Fukushima-A Year+ later

Thirteen months after the Tohoku earthquake, a series of scholars have analyzed the historical relevance of the disaster in conjunction with the Fukushima nuclear disaster. These scholars general focus on how changes in the environment, like for example, the building of nuclear power plants, can have devastating consequences for local residents. Japan has a particularly unique history with environmental disease. During Japan’s “economic miracle” in the middle of the twentieth century, Japan very quickly became a leader in the global economy. A side effect of this rapid, capitalist development was widespread industrial pollution. A succession of high profile pollution diseases brought this problem to the attention of the public. Throughout the 1970s, citizens reacted with outrage in reaction to allegations that industries like the Chisso Chemical Company were intentionally poisoning the local water supply. This led to a number of strict reforms of industrial pollutants. However, this public outrage over industrial pollution did not extend to nuclear power plants. This was due in part to, until 1999, the lack of fatalities or visible human victims of radiation poisoning. However, that does not mean that people were not suffering-many workers were day laborers who lost their jobs when they exposure levels got too high and would therefore deny their exposure levels to keep their jobs. Workers also had to learn to change their own movements and regulate their own bodies in order to stay as healthy as possible. This theme was also present in Joy Parr’s Sensing Changes¸ where Canadian plant workers changed their body movements to keep their exposure levels down. Another reason that the Japanese public did not get incensed over nuclear power plants despite their inherent riskiness is the complete dependence of the Japanese economy on nuclear power. As Japan has few natural energy resources, nuclear energy is one of the most effective ways of fueling the economy.

A theme in all of these papers is the connection between technology and the environment. It is obvious from the widespread industrial diseases and research on radiation that humans can make changes to their environment with their technological systems which can in turn have devastating health effects. However, it is also clear that far more people have died as a result of the initial earthquake and tsunami and other natural disasters generally than industrial poisoning incidents. These pieces do not argue for any specific policy changes but it seems likely most hope for some sort of middle ground that neither endangers civilians nor reduces the amount of energy diverted to Japan. Another theme from these papers involves the idea of “normal accidents.” Nuclear power plants have been used in Japan since the late 1960s, and though they perhaps have created radiation dangers for the landscape, until Fukushima, there had never been any large nuclear disasters in Japan. However, earthquakes have always been a part of the Japanese environment. As noted by Greg Clancy in Earthquake Nation, earthquakes have created dangerous disruptions to technological innovations. For example, architectural changes in the nineteenth century, while reducing urban fire hazards, caused many deaths when large earthquakes struck. If earthquakes are part of the natural environment of Japan, presumably every accident caused by an earthquake is foreseeable. However, Japan would likely have no other large energy source without these plants. So therefore there exists a struggle between human economy and human safety. It also begs the question of whether or not large scale economic development is really possible without threatening the environment.