The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 16 | Issue 16 | Number 4 | Article ID 5189 | Aug 15, 2018

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Japan’s 3.11 Nuclear Disaster and the State of Exception:Notes on Kamanaka’s Interview and Two Recent Films

Margherita Long

This essay accompanies Katsuya Hirano’sInterview with Kamanaka Hitomi, “Fukushima,Med ia , Democracy : The Promise o fDocumentary Film”

Documentary filmmaker Kamanaka Hitomi’sinterview with historian Katsuya Hirano takesthe post-Fukushima debate in a number offresh directions.

At the level of facts, Kamanaka draws from hervast knowledge of Japanese nuclear politics andthe global nuclear industry to sharedevelopments that may startle even those whohave tried to keep up with the unfolding crisis.

At the level of political critique, she findssynergy with Hirano and his insights as achronicler of post-3.11 local politics to developtwo broad points. First is that nuclear“recovery” (fukkō) as charted in Fukushima isneoliberal in the sense defined by MichelFoucault and developed by political theoristslike Wendy Brown. Understanding the value ofhuman l ife purely in economic terms,neoliberalism dismantles democracy byreducing all politics to market principles.Although Kamanaka and Hirano do not use theterm “neoliberal,” I’ll argue that their criticismof neoliberal politics is explicit. The secondpoint is that the suspension of human rightsrequired by Fukushima’s “recovery” is a primeexample of the state of exception that GiorgioAgamben identifies as an increasingly dominantparad igm o f government in moderndemocracies. Kamanaka and Hirano referenceAgamben’s work directly, and I’ll elaborate why

they find it useful.

At the level of activism, the interview alsoextends beyond critique to develop anaffirmative theory of artistic practice forchange. For much of the conversation this fallsunder the rubr ic o f “ the exerc ise o fdemocracy.” When Kamanaka and Hirano usethis term, they do not mean simply thatdocumentary cinema prompts people to electbetter leaders. Rather, they mean thatdocumentary cinema empowers viewers tointuit the difference between politics andeconomics , wh ich co l l apses underneoliberalism, and between good governmentand executive expediency, which collapsesduring a state of exception. The first threesections of the interview focus on how toinspire people to reopen these gaps, which areessential to a functioning democracy.

Also concerning activism, Kamanaka advancesa second affirmative practice that she refers toevocatively toward the end of the interview as a“revolution of sensibility” (kanjō no kakumei)and “a revolution underfoot” (ashimoto nokakumei). Here, in two much shorter sections,the emphasis falls less on reopening gaps thanon closing them: between reality as weconstruct it (however democratically) inlanguage, politics, economics and law, on theone hand, and reality as we live it materiallyand bodily (“underfoot,” “through our senses”)on the other. What would it mean to stopoperating under the standard modernassumption that the two are separate? Whatwould it mean to close the distance betweenour discursive reality and internal radiation, inthe worst case scenario, but also between

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discursive reality and what sustains daily life:food, shelter, clothing and energy at their mostelemental? Although the interview stops shortof fully developing these points, it is possible toread Kamanaka’s two post-Fukushimadocumentaries as answers to precisely thesequestions. Focusing on the power of nuclearcare and carework by doctors and mothers,Living Through Internal Radiation (Naibuhibaku o ikinuku, 2012) and Little Voices ofFukushima (Chiisaki koe no kanon, 2015)suggest that the nuclearized body is a site notonly of suffering, but also of insight, perhapseven the energy to sustain activism. This iswhat I argue in the second part of this essay.

How Neo l ibera l i s Fukush ima ’ s“Recovery”?

Wendy Brown has written that neoliberalismreplaces democratic values l ike law,participation, and justice with marketplacestrategies like “benchmarks,” “buy-ins” and“best practices.” The milestones the Japanesegovernment has set for Fukushima are goodexamples. Rather than actual decontamination,which is extremely difficult, the Ministry of theEnvironment asks Fukushima Prefecture tomeasure its recovery in the same increments asits soil removal (josen) campaign, withelaborate graphs, maps and percentagesupdated regularly online and at its local officein Fukushima-city.1 Prime Minister Abe Shinzō,in a famous speech, pegs recovery much moresimply to the year 2020, and the opening of theTokyo Olympics. 2 More recently, theadministration has begun marking the end ofthe cr is is with the end of subsidizedevacuation, and the successive opening of moreand more areas within the thirteen townsinitially impacted by restrictions andmandatory evacuations. 3 In this way,benchmarks and timelines focus collectiveth ink ing on shared economic goa ls(“recovery!”) in order to avoid acknowledging

the true scale of the disaster, and erase theneed to negotiate conflicting interests. Whatmakes the process uniquely perverse is theactive consent of those who suffer most. InWendy Brown’s words, “the citizen releasesstate, law and economy from responsibility forand responsiveness to its own condition andpredicaments and is ready when called tosacrifice to the cause of growth.”4 It’s aphenomenon Hirano says Fukushima activistMutō Ruiko told him she’s witnessed time andagain: the moment when even a long-term anti-nuclear ally will buy into the reassurances ofgovernment-dispatched “safety experts” whenfaced with the prospect of economic collapse.

True, radiation makes Fukushima’s recoverydifferent from the United States’ recovery fromthe crash of 2008, on which Brown focuses.When Americans were persuaded to accept theintensification of inequality as basic tocapitalism’s health, the resulting reductions injobs, pay and benefits affected their bodieswith much less cellular precision than the foodfrom the stricken area (“Namie Dishes” and“Fukushima Plates”) that Kamanaka describesTokyo University students eating in the name ofeconomic solidarity. There is also a differencein levels of awareness. The American neoliberalsubject theorized by Brown is better able tounderstand what he or she is being asked tosacrifice, economically, than the cesium 137-exposed Japanese subject is able to understandit, biologically. Nevertheless, one of the mainpoints to which Kamanaka opens our eyes inthe interview is that, like the American stockmarket which was supposed to be “smart” and“rational” but was actually unstable, theJapanese nuclear industry was also a “too bigto fail” behemoth which proved to be incapableof making money without massive infusions ofstate cash. According to Kamanaka, the truesource of the industry’s profitability for thepast thirty years has been a national Y600billion ($US 5.5 billion) Energy DevelopmentBudget (Enerugii kaihatsu yosan), of which 60or 70 percent every year goes to plant

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construction. Kamanaka explains that, inaddition to having new infrastructureunderwritten by the government, electriccompanies are allowed to add a 3.8% surchargeto capital expenditures, which they tack ontopeoples’ electricity bills. Given that these sameelectric companies receive a “subsidy forelectricity generating locations” (dengen ritchikōfukin) directly from the tax base, it is easy tosee how the bigger the “nuclear village” grows,the more money the state and electricityconsumers are obligated to feed it. So whileclaims that “nuclear is the lynchpin toeconomic growth” had been accepted as gospelsince Japan’s 54 reactors were first built in the1960s and 70s, in actual fact it is just thereverse: nuclear power is a house of cards thattumbles quickly in the absence of statesubsidies, as demonstrated in the wake of the3.11 triple disaster.

As evidence Kamanaka offers the fates ofToshiba and Mitsubishi, and their relationshipswith two corporate purveyors of nuclear fueland technology, Westinghouse in the U.S. andAreva in France. Both Westinghouse and Arevahave seen losses mount in the face of demandsfor greater safety after Chernobyl, 9/11 andFukushima, and both are currently mired inlong-overdue construction projects that pushthem further and further into the red. Whatdoes it say about the Japanese nuclear industry,Kamanaka asks, that Toshiba and Mitsubishihave been willing to step in with infusions ofcash just as other investors are backing away?In the months since her interview with Hirano,her insight into nuclear unprofitability has beenborne out spectacularly in the case of Toshiba,which all but bankrupted itself purchasingWestinghouse and hitching its star to failedreactor construction at the Vogtle Plant inGeorgia.5 Meanwhile, Mitsubishi’s president,his company having underwritten heavy lossesat Areva’s twelve-year late project in Olkiluoto,Finland, insists that fresh investments are safeeven while the Nikkei Asian Review wonderswhether Mitsubishi is “doubling down out of a

sense that it is in too deep to pull out.”6

What Kamanaka underscores are theaccounting gymnastics required to perpetuatethe myth that nuclear energy and economicgrowth go hand in hand. She notes that whenall 54 of Japan’s reactors were idled betweenSeptember 2013 and October 2015,government officials and business leaderscomplained that to continue indefinitely in theabsence of nuclear power would be like“returning to the Edo Period.”7 Her point, incontrast, is that Japan’s standard of living wentlargely unchanged, and what was actually setback was the bottom line of what fellowfilmmaker and antinuclear ally Kawai Hiroyukicalls the “immense profit-sharing community”comprised of the electric companies and theirsubsidiaries.8 It is this community that benefitsnow as the Abe administration ends its aidresponsibility to evacuees and puts its fullweight behind nation-wide reactor re-starts.Although neither the profits nor the hardshipare shared, people are convinced that thegovernment is doing its job because economicgrowth has become both its end and itslegitimation. Meanwhile Kamanaka is leftworrying, like Wendy Brown, “What happens tothe constituent elements of democracy – itsculture, subjects, principles, and institutions –when neoliberal rationality saturates politicallife?”9

Watching Documentaries as “An Exercisein Democracy”

One of the most emotionally difficult pointsKamanaka makes – and perhaps one she wouldonly make in an English-language publication –is that whereas neoliberalism generally chartsa hollowing out of liberal democracy, placeslike Fukushima may have never enjoyeddemocratic culture to begin with. It wasvulnerable to plant construction in the 1960sand 1970s because it lacked the sense of local

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autonomy it would have needed to recognizeTEPCO’s promised wealth as a poor substitutefor control over its own land, safety, andsolidarity. And it was further hurt by whatKamanaka identifies as one of the electriccompany’s favorite tricks, setting pro- and anti-nuclear fact ions against each other.Animosities would revive and deepen when thecommunity was forced to decide whether or notto evacuate after 3.11. Kamanaka’s account ofthese disputes is one place where she speaks ofthe need to reassert democracy by opening thekind of civic space or gap by which it functions.That is, in places with strong histories of civicactivism – she mentions Hokkaido, Nagano,Shiga, Shimane and var ious KyushuPrefectures – experience with collective actionallows “people to work toward a single goaleven with those with whom they disagree.” Thegoal acts as a rallying point, and what keepsthe community together is not achieving it butorbiting around it, despite differences.Conceptually, this is the same gap to whichWendy Brown gestures when she says thateven though liberal democracy almost alwaysfalls short of its ideals, it is precisely the divide“between formal principles and concreteexistence [that] provides the scene of paradox[and] contradiction that social movements ofevery kind have exploited for more than threecenturies.”10

So how can documentary film help open thisdivide? Early in the interview Kamanakaidentifies factual accuracy as a key subject ofher films. Especially with Living ThroughInternal Radiation in 2012, her goal was toempower viewers by replacing the safety mythwith “radiation exposure literacy.” But toinquire after the divide in question is to lingeron lengthier passages at the heart of theinterview that focus on ideals rather than facts.With reference, one imagines, to the joyfulnessat the center not only of Living ThroughInternal Radiation but also of Rokkasho from2006, Ashes to Honey from 2011 and LittleVoices from 2015, Hirano remarks, “Your films

make us feel especially keenly your convictionthat democracy is fundamentally a matter ofbuilding community in the place where you live,by your own will and determination, accordingto your own vision.” It’s an evocative phrase,“In the place where you live.” Kamanaka’s filmsare full of scenes of hands, mouths and bottomsin contact with the soil, the sea, and the foodthey provide. What sustains viewers amidstthemes of nuclear sacrifice and collusion arethe bonds between the people attached to thesehands, mouths and bottoms, and theircelebration, against all odds, of living lightly onand with the earth.

Kamanaka speaks in the interview of a“chemical reaction of consciousness” (ishiki nokagaku henka) that she wants audiences toexperience at her community screeningevents.11 With this phrase, she gestures towardat least two kinds of transformation. “This ishow angry I am at the government for tellinglies,” she wants them to be able to say out loud,especially if for the first time. “This is howmuch I want to begin speaking about thecrushing anxiety I’ve been feeling.” This is onetransformation. The second, more classicallydemocratic transformation, begins, “This ishow much I too want to build a community-in-place.” “This is how much I admire the peoplein Kama’s film, who find a way to beginspeaking with each other, across fear, acrossisolation, across differences.” Her films set up ayearning, a desire to bridge the gap betweenthe reality and the ideal. Audiences may arriveafraid and alone, pressed by what charactersfrom Little Voices identify as the government’sperceived injunctions: “Evacuate or not! Live ordie! It’s your responsibility! You choose!”(Figure 1). But after an hour of post-screeningdiscussion they break free from the lonelyquarantine of neoliberalism’s “responsibilized”individuality and find themselves part of agroup. As Hirano remarks with admiration, “It’sthe spontaneous birth of activism.”

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Figure 1: Noro Mika in Little Voices ofFukushima

Will You Still Say No Crime Has BeenCommitted? Agamben and the JapaneseConstitution

One of the most gratifying moments in theinterview is when Kamanaka and Hiranospeculate about how a post-3.11 “state scholar”(goyō gakusha) like Yamashita Shun’ichi couldhave justified his actions to himself. When theNagasaki University Medical Professor andauthor of a World Health Organization study ofChernobyl’s epidemiological legacy12 wasdispatched to Fukushima after the triple-meltdowns to assure residents that childrendidn’t need to take iodine pills and that therewere “no immediate health risks,” was hehimself convinced? Of course not, Kamanakareplies. But this is where political theoristGiorgio Agamben’s work is relevant, as Hiranopoints out by introducing the phrase reigai jōtaino kōzō, or “state of exception.” What Hiranomeans is that Yamashita is thinking in much thesame way as mid-century political theorists likeCarl Schmitt and Clinton Rossiter, who justifiedauthoritarianism with the logic that “nosacrifice is too great for our democracy, least ofall the temporary sacrifice of democracyitself.”13 Agamben cites thinkers like Schmittand Rossiter in order to warn us that “states ofexception” have come to define modern

democracies. They are not, as we like to think,extreme cases: rare situations in whichdemocracy fails when executive orders overridethe rule of law. Rather, states of exceptionincreasingly operate as democracy’s defaultmode.

In Fukushima, when Yamashita put nationahead of region; when he put “what theJapanese government ha[d] decided” over whatthe people of Fukushima deserved, he perhapsmore vividly than any single actor helpedabandon Fukushima to what Agamben calls“the no-man’s land between public law andpolitical fact.”14 The Japanese constitution of1947 guarantees “individual dignity” (Article24), “public health” (Article 25) and “life andliberty” (Article 31); this is the law.15 Butaccording to Kamanaka, the political fact, atleast in Yamashita’s mind, was that securingthese rights for the majority would requiredenying them to Fukushima. Rather thanacknowledge that public law would besuspended, he convinced himself that the safetymyth would do a better job of “avoiding theescalation of fear, social panic, and communitydestruction” that would have been caused bymandatory evacuations. This is how thegovernment rescinded basic human rightswithout anyone speaking about criminalresponsibility.16

Meanwhile, as Kamanaka points out, there isno better way to destroy a community than toforce it to disavow its own panic and accepttemporary crisis measures as permanentarrangements. Here the raising of the legalallowable annual radiation exposure from 1 to20 millisieverts is but one obvious example.17 Acompelling moment in the interview comeswhen Kamanaka describes the psychologicaleffects of inhabit ing the compressedtemporality of this sort of endless emergency:

It’s as if people are living only bytheir reflexes, playing some sort of

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mindless video game. They nolonger think in terms of contextsand narratives; there’s no sense ofhistory, or reflecting on cause andeffect within the flow of time andthe particulars of chronology. Whatwe’re seeing is the proliferation ofa style of living only with what isright in front of one’s eyes.

By using social media to gather communitymembers and put her films in front of theireyes, each others’ voices in their ears,Kamanaka aims to reopen time, reopencontexts and narratives and relationships. It's atask made difficult, she says, first by theJapanese education system’s failure to nurtureself-expression, and second by the post 3.11pro-nuclear faction’s success in labeling thosewho give voice to the collective injury ofsustained worry as part of the problem – ascirculators of “fūhyō higai” or “harmfulrumors.” Kamanaka’s point is that it is essentialto reopen a space between the mainstreammedia as sole purveyor of truth, and alternativemedia as at least equally true. The harder it isto open the distinction, the more valuable it isfor Japanese democracy.

She explains that back in March 2011 localnewspapers like Fukushima Minpō andFukushima Minyū had no idea that highradiation readings were making the failure toevacuate many areas of the prefecture aviolation of national law.18 The reason thesepapers waited to report on the accident untilTokyo told them what to say, repeating itobediently with no analysis, was that the verypossibility of local investigative journalism hadlong since been shut down by the nuclearindustry itself. Since the 1960s when the plantswere first built, TEPCO had been the singlebiggest source of advertising revenue for everynewspaper, television and radio station in theprefecture. As a result, there was no history ofinterest in or talent for nuclear reporting

beyond the safety myth. This is how it waspossible for Yamashita Shun’ichi to reaffirmthat myth at precisely the moment it seemedmost absurd. By contesting it, Kamanaka ismaking a crucial intervention.

Another reason Agamben is useful for framingKamanaka’s intervention is that he keeps usfrom reading Fukushima’s state of exception asa uniquely Japanese political phenomenon, areturn of pre-war Japanese fascism. As Hiranopoints out, Kamanaka’s films, particularlyHibakusha at the End of the World (2003),s h o w h o w J a p a n l e a r n e d t o m i x i t sschizophrenic cocktail – both affirming theneed for nuclear sacrifice and denying theextent of nuclear harm -- directly from theUnited States. At the Cold War nuclearproduction site in Hanford Washington,featured in the film, only a small fraction ofcancers suffered by people living downwind ofnine nuclear reactors and five large plutoniumprocess ing complexes i s publ ica l lyacknowledged to be the effect of radioactivity.What is more, when Kamanaka interviewsHanford families for her 2003 film, we witnesstheir wil l ingness to justify this smallpercentage with a rhetoric of heroic sacrifice:“This is how we won the Cold War” they say, inHirano’s paraphrase.

Agamben’s point is that this sort of suspensionof human rights is integral not only to thesmooth operation of fascism but increasingly,throughout the 20th century, to those verydemocracies that like to uphold themselves asexamples for the rest of the world: England,France, Italy, the United States. He helps ussee how vulnerable we have been toauthoritarianism all along, and how crucial it isto strengthen democracy not by petitioning ourrespective executive branches, which arealready far too good at overriding thelegislative branch, but by practicingrepresentative government locally, in townsand villages. It’s in this context that we canperhaps best appreciate Kamanaka’s remark,

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Especial ly when faced with“national this” and “the Abeadministration’s that,” I thinkbeing able to decide how to solveproblems at a local level – theproblems we face in the placeswhere we live, and where we’veput down roots – is crucial tocultivating a democratic society.That’s why I don’t spend muchtime at weekly protests in front ofthe Prime Minister’s Residence(kantei mae). If I’m always makingthe rounds with my films. . . to theprefectures, it’s because I’ve cometo believe that the center has nohope of changing if these otherplaces don’t change first.

Two Different “Revolutions Underfoot”

There’s no question that when Kamanakaspeaks of “ashimoto no kakumei” at the end ofthe interview she is referring to this sort of“revolution from below” -- to democraticactivism as an exercise in local autonomy. Butlet me quote from the final sections to suggestan additional meaning. Kamanaka says:

True transformation emerges fromeveryday living, not from historicalprinciples or dogma. In this sense Ihave to say that, like Mutō Ruiko, Ibelieve in “women’s sensitivities”(onna to iu kanjō).19 It’s becausewomen are the ones who live dailylife most intimately. Whether theylive in the city or the countryside,women cook, women do laundry,and women sort the trash. [. . .]Where the maintenance of dailylife is concerned, [they] are theones who do it closest to thesource. Of course one could object

that statements like this presumenatural gender differences. But mypoint is that in society as it actuallyexists, clearly it’s overwhelminglywomen who do this work. Isn’t thatwhy women are the ones who arebest able to sustain politicalmovements that derive from dailylife? The discovery of potentialwithin the act of living itself seemsold, but it’s quite new.

In the interview, Kamanaka stops short ofexplaining how the kinds of carework (cooking,laundry) she references can fuel politicaltransformation. But what’s remarkable aboutboth her post-3.11 films is that they documentthe potential inherent in nuclear carework inparticular – the potential unleashed whenpeople attempt to keep food and bodies safefrom an ionizing radiation whose impact cannever be fully measured or known. In additionto “revolution from below” as radicaldemocracy in the form of local autonomy, thefilms also document a revolution that beginsfrom a lack of autonomy. That is, theydocument what happens when we acknowledgethat humans are not in control of the unfoldingnuclear event, and that its bearing on ourhealth is as much in the hands of externalmaterial forces as in our own.

How is this revolutionary? As the fields ofphilosophy of science and Science andTechnology Studies have long argued, whatKamanaka calls “the potential within the act ofliving” is a material potential, a physicalimpetus that forces innovation in both thinkingand living.20 Living Through Internal Radiation,from 2012, documents this innovation in theaffective labor of frontline radiation doctors.Little Voices of Fukushima, from 2015,documents it in the affective labor of mothers.What we appreciate watching the filmstogether is that they portray the doctors andthe mothers doing much of the same work,

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work that philosopher of science IsabelleStengers has dubbed “small-s” science for thehumi l i ty and pat ience necessary toacknowledge “the possibility that it is not manbut the material that ‘asks the questions,’ thathas a story to tell, which one has to learn tounravel.”21 Attuning themselves to the intervalbetween what Kamanaka calls in her interview“the time it takes for the radioactive material toestablish itself in the body, and for the body tobegin changing in response,” her doctors andmothers know that to study radiation is tolisten as it asks its own questions of the bodiesit affects, and not assume that they are incharge. Hida Shuntarō, the Hiroshimaoncologist who became a mentor to Kamanakawhen she returned from making Hibakusha atthe End of the World in Iraq, explains themedical consequences of this with wonderfulsimplicity. He says, “there is no treatment forexposure itself; there is no safe amount ofexposure; any amount can cause illness. Butthere is healthcare for extending life.”22

The Four Doctors of Living ThroughInternal Radiation

We get a vivid example of this kind ofhealthcare from the first doctor in LivingThrough Internal Radiation, ValentinaSmolnikova. Working as a pediatrician in atown in Belarus 160 ki lometers fromChernobyl, Smonikova discovers that thyroidcancer, the most direct effect of nuclearexposure , i s f a r f rom the dominantproblem.23 Given that the half-life of Cesium137 is 30 years, and that internal exposurethrough contaminated food, air and evenplacental nutrients lodges in the body, whatSmolnikova says she has treated mostfrequently since 1986 are compromisedimmune systems, anemia, weak bones, lowbirth weights, congenital defects, respiratoryproblems and, not least, mental health (stress,headaches, insomnia, fear). Kamanaka’s film

gives equal attention to the long arc ofSmolnikova’s expertise, built over decades ofexperience, and to short snatches of hermaternal care -- for her own family, and forpatients like a depressed orphan in his lateteens, abandoned when his parents turned toalcohol. These scenes underscore theinterrelationship of medical care and affectivecare, emphasizing the emotional intensity ofboth, and the patience and humility necessaryto understand how radiation manifestsdifferently in different bodies over time.

Figure 2: Valentina Smolnikova in LivingThrough Internal Radiation

Humility and emotion are emphasized also by asecond doctor, Smolinkova’s Japanesecolleague Kamata Minoru, when he explainsthe key concept of “hoyō,” or respite care.Recalling his own work in Belarus, Kamatarelates how studies undertaken in part throughthe Japan Chernobyl Foundation in the 1990sand 2000s proved that regular respite care inclean environments with clean food can reduceinternal radiation significantly.24 Although thesereductions are measured in discrete units, theemotional support and nutritional cleansingthat coax them to happen are impossible toquantify. Precisely because the cause-effectrelationship remains imperfectly understood,Kamata asserts (Figure 3), “It’s not enough tocheck kids’ thyroids. We need to have a systemfor looking after the body in its entirety, the

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emotions in their entirety.” In such scenes,Kamanaka affirms that radiation is asking itsown questions of childrens’ bodies and minds,and that the responses can only begin to beunraveled, however partially, by doctors forwhom paradigm-shifting epidemiologicaldiscoveries like hoyō are linked to everydaycare.

Figure 3: Kamata Minoru in LivingThrough Internal Radiation

In perhaps the most powerful scene from LivingThrough Internal Radiation, 94-year-old HidaShuntarō, himself a Hiroshima survivor, movesseamlessly from the technical language heneeds to explain recent developments inoncological science to the elemental languagehe needs for his medical practice, and his ownself-care. Having cited a paper by a Russianresearcher that proves ionizing radiationcauses illness not, as everyone had assumed, byharming genes in the nucleus of cells, butrather by affecting cytoplasm and mitochondriaoutside the nucleus, he continues (Figure 4):

Figure 4: Hida Shuntarō in Living ThroughInternal Radiation

There is only one thing humanscan do, and that is,

use the force of living to gather alltheir might,

and determine to l ive a longhealthy life.

Thinking and living this wayrequire courage and stamina.

. . . .

You can never live just any oldway.

From the way you eat your meals,to the way you sleep at night,

to the way you make love, to theway you work,

and the way you play.

You have to concentrate [yourcourage and stamina].

This is the only way to f ightionizing radiation.

Kamanaka’s cinematographer Iwata Makiko

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lingers over Hida’s fingers here, and hishealthy skin, and the way he leans back in hisleather chair in his own home, comfortable andopen, as she records the precision with whichhis ninety-four year-old-lips form theirsyllables. Viewers’ filmic interaction with Hidais thus itself quite loving, and helps us intuithow Kamanaka decided to follow up her 2012doctors’ film with a 2015 mothers’ film.Kodama Tatsuhiko,25 a medical doctor whodirects the Radioisotope Center at theUniversity of Tokyo, is the fourth doctor sheintroduces in Living Through InternalRadiation. In this scene (Figure 5), he makesthe connection between doctors and mothersexplicit:

Figure 5: Kodama Tatsuhiko in LivingThrough Internal Radiation

Mothers who are taking radiationseriously are truly turning the tidein Japan; I’d be grateful if youcould convey my thanks to them.Watching their e f forts , we[scientists] find it easy to cheerthem on, and we’re pleased thatthey exist not only in Fukushimabut throughout the country. [. . .]Government o f f i c i a l s a reconstantly telling them that a

certain level of radiation is fine,that they shouldn’t worry. But theyare having none of it, and theirarguments are revolutionary. Ithink they should absolutely beproud, and continue fighting.

Because the sound quality of Kodama’s clip isnot good, Kamanaka may have vacillated onwhether to include it. No doubt she kept itbecause Kodama is rebutting so forcefully theidea that carework amounts only to unpaid,apolitical female labor.26

Care as Filmmaking, Filmmaking asPedagogy: Little Voices of Fukushima

In Japanese, the title of Little Voices ofFukushima is Chiisaki koe no canon: A Canonof Little Voices. Because this fi lm tooemphasizes what post-Fukushima Japan canlearn from post-Chernobyl Belarus, “canon”may conjure a single melody sung first in oneplace and then another. Yet we soon realizethat there is little straightforward repetition.Little Voices toggles between lessons learnedand taught first by Smolnikova and othermothers in Belarus, second by a group ofmothers in the town of Nihonmatsu,Fukushima, and third by the women directorsof a respite care center in Hokkaido where bothBelarusian and now Japanese children come torecover.27 In each case, women strugglemightily first to master the melody and keep itgoing. Because it can only be sung in harmonywith radiation itself, it takes its toll. In thissense, the “littleness” of the voices refers alsoto their tentativeness. Each new chorus mustattune itself to a different set of materialcircumstances, a differently irradiated set ofbodies.

We follow the Nihonmatsu mothers as theybegin to channel their fear and anger into actsof resistance that are also acts of radiation

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care: starting a vegetable co-op to distributesafe produce, removing contaminatedvegetation along school routes, taking tentativefirst respite-care trips with their kids, and,Kamanaka is careful to emphasize, providingthe emotional support for each other thatsustains the mental health of the entirecommunity. Despite triumphant scenes of theformerly apolitical mothers attending aPrefectural Health Survey meeting andspeaking out at an anti-nuclear rally inTokyo,28 their gains are summarized mostpoignantly late in the film. After letting usenjoy the high spirits of the expandingvegetable co-op, Kamanaka takes us outsidealone with Endō Fumiyo, whose chubby face,ready wit, and tearful doctor visits haveendeared her to us in several earlier scenes.When Kamanaka asks, “do you feel supported?”she replies “Yes. Things are expanding in acircle, no, – no, in a spider’s web. And it mustbe rough for [our supporters who send us thevegetables and invite us on respite trips],because we’re all so heavy!” What Endō hasdiscovered is that the kind of health carecapable of extending irradiated life is notgeometrically sturdy like a circle. Rather, it isdelicate and fragile, almost invisible, like aspider web. Difficult to spin and even moredifficult to inhabit, it is what she has learnedshe must count on, nonetheless.

This sort of reliance on the most tenuous ofconnections can at times feel remote from thelessons Belarus is teaching. When Kamanakashows us a map (Figure 6) that appliesBelarusian safety standards to Fukushima, itseems c lear tha t , a t l eas t s ince i t sindependence from the Soviet Union in 1991,Belarus has taken much better care ofirradiated citizens than Japan since 2011.29 Aswe see from the red shading for “enforcedevacuation zone” (kyōsei hinan kuiki), if Endō’stown of Nihonmatsu were in Belarus, it wouldhave been declared uninhabitable and itscitizens relocated with state support. Yet evenif Belarusian measurements are confident and

straightforward, how the country treatsexposed citizens is not.

Figure 6: Map of Fukushima withPost-1991 Belarusian EvacuationStandards Applied. Areas in red representwhat Belarus would consider "mandatoryevacuation" zones. Areas in pink showactual mandatory evacuation zones asdetermined by Japanese standards.

In a voiceover, Kamanaka explains that bymeans of a state respite care system, childrenbetween the ages of 3 and 17 who live in placeswith annual radiation readings greater thanone millisievert are sent to one of 14 nationalrecuperation centers for 24 days at a time,twice a year.31 Little Voices spends a long timein these centers, observing what Kamanaka’svoiceover calls “gentle, holistic and natural”treatments that eschew western-style drugs infavor of therapies like “mucous membranestimulation for the immune system,” “mineral-rich asthma treatment,” “carbon dioxide gas-baths to stimulate the production of oxygen,”“massage for bronchitis and lung disease,” and“salt therapy for respiratory issues.” Viewersmay feel a degree of prejudice toward theformer Soviet Bloc’s kooky-looking, low-techmedical apparati when they first watch thesescenes. But what are these treatments if notways to inhabit the interval between exposure

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and cellular response, and to cajole damagedDNA toward rest and regeneration? In the faceof humanity’s failure to control its mostadvanced technology to date, mucus membranestimulators and carbon dioxide baths remind usagain that it is not humanity but the materialthat gets to ask questions, which we must learnto unravel.

Perhaps the most powerful scenes in LittleVoices of Fukushima are shot in Hokkaido atthe respite care (hoyō) center, which occupiesa repurposed elementary school. Wheninterviewing in Fukushima and Belarus,Kamanaka typically speaks to children andmothers directly, in respectful tones and attheir height. In Hokkaido she asks fewer directquestions, and camerawoman Iwata Makiko’slens moves distinctly lower. Viewers findthemselves increasingly alone with kids whoare crying, or fighting, or urinating. With noother grownups in the frame, they talk to thecamera as if it were the parent on duty. In onescene, the camera hurries over to two brotherson the school stage, one of whom has just burstout crying. When we arrive the other looks atthe camera and explains, “He said he hit hishead.” (Figure 7)

Figure 7: At Noro Mika's Respite CareCenter in Hokkaido, from Little Voices ofFukushima

In another, several boys are jumping in aplastic-lined pool dug into a ditch filled withwarm water. One tumbles in head-first and

wrenches his neck. Wailing, he looks at thecamera while two others look at him and tellhim he’s an idiot. (Figure 8)

Figure 8: At Noro Mika's Respite CareCenter in Hokkaido, from Little Voices ofFukushima

In a third scene, a toddler trails his fingersslowly along the wall of an empty corridormaking his way slowly away from the camera,which is at his height. When he calls out“mommy?” “mommy?” we feel like answeringhim. (Figure 9)

Figure 9: At Noro Mika's Respite CareCenter in Hokkaido, from Little Voices ofFukushima

In a fourth, a child walks alone to the bathroomto collect a urine sample. Although we hear himtalking to one of the women who runs the

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center, the camera does not show her. Insteadit crouches with him at knee-level as he holdsup his shirt with one hand and aims into thebottle with the other. Looking into the camerahe asks, “could you hold it a little lower?”(Figure 10)

Figure 10: At Noro Mika's Respite CareCenter in Hokkaido, from Little Voices of

Fukushima

Kamanaka’s lesson for viewers is that we toohave something to learn from carework. Ratherthan dismiss it as abject or apolitical, shep e r f o r m s i t , a n d h o n o r s i t . “ T r u etransformation comes from everyday living”when we learn how to close the distancebetween the discourses that govern our lives,and the material origins that sustain andchallenge them.

I would like to thank Kamanaka Hitomi andKatsuya Hirano for giving me a window intotheir respective projects and politics, and fortheir inspiration and insight. I would also liketo thank Norma Field for her support andpassion, and Mark Selden for his editing.

Margherita Long is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, UC Irvine.She is the author of This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory andFreud (Stanford). Her current project is a study of post-3.11 public intellectuals, artists, andwriters called On Being Worthy of the Event: Thinking Care, Affect and Origin afterFukushima. She has published a number of essays from it, including “Ōe’s Post-FukushimaActivism: On Shame, Contempt and Care.” She can be reached at margherita.long@uci.edu.

Notes1 The Ministry of Environment maintains a large “Decontamination Information Plaza”(Kankyō saisei purazā) at 〒960-8031 Fukushima Prefecture, Fukushima, Sakaemachi, 1-31. Inaddition to extensive decontamination charts updated regularly at the plaza, the Ministrymaintains interactive web-maps of “prefectural decontamination information by every city,town and village.”2 A script of Abe’s September 2013 speech to the International Olympic Committee in BuenosAires is here. Documentary-makers Yoh Kawano (Human Error, 2017) and Kawai Hiroyuki(Nuclear Japan, 2014) both include a clip of the opening lines to underscore how defensiveAbe’s Olympic bid sounds when he insists Tokyo is “one of the safest cities in the world, nowand in 2020.” Despite the widely-reported dishonesty of this statement (see for instancewww.reuters.com/article/us-japan-nuclear/abes-fukushima-under-control-pledge-to-secure-olympics-was-a-lie-former-pm-idUSKCN11D0UF), the 2020 benchmark is being honored, both

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with the games at large in Tokyo and with baseball and softball events which will take placein Fukushima, to “show the world the extent of its recovery.” See here.3 These towns include, from north to south, Iitate, Kawamata, Minamisōma, Namie, Katsurao,Futaba, Tamura, Ōkuma, Kawauchi, Tomioka and Naraha. Fukushima Prefecture updates itsstatus maps in nine languages. As Katsuya Hirano points out in his interviews with bothNamie municipal worker Suzuki Yūichi and Namie mayor Baba Tamotsu, policies of “return”(帰還) and “recovery” (復興) do not make total sense even to those charged withimplementing them. Nevertheless, that they are the only recognized government benchmarksis clear from the naming of the affected areas. Every effort is made to turn the most toxic“difficult to repatriate” zones (帰還困難区域) into purportedly less polluted “residence-restricted zones” (居住制限区域). In turn, “residence restricted zones” are assigned dates fortransition to a third category, “zones in preparation for the cancellation of evacuation” (避難指示解除準備区域). Upon cancellation, these zones return to “normal.”4 Wendy Brown. Undoing The Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: ZoneBooks, 2015) 219.5 Kana Inagaki, Leo Lewis and Ed Crooks, “Downfall of Toshiba, A Nuclear Industry Titan,”The Financial Times, February 14, 2017.6 “Mitsubishi Heavy Doubling Down on Areva with Fresh Investment,” Nikkei Asian Review,April 24, 2017.7 In the interview Kamanaka paraphrases their complaint as “江戸時代に戻るわけにはいかないんだ.”8 Kawai Hiroyuki, Nuclear Japan, documentary, (2014; Tokyo: K Project), iTunes, 0:40:00.9 Brown, Undoing, 27.10 Ibid., 206.11 In English, some of the best work on Kamanaka to date is by film scholar Hideaki Fujiki ofNagoya University. Fujiki discusses Kamanaka’s films in the larger context of these jishū jōei,local self-screening events, in “Networking Citizens through Film Screenings: Cinema andMedia in Post-3/11 Social Movements.” Media Convergence in Japan. Ed. Patrick W. Galbraithand Jason G. Carlin. Online Publication: Creative Commons, 2016. Fujiki discussesKamanaka’s position on science, environmentalism, and documentary technique in“Problematizing Life: Documentary Films on the 3.11 Nuclear Catastrophe.” Fukushima andthe Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster. Ed. Barbara Geilhorn and Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt. London: Routledge, 2016.12 See Yamashita and Repacholi, Chernobyl Telemedicine Project 1999 – 2004: Final Report ofthe Joint Project with the World Health Organization, the Sasakawa Memorial HealthFoundation and the Republic of Belarus. In the introduction to her study of Chernobyl,anthropologist Adriana Petryna cites the key role played by the World Health Organization inminimizing the accident’s significance for local and global health (xv). Petryna’s analysis ofthe supporting roles played by NGOs and other providers of “international assistance” singlesout “the Japanese Sasakawa Fund” in particular for sending foreign experts to the Zone toabstract data without understanding the “complex interdependencies between thyroid andother physiological systems” (159). See Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens afterChernobyl (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).13 Clinton Rossiter in Constitutional Dictatorship (1948), quoted in Giorgio Agamben. State ofException. Trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 9.

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14 Agamben, 205.15 See here.16 It is in this context that the legal efforts of the “Complainants for the Criminal Prosecutionof the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster” (Fukushima genpatsu kokusodan) are so significant.Norma Field and Matthew Mizenko have translated their publication Will You Still Say NoCrime Was Committed? Statements by 50 Complainants, as an e-book available on amazon.For updates on the trial, see here and here. For accounts of activist Mutō Ruiko’s central rolein bringing the case to trial, see Tomomi Yamaguchi, “Mutō Ruiko and the Movement ofFukushima Residents to Pursue Criminal Charges against TEPCO Executives and GovernmentOfficials, APJ-Japan Focus, July 1, 2012. Also on Mutō Ruiko see Norma Field, “FromFukushima: To Despair Properly, To Find the Next Step, APJ-Japan Focus, September 1,2016, and Katsuya Hirano, “Interview with Mutō Ruiko”.17 On the raising of annual allowable radiation exposure, see Note 18.18 Until April 2011 the Japanese government followed standards set by the InternationalCommission on Radiological Protection (IRCP) allowing a maximum exposure of 1millisieverts per year for the general public and 20 millisieverts per year for nuclear workers.When Kamanaka remarks that Fukushima’s local newspapers “did not know that by Japaneselaw people cannot live” (日本の法律で[放射線管理区域に]人は住めない) in areas with officialmeasurements above one millisievert per year, she is referring to these standards. For moreon the standards themselves, and the Japanese government’s decision to raise them in April2011, see Norma Field, “From Fukushima, To Despair Properly”, note 7, and Katsuya Hirano,Yoshihiro Amaya and Yoh Kawano “Reconstruction Disaster: The Human Implications ofJapan’s Forced Return Policy in Fukushima,” note 1.19 On Mutō Ruiko, see Note 16.20 In science and technology studies, see Bruno Latour, especially We Have Never BeenModern, Trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993) and Facing Gaia, Trans.Catherine Porter (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017). In philosophy of science, see IsabelleStengers, especially In Catastrophic Times, Trans. Andrew Goffey (Online: Open HumanitiesPress, 2015) and Another Science is Possible, Trans. Stephen Muecke (Cambridge, UK: Polity,2018). In feminist philosophy, see Elizabeth Grosz, especially The Incorporeal: Ontology,Ethics and the Limits of Materialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).21 Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science. Trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 126.22 Hida Shuntarō, quoted in Kamanaka Hitomi, Hibakusha: Dokyumentarii eiga no genbakara (Tokyo: Kage shobō, 2009) 33. For a biographical sketch of HIda, see here.23 For a biographical sketch of Smolnikova, see here. After Chernobyl, Smolnikova’s town ofBuda-Koshelvo, 150 km from the disaster, accepted many refugees from towns that werecloser and more contaminated. But she is careful to document significant health problemsfrom radiation exposure among children from her own town, and among children born longafter 1986.24 For a biographical sketch of Kamata, see here. On the Japan Chernobyl Foundation (JCF),see here.25 For a biographical sketch of Kodama see here. In his capacity as Tokyo UniversityRadioisotope Center Director, Kodama was assigned a leadership role in Fukushima

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decontamination. In July 2011 he delivered a livid speech before the House of RepresentativesHealth Labor and Welfare Committee (shūgiin kōsei rōdō iinkai) decrying the government’sfailure to acknowledge the scale of the public health crisis or deal with it adequately. ForKyoko Selden’s translation of the speech, see here.26 This is the conclusion drawn in anthropologist Aya Hirata Kimura’s major new bookRadiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination afterFukushima (Duke, 2016). Kimura argues that mothers who band together to monitor foodsafety after Fukushima are constrained by three mutually constitutive social forces:“scientism,” neoliberalism, and post-feminism. When they measure and publicize radiation infood, their work is recognized as “scientific,” but only to the degree that it satisfies theneoliberal expectation that private citizens take care of themselves rather than count on stateprotection. Like the philanthropic work of civil society writ large, which is allowed tocompensate for aggressive profiteering but never question it, citizen science is genderedfemale: nurturing, non-productive, and non-threatening. In Kimura’s analysis, the result isclassic post-feminism: female citizen-scientists are allowed “an entry into the public sphere,but only on the condition of complacency with the existing power structure and of adherenceto hegemonic femininity”(17). See Aya Hirata Kimura, Radiation Brain Moms and CitizenScientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima (Duke UniversityPress, 2016).27 The respite care center in Shiribeshi, Rusutsu-mura is run by Noro Mika and herorganization “Bridge to Chernobyl,” which began collaborating with Smolnikova’s non-profit“Children of Chernobyl” in the early 1990s. For a biographical sketch of Noro, see here. Thevegetable co-op is overseen by Sasaki Ruri at the Shingyōji Temple run by her husband, PureLand priest Sasaki Michinori. For profiles and interviews with both Ruri and Michinori, seeIwakami Yasumi, Hyakunin hyakuwa dainishū (Tokyo: San’ichi shobo, 2014) 189-209.28 We see them react incredulously as the Review Board (kentō iinkai) of the 14th FukushimaPrefectural Health Survey (kenmin kenkō chōsa) announces that a 100-fold increase inthyroid cancer is the result of more extensive screening, not actual illness. For the publishedresults of the survey see here. One of the anti-nuclear rallies they attend is the “MillionMothers’ Tanabata Project” (Hyakuman’nin no hahatachi tanabata purojekuto) on 7 July 2013.For background see here.29 The map charts standards outlined in a piece of Belarusian legislation from November 12,1991 that Kamanaka also introduces visually (in Russian,) “On the Legal Status of TerritoriesContaminated as a Result of the Chernobyl Accident." See English translation.30 In another scene we see Smolnikova explain to mothers in a Belarusian community centerthat “you can remove half the radiation in a child’s body in 21 days” (1:09:05). At the hoyōcenter in Hokkaido, Bridge to Chernobyl NPO Director Noro Mika discusses hoyō in terms ofone month: “It’s hard work to go from 20 Becquerels to ND (not detected) in one month”(1:35:20). Interpreting the results of the Hokkaido urinalysis by bar graph (1:38:14),Kamanaka’s voiceover highlights one boy whose numbers plummeted by 70% in just 12 days.As if in response to viewers’ surprise that so much can be accomplished in so short a time,Noro says, “back [when we first started treating children from Chernobyl], we didn’tunderstand why they recuperated so quickly. But now we think the reason kids recover inthree weeks is because they’re kids.”