1 4 Y L I S B O N T O S E N D A I , N E W H A V E N T O F U K U S H I M A T H O U G H T S O N 3 / 1 1 J O H N W H I T T I E R T R E A T Someone put the bottle in the wrong place. – Robert Peabody, technician, United Nuclear Corporation, 24 July 1964 Everyone makes mistakes. – Hatamura Yōtarō, chair, Committee to Investigate the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Fukushima Nuclear Power Station Accident, 24 June 2011 In the wake of the most powerful earthquake their country has experienced in modern times, the Japanese know that everyday life has changed, but they are unsure just how much. The economic geographer Okada Tomohiro’s collected précis of events in the immediate aftermath hints at a bewildering national trauma: On 11 March 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake stretching from the Tōhoku to the Kantō region of Japan produced a tidal wave that engulfed coastal villages and communities from Sanriku to the Bōsō peninsula. It far exceeded the num- 1 5 R ber of casualties in the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake: nearly thirty thousand people were killed or have whereabouts unknown in Japan’s worst disaster since the war. In addition, the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake has led to nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the release of radiation, and fires in oil storage facilities and residential areas. Radioactivity unleashed by the accident into the atmosphere spread over a wide geographical area and contaminated soil, water, crops, and seafood products. One month later, we are in no position to evaluate fully the impact. From our perspective less than a year later at this time of writing, we see that it is the ongoing crisis of an atomic power plant, rather than unstable plate tectonics or tidal waves, that poses the greatest intellectual, not to mention public health, challenge to Japan. ‘‘Everyone,’’ the Japanese historian Seki Hirano wrote in May, ‘‘senses that Japan after this accident can no longer be the nation it earlier was.’’ There is some irony in this, if only because Japan, of all nations, has perforce contemplated the ‘‘nuclear’’ since 6 August 1945. ‘‘Japan, in the end,’’ Nishitani Osamu wrote soon after 3/11, ‘‘is the world’s guinea pig for nuclear culture, starting with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, continuing with the No. 5 Lucky Dragon fishing boat [in the 1954 Bikini Atoll aboveground test], and now including Fukushima.’’ This may be hyperbole, but it is worth asking why Japan, an ‘‘earthquake nation’’ ( jishinkoku), has the planet’s third-highest number of nuclear power plants, as well as the ongoing costs of what scholars such as Rob Nixon have called American ‘‘nuclear colonialism’’ in the Pacific have been. Along a coast teeming with atomic reactors – all in rural or semi-rural areas colonized for the power needs of Japan’s huge cities – nuclear power plants are so concentrated in Miyagi and Fukushima that those prefectures have been dubbed ‘‘the world’s nuclear-power Ginza.’’ The rationale for their proliferation is not governed by the logic of market economics, nor is it mere proof of technological prowess; rather it has to do with Japan’s assignment within the post-1945 American world order to redouble the pace of its modernization as a project of mimesis. Under U.S. pressure to buy 1 6 T R E A T Y American reactors, former prime minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, only a young parliamentarian in 1954, first proposed a bill in the Diet to ‘‘study’’ the feasibility of domestic nuclear power. That project of mimesis may now be over, if what everyone senses has changed is indeed as profound as some observe. In July 2011, Prime Minister Kan stated that Japan would eventually shut down all its nuclear generators: a promise unlikely to be kept but still marking a historic departure from the once sacrosanct ‘‘equal partnership ’’ Japan and the United States pretended to share. The economic decline of Japan since the Lost Decade following the bursting of...