Home Otherwise: Living Archives and Half-Life Politics in Post-Fallout Coastal Fukushima

While the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan forced residents out of their coastal Fukushima homes, transforming familiar ecologies into sites of estrangement, Naoko and neighbors remain invested in the material objects and spiritual relations of their houses, within and despite the logics of contamination. These desires to repair domestic livelihoods to nurture a sense of home (ie) and the idea of dying well (ii shinikata) challenge critical theories of nuclear fallout, which frame contamination’s impacts in terms of biopolitical logics and planetary scales. Thus, although contamination regiments the lives of residents through what I call a half-life politics, their practices of house-ing defy these strictures, as planetary contamination becomes experiential, ethnographic, and interscalar, and as people attempt to remake lives in an already injured and irradiated world. 要旨 2011 年東日本大震災に起因する東京電力福島第一発電所事故は近隣の森や 生態系を汚染し、多くの福島県浜通り地区の住民達を長期避難に追いやった。し かしながら住民の多くは汚染されなくなく避難した『家』との縁を切るのではな く、個々の考える『いい死に方』を求め汚染された家との物質的、精神的つながり 求め続けた。このような避難民の原子力事故後の行動は、人間と放射性物質の関 係性を生物的ダメージに特化して語るフォールアウト関連の学術的思考や、事故 後の政策に見られる汚染中心の『半減期的政治』とは異なる考え方の必要性を示 している。この論文は文化人類学的アプローチを使い、人はどのようにして『家』 を保持しようとする行動の中で自分以外のモノとのつながりを認知し、放射能汚 染の様々な規模 -その地域性や普遍性- を理解し、それと共存して行こうとす るのかという問いへの回答を探る. Resumo Enquanto o desastre nuclear de 2011 no Japão forçou os residentes de Fukushima a abandonar suas casas, transformando ecologias familiares em locais de estranhamento, Naoko e seus vizinhos continuam a investir em objetos e em relações espirituais com as suas casas agora emolduradas pela lógica da contaminação. O desejo de recuperar o sentido de lar (ie) e a ideia de morrer bem (ii shinikata) desafia as teorias críticas da contaminação radioativa que maiormente enfatizam o seu impacto em termos biopolíticos e em escala planetária. Assim, embora a contaminação regule o dia a dia dos moradores através do que eu chamo de half-life politics, suas práticas de house-ing desafiam essas restrições. A etnografia revela a contaminação planetária como sendo experiencial e interescalar, e mostra as pessoas refazendo as suas vidas em um mundo já irradiado e ferido. Resumen Mientras el desastre nuclear de 2011 en Japón obligó a los residentes de Fukushima a abandonar sus hogares, transformando ecologías familiares en lugares de extrañamiento, Naoko y sus vecinos siguen invirtiendo en objetos y en relaciones espirituales con sus casas ahora envueltas en la lógica de la contaminación. Los deseos de recuperar el sentido de hogar (ie) y la idea de morir bien (ii shinikata) desafían las teorías críticas sobre la contaminación radioactiva que en su mayoría enfatizan los impactos biopolíticos y la escala planetaria. Así, aunque la contaminación regula el cotidiano a través de lo que llamo half-life politics, las prácticas de house-ing desafían estas restricciones. La etnografía revela a la contaminación planetaria como experiencial e interescalar y muestra a las personas rehaciendo sus vidas en un mundo ya herido e irradiado.

Using Nuclear Fallout to Measure Soil Erosion in Tunisia

Cesium-137 acts as a tracer to evaluate the efficiency of conservation methods.

A benchmark for the environment: big science and ‘artificial’ geophysics in the global 1950s

Security concerns during the early Cold War prompted United States strategists to solicit worldwide assistance in studying Earth’s physical environment. Comprehensive geophysical knowledge required cooperation between researchers on every part of the planet, leading practitioners to tout transnational earth science – despite direct military applications in an age of submarines and ballistic missiles – as a non-political form of peaceful universalism. This article examines the 1957–58 International Geophysical Year as a powerful fulcrum in the transfer of ideas about Earth’s global environment from Western security establishments to conservationists worldwide. For eighteen months, tens of thousands of researchers across every continent pooled resources for data collection to create a scientific benchmark for future comparisons. Illuminating Earth as dynamic and interconnected, participants robustly conceptualized humanity’s emergence as a geophysical force, capable of ‘artificially’ modifying the natural world. Studies of anthropogenic geophysics, including satellites, nuclear fallout, and climate change, conditioned the global rise of environmentalism.

No Man’s Zone: The Essay Film in the Aftermath of the Tsunami in Japan

Produced in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami and earthquake that hit Japan on the 11th of March 2011, Toshi Fujiwara’s film No Man’s Zone(Mujin Chitai, 2012) is a portrait of a country coming to terms with the nuclear fallout in Fukushima. Interviews are interlaced with long takes of the post-apocalyptic landscape and subtle observations that point to the suffering and trauma by the people living in, or uprooted from, the area near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The film also questions the role of images of the disaster and indeed the role of the filmmaker creating these very images. Marco Bohr highlights how the philosophical debate about the role of images produced in a disaster zone is primarily facilitated through the aesthetic, formal and structural device of the essay film.Its self-reflexivity is deployed here as a strategy to provoke the viewer in seeing representations of the disaster in a new light.