Looking for the future in Fukushima
In the three years of nuclear catastrophe that have passed since the meltdowns at Fukushima I, the traumatic encounter with irradiation in all spheres of life has stretched thin across the ordinariness of disastrous experience. Much like âKatrina,â blanket terms such as â3.11â or âthe triple disasterââstanding in for the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster, in orderâindex multiple disasters, but establish themselves as signifiers with claims to complete representation. The eventhood of this catastrophe, and the still ongoing redistribution of radioactive matter into the human lifeworld, has been consigned to a past with which, it is said, people need to part if they are to make a future.
But what futures, we could ask, are imaginable in this denial of the present-tense, indeed the presence, of Fukushima in the political landscape? This essay is an attempt to probe the temporal boundaries of the traumatic encounter with bodily contamination and mutation. I dwell on two artworks that both identify in the event a moment of transformation still unfolding in the present. One, a manifesto of collective effervescence discovered in the disavowal of human complicity; the other, a schizoaffective account of six women from Fukushima prefecture narrating the affective discrepancy between sovereignty and suffusion. Both, I think, can be read as expressions symptomatic of the same âanimatingâ encounter with radiation.
But first, let us recapitulate the disaster event from the conventional viewpoint. In the afternoon of March 11, 2011, a magnitude-nine megathrust earthquake struck 43 miles off the East coast of Japan, triggering a tsunami wave that reached 133 feet high and travelled straight through dense human settlement up to six miles inland. Official numbers from 2014 cite 15,884 dead, 6,148 injured and 2,633 missing and presumed dead from the initial onslaught, with over a million homes destroyed or damaged.
The earthquake crippled auxiliary cooling systems at the Fukushima I nuclear power plant; systems that were further devastated by successive tsunami waves. As the exposed reactor cores continue to evaporate, outlining the contours of complex mechanisms for externalizing risk and responsibility, irradiated debris from abandoned communities are distributed by the truckload to a nationwide network of incinerators built with government subsidies. This fragmented distributive machinery here becomes the site for an inquiry into the duration of the event as both locus of traumatic repression and object of struggle (â3.11 has not endedâ).
If the first few days of government disaster response was characterized by extreme âelite panicâ (Clarke 2008), on-the-ground relief work consisted in the precipitous mobilization of an enormous, precarious work force. In addition to firefighters, Self-Defense Forces and US marines, the stricken territories filled with legions of disaster relief volunteers, and an opaque but complex hierarchy of subcontractors charged with reinforcing the boundary between the anomaly of the leaking plant and the ordinariness of urban life.
Crucially, in the three years that followed, the process of general precarization seems to only have intensified. In the wake of disaster, hundreds of thousands still remain evacuated from entire cities turned into wastelands. As diagnosed cases of thyroid cancer grow exponentially, state campaigns have sought to mobilize and divert affective responses from antinuclear (anti-establishment) sentiment toward performative solidarity with tsunami victims and a national project of âreconstructionâ (fukkĆ), while simultaneously suspending populations proximate to the Fukushima nuclear plants in an indefinite state of exception. Fukushima prefecture, a vast territory of over five thousand square miles extending westward from the stricken power plants, has become both eponymous of and synonymous with the long experience of trauma that refuses to let itself be contained by the disaster event.
Simultaneously, the same three years have witnessed an explosion in popular unrest throughout the country, often characterized in terms of a âresuscitated civil societyâ. Frustration with government countermeasures debilitated by vested interest has resulted in an outburst of public protest and autonomous organizing around issues of radioactive survival and solidarity. Diffusing from periphery to center, these tendencies intersect in a rapidly diversifying movement against nuclear power. On April 10, 2011âbarely a month after the disaster, and amidst deepening fear and uncertaintyâtens of thousands gathered in Tokyo, the capitalâs largest demonstration in decades. Ostensibly a rally designed in accordance with social movement convention (the generic slogan was âno nukes!â), the April assembly and its monthly successors eventually took place in a way more akin to carnivalesque street parties, seizing on the catharsis of collective expression and the individual figure of the protester as a locus of transformative potential.
For the anonymous authors of âIn the Streets We Become Cattleâ, a curious manifesto circulated online in the following weeks and months, the disaster as event carries the pernicious seeds of a new, insurrectionary sociality. For them, the puncturing encounter of individual bodies and the dispersal of radionuclei amounts to a feminizing penetration of the hegemonic, masculinist body politic and esprit de corps of postwar Japan.
What must be admittedâvery painfullyâis that this was a disaster âMade in Japanâ (âŠ) Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to "sticking with the program"; our groupism; and our insularity (Independent investigation commission, 2012).
This concluding summary of the National Dietâs official report on the Fukushima disaster is the opening to another point of departure: âWomen of Fukushimaâ a 2012 documentary whose protagonists seem to embody the impossibility for the inflated sovereignty of bombastic activist discourse to sustain itself amidst the compulsive repetitions of traumatic memory.[Love Kind1]Â In the second part of this essay, I read Women of Fukushima alongside Karen Russellâs short story âReeling for the Empireâ to further explore the fraught relations between traumatic subjectivity and its representations; between the sense memory of traumatic experience and the demand for linear temporality in its narration, and between the extraordinary event of disaster and the ordinariness of suffering.
Radioactive fallout from the Fukushima disaster continues to be an issue both demographic and distributive as it not only pierces the bodily membranes for human interaction with the world, but persistently, if disproportionately, lodges itself in the tissue (including the genome) of entire populations. The conservative tropes that hold young mothers responsible for the most extreme measures of radiation protection (while also being disavowals of responsibility: âwhat would I (not) do if I had children?â) hide the basic structures of unequal distribution of radionuclides in human tissue.
Several aspects of this distributive logic remain pertinent to my inquiry: the ways that exposed populations have taken on elements of hibakusha stigma in financial and matrimonial contexts; that state propaganda has attempted to reframe the inevitable bodily absorption of fissile matter as an individual expression of solidarity; and conversely, attention to the body as a site of accumulation and complicity by affected people.
Thus, in this essay I am not so concerned with the agency or telos of Tokyo Electric, the Japanese state, the global nuclear village, or any other actors of the nuclear state, as with the potential agency of embedded isotopes in animating a traumatic subjectivity. My concern is not with what Bifo calls necronomyâdeath as the conceptual locus of infinitely deferred, financialized futures (Berardi 2011, 139-147)âbut an inquiry into the agentive and temporal consequences? of traumatic encounter with radiation (as an expression of the specific assemblage of biopolitical technologies that is the nuclear state) and the receptive[Love Kind2]Â surfaces of the human subject.
For philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, the nuclear state continues a longer project of explication (making-explicit), âthe revealing-inclusion of the background givens underlying manifest operationsâ (Sloterdijk 2009, 9) as epistemological paradigm coterminous with the long twentieth century as an age of global warfare. Simply put, any media of existence (including an invisible one), any territory of human life (such as the human body), once revealed as fundamentally contested, can never be anything but (Sloterdijk 2009, 59)[Love Kind3]Â . The political âmovementâ of the twentieth century, for Sloterdijk, is one of explosive revelation rather than of revolution (Ibid., 56-57).
In this sense, the nuclear state as biopolitical project has profoundly disturbed the biological and cultural boundaries of âhuman natureâ. New risk societies of fear, exposure and ruination cut across borders of national sovereignty (Masco 2004, 521), while that in the body gives way to uneven attrition. The molecular effects of high-level radiation on the human and non-human body are well-documented; a by-product of elaborating ever-increasing forces of destruction throughout the postwar. Low-level dosages, however, still linger in the margins of intelligibility, as what Adriana Petryna calls âpartial knowledge[s]â (Petryna 2002) of bodily destruction, transformation and endurance.
The death tolls from the âprompt and utter destructionâ of Hiroshima and Nagasaki quickly became figures of abhorrence, testament to the dehumanizing capacities of modern civilization. But as Sloterdijk argues, that same recognition was denied the hundreds of thousands whose falling victim to the same irradiating encounter lingered by years or decades: âthe long concealed, the unknown, the unconscious, the never-known, the never-noticed and the imperceptibleâ denied a witness to their suffering and now âforced to the level of the manifestâ only in unpredictable bodily responses to traumatic encounter, through ulcers, secretions and other transformations.
This is a slow violence that âoccurs gradually and out of sightâ and that finds expression in ways that are âneither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretiveâ (Nixon 2011, 2). It is because legal-scientific recognition of its symptoms can never be allowed that the making-explicit of embodied molecular relations remains a complexly political act (Murphy 2008, 701).
In terms of biopower, then, the project of the nuclear state is one that forces people to endure life in an environment where social phenomena like suicide, disenfranchisement and radiological damage become regular parts of ordinariness. One result of these processes, argues Joseph Masco, is a radically altered notion of âhealthâ itselfâone in which an earlier concept of âpublic health as a key coordinate of the modern state system has been replaced by a governmental calculus based on individual sacrificeâ. In this model, â[h]ealth as an absence of disease or anxiety is long gone. What we have instead is a negotiation of degrees of contamination, of degrees of anxious association, of degrees of escalating riskâ (Masco 2010, 152).
Majia Nadesanâs Fukushima and the Privatization of Risk (2013) is a careful description of the processes by which risk is displaced from corporations and governments to the shoulders of individuals and their bodies. While hundreds of thousands are forcibly kept in a state of perpetual exile in isolated refugee facilities, many more are encouraged to return to nominally decontaminated communities through the withdrawal of evacuation subsidies. When government reports and newspapers denounce crowd panic and radiation stress, declaring that the real cause of harm is social rather than radiological, the causality of bodily harm is endlessly deferred (or externalized), responsibility for wellbeing displaced onto precarious regimes of caring for the self. Nadesanâs account reveals how the reproduction of uncertainty is crucial to this displacement of risk and responsibility. Ironically, as I think the narratives of Women of Fukushima could show, the reproducing of uncertainty is also ultimately a labor taken up by the very bodies marginalized in the same process.[Love Kind4]Â
The first post-disaster protest against nuclear energy had taken place a mere two weeks after the 3.11 disaster, organized by a high school student in Nagoya and gathering some three hundred participants. But it was the monthly series of Genpatsu Yamero! (officially translated as âno nukes!â) demonstrations that conflated the post-disaster with a new chapter in Japanese culture of resistance, when on April 10, 2011, more than twenty thousand assembled. Similar numbers gathered for a monthly series of demonstrations, and on June 11, occupied the square outside Shinjuku station. That organizers, when applying for a demonstration permit from the police, reported an expected 500 participants, should be seen as an indicator of the discrepancy between forms of public dissent preceding the disaster, and the magnitude with which of post-traumatic despair and uncertainty, pent-up within the hegemony of self-restraint, were about to find expression.
The participatory narrative framing the demonstrations, too, was one of repressed affective response, overflowing into socially mediated counterpublics and finally released in more or less spontaneous street spectacles of collective, carnivalesque dissent. A demonstration manual circulated via the official Genpatsu Yamero! weblog similarly narrates the experience of initial participation:
See, the demo is starting. Different voices can be heard from all over. Music too. This place is different than usual. This is what itâs like not to be alone, to be together with everyoneâthis is the demo.
The carnivalesque dramaturgy of these demonstrations challenged post-disaster regimes of public decency on a fundamental level. As had happened after the emperorâs death in 1989, the government, media corporations and right-wing intellectuals rallied around a massive co-optation of national mourning, imposing on the population an interregnum of responsible governance steeped in a narrative of patriotic self-restraint (jishuku). In Tokyo, mediated figures of panicked supermarket hoarding, of mushroom clouds above an exploding oil refinery, and of twenty thousand sad citizens forced to spend the night in a dystopian Disneyland void of electricity fueled both apocalyptic imaginations and a rapid suppression of the disaster into an event of the past.
Writer Yabu Shiro talks about a âsuspension of thoughtâ in the immediate aftermath, reproduced in a feedback loop through the paralyzing recursivity of television broadcasts (Yabu). Cultural studies scholar MĆri Yoshitaka likewise argues that the wave of television shows and public events that were cancelled in the first weeks produced a kind of âcultural vacuumâ stigmatizing dissentient expression. In this context, âno nukes!ââstrikingly naĂŻve, almost primal in its simplicityâbrought with it a liberating feeling.
The authors of the anonymous manifesto, In the Streets We Become Cattle â Towards a theory of demonstrations (2012), encounter their own bodies in the exuberant multitude of the April 10 demonstration:
We never could understand what statements like âitâs safeâ or âit wonât influence healthâ meant. The words that come out of the infants that weâd see from time to time on the bus or on the train are more articulate than that stuff. On that day in Tokyo (âŠ) in spite of the fear of being injured by radiation, walked between the threshold of the everyday, and a new ethics which unfolds outside of it.
Reveling in a Deleuzian fantasy of becoming-animal, the authors locate this virtual ethics unfolding outside an everyday where the presence of disastrous experience has been repressed into the past, in the figure of the crowdâand more specifically, in its collective experience of the pack.
We have given up our names. Which we had borne from start to finish. We are in exodus from our resumes and CVâs, workplace ethics and being a good citizen. We become a pack. We do not rely on any regulation or system which disconnects us from the pack. Imagine it. (âŠ) We are alone and we are innumerable. (âŠ)
At Fukushima, cattle and dogs escaped. Later, innumerable cattle appeared in front of Tepcoâs offices. They were brought there in the shaking trailer against their will, for had they only known where Tepcoâs offices were they surely would have come there walking. Can we discern the plaintiveness that crosses over into urgency in their voice as we walk? We become cattle and dogs. Perhaps this is solidarity. (âŠ)
Our affect shaken by cattle, feeling shame, we become cattle. The Self Defense Force (SDF) member who fled from Fukushima became cattle before this shame, and exposed his shame. He is us. Being-man right now â wasnât this what he was ashamed of? We become cats whose tongues are dry from the dust when we walk through the shattered rubble, we become dogs when we drink seawater on the shore where there is nothing but the sound of waves. We become cattle when we chew the cud while keenly sensing the disquiet in its unchanging taste. With our affect shaken by one shame after another we become cattle and dogs and cats, and we become a pack. A pack of innumerable affects that cannot be disconnected.
Ultimately, the cattle manifesto is a fantasy of transformation in its pure form, of becoming one with the event, and of the affinity found in irreconcilable alterity-turned-multitudinous as an affective state to relish and embrace. Their insisting on the eventhood of the disaster as transforming event here conflates the moment of irradiating exposure with a moment of being âpierced throughâ by the pack. The event of pure encounter with radiation is the same as the encounter with the multitude. This image is reinforced in the passages that inserts the pack as a figure representative of the event for people who will be forced to endure their life within it:
We greet the children who wear their sanitary masks, flee from the rain, and avoid drinking their water, and who play in the courtyards where the dust dances, and say to them,âwelcome home.â They will be able to choose to continue living life through the image of our lives. (âŠ) Even if this body disappears, politics will continue.
Event, here, is to be understood in Badiouâs terms of a singularity that âcould not possibly have been predicted since they found no place in the pre-existent social ontology, yet which afterwardsâfollowing this singular eventânecessitate a likewise radical change in our grasp of what had indeed been possible in just that prior situationâ (Norris 2009, 9). When Badiou says that "an event is always relative to a situation; it is an event for the situation, and not above or outside itâ (RadicalPolitics 2006, 180), that is to say that the event always happens within the same particular historical situation that it also consigns the past, bringing forth a new, different condition. The event, to Badiou, acts as a âvanishing mediatorâ between two distinct temporal experiences.
Much like the authors of the official Fukushima report reluctantly admit, the disaster event too is an expression of the situation in which it emerged. But in the manifesto, that situation is projected on to the hegemonic male body as the metaphorical site of a hegemonic body politic. The male body is that which embodied those âingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to âsticking with the programâ; our groupism; and our insularityâ (Independent investigation commission 2012) shamefully put forward by the Japanese government as the conditions of possibility in which the nuclear disaster unfolded. Moreover, the event as a fundamental break from that continuity is repeatedly described to as a âbecoming-womanâ Here the repeated tropes of âabandoning oneâs nameâ and becoming-pack are not only expressions symptomatic of the same fundamental transfiguration. Yet, the gaze witnessing this transfiguration is ultimately a male one, because in celebrating the moment of rupture as transgression of that body politic, it simultaneously reinforces the boundary between an already feminine, if imperceptible subject, and the inflated sovereignty of a privileged subject for which this transformation carries the possibility of pure pleasure. Â
In Karen Russellâs short story âReeling for the Empireâ (Russell 2013), a group of women are being held captive in a silk factory. Forced to consume the potion of transformation that inaugurates their indentured labor, they gradually assume the monstrous shape of the silkworms they have been tendingâtheir bodies taking on the burden of, indeed, becoming one with the very means of production. When her friend and accomplice, Dai, perishes in hunger strike, the protagonist, Kitsune, can merely witness.
Kitsuneâs own rebellion emerges as a symptom of the original trauma of encounter: in embracing the fragmented memories of violence and complicity, the silk she produces gradually turns black, and she sets out to spin the cocoon that will consummate her transfiguration.
Why contrast such a fictional account of mutation to that of the Women of Fukushima? In both accounts, the telos of abolition and the agentive immediacy between vision and praxis of the sovereign political actor figure as uncomfortable loci of narrative structure simultaneously punctured and sutured by symptomatic digressions into traumatic memory and bodily dysfunction. The failed narration of inflated sovereignty by the Women of Fukushima seems to me a political project particularly relevant to an interrogation of agency in the ordinariness of a disastrous present.
If the solution at hand for Russellâs protagonistsâtheir refusal of caring for the self in a strike that removes the conditions of possibility for their own survival as coherent, productive subjectsâseems unthinkable (or at least unspeakable) to the Women of Fukushima, it has not been for many others in the populations at once summoned and displaced by the trauma of irradiation. In late 2011, Fukushima and its surrounding prefectures reported record-low suicide statistics in the nine months since the disaster. Prefectural government reports read like panegyrics on national discourses of reconstruction and solidarity-through-consumption. Others voiced their suspicion. In a short piece in the Asia-Pacific Journal, journalist Makiko Segawa and her interlocutor, Domae ShĆgo, insist that the official figures are fabrications âto save faceâ and that the actual figures of suicide in affected populations are much higher âNobody in the bureaucracy wants to take responsibility for the deaths of these people,â says Domae, who heads a local NGO for evacuee care, arguing that âpolice and city officials press hard for cover-ups, such as by classifying the suicides as accidents or death from sicknessâ (Segawa 2012).
Nuclear evacuees are the most vulnerable. Domae says that only in his hometown of Iwaki City (forty kilometers from the radiation exclusion zone), more than fifty seeking shelter in in temporary housing have taken their own lives. âIn most cases, the evacuees live in isolation and lack communication with others. They choose to die by starvation, refusing to eatâ (Segawa 2012). Like Dai, Kitsuneâs mentor and source of insurrectionary inspiration, Fukushimaâs unrecognized victims are dying by hunger strike.. Failure of the stateâs biopower, not in keeping something alive, but in forcing something to endure life, to stay productive under particular conditions (Berlant 2011, 97). Seremetakis (1991, quoted in Bennett 2002) writes about the âbad deathâ as that passing which is improperly mourned or witnessed deathâVeena Das, in turn, expands upon the concept to say that any territory marked by the prevalence of such death calls for a particular analytic sensitivity. In Fukushima, the territory of âsocially authorized deathâ (Biehl 2001) is one that extends across a moral landscape of failed solidarity and witnessing.
In silently starving to death, the imperceptible join the dying non-human denizens of the no-manâs land. âNobody lives here anymore,â says Seki in the opening scene of Women of Fukushima. âThere are dead cows everywhere⊠and the pets⊠the dogs and the cats, they have all starved to death.â The sense of affinity with non-human life and death is a different one than in the becoming-cattle of the anonymous manifest: those who continue to live on in this landscape of death, Seki seems to say, do so in another time. But what if Fukushimaâs imperceptible victims do not wish their deaths to be witnessed, or for that matter, for that death to constitute an event legible as political? What if their refusal to make death legible is also a refusal of the form of publicness intimated in that very form? How can we think of the bodies dying in Fukushima as singular acts of âdetachment from the political as suchâ (Berlant 2011, 231)?
What needs to be theorized in tandem with the temporality of the disaster event, then, is the insistent immanence of toxic residue in the body, and the implications for individual agency brought forth by its animating power. Considered within the biopolitical assemblage of the nuclear state, the same body figures as a necessary depository for things that would not be (profitably) disposed of in any other wayâyet epistemologically, that encounter between organic tissue and mutating irradiation is denied its eventhood, its position as radical break between two distinct temporalities of embodiment.
Rather, like the suicide in Michael Fischâs account of the commuter train assemblage (or Daiâs hunger strike), the assimilation of radioactive matter by human tissue is mediated as a ânoneventâ for people in Tokyo or elsewhere with that affordance to negotiate as part of the âmundane and recurrent affective registerâ (Fisch 2013, 338) of ordinary life. Fisch considers the train system as an environment in itself, within which âirregularity as regular becomes an internal force of system recursivity rather than an engine of dynamism in relation to an external complex environmentâ (Fisch 2013, 338); a system that âwhile accommodating [certain] forms of value creation, also allows for treating the disorder of commuter suicides as a necessary process of metabolic renewal within an emerging techno-social bodyâ (Fisch 2013, 340).
In exile from spaces made uninhabitable, the Women of Fukushima are elaborating another form of strike in the literal shadows of the nuclear state. The âtent village,â occupying a small strip of state-owned property outside the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), and currently in its fourth year, consists of a handful of tents, a crude solar collector and an information table, surrounded by anti-nuclear signs and banners. In the documentary, Chie shows us around the site: âThis is tent number oneâitâs been here the longest, since September 2011,â she says, pointing to a rectangular party tent covered in banners and flags. âItâs also called the âmenâs tentâ and here is tent number two is the womenâs tentâŠâ[Love Kind7]Â
The difference between the two tents is striking: when I visited, the population of the first tent was indeed exclusively male, and conversations centered on the ebb and flow of social movement plateaus. One man, a Red Army veteran, spent eighteen years in a Tokyo prison. When I talk to him and half a dozen other (male) activists, most of them well into retirement age, they have squatted outside the Ministry for over three months, and they intend to stay there as long as the remaining fifty reactors are running. A heartbreaking clichĂ©, the labor of organizing in the âfirstâ tent seems on first sight spectacular, elaborate; in the second tent, affective, reproductive. Sometimes that labor is unbearable; when the rightwing extremists arrive in their vans to intimidate anti-nuclear squatters âwe just cuddle together inside the tent.â The Women of Fukushima, too, intend to stay until the last reactor is shut down.
âI thought that Tokyo would be the first place to stand up for Fukushima,â says Chie. âI believed that Tokyo would stand up for Fukushima. But I was wrongâthe reality is that Fukushima, that we have to do everything from start to finish. I hoped that they would rally with us and say, âLetâs stand up together, after all we were the ones who used all this electricityââ If Tokyo stands in for the male body in this sentence, the âweâ is the euphoric âweâ of the cattle manifesto. Seki, too, keeps returning to the same talking point: âHave the people in Tokyo already forgotten about us [in Fukushima]?â
Often, narratives of inflated sovereignty toward the imaginary goal of abolition rupture under the pressure of traumatic memory. In these accounts, the urgent sensation that the narration of the self as a vehicle of progressive change leaves something crucial out clashes with the impossibility of even imagining a verbalization of the entirety of traumatic experience. In the failure of language to mediate the experience of mass irradiation, it is the (gendered) body that must bear the burden. If we take seriously Scottâs (Scott 2003, 72) insistence on the close relationship between linguistic and bodily integrity, then these lapses into compulsory repetition can be a venue for investigating the agency of radioactive isotopes embedded, embodied in human flesh, making their shattering presence known throughout every aspect of biological, civic and consumer life. This is an invitation to take seriously the implications for individual agency posed by the animating presence of radioactive matter. In Ngaiâs work on animation technology (Ngai 2002, 595), the animated object is that which, once embedded, finds embodied expression by âusurping the human speakerâs voice from a position inside the humanâs body.â Here, perhaps, we can begin to examine the extent to which a shared experience of embodying nuclear matter can contribute to the theorization of a radical non-sovereignty beyond social determinism.
âAlready in April [of 2011] I had all these different symptoms⊠terrible diarrhea, skin spots, vomiting, joint pain, canker sores in my mouth. More and more symptoms kept appearing, and from April to June, I spent most of my time in bedâŠâ Chie interrupts her tour of the occupation to narrate her own bodily ordeals. As with the female figures in Karen Russellâs short story, the labor of staying productive, of staying âin oneâs prime,â is partly a labor of self-witnessing and narration. But significantly, in the narrative oscillation between subjective coherency and radical non-sovereignty, this narration sustains itself according to arbitrary or improvised taxonomies of bodily secretions and involuntary expulsion, of contextualizing and trivializing aberration as expressions of the ordinary. A later scene shows Setsuko atop a makeshift stage, addressing a seemingly endless crowd draped in yellow. âForty percent of the children in Fukushima have cysts. Do you know what a cyst is? Itâs like a water blister. Filled with liquid.â For Misa of the organizing group TwitNoNukes, the potential for social change are to be found on an entirely corporeal level:
Thereâs this chemistry happening in the demonstration. Study groups and lectures, while certainly informative in their way, theyâre passive, no? The demonstration, of course, is prepared by the organizer, but ultimately itâs by the will of individuals who participate, walk, bring their own signs and make their voices heard, and thereâs more and more of us. That happens within a framework of organization, sure, but the chemistry Iâm talking about is like an abscess bursting, a tendency for chemical reaction, for synthesis; thereâs magic happening there.
There is a certain sense of shame present here as wellânot of having embodied the being-man of a different time, but more complexly, of narrating oneâs own presence as a function of oneâs bodily transformation. The discursive form of disclosure that Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray (1993, 262) call âsurvivor discourseâ is always âconstrained by rules more often implicit than explicit but nonetheless powerful," and at times "absolutely prohibited, categorized as mad or untrue, or rendered inconceivable".
Sometimes the self-interruption borders on the farcical; the camera shows Setsuko thrusting flyers in the hands of young men with dyed hair and eyes glued to cell phone screens, barely acknowledging her presence. âWe pass out pamphlets every Monday ⊠We try to explain to apathetic people that they need to keep on fighting against nukes.â Nervously, she drops the flyers on the ground and reaches down, clumsily, to try and grab them. The men laugh, still seated, looking at their phones. âPlease donât forget that you spoke to this old lady about the nuclear plants,â Setsuko says, walking away. Then she speaks again, now as voice-over: âThings are finally starting to change a little.â
When the women of Fukushima do not punctuate their own narratives of coherency, their environment does. More specifically, it is a punctuation by the environment that is suddenly made visible in its toxicity, at the same moment as it becomes hopelessly entangled with oneâs own body. In the midst of her interview, Chizu turns around and gestures to the playground she is in: âWhen I came here to check the levels it was 1.0 [micro-Sievert per hour] over there. And up there, where there was a small, eh, landslide, the levels were 0.8 or 0.9⊠â
The impartial clicking of the geiger counter that accompanies the camera throughout ruinous landscapes witnesses and makes explicit both a territory suffused with splitting nuclei, and the trepidation, affective turbulence of the subjects wielding it. The window-shield gaze constantly runs up against highway blockades with radiation warnings, shopping cars strewn across a salinized desert or a house turned upside-down. Dead cows here and there. An escaped ostrich stares intently at us through the camera lens before strolling off amidst abandoned middle-class neighborhoods. It is as if the filmmaker is driving around aimlessly with his interlocutors around the savaged remains of material abundance (During my time in the tsunami-affected areas, I shared in the silence of many such aimless trips myself, minds torn between the difficulty of witnessing such relentless destruction and its incomprehensibility).
For Setsuko, however, there is no lack of purpose. âAt night, when I canât sleep,â she tells us suddenly, âI imagine going home by car.â We are also back in the car now, as if Setsuko was behind the wheel next to us. An abandoned strip mall passes by. âThen I make it to the front of my house. âAhh, Iâm home!ââ She points to a framed photograph of a nondescript, white building. âThis is my home! I get out of my car and think âI forgot my keys, what should I do?â But then I realize, itâs just a dream. So I just slip in, and Iâm inside.â Now we are watching Etsukoâs own video, from when the Self-Defense Forces allowed her family to briefly return to their home and recover memorabilia and small objects of value. She is a stranger, we are all strangers in this home. Other objects that must never again be touched are briefly described. âThen, I come back.â She pulls back, as if attachment to this life never again possible is too dangerous. âGoing there, I can recall every detail of the way there, but on the way back I just imagine myself driving, and I drift off to sleepâŠâ
To qualify my earlier statement, it is not so much that the narrative of inflated sovereignty lapses into the symptomatic. Rather, the narration of the activist persona as that which acts upon the world is paralleled by other self-narrations, other invitations to witnessing. One such kind of parallel autobiography is that of a vanishing-point, reversed-gaze journey toward that imaginary point just before oneâs encounter with world-transforming radiation broke individual temporality in two; a dwelling on the threshold of oneâs own existence. In the words of Kitsune, Russellâs protagonist: âRegret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to chooseâ (Russell 2013, 45). For Kitsune, it is the moment of signing her parentsâ name on the work contract, of downing the contaminated tea that initiates her physical transformation compressed into a single moment. For the anonymous authors of the âIn the streetsâŠâ manifesto, it was the being-man, the affect subsequently âshaken by one shame after anotherâ into the becoming-animal of relentless social momentum.
For Setsuko, however, there is no such return to the extraordinary. Like the possibility of a future replaced by a present thinly stretched, the retrospective of a good life, or aspirations toward it, of the pre-disaster have been replaced by the rediscovery of her home in its ruinous present. And yet, Setsukoâs dwelling on this moment has become habitual as a way âto understand [her] own historical presentâ (Bordowitz, cited in (Berlant 2011, 55). Now it is just that, âa habit[Love Kind8]Â â, and âwhen I canât sleep at night I just say, âIâll go homeâ and I imagine going homeâ.
In the accounts of suffering and endurance depicted in this essay, the sense memory of trauma is seldom reduced successfully to the linear narrative of ordinary memory. Rather, the latter is punctuated by the former in ways that for me point to interesting questions about the agency and explicability of individual bodies. The male chorus in the anonymous cattle manifesto is also punctuated regularly, but by âa voiceâ that interpellates it back from the pack and into the everyday of the post-disaster. Crucially, however, the manifestoâs anonymous authors are so preoccupied with the extraordinariness of the event as âvanishing mediatorâ as to neglect the ordinariness of the disastrous present unfolding in front of them. The nuclear state is a project of temporal interpellation in the sense that it materially invests a particular future in the subject, while simultaneously foreclosing others. But what happens when âthe future that nuclear power had preparedâ (Animal Insurrection Committee 2012) collapses?
If Freud was right that trauma requires a witness, the explication of radioactive dispersion throughout the human environmentââa reality witnessable only as the appearance of certain indirect effects (âŠ) not immediately perceivableâ (Sloterdijk 2009, 58)âintroduces certain problems for a politics of witnessing or care. The narration of shattered sovereignty performed by the Women of Fukushima seizes on, and lets itself be seized by, this problematic. Theirs is not the strategic narration of suffering to accommodate technocratic taxonomies of recognition and reimbursement in pursuit of âbiological citizenshipâ (Petryna 2002). Nor is it the strategic organization by dispossessed and disenfranchised people into forms appropriately legible to the tender gaze of state or NGO relief programsâwhat Chatterjee calls the âpolitics of the governedâ (Chatterjee 2006).
If in so many ways, the future âgood lifeâ invested in by these women was indeed lost, what kind of politics could be imagined âafter the futureâ (Berardi 2011)? Put differently, what in this (if anything) could constitute that which David Scott calls a âmoral politics for an age characterized by being stranded in the presentâ (Scott 2014, 14)? In dwelling on the antithetical relation between the savaged past and the present, stretching itself thin across a lost future, it is a politics that refuses care in a very particular way, reminiscent, perhaps, of the black silk spun from Kitsuneâs incessant return to the traumatic encounter in Russellâs novella.
If in the face of the ominous adversary that is the nuclear state, the situation for the Women of Fukushima continuing their strike outside the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry seems distraught, desperate, even hopeless, then perhaps hope is not the best concept through which to understand the general relevance of their experience. Embracing the protest as a form of ordinariness of a new life, optimism is allowed to flourish around the reproductive labor of keeping that ordinariness stitched together in the day-to-day struggle of militant occupation.
 But in the memory of traumatic transformation also rests the possibility of another genesis: like an abscess bursting, the moth one day emerges from the encrustations of chrysalis spun around itself. âWho knows what the world will look like to us if our strike succeeds?â ask Russellâs becoming-moth heroines. âWe will emerge from it entirely new creatures. In truth there is no model for what will happen to us next.â
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