Fukushima ETHOS: Post-Disaster Risk Communication, Affect, and Shifting Risks

Abstract

ETHOS Fukushima is a risk communication (RC) program organized after the Fukushima nuclear accident by the International Commission on Radiological Protection and other international organizations supported by the Japanese government. ETHOS has been hailed as a model RC that is participatory and dialogue-based. Yet the critical and feminist literature has shown the need for analyzing the power relations in participatory projects, and for analyzing affect as a target of management by neoliberal governmentality. The affective work of ETHOS is characterized by narratives of self-responsibility, hope and anticipation, and transnational solidarity with Chernobyl victims. These resonate with the affective regime under neoliberalism that privileges self-responsibility, anticipation, maximization of emotional potential, and cosmopolitan empathy. This particular regime of affect has been integral in shifting risk from the nuclear industry and the government to individual citizens. ETHOS Fukushima has supported continued residence in contaminated areas. It has helped portray the reduction of government/industry responsibility as morally defensible, and the decision to stay in Fukushima as a free choice made by hopeful and determined citizens. At the same time, ETHOS has helped characterize the state’s and the nuclear industry’s roles in cleaning up and compensating the victims as restricting individual freedom and demoralizing the local people. The recent RC literature increasingly argues for a positive assessment of emotion, but this argument warrants careful analysis, as emotion is socially regulated and entangled in power relations. Moreover, deploying affective tropes is a crucial technique of neoliberal governmentality, especially because of affect’s seemingly oppositional and external relationship to neoliberalism.