Seeing Through the In/Visible: Akagi Shūji and the Limits of ‘Environmental Restoration’

Abstract

This essay will explore the material and affective dimensions of the ongoing disaster caused by TEPCO’s Fukushima Dai’ichi reactor meltdowns from the perspective of Akagi Shūji’s photography. Mobilizing Twitter to record the uncanny traces of Fukushima city’s decontamination and recovery efforts, Akagi’s photography affords a renewed consideration of the lived struggles and unsettled realities of the ongoing disaster. Akagi’s work challenges the ideologies of recovery by recording the residual traces of the state’s decontamination process. His photographs constitute a record of bodily encounters with the visible and invisible remnants of disaster, disclosing limits within Fukushima’s ‘environmental restoration’ and its representation. I will explore how Akagi ‘traces’ the processes of physical and affective labor at work in decontamination through the specific context of the Twitter platform. I consider the ways this work operates as a place-based praxis to incite multi-layered and indefinite forms of affect, meaning, and value, elaborated through the aporia of the processes of decontamination and ‘recovery,’ thus recasting the prospects of the ‘environmental restoration’ of Fukushima in a decidedly different light. This novel practice is read as an ethical-aesthetic response that captures the ongoing disaster’s manifold dimensions as an event rife with deeply unsettled futurities.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to scholar of Japanese photography Dan Abbe who first introduced me to Akagi’s work and was the translator of Akagi’s Twitter captions included in the book Fukushima Traces 2011–2013. I began following Akagi’s work on Twitter around 2012 and this article has benefitted from many discussions with Akagi in 2015 and 2016 made possible by his publisher Yoko Sawada.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ English-language surveys of Japan’s post-disaster cultural context include, for instance, Nishimura Morse and Havinga (2015); Geilhorn and Iwata-Weickgenannt (2018). For surveys of literary production, see Haga (2019) and DiNitto (2019). While these are largely framed as inquiries into the response of a specific artist, medium, or genre to the spectacular events of the triple disaster, others have undertaken efforts to reconsider the affordances of the post-disaster context for thinking through and across a number of discursive and disciplinary boundaries, such as the edited volumes by Thouny and Mitsuhiro (2017) and Wake, Suga, and Masami (2018).

² In (Kirby, 2019), Kirby further details the ways that the program of decontamination fits into larger government efforts to integrate Japan’s waste management and nuclear waste recycling aspirations within policies promoting the image of the circularity of national waste programs. In addition to concerns over the efficacy of decontamination, many have decried the costs associated with graft among the layers of subcontractors and industrial waste management companies (Brasor & Tsubuku, 2021).

³ Ministry of the Environment, Government of Japan. (n.d.-f.). Kankyō saisei puraza.

⁴ Among the range of informational materials related to decontamination and environmental restoration, visitors can find useful educational manga and videos explaining the necessity and safety of the state’s decontamination program. At the Decontamination Information Site visitors can take a virtual tour of key educational sites about interim and specified waste disposal facilities (Ministry of the Environment, (n.d.). Fukushima kankyō saisei: Bācharu tsuā) or access the official archive of decontamination in each municipality. They can visit the Ripurun Fukushima site (Ministry of the Environment, (n.d.). ‘Ripurun Fukushima’) for details about a hands-on exhibition on the specified waste landfill project information hall and find links to newly built informational facilities such as the Fukushima Prefectural Centre for Environmental Creation Fukushima-ken kankyō sōzō sentā (n.d.) which houses a range of research and informational activities related to environmental restoration. They can even learn about how to participate in the creation of the ‘next’ environment for Fukushima at a Ministry of the Environment site dedicated to ‘Fukushima, to the next environment … ’ (Ministry of the Environment, (n.d.). Fukushima, sono saki no kankyō e).

⁵ Ministry of the Environment, Government of Japan. (n.d.-a.). Chūkan chozō shisetsu jōhō saito.

⁶ For an expansion of critical understandings of biopower at play in the aftermath of TEPCO’s reactor meltdowns, see Kohso (2020) for an excellent discussion of the stakes in evolving our critique of nation-state and capital in Radiation and Revolution.

⁷ See Liboiron (2021) for an invaluable text that reconsiders the environmental protocols that govern waste and toxicity measures together with the often-unacknowledged linkages with the histories and ongoing enactments of settler colonialism in the environmental sciences.

⁸ Unlike the longer duration of the program to remake relations with the land, the sea has already been subjected to these managerial ontologies as a resource for highly radioactive wastewater generated in the ongoing cleanup of TEPCO’s meltdown reactors. While local fisheries adamantly refuse the transformation of their livelihoods into a resource for waste disposal with untold consequences, indigenous communities of the Pacific region have denounced what they consider another colonial regime of radioactive environmental contamination of their seas. See the article, by Tau and Mangioni (2021). For the longer history of Japan’s plans to dispose nuclear waste in the Pacific islands, see Branch (1984).

⁹ Ministry of the Environment, Government of Japan (n.d.-b.) Decontamination.

¹⁰ Akagi’s work evokes what Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie describe as ‘critical place inquiry,’ a crucial praxis of engaging environmental and indigenous perspectives in considerations of place in all its specificities and multiplicities. See their co-authored volume, Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods (2015) which offers many generative theoretical and methodological insights on ways to reconceptualize and reimagine specificities of the manifold relations of place and the necessity of decolonial perspectives therein.

¹¹ Critic and curator Sawaragi Noi has celebrated the unique perspectives obtained through Akagi’s work in his three-part online column (Noi, 2016) as well as a review of Akagi’s ‘Fukushima Traces 2017’ exhibition (Noi, 2018). Yū Miri is the author of the moving post-disaster novel chronicling the life of a day laborer from Fukushima prefecture, JR Ueno-eki Kōenguchi, translated into English by Morgan Giles in 2019 as Tokyo Ueno Station, which was awarded the 2020 National Book Award for Translated literature.

¹² In addition to a number of small solo exhibition and talks in Japan, Akagi’s works were included in the Perpetual Uncertainty exhibition held in 2016–2017, produced by Bildmuseet and curated by Ele Carpenter, editor of the Nuclear Culture Source Book (2016). Akagi also participated as a member of the collective Grand Guignol Mirai (consisting of critic Sawaragi Noi, theater director Ameya Norimizu, and artist/musician Yamakawa Fuyuki) in the ‘Don’t Follow the Wind’ exhibition in 2015. The installation is part of an ongoing but inaccessible and unseen exhibition within the exclusion zone, organized by a curatorial collective consisting of Chim↑Pom, Kenji Kubota, Eva and Franco Mattes, and Jason Waite. Two publications have resulted from this exhibition, Don’t follow the wind: Tenrankai kōshiki katarogu in 2015 and Don’t Follow the Wind, edited by Nikolaus Hirsch and Jason Waite in 2021.

¹³ In English, for instance, many indispensable essays have been published and collected on-line by The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, including the essential guide ‘Japan’s 3.11 Earthquake, Tsunami, Atomic Meltdown’, (n.d.)

¹⁴ The translations of Akagi’s tweets for the book were completed by Dan Abbe and will be used throughout this article unless otherwise noted.

¹⁵ The translations of Akagi’s tweets made since the publication of Fukushima Traces have been done by the author.

¹⁶ Walter Benjamin highlighted the function of captions as seemingly superseding the contents of a photograph in the determination of its meaning within the circulation of images in print capitalism (Benjamin, 1996). Akagi’s nuanced use of words along with images is an important aporia amplified through his use of Twitter platform.

¹⁷ Leaving aside the problem of the long-term safety of such materials (not only, or even primarily, for humans, but for all forms of life on the archipelago and beyond), the temporal indeterminacy of these engineered futures is telling of the complexities of the on-going disaster. The material and affective dimensions of the work required for this logistical system of ‘environmental restoration’ are critical at each stage of its completion. Thus, the margins for error that might allow other perspectives or desires to seep into the operation of the system can drastically impact the calculable determination of how the program proceeds. In other words, no magnitude of controlled redistribution and reeducation is sufficient to ‘complete’ the colonization of the future.