One year has passed since the earthquake and tsunami in Tōhoku. How should we as scholars approach, think about, and teach about the disaster? In generations hence, will 2011 be treated as a historical turning point on a par with 1945? Will it appear more significant than the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, despite the far greater loss of life in that event? We have a long process of analysis and contextualization ahead before the traumatic events of March 2011 have sedimented into history. Meanwhile, the nuclear disaster continues. When the Japanese government announced in December that complete decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors would take forty years, it became clear that even in the most optimistic scenario the world would be living with this disaster for a long time to come.
Below are three essays, each very different in approach, that encompass some of the broader issues for us as humanists and social scientists one year on, and begin the work of making sense of March 11 and its aftermath. Sociologist Yoshimi Shun'ya situates the Fukushima nuclear site in the context of the U.S.-Japan relationship and the history of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, explicitly framing the event in relation to Japan's long postwar period. Historian of science Gregory Clancey encompasses a longer time span by examining the role of Japanese earthquake science in predicting disasters—for which the real context of the event is geological time. Yet as Clancey shows, earthquake prediction is as embedded in the nature of Japan's modernity as is nuclear science—and the faiths and investments involved in the two are inseparable. Political and social historian Alexis Dudden brings the focus to the ground level in post-March 11 Fukushima Prefecture and beyond, moving outside the confines of academic analysis to see the crisis through the eyes of evacuees stuck in the limbo caused by ambiguous policy, ineptitude, and deception on the part of the authorities and the power company. For Dudden and for her informants, it is too early to talk of historical context. First we must understand what to do with the anxiety and the anger of the present moment.
Certain words and phrases widely used in Japan over this past year provide insight into how politicians, experts, media, and the general public are beginning to contextualize the disaster themselves. From what might be called the lexicon of March 11, a few key terms worth highlighting for their contemporary significance appear in Clancey's, Dudden's, and Yoshimi's essays, and provide the structure for this introduction.
“Beyond Expectation”
As Gregory Smits has pointed out, throughout Japan's history, natural disasters were called “unprecedented” at the time they occurred, then later recognized as recurrent events with a long history (Smits Reference Smits2011). This time, however, the phrase most used is not “unprecedented” (mizou 未曾有) but “beyond expectations” (sōteigai 想定外), a reminder that in the modern era there are expected disasters; this one just happened to be outside the spectrum of prediction. Clancey's essay reveals what a central role prediction has played in the science of seismology in Japan. If earthquake prediction is in some measure a peculiarly Japanese scientific enterprise, it reflects not only the archipelago's extraordinary vulnerability to catastrophic earthquakes but also the great faith placed by Japanese society since the Meiji Restoration in the capacity of science to overcome natural limits.
The same faith in meliorative science and the predictability of disaster form the foundations of the nuclear power industry as well. Experts rely on mathematical modeling called “probabilistic risk assessment.” As physicist M. V. Ramana writes in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, these risk assessments ignore the past history of accidents and fail to account for the “indirect, non-linear, and feedback relationships that characterize many accidents in complex systems.” The results of probabilistic risk assessment sometimes diverge by several orders of magnitude from calculations based on known cases. While one plant claims a probability of one serious accident per twelve million years—a risk most people would deem tolerable—calculations based on the history of the performance of all reactors to date support the assessment that, with a worldwide increase in the number of reactors from the present 440 to 1,000, we should expect a serious accident on a frequency exceeding once every year and a half (Ramana Reference Ramana2011).
Belief that natural forces on this scale can be safely managed also involves faith in the state. For much of the period since 1945, a technocratic government served as the guarantor of safety and well-being in Japan. Alongside privatization of government assets in the 1980s, moves toward greater local government autonomy in the 1990s, and finally the dissolution of single-party rule after the millennium, a subtle but significant shift has occurred in this compact between Japanese state and society. In the Fifth Comprehensive National Development Plan, issued in 1998, policymakers acknowledged for the first time the need for planning to reduce damage when infrastructure failed in a disaster. Until this time, the operating logic of state disaster management had been that sufficient fortification could ensure zero damage (Sekiya Reference Sekiya and Kaoru2011, 243). Introduction of the term “damage reduction” (gensai) at this time reflected a shift from the model of an omnipotent technocratic state—the state image essential to the U.S.-Japan collaboration on nuclear development that Yoshimi describes—to a fallible one. As Dudden shows, the aftermath of the March 11 disaster has exposed not only government fallibility but also the terrible inadequacy of the present system to cope with the unforeseen.
German sociologist Ulrich Beck visited Japan in late 2010 for a series of seminars built around his influential work Risk Society. That book argues that, despite success in alleviating poverty, mature industrial society has launched a new historical phase of “global risk,” in which the distribution of hazards uncontainable by traditional political boundaries has taken on greater significance than the distribution of wealth. Beck was proofreading the first edition of Risk Society in April 1986 when the Chernobyl disaster occurred. With a last-minute preface about Chernobyl, the book became famous as a prescient theorization of events then unfolding. In the spring of 2011, he was again penning a last-minute preface, this time about Fukushima, for the Japanese publication of his 2010 lectures. Once again he found himself the man of the hour, like the “seismologist-Cassandras” discussed by Greg Clancey, the fortuitous timeliness of his theory giving him special credibility. Responding to an interview in the Asahi in July 2011, he compared humanity to people “on board an airplane for which there is no landing strip” (Beck Reference Beck2011b). Since March, many Japanese intellectuals have spoken of the “myth of safety” that the public was persuaded to believe. Beck's preface on Fukushima looked at the problem from a different angle, noting that the nuclear industry and supporting government agencies were themselves trapped in what he called “the paradox of safety”: compelled to justify an inherently dangerous technology, they promise absolute safety, then when any failure occurs, they find that the public, sensitized as much as reassured by their past explanations, loses all trust. Nor is this public response irrational, he notes, since when dealing with the risk of a disaster without spatial, temporal, or social boundaries, there is little solace in the logic of probability (Beck Reference Beck, Munenori, Beck, Munenori and Midori2011a, 3). Once the claim of predictability has been made, calling an event “beyond expectations” undermines all authority behind that claim.
“Bonds” and “Rumor Damage”
As Dudden notes, one of the most pervasive words in Japanese disaster relief campaigns since March 11 is kizuna (絆), meaning ties or bonds. The word is multivalent, implying not only the family bonds many have to people in the afflicted region, but the bonds created by voluntary aid and charity and, implicitly, the “natural” bonds of the nation. The political desire to promote bonds in this last sense gives the word a disturbing subtext for some, since invocations of “national unity” too readily recall the rhetoric of the wartime fascist state. Deployment of the emperor to address the nation on television (and in the same stroke “collectivize” the disaster, as Dudden remarks), only contributed to the uncomfortable reminder of the last great disaster that had prompted calls for “national unity,” as well as of the many unresolved issues around the political character of the postwar nation-state.
Yet even without this historical baggage, the hortatory rhetoric of kizuna arouses suspicions: Who is it that needs reminding? What rifts need mending? The massive uncertainty caused by nuclear contamination engenders not only a breakdown of trust in the government but also countless more complex divisions among citizens. Another ubiquitous term since the summer of 2011 suggests this divisiveness: media refer to the impact on Tōhoku farmers whose crops are unmarketable because of the risk of contamination as “rumor damage” (fūhyō higai 風評被害). “Rumor” here implies that the fear of contamination is unjustified. Yet what really is a rumor but a judgment made with partial information—like a “probabilistic risk assessment”? When the experts have been discredited, no one has a monopoly on knowledge, and the line between precaution and paranoia becomes difficult to draw.
In the huge gray area outside the official 20-kilometer exclusion zone around the plant, levels of radiation vary wildly from town to town, even house to house. But from outside Fukushima Prefecture, all of Fukushima readily appears contaminated—just as from overseas all of Japan was sometimes seen as a disaster area. And “rumor damage” is a problem not only of scale or distance, but of the consumer's perspective versus the producer's. Fukushima farmers' worries may seem a minor issue compared to a potential cancer risk for millions. Yet to farmers with nowhere else to go, who are determined to keep their livelihoods and convinced their products are safe, overcoming consumer distrust is a survival issue.
Affluence
Yoshimi begins his essay with what he calls the “end of the affluent postwar.” The term he uses, yutaka (豊か), is usually translated as “affluence,” but it does not imply luxury. What postwar industrial development promised was a life beyond the struggle for subsistence, a level of comfort. Yesterday's affluence often became today's norm, making comfort a shifting and relative phenomenon. But the foundation of the promise was not (as in the United States) that anyone might become rich, it was that all would be comfortable. By the late 1970s, this meant taking for granted secure housing, potable water from the tap, fresh produce year round, and energy enough for new household appliances. It is this affluence of taken-for-granted comforts that was sustained by an invisible system of power generation, a system whose stability Yoshimi suggests was built only on faith in American propaganda.
As long as comfort was unquestioned, even environmentalism could be presented as an attractive appurtenance to the comfortable lifestyle—the way organic food has become not only a cause but a form of luxury consumption. For many consumers in Japan, the question of food safety has acquired an existential edge since news of contaminated products in the national market began to emerge in the summer of 2011. Now some supermarkets and food co-ops are labeling products with radiation levels (Aoki Reference Aoki2012). The conscientious Japanese shopper is thus presumed to understand becquerels (a term few had heard before March), much as the American shopper is presumed to understand “trans-fats.” In a risk society, everyone is the expert.
Similarly, the disaster has rendered the energy dependency of ordinary life in stark terms. Prior to March 2011, Tokyo Electric (TEPCO) and other power companies had sold customers hundreds of thousands of “all-electric home” kits that included solar panels and the guarantee of back-up power as well as the agreement to buy back any excess power the household produced. Advertisements billed it as the switch to a “low-carbon style.” When the rolling blackouts began, these households found themselves with no heat or cooking energy. The solar panels did not come close to sustaining the standards of domestic comfort that customers took for granted, so the switch had only made them more dependent on the power company (Tanikawa Reference Tanikawa2011). As appealing as the idea of living off the grid sounds, few households can achieve it with present technology.
If Yoshimi is correct and the meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi returns us to the very premises of Japan's affluence—or worse, reveals them as bankrupt—then it may be in this sense that March 11, 2011, will mark a historic shift: a shift away from measuring progress in simple terms of standards of living and toward recognizing environmental risk as the most fundamental question for social well-being. In that case, it will be a shift not only for Japan but for the whole of the developed world.
