The Japanese people and landscapes still feel the unending impacts of a nuclear catastrophe that occurred a dozen years ago. Thousands of black bags litter the Fukushima exclusion zone enclosing radioactive earth and rubbish with nowhere to go. This fall, Japan plans to release millions of tons of radioactive wastewater into the sea. The death and destruction of the earthquake and tsunami — a tragedy in itself — was compounded by nuclear calamity.
On March 11, 2011, a powerful undersea earthquake unleashed the deluge that flooded the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant run by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), causing the release of deadly nuclear radiation. Invisible and moving uncontrollably, radiation continues to contaminate soil, air, water and lives it has touched. The Japanese government was responsible for not only creating the circumstance of neglect that caused the nuclear meltdown, but also for exacerbating the impacts of nuclear fallout through a delayed and opaque response that downplayed the severity of the catastrophe. Though the crisis was triggered by natural disasters, the nuclear catastrophe that followed was profoundly man-made. The late geographer Neil Smith describes the “unnaturalness” of disasters like Fukushima’s: “The contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus.” Following the nuclear disaster, Japan shifted to a necessary post-disaster survival and recovery strategy that can be characterized by the term “resilience,” defined by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction as the ability to “resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through…preservation and restoration…” However, resilience was invoked and experienced in two distinct forms in the aftermath of Fukushima: recovery of the state and recovery of the people.
Resilience, a term originating from ecology to describe species returning to “equilibrium” after an environmental shock, has become a frequently used buzzword across many disciplines. Urban geographer Tom Slater discusses the way resilience discourse is neatly folded into neoliberal nostrums by evoking the evolutionary “naturalness” of biological processes, framing market-driven agendas as inevitably interlinked with ongoing cycles of adaptive growth. Resilience makes for politically seductive language, as it “stands in opposition to notions of hierarchical control, emphasizing instead the ability of systems to self-organize across multiple scales,” according to sociologist Kathleen Tierney. In circles within/around the Japanese government, the rhetoric of resilience validated the top-down deployment of market-driven revitalization programs and private sector involvement, justifying a failure to provide adequate information, housing, and resources for displaced communities. The Japanese people responded to the government’s careless dearth of public services provision by embodying a different kind of resilience mobilized from the bottom up, through protest, activism and informal information networks.
“Bouncing-back” and other resilience neologisms championed by the state are inherently at odds with the irreversibility of nuclear waste. The Japanese translation of resilience, “fukkō” (復興), was employed as a catchphrase in building “apparatuses of [capital] capture” out of crisis, according to Sabu Kohso in his 2020 book Radiation and Revolution. In what Kohso calls the “nuclear capitalist nation-state,” the government endeavored to “build back better” and rejuvenate the national economy amidst an unprecedented crisis by implementing a series of fukkō reforms. These reforms included cuts in public spending, tax incentives targeted at international investors and the procurement of construction contracts, all of which ultimately proved advantageous for nuclear corporations and other private actors in the “business of reconstruction.” The government used the disaster conveniently for profit-making, further transferring the nation’s wealth to the elites, while further immiserating the people. TEPCO exempted itself from responsibility for the nuclear meltdown when it referred to radiation as a “masterless object” (無主物), therefore absolving any self-accountability for cleaning up the radiation emitted from TEPCO’s own nuclear reactors. Strategic documents such as the government’s 2012 white paper titled, “Toward a Robust and Resilient Society” were published with the intention of “nurturing the dreams and hopes of the people,” according to disaster studies sociologist Thierry Ribault. Postcolonial studies professor Ashley Dawson explains that “part of the power in the term resilience lies in the sheer hope it offers,” as hope allows for the elimination of fear. Resilience therefore mutates into what Ribault calls a “technology of consent”— a tool to make suffering communities more tolerant of terrible situations. It serves to divert attention and perpetuate the political and social circumstances that originally gave rise to the Fukushima nuclear crisis. By positioning the radiation as a masterless object and imposing a narrative of shared trauma that can be mitigated by collective hope, the authorities shift the burden of consequence from complicit parties onto the very people most harmed. The Japanese state employed resilience as a pseudo-therapeutic tool, strategically crafting visions of gracefully moving past annihilation — seeming to have a case of selective amnesia of its own role in creating the circumstances of nuclear devastation. This allowed the state to fuel a collective submission to an existing reality of radioactive contamination — a “submission to suffering.”
While enlisting idealistic language and visions of a future, the Japanese state failed to provide basic amenities, housing, resources and support for the Japanese people who had essentially become nuclear refugees. The state divisively categorized evacuees as either “mandatory” or “voluntary,” based on the proximity of their homes to the site of the nuclear meltdown, though it has been shown that deadly levels of radioactivity persisted far outside mandatory zoned areas. Using obtuse and hastily designated metrics to define life-defining policies, mandatory evacuees (which is in itself a contradictory term as it assumes the people in the “voluntary” category were not at risk of lethal exposure) were eventually forced to “choose between return and relocation without government support,” according to disaster-law expert Mishi Ishimori. Evacuees are seemingly “empowered” to make a choice; however, choice implies decision-making agency. The decision between returning to toxic landscapes and moving to new and unfamiliar homes without financial support is hardly an agency-empowered choice.
The Japanese people suffered as a result of the government’s neglect; and in their immense loss, communities forged collective bonds, extending mutual support, healing and resources. The resilience of the people resonated from the pain in their bodies and hearts — a resilience embodied by care and love for one another. Kohso vividly portrays the formidable uprising of people resisting radiation and the nuclear-capitalist nation. He christens them the “radioactive crowd,” reflecting the tragic reality of their condition and the deep harm they have suffered due to radiation, while also alluding to the powerful unity of their resistance. Hundreds of thousands of protesters were among the radioactive crowd, disproving the common Western stereotype that depicts Japanese people as docile and unwilling to resist authority. The media ignored the resistance movement, dismissing the public’s widespread anticipation and anxiety about future nuclear accidents, and instead toed the government’s line about nuclear energy as safe.
Community-driven resilience led by activists focused on a diverse range of concerns, including anti-capitalism, feminism and environmentalism. Spearheading this resistance were mothers and those who work to provide everyday needs, tirelessly organizing networks of information-sharing and support. For the sake of their children and loved ones, those in caregiving roles questioned the government’s opaque reports of radiation levels, though they were often denigrated as “hysterical” and “paranoid” by authorities and other family members, according to Kohso. Within the confines of Japan’s patriarchal society, which frequently undermines the value of womens’ knowledge, female activists subverted norms that “freed them from a degree of social control, giving them greater freedom to mobilize.” Author Nicole Frieiner documents how women mobilized resistance in informal digital spaces, such as a Facebook group named “Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation,” and a blog titled “Connecting Mother’s Blog.” They created safe and accessible spaces that supported alternative points of connection for people across the world. Artists were also crucial to the Fukushima nuclear resistance. Project Fukushima! was a collective launched to help revitalize the arts, culture and community of the Fukushima region. Workshops, dance festivals, art exhibitions and political performances were organized to bring together a local and global dialogue and community of artists, musicians and activists, as described by ethnomusicologist David Novak. Scenes of dancing and singing were ostensibly less controversial for the media to cover than heated protests and this coverage allowed the resistance-laced messages of Project Fukushima! to travel internationally and garner substantial recognition and support. New networks of activism took form through shared experiences of violence from radiation exposure. Feminist anti-nuclear activist Mari Matsumoto identifies the way nuclear workers and sex workers similarly exist in roles that maintain capitalist production, while simultaneously being excluded from it. Post-Fukushima resilience is centered around an activism rooted in the embodied experiences of affected people and reveals how the nuclear state is inextricably linked to the capitalist state — interwoven in an apparatus of profit.
The Japanese state touted highly idealized narratives of a quixotic struggle and richly resilient futures, but refused to commit to the housing security policies and resource-backed support needed to realize them. Resilience meant something else for the state — it fostered “a common-sense understanding of urban problems and solutions soaked in neoliberal bromides” as characterized by urban scholar Timothy Weaver, while the resilience of community nurtured informal infrastructures of care. The resilience-sloganeering of the social and spatial rebuilding of cities and communities after crises often conceal the unnatural circumstances of disaster and “prevent us from asking why urban dwellers are being asked to be resilient in the first place,” as discussed by Slater. Power is often confined to the hands of those able to write their own versions of stories that are shared with the world and accepted as authority and truth. Urban sociologist Loic Waquant’s concept of “symbolic power” describes the deterministic potential for performative discourse to misrepresent the past in a way that allows neoliberal agendas to become reality.
Survivors of Fukushima must live not only with the trauma caused by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown, but also that which followed in the ambiguous aftermath — years of a violent lack of acknowledgement, dignity and respect from public authorities. Concerning the compounded nuclear trauma from the genocidal atomic bombs of World War II, Kohso notes that there was “no longer simple anger.” Rather, images of ghosts and signs imprinted with the character for curse (呪) seeped into the ethos of the radioactive crowd. Bōkyaku (忘却) describes the Japanese peoples’ “forgetting without forgetting” of “existence in, despite oblivion,” as described by Novak. Ghosts that were left for hell and forgotten returned as Japan’s nuclear curse to haunt the radioactive crowd. A path towards liberation and relief from suffering exists in moving forward with their lives. Still, a certain type of amnesia is necessary to imagine a positive future.
Forgive, but do not forget; the peoples’ resilience exists within this tension. Their forgiveness actively resists the state’s selective forgetting of its own responsibility — it is the peoples’ self-defined and self-initiated release that will allow healing from the suffering. Words possess a powerful ability to trivialize violence while simultaneously perpetuating it. But they also hold the capacity to reverse these power dynamics. As Japan continues toward recovery, passion and care are embodied in the visceral experiences of life-as-struggle — lives in which suffering is not forgotten, but coexists with happiness.
