communities. Every show Mizuhara composed was a (re)worlding, a serialized, makeshift, collective site of slapstick, feedback, wit, and biting commentary, ushering her audience through yet another day of bureaucratic purgatory.

Interim worldings

There was a trajectory of coping in Fukushima in the wake of the disasters. Early on, the state and municipalities understandably did everything they could to project normality. So in April 2011, when much of the country was subject to rolling blackouts and calls for setsuden (conservation) and jishuku (self-restraint), the escalators spun away freely in the large rail station complexes at Fukushima City, Kōriyama, and elsewhere. They seemed to be the only ones running in Japan, while most of Tokyo’s escalators lay dormant. Many families and businesses were preoccupied with insurance claims, for example, collecting on what had once been. (Or what hadn’t—Tohoku informants of mine admitted to fudging the claims so that nearly every bottle of liquor in a restaurant was said to have been ‘damaged’ in order to help manage, somehow, to get the proprietors back on their feet.) In this and other ways, government and citizen impulses could seem retrospective.

Perhaps six months later, such cities in Fukushima and elsewhere in Tōhoku began to see a modest upsurge in newly started businesses as entrepreneurs—notably women—who were drawn to the cheaper rents and relative opportunities opened restaurants, hair salons, and shops. In time, municipalities began implementing changes whereby Fukushima Prefecture aggressively solicited central government funds to action a range of local projects from robot testing and agricultural technology research to biofuel production and ‘smart community’ infrastructure (MOE 2018c).

Lately, as more of daily life in much of the prefecture approaches something approximating a novel normality, communities boast a mix of perspectives. Some families, particularly older people, wanted to return more or less to exactly what they lost: their homes, their communities, their comfortable routines. Others were happy to choose a different path, perhaps in a different location, or with new opportunities, along the lines of Suzuki and Murakami, the josen entrepreneurs, above. Some eligible people bided their time, successfully, for compensation from TEPCO. Others were adamant that they would not. As a proprietor of a regional family business stated, ‘You can’t wait around for the state to help you. It takes so long—and it will never be enough!’ After the state declared the decontamination campaign ‘over’ on 31 March 2017—though continuing mopping-up operations to this day—and the state’s orientation and emphasis shifted more overtly toward showcasing Fukushima as ‘safe’ and promoting the Olympic and Paralympic Games, the gap between Fukushima and more prosperous regions became unspoken but palpable. Underdog Fukushima had always known where it stood in relation to the exalted capital, now less than two hours train ride away. Proud long-time residents of Fukushima, for their part, see all these plans (like the Olympic baseball games that were staged in Fukushima last summer, as well as ongoing development schemes like the ‘Innovation Coast’ [MOE 2018c]) as a continued ‘colonization’ of their home prefecture by Tokyo (Akasaka 2009)—namely, a well-worn pattern of outsiders using the zone for their own purposes, as were the original nuclear proponents who built the ill-fated Fukushima Daiichi plant in the first place. Moto lambasted the process. ‘This has been going on for many decades. Again, we have outsiders coming into Fukushima, dictating how to use our land, how to exploit our resources. They need to take account of the wishes of the people of Fukushima, how we want Fukushima to be’ (see also Kainuma 2011).

Disaster endures, but along different timelines—the elaborate scheduled process of moving millions of bags of nuclear waste from scattered locations in neighbourhoods to larger and larger, more centralized, still provisional depots, and eventually to the Interim Storage Facility, with a fleet of trucks making hundreds of roundtrip journeys each day; the clearing of town centres and coastline of more standard disaster debris, presided over by ancient-seeming billboards, like fossils from another era; and the detritus of vehicles and vessels and appliances that were directed into recycling regimes. Due to lingering complications of radiation, the timelines of some Fukushima communities are more ponderous than, say, the community of Rikuzentakata up the coast in Iwate, where the town swiftly dedicated itself to raising virtually its entire shoreline by up to 10 metres as a tsunami countermeasure, stripping a local mountain range for rock fill with the help of a giant three-kilometre-long conveyer belt in a megaproject reminiscent of Matsushita’s colossal postwar earth-moving plan, above. But most gutted are those exiled residents forbidden to go home and lacking the resources to move on—members of some hard-hit communities who look enviously from temporary housing at the evacuees emblazoned on state-promoted television news programs who have returned to their ‘decontaminated’ homes. (The rate of return is only about 15-30%, depending on the community.) Their timelines seem severed from the rest of Fukushima in this regard.

For a putative worlding project like josen and such ‘attribution of world-like characteristics’ (Tsing 2010, 48) to a wide-reaching PR offensive—one facet of which we witnessed at the farmhouse in Tomioka—it was, in the end, just as significant what was left out. Whether it was certain key radiation readings, the vaunted satoyama, or a candid discussion of what the state was really going to do with all those millions of tons of irradiated dirt, there was an emptiness at the heart of the ‘decontamination’ campaign that made it difficult for the illusion to be sustained without massive capitalization, prodigious manpower, and the full weight of the government behind it. Indeed, perhaps this was why the kind of solidarity that led to bold solutions, like in Rikuzentakata, seemed less common and less likely in Fukushima. The very insidious "worlding" that made the josen project appealing to the state seemed to undermine esprit de corps at the scale of people’s lives. By contrast, the emergent poetics of (re)worlding in Fukushima communities—some portrayed here—that unfolded spontaneously seemed more sustainable, more self-perpetuating—a more plausible and fertile ‘constellation of social and natural ecologies’ appropriate to the scale of disaster, fallout, and the challenge of renewal. These ‘systems of relationality’ (Tsing 2010, 48, 50), however multiple and provisional, seem capable of facilitating generative ties in the community that would allow trauma to be shared, to modulate, and eventually to heal. But worlding, as often mobilized in ethnography, is less an agent of radical change and more a declaration of sensitivity to nuances of culture, of capacity for poetry and beauty as it effervesces in community settings. As evocative as worlding is, it’s difficult to imagine ethnographers (or social scientists generally) advocating on behalf of disenfranchised informants under its conceptual war cry. Aiwha Ong (2011, 12), significantly, suggests that worlding should not be conceived as mere ‘situated everyday practices’ but as instantiations of ambition that can ‘creatively imagine and shape alternative social visions and configurations – that is, “worlds” – than what already exists in a given context’. Perhaps this is, then, what radiant (re)worlding can look like moving forward in a zone that will likely be grappling with radiation and neglect for generations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Leverhulme Trust: [Grant Number (RPG-2014-224)].

Notes

1 Most independent estimates dramatically exceed this government figure, particularly when they include full nuclear decommissioning. The Japan Center for Economic Research reckons comprehensive cleanup costs could exceed $759 billion (JCER 2019).

2 E.g., officially, Fukushima alone still has over 30,000 evacuees, and unofficially perhaps more than double that number (EAF 2021).

3 This article received generous research support via a Leverhulme Trust Project Grant (RPG-2014-224). I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the kind help and sharp insight of Dr. Toshihiro Higuchi of Georgetown University, who collaborated on some ethnographic fieldwork on which this article draws. Back in late 2020 in the depths of the Covid pandemic, Mitch Sedgwick discussed some elements of what I call ‘(re)worlding,' which helped me present the concept in this article.

4 Moe, whose precise meaning and usage draw on two respective homophonous Japanese characters that mean ‘budding’ and ‘burning’—as in a crush or passion—is a term that came to significance in otaku circles dedicated to manga and anime. Moe specifically refers to the consuming infatuation otaku might feel for a particular character, usually female.

5 TEPCO, or Tokyo Electric Power Company, was the operator of Fukushima Daiichi when it experienced its disastrous triple-meltdowns.

6 These findings are based on numerous interviews with nuclear- and debris-focused bureaucrats in the Fukushima Prefectural Government as well as nuclear decontamination officials in the Ministry of Environment and other specialists, between 2011 and 2019.

7 Professor Toshihiro Higuchi, of Georgetown University, kindly collaborated with me on some of the ethnographic fieldwork on which this article is based. Broadly, my research here derives from about 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork on decontamination, material conversion and the tsunami’s aftermath in the disaster zone from early April 2011 to summer 2018 (bolstered by a couple of decades of preceding ethnographic research on Japanese waste practices). In 2020-2021, I kept in touch with informants remotely.

8 Each bag is designed to hold a volume of one cubic metre.

9 A pilot project in Nagadoro plants flowers and energy crops in fields with a radioactive soil substrate (MOE 2019, 22).