The Pedagogical Work of Film for Technology Disaster Studies: Reassessing Fukushima through Film

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Notes

¹ The film notes that a thyroid ultrasound survey was launched in October 2011 as part of the Fukushima Health Management Survey in response to requests from the local population. Thyroid ultrasound examinations were provided to all Fukushima children under eighteen. About 300 children participated. Of those, 108 had positive or confirmed malignancy, and 0.8 percent needed confirmatory examination.

² Dr. Sunichi Yamashita, professor of molecular medicine and international radiation health at Nagasaki University School of Medicine’s Atomic Bomb Disease Institute, was the most prominent of radiation experts from Nagasaki and Hiroshima who came to help in the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, and took the brunt of public demonization. But it is he who responded by asking the UN Atomic Energy Agency (AEA) to help organize a series of workshops for both the doctors in Healing Fukushima and others in learning how to better respond to the public demands. Both “science communication” and “science, technology, and society,” or STS, methods were discussed in these workshops, under the initiative and supervision of AEA’s Dr. Remy Cheth, himself a radiologist as well as a historian of medicine. Participants included STS scholars Gregory Clancey (National University of Singapore), Kim Fortun (then at Renssaeler Poytechnic Inistitute, now at University of California, Irvine), and myself.

³ Dr. Kumagai and Dr. Yoshita Kongi are the two figures in the film who fit these two profiles respectively.

⁴ For more on the samurai festival and other such ritual techniques mobilized after the Fukushima disasters, see Fischer 2018, section 4 of the epilogue (“Fear of Radiation: Use It as a Torch”).

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Notes on contributors

Michael M. J. Fischer

Michael M. J. Fischer teaches at MIT, and among other writings is the author of “Biopolis: Asian Science in the Global Circuitry” (2013), “Anthropological STS in Asia” (2016), and “A Tale of Two Genome Institutes: Qualitative Networks, Charismatic Voice, and R&D strategies—Juxtaposing GIS Biopolis and BGI” (2018). He also teaches and writes about film: his Mute Dreams, Blind Owls and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry (2004) has two chapters on Iranian film; and Anthropology in the Meantime (2018) reviews ethnographic film and has a chapter on the Anthropocene that includes the films reviewed here. He is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the humanities and professor of anthropology and science and technology studies at MIT, and lecturer in global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School.