Appendix 1. Meridian 180 Forums

Cry from the Scene

Naoki Kasuga “Cry from the Scene”

What follows are excerpts from a document found at the following website: http://www.iam-t.jp/HIRAI/pageall.html

I don't know if the contents of this document are trustworthy, but the document was circulated as significant reference material among the members of a research group based at Kyoto University. I cannot imagine any absolutely trustworthy information in the current situation. The fact is that the socially constructed nature of information itself has been exposed. Many of my Japanese colleagues do not believe that this document should be circulated further. They want to handle information as carefully as possible and keep it limited so that any panic may be avoided while the current difficulty is being overcome (A majority of Japanese people would probably accept this view). This is very different from the way I think Americans approach a crisis. The American way would seek to overcome a crisis situation by exaggerating its criticality and creating a strong leader and self-sacrificing heroes.

The questions I would like to put forward through the following excerpts are:

1. What does the current situation illuminate about contemporary problems nuclear power plants embody in a highly concentrated fashion as ostensible foundations of the global economy, such as manualization, audit culture, modularized industries, non-regular employment, and social discrimination?; and

2. What does the circulation of this document itself tell us about the kind of information we need to sort and link together in order to construct reality. I would appreciate your comments.

Please find below some information about the author of the document, Hirai Norio:

Passed away in January 1997, he was a plant plumber 1st Grade, who served as Advisor to the Citizens Forum for Nuclear Power Plant Accident Investigation, Director, Support Center for Nuclear Power Plant Workers Exposed to Radiation, Special Assistant to the plaintiffs in the injunction against the construction of Hokuritku Electric Power Company's Noto (later Shiga) Nuclear Power Plant, Special Assistant to the plaintiffs in the injunction against the construction of Tohoku Electric Power Company's Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant and Witness for the plaintiffs in the injunction against the operation of Reactor No. 3 at Fukushima Dai-ni Nuclear Power Plant.

What follows are excerpts from the document:

I am not an anti-nuclear power plant activist. This is simply a report from someone who worked at a nuclear power plan for twenty years. There are many people who can talk about the design of nuclear power plants, but there are few who talk about the actual construction of plants. My specialty is plumbing at industrial plants, such as large chemical factories. I worked as a site manager for a long time.

The central government and electric power companies emphasize that all nuclear power plants are safe because they are earthquake-resistant and are built on solid rocks. However, this is nothing but a fairly tale. As the Hanshin-Awaji Great Earthquake (Kobe Earthquake) has revealed, no close monitoring is being done on the actual construction and maintenance of these plants.

In recent years there have been numerous accidents caused by human errors at nuclear power plants. This is because there are not too many professional (experienced) technicians on site. Even if the design of a plant is excellent, it is not followed in construction and maintenance work. What is assumed as an absolutely critical condition at the stage of designing is that construction is performed by craftsman technicians with superb skills. But the reality is that nuclear power plants or any other buildings are constructed by a bunch of unskilled persons, from on-site workers to inspectors. Until recently, craftsman technicians known as boshin and team leaders with more experience than younger site managers were always on construction sites. About ten years ago, these craftsman technicians started disappearing from construction sites. Complete amateurs are recruited. Prior experience is not required. Since craftsman technicians disappeared, construction has been manualized so that amateurs may construct buildings. As a result of manualization, what is done at the construction site is just like piling up toy building blocks, that is, simply matching prefabricated parts already partially assembled at factories like matching No. 1 to No. 1, No. 2 to No. 2, etc. Workers construct buildings without fully understanding what they are doing at each step, what particular significance each step has, etc. This is one of several factors contributing to the frequency of accidents and malfunctions.

Because of the exposure to radiation, you cannot train your successors at nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants are dark and hot. Because you wear protective masks, you cannot speak to each other. You communicate by gestures and hand signals. You cannot transmit your skills easily. Additionally, the more skilled you are, the more quickly you reach your annual allowable exposure level.

Some people say that we do not need experienced construction workers as long as inspection is done thoroughly. But the regime of inspection itself is problematic. In Japan inspection is done after the plant is completed. Inspection is more critical during the process of construction. Current government inspection only consists of listening to manufacturers’ and construction companies’ explanations and checking required documentation.

Only when nuclear power plant accidents became more frequent was a cabinet decision made to allocate an operation management supervisory officer at each plant. Even in a critically serious accident in which the emergency core cooling system (ECCS) is set off at Tokyo Electric Power Corporation's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, [national newspaper] Yomiuri Shinbun reported that the plant's operation management supervisory officer was “completely unaware of the accident.” Why wasn't the official informed of the accident? That is because the electric power company knew that the official is a complete amateur. In the midst of a frantic crisis situation the company did not have time to explain to the official what had happened as if they had had to explain the accident to a child and did not allow the official to enter the site. He was left uninformed, and he did not know anything.

Japanese nuclear power plants have caused astonishingly serious accidents so frequently, accidents equivalent to the Three Mile Island accident and the Chernobyl accident. In 1989, the incident at Tokyo Electric Power Company's Fukushima Dai-Ni Nuclear Power Plant involved the crumbling of its recirculation pump. This was the world's first accident of the kind. In February 1991, at Kansai Electric Power Company's Mihama Nuclear Power Plant small pipes broke and radioactive substance was emitted to the air and the ocean directly. Water containing radiation from the reactor also flowed into the ocean and was about to cause the empty reactor to start heating itself. The multi-staged safety valves that Japan is proud of failed one after another, and a veteran worker who happened to be at the site that Saturday made a quick decision to stop the leakage manually. A critical incident with potentially global impact was averted. The cause of the accident was a simple construction error.

Radioactive substance comes out from those tall chimneys of nuclear power plants. Radioactive substance falls over local residents, and they are exposed to radiation all day long. I once received a letter from a woman who was 23 years old: “I found a job in Tokyo and fell in love with someone We decided to get married. We even exchanged betrothal gifts. But suddenly our engagement was cancelled by my partner unilaterally. He told me that I had done nothing to blame. He said he wanted to be with me. But his parents told him that I had grown up in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture and had spent ten-odd years there. He said that women living near a nuclear power plant have a high chance of giving birth to children with leukemia. It would be too much to his parents to have to see their grand children sick with leukemia. That was why he said his parents had asked him to stop marrying me. Did I do anything wrong?” I have heard so many stories like this all over the place.

I once gave a lecture sponsored by a teachers’ union in the Town of Kyowa, Hokkaido, near Tomari Nuclear Power Plant. I solicited questions after my lecture. A second year junior high school student raised her hand. She said, “All of you, grown ups, who are here just want to look good. I came here to see their faces. What kind of face are they showing? Those grown-ups who are here pretend to be activists concerned with pesticide, golf course development, the nuclear power plant and others things claiming that they are concerned about children. I live in the Town of Kyowa right next to Tomari Nuclear Power Plant and am exposed to radiation 24/7. I learned from books that there is a high probability of giving birth to a baby with leukemia in Sellafield, a U.K. town near a nuclear power plant. I am also a girl. I will probably get married when I reach marriageable age. Is it okay for me to give birth to a baby?” She was in tears while posting this question to 300 adults in the audience. But no one was able to answer her question. “We girls always talk about this among ourselves. We won't be able to get married. We won't be able to have children.” Their teachers did not even remotely know that students had this kind of concern today.

Everyone knows that a nuclear power plant accident is horrifying. Does that mean that they are safe as long as accidents are avoided? Do they count as peaceful uses of nuclear power? I don't believe so. As long as power plant workers keep dying from radiation and local populations are suffering, nuclear power plants are not peaceful.

Cynthia Bowman

Here's an American response, not guaranteed to be representative. I am a law professor at Cornell who became involved about two years ago in environmental law, both as a professor co-teaching a legal clinic in water and land use law and as an activist in my local community, which is an idyllic rural area facing the threat of widespread drilling for natural gas by a process called hydrofracturing, to break out the shale deep below our homes, farms, and parks and release the gas trapped in it. I knew nothing about either the science involved or environmental law when I threw myself into these projects. Perhaps that is why I have been constantly shocked by discoveries about the virtual failure to regulate dangerous industries and the control of regulators by the powerful industries in this area. Natural gas, like nuclear power, is touted as a “clean” form of energy and a solution to dependence on foreign oil, global warming, and the like. Dig a bit deeper and you discover that although natural gas may be clean to burn, the process of releasing it from the earth is far from clean and poses huge dangers to the water supply, the environment, and the social and economic foundations of our communities. We are told that none of these dangers will come to pass because of the care with which the companies in charge will manage the process and the widespread regulations that will require them to do so safely. I quickly discovered that the very companies involved had managed to secure exemptions from the most important federal environmental regulations with respect to this industry, from the acts passed, for example, to protect a clean water supply. I set my students to pour over the regulations that did apply and to enumerate the tasks required to carry out the proposed New York State regulations of the proposed gas drilling and to estimate the hours and personnel that would be necessary to do so. The tasks involved were clearly much more than could even theoretically be performed by the number of employees of the Department of Environmental Conservation, and in the next state budget, due to recession-imposed reductions, there were major cuts to the state resources that did exist. Simple-minded as it seems, releasing all those numbers to the local press led to a front-page story on the problem in the local newspaper, at a time when the public was just beginning to become aware of it. The students also wrote comments to the Department of Regulation on the proposed regulations. With a local group of activists, we arranged speakers, held demonstrations, contacted our representatives in Albany and Washington, wrote articles for the local newspapers, and fed information to the national press. In New York State, this growing awareness came in time to prevent any licenses being issued to the drilling companies, delaying final issuance of the regulations, and leading to a temporary moratorium on the process. In our neighboring state, Pennsylvania, by contrast, the companies had gone ahead with drilling before anyone became aware of the dangers, that is, until people began to report that their drinking water had become unsafe to drink – indeed, that it was possible to hold a match to it and light a fire. Photographs of what the gas drilling has done to the beautiful rivers, valleys and forests are appalling. I'm saying all this just to explain why I was not surprised to read the account Professor Kasuga circulated, although I was at the same time horrified. Until profit-making corporations can genuinely be held accountable to the public, not just after an accident but before and during construction, and until regulatory agencies are genuinely independent of the industries they are meant to regulate, I don't think that one can ever speak of either nuclear energy or hydrofracturing as “safe” or “clean.” I personally am not hopeful that day will come, at least not soon, and think it is essential not to proceed with either of these forms of energy, no matter how much foreign oil they may be able to replace. Until alternate forms of energy have been developed, there is no answer except to reduce our energy consumption substantially. The natural gas companies take out full page ads on an almost daily basis in the New York Times, saying how natural gas is the answer to all of our problems, the clean energy of the future. These ads invariably feature a picture of an attractive young woman, usually African or African American, and perhaps a child. Money prints ads, so they will never include the dilemma of the young women described in the excerpts, who have come to see themselves as unmarriageable, never to give birth to their own children because they lived in the vicinity of a nuclear plant without even knowing the dangers. And we certainly cannot trust the information provided to us by the companies or our governments. This places upon us a heavy responsibility to acquire and analyze information on our own and to disseminate it widely. I've been reading, and demanding explanations of, a lot of science lately. In short, I agree with Prof. Kasuga about the typical American response but I hasten to add that I am far from certain that these efforts will be successful in the long run. As human beings of conscience, impelled by the disaster that is affecting the lives of so many people in Japan, we don't have any choice but to try, do we?

Grace Guo

I am from Taiwan. Ever since March 11th, the local media and all kinds of networks have been reporting as well as discussing the Japanese nuclear disaster, civilian and government reactions after the disaster, and comparing Taiwan's media and Japanese media in terms of media coverage, etc. The whole society seemed very concerned about the situations of the neighboring country Japan. I would like to share two points first. First of all, I want to start with Professor Kasuga's mentioning of the attitude toward Hirai Norio: uneasiness and distrust. Hirai Norio's document has also become popular in Taiwan, but there is also plenty of suspicion that the document was a 'fake'. Anyways, the attitude toward this story, I think, has shown our (even though we too are experts in some fields) uneasiness toward "so-called" high-tech professional fields, and our distrust about regulators. Secondly, take nuclear power as an example, could we discuss the issues between "pros" and "cons" with the help of "sufficient information and judgment"? Could we not be kidnapped by the two ideologies that have been pushed to extreme dichotomy, that is, cleanness and prosperity, etc, which are represented by "supporting nuclear-powered electricity", and progress and love of nature which are represented by "opposing nuclear-powered electricity"? Or, is it simply not possible that the presumption that I have brought up, i.e., "sufficient information and judgment", would exist in the debate on the kind of nuclear disasters?

Naoki Kasuga

Thank you Professor Bowman for your immediate response.  I want to express my utmost respect for Professor Bowman's research and outreach activities.  I've shared the link to Mr. Hirai's website because I wonder why Japanese scholars who are familiar with technology and nuclear energy – both in the social and natural sciences – avoid spreading this information.  I think it's odd to see them pressuring the authorities for immediate information disclosure, but concurrently – and confidently – trying not to raise others’ fears.  It is understandable that those trying to overcome the differences between the natural and social sciences are particularly sensitive about the power of information to construct reality.  But in my view there is something wrong with this approach.  It's not about either the American or Japanese approaches.  I can't share their conviction about their sense of reality.  This may be true not only for those Japanese scholars, but also for some American and Chinese intellectuals. I admit that I can't clearly explain my sense of discomfort with their conviction, but in what follows I would like to try to explain it as concretely as possible. One thing one needs to keep I mind in constructing an argument is that one should avoid a style that seeks simply to confirm one's own reasoning.  Even if one's argument or statement is logically consistent, needless to say one must leave things “open”.  Nevertheless, though I'm exaggerating this a bit, many researchers are only engaging in a kind of discussion to reaffirm their expert positionality in this state of emergency. I think that we (at least I) are every day facing a situation that is beyond imagination.  For example, today (March 23) , the authorities announced that the radiation in Tokyo tap water was found to be twice the allowed limit for infants, and they requested that the public not mix it with infant formula.  The Consumer Food Cooperative [a widely used grocery delivery service]  is running out of bottled water and perishable goods. Mr. Hirai's comment raises familiar questions of risk and trust.  Yet, what is “trust”?  There are numerous definitions in the social sciences, but discussing or thinking about trust in unimaginable conditions requires asking ourselves once again what and how each human being believes.  That in turn requires us to confront the nature of religiosity, science and  conviction. How can we decide what is trustworthy?  For example, like many anthropologists, I was critical of the arguments of [atheist evolutionary biologist] Richard Dawkins.  But I am no longer certain.  He challenged those people who worshipped at church after the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand.  Why do you worship a God who could not prevent the disaster.  Alternatively if God is not powerful enough to stop the disaster, in what sense do we consider him as God? (God and Disaster. Richard Dawkins.Net. 13.3.2011.An RDFRS Original). I've never sensed such a challenge from Dawkins’ question ever before.  Are contemporary scientists willing to confront religion head on?  And what is our understanding science, anyway, and to what extent should we believe in it?  This question is like a knife at my throat.  I also don't know what to think about the death of the young daughter of one of my informants in Fiji where I conducted fieldwork, whose father (my informant) rejected modern medical treatment for her due to his belief in witchcraft.  I've long been spending my time engaging with debates in anthropology, science and technology… Yet, I now feel I have never asked myself what it means to “believe.”      In 1995, as a victim of the Kobe earthquake, I struggled with losing a sense of reality.  This time, even though I'm not a victim, I'm facing severe confusion.  If my postings are the products of my confusion, Professor Bowman's thoughtful and considerate response is probably a gift to me to recover my sense of balance. 

Clark R. West

Professor Miyazaki has asked me to offer a response to this thread. I do so both as a priest and as an academic who has studied religion for some twenty years. I am very moved by the questions Professor Kasuga has raised about the possibilities and threats re: trust in the areas of religion, science and public accountability of government officials. My most recent research has been in the area of religion's responsiveness to the kinds of massive trauma currently being experienced and witnessed to in Japan and in people with close ties to Japan. As Professor Miyazaki has written about elsewhere, the category of hope is one that is regularly mobilized in such circumstances, and yet hope in the midst of trauma may look strikingly different from what religious (and non-religious) people expect. Thus I am sympathetic to the kinds of questions and challenges Professor Dawkins raises--too often religion and religious narratives in traumatic contexts rely upon a rhetoric of nostalgia or naive optimism at best, to self-blame and enervating shame at the worst (see Saint Augustine for a classic Christian examples of both strategies). More recently, western theologians influenced by psychoanalytic and sociological trauma theory have suggested that these classic strategies need to be replaced by ones more sensitive to what both Professors Kasuga and Miyazaki have pointed to as the confusion, epistemic uncertainty, and ambivalence ingredient in traumatic experience. Religious people are not given a pass from these conditions, as Dawkins rightly notes. Trauma inflected theologies are deeply sensitive to this epistemic situation of being 'in the middle' rather than beyond tragedy and trauma, and thus rightly reject the classic answers of theodicy highlighted in the Dawkins piece. Classic theodicies feel most often like a ‘view from nowhere’ rather than the response of an embodied subject deeply marked by ongoing woundedness. How to pray in such a situation thus becomes the crucial issue for the trauma theologian, and it is no surprise that prayer is the issue the Dawkins piece expresses the most suspicion of. A number of theologians have recently suggested that in contrast to the dogmatic, doctrinally confident prayer Dawkins scorns, tentative near-wordless prayer is particularly concordant with the experience of trauma. Here we might find some strong resonance between Christian forms of near-silent meditative prayer such as one finds in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and the Japanese Buddhist tradition of shikan-taza, just sitting zazen. Both of these forms of spiritual practice, interestingly, eschew words that could suggest a greater degree of clarity or epistemic confidence in a traumatic situation. Language exposes and makes one vulnerable to suggestion and in the traumatic situation needs to be handled with great care. Both zazen and hesychiastic(silent) prayer seek to avoid running after restless, fleeting thoughts so common in the wake of trauma (through attentiveness and a steadfast letting go of thoughts in both zen meditation and in neptic practices in the hesychiast tradition of eastern Christianity). Both seek a restfulness, or stillness of the mind, not as an escape, but as a deeper attentiveness to the heart's wellsprings for compassion which lie deep within a troubled mind. Neither practice, interestingly, requires strong dogmatic commitments, nor even much 'god-talk' which can be quite problematic in trauma settings. Finally, for the scientific mind, the possibilities of these kinds of spiritual practices for healing are intriguing. As Yoshiko Suzuki, a Japanese grief counselor currently working in Tokyo at a counseling center points out, grief and trauma along with its physical and psychological effects are scientific facts, and ‘whether you like it or not, whether you admit it or not, your brain has been affected and we need some help.” [see http://www.npr.org/2011/03/25/134821398/grief-stricken-japanese-reluctant-to-open-up ]Much recent scientific research has also been done on the effects on the brain of long-term practitioners of various forms of meditation practice. Though results are not conclusive, it is certainly possible and credible to believe that such spiritual practices may well be one way the human person copes with and even resists the most destructive effects of trauma. One might turn to the work of the great American psychologist William James here, whose own studies as a doctor, of mystical experience, were full of similar insights as to the measurable effects of spiritual practices on the wounded soul.

Tai-Li Lin

Follow me but trust me not? “At present I think I'll still follow the advises given by the government.” a woman replied when asked by Taiwanese media whether she would evacuate from Tokyo two days after the earthquake. Japanese have been praised for their orderliness and self-control, and there's no exception while encountering the tsunami of 11 March 2011 and the radioactive leak at Fukushima thereafter. Fukushima has raised panic as well as protests elsewhere in the world. What many people find exasperating is the reluctance of Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company) to inform in the beginning what exactly happened inside the nuclear power plant at Fukushima. Was the relevant information regarding the power plant, such as sustainability to disasters, accessible to common citizens? I visited the website of Japan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC, http://www.aec.go.jp/jicst/NC/about/index_e.htm), the competent authority of the Cabinet. There is plenty of information to be disinterred thereon, but is it what people really need? According to Article 3 of “Act on Access to Information Held by Administrative Organs” (http://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/law/detail) , any person may request disclosure of Administrative Documents pursuant to this Act. Under the request, the administrative organ concerned has the obligation to disclose the Information which is found necessary to be disclosure in order to protect a person's life, health, livelihood or property. (Subparagraph (b), Section (i) of Article 5) The Exclusions are listed as Section (ii) and (iii) of the same Article, which could be unsurprisingly argued NOT to disclose the information regarding the sustainability to earthquakes of nuclear power plants by JAEC (or Tepco). Is the Government free from the obligation to disclose to the general public about the potential danger power plant even without prior request? Is government's judgment still to be trusted as before after Fukushima? Perhaps we had better take the burden of judging for ourselves.

Grace Kuo

As for the story of Hirai Norio, I would like to add two more points about which I would appreciate comments. The first point is about the relationship between the use of energy and the project of modernity. To supplement debates about the (dis)continuation of nuclear power plants (of course, I think that all of us would agree that steering clear of the use of nuclear power is the safest way forward), I suggest that if human society seeks to become nuclear-free in the future, we should thoroughly rethink and redefine the symbols of 'prosperity' and ‘civilization’ associated with modern life. Examples include the colored lights that hang around Christmas trees, those that adorn leafless trees in the winter, and those that shine from sleepless city-views of large Asian cities (e.g. the lights seen at lively and bright night markets). These have become part of our life and serve as embodiments of a warm and encouraging modern civilizations.  While discussing energy policies and moving toward nuclear-free countries, should we transform how we have long imagined 'prosperity'? The second point is about a situation mentioned in Hirai Norio's story, in which girls in irradiated regions complained that they were unjustly discriminated against so that they could not get married. Around 2000, it began to become increasingly common for men in Taiwan to marry women from the Southeast Asia. For a long time, these marriages were seen by many as 'buy-and-sell marriages' in which women sought to marry in Taiwan for monetary gain, while men sought Southeast Asian brides because their social and economic statuses were too low to marry Taiwanese women. Many prejudices related to gender, economy, and social class are woven into these perspectives, including people's ignorance (or unwillingness to learn about phenomena they deem unnecessary to know about) about forms of international marriage. All of these prejudices, I think, are represented in a 2006 statement by one Taiwanese legislator: "Vietnamese brides have 'poison' in their bodies because herbicides polluted their land during the Vietnam War, therefore Vietnamese brides have the remaining poison in their bodies. Thus, males from Taiwan should not be allowed to marry Vietnamese brides, otherwise they will give birth to a lot of abnormal children which in turn will become Taiwan's burden." As soon as this comment was made, a great number of women's organizations spoke critically of its inappropriateness. As time goes by, demographic research conducted in Taiwan has begun to show that the children born of South East Asian women are healthier than those of Taiwanese women because the latter generally wait until an older age to have children. Today, the trend in Taiwan's immigration policies tends toward goals of 'openness,’ 'inclusiveness,' and 'multiculturalism.’ Further, allegations that 'Vietnamese brides contain poison' have disappeared among official and/or civil cultural activities. At the same time, the labor and fertility that has been brought to the country though these Southeast Asian women has indeed become indispensable material power for the families of male Taiwanese. 

Naoki Kasuga

I have read all of your comments with great interest. The nuclear power plant incident that has followed the earthquake reminds the world again of the importance of information. As I reflect on this, I can't help but think about how difficult it is to find credible and grounded information in such heavy and difficult circumstances. Reverend West's comment was very enlightening to me in this regard, as I sensed the thorough grasp of modern theology in his sympathetic response to the questions and objections of Professor Dawkins. I recognized that, perhaps more than those in other fields of study, theologians have candidly shed light on the radical questions that natural sciences like evolutionary biology, the cognitive sciences, physics, and mathematics impose on human society. I think that the current nuclear power plant incident is not only causing us humans to question our very trust in the natural sciences and our methods of reasoning and rationality, but also questioning "truth" as our absolute value, the nature of "facts" themselves. At least in my fields of study, I think, we have cleverly avoided such challenges by shifting from critiques of essentialism to a rising interest in constructionism. What is sought right now is a way to produce knowledge that can endure the practice of self-questioning, as we continue to question ourselves as we hold onto the pursuit of "ultimate evidence." Reverend West's concept of silent prayer presents us a powerful window into how the intellect could come to bear this challenge.

Naoki Kamiyama

It seems that many people in Japan have read “Hirai's Comment” which Professor Kasuga posted on this discussion wall. My friends have also sent it to me by e-mail. When I read this piece for the first time, I couldn't help recalling some of my own personal experience. Also, it became an opportunity for me to think more broadly about the responsibility of scientific technologies and private corporations. As for Professor Kuo's first point, I immediately agree with her thoughts on reconsidering our energy sources and current lifestyle. But we also need to take into consideration the North-South problem, the discrepancies between developed and developing nations. One the one hand, we find an argument to reduce the amount of energy consumption to avoid a possible energy shortage, and on the other hand, there are also nations and societies which demand the development of their economic power prior to reconsidering their energy consumption patterns. Because fossil fuel is cheaper and easier to process, developing nations and those of lower economic capacity have an incentive to use it over more expensive, cleaner technologies. It is thus more feasible for wealthier developed nations to bear with the inconvenience that arises as a result of the reduction of fossil fuel consumption. However, if these wealthier nations see capitalist economic expansion as their primary concern, the reduction of fossil fuel consumption could bring about unfortunate consequences for those developed nations by giving them a competitive disadvantage in certain manufacturing industries. The residents of developed nations presently have more leeway because they live in wealthy nations, but I believe their tone would change if they were to fall behind the others. Relative economic wealth might nor correlate directly with personal happiness, but I think that many of us have to admit that there are overlaps between wealth and happiness. At this juncture, can we imagine an economic and social system with restricted competition? It can exist as a kind of utopia. However, the limits of our accumulated knowledge discourage us from undertaking practical economic and social initiatives, those that seem necessary in a system in which the weak become victims of the strong due to market function and human greed. This can also be called “incentive,” and I think that we need to discuss what would be the ideal level of market competition. In response to Professor Kuo's second point, I'm writing about my own personal experience. I was born in Nagasaki in 1961 (16 years after the dropping of the atomic bomb). When I was seven years old, I moved to Fukuoka with my family. On the first day when I was going to go to my new elementary school, my mother told me, “Don't tell anyone that you were born in the Japanese Red Cross Nagasaki Genbaku Hospital, and don't tell anyone that your mother carries atomic bomb victim certificates (hibakusha techo).” As a seven-year-old child, I didn't think that I needed to say such things to anybody, and told my mother, “I won't.” What Mr. Hirai's comment reminded me of was the expression of my mother when she was much younger than I am right now. However, I haven't faced discriminations based on my place of birth so far. I can't ask my mother what she would think about the incident in Fukushima because she passed away a year ago. But since my father worked for a regional electric company for a long time, she might have been sympathetic to the workers of the electric company and would not have said negative things about the nuclear power plant. However, when I read a news article in which the school teacher asked the parents of an elementary school child from near the Fukushima nuclear power plant whether or not they would hide that they were from Fukushima (and no children sat next to her after the parents responded not to hide it), the story felt very personal to me. When I was in elementary school, it was just around the time when the US stopped their hydrogen bomb tests. But it was also still around the time when the Soviet Union and China were still engaging in hydrogen bomb tests (though those were conducted underground). Therefore, when it started raining on the way back home from school, my friends and I used to run, laughed and sang, “We will go bald if it rains on our head” (though none of us really thought that we would become bald). Also, after the current incident in Fukushima, since the media strongly criticized the liability of the electric company, I heard the rumor that the electric company was vandalized and the children of the company workers were bullied (I'm not sure about the validity of those news stories since they were not broadcasted, nor have I personally heard it from the victims). This news also struck a very personal chord with me because I too was a child of an electric company worker. I wonder if it is a human instinct to ruthlessly create such boundaries between and within groups. If such incidents are really taking place in our educational institutions, I have trouble thinking clearly about what would be the best response. I also thought about the meaning of “self-sacrifice” in relation to Professor Kasuga's comment on leadership and Professor Lhuilier's comment on language. What I'm writing below includes what I heard from others and I have not confirmed the accountability of the information. The leaders of the industry I'm working for – including those of my own company – are predominantly British and American. As the information on the nuclear incident has continued to circulate since just a week after the earthquake, I heard that the “leaders” of my industry evacuated to the Kansai region two weeks after the earthquake and directed the company remotely via phone and e-mail. Some of the international corporations revised their risk management strategy, and moved out from Tokyo to Osaka or Nagoya. In this process of corporate relocation, there were numerous discussions on the question of “whether to evacuate or to stay.” In light of this, I paid attention to how many Japanese businessmen suggested that, “If the leaders leave, their companies will loose the trust of their employees and their customers.” I thought that there were some rational reasons to relocate their business to the Kansai region because all were uncertain just how dangerous Tokyo was, and it was not clear whether or not we could trust the government's information. Further, the train schedule in Tokyo was chaotic and there were scheduled blackouts. Finally, it seemed very possible to work for a couple of weeks via e-mail or phone. However, I sensed that some of the Japanese workers “viewed the organizational order with pride and hated the idea of considering individual happiness over the collective body.” (I'm sorry that I'm writing this based on limited information). I think that there were significant differences between the Westerners and the Japanese even if the definition of self-sacrifice was to “sacrifice oneself to save a society or many people.” At least in Hollywood movies, there are possibilities for an individual to give up his/her life to save the life of millions. However, I don't think anybody will praise those taking their lives for organizational pride. Anywhere in this world, few would respect those who immediately run away. However, if their decision would entail the best consequences, I think we will probably respect their proper decision-making ability. In most cases, the expatriate company leaders allow their Japanese employees to either relocate to the Kansai region with them or to be on call at home. In Japan (even though I'm hesitant to generalize this), I thought Japanese leaders expected to stay long enough "to be the last to leave.” It seems that the Japanese wanted their leaders to stay in Tokyo until they could confirm that nobody - including the workers and the customers - was left behind. I don't think that all Japanese people should stay in Tokyo. I heard a story that an owner of a medium-size financial corporation suspended a meeting right after the big earthquake, told his employees to take the day off from work, ran down the stairs faster than anyone else, and even got angry at an employee when he noticed his driver was not there to give him an emergency evacuation. I think that the fact that there are such rumors spreading around indicates how much we dislike such scenarios. But there is also an opposite example. I heard that even though a Japanese worker of an international corporation was preparing to evacuate to the Kansai region because his Western expatriate manager did so (I hypothetically set them as Western expatriates but they could be the Italians or Turkish), he decided to stay in Tokyo in the end because the Japanese employees were extremely angry at their manager's decision to evacuate. This story reminds me of an incident in which Japanese citizens were injured by an IRA terrorist attack in London. I'm sorry that I don't remember it in detail, but it was around 1994 when the IRA and the UK government had not agreed to a ceasefire (I think this incident has already been forgotten because I can't find much about it on the internet). I was living in London after being sent there by a Japanese brokerage company. The IRA used to engage in suicide attacks at the “White House” near my office, and used to set up bombs in a trash box. It was a serious problem for me as some of the workers in my office got injured by their terrorist activities. The bombing was on an evening day in the city's financial district. It was the IRA's usual strategy to set up large-scale bombing in sparse areas during the weekends. Typically, their bombings lead to only a small number of casualties. However, I remember that the employees of Sanwa Bank were working over the weekend, and sadly over 10 people (I guess all of them were Japanese) got injured from the broken glass and other causes. When the IRA made their announcement, they stated that they did not think that the Japanese were working over the weekend. What I thought at that moment was that it must have looked strange to the British and the IRA that the Japanese were working in a high risk place that the British couldn't even get close to. One might say this incident would spark questions about whether or not the “foreigners” had appropriate information, as if they have different patterns of behavior and judgment standards. I think the Japanese feel more uncomfortable not going into work alongside others than facing the fear of terrorism. In terms of information sharing, (I'm sort of joking, but) it seems that some of the Westerners in Japan exchange information mostly in the changing room of the gym of the American Club near the US Embassy. Even if some of them have Japanese spouses, it is not strange for them to find the information from these other sorts of social networks more important. While I lived in London for five years, I didn't have a British friend who I could expect to provide me with information about how to respond to an emergency. I think the evacuation was an appropriate decision because it could have had a significant impact on people in business once they decided that they might be in a weak position in terms of available information. I was a sort of horrified by the fact that the decisions of some Japanese changed those of other Japanese. I would like to discuss it more because I think my fear is related to what Professor Lin pointed out as “the orderliness and self-control of the Japanese.” I guess there is something intangible here, an unconscious will to try protecting the organizational order (otherwise they will be stressed out) when they would be reacting to protect their health or lives as an individual. Such urge can be interpreted as the traditional group consciousness to protect a relatively narrower sense of a societal order as it is understood in Japan: “There is no society but interpersonal relationships in Japan.” However, I rather think that there is a value standard which treats “individuals' lives as relatively lower” than what they might actually be worth. A surviving kamikaze pilot and a novelist, Toshio Shimao, wrote in his novel of the “strangeness of not feeling the strangeness” of volunteering to give his life over as a weapon. I'm not saying that it is appropriate to engage in looting in disaster-stricken areas-- it is rational and appropriate to have social order. However, I find that the value judgment steering this case is not an ideal thing to be considered somehow universally righteous (I'm sure there are discussions about whether or not there is a such thing as universal righteousness), but rather something intangible that must be protected even if it would be dangerous for the individual. It's not strange for a leader to stand in front of an evacuating group, nor necessary for them to be the last one to evacuate the disaster site. Also I can't currently find any words to express the unfortunate feelings of those who gave up evacuating even though they personally thought that it was an appropriate course of action. I agree that the Japanese have demonstrated a high moral standard in their response. I also think that we can praise the value judgment that guided their decision because it was connected to a good consequence. I'm not saying that the psychological stress of those who engaged in the orderly response in the disaster area corresponds with the sort of strangeness that the Kamikaze pilot had faced. However, I thought that such a standard would lead to criticism of those who decided to leave their posts in Tokyo due to the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant incident and the confusions of public transportation. I saw an interview of victims who were staying in a shelter, eating only a few rice balls a day. This victim responded to the media, “My relatives in the other town called me to evacuate, but I can't move out from this place by myself.” I assumed that the victim must have wished to look for his/her missing family members, could not leave the farms or livestock behind, or wished to repair their damaged house. Yet, I must confess that I find it strange that I'm sympathetic to the response, “I can't move out from this place by myself (even if, at the end of the day, nobody is stopping me).” Lastly, I never doubted the potential for the development of nuclear power plants to reduce CO2 emissions. However, based on the knowledge which I have gained from the incident in Fukushima, I started to feel strongly opposed to the use of nuclear energy. As Professor Bowman pointed out, I learned that I can't make any correct judgment without proper knowledge. The knowledge and information weren't enough for voters to make their decision. I understand that nuclear energy development was led by the government rather than an electric power company. The biggest reason for its development was to diversify Japan's energy sources after the oil shocks of the 1970s. However, I think nuclear energy is far more than humans can handle. It always needs a cooling system and it produces far more energy than we can consume, thus causing enormous energy loss. And once the cooling system gets damaged, the nuclear system goes out of control as it starts producing the unnatural chemicals that can damage our health for a long time. From the current incident, we could learn how difficult it is to stop the disaster or to collect the right information on this matter. I see Mr. Hirai's comment as the resource to support my opinion. Moreover, it is not easy to process used nuclear cores. It was reported that the new nuclear waste disposal site in Finland would “last for 100 thousand years.” However, if such a facility really requires us to protect ourselves from its dangerous nuclear core for a period of 100 thousand years, it is reasonable to suggest that this sort of energy resource is currently inappropriate to use. Until recently I've never thought about why nuclear weapons are “worse” than regular weapons. I thought there was little difference between killing a person with a knife and killing many with a nuclear weapon: indeed the intentions behind both of the acts concern the will to take others’ lives. However, I've begun to think that the major difference between a knife and a nuclear weapon is not reducible to the deaths it causes. It is deeply concerning that a nuclear weapon is capable of wiping out entire ethnic groups or communities in just a moment (I say this probably because I read Foucault). This nuclear power plant incident has (probably) destroyed the livelihood of more than 100 thousand residents in just a second. Even though I see this as extremely destructive, the farms and the factories remain there just as they used to be. However, it has become a place that residents cannot easily go back to and won't be able to inhabit. Of course, a nuclear power plant is not a weapon and its intended use is completely different from that of a nuclear weapon. However, even though the total number of the dead is different from a nuclear bomb explosion, the consequence is quite similar. I think this technology far exceeds what we can handle. My grandmother told me that the amount of discrimination in Japan dropped drastically after the first atomic bomb explosion. In western Japan, for instance, there existed strong discrimination based on peoples' occupations or places of residence, and she said that it dissolved significantly in Nagasaki after WWII. But the atomic bomb also destroyed or ended so many individual lives and communities. I guess, in some way, it was good that this event triggered the end of a tradition of prejudice, but of course I don't want to consider this experience to be a light of hope. Moreover, even though it was a government entity, the management of a nuclear power plant is generally administrated by a private corporation. It is an obvious problem that we have private corporations managing nuclear energy in ways we are unable to control. And behind the problem of information transparency, the actions of the electric power company might be constrained by the will of its stockholders (plus there are loopholes in the Act on Compensation for Nuclear Damage). Indeed a model of corporate capitalism has supported the prosperity of developed nations so far. However, I think that the innovation and use of technologies which extend beyond our control such as nuclear energy have shown to us the contradictions internal to this system. From this point forward, we will also notice contradictions in a regulatory system in which “a law determines how we define our lives” in other fields such as biotechnology. On the other hand, years after Winston Churchill said, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" that have been tried, some economists (such as Raghuram G. Rajan and Luigi Zingales) have suggested that "capitalism is the worst form of economic system except for all the others" that have been tried. For them, it is our job to maintain and save capitalism. But just as militaries wish to obtain stronger weapons, I think corporations seek to obtain stronger technologies. Just as we need global information exchange, legal regulations at national level, citizen monitoring by what has been called the “New Public,” and voluntary corporate ethical management patterns springing from movements such as CSR, we also probably need an education system that challenges us to ask whether the use of dangerous technologies will lead to an unsustainable future. Even though full understanding of the complex fixtures of economy and society extend well beyond our imagination, the need to create frameworks to understand what constitutes proper courses of action in these arenas remains. Even though it seems infinitely complex to question how to balance scientific technology and corporate activity, I believe that we should not give up on working toward this goal.

A Grand Coalition for a Rise in the Consumption Tax is the Only Way

Yuji Genda “A Grand Coalition for a Rise in the Consumption Tax is the Only Way”

An enormous amount of support and assistance for regions and people affected by the Tohoku-Kanto Great Earthquake is pouring in from all over the country and the world.In addition to the donations of goods, numerous calls for monetary contributions are underway. For sure more volunteers will head to affected areas once the road condition improves. All of these are dearly needed efforts for now, and I forthrightly express my respect to those actively engaged in relief work.

But there is something those of us who luckily escaped the disaster and are able to continue to live a fairly safe life ought to ask ourselves. Is such relief work enough? Does this mean that those of us who live in Japan have fulfilled our responsibilities?

The reconstruction of our country will require a tremendous amount of money, labor and patience over a long period of time. For sure we need to avoid imposing the burden on the victims of this disaster. In order to accomplish the reconstruction work, we need to secure stable financial resources. However, considering Japan's already critical financial state even before the earthquake, we no longer have room for this.

What do we need to do? The only way to reconstruct our society is to raise the consumption tax rate decisively. This will only be possible if the Democratic Party of Japan and the Liberal Democratic Party spearhead the finding of common ground and facilitate the formation of a grand political coalition as quickly as possible.

Our political leaders ought to use the strength of this coalition to explain to the Japanese people with passion and sincerity why the consumption tax needs to be raised and to push this much needed tax reform forward. I believe that the Japanese people will understand the need for collecting the funds required for the reconstruction work ahead on a continuous and sustainable basis in the form of the consumption tax. The consumption tax may be waived for those regions affected by the earthquake. I expect our society to be united in the name of renewal.

Some may ridicule my proposal: “You are simply taking advantage of the current confusion.” Perhaps behind the scene clever politicians are steadily working toward such a coalition. But now is the time for a younger generation of politicians with a sense of a mission to voice their views in a more transparent fashion and unite themselves across different political parties and persuasions. They should use the momentum they may be able to create to lead us forcefully so that we may overcome the current crisis.

The raising of the consumption tax is a difficult task politicians alone have not been able to accomplish due to their preoccupations with elections, approval rates, etc. As a result, Japan is near bankruptcy. If this tax reform is achieved through a grand political coalition triggered by the earthquake, it would be a monumental achievement in which we confronted this severe experience head-on and overcame the crisis on our own.

In my view, taking decisive action in order to overcome difficulties is the only way to repay the dead. Now is the time to chart a route toward financial reconstruction. If we miss this opportunity, reconstruction will be impossible.

This is the moment of decision. Politicians may say that now is not the time to think about these things. We are preoccupied with the disaster. But before long we will have to choose to create one coalition government or another. Timing is everything. We are running out of time. A coalition government is the only hope for Japan.

Naoki Sakai “On Nationalism”

Disaster rarely affects people's lives evenly, as even the slightest differences in individual circumstances and environments may ultimately determine whose lives are saved, whose are destroyed, and whose are lost. It is also common for disaster survivors and those who are able to live their lives in safe places to develop a sense of guilt over the fact that they have survived or have managed to escape from disaster. Perhaps this reflects a rather paradoxical fact of human life: that only happenstance separates survivors from victims. Some people happen to survive while others happen to die, and often no reason can ultimately be found as to why one person died while another is left alive. We all know that war and disaster force us to confront the contingency of life and death, and that such traumas can spark what is known as “survivor's guilt.” In Japan, this paradox was confronted en masse during and after the Asia-Pacific War. Thus, it is understandable that the Tohoku-Kanto Great Earthquake has awakened memories of the past total war in a number of Japanese people today. It is also perfectly natural that some wish to extend the boundaries of “we” to include the national community and to express “survivor's guilt” in terms of the nation-state as a whole. I have no intention of criticizing this idea as unnatural. In any case, this disaster has once again confirmed that we humans have a rich capacity to create community. People have become particularly creative in their efforts to offer assistance not only to people from their hometowns, but also to total strangers. Many are trying to help others across social classes, geographical regions and national boundaries. This is why we never lost hope in the social conscience of the masses despite all the problems that volunteerism entails and the extremely tragic nature of this disaster. Unlike those in poverty-stricken areas of Africa and Asia, one does not get an impression that victims of the recent earthquake have been ignored or left unattended. One of the possible reasons for this is that Japan is a member of the so-called First World: it is a quintessential information society entwined in myriad transnational networks. Therefore, one can easily expect some Japanese intellectuals to use this disaster as a chance to turn adversity into opportunity, to seek a national political transformation that would be unimaginable under the political regime that existed prior to the disaster. Nevertheless, I have this lingering sense of being left unpersuaded by Yuji Genda's proposal. It is as if it keeps getting stuck in my throat and I am not able to swallow it. As I begin to discuss this feeling, two stories come to mind―one invoked by a momentary scene from a film, and the other about a Japanese cabinet member's recent resignation. The first episode can be be found in the opening scene of Clint Eastwood's “Letters from Iwo Jima.” As the scene begins, the screen shows what looks like a dark night sky. As the camera pans out, however, it becomes clear that the blackness is in fact the “sands of Iwojima.” After panning to waves breaking on the shore, the camera moves to a panorama of the Pacific Ocean. The scene I wish to describe comes right after this and lasts merely a second, a scene that depicts a cenotaph, facing its back to the Pacific Ocean, that commemorates the soldiers who fought in the battle (硫黄島戦没者顕彰碑). We can say that the entire theme of “Letters from Iwo Jima” is captured in this momentary image of the cenotaph. As the monument rests on the US-controlled island, the engraved script - in kanji, not Romanized script - seems to float in the dark. Then, right below the nine kanji, there are four more characters: “Kishi shin suke sho” (岸信介書) [written by a former member of the national Diet, Shinsuke Kishi]. This cenotaph was made not only to commemorate the fallen, but also to preserve the writings of a survivor. When I saw those four letters, I felt a reflex. I must say that it felt like a vomit reflex. Shinsuke Kishi was an extremely famous bureaucrat-politician. He was the father-in-law of Shintaro Abe, the Secretary General of the national LDP and the national minister of foreign affairs, and was the grandfather of Shinzo Abe, Japan's Prime Minister between 2006 and 2007. He was a reformational bureaucrat who worked toward the establishment of Manchuguo before WWII, was the Minister of Commerce under the Tojo administration, and was one of the national leaders who planned and directed the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. Of course, he was convicted as a Class-A War Criminal following Japan's defeat, and spent three years in Sugamo prison. Once US foreign policy changed 180 degrees in response to the rise of communist powers, he was freed from prison. Next, he reinvented himself as a player in anti-communist propaganda campaigns and a supporter of the anti-communism policies of the US government. These efforts culminated in his role as a founder of the 1955 regime, and he became the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and later the 56th and 57th Prime Minister of Japan. It is not hard to imagine that Kishi, who was well-versed in the vision of the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, served as a crucial resource for American governance in East Asia. It was also a well known fact that – even though it was not reported much in the Japanese press – Kishi and his brother Eisaku Sato were CIA operatives. Once the leader of the anti-US and anti-UK [campaign], Kishi became famous as a facilitator of American imperialism. As a consequence, several historians point out that protests of the ratification of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1969 were partially due to the Japanese public's hatred of Kishi. However, Kishi was one of the few sly old fox politicians who forged strong connections with American politicians during the post-WWII period. He was an exception-to-the-rule who could provide arrangements for soldiers’ families, and did not hesitate to use this privilege [for his own benefit]. Thus, he was able to leave his name on the cenotaph as a survivor. Yet it is not an exaggeration to say that the Japanese soldiers in Iwo Jima practically died as [sacrifices] for the Tojo administration's Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere: they were the victims of Kishi and others’ mismanagement. Despite the fact that he ordered the soldiers to “die” in Iwo Jima, Kishi is now commemorating the fallen as if he was the one to inherit their wishes. In other words, the ill-intentioned person behind the soldiers' death is now commemorating the fallen. By doing so, Kishi stole the position to inherit the wishes of the fallen, and I must say that, in doing so, Kishi successfully stole the names of the fallen soldiers. I'm bringing up Shinsuke Kishi's wartime responsibility not solely to criticize the fact that survivors can often take advantage of the loss of others. What Kishi's expedient action shows us, I think, is something about the possible courses of action that survivors could take in response to the fallen, “to inherit their will” or “to commemorate their death.” At end of day, I do not know whether the soldiers are happy or angry with the fact that Kishi made the cenotaph. Of course, they are not able to speak for themselves (死人に口無し), so [we] cannot criticize the survivors on behalf of the fallen. What we have to reflect on instead is actions which might use the plight of the deceased as tools to support or oppose preexisting interests. Understandings of the relationship between the living and the dead are typically derived from the religious sphere. But even secular societies uphold an ongoing relationship with the dead that is inherited through nationalistic rhetoric. It is a commonly thought that the idea of a national community has been founded upon a mythical continuity of the dead. Also, it is often discussed how such secularized religiosity has historically led to so many tragedies. What concerns me with regard to Professor Genda's suggestion is his lack of attention to the pseudo-religious nature of nationalism, and how he naturally accepts the mythical nature of a national community. I cannot say that the cenotaph in Iwo Jima commemorates only Japanese soldiers, as its purpose is to commemorate all of those who lost their lives in Iwo Jima, Japanese and American soldiers alike. However, when we query the details of the “fallen Japanese soldiers,” we immediately find this to be a difficult case. When Professor Genda asked us “Does this mean that those of us who live in Japan have fulfilled our responsibilities,” I do not think that he paid due consideration to the pseudo-religious nature of nationalism. I must say that this statement does not do justice to the limits of nationalism that the cenotaph in Iwo Jima contains. Among the Japanese soldiers who lost their lives in Iwo Jima, there are hundreds from the Korean peninsula and other former Japanese colonies. Yet even though they were treated as second-class citizens, they were still recognized as Japanese citizens. The boundary of Japanese citizenship not static, but is always in a process of historical flux. After 1945, many of the families of the soldiers, including those of the fallen commemorated in Yasukuni, are no longer Japanese citizens. And historically, a national community doesn't last forever. Such a mentality that approaches the national community as an eternal or immortal fixture is the foundation of the pseudo-religious nature of nationalism. Now I must tell you the other story, about the recent resignation of Seiji Maehara, the former Minister of Foreign Affaris. Maehara was forced to resign because it was revealed that he received political donations from a “gaikokujin” (foreigner) annually less than 50,000 Japanese yen. According to the news reports, the donation was from one of his long-term friends who managed a Yakiniku restaurant (a Korean BBQ restaurant). It is formally difficult to defend him, because we must interpret laws exactly as they are written, and his friend, according to the letter of the law, was indeed classified as a "gaikokujin." However, I see little problem with him receiving donations from someone who has lived in his voting district for long time, and I also don't find much problem with him giving a favor to the friend from his hometown. I don't think those are shameful acts for politicians. Still, I found it strange that I did not hear any commentary whatsoever from the media about whether applying the law literally would constitute racial discrimination, or about whether or not such a discriminatory law should be revised. This response reminds me of the lack of public criticism in response to the comments made by the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishirara, that “The Third Nationals” was racial discrimination. I guess it is our own philosophical decay to stay silent in such daily discrimination. Professor Genda started his question, “Do we, those who live in Japan, fulfill our responsibility?” However, wouldn't the manager of the Yakiniku restaurant be included among those “living in Japan?” What is the reason for connecting the concepts of “responding to the will of the victims” and the “citizen's” obligation? Professor Genda's suggestion is rooted in the standard nationalistic rhetoric of “Patriotic Shishi” (憂国の志士), so wouldn't such self-demarcation immediately make nationalism the justification of the tradition? Doesn't the logic behind forming a ground coalition to increase the consumption tax by using methods rooted in the pseudo-religious nature of nationalism worsen the existing racial discriminations in dangerous ways? All of the residents who live under the administration of the Japanese nation-state, regardless of their citizenship, typically have to pay taxes, particularly the consumption tax. Even though Maehara's friend was not legally a part of this nation-state, he will still have to pay [the tax]. I agree that we have to unite to help the victims of the earthquake. However, it does not have to be through an appeal to a national community. Without the pseudo-religious nationalism, we can still form a community. Right now, isn't the intellectuals’ obligation to find prospective ways to unite those with differences?

Hirokazu Miyazaki “The Hopefulness of a Rested Mind”

I want to respond not to the substance of Professor Genda's proposal since I am not an economist but to his call for immediate action. It is widely reported that Japanese people responded to the disasters in a calm and orderly manner. Some celebrated this as a manifestation of the well-known Japanese cultural commitment to perseverance and the social sharing of pain and burden. As far as I know, however, despite their surface calmness, many of my colleagues and friends are deeply suffering and mourning in the ongoing uncertain and unsettling situation. I believe this is true for many of us who are not currently in Japan. Where is hope now? There is a widely shared urge to take action in Japan and elsewhere. This is definitely a sign of hope, an indication of solidarity in which people are willing to share the pain. But my research on hope points to a different kind of hope that I feel that we all need at this moment. That is the hopefulness of a rested mind. It is hard not to watch the news and search incessantly for current numbers (the death toll, radiation levels of all kinds, etc.). Indeed, information and knowledge are important tools for navigating uncertainty, and they are slowly becoming available. In my view, the Japanese government is doing a fairly good job of providing the Japanese public with relevant information and knowledge and of assuring the public of the government's commitment to their safety. For sure, there is lingering doubt on the part of the public about whether the government is fully forthcoming in terms of critical information about radiation and food safety, but the situation is extremely fluid. Moreover, radioactivity is a contentious and little known territory to begin with. In other words, no matter what, certain knowledge is not something we can expect to achieve at the moment. Anthropological and sociological research on the nature of hope I have led at Cornell University has shown something profoundly controversial in the midst of our collective urge and will to take action. Research shows again and again that hope cannot be reduced to either action or non-action. It is a particular kind of modality that is neither active nor passive. It often entails a temporary total submission or abeyance of yourself, even your capacity to act in and know the world, to other forces. That is, in confronting uncertainty, hope demands that we at least temporarily give up our constant quest for information, knowledge and certainty. It then gives us a moment of rest that our mind desperately needs for further thought and action. We all need a moment of rest particularly in the midst of this catastrophe so that we may mourn our losses together, pray for others who are suffering and have a rested perspective on the crisis of humanity we now confront together.

Shigeki Uno

Much like others who share my specialization in political philosophy, I believe that I need more time before engaging in discussions on the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant crisis. What I can say right now, however, is that this crisis is a political one, and that we find ourselves called to restore not only people's lives, but also politics itself. I will discuss three points in the following comment. First of all, I would like to call attention to criticism of the Japanese government's response to the disaster. It has been said that the government was slow and insufficient in providing information to the public as the events unfolded. And following the nuclear power plant explosion, countries and international organizations around the world began to question the government's handling of information disclosure. Thus, one could say that the credibility of the Japanese government has been damaged in the course of this disaster. More critically, we can observe a tendency toward paternalism in the government's behavior. The most likely reason the government repeatedly insisted on the safety [of the nuclear power plant] is because it wanted to avoid fueling the anxiety and panic of the public. And it is no doubt that the reason behind its choice to extend the evacuation order was rooted in a deep concern about the fear and confusion that could rise during the evacuation process. In this case, the United States federal government would have likely taken a different approach to this issue. In American political culture, the individual has the right to decide how, when, and whether to evacuate a dangerous area. I believe that, [in a political context like that of America], the role of the government is to provide necessary information for all individuals [so they can make their own informed decisions]. When it issued the evacuation order, the Japanese government did not provide a clear explanation of their understanding of the incident, nor did it suggest what was considered to be the “worst case scenario” that could emerge from the disaster. I believe that the government likely thought that it would be sufficient to disclose only the results of their deliberations and decision-making endeavors because they felt assured that they were indeed making responsible decisions. We also can't deny that the public has a tendency to depend on the government's decisions, as they might operate under the assumption that they should follow the officials’ judgments. Yet, sooner or later, individuals will find a desire to make their own decisions, and will demand that their government provide the information necessary to make their own choices. We must pay close attention to whether or not this traditional paternalistic political culture will change. Secondly, [I would like to point out] the unequal burdens imposed by the earthquake. As Japan is seen by many as a nation marked by social inequalities, it is critical to question how this disaster will effect existing disparities. Nevertheless, as soon as news of the earthquake circulated, rescue and aid initiatives were organized all over Japan, orchestrating ground logistics and volunteer activities. The deeper sense of national unity – the notion of “One Japan” that emerged – might be the only positive outcome of this unfortunate disaster. Still, we need to perceive this issue in a long-term trajectory. How will we raise the funds to recover the damaged regions? This poses the question of how we – as an entire nation – share the enormous burden of aiding the victims. If we make a mistake in [dealing with this issue], we will reinforce or exacerbate the existing unequal burden of inequality in Japanese society. Professor Genda's suggestion was a short response to this very problem. This question is difficult because it contains two interconnected issues. It is no doubt that our most immediate imperative is to restore the victims’ normal daily routines as soon as possible, and that the need to form organizations and secure financial resources for restoration is urgent. But this disaster should also lead us to reevaluate the legal and tax system to achieve a greater degree of fairness and equality in Japanese society. These two issues need to be discussed together. Moreover, we must not forget that there is a broader issue that transcends these two issues: without understanding the interconnection of such multifaceted problems, it is likely to be impossible to substantively change Japanese society. The damage of this disaster is devastating, and the victims’ burden is enormous. In the short term, such unequal burdens will probably be exacerbated. We should initially start figuring out how to share their burden, and should later discuss how to regain the fundamental fairness and equality in the Japanese society. This will be a long process. However, without going through this process carefully, we won't have a real sense of equality in Japan. And finally, recovery from this disaster is connected deeply to the future of Japanese society. Not only can we expect more discussion of energy issues, but we must also undertake a proper discussion of the future direction of our nuclear energy policy. I believe that this nuclear power plant crisis has made many Japanese citizens aware of how our society is built upon a very dangerous foundation. How will we come to deal with the expected long-term energy shortage? This is closely related to the challenge of reimagining our way of living: this disaster is inseparable from political questions about how we must steer the future of Japanese society. This nuclear power plant issue is a symbol of Japan's “political absence.” If we had ever properly discussed the risk of nuclear energy and then, after reasonable deliberations, formally determined it necessary in terms of a comprehensive energy policy, I could have accepted any outcomes. However, in reality, it seems most people face this critical problem without realizing that they voluntarily chose nuclear energy. The world has praised the victims’ calm and orderly reaction to this disaster. However, it is a serious problem if we interpret their response as a sign that they are merely giving up or accepting the disaster as their fate. If we consider both the earthquake and the government's subsequent response as accidents, what we see is far from a restoration of politics. It is a kind of clouded thinking, one that does not mesh with a politics in which people are supposed to change society through voluntary means. This disaster, as a result, reconfirmed the deeply rooted paternalistic tradition in Japanese political culture. There is nothing more unfortunate than surrendering critical thinking to such political paternalism. If we can lighten the burden of the victims by sharing it with the rest of society, and if we can reexamine and develop a fairer and more equal Japanese society, then we will see a comprehensive “recovery” from this disaster.

Cynthia Bowman

I'd like to comment on Professor Uno's recent contribution, with much of which I agree. I disagree, however, with his assumption that a comparable accident would have been treated differently in the United States. Professor Uno posits that a political culture of transparency, individualism, and access to information would have meant that citizens in the United States would demand and receive prompt and accurate information from the government, on the basis of which they could decide whether it was necessary to evacuate or not. The conduct of the U.S. government during the 2010 BP oil spill suggests otherwise. It was very difficult for anyone, even relatively educated persons who keep up with the news on a daily basis, to figure out exactly how bad the disaster in the gulf was, and the real story did not come out for months. The explosion that caused the British Petroleum oil spill (to date the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history) occurred on April 20, 2010, and the well was not capped until July 15, 2010, after immense damage had been done to the economy and environment of the coastal regions. During the first few days after the explosion, both BP and the federal government estimated the amount of oil spilling at 1,000 barrels per day. By the end of April, however, independent scientists who had viewed satellite photos of the area told the press that the leak had to be at least 5,000 barrels per day, and the government switched to this estimate on April 28, over the public objections of BP. By mid-May, independent experts who had examined BP video at the request of the media suggested that the real figure was 10 times higher. By June 11, the government raised its own estimate to 20,000-40,000 barrels per day. The final official estimate, at the time the well was capped in July, was that the initial leakage had been 62,000 barrels per day, which had decreased to 53,000 barrels per day by the time it was stopped. Internal BP documents showed their worst case scenario to have been 150,000 barrels per day. But in December 2010, the company's lawyers were again contesting the government estimates of volume, arguing that it was as much as 50% less, because civil and criminal fines for restoration efforts would be levied on the corporation in direct proportion to the amount of the spill. In short, the U.S. public was faced with wildly differing estimates from day to day during the crisis; and if it were not for some persistent media sources (especially National Public Radio, which the Republican Party has been targeting for defunding), realistic estimates would not have been forthcoming. In the meantime, 320 miles of shoreline were affected; vast numbers of marine animals and birds were killed; and commercial fishing important to the lifeblood of people in the region was closed down. After all the efforts to recapture the oil, it is estimated that 75% still remains in the gulf and may be toxic for decades, exacerbated by the effects of the chemicals used as dispersants. While I do not suggest that this was equivalent to the nuclear disaster experienced by Japan in 2011, the performance of the corporation responsible for the accident and of the government appear rather similar to that in Japan. So the political problem Professor Uno describes may be one that we share in important ways. My own diagnosis is that this problem results, in the United States at least, from corporate cooptation and control of the government and (for the most part) of the media, rather than from a tradition of paternalism or presumed deference to authority. I wonder if this is not so in Japan as well.

Shigeki Uno

I deeply appreciate Professor Bowman's comment. I think that it is very important to compare the 2010 BP oil spill and the present nuclear power plant incident in Japan. Further, it will be important to evaluate how corporations approached and pressured the media with regard to coverage of the nuclear disaster. There are a number of people who are presently dissatisfied with the ongoing media coverage. I have an impression that there is an amazingly small amount of objective media reporting on this incident, as they mostly broadcast the comments of some “experts” or some personal episodes instead of the official press releases of governments or TEPCO. I think social scientists should examine the significant differences in the coverage between the Japanese and the Western media on this nuclear power plant incident. Nevertheless, many candidates who ran for positions in the recent nationwide local elections did not engage in the political discussion on the nuclear power plant issues, while they repeatedly stated that they would try raising the safety of nuclear power plants. While many people have questions about the safety of nuclear power plants, there is some continuing mysterious political silence following this question. I now wonder if this silence is the outcome of political control of public opinion, the response of a public resigning itself to live with nuclear power plants, or the result of some nation-wide coma.

Tom Ginsburg

I want to intervene in the Uno-Bowman exchange. Comparing the BP oil spill disaster in the United States with the nuclear disaster in Japan, I tend to agree with Uno that the two polities respond differently. While Bowman is correct that information was not very clear in the US case, the key point is that the government and business had a more adversarial relationship. President Obama spoke early and often about keeping the government "boot on the throat of BP", surely a hostile image. The Japanese government appeared much more closely tied to TEPCO. The government seemed to think its role was one of simply managing public fears. It also seemed to lack any independent fact-gathering capacity in the early days of the nuclear disaster. Surely there are problems associated with our pattern of more adversarial business-government relations, and surely in many instances government is captured by industry in the US. But in Japan, the two are nearly identical.

Annelise Riles

An Emerging Debate It is exciting and even moving to see this rich conversation developing on Meridian 180. Thank you so much to all the contributors so far for taking this dialogue so seriously. On the surface, this conversation seems focused on recent events in Japan. But I think the comments raise many questions that transcend this specific set of events. I see a number of issues emerging from the comments so far that might benefit from more intensive exchange and from comparative analysis. I particularly want to encourage members outside of Japan to comment on these questions from the point of view of other events or political and legal contexts that seem most important to you. Major Themes (in roughly the order in which they appeared) 1. National Unity versus Nationalism: Professor Sakai queries whether the national unity and concern for victims voiced by Professor Genda does not build on the ugly underpinnings of nationalism. Certainly as an American married to a foreign citizen who lived through 9/11 I remember being as frightened of the anti-foreigner rhetoric of my fellow-citizens and government representatives as I was of Al Qaeda at that dark moment in our own history. Yesterday as I walked in my neighborhood in Aoyama, Tokyo I noticed a new shop catering to trendy young people selling every kind of clothing and bag with the words “Kamikaze” emblazoned on them. I don't remember any such thing before. What a sad discursive frame for the sacrifices that each person in Japan is now making. I did not see a direct response to Sakai's critique from Professor Genda so I want to invite him to respond if he wishes. But more broadly, what do others think about the relationship between national unity and nationalism? Do the two always coexist? How do we know the difference? What more positive models of national unity might we support? What examples can you share? 2. Focusing on policy solutions versus taking a break: Miyazaki and Kuo argue in different ways that the urge for finding policy solutions can produce unintended consequences. More generally, their comments focus on the role of the intellectual in moments of crisis. Their counterintuitive suggestion is that rather than rush to find answers our job is to slow things down. What do others think of this? 3. Government paternalism, individualism, and public/private collusion: The fascinating debate between Professors Uno, Bowman and Ginsburg concerns how to diagnose the political crisis behind this and other environmental crises. Uno argues that the Japanese government has acted paternalistically in failing to release information so that citizens can make their own choices, while the Japanese people in turn are in a “nation-wide coma”. As a foreigner in Japan now, I do share Uno's inchoate sense of some sort of odd collective “coma”—on the one hand, ask any person and you get a quite robust critique of the government and TEPCO both, along with quite detailed knowledge of the dangers from radiation they are now facing every day. Yet the very same people for the most part do not even think of speaking out publicly, nor do they do as much as one might expect to avoid contact with radioactive rainwater or foods. They both know and choose not to know. What kind of political stance is this? It reminds me a bit of something Professor Kasuga has tried to describe in his writings long before this crisis concerning so-called “freeters” so I wonder if he wants to comment here. Bowman points out that in making this argument, Uno relies on a rosy picture of politics in the United States. Uno's vision of pure political transparency enabling individual action in the US may be rhetorically effective in Japan but bears little relationship to the reality of American political life. I love this exchange because it gets to the heart of what we can achieve on Meridian 180. I did not see a direct response to this point from Uno, so I wonder if he wishes to comment. I also wonder if others want to intervene, either on the substance of the debate over which is better—individualism or paternalism—or how they come together in other political contexts, or on the more general point this exchange raises about how examples from other countries, fictional though they may be, can be deployed in domestic politics, and what the intended or unintended consequences may be. Although Ginsburg structures his intervention in this debate as siding with Uno against Bowman, I think he actually raises a separate and equally fascinating point. His point is that rather than focus on individualism versus paternalism—on state/citizen relations—to understand the root causes of this disaster, we should be focusing on government/industry collusion. He argues that government/industry relations are not so collusive in the US. I wonder what Bowman or others think of this. But more generally, what do others think of the choice between focusing on individual /state relationships versus industry or market/state relationships as a way of thinking about crises—financial, environmental, political, etc? 4. Legal interpretation The exchange between Kamiyama and Yamada (the financial expert and lawyer, respectively) about how to interpret a key clause in a Japanese law absolving nuclear power plant owners of liability in certain extreme situations raises much broader issues about the nature of legal interpretation, and I wonder if the many eminent legal theorists in our midst would like to weigh in on this issue. Essentially, Kamiyama looks to the letter of the law, while Yamada argues that the letter of the law tells you little: the meaning of the law will be determined by the political and economic effects of one interpretation versus another. Yamada makes what in the US we would call a classic legal realist argument here. My question for Yamada would be, what do you make of the fact that many of the influential parties in this story are not lawyers, and that many of them probably think about the law as does Kamiyama, in much more literal terms? At what point does their non-professional reading of law become legal reality by the force of the fact that they believe this interpretation to be correct and act accordingly—especially in Japan where even prominent company managers have less minute-to –minute contact with the kind of sophisticated legal expertise people such as Yamada offer? I am simply raising a query about the legal realist move from the point of view of a sociological understanding of legal thought in the market. And one unanswered question: Doug Kysar raised the point that how any stimulus should be used is as important as how it should be funded. He offers the example of wasted stimulus funds in the United States. Since Kysar intended this as a cautionary comment on Genda's proposal, I wonder what Genda thinks of it. More generally, what experience do those in other countries have with this problem of controlling up front how large stimulus funds are distributed? I realize I have left out many important points but this post is already much too long. The main point is that I hope that our members around the world who perhaps feel less connected to the Japanese case will freely interject on these or any other points of debate. In emphasizing the points of potential disagreement, also, I am only acting on my hope that Meridian 180 can become the kind of friendly space in which we can disagree openly knowing we are among friends. We will close this conversation on May 31.

Shigeki Uno

Professor Riles has pointed out what I didn't clearly respond to in my previous comment. Since I can no longer “escape,” I'd like to explain my idea. As the participants of this forum know, the Japanese – both intellectuals and the general public – have used such rhetoric as “in America” or “in Europe” since the time of the Meiji restoration. The Japanese have idealized the West (presenting an image which sometimes departs significantly from reality) to criticize actualities in Japan. Recently, this rhetoric has been regarded as an exaggeration, and is not as effective as it used to be. However, it is not fully gone. I found that I had been in line with this “tradition” when I read Professor Bowman's comment. However, my research focus is on Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville's purpose of writing “De la démocratie en Amerique” (Democracy in America) was to emphasize the healthy segments of American democracy (to the audience in France) while he pointed out the many problems in the system. I'm not trying to identify myself with Tocqueville, but I think that American Democracy does suggest various points to reflect on with reference to Japanese society even as it contains many problems. “In a state of emergency, it's the individual who has the responsibility to make decisions, but not the government. The role of the government is to provide necessary information for all individuals so they can make their own decisions.” I think that many individuals in America share this idea, but not so in Japan. As it is, I find paternalism in Japanese political culture, and I believe that that's not a good thing for Japanese democracy.

Crisis of Relationality

Yuji Genda “Missing”

6,349: The death toll of the 1995 Kobe Earthquake
4,487: The death toll of American soldiers in Operation Iraqi Freedom (as of December 30, 2011)
2,602: The death toll of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center
1,863: The death toll of American soldiers in the war in Afghanistan (as of January 13, 2012)
15,841: The death toll of the Great East Japan Earthquake (as of December 11, 2011)
 
It is nonsense to translate people's lives into numbers.  Around the world, many more people lose their lives than media can broadcast.  Still, such tremendous figures do represent the degree of the survivors’ grief.
 
Now, what do you think the following figures represent?
 
“3” and “24”
 
“3” is the total number of the missing persons in the Kobe Earthquake of 1995 and “24” is the total number of those missing in the 9/11 attack on World Trade Center.
 
3,493: This is the number of missing persons in the Great East Japan Earthquake.  Most of these were swept away with the sets of the tsunami, and have been missing ever since.  No other single incident has resulted in such a large number of missing persons in Japan since the end of WWII.  Prior to this disaster in Japan, one of the worst natural disasters in Japan post-WWII was the Isewan Typhoon (Super Typhoon Vera) on September 26th, 1959.  4,687 died and 401 were missing.  In response, the national Diet passed the Disaster Countermeasure Basic Act, and the executive branch rapidly developed disaster preparedness infrastructure with the act.  With three times more deaths and nine times more missing persons than that of the Isewan Typhoon, what do we have to learn from the Great East Japan Earthquake?
 
In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina caused the deaths of 1,836 people, and 705 people were still missing as of April 18, 2006.  Also, the 2008 Great Sichuan Earthquake (May 12) caused the deaths of 691,207 people, and, as of August 4, 2008, 18,194 people were still missing (and probably buried by debris).  For me, facing such a tremendous figure of missing persons in the Great East Japan Earthquake, it seems that I can finally understand, for the first time, the sorrow of survivors of devastating disasters around the world.  
 
In Japan, people are hesitant to use the word, recovery (fukkou), and the speed of the current recovery is slow.  I suppose that the reason for both the sentiment and for the slow recovery process is because there is still an enormous number of missing persons, most of whom will not be found imminently (especially given the nuclear incident at the Fukushima power plant). 
 
For the families and the friends of the missing ones, the 3/11 disaster is still not over, it is an ongoing matter.  Until they find their missing ones, they cannot put an end to this devastating disaster.  In other words, the problem is that there are those who will never have “closure."
 
When we design a recovery project, we have to set up a “beginning” point and an “end” point.  Also, we have to able to decide what the “end” of the project should look like.  For example, municipal governments around the Tohoku region are offering a temporary extension of unemployment benefits, and are hiring disaster survivors who have lost their jobs as temporary staff for rubble/debris clean-up and the like.  However, such “temporary” measures will not and should not last for long.  If a temporary measure lasts longer than it should, it can take away the motivation of the disaster survivors to become independent by themselves.
 
What should we consider the “starting point” and the “end point?”  One of the officials of an affected municipality strongly stated that his municipality would stop any of the recovery projects that won't lead to definitive outcomes.  I strongly believe that what we need in the recovery project is such determination to decisively act.  Contrary to this, I assume that the survivors of missing ones and those who are restricted from going back to their homes around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant will not have any sense of “closure” or an “end to the recovery effort” within their lifetimes.  They suffer from the sense that there will never be any closure from this disaster.  It is a similar sense of suffering which families of suicides in Japan (over 30,000 per year) go through, and which they cannot escape.
 
Now, what can we do for those who will not gain closure, including the families of missing ones?  At the risk of sounding extreme, I don't think that anybody – including the government – can help them.  Monetary remedies and financial relief programs for individuals’ recoveries can provide temporary support for the survivors, but those are not the solution. 
 
We are so powerless to do anything for those without closure.  Even if we try to share some part of their sorrow, we probably cannot do anything.  However, even if we cannot understand their sorrow, it is true that they may see it as an encouragement if people around the world do not forget their missing ones and are always praying for them.
 
As with the missing ones of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the victims of nuclear accidents, there are many people who cannot gain “closure.”  When we think about characteristics of devastating disasters like the Great East Japan Earthquake (including the Great Sichuan Earthquake), how should we perceive a recovery?  I would like to hear opinions from you and those living around the world (including anthropologists, priests, monks, and many more).  As we build memorial statues, it seems to me that it is a process to think about how to forge a “non-closure mechanism” to remember the missing, and to concurrently make a “closure mechanism” to ease survivors’ sorrow.
 
We tend to think of “life” and “death” in a binary manner.  However, those are in fact not binary opposites.  It seems to me that there is one more sphere: the sphere of the “missing.”  It seems that “missing” is neither life nor death, but is concurrently “life” and “death.”  Such a train of thought on the “missing” might inherently be a Japanese way.
 
However, it may be meaningful if we can discuss the presence of the “missing” – as well as life and death – in a global sphere such as Meridian 180. 

Chika Watanabe “Kizuna (bonds) after the Great East Japan Earthquake”

The word kizuna (“bonds,” “emotional ties”) is everywhere in Japan now, from advertisements to news reports.  It calls for ties that bind “the Japanese nation” together into an imagined collective effort to rebuild the country after the devastating disaster.  The message makes apparent sense.  It was, after all, a national shock and tragedy.

But after spending some time as a volunteer with an NGO in Ishinomaki, one of the regions in Miyagi prefecture hit hardest by the earthquake and tsunami, I'm no longer sure how to think about this word.  I'm struggling with how to define kizuna—what it means, where it can take us, and whom it encompasses (and excludes).

A man whose house was damaged—the first floor was completely destroyed by the tsunami—and currently lived on the second floor, spoke to us volunteers in heated anger about the first few months after the disaster.  He told us that, as late as May, the remains of the destroyed houses had not been cleared.  But he knew that an elderly woman was buried under the rubble in his house.  Other residents also knew where there were dead bodies, and many of them put signs in front of their half-damaged houses saying “There are dead bodies here, please bring a shovel truck to remove the rubble,” but nobody came for months.  One day, he couldn't wait any longer and went out to find some policemen from the National Police Agency to ask for their help.  They told him that they could only act on orders from the city.  They argued back and forth, until they told him that if he wanted to make such a fuss, he should go to the city himself.  So he went, and after some more hurdles, he finally got the city to give the order.  “But they showed up with a single crowbar!” he exclaimed.  Then they lined up in single file and took out pieces of rubble one by one, absurdly identifying each item as it was passed down the line.  The first officer would yell out “Wood item coming (mokuzai ikimasu)!” and the following officers would echo the phrase down the line.  He yelled at them that they needed to bring in shovel trucks, but they told him again that this was outside their authority.  “And in the meantime,” he said, “dozens of trucks just sat around not being used!”

The police as well as the Self-Defense Forces moved upon orders from the city mayor, he explained to us, and if this top person is worthless, these forces are also ineffective.  He told us that the mayor is an idiot (bonkura), and so the situation was a mess.  He was so incredibly angry.  And it was infectious.  How could the city and anyone with authority leave bodies of missing persons buried under debris because of some boundaries of authority?  In a piece on this forum, Professor Yuji Genda speaks of “the people without end,” those who cannot find closure because of loved ones who are still missing.  How can we talk about kizuna then, from this anger and this space of the missing?

One of the differences I saw between May of 2011 and January of 2012 was that 10 months ago there was debris everywhere, and now there were empty plots of land.  In some ways, this is a kind of progress.  But in other ways, it's an unbelievably small one.  From what I heard, the city had not yet decided what to do with most of these devastated areas.  Could people rebuild there?  If so, how?  If not, what were their options?  The city's decisions seemed to be too slow and non-transparent for residents left in limbo.

At the same time, I met several residents of Ishinomaki who were paving ways to move forward on their own.  For example, a group of women from a local NPO had decided to continue their work teaching handcrafts.  They themselves had lost their houses and were now living in temporary housing.  When I attended one of their workshops with elderly women in a temporary housing community, I saw how powerful it was that instructors and participants could share the pain and frustration of losing their homes, even if sometimes it devolved into petty jealous gossip.

I was also impressed by the long-term volunteers.  Some of them had been there for months, and others came regularly in between their work.  And it was these regular volunteers who promised to return and did so that local residents seemed to appreciate most profoundly.

Although the commitment of these volunteers was extraordinary, the local NGO staff—most of them young men and women from Ishinomaki—spoke about the need to plan how volunteers could be most effective.  The difficulty lay in figuring out where to draw the line between assistance and over-dependence.  For example, the staff told me that some residents scheme and hoard aid items unnecessarily.  Someone else pointed out that hoarding itself could be a sign of trauma.

Another issue bubbling beneath the surface was the sense of disparity.  The earthquake and tsunami affected even immediate neighbors differently, one house being completely destroyed while the house across the street still stood basically intact.  People I spoke with also mentioned that only a third of Ishinomaki residents had insurance on their houses.  “Some people became rich with insurance money after the disaster, you know,” said one woman to a group of us once.  “While others like myself became poor.”  How do you talk about kizuna in the face of such statements?

I'm not against the sentiments of kizuna, but I do think that it needs to be complicated.  The warm fuzzy feeling of being connected to other people shouldn't become an alibi for suppressing expressions of anger or jealousy because they make us uncomfortable in the specificity of their demands.  Simply the act of being together cannot be the endpoint of kizuna—it seems to me to be the beginning of a much more arduous process.

**
**

Shuhei Kimura “Beginning and End”

 Must everything have closure before new beginnings are possible? Can we get to a new starting point only after finding closure? We often start new things without ending others, but sometimes, even with closure, we find that new starts are not possible.

The term, a missing person, reminds me of the Japanese abductees in North Korea.  Since it is an extremely politicized subject, I would like to not go into details. However, in my view, what the families of the abductees want is to have them back alive, or at least to know the “truth.” The families of victims can accept what happened in tragedies by finding out the “truth” – in other words, by finding a way to understand what happened.

It's not only the families of the missing ones who suffer from a sense of loss; it takes a long time for anybody to accept death or loss and the truth behind it. In this sense, many individuals have not reached the end of the 3/11 disaster. Just as the families of the fallen WWII soldiers still travel to look for the remains of family members, decades may pass before the victims of the 3/11 disaster find closure. On top of the earthquake and tsunami, there was the nuclear accident. I cannot even imagine how long it will take for the survivors to reach an end point.

Meanwhile, some people have found their new starting points without having closure from the disaster. Last summer, the residents in affected areas hosted various events such as memorial services and summer festivals. Those events functioned as “non-closure mechanisms” for them to concurrently start over and not have closure from the disaster. The ceremonial events can make them forget, remember, and recall the disaster. Therefore, it is both a mechanism for the residents to receive a kind of closure and while also marking a point in a never-ending continuation. I assume that this paradox characterizes various upcoming events on March 11.

In such a sphere, a starting point and an end point may entangle with one another because others cannot force survivors to choose a beginning and an end. Residents of one affected fishing village used to organize two kinds of annual “traditional performing arts”: the Deer Dance and the Nembutsu Swordplay (a Buddhist Nianfo dance style). In addition to these traditional performing arts, any acts of handing down traditional practices were closely tied to the local rite of passage for young males becoming responsible adults in the community. Even though local youths constantly have been moving out of this fishing village, some come back to participate in these rituals. However, the tsunami swept their ritual costumes away. On June 18th 2011, when many of the disaster survivors held the 100th day memorial events (based on a Buddhist calendar), male members of the fishing village quietly held the Deer Dance ritual in the middle of debris near a local shore. The Nembutsu Swordplay ritual is for families having their first Bon festival (an annual Japanese Buddhist event). It is a ritual for the family to accept that their family members have passed away. The organizers and the participants of the Nembutsu Swordplay ritual went around the local households to mark the starting point of their recovery project. However, they were told not to dance in temporary housing districts because some of the survivors in those districts would still be struggling to find closure.

A few days after the event and concurrently with other affected areas, members of this fishing village held a fireworks event at a local shore. They removed the debris and cleaned up the local seaside park for the fireworks event. On the day of the event, local stores set up stalls and a large crowd turned out for the fireworks. Some remarked that the event motivated them to “ganbaru” (to try his/her best, work hard, persevere, or stick to it) by seeing many people at the venue and seeing friends again. Yet, an owner of one of the stalls said, “It's good that we can have a lot of events like this over the summer. However, this place will become desolate in winter. If we don't do anything by the upcoming winter, this village will be through.” He implied that the “end” is coming for the village, but this “end” was one that residents around the Pacific coast of Tohoku region had been concerned about even prior to the earthquake.

If we do not want or cannot find closure, we might still move on to a new beginning. The process of recovery is probably an entanglement of infinite starting points and end points. Thus, different opinions about the direction of recovery efforts seem to crash into one another. What we need is not a device to assemble or aggregate different temporalities, but one that preserves entanglements without them becoming conflicts. In my opinion, such conditions of temporality might be important in this interval of ambiguity. Temporality is itself transitional. Though time has an end point, its movement concurrently implies a recovery, regardless of closure. (It is another ordinary day.)

Anne Allison “Rituals for life: Non-closure mechanism”

Yuji Genda has asked us to consider the possibility of “non-closure mechanisms” for dealing with the wounds left gaping from the triple disasters of 3.11. As he notes, many people were killed. But a shockingly large number (3,493) remain missing; neither alive, nor dead. If I am reading Genda right, he's also imputing such a liminal state to Japan/ese more broadly: to the fabric of an everydayness that has now been permanently altered, if not destroyed. Until the life/lives that died get mourned, is it impossible to move forward? “How Can We Bring Closure to Crises”,” this forum is poignantly named.

But I agree here with the position taken by Chika Watanabe and Shuhei Kimura that closure itself is problematic. Those who have asked for closure (bodies removed under houses) don't necessarily get it and the “kizuna” advocated for moving forward extracts costs and sacrifices differentially distributed. This doesn't mean, however, that marking the loss, death, and pain of what has transpired is a bad idea. Anthropologists know how traumatic disruption to the social—of any kind—is and how important—to the person and community—the attempt made to reestablish equilibrium. Rituals perform something collective: respect for the dead, grief at loss, the will to keep going. Kimura notes that memorial rituals of various kinds were performed throughout last summer in Tohoku, as were community-based ceremonies of other kinds.  And Watanabe speaks of the outpouring of volunteerism and relief activities that proliferated across the country in the aftermath of 3.11: activities that could also be seen as ritualistic—rituals of survival in which people not otherwise connected came together to work towards helping others.

I too participated in volunteer activities last summer. I joined Peace Boat in Ishinomaki where I shoveled mud for two days and in Minami Souma I washed family photo albums retrieved from tsunami-battered houses at the local volunteer center. The work was moving though I wasn't always sure how much we actually “moved”; the mud drained slowly from the rain gutters we dug at and the dirt ebbed even slower from the images we were washing. And yet we all worked hard, quite quite hard. And, at the end of the day, this work felt more meaningful that just about anything I've ever done. It struck me at some point that what we were doing was as ritualistic as anything “real;” done as much for those of us doing it as for those we were there to help out.  This wasn't so much about putting closure on something although we really WERE trying to shovel mud from the devastated downtown of Ishinomaki and to retrieve images of life prior to 3.11 for those who would find such photos a salve for their wounds. But my sense is that these activities were also a means, a method of not standing still—of doing something in some kind of figuration of togetherness.  In neither case was there much talk of “kizuna” or “tsunagari” or anything really concrete at all.  But there was something. A willingness to act even if what that action would produce wasn't totally sure-footed or clear. And there was a different kind of coming together than that based on other kinds of social affiliation (sharing workplace, family, town, for example).

Respect for the dead, an effort made to work for—or with—those who have been wounded, and a collective gesture towards life moving forward. Not closure, but something socially ritualistic (or ritualistically social) in what I take to be a positive way.

Steffi Richter “Kizuna” Fragments

1. I had my first encounter with the term kizuna (“bonds”) in the book “Bonds of Civility. Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Cultures,” written by Ikegami Eiko (Japanese Title: “Bi to reisetsu no kizuna”『美と礼節の絆』). She introduces this term as a new perspective on the premodern Edo Period in Japan: The emergence of civility and proto-modern relationships in the stable and hierarchically structured, state system of Tokugawa (“strong bonds”) can be understood only by simultaneously looking at the “weak bonds.” People formed these weak bonds or kizuna in several places of non-hierarchical, artistic activity, thus building diverse (aesthetic) networks. Those networks then crossed each other, leading to the formation of “public spheres,” where something new could emerge and undergo social change.

2. When I came across the speech of former prime minister Kan Naoto held at the World Economic Forum at Davos (on January 29 2011), the title, “Opening Japan and reinventing Kizuna,” immediately awakened my curiosity. Interpreting “kizuna” as “interpersonal bonds,” Kan calls for a “Third Opening of Japan” to the world and for forging new connections between individuals in Japan itself, in order to create a “Society with the Least Unhappiness.” Only a few weeks later, the Three-Fold-Catastrophe occurred in Northeast Japan, whereby “kizuna,” invoked by Kan, revealed a new, a dramatic, dimension.

3. Kan in Davos: “Through working, we connect ourselves with society and secure ‘a place to be’ and are given ‘a role to play,'” and so reinvent these bonds. However, long before the tragedy of 3/11, social reality gave Kan's words a different meaning at least in two ways.

The nuclear industry is actually the only industry showing both the dual structure of labor and that the “kakusa” society has existed through the entire postwar history despite the perception that a relatively homogeneous, middle class, nuclear-family society had gained cultural hegemony since the mid-1970s. The inclusive “strong kizuna,” firm/family is possible only by socially and symbolically excluding certain work and workers, without whom this society would not be able to function. “Kaisha” and “katei” – both representing privacy – are spatially connected by a gigantic network of electric (!) private railways and their “consumerist meccas” (the “tâminaru hyakkaten”), through which public space degenerates into a space of transit.

But, this might change after 3/11. On 9/11 2011, a large anti-nuclear demonstration took place in Shinjuku, which followed many others in Tôkyô and other places since April 10^th^, and preceded a large demonstration a week later on September 19th, when approximately 60,000 people came together. It was organized by leaders who, even before the catastrophe in March, had looked for other bonds in a society that had been exceedingly affected by precarious (and non-regular) work relations and by a general precariousness from living in a society that simultaneously possesses technological requirements for twitter, the internet, and online social networks. One of these leaders is Matsumoto Hajime with his project “Shirôto no Ran” (Amateur Riot). His team had been acting in two relatively independent networks before they crossed paths and collaborated with the anti-nuclear demonstrations.

4. “Act locally and think in global contexts” to escape from or oppose the capitalist pressures of globalization as you so choose; this theme is also used by the group “Shirôto no Ran.” In Kôenji/Tôkyô, where the first demonstration against nuclear energy took place in April, Shirôto no Ran runs several thriving businesses on a small shopping street, including recycle shops, a vegan café, a second-hand shop, some bars, and an internet-radio station. With this business, they try to elude consumerist pressures by shaping a space for self-determined action and welcoming other, typically elderly, residents of the neighborhood. The shop number 12 also hosts the “Underground university” (chika daigaku), which is “a non-regular university with non-regular lecturers for non-regular workers,” founded in 2008 during the uproar surrounding the Anti-G8-Summit movement and the failed invitation of Antonio Negri to Japan” (Hirai Gen).

Since April, the university has addressed the revolutionary changes in the Middle East and the social uprisings in the West (the “Occupy” movement) mostly in relation to their own, in a double sense, “trembling” society. So, Shirôto no Ran acts interpersonally and transnationally beyond Kôenji/Tôkyô/Japan. They are part of a transnational and transversally acting “multitude,” demonstrating that new forms of “kizuna” already do exist, albeit in a different sense than that dreamt by Kan, politicians, and other elites.

5. I agree with Saitô Tamaki regarding his uneasiness with “kizuna” as an alleged means to confront the dramatic results of the threefold catastrophe (see his article “Solidarity of free individuals” in “Mainichi shinbun” 2011/Dec. 11th). And I agree with Hirose Takashi, who by responding to Noda's “Genpatsu jiko shûsoku sengen” (PM Noda's declaration on regaining control of reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Dec. 16, 2011) complained that “kizuna” should not be the “kanji of the year 2011” but rather the “uso” – the lie.

Naoki Kasuga “Subversive Lies”

“Beginning,” “End,” “Bond,” “What?” -- All of those words deeply resonate with me. They are important words to ponder for life after 3/11. The perspectives of Professor Uno and Professor Riles inspired me, particularly with respect to the role of the disaster in present-day Japanese politics. Last Spring, when I posted my essay in one of Meridian 180's forums, I was feeling stuck, feeling lost, and feeling guilty. Objectifying these feelings about a post-disaster situation is easier by translating them into a political discussion. “‘Kizuna’ should not be the ‘kanji of the year 2011’ but rather the ‘uso’ – the lie.” This is right. I think that we must accept that this “lie” not only includes a political sphere but also non-political spheres. It is impossible to escape the influence of this “lie.”

Helplessly watching the ongoing political transformation, just as we felt the sense of discomfort leading to “jishuku” (voluntary restraint/self-censorship) right after 3/11, we also found it difficult to understand our thoughts. One night, while walking along a road, a dark one because of the post-3/11 energy saving policy, I cynically said to myself, “If it's like this, I guess we can start another war.” Was I the only one who thought this way? I think that self-restraint is important, and I'm not seriously thinking about starting any war. I just muttered to myself, cynically. However, I think that there is a problematic, shared sense that nobody should verbalize such a subtle sense of discomfort. The deterioration of Japanese politics is related to these layers of taboo. One good example is the pay cut suffered by public employees in Japan. The current majority party of Japan's national Diet, the Democratic Party of Japan [DPJ], emphatically has been claiming that “a bureaucrat = a public employee = ‘Japan's obstacle’” ever since the DPJ was a minority party. Recently, the national Diet passed a bill to cut the salary of public employees by 7.8%, and both majority and minority parties supported the bill. Further, partly as a result of post-WWII, anti-communism policy, Japanese public servants still lack the right to collectively bargain or strike. But we don't hear an outcry from those who had pinned their children's educations and their mortgages on their salaries.

The question, “How can we bring closure to crises?” is inseparable from another question, “How should we deal with a subversive lie?” Unlike a garden-variety lie which we can easily identify, aren't many subversive lies difficult for us to detect? This kind is difficult to resist. It discourages us from expressing our sense of discomfort, and the lie thickens. Its slyness, expanding since 3/11, causes us to think we are lying if we judge the lie as a lie. It turns a crisis into a much worse crisis.

Satsuki Takahashi “Endless Liminality”

When I read the words, “beginning,” “end,” and “closure,” what initially came to mind was an e-mail from a fisherman around the end of last year.  2011 was coming to a close, and he wrote in his e-mail, “The pathway to the end [of this disaster] is still far away.  The post-disaster effect may be more serious next year than it has been this year.”

In the same e-mail, he also wrote that the town where he lives finally started restoring their port.  It will take time but will probably be completed by the end of 2012.  However, even though they can restore the port from the disaster damage, we still have no clear idea when the nuclear disaster will end.  Instead of having any closure, the nuclear disaster is expected to get worse.

As Professor Kimura mentioned, the ambiguous time in a temporal state is important. However, when we think about the nuclear power plant's temporality, I get stunned by thinking about what will constitute an “ordinary day” after a transitional phase.  In late December 2011, the Japanese national administration announced that they were going to change their temporal “interim radiation safety standards” for food including fish to much stricter standard in April 2012.  They are going to change the current interim standard on caesium, 500 becquerel per kilogram, to a new standard, 100 becquerel per kilogram.  A safety standard establishes the legal distinction between “safe” and “dangerous.”  To revise this standard, the national administration chose April, the start of the new administrative/fiscal year of Japanese institutions.  That is to say, some food items which the national government currently approves as “safe” will be excluded from commercial distribution after April 2012 because they will be reclassified as “dangerous.". Fishermen's catches, which currently meet the national government's interim safety standards, will soon be excluded this upcoming April.  This will be a part of their “ordinary days.”  However, how long will such ordinary days last?  Probably there will come a time when the government will again revise the distinction between “safe” and “dangerous.”  It seems that such ordinary days of a post-nuclear disaster will undergo some transformations but will continue into an endless liminality.

Last month, a Japanese TV program, NHK Special, broadcast a report on the oceanic effects of a nuclear aftermath.  In this documentary, a Ukrainian official talked about the continuing fish contamination from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 (which was 25 years ago).  It will take thirty years for caesium to reach its half-life period. This Ukrainian official stressed that it was important to continue their research with patience.  They still have five more years.  What kind of closure will the Ukrainians have five years from now?  As the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant is still emitting radiation, it is not clear when the thirty-year period will end, or even which point we will consider the start of such a thirty- year period.  Will we live in this post-disaster ordinary period with an unclear closure by tentatively hoping there is closure in thirty years?

Shigeki Uno “Political Closure”

After a crisis, finding closure in the political sphere presents another critical question. Currently in Japan, politicians are trying to find political closure in a very undesirable way. 

Many thought that the 3/11 and nuclear disasters would mark a turning point for Japan.  Japan's national politicshad been in trouble since the change of the national executive branch and the Diet in 2009. Many hoped that politicians would restore their leadership by constructing a new Japanese society. However, it seems as though their hope was futile. Ever since 3/11, instead of proposing or implementing recovery plans, the majority party (DPJ: Democratic Party of Japan) and minority parties have spent all of their efforts forcing the Cabinet out of office. Without presenting any new energy policy, the current Prime Minister unilaterally declared an end to the nuclear power plant crisis, but nobody actually believes him. It seems to me that politicians are intentionally ignoring reality. 

Although I understand the mentality of intentionally forgetting an undesirable reality, I find it extremely surprising that those in Japan's national politics have this mentality. Why are we facing this kind of trouble? 

Perhaps, the single-seat constituency system in Japan offers us a clue. This political system brought about the so-called “two-party system” and changed national Japanese politics in 2009. As a result, the two-party system eliminated the differences between the DPJ and the Liberal Democratic Party and forced DPJ members to evoke an imagined “social majority” instead ofdevelop principled political positions. What we now call the political system exiles frustrations and criticism from Japanese society to outside the political sphere. Members of established political parties currently fear such “voices” from these outer regions of politics, while others try to appropriate those “voices” as a political resource. Japanese politics is unstable, and the public is becoming more frustrated with Japanese politics and democracy. 

At this rate, in the realm of Japanese politics, it seems that closure is only found by the negative employment of intentional forgetting. If Japanese democracy continues down this path, the crisis will worsen.

Annelise Riles “Guilt”

Following Shigeki Uno's suggestion that we look not just to Tohoku but to Tokyo,  I want to put on the table another class of victims of the March 11 disasters. I have in mind the victims of the psychological trauma of the constant exposure to the unknowability of radiation risks (not to mention the possible long-term health effects of this exposure), and also of the trauma of having to face the stark reality that our leaders are unwilling or unable to put aside politics as usual in order to respond to the human suffering of the moment.  We are all victims in this sense, although my sense is that the trauma has been even more severe for women who in Japan still have the greatest responsibility for ensuring that the family has safe food to eat, that children can have a safe place to play and that the emotional needs of the family are met to the point that office work and school work gets done. 

In one sense it may seem unimportant to raise this, given the magnitude of the suffering of the people most immediately affected by the tsunami and nuclear disaster. Re-reading my journal entries from the days after March 11, 2011, what strikes me now is how often the word “guilt” appears. I felt so guilty that others were suffering so much more than I was, and that made focusing on my own suffering seem completely illegitimate to myself.

Yet from another point of view, this guilt is also contributing to our political incapacitation.  Sadly, the recovery is plagued by a number of serious political problems--an unwillingness of the mainstream press to fully investigate or to place news in analytical context, an unwillingness of elites in position of authority, whether in the private sector or the government, to take even small political risks in order to address the needs of the many victims, and a lingering unwillingness on the part of many citizens to openly challenge the government even though many people privately voice their total distrust of government claims and cynicism about its motivations.  And in this sense we are not just victims but perpetrators.

Hiroyuki Mori “Populism”

As for Dr. Uno's point on the Japanese political sphere, I want to add a note about current politics in Japan, specifically the waves of populism from local governments.

Before the earthquake disaster of 3.11 last year, there were some influential trends of local populism, which created new, local parties in Osaka, Nagoya, and so forth. After the earthquake, the populist leaders (typified in Osaka) seem to leverage the disaster to cultivate their popularity, drawing attention to the slow responses of the central government (i.e., the existing political parties such as DPJ and LDP). Indeed, last November, the local party of Osaka, "Osaka Ishin no Kai" (Osaka Restoration Party), won the dual elections of governor (of Osaka prefecture) and mayor (of Osaka city) with the political promise of abolishing the divisions between Osaka and Sakai city, and uniting them together for greater political heft. The resulting so-called "Osaka Metropolis project,” along with various political attacks on public servants and schoolteachers, serves as a means to garner political favor. One of the reasons that they insisted on the necessity of the Osaka Metropolis project is to benefit from the support of Tokyo capital. Just after the election, the new mayor, Hashimoto, president of "Osaka Ishin no Kai" said that the next national election must focus on federalism. He claimed that federalism, not the crisis of public finance or social security and the like, was the biggest political issue. His focus on federalism ironically overlooks the purpose of the Osaka Metropolis project to merge several smaller prefectures into larger state governments.

These local populist movements have eroded existing political parties and may exert such drastic influence as to melt down the Japanese political system.

I am afraid that there will be no "closure" in terms of the political sphere in Japan, unless we find a point of political stability.

Hirokazu Miyazaki “A Politics of Hope?”

The popular Japanese novelist and influential opinion leader Ryu Murakami published an op-ed piece in the New York Times a few days after Japan's natural and nuclear disasters in which he states,

Ten years ago I wrote a novel in which a middle-school student, delivering a speech before Parliament, says: “This country has everything. You can find whatever you want here. The only thing you can't find is hope.” One might say the opposite today: evacuation centers are facing serious shortages of food, water and medicine; there are shortages of goods and power in the Tokyo area as well. Our way of life is threatened, and the government and utility companies have not responded adequately. But for all we've lost, hope is in fact one thing we Japanese have regained. The great earthquake and tsunami have robbed us of many lives and resources. But we who were so intoxicated with our own prosperity have once again planted the seed of hope. So I choose to believe (Ryu Murakami, “Amid Shortages, a Surplus of Hope,” New York Times, March 16, 2011). 

Hope has been a significant subject of public debate in Japan since the early 2000s. Japanese people, especially young people in Japan, seem to have lost hope for the future. This paralyzing sense of loss of hope and futurity has been amplified by the widely reported aging population and steady decline in the country's birth rate, the two decade-long economic slump and various phenomena associated with increasingly inward-looking youth. Murakami was one of the first social critics to capture this widely shared sentiment in the late 1990s. Have Japanese people ironically regained hope for the future as a result of the March 11 disasters, as Murakami has suggested?

The broad popular support for Mayor of Osaka Toru Hashimoto and his party, Osaka Ishin no Kai (Osaka Restoration Group), is a case in point. Hashimoto's politics can be regarded as one troubling kind of politics of hope. I do not support his politics myself, but I am not being ironic here. Hashimoto's upbringing as a self-made man (a lawyer and a popular television commentator who grew up in a family associated with a socially stigmatized and economically impoverished area of Osaka) and his consistent effort to challenge vested interests from yakuza to bureaucrats, mainstream party politicians and even academics present a concrete image of possible personal and social transformation. Of course, there are other potentially highly problematic and disturbing aspects to his politics which have been regarded as “dictatorial” and “fascistic,” but hope tends to thrive on ambiguity as many philosophers and theologians have long pointed out. What all this suggests is that what is problematic about Japan today is not so much Hashimoto's politics or the apparent rise of fascistic politics per se as the lack of alternative politics of hope.

If Hashimoto's politics of hope takes for granted the irrelevance of academic, bureaucratic and other forms of expert knowledge, I wonder if there is a different kind of politics of hope possibly ignited in those very forms of knowledge currently under attack. I have no intention to defend academics, bureaucrats and other experts whose arrogance and inclination toward preserving the status quo at all costs is clearly part of the problem. What kind of politics of hope would be possible from within those forms of knowledge? In my view, as I have suggested in my initial posting, one key issue is the question of uncertainty and unknowability. What the ongoing global financial crises and Japan's natural and nuclear disasters have demonstrated is the fundamental truth of the unknowability of the world, and in my view, Japan today is one place in the world where this truth is lived (or consciously denied or forgotten) daily. However, those disasters beyond human control also have destroyed the authority of expertise of all kinds from financial engineering to seismology and nuclear energy science. Scientific approaches to the world share an admittedly often forgotten commitment to embrace the limits of certainty which, in my view, is dearly needed now more than ever. Could we practitioners of expert knowledge imagine an audacious response to political crises like Japan's current crisis? Could Meridian 180, which some of us initiated partially as a response to Japan's disasters, be a site for experiments in a politics of hope?

John Whitman “The Discrediting of the Intellectual Elite in the Post-Fukushima Japan”

Hirokazu Miyazaki's post brings home a point that the triple disasters of March 11 reinforced - if only fleetingly - in the international cultural consciousness. For two decades Japan has been mapping out the dimensions of the kind of postindustrial society imagined by Western public intellectuals in the 1960s and 70s. These dimensions include not just the "hollowing out" (空洞化) of the industrial economy, but social phenomena such as hikikomori and the themes touched on in Murakami Ryu's novel Exodus to a Country of Hope (希望の国のエク ソダス), cited by Professor Miyazaki。(In my opinion this novel is more in need of translation than the novels of the other, internationally more famous Murakami. The fact that the latter, but not the former, have been translated says much about how a particular construction of Japan is marketed by the international Japan studies community.)

In terms of its movement along this particular historical trajectory, one could argue that Japan is more advanced, in a Hegelian sense, than other countries. The Fukushima nuclear emergency and its aftermath are part of this advanced status, not just in the crude sense that the same could (and will) happen elsewhere, but in the interplay between the government, industry, and the science establishment; the militarization of the emergency response; and especially the international and domestic control and marketing of information.

Professor Miyazaki also spoke to the phenomenon of Osaka Mayor Tooru Hashimoto and his Osaka Ishin no kai. I believe that Professor Miyazaki is correct in placing this phenomenon centrally within the discourse about hope, and also in cautioning intellectuals not to think about Hashimoto and his supporters in traditional terms of left and right. An additional legacy of Fukushima may be the very substantial discrediting of the intellectual elite, in universities and the dominant media. Not only did they fail to anticipate Fukushima, they failed to effectively critique the mass media response to the emergency, shape the public debate, or influence politics in a serious way afterward. Hashimoto's attack on this elite, especially in the universities, has traction, and it is likely to be part of the next episode of the post-Fukushima story.

Ghassan Hage “Hope and Crisis”

I'd like to make two remarks in relation to Hiro's excellent post. They are about the relation between the politics of crisis and the politics of hope. Both are drawn from the experience of the Lebanese civil war which lasted fifteen years with more than one hundred and fifty thousand people dead, the social and political institutions of the country were either totally destroyed or seriously weakened.

First, what does it mean to speak of a politics of crisis rather than simply refer to 'the crisis'? It means that there is an interpretive politics associated with every crisis where people with political and economic interests actively try to make of the crisis what they think is best for them. In Lebanon there was a big difference between those who tried to say the country was in crisis and those who portrayed it to be in a 'critical condition'. A crisis always carries with it the possibility/hope of something new emerging. It invites people to think of possible alternatives.

When a situation is portrayed as 'critical' the hope of something new disappears. Like when a patient is taken to hospital in a critical condition: the only hope people have is that the person makes it. In Lebanon, there was and still is an active in interest in portraying the country as always on the verge of collapse: people wake up and say 'wow, we've made it one more day without collapsing'. In such situations a politics of hope predicated on imagining new possibilities is effectively made obsolete. This is to say, that there is a form of conservatism which denies that there is a severe crisis to argue against the necessity of change, and there is another conservatism which thrives on making the crisis even more severe than it really is and then arguing: 'this is no time for thinking about change, we're lucky if we make at the moment'. I wonder how true this is of the Japanese politics of crisis.

Second, with relation to the politics of hope as Hiro has argued so well hope can be kidnapped by one political tendency or another if no alternative politics of hope is created. There is however another important dimension to this, hope is not simply differentiated in terms of its content but also in terms of the degree of political participation it invites. There is a politics of hope on both the right and the left that encourages dis-engagment from everyday political participation. We can call this passive hope. It involves people hoping but in the form of waiting for others to do something for them. There is on the other hand a participatory hope which encourages mass political action and participation. I'd like to think that academics should be on the side of this participatory hope.

Naoki Yokoyama “Searching in Darkness”

I read Sokyu Genyu's “Fukushima ni Ikiru” (Living in Fukushima: 玄侑宗久『福島に生きる』) and thought that Sokyu echoed Professor Miyazaki's post in this forum. 

In his book, Genyu wrote, “From the beginning, life is like anchu-mosaku (trying various things without any secure approach to a solution, a shot in the dark or grasping at straws). Right from the start, life is our search for subjectivity, as our grasping in darkness pulls us through an uncertain future.”

I found that Genyu's “uncertain future” is similar to what Professor Miyazaki called “the fundamental uncertainty and unknowability of the world.”

Genyu stated, “The future is always uncertain” in any era, and “we should find our subjectivity in our stumbling progress and our grasping in darkness towards an uncertain future.“Meanwhile, Professor Miyazaki observes that we are “[a]t the moment at which the scientific mind is dearly needed. It seems that the authority of scientific knowledge has crumbled before those unprecedented disasters beyond human control.” Then, he asks, “What role can intellectuals and professionals play in this situation?”

I think that Professor Miyazaki says that the workings of nature and human behavior have become and are still uncontrollable. Genyu thinks that the workings of nature and human behavior are uncontrollable right from the start. Even though there is a difference between Professor Miyazaki's and Genyu's arguments, the two of them agree that the workings of nature and human behavior are beyond our control at this time.

If so, I think that Genyu is also asking, “What role can the zen monk play?” His answer to this question is also to teach us, “We should find our subjectivity in our stumbling progress and our grasping in darkness towards an uncertain future.” We may interpret that Genyu is also asserting that religious leaders cannot do anything, and we should not expect anything from them. If the workings of nature and human behavior are beyond human control, couldn't intellectuals and professionals say, “We can't do anything. Don't expect anything from us.”

It seems that the experience from the 3/11 earthquake and the nuclear disaster is asking us to decide whether we think that the workings of nature and human behavior are beyond human control, or whether we think they are controllable.

Whichever position you take, I would like to share that the foundation of Genyu's book, “Fukushima ni Ikiru,” is the message to “not depend on power or authority.” The former position (of uncontrollability) is “to try various things without any secure approach to a solution, being puzzled and confused in too abstract a reality, to grasp at straws.” The latter position (of controllability) is “to establish a system by discovering techniques for living in a fundamentally uncertain and unknowable world.” The role of intellectuals and professionals is to clarify and establish such techniques.

I wrote this comment because I hope that Meridian 180 can be an experimental place for politics of hope.

Nuclear Energy and Climate Change

Hirokazu Miyazaki

Meridian 180 was formally launched just a few weeks after Japan's earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster of March 2011, with two forums—“A Grand Coalition for a Rise in the Consumption Tax is the Only Way,” coordinated by Professor Yuji Genda and “Cry from the Scene,” coordinated by Professor Naoki Kasuga—both of which addressed Japan's pressing issues following the disaster. Professor Genda's forum focused on the country's fiscal/financial crisis while Professor Kasuga's forum focused on the crisis of trust in information. We also organized two forums in March 2012 prior to an international conference held at Cornell University to commemorate the first anniversary of the disaster—“How Can We Bring Closure to Crises?” (coordinated by Professor Genda) and “What Role Can Intellectuals and Professionals Play in Crises Like Japan's Natural and Nuclear Disasters?” (coordinated by myself). The two forums together confirmed a lingering sense of crisis—a crisis of expertise and a crisis of hope, respectively—one year after the disaster. In the “Secrets in the Age of Transparency” forum coordinated by Professor Katherine Biber in September 2013, Ms. Yuki Ashina, a lawyer who had worked with victims of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima in their lawsuits against Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of Fukushima Dai-Ichi Power Plant, posted a comment in which she drew attention to her own and others’ frustration with the lack of accurate information about the nuclear disaster. By then, the uncertainty associated with the condition of the troubled reactors at Fukushima Dai-Ichi and a broader condition of long-term low-level radiation exposure in Eastern Japan had become so profound and unbearable that many citizens just wanted to move on and embrace the excitement about Abenomics and the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. Two of Japan's nuclear reactors have already been restarted, and the Japanese government and Japan's nuclear plant manufacturers are now eager to export power plants overseas.

Many progressive intellectuals expected Japan and the world to change their view of nuclear energy and the future of humanity, more generally, after the disaster in Fukushima. What has unfolded since the disaster instead, however, is a layering of dissonances of all kinds—dissonances between people in Fukushima and the rest of the nation, between the official rhetoric of kizuna (bonds) and many citizens’ quiet acts of self-protection and preservation, between the unknowability of the condition of the troubled reactors and the government's official declaration that the crisis is over, and between the ongoing crisis and the anachronistic dream of economic growth associated with Abenomics.

From the outset, our goal has been to develop a global/transnational perspective on Japan's multi-layered crises. We hoped to break open Japan's domestic debate about the future of nuclear energy deeply conditioned by vested interests of all kinds and hopelessly dictated by the unproductive disagreement about the relative safety of radiation vis-à-vis other kinds of everyday risk. In this new forum, we seek to follow this spirit to advance our thinking one step further by re-visiting Japan's nuclear crisis, which is still continuing if not deepening, in relation to the increasingly heightened and shared concern about climate change. What do Japan's (ongoing) layered crises—a crisis of expertise, a crisis of trust and a crisis in the economics of nuclear energy—tell us about the future of nuclear energy for the rest of the world? How can highly technical issues related to nuclear technology and climate change be brought into conversation with the question of hope that encompasses Japan's and the Earth's crises? I especially welcome thoughts and reflections from Japan-based members.

Amy Levine

First, I wish to follow up on the 'vested interests' that Professor Miyazaki described working in Japan. In South Korea those interests are often called 'nuclear mafia' and there is so much more mainstream awareness of them in the wake of the Triple Disaster in Japan. Just a few years before, in contrast, those images of 'construction mafia' or other types of mafia were mostly confined to activists and progressives in South Korea.

Just after the IAEA's official report on Fukushima came out in September of this year and reactors had been restarted on Kyushu island, I happened to be giving a paper at a joint conference of Japanese and South Korean academics and the anxiety and interest in any discussion of a 'nuclear mafia' was impossible to miss. Both Japanese and Korean academics were keen to share the latest examples of questionable behavior by their respective governments. It was a rare moment of unity and common cause--around discussions of 'nuclear mafias' in Japan and South Korea--after just a month before when the two nations seemed so distant and tensions again ran high with all that surrounded the commemorations of end of World War II, Korean liberation from Japanese colonial rule, etc. in August of this year. Many were particularly interested in former PM Koizumi's critical comments about PM Abe's nuclear energy policies.

Second, following up on Prof. Slayton's introduction and previous comments on the Laudato si forum, one of the 'radioactive Greens' who supports nuclear energy penned this column in USA Today on recent news out of the Paris climate talks: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/12/02/fracking-ends-climate-change-wars-clean-energy-solutions-column/76663456/

The 'end of climate wars' pronouncement around the successes of fracking and shale gas technologies present a potential point of comparison and contrast to nuclear energy debates. This comparison need not be on the Breakthrough Institute's terms (http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/voices/michael-shellenberger-and-ted-nordhaus/frackings-war-on-coal); is there another compelling read of that history and the incremental, pragmatic implications Breakthrough wishes to see?

Satsuki Takahashi

Inspired by earlier postings, what I would like to contribute to this forum is to pose questions regarding the relationship between hope and the future. In doing so, I would like to share some stories from Fukushima.

Based on my research on fishing communities in and near Fukushima since 2004, I hear more stories of hope and the future now than I did 10 years ago. It is true that, since the meltdown, the conditions of the marine environment are highly precarious. For over four years since the accident, marine scientists have been trying to figure out the mechanisms of radioactive contamination in the sea. But what they have learned so far is tiny, compared to what they haven't figured out. The lives of fishing families are equally precarious. Due to the radioactive contamination of fish and also the consumers’ fear of eating any fish from Fukushima, fishing families are still living on disaster compensation payments from TEPCO. And yet, despite these highly precarious conditions, post-disaster discourses of Fukushima have been filled with the bright future. The quintessential example of this is the Fukushima Floating Offshore Wind Farm Demonstration Project.

Entrusted by the government, the project's consortium itself emphasizes that it is an “All-Japan” team, consisting of 1 university and 10 corporations. According to the team leader from Marubeni Corporation, the new energy project “opens up the nation's future.” Symbolizing the bright future, the consortium named the first windmill, “Fukushima Mirai (Future).”

According to the consortium's leader, the project will open up the bright future for not only the nation's energy but also fisheries. By building an “ocean farm” underneath floating windmills, he argues that it will increase fish population. The image of the ocean farm multiplying fish in the radioactive ocean sounds like a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story. But for some Fukushima fishers, the ocean farm was a hopeful proposal that might allow them to survive in their precarious future. They told me that “Fukushima Future” is their future.

Having these stories in mind, I am interested in understanding the conjuncture between hope and the future. As we know both from our own personal experiences and from scholarly works on these concepts, hope and the future are intimately connected. But how are they actually related? Related to this, I am also interested in the diverse projections of the future. When multiple narratives for a hopeful future emerge, how can we best make sense of the multiplicity in imagining the future? As Kirksey et al. remind us in their insightful essay, “Hope in Blasted Landscapes” (2015), hope can emerge in the midst of the worst industrial disaster, like the BP Oil Spill. I witness similar hopeful narratives in the case of Fukushima, but I wonder how hope generates different imaginaries of the future. As Professor Slayton nicely summarizes, debates of nuclear power and climate change alike ask about the future. But what is the future? What does hope do to the making of the future?

Vincent Ialenti

The chances of a nuclear renaissance occurring in North America or Western Europe on a scale large enough to significantly mitigate climate change currently seems low.

Today's Gen III reactor building projects have very high up-front costs in the billions. With new reactor designs, profit is sometimes not seen for four decades-- financial risks poorly fit for more shallow corporate investment horizons. Then there's the pricey challenge of continually producing highly-trained nuclear personnel for a reactor's 75+ year operating life as universities see reduced student demand for nuclear education, high instruction costs per nuclear student, uncertain government funding futures for research reactors, and increasing worries about liabilities associated with keeping nuclear materials on campus. Without subsidy, why would a private university invest in bulky pricey Big Science departments – like space science or nuclear engineering – when they could instead invest in less-expensive more-lucrative information-, communication-, or computer-sciences departments that seem, to paying students, more in line with the times? On top of this, in the rare event of a major meltdown, enormous cleanup costs render Gen III reactors uninsurable: states/taxpayers must always bail them out. All this leads many to see nuclear as untenable without military-style government purchasing (to, say, achieve fleet effects), without clean energy state subsides like those seen by wind/solar/hydro in the US/EU, or without strong sovereign support for nuclear like that in China, India, or Russia today.

I suspect a lot would first have to change politically, economically, and culturally in North America and Western Europe before the regions could see enough new nuclear reactors built, and fossil plants not built, to have a meaningful impact on total yearly carbon emissions.

Yet some put hope in Gen IV small modular reactors (SMRs) currently under development. SMRs, it is said, would be safer because they "need fewer operators and safety officers, less robust containment structures, and less elaborate evacuation plans." But many contest this. It is also said that SMRs could lower nuclear's staggering initial investment costs: the smaller, lower-output, simpler reactor designs could be factory-built uniformly in one place and then transported via trucks/trains to individual installation sites with minimal on-site assembly. Today's Gen III reactors, by contrast, must be tailored to specific locales, customized for specific regulatory contexts, acquire their own unique construction licenses, be subject to more extensive safety analysis, and be assembled mostly on-site-- creating costly non-uniformities between projects. Even if SMRs do lower costs, would they be lowered enough to make nuclear widely viable? How much (state) funding for further R&D and innovation would be necessary before SMRs are refined enough to be commercially successful? Once running, would SMRs ever realistically be subsidized as clean energy sources like hydro/wind/solar?

Gabrielle Hecht

I strongly second Ialenti's skepticism about the ability of GenIII reactors to meet climate change goals. As for GenIVs: we'd do well to remember the long history of disappointments that followed 1950s atomic enthusiasm, symbolized by the (in)famous “too cheap to meter” claim. As a former US NRC Chair argued in a recent editorial, “The reality with nuclear power is that it has proven time and again to take longer and cost more to develop than predicted. There is nothing in the new designs nor the performance of the industry today that suggests this trend will end.” Even putting questions of safety aside, nuclear plants cannot be built quickly enough to offer a realistic means of mitigating climate change.

Billions of people on this planet still do not have access to electricity. Providing such access is essential. But we need to understand that arguments about the need for centralized baseload electricity are technopolitical claims that seek to keep power in the hands of large-scale corporations and the states that support them. This is true in North America and Europe; it's equally true in Asia and Africa. 2 quick examples:

Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe and Narendra Modi have just signed an MoU for Japan to help India build a new fleet of reactors. The deal gives Japan's nuclear industry a new lease on life. It enables Modi to claim that he can electrify the whole nation. And it gives both countries a means of countering China's growing economic and industrial power. But for many Indian citizens – such as those who live near the Russian-built Kudankulam nuclear power station, who have been protesting for years because of serious concerns about shoddy construction practices, India's willingness to properly regulate the industry, and the likelihood of an accident in their backyard – the deal represents a dangerous attack on Indian democracy. And this doesn't even take into account India's history of uranium extraction, among the most shameful and devastating in the world.

A similar conflict is brewing in South Africa, where President Jacob Zuma is pushing for his country to sign a deal to build 9 new nuclear reactors, probably with Russia. He's encountering vocal opposition from all corners, from mistrustful citizens to his own finance minister, Nhlanhla Nene, who argued that even with foreign financing, South Africa could afford no more than 2 new reactors. One undercurrent in this whole affair: there's good reason to suspect that any large contract would come with lucrative payoffs for top officials. Zuma rewarded Nene's efforts to stem corruption by sacking him.

Obviously there's a lot more to say. I've written elsewhere about African dreams for nuclear power. I join those who argue that massive investments and rapid deployment of solar, wind, and hydro are the only realistic means of quickly providing energy to those who so desperately need it, while remaining within a “safe operating space” for humanity.

Haejoang Cho

I am in deep agreement with Professor Hecht's comment, and I also recall Ulrich Beck's concept of a ‘risk society.’ Beck divides modernity into two phases, modernity and second modernity. Where modernity is characterized by rapid economic growth, second modernity systematically produces risk. In a risk society sustainability and reflexivity becomes more important than economic production, and emphasis is placed on the capability to overcome and manage crises and disasters. In that sense Germany is a model case of a second modernity state: after meticulously reviewing the risks of nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster, it reached a national consensus to place a moratorium on new nuclear plants. On the other hand, those economic powerhouse states that take reckless risks for the sake of raising their economic indices, even after Fukushima, do so at the peril of bringing about global disaster.

I have always argued that once a country's per capita GDP exceeds $20,000 it must wean itself of the paradigm of growth. However, former President Lee Myung-bak of Korea (from 2008 to 2013), elected around the time its per capita GDP reached this threshold, made the so-called 747 Pledge (7% growth rate, GDP per capita of $40,000, and seventh largest economy in the world) and spurred forward large-scale construction projects including nuclear plants. The current president made a similar 474 Pledge (4% potential growth rate, 70% employment, GDP per capita of $40,000) and last year announced the construction of 13 more nuclear plants by 2029, despite her promise as a candidate to take public safety seriously.

There is increasing exchange between Japanese and Korean activists since Fukushima and the anti-nuclear movement is gaining strength in Korea, exposing the "nuclear mafia” that Professor Levine mentioned. However, the prospects for success are not bright because the "nuclear­construction mafia" is backed up by state power and comes equipped with an incredible publicity machine that turns lies into truth, not to mention the financial capacity to buy off local communities. Last week the credit rating service Moody's raised Korea's credit rating again, meaning these construction interests will be all the more eager to push forward their hugely profitable projects while this window of opportunity lasts. Moreover, a solid 30­-odd percent of the electorate are swing voters ready to be seduced by the slogan of economic recovery.

Meanwhile, two weeks ago President Putin of Russia followed Prime Minister Abe of Japan in concluding an agreement for the construction of nuclear plants with Prime Minister Modi of India, a deal that is also said to include a program for the sale of arms. The success of the "nuclear environmentalists" at science marketing is as devastating as it is dazzling. Just as accumulation by dispossession (David Harvey) marches on after the Wall Street crash of 2008, the nuclear industry appears set to continue business as usual in the wake of Fukushima with the backing of its state sponsors.

Despite everything, I still believe that we can achieve “energy shift, energy down” and hope that we can discuss this possibility at the Okinawa conference this summer. 2016 is the year of the clever monkey and I am waiting for Sun Wukong(孫悟空), the legendary trickster Monkey King from the Chinese novel Journey to the West. Professor Genda is the one who put the playful theme “Asobi” to the conference; could he play the Monkey King that the year and the times call for?

Shuhei Kimura

In March 2015, after four years since the Great East Japan Earthquake, I visited Rikuzen-takata city, which was a tsunami disaster area (not a nuclear disaster area). I have visited there many times since the earthquake disaster happened, although I wish I could have been there immediately after the disaster. During the last four years, there have been different changes. Rubble piles and muddy coast have become a vast vacant lot, and the only surviving pine tree from the tsunami disaster has become a tourist spot, and BRT was inaugurated instead of reconstructing a railroad. Yet, these changes were less shocking for me than another scene which I saw at the time.

I am speaking of a bridge, which was called a “bridge to hope.” However, to be honest, I felt that it was grotesque. The conveyor belt was 33 feet in width and a couple of miles in length. One of its edges is located on the mountain across the river, covering the vast area where so many things were destroyed or artificially developed. With its undecorated steel bridge piers, was working on its own under only a few operators, the bridge looked like a gigantic automaton. People call this belt conveyor a “bridge to hope” (the name was chosen from submissions from the public), and it “can convey , in one day, the amount of soil which a 10 ton truck can convey 4000 times, thereby shortening construction time from about 10 years to about 2 years.”

In addition to this landscape, my shock stemmed from the fact that this “machine” was referred to as a source of “hope.” When the disaster happened, many people spoke hopefully of the future despite all of its confusion and uncertainties. People said that Japan would change and Japan had to change. However, four years later, it is this giant automaton that is the “hope” of the disaster area (or, at least, people are unwillingly calling it the “hope,” considering the governmental policy). There are infrastructures inevitably, systematically, and “solemnly” being created by this gigantic automaton. It is raising the ground level, which increases local people's anxiety day by day. They are worried that the project is irreversible and so on. Are people limited to imagine their future under these grotesque infrastructures? Whose future and what kind of “hope” do these infrastructures represent?

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Thank you very much for your important suggestion, Prof. Slayton. Since Prof. Miyazaki commented “I especially welcome thoughts and reflections from Japan-based members,” I was thinking about what I could say, based on my experiences. For the past five years I have sometimes participated in research concerning the tsunami victims. Nevertheless, I was not able to gather my words easily. Considering that there are so few comments from Japan-based members, I guess that their difficulty in saying something indicates a current reality in Japan.

Mr. Hiroshi Kainuma, who analyzed the historical process of building nuclear plants in Fukushima in On Fukushima (Fukushima-ron), simply narrated the current discursive situation in Japan: ordinary Japanese people feel that “it is so difficult to say something to Fukushima problem.” (Introduction to Fukushima Studies). That is, we are still caught up in “Japan's domestic debate … hopelessly dictated by the unproductive disagreement.” Moreover, I feel that this situation is about to become more serious. Briefly speaking, in the current discursive sphere in Japan, the tendency is that all discussion about nuclear energy is framed either as approval or disapproval of the Abe administration1). If we were to escape from this dichotomy and look at diverse values and interests in our society (which originate from the simple reason that it is so difficult to change the ways and places of our lives), we would find it difficult to say something. For instance, concerns about health risks from exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation will still seriously influence local farmers. They are carefully measuring radiation levels around Fukushima and cultivating crops under the condition that such risks were not scientifically verified based on enough data analysis. This is just one example. Even among those who are opposed to nuclear plants, there is no common ground. Under this condition, Mr. Kainuma, who was born in Fukushima prefecture, argued strongly that outsiders pretending to have knowledge shouldn't say anything. However, ironically, his argument cannot convince those who already believe that their arguments are correct, and makes it uncomfortable for those who try to listen to different voices to speak frankly.

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Following Prof. Slayton, I would like to reconfirm the significance about the problem at a specific ‘level’ or ‘order.’ We need to “identify outstanding questions about nuclear power, and explore possibilities for addressing those questions.” Addressing the climate change problem needs “global scale” imagination. While the nuclear power problem as it relates to energy or economic issues could be discussed at the level of individual states, some comments in this forum argue that we should discuss the problem at an international level. In contrast, following Prof. Takahashi, I would like to argue that it is important to carefully consider about how this problem would appear on a smaller scale. And we should also try to connect multiple-scales to each other. This argument might be contrary to what Ulrich Beck said, that is, that radioactive substances move beyond borders. Having said that, the reason why I think a small-scale perspective is important is because in Japan, at least, it is not states or electric companies, but municipalities who decide to build (or accept) new nuclear plants.

In Japan, I think that this suggests a question: “in what scale we could resolve problems without falling into a strict discussion such as the above?” I think that some cities could provide clues to consider, such as Kubokawa-cho where residents discussed building nuclear plants for a couple of decades (Kohei Inose, Village and Nuclear Plants) and ultimately succeeded in rejecting them. Or we could consider Kashiwa-shi where citizens and farmers held a round-table meeting about confidence-building in farming in hotspot areas generated by Fukushima nuclear plants disaster, and shared their experiences in overcoming their situation (Yasumasa Igarashi, The Form of “Relief” which Everyone Has Chosen).

1) Once people begin to discuss or share their arguments about nuclear energy on Twitter, SNS, or other digital media, they are immediately connected to pro-Abe or anti-Abe camps by politically partisan people, and strongly criticized by partisan groups. Those who try to find common ground between pro-nuclear energy and anti-nuclear energy are severely criticized. However, the simplified formula (anti-Abe = anti-nuclear plants = anti-the US-Japan Security Treaty = the cooperation policy with other East Asian countries based on accepting Japan's war responsibility) and its reversed formula begin to twist due to the “resolving” of the Korean comfort women problem in the end of 2015.

Yuki Ashina

I am a lawyer working on relief efforts on behalf of victims since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident of March 2011. I feel strong anger and sadness at the current situation; while about five years have passed since the accident, nuclear reactors all over Japan have been restarted almost as if the accident never happened. Moreover, technologies of building nuclear power plants are being exported from Japan to the rest of the world.

In the first place, electric power technologies aim to make people happy by making their lives convenient. But there is no “perfect” technology. Any technology will definitely have its demerits as well as merits. I believe that if a technology with excellent merits also has demerits which make people unhappy, it shouldn't be used by human beings.

Up until now, some have argued that the merits of nuclear power generation include its low cost, low environmental pollution, and high contributions to resolving the earth warming problem. I'm not a specialist of nuclear power generation, but I can understand that these merits are some of the reasons why nuclear power plants have been built all over the world.

Having said that, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident clarified the worst demerit which nuclear power generation has. That is, if a nuclear power plant accident occurs, people's lives around the plant will be fundamentally and unrecoverably destroyed. I don't think that the aforementioned merits of nuclear power generation offset these demerits. I have seen people in despair, the lives they painstakingly built for themselves completely demolished by this accident. I would like to present some examples of the victims’ sadness and anger. Behind the following examples there is an enormous number of victims.

First of all, I have to say, it was not only “workplaces” or “houses” (which are easily convertible into money) that were lost, but also “home towns” themselves. Even if victims received some compensation money, some things are not recoverable: their former classmate cohorts who have supported them even decades after graduation, the murmur of a mountain stream where they enjoyed fishing with their friends over the summer holidays, or the casual conversations with neighbors as people exchanged the vegetables which they harvested on farms cultivated with care and toil.

Moreover, I would like to stress that most victims cannot identify what they have lost, even now. They are so busy trying to sustain their everyday lives that time to truly comprehend their loss. Even after five years, the nuclear power plant disaster – which is not contracting, but actually expanding every moment – must be weathered and will be forgotten in time.

I think that the first starting point to consider is the sustainability of nuclear power energy. All specialists and ordinary people, as well as victims, should seriously think about what would be lost in a “nuclear accident,” this worst demerit of nuclear energy generation. “Seriously” means to walk a mile in the victims’ shoes and imagine what it would be like if a nuclear power plant accident happened near your home. What would this mean for your life? Could you bear such a severe situation? If, together, we consider the possibility of nuclear energy generation technologies going out of control, then we have to imagine the potential misery for each of us as individuals and for our loved ones. Only after this consideration can we really think about whether pursuing such technologies is the correct course of action.

Hiroyuki Mori

Although almost five years have passed since the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, there are still more than 100,000 refugees living in refugee camps in twelve municipalities. According to the latest environmental epidemiological research, the incidence rate of thyroid cancer in children at Fukushima is 20-50 times higher than normal, and an increase in future cancer rates seems unavoidable. If we considering this situation sincerely, it is obvious that it will take a very long time to restore the areas around the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

The Ashio Copper Mine mineral pollution incident has been regarded as the worst incidence of pollution in Japan. It occurred around the Watarase River in the Tochigi and Gunma Prefectures in the late of the 19th century. The development of the Ashio Copper Mine resulted in the emission of many different kinds of pollutants including smoke, polluted gas and polluted water polluted into the surrounding area at that time. Many villages were forced to be closed by this mine pollution. The influence of this disaster on the environment continues even to the present day. However, the pollution incident in Fukushima is quite more overwhelming and is really beyond comparison in Japanese history.

The true cause of the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident has not been clarified yet. Even so the Japanese government and municipalities are restarting nuclear power plants all over the country one after another. I believe that requests from the business community and local stakeholders are strongly promoting that.

As a specialist of local governmental finances and economics, I have researched the Fukui Prefecture, which has the biggest agglomeration of nuclear plants in the world. I realize that this area is confined by a social-economic structure which depends on nuclear power plants and their potential to bring in enormous fixed asset tax, grants, subsidies, public works projects and consumer demand. At the same time, during my research, I felt that there was a strange atmosphere which did not permit us to speak about the nuclear power plant problem inside of the area. There was a horrible situation in which power companies attempted to conciliate local interested parties with bribes and municipalities put pressure on local residents who were opposed to nuclear power plants.

Following the precautionary principle in protecting health and the environment, which is common practice throughout the world, reducing and closing nuclear plants is inevitable. We should not cause other historical catastrophes. Toward that end, we have to take measures in areas already bound up within the structure of nuclear power plant dependence, fully mobilizing every kind of public policy such as monetary policy, financial policy, industrial development and citizen participation. I think it will take this kind of mobilization to abolish nuclear power plants