September, 2017

It is difficult to speak of disaster without relinquishing specificity, as if the very term insists on generalization. One reason that the massive body of literature on 3.11 — the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and ensuing nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima-1 — has not aged well is that it itself has become the vessel of grander narratives: narratives of risk and its incalculability, technological failure and its inevitability, of victimhood as universal, and of safety as myth. This report on a September 2017 study trip to Fukushima’s Iitate village, hosted by the NPO Resurrection of Fukushima and sponsored by the Atsumi International Scholarship Foundation, argues that for those that work in and on the aftermath of this disaster — whether they are government agencies, volunteers, scientists or individual citizens — negotiating these mythological or ideological inflections is a central challenge. 

Over 6,000 people lived here when disaster struck: well outside the exclusion zone, the village even welcomed a large number of disaster refugees from other areas. But a few days later, changing weather patterns pushed the F1 radiation plume inland. On March 22, an inspection team from the International Atomic Energy Agency gathered samples twice that of the civilian safety limit inside the village. Anxiety and animosity grew amidst contradictory radiation readings, and conflicting information on its risks; many left on their own accord. “We have been sacrificed so that Tokyo can enjoy bright lights,” a local farmer told the New York Times. A month later, the evacuation order came. NHK showed footage of faceless workers in hazmat suits running geiger counters over childrens’ bodies, “as if radiation was contagious”. For Muneo Kanno, Resurrection of Fukushima’s local representative, this is the moment when Iitate’s collective disaster experience transformed from victimhood into pariah. When journalists reporting on a hot spot in Tokyo’s affluent Setagaya ward called it “another Iitate,” the village had been reduced to a marker of pollution. “We found ourselves right in the middle of a narrative we could not have changed or predicted.“ This time last year, nobody was allowed back, but now some six percent of villagers have returned. For those that do, it must be said, the serious problem to contend with is not radiation but sanitation. Meter-high soil platforms are caked on top of existing lots to prevent flooding from contaminated rivers. Decontamination demands the removal of top soil, traditionally considered the most fertile, which often ends up in black bags on top of the same field or a nearby one, sand and gravel put in its place and flattened by heavy truck wheels. 

Surveying the landscape, the black bags are what one tends to notice first. There are a lot of them: 2,6 million in Iitate alone, by last year’s count. At one metric ton it takes a lot of work to fill one, and a truck only takes three or four. The enterprise of shuffling them about the village is a labor-intensive one, but their presence can be lucrative. When our dour bus guide addresses them some twenty minutes into the tour, one has almost had time to get used to them. Sometimes wrapped in a glaucous green tarpaulin, sometimes behind construction site fencing, they accentuate the contours of the post-disaster landscape as reminders of the fallout that lingers here, the impossibility of accounting for it all, and that place beyond the mountains whence it came: F1 with its molten cores, at once nowhere and everywhere to be found, its glacier walls, and its expanding network of contaminated water tanks… F1 and the incomprehensibly large apparatus of decommission and decontamination surrounding it: the endless lines of trucks entering leaving the compound, the hazmat-suited hordes of subcontractors attending to it, the shanty towns that house them, the convenience stores, movie theaters and red-light districts that keep them going. Just because a few reactors explode, it does not mean they stop being productive. 

Iitate straddles the inner edge of Hama-dori, the coastal and most developed part of Fukushima prefecture. Yet it is far both from the booming economy of decommission, and from the avant-garde landscape architecture transmogrifying coastal communities leveled by the tsunami into wave-breaking fortresses. It is far from all of that. But there is no lack of activity here: large public works projects are everywhere, as are the traces of state-cognitive infrastructure, from the ubiquitous Geiger counters to the traffic checkpoints. The machinery of disaster management creeps outward while the no-go zones recede: newly redrawn lines between those to be repatriated and those to remain in refuge cut deep in the social fabric of the village diaspora, already stretched thin. As we descend into the next valley, we are welcomed by a dense latticework of solar panels covering large swathes of its basin. Solar has often been touted as a potential antidote to the centralized yet lossy distribution schemes exemplified by nuclear power, but these massive facilities are owned by infotech conglomerates with headquarters in Marunouchi skyscrapers, and nobody seems to know where the electricity is going. The megasolars flooding these rice fields on aggressive short-term leases, are themselves high-risk, high-return endeavors that seem to replicate the central contradictions of the nearby nuclear facilities. I reach for my phone to read up on the leasing process, triggering a brief bidding war won by an advert for “self-powered” cryptocurrency farms to be rented out, in turn, to larger mining initatives. Worlds collide: it is a photo of a solar farm identical to the one we are driving past. 

Amidst this landscape of simultaneous intensity of investment and decay, the NPO Resurrection of Fukushima has crafted a powerful vision of local community and regional autonomy, and in that same context, a unique position for themselves as a conduit between outside experts, villagers and local government. Active in Iitate since the early disaster aftermath, they have developed and documented a range of experimental practices responding to the reality of devastated conditions for agricultural production through both fallout and cleanup, in addition to systematic radiation monitoring across the village. The latter seems to be organization’s primary concern during our visit, and at the core of their activities lies a map of the village split across a grid into zones for automated collection of up-to-date radiation values, a record of which can be accessed for comparison. In creating a map that is in many ways more palpable than the simultaneously derelict and investment-heavy territory it represents, Resurrection of Fukushima’s monitoring efforts interrogate the relationship between actuality and virtuality, real and representation. Differently put, what the earth gives matters less than its radiological readings. What is harvested here is but a byproduct (albeit a delicious one). For Resurrection of Fukushima’s president, Yoichi Tao, this task of making the invisible visible is also a therapeutic, because accumulation of data alleviates the anxiety of uncertainty that otherwise threatens to become all-pervasive among those trying to survive in the village. What’s at stake here is less the accuracy or credibility of individual measurement, but the threshold where data accrues sufficiently so as to afford it some weight amidst the post-disaster complexity of multiple monitoring initiatives, expert opinions and governing agencies. Yet even if people trust the numbers, “they don’t trust us”, says Mr Tao. “They think we’re some weird scientists.” In response, he argues that “we are not here for anyone else’s sake, but our own.” The metropole is a deadening place, and there are a lot of interesting things happening out here. Resurrection of Fukushima is not here to act in the name of the village or its denizens: “we empathize (kyoukan) and collaborate (kyoudou)” but it is up to the villagers themselves to wrestle back control over the post-disaster narrative. The rhetoric here is refined. Yet the concrete characteristics of this collaborative relationship remain enigmatic throughout our residency. We spend our last morning preparing seedbeds for one such experimental harvest: a few dollar store bags of radish seeds. 

May 2018

Coming back to Iitate six months after our last visit, one was tempted to ask if we had not ended up in the wrong valley. When visiting last fall, the evacuation order had just been released for areas with annual radiation dosage below twenty millisieverts, and we found the former no-go zone bustling: where six thousand original inhabitants of the village remained mostly evacuated, in their place about as many decontamination workers had descended upon the village. But in the summer of 2018 those numbers have receded drastically. A spiritless convenience store clerk at the rest stop north of the village told me that the place has been “dead” since the sanitation crews left, and where last year workers swarmed around the village in trucks and heavy machinery, busily scraping off and dumping in plastic bags the top few inches of soil from the billowing fields and rice paddies of the valley, now only the occasional truck rumbles past, carrying one or two of the black bulk bags that have become such a defining feature of the village’s political geography. Like last year, almost two and a half million of the cubic meter bags still adorn the landscape of Iitate, piled in sprawling ziggurats and draped in thick sheets of moss green vinyl, or lying exposed to the elements, leaking soil and water, grass and flowers peaking out of their torn polypropylene weave. Still, less than one in ten have yet to reach their final resting place, and a 2018 investigation revealed that over a third of the bags had been improperly sealed or disposed of (1). In the meantime, shuffling them between decontamination sites, short-term land leases and interim storage grounds is still lucrative business: a quick search for “Iitate” on a popular website for part-time work still almost exclusively shows cleanup and driving jobs for obscure subcontractors. Only solar farms compete with the black bags for former farm land in the valley’s basin, but demand little maintenance or manpower.

Bulk bag architecture in the valleys of Iitate. Drone photography by Iwashita Koichiro, copyright 2018 Mainichi Shimbun. “Doroon de mita hisaichi” Mainichi Shimbun, March 9, 2018. 

Night comes suddenly to the valley, and it is dark, a dense, sticky kind of dark, but never quiet. The prefectural government finances a great ensemble of deterrent technology of to keep exploding populations of boar and monkey out of developed areas: tactical deployments of electrical wire and motion sensor-equipped sound traps that trigger haphazardly throughout the night, adding synthesized intermezzo to the cacophony of nocturnal animal noise. Commercial rice cultivation nevertheless remains far from recovery seven years after the catastrophe, and only began again last spring on seven acres — one percent of the productive acreage from seven years ago (2). Elsewhere, people are primarily preoccupied with attempts at preventing further destruction of the post-cleanup landscape. And landscape is often the focal point of the informal struggles, ambiguous legal regimes and theatrical government investments that characterize what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls the "zones of awkward engagement" at the frontiers of capital accumulation (3). One such engagement (as described by cartoonist and writer Kobayashi Yoshinori, a frequent visitor to Iitate) involves a public official screaming at an elderly man, intently trimming the weeds around a municipal radiation monitoring post constructed on his land. While this was but one of thousands of geiger counters set up by the government, “by doing so, the old man thought, perhaps radiation numbers would go down, and then, perhaps, he could be allowed to return to his farm” (4). The anecdote speaks not only to the the massive technical regimes that sustain the Sisyphean task of producing a scientifically stable state of non-irradiatedness, but with the same numbers that keep somebody away from their home propping up access to recompensation schemes for another, to the many valences taken on by these bodies of data once they start circulating in the world.

Active in this contested territory since the early disaster aftermath, Tokyo-based NPO Resurrection of Fukushima have developed and documented a range of experimental practices responding to the reality of devastated conditions for agricultural production due to both fallout and cleanup, alongside systematic radiation monitoring across the village. The group pledges to reject dichotomies of victims and perpetrators, supported and supporters, and work alongside the villagers on alternative approaches to radiation monitoring and cleanup as well as sustainable energy production. But in light of the current situation in Iitate, what do we even mean when we speak of “the villagers”? Who are we referring to? Like recent attempts in the metropole to speak in the name of “the people”, here, to speak with Blanchot (5), each attempt to define the relevant community is marked by insufficiency. Is it, as the activities of Resurrection of Fukushima suggest, the few dozen pioneers, mostly retired, that have returned to the valley to find new ways to “coexist” with radiation? Or is it the eighty-nine percent of the original constituency that have left the village behind, most likely forever, and committed to building a new life elsewhere while formally remaining registered in the village? As long as Kanno Norio, mayor of Iitate since 1995, hopes to be reelected for a sixth term, this silent majority may well make itself heard as the primary focus of the rhetoric and optics of recovery. The mayor has launched a special program of symbolic residence (furusato jūminhyō) which caters to former inhabitants who do not live or pay tax in the village, as well as to those complete outsiders who, like myself, have become captivated by Iitate, and who perhaps, also like myself, have begun to think that there is something going on in this desolate village which demands to be witnessed, if never fully accounted for. The credit card-size certificate of emotional attachment I carry in my wallet offers other perks, such as an invitation to the “mayor for a day” program (reservation necessary) and deep discounts at the rest stop. Nevertheless, official recognition of and catering to “symbolic villagers” like myself is in many ways the opposite of the recompensation schemes that stimulate claims to biological citizenship by the village’s actual inhabitants. And for those outsiders that opt to renounce symbolic solidarity and join the latter, there are plenty of incentives: local municipalities not only pay for moving costs, but since this year offer five million yen toward newly constructed homes, in addition to a monthly stipend of a hundred thousand for the first two years, and six hundred and sixty square meters of free land for those committing to live in the village for the next ten years. The generous funding program is but the latest addition to an opaque economy of disaster recovery, complementing and complicating the already vast and unevenly distributed compensation schemes for owners of property in the gradually receding exclusion zone. Yoichi Tao, Resurrection of Fukushima’s president, is one outsider who has decided to settle in the village. For Tao, the village is the bleeding edge of state recognition of and response to a cluster of issues unrelated to but exacerbated by the threat of radiation: population aging, food and energy security, and community cohesion — problems that face not only rural areas but the whole nation and indeed the developed world. As we drive around the village’s deserted roads, Tao laments the lack of an ideology for the twenty-first century: “when I was young, we quoted Marx, Mao, Freud. None of them can speak to the situation we face here.” Yet the situation demands to be witnessed. Refusing ideological guidance from the dominant voices of the last century, Resurrection of Fukushima’s program of “coexistence” is fundamentally phenomenological; an invitation, first and foremost, to witness the material and economic conditions within which any new proposal for a political subjectivity or community proper to our times must take shape. But in the shadow of state recovery initiatives, so awesome in scale and reach even here in Iitate, evaluating the viability and radicality of Resurrection of Fukushima’s proposal for “coexisting” with radiation would necessarily involve measuring its distance to corresponding government rhetoric aimed toward achieving symbolic closure to the process of disaster recovery.

Fukushima zyosen “tenuki”. Tokyo Shimbun, January 1, 2018. 

Fukushima village begins sowing rice for first time since nuclear crisis. Japan Times, May 10, 2017. 

Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press 2005.

Gomanizmu Senreki, KK Best Sellers 2016, p. 380.

Japon mahkemesinden intihar eden köylünün ailesine tazminat kararı!

Japonya’da mahkeme, nükleer felaket nedeniyle köyünün tahliye edileceğini öğrendikten sonra intihar eden kişinin ailesine 15,2 milyon yen tazminat ödenmesine karar verdi Japonya’da mahkeme, 2011’de Fukuşima’daki nükleer felaketin ardından köyünün tahliye edileceğini öğrendikten sonra intihar eden 102 yaşındaki Fumio Okubo’nun ailesine 15,2 milyon yen (535 bin lira) tazminat ödenmesine hükmetti.…

Iitate Village in Fukushima is developing a strawberry-flavoured black tea with Lupicia (a worldwide tea retailer), and is looking for 100 monitors to taste and critique their new blend. The applications opened on the 5th so I’m guessing they’re full up now. Too bad, but I’ll write a bit about the journey it took to get to this stage. It’s quite interesting and is related to the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi. The original information is here, in the original Japanese. I won’t be translating everything here. 

Currently, Iitate Village is designated as an evacuation zone, and its citizens are still living in other towns as evacuees. 

Iitate Village’s summer strawberries were grown last year (2014) in July for the first time since the disaster, and were grown in “Iitate Strawberry Land” in plastic greenhouses. 

 Part of Iitate Village may be cleared of its evacuation zone designation soon, but currently residents are not allowed to live or spend the night there. 

The husband-and-wife team who run Iitate Strawberry Land, the Satous, currently live as evacuees in Fukushima. However they commute every day to Iitate Village to care for their strawberries. 

Mr. Satou said: “We worried whether we would be able to grow again after the earthquake, but we figured we could grow them in greenhouses, and we decided to reopen if they passed testing.” With this resolve, he rebuilt the damaged greenhouses, filled them with new soil, and carefully replanted his crop.