The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 14 | Issue 5 | Number 1 | Article ID 4862 | Mar 01, 2016

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On Forgetting Fukushima

Robert Jacobs

Advertisement in downtown Fukushima City (by author,2015)

This month the media and social networks arebusy remembering Fukushima on the fifthanniversary of the earthquake, tsunami andnuclear meltdown, but what we are reallyobserving is the beginning of the work offorgetting Fukushima. Fukushima is taking itsplace alongside the many forgotten nucleardisasters of the last 70 years. Like Mayak(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster) a n d S a n t a S u s a n a(http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/20975-remembering-rocketdyne-discussing-americas-worst-nuclear-meltdown-not-three-mile-island-

with-erin-brockovich), soon all that will be leftof the Fukushima nuclear disaster are theradionuclides that will cycle through theecosystem for millennia. In that sense we areinternalizing Fukushima into our bodyunconsciousness.

Forgetting begins with lies. In Fukushima thelies began with TEPCO (the owner of the powerp l a n t s ) d e n y i n g(http://www.dw.com/en/reactor-escapes-damage-after-explosion-at- fukushima-nuclear-plant/a-14904492) that there were anymeltdowns when they knew there were three.They knew they had at least one full meltdownby the end of the first day, less than 12 hoursafter the site was struck by a powerfulearthquake knocking out the electrical power.TEPCO continued to tell this lie for threem o n t h s(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8509502/Nuclear-meltdown-at-Fukushima-plant.html), even after hundreds ofthousands of people had been forced to orvoluntarily evacuated. Just last week TEPCOa d m i t t e d(http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/02/24/national/tepco-admits-initial-assessments-fukushima-meltdowns-wrong/#.Vs1YeIx96ig)that it was aware of the meltdowns muchearlier, or to put it bluntly, it continued to hidethe fact that it had been lying for five years(I've written about the dynamic behind thish e r e(http://www.dianuke.org/managing-public-perceptions-of-fukushima-first-emergency-response-of-the-nuclear-complex/)).

The government of Japan had such weakregulation of the nuclear industry that it was

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completely reliant on TEPCO for all informationabout the state of the plants and the risks tothe public. It was reduced to being an echochamber (https://youtu.be/5NoBDBWcd8Q) forthe denials coming from a company that waslying. The people living near the plants, anddownwind as the plumes from explosions inthree plants carried radionuclides high into theair and deposited large amounts of radiation farbeyond the evacuation zones, had to make lifeand death decisions as they were being lied to(http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031102-e.html) and manipulated.

Clouds hang over Fukushima City (by author, 2015)

Lying about nuclear issues is not unique toJapan or Fukushima. It began with the first useof nuclear weapons against human beings, inHiroshima and Nagasaki. When announcing thefirst attack President Harry Truman referred toHiroshima as a "military base," and said it waschosen specifically to avoid civilian casualties.Hiroshima was a naval base (in a countrywhose navy was already destroyed), but thetruth is that the city was chosen to demonstratevividly the power of the super weapon and thebomb was aimed at the city center, the areamost densely populated with civilians. After thewar the US claimed that these attacks, in whichover 100,000 people were killed instantly,actually saved lives.

The most powerful legacy of Chernobyl, besidesits long-lived radiation, is the widespread use ofthe word "radiophobia" by nuclear industryapologists to describe the public response tolarge releases of radiation: fear. Look for thisword and sentiment in the many articles beingpublished this month about Fukushima. Whenyou see it, or read the claim that more peoplewere harmed at Fukushima by their ownirrational fears than by radiation, you areseeing the work of forgetting turn its cruelwheels. Behind those wheels are the shatteredlives and emotional wellbeing of hundreds ofthousands of people whose communities weredestroyed, and whose families were rippedapart by the Fukushima disaster. People whoseanxieties will rise every time they or theirchildren run a high fever, or suffer a nosebleedor test positively for cancer. People whosesuffering-at no fault of their own-is becominginvisible. Soon when we talk about Fukushimawe will reduce the human impact to a quibblingover numbers: how many cases of thyroidcancer, how many confirmed illnesses. Lost-hidden-forgotten will be the hundreds ofthousands of people forced to flee their homes,in many cases permanently, and try to rebuildtheir shattered lives. Public relationsprofessionals and industry scientists will saythat these people did this to themselves (seeh e r e(http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/science/when-radiation-isnt-the-real-risk.html?_r=1), andh e r e(http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2012/03/10/fukushimas-refugees-are-victims-o f - i r r a t i o n a l - f e a r - n o t -radiation/#4c782e8c37cb)). And the curtainwill draw ever downward as we forget them.

This is the tradition of nuclear forgetting.

The production sites of the Manhattan Project(http://manhattanprojectnationalhistoricalpark.com/) are being transformed into Disney themeparks of American exceptionalism; their locallegacies of cancer and contamination becoming

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footnotes without citation sources lost amidstthe museum exhibits and commemorationshailing the greatness of American science andeng ineer ing . The ac tua l goa l , andaccomplishment, of destroying two cities andthe hundreds of thousands of people living inthem, barely receives brief mention at the endof the celebration: confirmation of thesuccessful application of American power andjustice that the victims brought uponthemselves. In America we honor the memoryof the architects of this mass murder, and weforget the victims.

Some of the difficulty in remembering thoseaffected by nuclear disasters is systemic, andsome is strategic. Radiation is difficult tounderstand. Exposure to radiation embodieswhat Rob Nixon describes as slow violence(http://www.english.wisc.edu/rdnixon/files/slow_violence.pdf), "formless threats whose fatalrepercussions are dispersed across space andtime."1 The slow impact of the catastrophe ofnuclear disaster dislocates it from the disasteritself. The news cameras of the world werefocused on the Fukushima Daiichi plants whilethey were exploding, but as the fallout of thoseplumes settled to earth, other catastrophicevents drew our collective gaze elsewhere.Most health effects from exposure to radiationunfold over years and blend into the low moanof tragedies that afflict people in their personallives, uncoupling from the events that causedthem by our perception of the passage of time.

A girl who has been isolated at a makeshift facility toscreen, cleanse and isolate people with high radiation levels,looks at her dog through a window in Nihonmatsu, NorthernJapan, March 14, 2011 (Reuters/Yuriko Nakao

This dynamic has been useful to thosepromoting nuclear power, and discounting thehealth impacts of exposures to radiation sincethe advent of nuclear technologies (see here(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1469835/?tool=pubmed)). Many of the cancersthat progress out of these exposures resultfrom the internalizing of radiological elementsand then surface as ingestion cancers, such asthyroid cancer whose causation cannot bedirectly demonstrated on a case-by-case basis.When numbers spike, as in the case of thyroidcancers, some scientists claim that this ismerely the result of more intensive screening.This manipulation of ambiguity is the bread andbutter of the denial of the health effects ofwidely distributed radioactive particles, such asthe situation facing people living downwindfrom the Fukushima plants. In addition tothyroid cancer, ingestion cancers that arecaused by internalized particles tend to appearas lung cancer, bowel cancer, stomach cancer,throat cancer and cancers of other parts of thebody that process what we swallow and inhale.These cancers are common and have multipleorigins, allowing nuclear apologists toobfuscate the role that radiation may haveplayed. This is strategic forgetting.

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A malfunctioning public Geiger counter in Fukushima City(by author, 2015)

We have to do more than rememberFukushima, we have to learn how to rememberFukushima. To do this we must learn to see thei m p a c t s o f r a d i a t i o n e x p o s u r e s(http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/440/chp%253A10.1007%252F1-4020-4956-0_15.pdf?originUrl=http%3A%2F%2Flink.springer.com%2Fchapter%2F10.1007%2F1-4020-4956-0_15&token2=exp=1456567603~acl=%2Fstatic%2Fpdf%2F440%2Fchp%25253A10.1007%25252F1-4020-4) before they become vaguely visible ascancers nestled in health population statistics( f o r e x a m p l e a t C h e r n o b y l(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20002059 ) a n d H a n f o r d(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14738272)). Already higher than normal rates of thyroidc a n c e r(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/12160794/Fukushima-disaster-

Children-cancer-rates-rise-with-16-new-cases.html) have been detected in childrenliving in the plumes of the Fukushimaexplosions. But before we are reduced toarguing about numbers of attributable cancers( a s a t C h e r n o b y l(http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2370256/chernobyl_how_many_died.html)),we need to learn to see the larger and subtlermanifestations of radiation disasters in thehuman communi ty . Meanwhi le , thepsychological and emotional legacies ofradiation exposures can be as devastating assome of the physiological impacts. Multi-generational families that are split intoseparate "temporary" accommodations,children that are taught they must avoidcontact with nature, marriages dissolved by theconflicting financial requirements for oneparent to keep a job while another takes thechildren away from radiological hazards, andlifelong anxiety over each illness because ofuncertainty over one's exposure all disruptfamilies, communities and individuals.

Hundreds of thousands of lives have beendisrupted by the Fukushima disaster, leavingpeople who must pick up the pieces and carryon by themselves.

A woman walks in a temporary housing complex whereevacuees from the Miyakoji area of Tamura are living, atFunahiki area in Tamura, Fukushima prefecture, April 1,2014.(REUTERS/Issei Kato)

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There is good reason to f ixate on theclusterf*#k that is the remediation of theFukushima site, and to track the ceaselessentry of radionuclides into the ocean that willcontinue for decades, the still lethal meltednuclear cores of the plants will need to beremoved and contained (a process that willtake numerous decades) and the flow ofradiation into the sea will continue to effect thelocal ecosystem and the food chain in thePacific Ocean. However, we should not allowour gaze to remain fixed on the nuclear plants,we must learn to see the deep wounds tosociety that are left to heal in darkness. Wemust learn to bring the whole of the populationand ecosystem that suffer from radiologicaldisasters into the light of our awareness andconcerns. We must grieve for all that has been

lost and we must hold government and theTEPCO Corporation responsible for assistingthose whose lives have been shattered. We candemand corporate and governmentalcompensation and medical monitoring for thosewhose health and wellbeing have beencompromised, for those displaced from theirhomes by radiation, and for those who have losttheir livelihood because of the contaminationand loss of public faith in the food they grow orfish they catch. We can remember all of thosewho have been affected. And we can learn howto understand the long, slow violence thatfollows behind the compelling first week of thenuclear disasters yet to come.

Recommended citation: Robert Jacobs, "OnForgetting Fukushima", The Asia-PacificJournal, Vol. 14, Issue 5, No. 1, March 1, 2016.

Robert Jacobs is an associate professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute at Hiroshima CityUniversity. He is the author of The Dragon's Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (2010), theeditor of Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future: Art and Popular Culture Respond to theBomb (2010), and co-editor of Images of Rupture in Civilization Between East and West: TheIconography of Auschwitz and Hiroshima in Eastern European Arts and Media (2016-forthcoming). His book, The Dragon's Tail, will be released in a Japanese language edition byGaifu in April. (Japanese edition of Dragon Tail: Kaku no Anzenshinwa to America noTaishubunka [Tokyo: Gaifusha, 2013]) He is the principal investigator of the Global HibakushaProject.

Notes1 Rob Nixon, "Slow Violence, Gender and the Environmentalism of the Poor," Journal ofCommonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Vols. 13:2-14:1 (2006-7): 14.