All images copyright by Pablo Figueroa.

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Inside the Fukushima Exclusion Zone: Place and Memory after Disaster

by Pablo Figueroa

FROM BEHIND THE WINDSHIELD of the moving car the landscape looks exuberant, unpolluted. Warm morning sunlight bathes the forest to the side of Tomioka highway, a 69 km stretch of pavement also known as National Road 114 that connects Fukushima with the town of Namie. It’s a Sunday morning and few people can be seen. The feeling of emptiness is vast and real. From time to time, large plastic bags appear along the road, neatly stacked one on top of the other. The orderly layout obliterates a much more messy reality: The bags contain highly radioactive soil that was removed from villages and fields during the so-called “cleanup efforts” following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Their final destination undecided, the ominous recipients are a painful reminder of what happens when trying to decontaminate the environment after a nuclear catastrophe. You can scrape topsoil and wash the surface with pressure hoses as much as you like but Cesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years, will keep coming down from hills along with other radioactive isotopes, carried by rain and wind, dispersing in manifold and uncontrollable ways.

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I have been to this part of Japan for ethnographic fieldwork before, but never to Namie Town. In April 2011, the government declared a 20km radius from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant an exclusion zone, and Namie fell into this perimeter. Without a permit issued by the Town Hall, people cannot go through the checkposts. Police zealously custody the almost empty towns. The authorities are fed up with thieves, journalists, and other trespassers. Defying this ban can lead to fines and imprisonment.

We are three occupants in the car. One of them, Yosuke Kinoshita (This is not his real name, for privacy reasons I am using a pseudonym) is originally from Namie. Namie—like other neighboring villages—became deserted due to forced evacuation (local residents were told to escape but not why; they did not know where to go, or how long they would be away).  Because his family house is located within the no-go zone, he is allowed permission to enter for a few hours at a time, in order to visit the abandoned property. The officials at the checkpoint, wearing gloves, masks and helmets, inspect our documents, IDs, and open the gate letting us into the forbidden zone.

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We drive through town. It is odd that the traffic lights are working when there are no vehicles. There is nobody around, either. The scenes in front of us testify that time in Namie has stopped. In the turmoil of earthquake, tsunami, and evacuation, bicycles and cars were left abandoned; shops remain untouched after owners were forced to escape. And then, during the days to come, hydrogen explosions at the stricken reactors emitted an invisible blanket of radiation that silently and tragically covered Namie.

I get off the car at the main street to snap a few photos when suddenly police stop us. We are questioned at large. Why are we carrying cameras? What are we doing here? Are we journalists trying to pass as visitors? This treatment somehow puzzles me; as officers trying to enforce the law, their reaction is perhaps understandable but seems out of proportion. If criminal actions are to be found, it is surely among people and organizations that privileged their own self-interest rather than protecting public wellbeing.

Once cleared out, our trip continues and we head to the Kinoshita’s household.  We get off the car wearing gloves and facemasks although we know they offer little protection against radiation. The aerial levels of radiation are supposed to be lower than the standard required by the Japanese government for decontamination—so we are told—but there is reason to believe there might be undetected hot spots (In addition, whether the official readings of radiation can be trusted, is a matter of dispute). We follow Kinoshita through the rubble in the garden and into the falling house. The construction is badly deteriorated.  “It’s worse every time I come”, he says. “The floor is rotten. Watch your step.”

He guides us into the living room, kitchen, and other sections of the house. Objects lie all around exactly as they fell after the earthquake four years ago: family photographs, furniture, a TV set, golf clubs, kitchen utensils. I look into Kinoshita’s eyes; they look sad and pensive. A long silence falls upon us and I can’t help but imagine the tranquil life his parents must have led in this idyllic place before becoming nuclear evacuees.

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Later on we go to the coast, where the tsunami washed away the entire lower part of town, getting as far as two kilometers inland. The debris has been cleared out and is now placed in designated dumpsites. At the port of Ukedo I climb up a wall facing the beach. The silhouette of Fukushima Daiichi, which I have seen uncountable times on photographs and videos, appears in the distance, the reactors enshrouded in a heat haze. Waves break in the shore while seagulls plunge into the water, oblivious to the massive amount of radioactive water that is spilled everyday into this striking ocean. Here stands a monument to institutional failure, to corporate irresponsibility, a truly Man-Made Disaster, framed into a beautiful postcard-like image. Fukushima Daiichi is such a perfect metaphor of the human condition at the Capitalocene.

I sit and silently weep. This unexpected release of emotion makes me momentarily void of thoughts. The only feeling that remains is awe of the deep-blue sea in front of me.

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The socioanthropological contribution to society in times of disaster is surely limited; no amount of ethnographic writing can ever fix a human tragedy in a measurable way. The pre-existing social fabric of Namie (and Fukushima) has ceased to exist, never to be recovered. Almost five years on, the future of hundreds of thousands of evacuees remains uncertain. And yet, people of Fukushima want to have their stories told. As anthropologists, it is our job and our mission to tell those stories in a meaningful way.

In the official discourse, Japan is fine, Fukushima is fine, nuclear power is fine, and the affected people are fine. Almost five years on, the victims of nuclear power remain, in a way, victims. The tragedy was imposed on them. Their voices have not been heard; rather, people’s notions of place and memory have been subsumed into an official discourse crafted by a state narrative.

Just days after the Fukushima disaster Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo wrote, “Once again we must look at things through the eyes of the victims of nuclear power, of the men and the women who have proved their courage through suffering. The lesson that we learn from the current disaster will depend on whether those who survive it resolve not to repeat their mistakes.” (See, Oe Kenzaburo, History Repeats. The New Yorker. March 28, 2011. Link.)

This is something the Japanese government, the nuclear sector, and society as a whole should learn from.

One of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits is a game show parody called “What’s the Best Way?” The premise is simple: a group of New Englanders jockey to give fast, accurate driving directions. Phil Hartman plays an old man with an airy Downeast Maine drawl; Adam Sandler an electrical contractor from Boston; and Glenn Close an upper-class Connecticut resident. The host, played by Kevin Nealon, asks questions about how to get from one place to another within New England. For example “Who’s got directions from Quincy, Maass to the Jahdan Mahsh department store in Bedford, New Hampshire?” Contestants buzz in, quiz show style, with their directions—directions which are loaded with quirky geographical references, including a “wicked huge Radio Shack” and a fahm that offers a chance to pick fresh Maine blueberries (“but only in the summah”).

I love this skit because it satirizes my own predilection as a native New Englander for giving overly detailed directions that orient the asker to the contours of the road, the colors and shapes of houses, and places that “yous-tah be there” (instead of supposedly conventional things like the number of traffic lights or street names).

But I also find this rather esoteric parody instructive for thinking about how to write place ethnographically. For many anthropologists, navigating fieldsites that are out-of-the way or otherwise marginalized, Phil Hartman’s character’s resigned answer to one directional challenge might ring a little true: Yah caahn’t get theyah from heeyah. Beyond writing about place, how can we use our writing to recall visual, material memories of getting from one place to another (or failing to do so)?

Doing fieldwork involves moving through and experiencing space in ways particular to our projects and the places we work. In my research on Darjeeling tea plantations, I climbed up and down steep Himalayan foothills, pulling myself through the tightly planted, gnarled tea bushes that gripped the slopes. But a trip down to the plantations each morning first required a consideration of the eating schedules of the families of macaque monkeys, who would descend from the temple, where they spent their evenings, to the road below to munch on offerings left by morning walkers and whatever else they could mug off of passersby. If I could not find an old Tibetan woman on her circumambulation of the temple complex to cling to for protection as we weaved through the gauntlet of hungry monkeys, I made elaborate detours. When I write, I recall these everyday movements. As ethnographic writers, these remembered images and descriptions from our fieldnotes are “data,” as important as material from interviews or other punctuated events.

Why should we care about how (or whether) one can “get there from here”? Perhaps because, as Kirin Narayan reminds us, “Reading transports us.” She frames the project of writing place with a question: “How do ethnographers enhance this journey so that readers glean facts about a place and something of the feel of being there?”

The “arrival trope” is, of course, the most common of ethnographic devices. I have one. You probably do, too. But the arrival trope has been rightly criticized for fetishizing the state of finally being somewhere (else), ready to begin anthropological fieldwork. We probably all recall Malinowski’s directive to “Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight.”

This impulse to recount arrivals speaks to the fact that ethnographic narratives are at heart concerned with movement—from place to place.

The primary means by which I move from place to place, both in the field and closer to home, is walking. When I work in Kolkata, the act of winding my way through pedestrian congestion, in and out of markets, and through that city’s metro, is a constant sensorial overload. When I write about Kolkata or Darjeeling, I use the local equivalents of the “wicked huge Radio Shack” to draw readers into these movements—and importantly the sensations of these movements. As Alex Nading has argued, “trailing” the movements of people and other creatures can be a way of carrying place seamlessly from fieldwork into narrative.

When I write about place, then, I close my eyes and re-imagine walking. This is less visualization exercise and more constructive daydreaming. What does it smell like? What does it sound like? What does it look like? What does it feel like? How do I get there from here? How many Dunkin Donuts (or their Himalayan or Kolkatan analogues) do I pass on the way? I find that on my first couple of drafts, these descriptions are way overwritten, but with more editing, place starts to tighten, and even serve to bolster historical and theoretical elements of books and articles as well.

When I read an ethnography, I want to know where I am in the world. When I write, I want to communicate not just stories about people, but also stories about landscapes.

Most anthropological monographs begin with a fieldsite chapter as the first substantive section after the introduction. (I would add that many proposals and articles allow for a fieldsite/background section after the introduction as well.) Sometimes these chapters can be a total slog to write (and read). Perhaps we tell ourselves that we need to get a lot of historical and contextual material across so that the (more fun to write) subsequent ethnographic material makes sense.

We should bring our creative ethnographic writing skills to these chapters, but we should also work to pepper the remainder of our narratives with more place descriptions. Such descriptions can serve as a medium to convey forward what might otherwise be an episodic tale. Amitav Ghosh beautifully accomplishes this kind of conveyance, both in his intimate fluvial story about life, work, and uncertainty in the Sundarbans, The Hungry Tide, and in his epic account of Mandalay, Calcutta, and the spaces in between, The Glass Palace. An unfolding landscape—of plants, animals, infrastructures, and histories of change and perturbation—can be as much a “character” in an ethnographic narrative as a human interlocutor, as encapsulated in ethnographies by Laura Ogden, Hugh Raffles, and Paige West.

While I was writing my dissertation, Kirin Narayan, who was my dissertation advisor, reminded me on multiple occasions that “all quotations need context.” We all know that quotations don’t just happen, yet they often seem to magically appear in the narratives we craft. We need to ask ourselves: Where was I? What was going on during this conversation? Was I plucking tea? Was I making tea? Was I drinking tea? Was I holding a baby while someone else performed similar labors? Or were we walking?

Without a grounding in place, narratives don’t flow. They caahn’t get theyah from heeyah. Voices appear out of nowhere. Ethnographic narratives, then, are like New Englanders giving directions. Where to turn? Certainly, “two lefts and a right” will get you there, but what about that kid on the corner selling fireworks? At the place you can get a good peach cobbler—but not on Sundays, lest you be overrun by the after-church crowd? This kind of context-building—the folksy chatter that can seem so superfluous to the weighty, critical questions we’re asking—provides an excellent opportunity for giving stories a physical medium in which to live.