An Environmental Origin of Antinuclear Activism in Japan, 1954–1963: The Government, the Grassroots Movement, and the Politics of Risk

Abstract

This paper challenges the centrality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in our understanding of Japan's antinuclear activism. Focusing on the social distribution and perception of the fallout d*anger, I reexamine the symbiotic dynamics of governmental diplomacy and the grassroots movement against nuclear tests from 1954 to 1963. I argue that radioactive pollution during the Bikini incident triggered a consumerist and materialist turn in the peace movement with housewives at the center. Initially resisting the citizens’ perception of risk, the conservative administration by 1957 came to embrace it and launched diplomacy against nuclear tests to steal people's support away from the grassroots movement. At this crucial moment, the grassroots movement's leadership switched its focus from fallout to the “war policy” in the West, which brought about a paradigm shift from the consumerist and materialist platform toward militant workerism for socialist peace. Now disparaging fallout as merely a “physical phenomenon,” the campaign leaders left the environmental angle exposed in 1961 when the Soviet Union unilaterally broke a test moratorium in effect since 1958. While the government's diplomacy, shrewdly stressing the fallout danger, applied a blow to the campaign, the group was split and paralyzed over a protest of Soviet fallout until it dissolved in 1963. The Japanese experience ultimately proved to be an abortive attempt to grasp the environmental legacy of the Bikini incident.