September 11, 2011 was simultaneously the ten-year anniversary of the eponymous terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the half-year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the coastline of Tohoku and crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The Japanese media covered both stories, although the bulk of its stories concerned the latter catastrophe (the American media, by contrast, didn’t mentioned the significance of the date in Japan).
These two events defy comparison in so many ways. Certainly one can say that March 11th was the deadlier of the two, taking roughly ten times the number of lives as were lost in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001 – but to what point? 9/11 was an act of willful brutality on the part of a small circle of men, fueled by a tremendous hatred of America for its interventions, military and otherwise, in the Middle East. At a decade since, there can be little doubt that it was a turning point in world history. The significance of 3/11, on the other hand, is still very hard to pin down. Unlike 9/11, which gave Americans and, eventually, other first-worlders a new enemy to hate and fear and sent the United States and its allies off on a new round of wars, 3/11 has left the Japanese less of a focal point for popular emotions. No matter how cruel it is to us on occasion, it makes no sense to despise nature, nor would it be healthy to go through life fearing it. While TEPCO and even the Japanese government itself may come close to the role of the villain, however, with the exception of their attempts to conceal and obfuscate the extent of damage to the nuclear reactors in the first few weeks after 3/11, – itself a by-product of decades of energy and educational policies that assured people that nuclear power was “safe” – Fukushima Daiichi was a colossal (albeit foreseeable) accident. Mistakes by domestic actors just can’t provide the sense of national unity – or the desire to seek vengeance – as acts of malice by foreigners do.
Where the two elevens do seem similar, though, is in the way they have (or most like will, in the case of 3/11) defined an epoch; in the same way that Americans and others speak of a “post 9/11 world” and most can recall where they were and what they were doing on “that day,” people in Japan will probably think of society and their own lives in “pre-“ and “post-“ 3/11 terms.
What will become the hallmarks of “post-3/11” Japan? Historians make notoriously bad fortunetellers (although no worse so than many social scientists, it would seem), but there are some elements of the emerging reactions to this disaster that seem to echo trends and concerns from Japan’s modern past. Others diverge from the past – or at least the immediate past of “pre-3/11 Japan” – in significant ways. I’ll examine a few of both below.
Searching for a new mode of life – coalescing forces and traditions
In an earlier posting on this blog, I talked about the buzzword and the practice of setsuden – conserving electricity – which the government and the various regional electric power companies throughout eastern Japan were promoting as a means of easing the burden on the grid during the hottest months of the year, since most nuclear power generators had been taken offline pending clearance of stress tests. With the arrival of fall, the government has since officially declared the conservation campaign over. Even so, the declaration did not result in a sudden spike in electricity consumption; many individuals, households, and companies have continued to practice setsuden even without government exhortations and conservation targets. Some Japanese, in fact, saw in the crisis that began to unfold in Fukushima Prefecture on March 11th a wake up call of sorts, one that demanded a fundamental rethinking of what affluence and convenience should mean.
It might be an exaggeration to describe this as a “movement,” but my sense is that it would be too cynical to view it simply as a fad. A public opinion survey conducted by NHK after the disaster found that 38% of those polled expressed a strong interest in shifting to a more environmentally friendly and ecologically sustainable lifestyle. (『クロスアップ現代：ライフスタイルを見つめなおすキャンドルの夜に』、NHK企画、２０１１年６月２２日放送) As concern over the Fukushima Daiichi situation grows, municipalities and even private home owners have begun to explore other options than the grid to supply their energy needs, including solar, wind, and geothermal power. Although still quite small in scale, in some areas groups of like-minded citizens have formed “transition towns,” in which families reside in group-living arrangements that seek to build community while eliminating some of the wasteful redundancy of the one-household-per-nuclear-family lifestyle; in some of these communities, for example, laundry, bathing, and even cooking facilities are communal.
There is an irony here: this “movement” – or at the very least the shift toward conservation, getting by with less stuff, and abandoning the consumerist lifestyle that characterized much of Japanese society prior to 3/11 – is more prevalent outside of the hisaichi than within it. For those living in the hardest hit areas, reacquiring the things they lost in the tsunami has taken precedence, no matter what the people there may think of the need to find a more sustainable lifestyle. As I mentioned previously, the Tohoku region led the nation in consumer spending for the first quarter after the disaster, and will probably continue to do so as the reconstruction work gains traction. I also suspect – although I have no survey data to back me up on this – that practicing this renewable, sustainable lifestyle (and perhaps even the desire to do so itself) is more prevalent among wealthier and more highly-educated Japanese than it is among the working and lower middle classes. Shifting to a sustainable lifestyle costs more, at least in the short run, than pursuing one’s old, wasteful ways.
This is in many ways what we might call a “green” consciousness, one that was by no means unheard in pre-3/11 Japan. In most areas of the country, for example, municipalities instituted mandatory separation of trash well over a decade before 2011, enabling Japan to recycle an astounding 96% of its refuse, as I mentioned before.
At the same time, though, the post-3/11 desire to simplify might also have a bit of a cultural nationalist element to it, at least for some. Consider this, for example: in spite of the asinine nature of Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintarō’s comment about the earthquake and tsunami being “divine punishment” visited on a Japan that had become too materialistic, I was surprised to find many people in the hisaichi who agreed with his assessment. Yes, the timing of his comment was ill considered, most would admit, but they felt he had a point nonetheless: the Japanese had become a nation of conspicuous consumers with no broader or deeper vision of what was really important in life. They also agreed with something that Ishihara only implied in his statement, by claiming that the Japanese “had become” too materialistic, instead of accusing them of simply “being” so: that there was a time, back somewhere in the nation’s past, when this was not the case. In one sense this is good old nostalgic nationalism: the “old days” are always simpler, kinder, and purer (in a cultural and even ethnic sense as well as a moral one) than things are today. Such visions of a better past, before everything went to hell in a shopping basket, can be found in any modern state that builds a sense of national unity around the specter of a shared past. These notions are as ubiquitous as they are inaccurate. Japan is of course no exception to this phenomenon, but the argument seems to have a particular appeal across the political spectrum here, due to a preoccupation with the impact of the West on Japanese culture, as well as Japan’s “client state” relationship with that mecca of consumerism itself, the United States, since the end of the Occupation. Owing to the peculiar historical nature of that relationship, however, decrying the evils of materialism in Japan, whether from the Left or the Right, often carries an implicit criticism of the relationship itself, and Japan’s emasculated position within it.
In brining this up, I don’t mean to suggest that every Japanese person who now believes that it is time to rethink his or her lifestyle should, by dint of that belief, be regarded as a staunch nationalist. 3/11 and its aftermath, however, have once again raised the perennial question – what does it mean to be Japanese? – with a renewed sense of urgency. One possible answer to that question is a retooled cultural essentialism that makes hollow claims to Japanese “uniqueness” and discounts the values shared with other peoples and cultures. Another would be to call for a return to “traditional Asian values,” without first establishing what those values are or how they actually differ from (and are superior to) the values one seeks to discard.
If a return to some variety of cultural nationalism is one possible avenue, however, a return to a different kind of past also seems to be taking place. The nuclear crisis at Fukushima Daiichi, and the subsequent realization that TEPCO, the central government, and most of the mainstream media in Japan tried to cover up or otherwise downplay the severity of the situation throughout much of the spring, as the failed reactors and spent fuel pools spewed radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere and ocean, has revived a willingness to protest in Japan. By late March, TEPCO’s mishandling of the situation and lack of clear explanations for what happened and why led to demonstrations in front of its Tokyo headquarters, some of which led in turn to clashes with the police mobilized to protect the company and its executives. Chat sites on the internet soon carried the names, addresses, and salaries of TEPCO executives, along with demands that they take responsibility for the disaster by descending into the fractured reactor containment vessels themselves. Death threats were also sent to the company, along with thousands of messages of a less extreme nature that arrived daily from throughout Japan. But the main focus became the demonstrations, which have continued to grow in size. On September 19, in fact, a demonstration in Tokyo attracted a crowd of 50,000 from across different generations and all walks of life. Such a turnout for a demonstration has probably not been seen in Tokyo since the heyday of postwar popular oppositional politics in the 1950s and 60s.
50,000 demonstrators gather in Tokyo’s Meiji Park to protest the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.
The thrust of these protest is not simply to criticize the mishandling of the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi facility or the way TEPCO and government officials tried to cover up and then down play the dangers it posed; the protestors are calling for an end to the government’s long term energy policy that placed nuclear power generation at the center of Japan’s electricity supply. The demand itself is nothing new, either. There has always been a fairly vocal, albeit small, anti-nuclear power faction in Japan – as the only country ever to suffer attacks by nuclear weapons it could hardly be otherwise – and despite the best efforts of the government and the nuclear power industry to put people’s minds at ease about the safety of nuclear power through school textbooks and advertisements, most Japanese felt a great deal of ambivalence about the reactors even prior to 3/11. Familiar “not in my backyard” opposition prevented power plants from being built in areas were the local population was large enough and its standard of living high enough to mount staunch opposition, to the result that most of the country’s 54 reactors are located in rural areas that were sparsely populated prior to the construction of the plants, and/or suffered from legacies of socioeconomic disadvantage. Once established, the companies bought off local governments, politicians, and even residents through a variety of means, to the extent that the local economy became largely dependant on the existence of the plant. Even in such areas, however, most residents viewed the monster in their midst as a necessary evil. Most other Japanese were content to not think about where their electricity came from, but this of course was not the same thing as unequivocal support for nuclear power.
The alarming extent of the spread of radiation from Fukushima Daiichi and its insidious threat to the national food supply, however, has caused a sea change in public opinion. Furthermore, the obvious parallels between the victims of this disaster and those who suffered the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki add to the sense of national importance, due to the central position of the two cities in the iconography of Japan’s postwar pacifist nationalism. If fact, by sheer linguistic coincidence, the Japanese terms for “those who survived the atomic bombings” and, more generically, “those who have been exposed to radiation” just happened to be homonyms written in slightly different character combinations: 被爆者 for the former and 被曝者 for the latter, both read “hibakusha.”
Along with the willingness to gather and protest, the protest song too may be coming back into style. As with the anti-nuclear movement itself, the protest song genre never completely died out in Japan after the 1960s, but during the “Bubble years” of the roaring 80s the Japanese folk music scene all-but disappeared, and upbeat pop ditties touting a consumerist “youth culture” lifestyle came to dominate the Japanese popular music scene. The result was that protest was no longer “cool.”
In light of the Fukushima fiasco, however, that may be changing. Just one case in point: singer/songwriter Saito Kazuyoshi. Saito has been making commercially successful music since his debut in 1993. Although his sound is more rock than pop, he’s not known for writing politically charged material. As criticism of TEPCO and the government mounted, however, he revisited one of his hits, a ballad of unrequited love titled “I was always fond of you” (Zutto suki data), and rewrote the words to create the protest song “It was all a lie” (Zutto uso data). I’ll just give you a taste, from the first verse and refrain:
If you walk around this country,
you’ll find 54 nuclear power plants.
The textbooks and commercials told us,
“they’re safe.”
They deceived us,
And now their excuse is this was “unexpected.”
The sky I miss,
now pestered by the black rain.
(refrain)
It was all a lie.
And now it’s come to light.
It was really just a lie,
that nuclear power is “safe.”
It was all a lie.
I want to eat spinach again.
So now you see what’s going on.
There’s no way to stop the radiation blowing in the wind.
How many people will be exposed,
before the government of this country takes notice?
Here’s the video clip that Saito posted, with the lyrics in Japanese added in:
(Just in case you’re wondering, “black rain” is a reference to the fallout-laden rain that fell from the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. Saito mentions spinach because it was one of the first agricultural products from Fukushima Prefecture to show signs of contamination with radioactive cesium 137.)
Anger about the situation in Fukushima Prefecture and opposition to any further development of nuclear power in its wake are not the only things bringing people in Japan together these days. The disaster seems to have urged people to rethink the importance of the connections they share with those around them. According to a survey by NHK, even outside of the three Tohoku prefectures most heavily damaged on March 11th, 57 percent of those polled claimed that the disaster taught them the value family and other personal relationships. Within the three prefectures of Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate, 71 percent responded that these relationships meant more to them now than they had prior to 3/11. It also urged many to give; 87 percent of those surveyed responded that they had contributed money to the relief effort. Although much smaller in proportion, eight percent also said they had volunteered on relief work in the hisaichi. The exact number would be impossible to determine, but the same survey estimated that in the first half-year since the disaster, 7.5 million people had taken part in some form of volunteer work in the Tohoku area. (The survey and its results were reported on NHK’s nightly news program “News Watch 9” on September 5, 2011.)
This renewed sense of the importance of relationships is captured in a single Japanese word that has become something of a slogan in post-3/11 Japan, along side the gabare-type exhortations I mentioned previously: kizuna (絆). Prior to the disaster, this was a simple noun, covering about the same range of meanings as its English translations of “bonds” and “ties,” such as in the phrase kazoku no kizuna (family ties). After 3/11, however, it took on a new ideographic sense of importance. The character came to symbolize the idea that people would only get through this together; that reaching out to others to help them was not just a virtue, but in fact the proper form of human society. Kizuna suggested the importance of not just giving of oneself, but of the relationship between giver and receiver as members of a greater community.
Is it more than just a slogan, though? It is probably still too soon to tell. Furthermore, as we’ll see below, there are contradictory trends that seem to suggest that this sudden discovery of the importance of social cohesion has its limits.
That said, however, a few observations about the new volunteer spirit and its potential for lasting impact seem in order. The first is this: while a volunteer rate of eight percent of the national population may not seem like a mass movement (or maybe it should?), it is important to make note of the fact that many of these volunteers belong to the under-30 demographic. Why is this significant? Because in much the same way that American pundits wring their hands about the lack of public spiritedness among the young – be they “generation X-ers,” “millennials,” or what have you – Japanese pundits across the political spectrum have tended to view the youth of Bubble-era and post-Bubble Japan in much the same terms. Young people in today’s Japan, so the common characterization goes, have no sense of ambition, do not understand the value of community, do not understand the meaning of hard work, etc., etc. The much–maligned image of the “freeter” in Japan is that of a young person who lives parasitically off of his or her parents, while working only long enough at part-time jobs to earn enough money to pay for a lifestyle based the immediate gratification of consumerist desires. This image is not only wrong in assuming that most choose to become “freeters” (in fact, given the lack of full-time employment opportunities for college graduates over the past decade in Japan, living at home while working part-time is the only option many young people have to get by), but in light of the surge in volunteerism among this generation, the charge that they are self-centered hedonists is simply wrong.
Again, during my stay at Watanohaus I met many Japanese among the eight percent, most of them under age 35. Groups of college kids generally came for short stays, but I learned from talking with them that for many this was not their first time: they had done volunteer work in Ishinomaki or in other hisaichi areas before contacting JEN. While college students often volunteered in groups, and introduced themselves in a way that suggested they saw themselves as representatives of their universities, there were also folks – a bit older (or even much older) – who had become, for lack of a better way to describe it, professional volunteers. Folks like the Ishida family and Hana-chan exemplified the type. They were the “repeaters,” who had stayed at Watanohaus on several occasions prior to my brief time there and, judging from what I have gleaned from their frequent Facebook updates, they have been back more than once since. As I said before in regard to the special camaraderie among volunteers, it is easy to see how people can get addicted to this. But I doubt that is the only reason they keep coming back; the convenience and comfort of the “real world” have their seductive power, too, after all. No, there is something else going on with these folks. Perhaps they’ve discovered that the easiest way to stay hopeful is to stay involved.
Hana-chan and Cat on lunch break during yet another day of cleaning rain ducts in Ishinomaki. Lord that pavement looks comfortable!
And that is something that they can take with them, even beyond the situation in Tohoku. This is where I believe the term “professional” best suits the kind of volunteers they have become. They have learned the value of helping and the skills to do it in the Tohoku hisaichi, but this knowledge can be employed in any disaster. Hana-chan is a case in point: during the last week of September, she traveled once again from her home in Osaka to Miyagi – this time to the city of Kessenuma – to do more volunteer work there. No sooner had she arrived than a massive typhoon slammed into the Kii Peninsula, along the southeastern coast of the island of Honshu. TV broadcasts showed footage of the aftermath that looked eerily like the coast of Tohoku had back in the immediate aftermath of 3/11, albeit on a much smaller scale. Tohoku had come a long way since then, so she decided that Kessenuma would be all right for a few days without her. Hana-chan packed her bags and headed down to the most recent hisaichi to lend a hand.
Avoidance and prejudice – divisive forces and the pall of radiation
If people like Hana-chan are worthy of sainthood, however, we should remember that most people in Japan, as anywhere, remain bound to a day-to-day existence in which the extent of both their desires and troubles seldom reaches far beyond themselves and those closest to them. The same NHK survey that I cited, above, also examined current levels of donations to and volunteer participation with relief organizations that continue to operate in the Tohoku area. Despite the fact that all the major broadcasters continue to run frequent public service announcements asking people to give, donations have rolled off dramatically. Part of this is probably what we might call “donor fatigue.” A greater part, though, seems to lie in the fact that most Japanese outside of the Tohoku area have little to no connection with it. Japan is still a surprisingly regional society, especially for a nation that emphasizes its homogeneity vis-à-vis other foreign countries.
In regard to Tohoku, this parochialism is exacerbated by a long-standing image of the region as an economic and cultural backwater. The view of the region as somehow culturally “different” from the rest of Japan dates back to premodern times; indeed, its roots may lie in the fact that the Japanese court fought a series of sporadic wars against the so-called emishi tribes in these parts for control of northeastern Honshu during the ancient period. By Tokugawa times, at any rate, travelers from Edo and points further southwest commented with a mixture of fascination and disapproval on the strange customs and incomprehensible dialect of the region. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, poor climate and a series of disastrous crop failures, coupled with high tenancy rates and usurious land rents led to widespread poverty that further strengthened the image of the region as hopelessly backward. (For an insightful history of the construction of Tohoku as an “alien” region, see Kawanishi Hidemichi, Tōhoku – tsukurareta ikyō, Tokyo: Chūkō shinsho, 2001.) The notion persisted until surprisingly recently, in fact. In 1988, when the central government was contemplating the relocation of some of its ministries to other cities, Saji Keizō, Osaka Chamber of Commerce head and CEO of Suntory Beer, went on record to criticize plans to move some of these offices to Sendai. The Tohoku area, he explained, had been the ancient home of peoples opposed to the throne and, presumably as a result, had a very low level of cultural development. (http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/東北熊襲発言)
Prejudice to the level of Saji’s statement is probably very rare today. Still, certain reverberations linger. A case in point is a characterization of the hisaisha that cropped up in countless Japanese reports on the disaster, especially in the immediate aftermath; much like the foreign media said of the Japanese people as a whole, the Japanese media emphasized how gaman-zuyoi, or “good at putting up with adversity” the people of Tohoku were by nature. There seems to be a bit of a backhanded compliment in this. The people of Tohoku are assumed to be gaman-zuyoi because they have had so much practice at it. Below the surface of the compliment is the image of a hard life in an unforgiving climate, and the pointless, hopeless perseverance of stolid peasants struggling wearily through life. At the very least, the appeal to Tohoku gaman-zuyosa (the noun form, for you linguists out there) in these reports suggested – in a similar vein to David Sanger’s comment on NPR’s On Point – that although things were tough up in the hisaichi the people there could take it, because they were used to living under harsh conditions. While I have no doubt that the intention behind such characterizations was to express a sense of awe and admiration for just how well the victims appeared to be dealing with the crisis in the early days and weeks, it also implied that the people of the region would be okay, at a time when that was far from certain. It still isn’t; a recent survey of survivors’ attitudes found that many believe things are harder for them now both financially and psychologically than they were in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami. (NHK Special: 追いつめられた被災者, broadcast 9/10/11). The region has also seen a gradual rise in suicide rates over the past few months.
In tandem with donor fatigue, regionalism, and whatever parochial prejudice there may be, benign or otherwise, perhaps the largest factor in the decline of donations and volunteers is the decreasing visibility of the present conditions in the hisaichi in the national media. By “media” here I mean more than just the news media; TV, print, and internet news outlets continue to cover the reconstruction efforts, although with somewhat diminishing frequency. Beyond the news, however, the pop culture industry has moved on. Japan’s ubiquitous “wide shows” (variety/talk shows broadcast during the late morning through early afternoon time slot) carry very little on the situation in Tohoku. The disaster-related news that they do offer generally concerns the nuclear crisis and, especially, the threat that its spreading veil of radioactive contamination poses to you, the viewer. NHK has been far more consistent is keeping the plight of the hisaisha in the public eye, through regular segments on its news hours and frequent documentaries on various aspects of the disaster – most likely because, as a public entity, it is supposed to operate in the public interest (as NHK itself chooses to define it) and is less beholden to the wishes of advertisers than its commercial rivals. Even on NHK, however, this coverage represents only a small portion of the broadcast day.
The result is that the present state of things in the hisaichi areas is much less visible to the nation than it was back in March, April, and May. This is what prompted Toba Futoshi, the mayor of Rikuzen Takata that I mentioned in a previous post, to write his book. According to Toba, what most people outside of the stricken areas see in the media these days is stock footage of towns reduced to rubble, often juxtaposed to images of the same areas, now largely cleared of debris. The unintended message this sends is that the areas are making progress toward recovery and reconstruction. Viewers are lulled into the belief that the gradual disappearance of stories on Tohoku in the news must mean that progress is being made and things are getting back to “normal.” If they are moving toward anything, though, it is a “new normal” that is far from desirable. The same NHK Special I mentioned, above, reported on the situation in Ishinomaki, where some of those dislocated by the tsunami have started to move out of the shelters and back into upper floors of their severely damaged homes. In some cases these homes have no electricity or running water. Why do they do this? Because most of the prefab temporary housing units that have not already been taken are located at a great distance from the city center, in areas that are very inconvenient without a car. Although Ishinomaki’s problems may be particularly severe in this regard, across the hisaichi there is a growing sense that reconstruction has stalled. In response to a survey question on the state of reconstruction work in their towns, 74 percent of municipal officials in towns hit by the tsunami responded that the pace of work had slowed in recent months or was not progressing at all.
Yama-chan walks past a row of prefab housing units, complete and ready for occupancy but still empty, since they are located too far from central Ishinomaki to commute from without a car.
The decline of media attention is only to be expected, perhaps. “Getting back to normal” for folks outside of the hisaichi means getting back to a state in which one’s own problems and desires take precedence over those of complete strangers; indeed, the very notion of “complete strangers” as people with whom one shares no connection is part of this sense of normality.
And the news in Japan today provides plenty to worry about. Since the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi, Japanese viewers have been subjected to a crash course in the science of radioactive isotopes. Terms such as millisieverts, microsieverts, and bequerels – all measures of the amount of radiation detected in a given area or object – come up repeatedly in the news, although despite occasional efforts to enlighten the public on what these terms actually mean and measure, most viewers have very little idea about them, beyond the understanding that the higher the number, the worse things must be. Detection, quantification, and reporting have led to new fears – and with these new patterns of avoidance and even prejudice – not only because the viewing public tend to be unclear on the concepts, but also because even the experts admit that the state of our understanding of how much radiation is tolerable is not very well developed. The current guidelines of the Japanese government declare that individuals should not be exposed to more than 1 millisievert per year above the natural level of background radiation, but this is more of an arbitrary number than a level based on painstaking research. In fact, the long-term effects of exposure at this and even lower levels have not been studied, nor is it understood how radiation at lower doses might affect children differently from adults.
A map of average levels of detected radioactive contamination by area, complied from local readings taken as of September 11, 2011. The readings are in microsieverts per hour (μSv/h). Red = 8 or more μSv/h; dark orange = 4 or more μSv/h; orange = 2 or more μSv/h, and so on, in descending order. It should be noted that, while this map is detailed, the values assigned are interpolated from the average readings observed across the area; in any given area, readings will often fluctuate significantly from one sample location to another. For example, red indicates that there is a greater preponderance of “hot spots” in that zone with readings of >8 μSv/h; not that every location within the red area registered >8 μSv/h. (Source: http://kipuka.blog70.fc2.com/ the personal blog of Dr. Hayakawa Yukio, a volcanologist at Gunma University who specializes in distribution dynamics of ash after volcanic eruptions.)
The main concern that has emerged in this crisis is over “internal exposure.” In any sort of nuclear event, one can be exposed to the radiation produced externally, by absorbing the radioactive particles that are emitted by decaying radioactive isotopes in the immediate environment, or internally, by actually ingesting those isotopes into one’s mucus membranes, lungs, or digestive track. The latter is more harmful than the former. As long as the emitter of radiation is external, I as victim am only exposed to the radioactive particles emitted straight in my direction; if they don’t hit me, they don’t hurt me. If the emission source gets inside my body, however, I’m exposed to all of the radiation it produces, no matter in what direction it is emitted. Putting children at risk for this kind of exposure is doubly dangerous, because of the relative length of exposure they will have to suffer in comparison with adults, and the effects this will have on the cells of their bodies as they grow and age. We know that radiation can damage the DNA of cells, and that when this damaged DNA is copied in the process of mitosis the result may produce malfunctioning, cancerous cells, which then go on to produce more of their kind. For adults, however, the spread may be so slow at low levels of exposure that the individual may well died of other natural causes before cancer takes its toll. In children, however, the greater rate of cell reproduction during their growing years, along with the greater number of years they would have left in their normal life span from the time of exposure increase the likelihood that DNA damage could lead to cancers over time.
Add to this uncertainty a deep mistrust of the government and TEPCO over the botched response to the crisis and their initial efforts at “damage control” by concealing the extent of the problem, and the result is a perfect storm of popular concern for the safety of oneself and one’s family and suspicion of information disseminated by officials. The discovery of hot-spots well outside of the 30km evacuation perimeter has exacerbated this reaction. The phenomenon, little understood prior to the Fukushima disaster, first came to light soon after the quake, when surprisingly high levels of radioactive iodine-131 were detected in drinking water reservoirs serving Tokyo Prefecture, despite the fact that they were a great distance from the evacuation zone. Since then, hot spots have been detected well outside of the zone, sometimes with levels of radiation exceeding areas within the zone. This iodine, as well as the radioactive cesium that is now turning up in hot-spots scattered in some cases over 100km from the plant, escaped into the atmosphere during the hydrogen explosions that blew the roofs off buildings housing reactors 1, 3, and 4, as well as in the plumes of radioactive steam that were released in order to lower mounting pressure in the containment vessels at several times in the days following the meltdowns in three of the six reactors at the plant.
Satellite image of the radioactive plume released from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (located along the coast of Hnoshu, under the red tip of one of the plume’s tendrils), taken at 11am, March 15, 2011. Red indicates the highest levels of cesium 137 (greater than 200 bequerels per cubic meter) and dark blue the lowest (less than 0.5 per cubic meter).
When rain fell through this plume, as it did in many parts of Japan on March 15th, it carried radioactive isotopes in it to the ground, creating the now seemingly ubiquitous hot spots. Subsequent releases of steam from the reactors produced similar plumes, creating new hot-spots. In fact, the government’s decision to establish an evacuation perimeter now appears to be based on a flawed understanding of how radiation spreads in accidents of this kind – one more appropriate to a nuclear explosion than to the release of airborne radioactive isotopes. (See, for example, the eye-opening report on a survey of radiation levels in Fukushima Prefecture conducted by the watchdog group Safecast, issued September 20, 2011, http://blog.safecast.org/2011/09/safecasting-inside-the-evacuation-zone/)
Although iodine 131 was detected in great abundance at first, with a fairly short half-life of about a week it is nowhere near the threat posed by cesium 137, with a half-life of 30 years. This long half-life (and bear in mind that half-life means, in this case, that after 30 years the radioactivity of a given sample has only diminished by half), along with the fact that the isotope has entered the food chain and been detected in a variety of meats and vegetables that made their way into national distribution networks, has added an understandable sense of panic to the suspicion. Since there are no conclusive studies on the long-term effects of low dose radiation, no one knows how much is too much. Yet despite the fact that hot-spots have been discovered at a great distance from the Fukushima plant, the continued images of the 30km evacuation zone on any map of the country that appears on the news in connection with the crisis, as well as an all-too-common tendency to believe that things can’t possibly be so bad in one’s own neighborhood (as long as that neighborhood isn’t too near the plant, that is), has led to various understandings of how much of Japan has been contaminated and how much of it is safe. The website “nanohana,” just one of many blogs providing information on the crisis from Japanese and foreign sources for consumers and concerned citizens, parodied this multiplicity of interpretations with a series of “range of contamination” maps, which I have copied from the site and provided translations for, below. (A shout-out to Facebook friend Ogura Satoko for the introduction. The original page can be found at: http://nanohana.me/?p=5003)
What people in Tohoku think is the range of contamination
What people in the Kanto area think is the range of contamination
What people in Hokkaido think is the range of contamination
What politicians think is the range of contamination
What people in the Kansai area think is the range of contamination
What people in Okinawa think is the range of contamination
What people overseas think is the range of contamination
What TEPCO thinks is the range of contamination
Parody aside, though, uncertainty over the effects of low-level radiation, coupled with the tendency for people to imagine that there is a specific region of Japan that is contaminated more-or-less uniformly and thus must be avoided has produced very unfortunate reactions. In the second post on this blog (“First and other impressions”) I mentioned reports of children evacuated from Fukushima being shunned and teased by kids at the schools they had transferred into, because these children believed that they could “catch” radiation from the Fukushima evacuees. I also mentioned the case of a woman who returned to her parents’ home in Tokyo from Fukushima, only to have people in the neighborhood express their dissatisfaction at the presence of a car with Fukushima license plates parked in their local lot. Such stories were all-too-common in the early months after 3/11. Nor were they confined to areas outside of Tohoku; one of the most discouraging stories of the kind I heard was from Sendai, told to me by Hariu-san as we drove back from my first visit to Ishinomaki. Apparently, in the days soon after the growing enormity of the crisis in Fukushima became widely known, a convenience story in Sendai posted signs at the entrance to its parking lot, asking costumers with Fukushima license plates to refrain from parking there, since it would be “bad for business” to do so. Hisaisha discriminating against other hisaisha.
At first glance, it is tempting to see in these acts of ostracism a basic misunderstanding of how radiation poisoning works. Radiation cannot be passed from one individual to another, after all, nor would a car be able to absorb enough radiation to become radioactive itself, even if it had been parked near the failed reactors – which most cars from Fukushima had not. But in the reactions on the part of adults, at least, the underlying cause of the ostracism in these cases probably has less to do with any misunderstanding the science involved than a desire to avoid association with anything that threatens to draw negative attention to oneself, for whatever reason. Note that those who react negatively to the presence of vehicles with Fukushima plates say nothing about the threat of radioactive contamination. The cars aren’t described as a health hazard; they’re just “inconvenient” or “bad for business.” What’s going on here is not so much a concern for one’s health as it is a concern for one’s reputation; the perpetrators are not trying to avoid radiation, but rather stigmatization through association with the unfortunate situation of Fukushima.
This seems to be a modern recasting of what historians of discrimination in Japan have called kegare ishiki, or “a preoccupation with defilement.” In tradition Japanese culture, the argument goes, avoidance of physical and spiritual defilement was a major everyday concern. The variety of things that could cause such defilement was myriad, and religious traditions such as Shinto in particular prescribed various procedures for avoiding it, or else ridding oneself of it once contracted. Since ridding oneself of defilement was typically an arduous process that required a certain period of self-imposed exile or “quarantine” from the community to complete, however, it was best just to avoid all contact with sources of defilement whenever humanly possible. This premodern way of viewing the world dovetailed seamlessly with modern, Western ideas such as germ theory, hygiene, and eugenics when they first entered Japan in the late 19th century. The combination yielded new, “modern” reasons for ostracizing certain groups of people, such as those suffering from Hansen’s disease (leprosy), outcastes under the feudal system of social status and their descendants, and the poor in general (including those in Tohoku and other culturally “peripheral” regions like it). In the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, survivors faced social ostracism from other Japanese for similarly pseudo-scientific reasons. The current avoidance of refugees and others from Fukushima seems strikingly similar in its genesis.
I suggest this as an explanation with some unease, however, for two reasons: for one, as an explanation for contemporary Japanese behavior, it smacks of a cultural determinism not unlike that employed by Western journalists in their appeals – pro and con – to the power of the Japanese trait of gaman (although the idea of kegare ishiki is at least a bit more historically informed than that). Second is the shadow that the unknown effect of low dose radiation casts upon the situation. When Japanese in the early twentieth century quarantined Hansen’s patients in leper colonies and avoided contact with outcastes, the poor, and others, they often explained their reasons for doing so in “scientific” terms: these people spread diseases and compromised the gene pool. We now know these explanations to be so much pseudo-scientific drivel. When a business owner today asks customers from Fukushima not to park their cars in his lot because it is “bad for business,” he may do some because he actually believes their vehicles are radioactive, or he may simply do so because he is afraid that other potential customers will think so, and avoid his business as a result – in the former case, he is ignorant, in the latter, gutless. But when a consumer thinks twice about buying rice or vegetables grown in Fukushima, despite official assurances that the produce is “clean,” or the citizens of a city well outside of the Tohoku area begin to have second thoughts about accepting debris from the Tohoku area for disposal in local landfills and recycling centers for fear that it may have come from a hot-spot area – as is happening now with increasing frequency – what are we to make of it? Given the unknowns involved, can we blame them?
One answer would be to put a Geiger counter to everything and declare it “clean” before sale or processing, thus dispelling any reasonable basis for doubt. Yet this is not so feasible in practice (to take the case of meat, it apparently takes nearly an hour to test a sample, and the number of machines designed to do this is limited, whereas in the case of debris, the sheer volume of it presents similar challenges for thorough screening), nor would doing so necessarily satisfy people who have lost faith in official proclamations of “safety” in the wake of the government’s mishandling of the situation at Fukushima Daiichi.
A recent unfortunate incident in Kyoto provides a poignant illustration of the dilemma. The “Gozan no Okuribi” festival takes place there every year on the evening of August 16th. It is a festival to conclude the Obon holidays, during which the spirits of departed ancestors supposedly return to be with their living loved ones and descendants. The Gozan no Okuribi is thus in essence a farewell to these spirits, and involves the lighting of bonfires in the shape of various Chinese characters and illustrations on city-ward sides of the five mountains surrounding Kyoto. The most famous of these is the “daimon-ji” fire, in the shape of the Chinese character for “great” or “big” (大). The combined length of the three strokes of this character for the bonfire is roughly 360 meters, which requires a substantial supply of logs to create.
The tsunami made large supplies of lumber available for the purpose. In Rikuzen Takata in particular, the 16-meter high wave destroyed a picturesque forest of nearly 70,000 pine trees that had lined the coast since its initial planting and cultivation as a wave break in the early Tokugawa period. Out of the 70,000, only one tree survived. Understanding the meaning of the Gozan no Okuribi festival and the need for logs to build its bonfires, Mayor Toba contacted his counterpart in Kyoto to see if he would be interested in accepting logs prepared from the fallen pines for constructing the daimon–ji bonfire. The mayor of Kyoto agreed, and a group of survivors in Rikuzen Takata set to work cutting some of the fallen trees into logs for shipment to Kyoto. As they did so, they wrote the names of friends and loved ones lost to the tsunami on the logs, so that the bonfire would serve as a memorial to those who died.
But this is where the story turns from touching to maddening. In early August, after news of the planned use of logs from Rikuzen Takata became known in Kyoto, some residents of the city contacted the organizers of the festival to protest the decision out of concern that the wood might be radioactive. The initial shipment of 340 logs had already arrived and was duly screened for traces of cesium and other radioactive isotopes. Despite that fact that city officials determined that the logs were contamination-free, however, festival organizers decided that it would be better to allay citizens’ fears by not burning the logs in the festival. The shipment was returned to Rikuzen Takata, where the town used it for its own bonfire ceremony on August 8th.
When the story hit the national news, Kyoto city hall was once again barraged with protests, this time from people across Japan decrying the insensitivity and arrogance of people in the “old capital,” as well as from residents of the city who felt deeply ashamed of the way their city had comported itself. With just a few days left before the festival, another shipment of 500 logs was ordered from Rikuzen Takata. This time, however, there was another problem: a foot-long section of the lumber, tested at random from the shipment, revealed trace amounts of cesium 137. Although subsequent tests of other samples in the shipment did not test positive for the isotope, the organizers once again decided that it would be best not to use the wood.
The mayors of both cities offered their apologies to one another over the whole situation; Mayor Kadokawa of Kyoto for disappointing the people of Rikuzen Takata a second time, and Mayor Toba for the anxiety that the good people of Kyoto must have felt at the thought that radioactive smoke might waft over their festival. I am much more inclined to see the need for Kadokawa’s apology than Toba’s. Given all that the folks in Rikuzen Takata had been through since March 11th, the excessively-NIMBY reaction of some people in Kyoto seems egregiously insensitive, just as the decision of the festival organizers seems cautious to the point of cowardice. (As a postscript to the story, Buddhist monks at the Narita-san Shinshoji Temple in Chiba Prefecture burned 30 of the logs from the latter shipment in a festival held at the temple on September 25, despite the initial protests of 100 residents of the area.)
But this is the dilemma posed by nuclear contamination to a democratic society: since we really have no idea what the long term effects of internal exposure are, even at very low doses, how can such fears be definitively laid to rest? And if some folks in Kyoto get upset about burning a few hundred logs that may have trace amounts of cesium on them, how are municipalities ever going to convince their residents to allow tons of debris from the hisaichi to be processed in their backyards? The out-sourcing of debris processing is of crucial importance to the work of reconstruction in Tohoku; it would take Miyagi Prefecture an estimated 23 years to dispose of the 18.2 millions tons of debris left in its coastal communities by the tsunami on its own. Yet the concerns of Japanese outside of Tohoku are real, not unreasonable, and would be ignored only at the peril of central, prefectural, and local governments alike. (In recognition of this fact, the central government has declared that the debris in Fukushima Prefecture – all 3.4 million tons of it – will have to be processed and disposed of “in-house.”)
All of this undermines the sentiments in ubiquitous slogans such as kizuna and ganbarō Nihon (“Hang in there, Japan!”), with their appeal to mutual support and shouldering the hardships of reconstruction together. “We will gladly share your burdens, just not that particular burden,” seems to be the unintended national message to the people and communities most severely affected by the tsunami in general and the Fukushima Daiichi fiasco in particular. But given the uncertainties of the science of radioactive contamination, who can blame them?
There is another layer of irony here, too, involving the nation-state. Shortly after the worsening situation at Fukushima Daiichi wrested the world’s attention away from the plight of the tsunami victims and urged media outlets across the globe to offer alarming reports on what the release of radiation into the environment might mean for the safety of food supplies in their own countries, Japan’s trading partners around that Asian Pacific rim either banned or else placed stringent restrictions on imports of agricultural and other products from Japan, pending reliable assurances from the Japanese government that these exports were contamination-free. In at least one case, a cargo ship from Japan that showed heightened levels of radiation was turned away before reaching its port of destination in China. Some Japanese pundits claimed that this was overkill based on hysteria – if not in fact a ploy to take advantage of the crisis to shut out Japanese imports to the benefit of domestic producers. It is quite likely that many “just plain folks” in Japan during the spring of 2011 agreed with such views. One wonders how they might feel now about processing debris from the hisaichi in their hometown.