Japanese Organic Farmers: Strategies of Uncertainty after the Fukushima Disaster

ABSTRACT

This ethnographic study of organic farmers affected by radioactive contamination in Japan illuminates responses to situated uncertainty as an everyday mode of subjectivity and practice. The farmers' strategies vary along a continuum from accommodation with dominant institutions to precautions of possible uncertainty to innovations and oppositions of potential uncertainty. Significantly these strategies are contradictory and they show variations in power and morality. The data indicate a subjective- and practice-oriented response that I call localized, relational uncertainty. It is contextualized in farms and villages with responsibility for family, consumers, and organic agriculture itself and it enables farmers to embrace multiple strategies. Thus, uncertainty brings loss and limitations, but also produces opportunities through, for example, expanded trust in relationships, deepened commitment to place, reinterpretation of organic agriculture, and sharpened critique of Japan's trajectory of economic growth.

KEYWORDS:

• Disaster
• Japan
• uncertainty
• risk
• organic agriculture

Notes

1. Subjectivity is historical and cultural, defined as the ʻensemble of modes of perception, affect, thought, desire, fear, and so forth that animate acting subjects … as well [as] the cultural and social formations that shape … those modes’ (Ortner 2005: 37). Practice is defined as the concrete expressions that emerge in the fields of everyday life wherein people bring their subjectivity, influenced by their habits of class and upbringing, to bear in games of interrelationship and power. Innovations in subjectivity and practice emerge in these fields of power with new circumstances and experiences (Bourdieu 1989).

2. The plutonium reprocessing plant remains under construction in Rokkasho-mura in Aomori Prefecture and is designed to make weapons-usable plutonium. Japan already has 42.7 metric tons of plutonium, enough to make 1000 nuclear weapons (Lee 2013).

3. Seikyo are consumer cooperatives, now stores with membership, that bring healthy and reasonably priced food to ordinary Japanese citizens.

4. Sugeno Seiji and his daughter Mizuho are featured in a film called Uncanny Terrain on organic farmers facing Japan's nuclear crisis, directed by Junko Kajino and Ed Koziarski. Their group has also established a company to distribute products in Tokyo.

5. This point of view is similar to the ʻsimple life narrative' that argues for return to nature and simpler times in order to survive as a national community that Samuels (2013: 128) found post-disaster among intellectuals and religious leaders, and a minority of government leaders. Ogawa (2013: 322) found that under-employed young people participating in anti-nuclear protests also question economic growth because it exploits their right to have decent work.

6. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.