Radiant scars: fallout, trauma, ghosts, and (re)worlding in Fukushima

Abstract

The triple-disasters on and after 3.11 triggered devastation of a messy, intimate, personal kind that confounds centrally organized, large-scale renewal. In time, a whole substrate of human suffering became effectively ignored and interred by the armada of cranes, backhoes, dump trucks, and bulldozers that descended on Japan’s battered coastline to restore ‘normalcy’. Japan’s focus on economic rather than emotional reconstruction—not atypical for any industrialized state—was in many ways very much in character for a country shaped by sociocultural logics of massive-scale development/public works (known as doboku). Nevertheless, Tōhoku’s recovery obscures the poorly-sutured wounds of hard-hit communities. This article considers the contours of radiance in post-3.11 Japan through a comparison of the bottom-up, impromptu ‘worlding’ processes that sustain recovering Fukushima communities and the top-down apparatuses of efficiency and rationalization mobilized in the post-tsunami reconstruction. The latter included a massive ‘decontamination’ (josen) effort that comprised by far the largest radiation response effort in history, though highly uneven and likewise misleading. Through ethnographic research, the article juxtaposes the official project and rhetoric of renewal with geographies of trauma, anxiety, and endurance in communities to interpret the complex aftermath of the disasters.