Bearing the weight of the world Exploring Maternal Embodiment by Einion Alys;

Author:Einion, Alys;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Demeter Press
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Indeterminate Life:

Dealing with Radioactive Contamination as a Voluntary Evacuee Mother

Maxime Polleri

On 11 March 2011, Japan experienced the most powerful earth-quake ever recorded on the Japanese archipelago, followed by an equally devastating tsunami. These two successive natural disasters greatly damaged the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Subsequent human errors contributed to the nuclear meltdown of some of the power plant’s reactors, causing the discharge of radioactive materials and the forced evacuation of residents within a twenty-kilometre radius. Many more individuals living beyond this officially restricted zone fled through their own initiative—putting the number of evacuees at more than 160,000. In the following years, members of the local and central government have repeatedly stated that the levels of radiation released during the disaster were too low to pose any major adverse health effects to the population of Japan. The same officials were also quick to assert that the more serious source of harm to the affected public would be the resultant psychological fear linked with radiation.

These historical facts are known by many, yet they only tell one version of the story. Indeed, there is another parallel experience running alongside this official narrative—namely, the often unheard story of the individuals living in the shadow of these sanctioned statistics, which constitute the official understanding of what is now known as the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Fast forward to 11 March 2016. Five years have passed since the disaster, and I am listening to a speech being given by Akiko Uno, the founder of the National Refugee Association. Mrs. Uno, a voluntary evacuee (jishu hinansha) from Fukushima, did not fall within the official evacuation perimeter. Fearing radioactive contamination nonetheless, she formed a group of mothers seeking the right to officially evacuate from an environment they consider harmful to themselves and their children. In front of a full audience, she invites these mothers to share their experiences as voluntary evacuees. Many go on to voice their concerns about the hardships of rationalizing the presence of an imperceptible harm—radioactive contamination—and about the apparent increase of thyroid cancers in children, which they believe is linked to radiation exposure. At one point, a young mother suddenly bursts into tears. The only sounds heard are the woman’s sobs and the constant electrical whine of the microphone. Thus, even as government officials contend that concerns about radioactive contamination are unwarranted, the story of that young mother, convulsing with tears, points toward a different set of experiences.

In this chapter, I explore how Japanese mothers who have chosen to evacuate of their own free will embody radioactive hazards resulting from the Fukushima disaster. As an anthropologist, I explore the notion of embodiment as the lived experience of radioactive hazards, constituted through corporeal knowledge and affective entanglements, and located within specific sociocultural, gendered, and technological contexts. Employing an ethnographical approach, I follow the story of one voluntary evacuee, a mother named Noriko Matsumoto, whose experience forms the primary analytical framework of this chapter.1 I offer a different narrative from the one presented by government officials—an

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