Five Years of Forgetting: the Fukushima Disaster And Nuclear Amnesia
Binoy Kampmark
“People’s understanding of disasters will continue to be constructed by media. How media members frame the presence of
risk and the nature of disasters matters.”
Celine Marie Pascale, American University, Mar 10, 2015
Fearing radiation; terrified by the nuclear option. Perfectly sensible instincts that never seem to convince
establishments and those who have long ceased to loathe nuclear power and its various dangerous by-products. Each
nuclear disaster, such as the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plants five years ago, come with its treasure of
apologetics and justifications. The reason is always the same: nuclear energy is safe and we cannot really do without
it.
To that end, the emergence of “radiophobia” is a designation that dismisses as much as it supposedly diagnoses. It pokes
fun at those ninnies who think that they are about to perish because of the effects of nuclear catastrophe and radiation
contamination. Risk, according to this philosophy of concerted denial, is always exaggerated.
Shunichi Yamashita, a proclaimed expert on the effects of radioactivity, was invited by the Fukushima prefecture in the
aftermath of the meltdown to reassure rather than investigate. “The effects of radiation,” he claimed, “do not come to
people who are happy and laughing, they come to people who are weak-minded.”
This Dr. Strangelove dismissiveness is as much an advertisement for the virtues of doom as it is about the brutal
consequences, real and imaginary, of radiation poisoning. Radiation is the invisible killer that stalks the earth, but
for many, it is hardly worth a thought. For one, it suggests a simple calculation in environments that are not,
supposedly, that dangerous. “With low radiation doses,” argued this doctor of nuclear apologetics, “the people have to decide for
themselves whether to stay or to leave.”
Despite this bubbling confidence on the part of his colleagues, Japanese American physicist Michio Kaku had little time
for such views as Yamashita’s. In an interview soon after the meltdown, Kaku claimed that, “The slightest disturbance
could set off a full-scale meltdown at three nuclear power stations, far beyond what we saw at Chernobyl.”
Smile with upbeat confidence, and the problem goes away. If people are depressed before radiation, suggests Yamashita,
they will succumb as the negative dramatists they are. “Stress is not good at all for people who are subjected to
radiation.” Then again, stress could hardly be deemed good for anybody in particular, irrespective of radiation.
Such fabulously misguided nonsense is central to the amnesiac context of Fukushima. Makiko Segawa put it rather
poignantly in his contribution in the Asia-Pacific Journal: initial enthusiastic snaps and coverage by the press corps, an insatiable lust for disaster imagery, quietened in due
course. Writing a year after the disaster, Segawa noted how “the journalists have packed up and gone and by accident of
design Japan’s government seems to be mobilizing its agenda, aware that it is under less scrutiny.”
Robert Jacobs similar notes that Fukushima conforms to that litany of disasters that has afflicted the human experience,
a matter of rejection and experience rather than learning and adapting. “Fukushima is taking its place alongside the
many forgotten nuclear disasters of the last 70 years.”
Sociologist Celine Marie Pascale of the American University, on scouring some 2,100 news stories from four media outlets
(The New York Times, Washington Post, The Huffington Post and Politico) came to the conclusion that a strategy of minimisation was underway. The implications of such an event had to be
downplayed, de-emphasising the risk of massive contamination and environmental disaster. A mere 6 per cent of the
articles examined the health implications of the event. “We see articles in prestigious news outlets claiming that
radioactivity from cosmic rays and rocks is more dangerous than the radiation emanating from the collapsing Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear plant.”
A necessary process of mendacity has to come into play. The Tokyo Electric Power Plant (TEPCO), Japan’s largest power
company and owner of the affected power plants, initially denied the existence of meltdowns when it knew three had taken
place. It was a process of deception that continued for three months after the event, a situation made even more absurd
for the fact that hundreds of thousands were evacuated in the vicinity. It is a disaster episode that keeps on giving.
Even in March 2015, their reassurances seemed less than comforting. Chief Decommissioning Officer Naohiro Masuda would
claim rather blandly that, “Even if some contaminated water remains, I feel that we can reduce a substantial amount of
risk.”
The nuclear genie is a creature that encourages the lie in planning establishments. There are lies about safety; there
are lies about legacies. As Jacobs suggests, the Disneyfication of disaster sites affected by the nuclear or atomic
scourge is all too real. The Manhattan Project that led to the development of the atomic weapons used on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki became “Disney theme parks of American exceptionalism”. The quest for the nuclear option in both the military
and energy contexts saw massive environmental degradation.
Even now, the ghostly sense of Fukushima should be a reminder of errors and negligence rather than dismissal and
indifference. Jacobs suggests a simple but necessary formula to combat nuclear amnesia: see the impacts of radiation
exposure “before they become vaguely visible as cancers nestled in health population statistics”.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Email: bkampmark@gmail.com