Le Merle

To me two references regarding care and health are very important after Fukushima.

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One is the Hiroshima / Nagasaki experience, through this medical doctor, Shuntarô Hida – he died a few years ago [in 2017]. He was himself a Hiroshima victim, a Hiroshima witness. He was doing two things, one was to demand that the US government compensate the victims and their offshoots – not only the victims themselves, but their offshoots as well, because genetic mutations are inherited.

On the other hand, regarding Fukushima, he made a very strong statement, saying that, after the nuclear catastrophe, Japanese people will never be free from small doses of radiation anymore. Hida was trying to encourage a general idea of health, ways to empower your immunity and maintain your body and mind, under the inevitable internal exposure to small doses of radiation.

His point is that you really have to do it yourself, nobody can help you. This is not to foster individualist behaviours, but a “you are the only person who can help you” kind of attitude. I think in the final instance, it was very important because that’s precisely telling how the government is irresponsible, and society too, because their priority was the economic and industrial recovery at the expense of people’s well-being. Especially since some Japanese medical specialists are even saying that anxiety coming from the fear of radiation is worse than the effect of radioactivity itself. And far less than necessary medical examination has been made, that’s for sure.

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And the second reference about which people are talking a lot is Minamata Disease. It’s not radiation illness but fatal mutation from mercury poisoning. Many people started to read Michiko Ishimure – she died very recently, a month ago or so. She was a novelist, a poet, but also a very dedicated activist fighting along with Minamata patients. She was from Minamata herself and grew up there. Before the disease, she was already a writer, but after it surfaced, she became politically active and started writing about it.

Minamata is in the Southern part of Japan, in theWestern part of Kyūshū, which is geographically a very complex coastal region, with many inlets. It’s an incredibly beautiful coastal town. A very crucial fact is that people live from fishing. Economically, it’s originally not a flourishing, wealthy place, but money came to town with Chisso corporation [now JNC: Japan New Chisso], a chemical industry producing fertilizer, liquid crystal, etc., which has always been backed by the state, before and after the war.

Ishimure’s writing gives us the horizon to struggle against this extremely nasty industrial pollution, involving full of implications on how to think of this world. Her pieces constitute some kind of documents: medical documents, records of the court cases, descriptions of protest, and of its context as well, the way of life among local people, their history and environment. She also includes the voices of many individuals, real existing individuals, most of them in agony, the mutation of their body and deterioration of the mind.

But, her vision includes – I don’t know how to say, it’s very difficult to say – the title of her works shows it already: 苦海浄土 (Kukai jôdo), “ku(kai)” is the world of agony and “jôdo” is heaven. Livia Monnet’s translation into English is Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow. So somehow Ishimure’s capable of presenting a kind of cosmology, the richness of local life overlapping with this hell inflicted by capitalism and the state. Somehow, she has faith in this locality and – it’s not recovery, but something else… This tension is really incredible. Or it’s not exactly a tension but a complexity, also involving local folklore, local language. We’re still interpreting her work, as a rich index of the life in our catastrophic world. To me, this is something we need to approach seriously, because after Fukushima and all other industrial hazards, I’m very pessimistic about health and the possibility to sustain a good environment. But we continue to live and struggle for happiness.

Rebecca Solnit wrote a book called A Paradise Built in Hell, on how catastrophic situations can create a mutual aid society. After Fukushima she came to Japan, and we discussed. Of course, in the long perspective, what she says is totally correct and inspiring, but in the immediate situation, in Fukushima, that’s not possible. With radioactivity… If there hadn’t been radioactivity, no matter how thoroughly homes and other infrastructures are destroyed, people can rebuild. But now land and people are separated because of this radioactivity. So, I think, the only possibility would be a kind of mutual aid society, possibly in a nomadic or mobile form… Solnit honestly told us that this situation is a little bit difficult, more difficult than what she wrote. That’s very honest.

With radioactivity… If it’s high radioactivity it’s evident, but what’s nasty in Japan’s situation are small doses – small doses and internal exposure. X-rays are external, bomb is external. Internal exposure is what you inhale with dust, or drink with water, or eat with food. And the threshold, the amount of what is safe and not safe, is very difficult to determine.

I feel that this nasty and obscure situation is going to be worse and worse.The issue of how to sustain our will to autonomy, our own health, our community relations is the key.

The difficulty in Japan concerns this – I would use the word “violence.” This is not immediate violence, like police brutality or military attack. It’s a kind of invisible violence, very hard to determine where is its cause. It’s the whole drive of Japan’s postwar capitalism, and the relationship with the United States, which introduced nuclear power into the country that already experienced the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. This insanity….

This is what is called “slow violence” by Rob Nixon, that is, the imposition of industrial waste – created by exploitation of human and natural resources for commodification – back on our body and environment, always with discrimination or unevenness, on the minorities and the people in peripheries, instead of recycling them within the productive and reproductive systems. This form of violence is hard to connect with a protest type of action, you know, the mass of angry people who go to the government to demand compensations of their injustices. After Fukushima, the people did that for about two years, but it died down, in confrontation with the enemy whose stretch of power is so large and complex.What persists inconspicuously is more everyday care, how we can mutually care for each other, not just push it to women or people in the periphery.The most difficult, politically difficult, thing nowadays in Japan, is to connect protest culture and reproductive practices in an organic manner.

If we follow the nuclear problematic toward
its entirety, it reaches the problematic of the Anthropocene, because of its global stretch. The Anthropocene is one dimension, the whole thing, the big thing. I believe that the problematization of the whole is very important. But, when we look at post-Fukushima Japan from a microscopic view, the issue is more about unevenness, there’s a lot of unevenness. We need both big and small views to approach the slow violence. While the everyday care under the threat of radiation is pushed to reproductive workers (and women), nuclear wastes are usually stored in poor neighborhoods or sent to the periphery – Japan is trying to export it to Mongolia, etc.

TEPCO’s nuclear powerplant in Fukushima is still releasing radioactivity in the ocean. That’s a very important question, but also the real question is that the politics of nation-states consider the ocean only as a pool of resources (i.e., for fishing industries), or as a dumpsite – but for the ecosystem, ocean is much more than that, right? The territorial politics of the nation-state cannot deal with such a situation. This politics is over! Now it is only hazardous to the planetary beings!

In the beginning, after the reactors exploded, I don’t remember how long afterward, the government allowed TEPCO to release radioactivity in the ocean. The association of fishermen was the first to oppose it, because they knew the impact. I believe they have a clear sense of the whole issue of people living with nature. In the first months, they did the very brave act of fishing for measuring, without selling. But at some point, with government’s pressure and in order to get compensation – which they needed for living – they had to start selling. They had to set their own threshold (below 50 Bq / 100 kg), that is lower than the government’s (100 Bq / kg). This messed up situation, where people are forced to choose their subsistence or planetary well-being, makes people’s ethical thinking almost numb.

Nuclear power, or nuclear fission, has two faces, one is the bomb, the other is energy. These two sides cannot be separated, because nuclear fission itself is a catastrophe – almost like a never-ending catastrophe. My hypothesis is that the Janus-face of nuclear power is the most solid joint of capitalism and the state. Here the tasks of ousting capitalism and stopping nuclear power would merge. But the threats on humanity by a possible nuclear war or inevitable nuclear accidents force us to think very big, in terms of saving humanity, almost to our incapacitation. Our political action can hardly reach this humanity level, except for petitioning at the UN, or for the better, making a huge coalition of all struggles of the people who are affected by the global nexus of nuclear production and consumption. In any case, the task is so large that we either have to start a new planetary movement or give up!

This is one level, huge level. But also, there
is another level, micro-level: radiation and the governance that seeks to nationalize or commodify it by encouraging food distribution and using radioactive soils as part of construction materials. As in the post-Fukushima struggles in Japan, there are two enemies: the pro-nuclear government and the radiation itself. But the latter is not quite a political enemy. It has already become part of the environment.

In any event, we used to believe in organic food, natural food – and of course we still believe that it’s better than artificial food – but, in a radioactive situation, the most beautiful green or organic food can be…

That’s the very big threat to this idea of pure nature as the resources to create commons. But still we must create autonomy with commons in the apocalyptic situation. Perhaps, we should create
a different way, in a detour or roundabout way, it’s something we still have to find out. This politics, or struggle, is ongoing, so there’s no answer. But to face this endless pollution, we have to extend our practice of care, of caring for each other and for ourselves. Maybe that’s something I want to get from Ishimure: she has two aspects. She sustains faith in the power of nature or nature as active creativity [natura naturans]. But also, what we have to do, the dimension of struggle is almost endless… So, this is both heaven and hell.

That’s an interesting question. I like her theoretical orientation, in a very large perspective. I agree with Haraway in the onto-metaphysical sense that the creative power of nature involves uncontrollable mutations, which we need to affirm, beyond humanism. But how we do so in our techno-political practice is our challenge. Again, I think it has to do with what Ishimure’s ultimately getting at – with the two aspects. The extensiveness of what we have to do for survival is unknown and expanding. But on the other hand, we also don’t know what our body as part of nature can do.

I felt more incapacitated than depressed. But now I must say that I forgot how I was thinking before Fukushima. So naïve I was. My idea of anti-capitalism was so simplistic. Naïve may not be bad, but I was able to say things on the world much too simply. My idea of the political was lopsided. And I forgot that sense. At least, I was not planning to write about nuclear power or radiation at all. I cannot believe that’s what I’m doing.