Living in Post-Fukushima Grey Zones: Family Decisions in the Wake of Nuclear Disaster

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Fukushima mothers who were pregnant or had school-aged children at the time of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident of March 11, 2011, navigated constrained choices and conflicting values in a world the Japanese government deemed permissibly toxic for them and their children. This would seem an extraordinary set of circumstances, and yet living through nuclear and other manmade disasters has become a regularly recurring part of being human the world over—in the global North and South, East and West; within former communist states, emerging and established liberal democracies, and global neoliberal orders. Concurrently, we all seek to live “normally” in, through, and within a permissibly toxic world—full of not only nuclear materialities, but also things like permissible food additives, ingestible and otherwise circulating carcinogens, air pollution, and climate change.

How can we understand the material and social reconstitution of a world that contains radioactive materials, where things, people, places, and social relations have been exposed to radiation, contaminated by a kind of toxicity that is invisible to the human eye, but made visible and knowable through other means? How do these toxic and nuclear normalities and abnormalities articulate with the contingencies of everyday life, raising and caring for children, and living as families? How do people agentively live—or to use Bourdieu’s (1977) term, strategize—through nuclear contamination? How do people navigate trust in expertise and authorities, their environments, and their interpersonal relationships when knowledge about that toxicity is debated and disagreements abound? Living in Post-Fukushima Grey Zones offers ethnographic answers to these questions for different Fukushima families.

My central analytic is what I call “everyday nuclearity.” Hecht (2012) argues that “nuclearity” refers to disagreements about what is radiologically acceptable and unacceptable, exceptional and banal in a given historical, technological, and political moment. Nuclearity “emerges from political and cultural configurations of technical and scientific things, from the social relations where knowledge is produced” (Hecht 2012, 15). I build on this insight to argue that in post-Fukushima accident grey zones, the “social relations where knowledge [about nuclear things] [was] produced” became the social relations of people’s homes, families, communities, and economic and non-economic forms of exchange, including everyday life, kinship, gifts, and produce. Everyday life already involves navigating contrasting perspectives on and practices of consumption, social and economic values, food, child rearing, outdoor play, and so much more. Everyday nuclearity refers to the navigation of disagreements between radiation-related considerations and the demands and practicalities of interpersonal relations, extant differences of opinions, and already varied practices of daily life. Everyday nuclearity acknowledges, on the one hand, that citizens are empowered to make decisions about safety and danger, banality and exceptionality of nuclear things. On the other, it underscores how the displacement of radiation-related decisions into everydayness and family life created strain within those already varied social relations.

Living in Post-Fukushima Grey Zones tells the stories of Fukushima mothers learning to live and raise their children “normally” (futsū ni) in a nuclear grey zone despite criticism, misunderstanding, and conflict resulting from their decisions not to return to the status quo ante and how Japanese civil society sought to support them, their children, and their family choices.