![]() These isotopes, with lifespans ranging from days to centuries, blew across Fukushima and northeastern Japan. As the reactors began to meltdown, pressure mounted in the power station’s facilities, leading to explosions that released dangerous radionuclides into the air, including caesium-134, caesium-137, strontium-90 and iodine-131. Soon, Fukushima would find its place alongside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl as an icon of nuclear disaster – and an emblem of the Anthropocene, the period when human activity has become the dominant influence on environmental change. At that moment, a magnitude 9.0-9.1 earthquake off the coast of northeastern Japan caused a devastating tsunami that set in motion a chain of events leading to the meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. It begins under the Pacific Ocean, at 2:46pm on 11 March 2011. Among rice fields, orchards and flower beds, novel modes of social organisation are emerging – new ways of living from a future we will one day all reckon with.īut the story of toxic solidarity in Fukushima doesn’t begin among rice fields and farms. They involve weaving relationships with scientists, starting independent decontamination experiments, piloting projects to create food security, and developing new ways to monitor a changing environment. These practices go far beyond traditional ‘farming’. Rather than giving up, Tanizaki and other farmers have taken matters into their own hands, embracing novel practices for living alongside toxic pollution. In Fukushima, I found a society collapsing under the weight of industrial pollution. Some villages are still abandoned.įarmers took matters into their own hands, embracing novel practices for living with toxic pollution And state-sponsored attempts at revitalisation have been ineffective, or complete failures. Village life has been transformed by forced evacuations and ongoing relocations. Residents remain uncertain about the adverse health effects of living in the region. A sense of unravelling has indeed taken hold in rural Fukushima. Stories of post-disaster collapse circulate in our collective consciousness – tales of mistrust, fear and isolation, accompanied by images of abandoned homes and towns reclaimed by plants and wildlife. I expected to find social bonds pushed to breaking point. I wanted to understand the social dynamics of this new world: to understand how radioactivity is governed after a nuclear disaster, and how different groups clash and collaborate as they attempt to navigate the road to recovery. That is why I began coming to Japan, and spending time with farmers such as Tanizaki. Watching Tanizaki measuring industrial pollution in a toxic landscape neglected by the state, I began to wonder: is this a future that awaits us all?Īs an anthropologist interested in contamination, Fukushima throws into sharp relief the question of what it means to live in a permanently polluted world. Though attempts at removing pollutants continue, a new realisation has taken hold among many of Fukushima’s farmers: there’s no going back to an uncontaminated way of life. ![]() Contamination in Fukushima, he believed, was structured in a way that no state was prepared to solve.Ī decade after the 2011 meltdown, the region remains contaminated by industrial pollution. Tanizaki called these areas ‘hot spots’ and they were scattered across the landscape, even within supposedly ‘safe’ zones on government maps. But here and there, beside a ditch or near a pond, the level was elevated dangerously high. In some places, the radiation level dropped low, becoming almost insignificant. With his Geiger counter, he showed me how radioactive elements were indifferent to the cartographic logic of the state. Almost everything now carried invisible traces of the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. And woven through it all – air, water, land, plants, and living bodies – were unseen radioactive pollutants. A troop of wild red-faced monkeys stopped foraging to watch us as we walked by. ![]() The nearby mountains were thick with emerald forests of Japanese cedar, konara oak and hinoki cypress. It was spring in 2016 when I first visited Tanizaki’s farm. The author examines maps of radioactive contamination in Fukushima. ‘Case by case,’ he said, grimly, as he guided me along the narrow paths that separated his rice fields, on the outskirts of a small village in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture. Instead, they navigated the landscape one field, one tree, one measurement at a time. Colour-coded zoning restrictions might make sense for government workers, he told me, but ‘real’ people did not experience their environment through shades of red, orange and green. As a farmer, Atsuo Tanizaki did not care much for the state’s maps of radioactive contamination.
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