In February 2001, the USS Greeneville, a nuclear submarine carrying sixteen “distinguished visitors” as part of a U.S. Navy public relations program, collided with the Ehime Maru, a fisheries training boat operated by Uwajima Fisheries High School, off the coast of Hawaii. Nine Japanese perished, including four high school students. Nearly nine months later, the U.S. Navy succeeded in raising the boat from its deepwater crash site and in locating the bodies of eight victims. This retelling focuses on the ways in which both governments emphasized repeatedly the special emotional needs of Japanese victims’ families and of Japan as a whole. By calling attention to inherent contradictions within these representations as well as to tensions surrounding the victims’ families, it separates emotion itself from its political representation, and suggests that the analytical lens ought to focus on the latter rather than the former.
Modeling the transport of radioactive pollution in the Ussuri Gulf during the first days after the nuclear accident in the Chazhma Bay in August 1985
