Introduction to Special Issue: The Limits of Nuclear Discourse

Abstract

The articles in this special issue explore the limits of nuclear representation and discourse via analyses of Japanese literature, photographs, animated television shows, and social media posts. Through these media, the authors delve into the subjectivity of disaster victims – children, youth, women, national subjects, foreigners, humans, and animals – and cross the temporal networks connecting the atomic bombs, the Cold War, the 2011 Fukushima disaster, and the COVID-19 pandemic as they navigate the nexus of government power, technological narratives, and ecological destruction. Writing from the perspective of 2023, over a decade after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdowns, the issue looks back to this critical moment to consider how the disaster realigns Japan’s history of the nuclear, changes both the domestic and global narrative, questions our understanding of our human subjectivity, and impacts the planetary ecology. The hindsight of a decade allows for a wider vista, a chance to reconsider the Fukushima disaster itself and reassess its rupture, but also its historical placement following the atomic bombs and an era of economic and social collapse, as well as the ongoing repercussions of the 2011 disaster during the more recent COVID-19 pandemic.