Nuclear Power Plants in “The Only A-bombed Country”: Images of Nuclear Power and the Nation’s Changing Self-portrait in Postwar Japan

Abstract

The Japanese government conducted the first public-opinion poll on the utilization of nuclear power in 1968. It was significant in two aspects.1 First, by emphasizing the difference between military and nonmilitary uses, it had the plainly propagandistic aim to state the potential and safety of peaceful nuclear technologies. Second, the outcome showed two tendencies. Approximately 70 percent of the respondents associated nuclear power not with “peaceful use” but with fear of “atomic and hydrogen bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or war”; also, almost 70 percent approved of promotion of “nuclear energy for peaceful use,” even though they distrusted the safety of nuclear power plants and felt some anxiety about radiation. The former tendency indicated that a majority of the Japanese people in the mid-1960s had a negative image of nuclear technology for military use; the latter showed that most had a positive image of peaceful uses, in spite of some doubts and fears. These attitudes persisted until quite recently. In a poll conducted by Nippon Hoso Kyokai (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) in 2010, almost 80 percent of the respondents opposed both the possession and the use of nuclear weapons.2 In another poll taken by the government in 2009, nearly 80 percent expressed their approval of promoting or maintaining production of nuclear electric power.3