On Being Worthy of the Event:Four Fukushima Stoics

January 5, 2021 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 30, Number 1, September 2019

Margherita Long (bio)

Abstract

This essay reads the testimonies of four Fukushima women interviewed by journalist Iwakami Yasumi in the summer and fall of 2011. At the time, mandatory evacuations had emptied the zones closest to the triple meltdowns, but people in surrounding areas were left to decide for themselves: should they stay at their ancestral homes, or flee to protect their bodies? These four women are inspiring as leaders and as activists because of their ability to think beyond the crippling dichotomy and become worthy of Fukushima as an “event” in the sense explored by Deleuze in The Logic of Sense (1969).

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After three reactors at the Fukushima Dai’ichi Nuclear Power Station melted down in March 2011, the Japanese government issued mandatory evacuation orders for the twenty-kilometer radius around Futaba, the plant’s host town. In April 2011 the government evacuated two additional towns outside this radius, Iitate and Katsurao, located under the plume that had spread northwest after the explosions.1 People in these zones had no choice but to leave. But what about people living just outside the zones, where radiation readings were also high, yet the government was offering no compensation for relocation? Should they stay or should they go? This essay reads a series of interviews conducted by journalist Iwakami Yasumi in the summer and fall of 2011. Iwakami’s interviewees hail mostly from the cities of Iwaki, Fukushima City, and Kōriyama, which are 40, 55, and 60 kilometers respectively from Fukushima Dai’ichi. A subset of interviewees is from the areas around Kawauchi-mura and Tamura-shi, 30 and 35 kilometers away. In all these places, disagreements about the implications of staying or going were tearing communities apart. Iwakami laments:

By that summer [. . .] Fukushima was divided [and . . .] elements from both groups had begun quarreling. Among those who evacuated there were many who got called “traitor” (uragirimono) by those who had decided to stay. In turn, many of them were criticized by those who advocated evacuation. “How can you not consider the children?” they demanded. It was a painful sight to behold, these mutual attacks by groups that had both been victimized by the nuclear accident. (5-6)

Iwakami is the founder of an internet-based independent television station called Web Iwakami, which flourished after the disaster by countering government misinformation in the mainstream media. Collecting testimonies, he wanted to access local truths and give voices to g otherwise merely be managed as a “population.”2 He conducted dozens of interviews and published them as long-form videos on the website of his media organization, IWJ (Independent Web Journal). Then, in 2012 and 2014, he published two bound volumes, titling them Hyakunin hyakuwa: One Hundred People, One Hundred Stories.3

As an admirer of Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel-prizewinning Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, I was interested in reading Iwakami’s interviews as literature. As a feminist, I also wanted to read them for insights into how people were overcoming the split Iwakami describes, between a kind of materialism, namely the physical reality of children’s health, and a kind of idealism, namely the spiritual importance of the family home. To study Fukushima is to see that this split has mapped itself directly onto stark political oppositions between left and right. The left criticizes the government’s failure to acknowledge the real physical danger of radiation. The right insists that what the left calls danger is actually just “harmful rumors” (fūhyō higai) damaging the economic recovery (fukkō) and community bonds (kizuna) they idealize. Arguably, it a version of the same schism that feminist new materialism has been trying to overcome, especially in an age of climate crisis, by insisting on the importance of what Elizabeth Grosz calls “the incorporeal.” 4 The incorporeal is a concept that emphasizes the interdependence of the material and the ideal, the world of things and the world of ideas, and the harm done to both when they are conceived separately. When Iwakami uses his interviews to address the harm done by nuclear victims’ mutual recriminations, is he making a similar point–that the two sides would be better off if they stopped seeing themselves as separate?

As I made my way through his two volumes, I was reminded repeatedly of a line from Deleuze in The Logic of Sense: “Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us” (149). Rather than resent the nuclear disaster as something happening to them personally, many of the people in Iwakami’s books “become worthy” of it by understanding it as something vast and impersonal. They do not put the materialism of contaminated soil, food and bodies on one side, and the idealism of safety and community on the other. Instead, they link them all together by means of what Deleuze would call “the logic of sense,” replacing the on-high moralism of nuclear judgement with an immanent ethics of day-to-day nuclear engagement.

We see it first in the way Iwakami assembles his interviews. In the introduction to his first volume he cites as inspiration the American journalist Studs Terkel, whose oral histories he had first emulated in the early 1990s when collecting personal narratives about the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After Fukushima, Iwakami says his aim is to debunk stereotypes by means of the authenticity of “ichininshō hitori katari,” “first person singular narrative” (Iwakami, 6). However, the emphasis in the two volumes never becomes a confessional grammar; it is never the individual subjectivity of his speakers. Instead, because Iwakami allows each twenty-page narrative its own logic, the emphasis falls on the relation between the disparate voices. In quick succession we encounter people who are not only on opposite sides of the issue, but often internally conflicted themselves. Paradoxically, we feel affinity for all of them. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Deleuze’s discussion of the paradox from Logic of Sense, everyone in Iwakami’s book asks, “Which way which way?” Iwakami’s point, like Deleuze’s, is that “the question has no answer, because it is characteristic of sense not to have any direction” (77).

“No obvious direction.” How does this work, philosophically? The second place we see “sense” and “the incorporeal” replacing moral judgement in Iwakami’s volumes is in a subset of fascinating interviews that answer the question directly. These are my favorite interviewees, and the remainder of this essay is devoted to them: Saitō Hideko, Sasaki Keiko, Mutō Ruiko, and Satō Sachiko. All are women,5 all are activists, and all offer narratives that pivot on a series of recurring infinitives—”to be irradiated” (hibaku suru), “to eat” (taberu), “to get sick” (byōki ni naru), “to grow old” (toshi o toru), “to die” (shinu), “to live” (ikiru). The four women push themselves to understand both how these verbs connect the people of the event, and how they can be used to extract something useful from it for activism.

In Deleuze, the reason “sense” has no obvious direction is that it is incorporeal: it belongs to the enigmatic but crucial philosophical category that proves the inherence of the material in the ideal, and vice versa. Deleuze acknowledges that using “sense” and the “the incorporeal” as concepts is difficult. To understand them, he says, we have to go all the way back in the history of Western philosophy, past the Platonic dichotomy between the material and the ideal, to the pre-Socratic Stoics, who put both on one side of a conceptual divide, and opened another side for what explains their relations. That is, the Stoics put both bodies and souls, both substances and qualities, on one side, and saved the other for what operates by the incorporeal “logic of sense.” Deleuze explains:

The Stoics’ strength lay in making a line of separation pass—no longer between the sensible and the intelligible, or between the soul and the body, but where no one had seen it before—between physical depth and metaphysical surface. Between things and events. Between states of things and compounds, causes, souls and bodies, actions and passions, qualities and substances on the one hand, and, on the other, events or impassive, unqualifiable, incorporeal Effects, infinitives which result from these amalgams. (Dialogues II 63)

What is interesting about Saitō, Sasaki, Mutō, and Satō is the way they make using “impassive, unqualifiable” infinitives seem not enigmatic and ancient but obvious and modern. Theirs is nuclear-induced Stoicism that has much to teach not only fellow Fukushimans, but everyone looking for new ways of being worthy of environmental catastrophe.

To take the most obvious example: both within and outside of Japan, intellectuals have responded to the nuclear accident with angry incredulity toward the Japanese government’s two main responses. The first was a safety campaign, legitimized by a group of “government scholars” (goyō gakusha) who insisted raising the annual legal radiation exposure limit from 1 to 20 millisieverts in Fukushima was fine, even for children, and that increased rates of juvenile thyroid cancer beginning in 2012 and 2013 were due solely to increased screening rates.6 The second was a decontamination (josen) campaign, which allocated the lion’s share of national disaster money not to evacuations but to collecting the top six inches of soil, leaves, branches, and other organic material from all “special decontamination zones” in one-ton plastic bags that were then be stacked near the crippled reactors.7 With both responses, the government’s willful denial of radiation’s actual material properties was truly staggering. As intellectuals, should we not insist on a materialism that would take radiation seriously?

Yet what Saitō, Sasaki, Mutō, and Satō teach us is not only that compassion for people who cannot leave is crucial, but also that the innovative thinking needed to address the disaster may require the refusal to separate reflecting on the world from living in it. Interested less in critique than in affirmation, they each find impetus in the circumstances themselves, responding not to the enormity of the disaster but to the possibility of extracting something immanent to it: something lighter and less personal, something “incorporeal.” Each manages to orient her creativity along lines of sense already traced by the event itself. Explaining how this can work, Elizabeth Grosz notes that Deleuze returns to the Stoics because it is precisely their concept of the incorporeal that allows them to locate the force of idealism within materiality:

We think only because we are forced into invention by external exigencies on which we must rely to live, let alone prosper. Thinking does not come easily and is wrenched not only from the living being’s interior but above all from the capacity for sense that the alignment of events—these external exigencies—make possible. (149)

Modeling the ability to wrench thought from the capacity for sense after 3.11, Saitō, Sasaki, Mutō, and Satō become worthy of the event not just to keep from resenting it, but to find out what it will allow them to think if they acknowledge their place within it, and its place within them.

SAITŌ HIDEKO

Let’s start with Saitō Hideko, the director of a daycare center affiliated with a hospital complex in Iwaki. Speaking about what it has meant to “take responsibility” after 3.11, Saitō objects to a recent op-ed in the local newspaper with the headline, “Now More than Ever, Let’s Eat Fukushima Produce.”8 The op-ed complains that even local customers in area restaurants are reluctant to eat food raised in Fukushima. “If the people of the prefecture don’t take the initiative [and eat it],” the op-ed asks, “what kind of thanks are they offering their supporters elsewhere in Japan” who do? (Iwakami, vol. 1: 157). This is a central controversy surrounding economic recovery in a heavily agricultural area. Saitō counters that not only do outside supporters not expect Fukushima residents to eat contaminated food, it is also not the role of ippan shimin, the general populace, to take responsibility for an accident wrought by national policies and the Tokyo Electric Power Company. She sounds full of anger and resentment, and at this moment, not particularly Stoic. Yet even though she has sent her own children to live with relatives in western Japan, she herself remains in Iwaki, which we come to realize she does to model her own version of responsibility.

Deleuze calls events “impersonal” because they correspond to a part of the present that exceeds one’s own particular “now.” When he suggests, for instance, that every event is “a kind of plague, war, wound, or death” (Logic 151), he does not mean simply that events always happen to more than one person or entity, but rather that they never inhere in the personal, actualized moment of “I get sick,” “I shoot the enemy,” “my body is cut,” or “I die.” They inhere instead in the unlimited set of other possible actualizations or self-structurings to which this same set of conditions could give rise: to sicken (or not), to shoot (or not), to be cut (or not), to die (or not). Deleuze calls these “counter-actualizations” that are “grounded in me” but also have “no relation to me at all” (Logic 151). This is why, in Stoic thought, the bodies and passions that are causes can be described with nouns and adjectives, but the events that are their effects are always described with verbs (infinitives). One of the main arguments in The Logic of Sense is that to be worthy of the event is to attune oneself to the simultaneity of these different temporalities, one personal and the other impersonal. As Deleuze scholar James Williams explains, “We have to express the event in its eternal significance and we have to represent it in its present happening” (144).

In Saitō’s narrative we discern at least three separate events: “to feed,” “to irradiate internally,” “to sicken.” She relates that, as a daycare director, she “can not take responsibility for other people’s . . . children based on government assurances of ‘no immediate health effects'” (158).9 So she proposes that the daycare forego local produce, even though it meets national radiation standards, and secure a regular supply from Nara Prefecture in Western Japan. This, however, results in yet another dilemma. Hearing about the daycare’s dietary precautions, and also that it has removed contaminated soil from its play area, a number of parents who never left Iwaki move their children to Saitō’s school. They also telephone friends who have evacuated and convince them to return and enroll in Saitō’s school. Saitō worries that this makes her a hypocrite. “Right here, right now,” she says, “I’m proud to be taking some degree of definitive action. But when I think about looking back at myself in five or ten years to ask whether what I did was right or wrong, I worry” (Iwakami, vol.1: 159).

The phrase “right here, right now” hints at Saitō’s investment in “representing the event in its present happening.” But what does it mean to “express it in its eternal significance”? At first Saitō seems to be judging herself; she tries to solve her dilemma by imagining herself looking back with the understanding of hindsight. Yet her gesture of splitting time into two categories can also be said to correspond to a key gesture Deleuze admires in the Stoics: their division of time into Chronos and Aion, the corporeal present and the incorporeal past-future.10 When parents phone their friends to say the Iwaki daycare is safe, and when op-ed writers say the same about Fukushima food, they are seeing, in Saitō’s words, “only what is right in front of their eyes” (158)—the immediacy of Chronos. The Stoic trick, and indeed the trick that Saitō exhibits, is in addition to cultivate an appreciation for the way the present never exhausts events because, as Deleuze says, “there is a part of them which their accomplishment is not enough to realize, a becoming in itself which constantly both awaits us and precedes us” (Dialogues II 65). This becoming awaits us in the eternal past-future of Aion, an immaterial well of difference to which Deleuze says we can only gain access if we constantly replay the event, like an actor who knows her role is always there to be played differently by others.

In Saitō’s narrative, these others appear at two key moments. She says, first:

Four years ago we went to Hiroshima, visiting the Genbaku Dome and Museum, and having the opportunity as a family to talk about what took place there. If not for that experience, I think I would have been much more resistant to acknowledging my fear of radioactive contamination. (155-156)

Saitō traces her ability to stay in Iwaki and lead the daycare creatively to having pondered the photographs and exhibits of the Hiroshima Peace Museum. There, she saw firsthand how the infinitive “to be irradiated” was played out in hundreds of lives before hers. We sense her thinking about a similar impersonality of events in the future when she then relates:

During Golden Week in May my son and I were eating okonomiyaki in Himeji [where he is living with my relatives when] the conversation turned to whether we should sprinkle it with aonori (shredded seaweed). We decided on just a little, since it tends to stick to your teeth. But then quite a lot stuck to our teeth, and we laughed that this must be exactly what’s meant by ‘there is no particular threshold’ (shiki’ichi ga nai), just like with radioactivity. Sometimes you use lots of aonori and none sticks, and other times you’re careful to use only a little and your teeth get covered.11

The metaphor gives voice to a Stoic insight easily lost in polarized post-3.11 thinking, namely that the relations between “to ingest,” “to be irradiated,” and “to sicken” will be actualized differently in every body that performs them. This is what it means for Stoic thought to find its origins in what Grosz calls “the capacity for sense that the alignment of events—these external exigencies—make possible” (149). Depending on this alignment, sense, in both of its senses, as meaning and as material orientation, will direct itself differently, and outcomes will change. The crucial difference between this insight, and the much crueler biopolitics of “letting die” a small but inevitable percentage of the irradiated population, is positionality. As Deleuze writes, “[t]he eternal truth of the event is grasped only if the event is also inscribed in the flesh” (Logic 161). He continues, introducing the keyword “counter-actualization”:

But each time we must double this painful actualization by a counter-actualization which limits, moves, and transfigures it. . . . Counter-actualization is nothing, it belongs to a buffoon when it operates alone and pretends to have the value of what could have happened. But, to be the mime of what effectively occurs, to double the actualization with a counter-actualization, the identification with a distance, like the true actor and dancer, is to give to the truth of the event the only chance of not being confused with its inevitable actualization. (161)

When Saitō and her son act out the statistics of “sticking” and end up with their teeth covered, it is a painful actualization of the way in which their exposure may already be wreaking havoc on their health, and even more so on the health of friends who have not evacuated. But when they double this possibility with its non-stick inverse, they also connect it to the variability of what is “effectively occurring” in Fukushima: a counter-actualization in which many are also not getting sick. In a single performance they manage to maintain both intimacy with and distance from the inevitability of cancer and all the other illnesses caused by long-term internal exposure to radiation. To borrow James Williams’s language, Saitō and her son are “willing the event” by “conduct[ing] [its] intensity . . . while resisting [its] . . . compulsion to confirm injuries, ideas and values as final and inevitable” (140).

SASAKI KEIKO

Let’s turn next to retired teacher and activist Sasaki Keiko, a native of Fukushima City. Now in her sixties, Sasaki might be said to have been grasping the eternal truth of the event “to be irradiated” for four full decades.

In her twenties, she marched in the streets to protest the construction of the nuclear plant at Futaba. It was built. Ten years later, she rallied anti-nuclear study groups and lectures. Nevertheless Fukushima elected a pro-nuclear governor, Satō Eisaku. After Chernobyl, when Governor Satō agreed to allow the Futaba plant to add an even riskier “fast breeder” reactor to burn reprocessed mixed-oxide fuel, Sasaki and her comrades picketed the prefectural government. This time, to their delight, Governor Satō changed his mind. But his refusal angered the nuclear industry and the national government so much that he was arrested on politically motivated bribery charges, and his successor quickly acquiesced.12 At this point Sasaki herself ran for prefectural assembly, lost, and then helped form an activist group for peace and the environment.13 At the time of the earthquake, her group had begun staging daily silent vigils at the prefectural capital to protest the 2010 implementation of the fast breeder plan, holding giant banners that read “No Second Chernobyl” and “Don’t Make Fukushima a Nuclear Dumpsite.” After 3.11 she continued these vigils.

In her interview with Iwakami, Sasaki invokes the politician Hachiro Yoshio, who had recently lost his job because he referred to the specter of evacuated hometowns as shi no machi—towns of death.14 Having been appointed Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) by incoming Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko on 2 September 2011, Hachiro made his fateful remarks during a visit to the towns of Futaba and Namie on 9 September. Upon his return to Tokyo, he is also said to have joked to an Asahi Newspaper reporter that he would “share the radiation” emitted by his clothing. Within the week he had tendered his resignation. Yet Sasaki notes that she embraces the term “town of death.” Speaking about her own town, Fukushima City, she says she thinks families with young children should leave, and seniors, who are “dull” (nibui) to the effects of radiation, and whose generation is responsible for the disaster, should stay. Where her definition of shi no machi parts company with Hachiro’s is in its insistence on the ability of death’s impersonal, incorporeal dimension to generate new ways of thinking about how to live:

I myself have appealed to seniors to be the first to do what they can, and have drawn up a proposal called “Senior Paradise Fukushima Plan,” calling for the cooperative creation of a safe environment with sponsored employment and community policing, to be paid for primarily by a self-governing body. I want to build a system that would give seniors a reason to live, and on which they would want to stake those lives, and live them out. It would be like a special development zone, a hometown so unique that seniors from other prefectures would want to live here too. (179-180)

Sasaki’s plan to convert her “town of death” into a paradise that would draw seniors from other prefectures is wonderfully absurd. Repurposing the neoliberal idea of a “special development zone,” she imagines Fukushima City as a site for counter-actualizing death with life. Here, growing older and slower will mean growing more purposeful and more lively. How is she able to imagine this?

Deleuze would say she can do it because she knows how to be “led back to the surface” – how to reject both philosophical heights and philosophical depths (136). In The Logic of Sense, the term “philosophical heights” refers to the idealism of Plato, “he who leaves the cave and rises up” (127). The term “philosophical depths” refers to Plato’s predecessors, the pre-Socratics, who never left the cave—who “sought the secret of water and fire [and] philosophized with a hammer” (128). In Fukushima in 2011, Hashiro Yoshio strikes us as something of a pre-Socratic, his humor (“Contamination!” “Certain Death!”) not only falling flat but swiftly censured by on-high Platonic officialdom. In contrast, when Sasaki sets out to think “what we can do as seniors,” her humor succeeds by tracing its way to the surface of the same state of affairs. Interested neither in relegating death to a safe outside, nor in immersing herself in it, she thinks rather about all the ways it might be played out by people already oriented along its axis: already sensing it. Given that, for “us seniors,” “to die” is both immanent and limitless, why should it not include sponsored employment and community policing? This is her utterly original question, and she answers it in the affirmative. Certainly! Why not? It is a good example of what Deleuze means when he says it is “characteristic of sense not to have any direction” (Logic 77). “To die” means both to grow older and younger at the same time. It also shows why Deleuze says Stoic thinkers are funny: “humor is the co-existence of sense with non-sense” (Logic 141).

It is interesting to imagine what Sasaki would make of the fate of her city four years later. On my way home from a conference in September 2015, I got off the bullet train in Fukushima City, moved to visit some of the places Sasaki mentions in her narrative. I started by googling her organic-yeast bakery Papa Gēna, but an online review noted it was “closed due to the disaster.” Then I took a taxi to a residential neighborhood to find her favorite natural food cafe, “Wind and Wood” (Fū to boku), but it was shuttered. Finally at her favorite art-house cinema, Fukushima Forum, I found friendly faces. While those I met were willing to list several films that dealt with 3.11 in thought-provoking ways, they said those films were only of interest to tourists because local people cannot afford to think about radiation, especially if they have young children. In the taxi on the way to the theater my driver said the population of Fukushima City hadn’t changed much since 3.11. Right after the disaster, it dropped from 310,000 to around 250,000, but many people moved back, and the population was now around 290,000. Wikipedia corroborated his numbers. To the naked eye, the city was bustling. It was in no way the “city of death” peopled by a small but revolutionary group of seniors that Sasaki had envisioned four years earlier.

On my walk from the theater back to the station I stumbled upon the Fukushima Office for Environmental Restoration (Fukushima kankyō saisei jimusho), funded by the Ministry of the Environment (Kankyōshō). Near the entry were a series of wide-screen displays with interactive features for answering questions and quelling fears. In low-tech contrast, the inner walls were covered floor to ceiling with painstakingly updated handwritten charts of the progress of soil decontamination (josen) in every city, town, and village in the prefecture. Many boasted “100% decontamination.”15 Given my itinerary, I couldn’t help thinking that the minority who would contest such reassurances—those who bake organic-yeast bread, for instance, or eat at natural food cafes—had long since evacuated. Historically speaking, had Sasaki’s revolutionary plan for “Senior Paradise Fukushima” not ended in colossal failure?

This question resembles one Antonio Negri puts to Deleuze in their 1990 interview, “Control and Becoming.” Pushing Deleuze to explain how we can get from minority “becoming” to full-scale political insurrection, Negri admits, “[R]eading you, I’m never sure how to answer such questions” (Negotiations 173). Deleuze’s reply is remarkable for the way it repeats a line from Logic of Sense, in which he quotes the French poet Charles Péguy on the difference between “history” and “event”:

What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actualized in particular circumstances; the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of History. History isn’t experimental, it’s just the set of more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment with something beyond history. […] In a major philosophical work, Clio, Péguy explained that there are two ways of considering events, one being to follow the course of the event, gathering how it comes about historically, how it’s prepared and then decomposes in history, while the other way is to go back into the event, to take one’s place in it as in a becoming, to grow both young and old in it at once, going through all its components or singularities. […] They say Revolutions turn out badly. But they’re constantly confusing two different things: the way revolutions turn out historically and people’s revolutionary becoming. (Negotiations 170-71)16

The passage invites us to consider whether we can say that Sasaki’s revolutionary becoming, as narrativized in Iwakami’s book, outlives its positive or negative actualization in Fukushima City. In other words, although Sasaki’s historical, material now is very much the starting point for her experiment, very much its source and location, there is also something immanent in that same history, something incorporeal, which history is not equipped to address and that she herself exploits. Is this not how she manages to be in the middle of a great failure of politics and thought—a massively depressing historical now—and still to practice an affirmative philosophy? Speaking with Iwakami, she jokes about converting her husband to an anti-nuclear stance (“It required a long-haul battle plan, but that’s my style!” [174]) and reminisces about when Satō Eisaku changed his position to anti-nuke (“We sent him flowers!” [173]). Her levity and joy are infectious. For her the event “to be irradiated” is ongoing, so she can always take her place in it anew.

MUTŌ RUIKO

Let’s meet another woman activist for whom the event “to be irradiated” began long before 3.11. Mutō Ruiko is a long-time antinuclear activist in Fukushima whom Negri would likely love for her concrete political victories. In 2012 she co-headed the “Complainants for Criminal Prosecution of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster,” a group that in 2015 successfully petitioned Tokyo district court to hold TEPCO executives responsible for the professional negligence that led to the disaster. As Norma Field and Tomomi Yamaguchi emphasize, the resulting “Fukushima Nuclear Plant Criminal Proceeding” (Fukushima genpatsu keiji soshō) is not a civil lawsuit, of which there have been many, but an unprecedented criminal prosecution.17 Since June 2017, five court-appointed attorneys representing the state have extracted 31 days of testimony from three retired executives representing the nuclear industry. Mutō and her comrades attended all these testimonies as members of an organization they founded, Supporters of the Fukushima Nuclear Plant Criminal Proceeding (Fukushima genpatsu keiji soshō shiendan).18 If found guilty, the executives face up to five years in prison, and Mutō’s political, historical revolution will have turned out well.19 But what about her revolutionary becoming? Back in October 2011, when Mutō spoke with Iwakami, she was still in the early stages of thinking through her dilemma, and she did not mention criminal charges or TEPCO executives. Instead, we see her deep in the process of trying to grapple with the events directly, to extract what she will need to play her role.

Mutō Ruiko’s parents were educated Marxists who grew up in Fukushima. They moved back after her father attended Waseda University in Tokyo and served in the Pacific War on Karafuto (the Russian island of Sakhalin, colonized at the time by Japan). She went to university both at Wakō Daigaku in Tokyo and in nearby Miyagi Prefecture, where she earned a second degree in special education. After twenty years as a teacher of children with intellectual disabilities, she inherited land from her grandfather in Miharu. She then worked for three years to clear the land, built an energy efficient house, and opened a small cafe. At the time of the earthquake she was living with her mother, her partner, and her dog. They had been running the cafe for eight years, experimenting with ways to use as little energy as possible, serving tea made from their own herbs and grasses and curry made from their own acorns. For light they used a kerosene lamp and for heat a wood stove. Both home and cafe were active workshops for living lightly on the earth.

Mutō’s investment in the ethics of energy production and consumption recalls Deleuze’s assertion in The Logic of Sense that Stoicism is “a concrete [and] poetic way of life” (148). Mutō traces these ethics to the shock of Chernobyl and the subsequent books of Fujita Yūkō, which prompted her to join a group called Fukushima Network for Denuclearization (Datsugenpatsu Fukushima nettowāku). If the “eternal” side of the nuclear wound became clear for Saitō Hideko during a visit to Hiroshima, for Mutō that same vastness of temporal scale impressed itself as she attended more lectures and study groups about a massive precariat of uranium miners, plant workers, and waste haulers. In 1991 Mutō lay down in the road with 300 other protesters to stop uranium from being delivered to the Rokkasho-mura reprocessing plant in Aomori Prefecture. She was adamant that spent fuel from the two nuclear plants in her own backyard not spread its misery any further.

In scenarios like this, what Deleuze calls Aion, the impersonal past-future of the event, is easier to discern than in Deleuze’s own examples. One of his best-known Stoic portraits in The Logic of Sense is of the WWI-wounded paraplegic and French poet Joë Bousquet, who lived his life in symbiosis with his injury, determined to become its equal. Bousquet wanted his wound to select in him only “what is best and most perfect” (148). Deleuze writes:

Joë Bousquet must be called Stoic. He apprehends the wound that he bears deep within his body in its eternal truth as a pure event. To the extent that events are actualized in us, they wait for us and invite us in. They signal us: “My wound existed before me, I was born to embody it.” It is a question of attaining this will that the event creates in us; of becoming the quasi-cause of what is produced within us, the Operator; of producing surfaces and linings in which the event is reflected, finds itself again as incorporeal and manifests in us the neutral splendor which it possesses in itself in its impersonal and pre-individual nature, beyond the general and the particular, the collective and the private. (148)

What does this mean? If for Bousquet the event is the crippling war injury, and if it “existed before him,” it is because he is not the first to embody such a wound, and he will not be the last. It exceeds him in the sense that there have always been and will always be particular weapons and particular wars. These weapons and wars, these bodies, become corporeal causes for all the equally particular, equally personal, equally corporeal soldier and civilian bodies that they wound. But what the Stoic appreciates is not just bodies, not just things, not just causes or passions, but also effects: the incorporeal infinitive “to wound,” which is a relation between bodies, a way of understanding their alignment, and an understanding of their connection.

The parallel in Mutō’s case might go something like this: There have always been and will always be people who need heat and energy to do work. In an example Deleuze develops from Sextus Empiricus, “the fire, a body, becomes cause to the wood, a body, of the incorporeal predicate ‘to burn'” (qtd. in Grosz 30). What labor harvests the wood? What hands and lungs distill the kerosene? What eyes enjoy the light? What bones soak in the heat? These are particular, personal, material questions, both evoked and exceeded in the infinitive “to burn,” which establishes their relation. Mutō is comfortable with the way these questions get answered in her little cafe. She has thought deeply about what it means to be worthy of the event “to burn” in her daily life.

In contrast, as we have seen, she is not comfortable with the way these questions get answered at the Fukushima Dai-ichi and Dai-ni nuclear power plants. She tells us that one concession her Denuclearization group did win from TEPCO was a monthly audience for such questions, where, one year prior to 3.11, they learned of a recent thirty-minute power outage. It was at about the same time in 2010 that the significantly more toxic fast-breeder reactor, Reactor Three, started burning mixed-oxide MOX fuel at Dai-ichi, and Mutō’s group had invited journalist Hirose Takashi for a lecture.20 The author of Nuclear Reactor as Ticking Time Bomb, Hirose had cited seismologists’ predictions of major tectonic plate shifts in line with the hundred-year patterns of what is known as the Tōkai earthquake series. Hirose himself had predicted a tsunami and power outage in Fukushima. This is why, when Mutō felt the earthquake on 11 March 2011, her thought as she dove under a table with her dog was, “Will the nuclear plants be okay?” It is also why, when she heard on 14 March that Reactor Three at Dai-ichi exploded, she knew its fallout would be more toxic than that of Reactor One, which had already exploded, or of Reactor Two, which would explode the following day.21 Being worthy of these events, of the infinitive “to burn,” would be much more demanding than any fire in a kerosene lamp or wood stove.

The point is that Mutō and her friends in the Denuclearization Network were already infinitely more worthy of the events than the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which has maintained ever since that they were completely unforeseeable. What Mutō and her friends understand, and TEPCO does not, is the difference between an accident and an event. In Deleuze, Joë Bousquet says, “My wound existed before me; I was born to embody it” (Logic 148). He apprehends it in what Deleuze calls its eternal truth by thinking through the limitless past-future of war. In Iwakami, Mutō Ruiko never says, “My radiation existed before me; I was born to embody it.” But by having done such a careful job of pondering its implications—by having cataloged so diligently the relations it sets up, its effects far beyond her own body–she understood, like Bousquet, its “neutral splendor.” Was it not in this sense waiting for her, signaling her? Because it was not for her an accident, because it was eternal, she knew resentment would be useless; she knew that 3.11 was not only happening to her. Rather than be resigned to it, she would begin to will it, to replay it, in a series of narratives including the one she provides for us via Iwakami and another she provided one month prior to that interview in front of a crowd of 60,000 at the first major rally of the Sayonara Nuclear Power National Action Group in Tokyo.

Let’s take a look at her speech on that occasion, which is remarkable because it ends with a listing of infinitives. These infinitives appear just after she has evoked the natural beauty of the landscape of her home prefecture:

With 3.11 as the threshold,
that same landscape was flooded with invisible radiation
and we became hibakusha.
In the ensuing confusion,
various things happened to us.
Our connections to each other were tested and broken
by stress and [the false promises] of a hastily instituted safety campaign.
One can only imagine peoples' vast worry and sadness:
in their communities, their workplaces,
their schools, and within their own households.
And every day, the endless, pressing, compulsory decisions:
To flee, or not. To eat, or not.
To make the children wear masks, or not.
To hang the laundry outside, or not.
To till the fields, or not.
To say something, or to remain silent.

(Fukushima kara 11-13)

Mutō prefaced these remarks in Tokyo in September 2011 by asking everyone from Fukushima to stand and to remain standing during her ten-minute performance.22 This meant that her audience could associate the devastating choices she recounted that had been made thousands upon thousands of times with the thousands of people standing. These were the people who had become hibakusha six months earlier, at the same time that they were also torn from one another [hiki sakarete i[tta]], their connections broken. The phrase “broken connections” refers to the effects not only of a safety campaign that asked them to ostracize those who did not believe its promises, but also of a paltry compensation policy that asked them to compete for insufficient state resources. What Mutō accomplishes with her infinitives is the reestablishment of these connections. By attributing the devastating choices to all those standing, she lightens and depersonalizes the individual choices, transforming the heavy moral burden faced by individual parents, farmers, and activists, into a hovering, impersonal event. Her simple poetic infinitives announce that there is no longer any wrong answer to these questions, and their impact is only the force of the sense they evoke, a force that can be extracted and used. The infinitives raise the question of how to think about time. To flee? To eat? To hang laundry? To wear masks? To till land? Mutō converts the question marks to simple declaratives, refusing the isolating neoliberal decisions of 3.11’s “present moment” and affirming the expansive past-future of these ongoing events.

On the Left in Japan, rallies like the one that brought 60,000 people to Meiji Park in September 2011 (or that brought 170,000 to Yoyogi Park the following July) are themselves considered tremendous victories: collective exercises in democratic free speech not witnessed in mainland Japan since the collapse of the student movements in the 1960s. Yet according to Mutō, such protests are meaningless without significant intellectual work beforehand from each constituent. She tells Iwakami:

We need to understand the degree to which we are made dependent on nuclear power without even realizing it.

It’s something you have to think through with your own head. You can’t rely on someone else’s opinion or someone else’s idea. I personally am not that smart. So I have to really wring my brain out, and think hard to make my decisions, and then take action. I think this relates directly to the question of how to change society. [Each individual thinker] must ask from her own perspective, “What is Nuclear Power Really?” (305)

Rather than speak truth to power, Mutō’s strategy, like Sasaki’s and Saitō’s, is to extract truth, not from those who are named in criminal cases, or from one’s politicians, but from the power of the event itself. “I think the world has changed a lot since 3.11,” she says, “and this change has come at great sacrifice. But we have been able to think about an amazing number of things, to feel them, to experience them. It’s not something for government to do. It’s for us, one by one” (308).23

CONCLUSION: SATŌ SACHIKO

Let’s conclude with Satō Sachiko, an organic farmer, social worker, and activist, whose interview with Iwakami is unique because it narrates Fukushima as an event less of radiation than of mental health.

Satō was born to generations of farmers on both the maternal and paternal sides of her family in the hamlet of Kawamata-town, Iitate-village, 55 kilometers as the crow flies from the Fukushima Dai’ichi plant. At the time of the triple meltdowns she was raising the youngest two of her five children and training interns at “Sea of Mountains Nōjō,” an organic farm she founded with her husband thirty years earlier. She was also running a nonprofit welfare center for elderly and disabled people in Fukushima City, thirty minutes away by car. As she tells her story, readers slowly discern the scope of her accomplishments. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, having relocated her family 90 minutes to the west in Yamagata Prefecture, she continued commuting to the welfare center. There, she formed a volunteer group to take radiation readings at elementary schools in Kawamata and Fukushima City and, finding the radiation levels three and five times higher than the upwardly adjusted legal limits, she successfully petitioned the prefectural government to monitor all 1400 schools in the prefecture, not just in the restricted zone. The same group supported social media platforms to facilitate communication among worried and angry parents. In April 2011 Satō launched the “Fukushima Network for Protecting Children from Radiation,” a 250-member NGO committed to “refuge [hinan], evacuation [sokai], respite travel [hoyō]” and, for children who cannot leave, “protection [bōgo]” (228). In September of the same year she traveled abroad for the first time in her life, joining representatives of other Japanese anti-nuclear NGOs in New York to address the National Press Club, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the United Nations Human Rights Commission.24 Participating in a street demonstration, she even managed to land a zinger on Prime Minister Kan Naoto as he emerged from a speech at the UN: “It’s cowardly to talk about the safety of nuclear power when you can’t protect the children of Fukushima!” (231).

If readers discern the scope of Satō’s achievements only slowly, it is because the spotlight is stolen by the family narrative she uses to frame them. The interview begins with her recounting that, as her family fled during the meltdowns, she stopped at her mother’s grave to beg forgiveness for her decision not to endanger her children by returning again: “I want be like you mother; I want to save the children. Please forgive me” (226). We learn that her mother had suffered three major bouts of depression: first when she was in her second year of middle school and her parents both died, leaving her with an infant brother who died in her care; second, when she was a young mother and her youngest daughter almost drowned; and third, when she was a grandmother and the same daughter, pregnant during Chernobyl, gave birth to a child who later developed hydrocephalus. We also learn that Satō has struggled with depression, which she traces to her second year of middle school when she watched her mother rush into their burning house to save a sister she herself had failed to wake. These narratives underscore the pain and conflict at the heart of Satō’s activism on behalf of children. Explaining the scene at her mother’s grave, she reveals, “[Mother] would be out of the hospital for several years, then back in again, but she never recovered, and in the end she committed suicide. Thinking of the lives she had gone so far to protect (sō made mamotta inochi), I knew I had to carry them forward, and live as she had lived” (226).

Living as her mother had lived, heroic but depressed, protecting children on a journey that threatens to veer toward suicide: this is a trajectory Satō desperately wants to avoid even as she finds herself hurtling along it, committed to its vigilance, its love, and its intensity. By launching the Fukushima Network for Protecting Children from Radiation, she effectively expands the scope of her maternal line from one family to thousands. But what are the stakes for her mental health? It is a question we could ask of all activists in Fukushima. If Deleuze’s concept of “being worthy of the event” is relevant for the triple meltdown it is because he draws a careful distinction between the kind of “crackup” that killed Satō’s mother, and the kind of “crack” we wish for Satō herself.

In a key section in his discussion of the Stoics, Deleuze identifies alcoholism and schizophrenia as some of the modern psyche’s most devastating events, and advocates not that we cure them but that we draw a line of separation between their weighty physical and intellectual burdens and the whisper-thin, incorporeal crack that runs across their surface. This crack, Deleuze insists, is the source of crucial resources:

If one asks why health does not suffice, why the crack is desirable, it is perhaps because only by means of the crack and at its edges thought occurs, that anything that is good and great in humanity enters and exits through it, in people ready to destroy themselves. (Logic 160)

In March 2018, when several Fukushima activists came to Washington D.C. for a round-table at the Association for Asian Studies, I had a chance to ask after Satō Sachiko and her NGO, Fukushima Network for Protecting Children from Radiation. The activists replied that they and Satō had fallen out of touch after Satō violated an unwritten rule of grassroots activism in Japan and accepted money from a Marxist sect called Chūkaku-ha. I will end with some observations about this choice, which returns us to the problem with which we began: community division.

Formed in 1957 during the heyday of Japan’s New Left, Chūkaku-ha is still associated with the excesses of its 1960s and 70s rivalry with another sect, Kakumaru-ha. After Fukushima, Chūkaku-ha established a network called NAZEN, short for “Subete no genpatsu ima sugu NAkusō ZENkoku kaigi” (Nationwide Association to get rid of all nuclear reactors right now!). Collaborating with NAZEN, Satō drew criticism from those who agreed with the Japanese police, which continues to classify Chūkaku-ha as a terrorist organization.25 What we appreciate from Satō’s interview with Iwakami, however, is that if there is money to help children, she does not care whether it comes from Chūkaku-ha, because the fraught history of Japanese Marxism is not the event of which she is striving to be worthy. What both fuels her activism and imperils her mental health is a different event, that of ongoing threats to children’s bodies in Fukushima, and mothers’ attempts to intervene. Reading her story we can see that what makes her special as a human being and powerful as a thinker is her ability to sidestep moral judgment and pursue an ethics immanent to the intensive care-work of parenting in a prefecture where radiation is only the most recent in a long series of challenges. In its enormity this event threatens to crack her up. Yet she strives to make it select in her something equally powerful and impersonal, maintaining her sanity by raising it up and bringing it out to the surface, to the infinitive “to care.”

Footnotes

1. In March 2011 the Japanese government designated the 20-kilometer radius of the plant a “restricted zone” (keikai kuiki). In April 2011 it extended the designation to include more places where annual exposures were also expected to exceed 20 microsieverts (mSv). For a timeline of these and other key policy dates, see Iwakami, Dai ishū, 341-349.

2. For a comprehensive Media Studies account of Japan’s two main post-3.11 citizen-based online news initiatives, Web Iwakami and Our Planet TV, see Liscutin..

3. Iwakami’s videos can still be viewed at the IWJ site for a small membership fee. See “Hyakunin hyakuwa.” Iwakami edited the final video and print versions of One Hundred People, One Hundred Stories to 59 interviews: 25 women and 34 men. The print versions are divided into two volumes published with San-ichi Shobō, the first of which is the source of the four interviews I analyze here. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

4. Grosz takes the title of her most recent book, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics and the Limits of Materialism, from the Stoic concept of the incorporeal as developed by Deleuze in The Logic of Sense. One of her aims is to encourage the “new materialist” feminism with which she is often associated to avoid swinging from the idealism of cultural constructivism to the vitalism of new materialism, and instead to understand materialism and idealism as mutually constitutive, each “the implicit condition for the other” (13).

5. For additional studies that theorize women’s responses to Fukushima, see 1) Kimura, on citizen radiation-monitoring organizations both in and outside of Fukushima (sociology), 2) Slater, Morioka and Danzuka, on young mothers from Fukushima (anthropology), and 3) DiNitto on gender and nuclear containment in post-Fukushima fiction films (literature/film). All three emphasize women’s positions as arbiters of competing social/discursive and scientific/material claims.

6. Until April 2011, the Japanese government followed standards set by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) allowing a maximum external exposure of 1 millisievert (mSv) per year for the general public and 20 mSv per year for nuclear workers. One month after the triple-meltdowns, the government raised the maximum to 20 mSv per year for the general public, including children, and 250 mSv over five years for nuclear workers. Two “government scholars” responsible for promoting the new standards were Yamashita Shun’ichi and Takamura Noboru, whose names are cited repeatedly and often angrily by Iwakami’s interviewees, many of whom attended Yamashita’s and Takamura’s public lectures in the spring and summer of 2011. Yamashita’s assurances were difficult to rebut because he had done research in Chernobyl and co-authored World Health Organization studies on its epidemiological legacy. In 2011 he was also chair of the Japan Thyroid Association. For a concise account of Japan’s shifting safety standards after Fukushima, see Normile, 909. For a discussion of how Yamashita put politics over science, see Kamanaka, 7.

Official post-disaster thyroid cancer screenings have been conducted by Fukushima Prefecture’s “Health Management Survey” (Fukushima kenmin kanri chōsa, or FHMS). In his introduction to the second volume of “One Hundred People One Hundred Stories,” published in April 2014, Iwakami explains that in November 2013 the FHMS examined 254,000 children and found seven “definite” and nine “probable” cases of thyroid cancer. By early 2014 the numbers had risen to 33 “definite” and 41 “probable” cases. Nevertheless, the FHMS maintained that it was “difficult to think” (kangaenikui) that the increase was the effect of radiation (Dai nishū 9).

7. In March 2012 the “restricted” zones outlined in note 1 were reclassified and subdivided by the Ministry of Environment into 1) areas expected to receive more than the allowable 20 mSv of external radiation annually, which became “difficult to repatriate zones” (kikan kon’nan kuiki), 2) areas expected to receive around the limit of 20 mSv, which became “residence-restricted zones” (kyojū seigen kuiki), and 3) areas expected to receive less than the maximum legal 20 mSv, which became “zones in preparation for the cancellation of evacuation” (hinan shiji kaijo junbi kuiki). As levels fall, the zones are recalibrated in keeping with the extension of the 20 mSv air-dose limit (see note 5). Meanwhile, the centers of the “difficult to repatriate zones” are not expected to be opened in the foreseeable future. As Iwakami notes in the 2014 introduction to his second volume of interviews, these zones, which include the seaside towns of Futaba-machi, Ōkuma-machi, and Naraha-machi, have become the primary storage site for the organic material scraped from the surface of the rest of the prefecture. One interviewee notes with sadness and irony, “They couldn’t have dreamed of a better solution to the problem of having nowhere to dump nuclear waste than an actual nuclear accident. We should have seen this coming when they chose our towns for the plants to begin with” (207).

8. The two major local newspapers are Fukushima Minpō and Fukushima Minyū. In a recent interview, documentary filmmaker Kamanaka Hitomi explains that both papers, together with local radio and television stations, had long since abandoned investigative reporting on the prefecture’s nuclear plants because the nuclear industry had been their biggest advertiser since the plants were first constructed in the 1960s and 1970s, and negative press was taboo (Kamanaka 11).

9. Saitō is parroting the words of Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yuiko, who first used the phrase “tadachi ni kenkō ni eikyō wa nai” (no immediate health effects) on 16 March 2011 after the third reactor, Reactor Two, blew up. Noriko Manabe notes that Edano “would repeat this infamous phrase on seven occasions” thereafter (49). Iwakami’s interviewees cite it frequently.

10. As John Sellars notes, Deleuze derives the terms “Aion” and “Chronos” more directly from Victor Goldschmidt’s (1953) reading of the Stoics than from the Stoics themselves (161).

11. P. 155. With the term “shiki’ichi ga nai” (no threshold) Saitō and her son refer to the “linear no threshold” (LNT) model for calculating risk, according to which the long-term biological damage from radiation is proportional to dose, with no dose low enough (“no threshold”) to pose zero risk. LNT has long been the dominant model used in Japan and globally to set safety standards, although competing models exist. For a history of the LNT model from a Japanese perspective, including that of the geneticists who collaborated with the US-led Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see Onaga.

12. Satō Eisaku served five terms as governor of Fukushima from 1988 to 2006. He suspended the MOX (Mixed Uranium-Plutonium Oxide Fuel) program in 2000 after filing a number of unheeded safety complaints, then was forced to resign in 2006 amidst charges that he had misappropriated public funds for a dam project. After the triple meltdowns, his June 2011 book The Truth About Nuclear Power in Fukushima (Fukushima genpatsu no shinjitsu) became a best-seller, as did his September 2009 book, Expunging the Governor: False Charges of Corruption in Fukushima (Chiji massatsu: Tsukurareta Fukshima-ken oshoku jiken). For the specifics on the numerous safety complaints that Satō submitted to TEPCO, see Onuki.

13. Sasaki ran as an independent. The group she formed is called “Fukushima Wawawa no kai” (Fukushima Wawawa Association), where “wawawa” corresponds to characters meaning “environment” (環), discussion (話), and peace (和). The group’s website is www.wawawa1210.blog.fc2.com/. It was last active in 2015.

14. On Hachiro’s gaffe see Mochizuki and Oribe; see also “Hachiro Yoshio.”

15. The information is also kept online at http://josen.env.go.jp/plaza/. The address of the “Decontamination Information Plaza” (Kankyō saisei purazā) is ₸ 960-8031 Fukushima Prefecture, Fukushima, Sakae-machi, 1-31.

16. Here Deleuze repeats what he says about Péguy in the ninth series of The Logic of Sense when he is talking about the difference between history and event: “Péguy clearly saw that history and event were inseparable from . . . singular points” (53) but that “singularit[ies], unlike history, are not discursive and not realized in the present: the singularity belongs to another dimension than that of denotation, manifestation, or signification. It is essentially pre-individual, non-personal, and a-conceptual” (52).

17. Field explains, “Citizens can file a criminal complaint with the police or prosecutors when they believe that a crime has been committed but has not been pursued by the police or prosecutors. To do so is to insist that responsible parties be identified by public authorities and not just by private citizens who feel they have sustained injuries” (3). Given that neither TEPCO nor the Japanese government has acknowledged their role in causing the disaster, the criminal prosecution was not expected to go forward. For coverage in English, see Negishi and McCurry.

18. The group’s website (https://shien-dan.org/) provides analysis of each day of testimony.

19. The three executives were found not guilty on 19 September 2019. See Sheldrick and Kelly.

20. This is the same MOX fuel that Sasaki Keiko and her group petitioned Governor Satō Eisaku to stop allowing. His successor allowed it after he was driven from office in 2006.

21. The reprocessed MOX fuel in Reactor Three was more dangerous because it contained both plutonium and uranium. As science writer Natalie Wolchover explains, unlike the all-uranium fuel used in the other reactors, “Plutonium emits alpha radiation, a highly ionizing form of radiation, rather than beta or gamma radiation. External exposure to alpha particles isn’t much of a health risk, because they have a low penetration depth and are usually stopped by skin. When alpha-emitters get inside cells, on the other hand, they are extremely hazardous. Alpha rays sent out from within cells cause somewhere between 10 and 1,000 times more chromosomal damage than beta or gamma rays. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, plutonium enters the bloodstream via the lungs, then moves throughout the body and into the bones, liver, and other organs. It generally stays in those places for decades, subjecting surrounding organs and tissues to a continual bombardment of alpha radiation and greatly increasing the risk of cancer, especially lung cancer, liver cancer and bone sarcoma.”

22. The performance is on Youtube. See Mutō “9.19.” The speech was published in Mutō’s 2012 book, Fukushima kara.

23. In a recent essay about Mutō, Katsuya Hirano also emphasizes her role as a thinker: “For Mutō, to despair properly (kichinto zetsubō suru) is to fix one’s gaze firmly on the outrage of the nuclear disaster and continue pondering it, resolutely.”

24. Satō recounts the journey in her 2013 book Fukushima no sora no shita de (Underneath a Fukushima sky, 128-135). Her collaborator Aileen Miyoko Smith writes about the same trip in “Bridging the Plight.”

25. For an account of activist groups’ attempts to steer clear of a newly revived anti-nuclear New Left after Fukushima, see Kimura, 116-120.

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