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.

When the Roman Empire collapsed, numerous libraries and an unknown quantity of books disintegrated with it. Amid a rising Christianity hostile to traces of paganism, the texts of many authors admired in Roman antiquity were turned to dust and the memory of their existence dissolved. Pieces of writing by noted figures such as Cicero or Virgil certainly survived, but the majority of what these men wrote has been lost. This was an epochal moment in the history of writing: an imperial collapse so profound that it physically disintegrated vast amounts of texts, erasing them from human memory.

Some books from ancient Rome were saved from this massive vanishing of written words only because a few copies survived for over a thousand years in the libraries of European monasteries. This survival was often the outcome of pure chance: that is, a set of conjunctural factors somehow allowed those books, and not others, to overcome the wear and tear and ruination of paper and ink by the physical pressures and cuts inflicted on them by the weather and by the living forms attracted to them, primarily insects, mice, and humans. In these monasteries, many ancient books and their words disintegrated after a few centuries, gone forever. But others lingered and were eventually copied by hand again on new and more robust paper, which could withstand atmospheric and bodily pressures for the next two to three centuries. Three hundred years or so later, another monk would grab a manuscript about to disintegrate and copy those words again. Who knows how many amazing books were eaten away by bugs simply because no monk chose to save them from their ruination? One of the books that miraculously survived in a monastery over a millennia of chance encounters with the void was Lucretius’ extraordinary philosophical treatise De rerum natura, The Nature of Things.

What got me thinking about the ruination of written words is Stephen Greenblatt’s fascinating (if uneven) book The Swerve, which narrates how in 1417 a book-hunter discovered Lucretius’ The Nature of Things in a remote monastery. In my book Rubble, I examined how different forms of ruination, from the Spanish conquest to the soy boom, have created constellations of nodes of rubble in northern Argentina, many of which are perceived by locals to be haunted (Gordillo 2014). I therefore read The Swerve with an eye sensitive to the destruction of places and matter and the affective materiality of their debris. The richness conveyed by Greenblatt’s story of the vanishing of Roman books reveals that the physical disintegration and afterlives of rubble also involve the written word, which in the modern world is often presented as an emblem of human endurance.

The striking thing about The Nature of Things’ close encounter with its ruination is how closely it resonates with Lucretius’ ideas about matter, contingency, decay, and the void. Lucretius conceptualized and celebrated in poetic verse the immanent materiality of the world through the lens of Epicurus’ atomism: the thesis —first articulated in Greece centuries earlier— according to which everything is made out of atoms and void. Written around 40 BC and admired as well as controversial in its days, The Nature of Things argued that atoms are always moving in the void, clashing with each other because of their clinamen, or tendency to “swerve.” Amid whirlwinds of random collisions, atoms create the energy of the universe and all motion, life, and destruction. Hostile to religious transcendence, Lucretius celebrated chance and the sensuous, fleeting becoming of life. The Catholic Church condemned Lucretius as a pagan writer and by the early middle-ages De rerum natura had been largely forgotten, except by a few scholars who saw it cited in ancient texts. Yet in a remote monastery those ideas lingered in the fragile materiality of those written words penned by a man who had long been dead. Those markings on paper were not just signs with meaning and poetic symbolism: they were traces, left by a human hand, that had the power to affect.

Once discovered and disseminated more widely as a book in 1471, Lucretius’ text subsequently affected some of the most prominent physicists of early modernity such as Gassendi and Galileo. As Greenblatt shows, when in 1633 the Inquisition condemned Galileo for claiming that the Earth moved around the sun, one of the charges was that he was under the influence of atomism and its pagan physics of motion, which contradicted Aristotle’s ontology of spatial fixity and stasis. As Michel Serres has argued in The Birth of Physics, Lucretius is often misread as an imaginative poet rather than a rigorous philosopher of physics. But the quantum revolution in physics in the 1900s demonstrated that Lucretius had brilliantly anticipated, if in rudimentary form, that the material makeup of the universe comprises, indeed, a ghostly dance of subatomic patterns in the void. Further, Lucretius deduced the existence of atoms through the observation of the decay and decomposition of objects such as books, which in disintegrating into smaller and smaller fragments reveal that the seeming solidity of matter hides its constitutive void.

The story of the greatest philosophy book that survived from the times of the Roman Empire may seem distant from the experience of writing in our high-tech, hyper-digitized twenty-first century. Writing has become so deterritorialized, so agile in its capacity to connect humans across continents through screens, cables, and fiber optics that it is easy to forget that writing has not ceased to be, and cannot but be, a material practice that produces a physical object, the written word. Today, as it was in the days of Lucretius, writing is a form of thinking that mobilizes a geometry between the hands (or other bodily organs) and tools for leaving material traces on an object. On a computer, these traces may be digitized but bits of energy are material nonetheless. This materiality makes of written words, either printed or digitized, objects always-already subject to ruination. As in medieval monasteries, to prevent written words from vanishing, human beings have to copy them over and over again as hardcopies or data files. Writing undoubtedly creates transcendence, and what Lucretius wrote indeed survived his times and still affects us today. But written words are immanent traces that, like all objects, as Lucretius wrote, eventually decompose into atoms moving in the void.

References

Gordillo, Gastón. 2014. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham: Duke University Press.

Greenblatt, Stephen. 2011. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: Norton.

Lucretius. 2007. The Nature of Things. New York: Penguin.

Serres, Michel. 2000. The Birth of Physics. Manchester: Clinamen Press.