Fukushima: Radiation and Revolution

Sabu Kohso
Two thousand eleven marked the beginning of a new era for many of us -- framed by the
Fukushima nuclear disaster and Occupy Wall Street. The worst nuclear accident in
human history embodies not only the calamities that threaten the planetary populace, but
also a new form of governance that imposes national conformity upon people struggling
to survive in a post-nuclear-disaster society. Meanwhile, Occupy epitomizes a
reverberation of global uprisings that is increasingly visible across the planet, though its
orientation is yet uncertain. The two on-going situations form a mirroring spectrum
where the present of our planetary experiences is being critically played out.
In this context, two questions are frequently asked by non-Japanese comrades and
friends: Why did Japan dare to introduce nuclear power after Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
and Why would Japanese not rise up after Fukushima? Although they address issues of
entirely different natures, I sense they are tacitly interconnected on the spectrum and
together indicate the substance of the Fukushima problematic. Here I would follow them
as guiding threads. That is to say, Fukushima is an unprecedented situation that is
nevertheless nurtured as a historical repetition in the formation of the Japanese modern
nation-state; and is also an epitome of our existential crises today, wherein the world as
totalization of human societies and apparatuses is unwittingly colliding with the earth as
an omnipresent environment, and thus the struggles to survive by changing the world are
inexorably involving all of our existential territories from individual mind/body to social
relations and to the environment, exceeding the conventional demarcation of the
political1.
Event and Process
The name Fukushima indicates both an event and a process. The event consists of two
layers: first, the destruction by tsunami and earthquake (3/1) and second, the devastation
by nuclear explosion and radiation contamination (3/2). The first layer, as tragic as it was
in itself, would have remained a situation where a mutual aid society could have been
built locally -- as beautifully described in Rebecca Solnits A Paradise Built in Hell2-- if
and only if it had not been enfolded into the second layer with an expansive
contamination that will last for as long as the half-lives of the radioactive nuclides. What
is worse, the effects of the disaster have been doubled, tripled or even multiplied by the
way the authorities have sought to subsume the singular event into a process for
sustaining business-as-usual: there has been a consistent downplaying the magnitude of
radiation contamination. It is clear that the Japanese government has determined to use
the catastrophe as the fountainhead of a new process that can lead toward a stronger
nation, while its laboring and consuming forces are falling prey to radiation illnesses.
Herein the basic scheme of opposition is at stake: the people are struggling to live
the event (or discontinuity) as a battle to achieve autonomy for protecting their health and
lives against the threat of radioactive contamination, while the power operation of
governance is seeking to smooth out the event and produce a social process consistent
with the capitalist-democratic-nation-state.

This is not the first time in Japanese history that a catastrophic event has provided an
opportunity for a larger development and reorganization of the social body. To name but
a few examples: the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 contributed to a bloody purification
of the national body [kokutai] (through the massacre of resident ethnic Koreans, Chinese
and political dissidents) more convenient for its expansion into Asia, and the shaping of
Tokyo into a metropolis according to international standards; then, the US bombardment
of Tokyo during the Pacific War prepared a level ground upon which to build an
economic giant in the Far East. In this process, the defeated nation regained its
confidence under a regime called postwar democracy that used to see itself as
exceptional -- with the Peace Constitution (Article Nine) and economic prosperity. This
was made possible specifically under the control and protection of the US as an extension
of its occupation policy, and in exchange for siding with US global political strategy and
offering its land for US military bases.
The tragi-comic introduction of nuclear power into the civilian life of a nation that
had already experienced the nuclear atrocities in Hiroshima/Nagasaki took place in this
same process, largely by the intention of the allied ruling powers of the US and Japan. In
order to push the Atoms for Peace policy advocated by President Eisenhower in 1953,
bombastic media campaigns (involving Walt Disney) and shrewd information
manipulation -- taking advantage of the social atmosphere during the time of economic
growth and the initiation of mass media (TV) -- were instigated to promote the dream
energy of the future; the players included CIA agents operating within the Liberal
Democratic Party and major media such as Yomiuri Shimbun and Nippon Television
Network Corporation3.
The question: Why did Japan dare introduce nuclear power after Hiroshima and
Nagasaki? addresses one of the essential attributes of nuclear power: that it oscillates
between dystopian and utopian sublimes. It threatens us--the human populace --with the
dystopian dread of destruction, while entrapping us with its utopian dictum and material
composition of an almighty energo-informatic grid. Engaging the planetary populace in a
double-bind between two opposing sublimes has been the surest way of global
governance ever since the Cold War. Finally, the Janus-headed aspect of nuclear power -energy and weaponry -- offers an ideal ground for capitalism and the state to cement their
permanent bond.
In September 2013, when Tokyo won the bid to host the Olympics in 2020, many were
shocked, mainly because Tokyo is not exempt from radiation: it also has so-called
hotspots4. We were not unprepared to hear Prime minister Abe tell an outright lie: he
said, contaminated water will be completely contained. But what was shocking was the
implication that the international community (IOC) or the international ruling forces
had now acknowledged that (small-dose) exposure to radiation would be acceptable as a
common condition for the planetary populace. We are certainly in a new age of
apocalypse.
Now another humongous reconstruction of Tokyo will be undertaken. The
construction of a new stadium and facilities will involve the demolition and eviction of
residential buildings and homeless camps in central Tokyo. This exemplifies a new kind
of atrocity, which is the increasingly overlapping process of destruction and
reconstruction, developing into a more and more shameless spectacularization5, at the

expense of lives on the soil. Groups of homeless people living in major public parks such
as Yoyogi Ken and Meiji Ken have been confronting threats of coercive removal. They
have organized a coalition No Olympics 20206 and begun to prepare a new urban
struggle against this atrocity, which is affecting many urban dwellers across the globe.
For instance, they have established a connection with Brazilian groups fighting against
gentrification in favelas, accelerated by global spectacles such as the World Cup and the
Olympics.
Fukushima is thus the epitome of the way this world is materially expanding into
the planetary body with frictions that cause more and more catastrophic events: the
modus operandi of capitalist-nation-states is to subsume every catastrophe into an
apocalyptic process toward a radioactive planet.
A Monumental Solution or Heterogeneous Struggles
For planetary beings, radiation contamination implies two fatal losses. By their power of
mutation and destruction of genetic activity, half-lives of radioactive nuclides will largely
restrain the future as an unknown and undetermined temporality from which we can
create new planetary experiences. Then, the mobile complexity of radiation expansion
will increasingly deprive us of a permanent connection with the land, which had once
been assumed as the basis for creating the commons. That is to say, aspirations and
resources -- two vital elements for us to live and create -- are facing an unprecedented
decrescence.
Our sense of urgency and the magnitude tends to bundle all the post-Fukushima
issues into a Human Crisis, that which conjures up the idea of a monumental solution -involving those in power to progressive parties to grassroots movements bypassing the
differences of the situations confronted by people of varied sectors and stratum. It is
understandable that, overwhelmed by a fearless monster-like Leviathan or what Timothy
Morton calls hyper-objects,7 we feel helpless and in immediate need of appealing to the
artificially constructed, most powerful and capable decision-making agent, who is
entitled to direct the masses and try to contain the panic. Some anarchists have chosen to
give up their non-authoritarianism, reasoning that now the priority is to stop nuclear
power and it is necessary to work with the specialists and authorities until this objective
is achieved8. Inherent dread of nuclear fission, highly specialized technology, tremendous
equipment and the complexity of the apparatuses all these make us prioritize the
discourses of specialists such as technocrats, scientists, politicians and executives. This
whole thing is telling, more than anything, of the role of nuclear power -- that it is a
disaster in and of itself and at the same time the surest way of concentrated control by
forcing everyone to get involved in the same process of suffering, worrying and solving;
this is the ultimate threat to the anti-authoritarian politics with principles such as dual
power structure, autonomy, self-sufficiency, bottom-up organizing, etc. The project to
change society and the world by and for the people is suspended for a total solution that
might not even exist. Perhaps this is the severest damage that the post-Fukushima
situations have caused to our world. The second question, Why would Japanese not rise
up after Fukushima? addresses this situation where the circuit between the crises by the
disaster and the impetus for changing the world revolution -- has been severed, waiting
to be reconnected.

Meanwhile, however, we cannot forget that there have been heterogeneous forms of
struggle that the people have been waging in order to confront the singularity of the
disaster for their survival and well-being. They are less movements with teleology than
struggles for survival. They do not present one solution but entail innumerable problems
to be tackled. It is they that provide us with the material basis to confront the worsening
crises and the power operation that has caused them. Without taking these autonomous
initiatives in consideration, the post-Fukushima world would remain a mere illustration of
sufferings of vital activities only useful, at best, for lobbying the government or the UN.
The struggles of the people include actions such as anti-nuke demos, blockades
against the distribution of radioactive debris and the restarting of power plants, lawsuits
against the promoters of power generation, demands for medical compensation,
commoners radiation monitoring and information exchange, voluntary evacuation,
communal living, organizing nuclear workers etc. It internalizes heterogeneous practices
necessitated by varied modes of existence and positions.
According to a categorization circulating among groups of anti-authoritarian activists
who have been engaged in issues of precarious workers, student loans, homeless,
minorities, community building and more inclusive projects for change, there are roughly
two orientations in these struggles: those who go North and those who go West
evidently seen from the geographical position of the Tokyo metropolis.
The former consists of activists of varied stripes who choose to go to Fukushima
and its vicinity to help restore the living conditions of the people in the disaster stricken
areas. Furthermore, though small, there have been attempts to organize the nuclear
workers being exposed to radiation in the crippled reactors. These people choose to be
irradiated by their own will in order to rescue and support the immediate victims, and to
organize the most oppressed stratum of workers in nuclear industries. In these practices,
we can sense the anarchist ethos of the mutual-aid society that can be realized especially
on the occasion of disasters, and the will to organize the underclass for the radical
moment of class struggle. Notwithstanding their importance, however, the rescue actions
have a danger of being appropriated by the state project to tie as many people as possible
the contaminated land for industrial reconstruction, especially without an alliance with
the other groupthose who go West.
The people in this latter category are engaged in creating new forms of life in
confrontation with the virtuality of radiation: i.e., its invisibility, astronomical half-life,
nano-activity, complexity of movement, etc, as well as the governance that makes it a
nationally shared condition. They embody grassroots efforts to sustain the safety of food
and the everyday environment for themselves, their families, friends and communities.
Here information and knowledge are playing a pivotal role. People, especially
reproductive workers (consisting mainly of women), have begun to take charge of
investigating the state of contamination and researching its effects. Many lay people have
studied nuclear and medical sciences for the care of self,9 and become scientists in their
own right. Many civic centers have appeared to monitor radiation and exchange
information. These are radically opposing the government manipulation of information.
However, this effort to take radiation seriously and coordinate actions accordingly
has been criticized and oppressed by proxy scientists and officials as spreading rumors
and causing panic10. In this sense, the information war is also an affective war. Those

who go West provides us with the sensitivities that had never come into existence so
intensely and broadly before the disaster: (1) detailed views of everyday reproduction:
food, living environment and care, (2) affirmation of ephemeral yet singular life and (3)
recognition of ones life as part of the continuum of the life chain. It is this creation of
affective war that most powerfully opposes the nationalist death drive of Eat and
Support Fukushima whose promoters include the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and
Fisheries, a number of food chains as well as some consumers11.
It is clear that we can no longer live in a radiation free environment; we all are exposed to
more or less radiation, and increasingly so in the future, due to not only the permanently
crippled reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, but also the persistence of nuclear states across
the world that will never abandon nuclear power. Here it is crucial to introduce a slogan
of the Zero-Becquerelists (i.e., anarchist Shiro Yabu, et al.): We dont need a society
that tells us to eat radiation.12 It is a refusal to be a good Japanese and participate in the
post-nuclear disaster conformism. It is a declaration to leave the nation-state called Japan.
It is a refusal, furthermore, of the abstraction of our lives and categorization of our
bodies, serving to naturalize radiation and other contaminations across the planet,
namely, a refusal of all political imposition of radiation and contaminants upon our vital
activities. And finally it is a call for winning autonomy of life and death: it must be up to
us as to how to live and die; as to how we create our body, social relations and
environment.
These projects unequivocally involve active transformation of forms of life:
eating habits, social relations and living environments. Most significantly, there are
increasing numbers of voluntary evacuees who determine to give up living in their
polluted homelands in the northeastern and Kanto regions to migrate to safer regions in
Hokkaido or western Japan, where there are groups of people who are willing to accept
and support those newcomers to their neighborhoods.
What is crucial in this last practice is that while it often involves tragic splits in
families, friends and workplaces over the choice of changing ways of life, it internalizes
an impetus to decompose the old conformity of Japan and create a new, unknown
sociality; and furthermore, it is developing new territorialities of life and communication,
outside the geographical hierarchy centered in the Tokyo metropolis.
From the World to the Earth
If the Fukushima disaster is apocalyptic, it is so in two senses: first, it is the end as a long
process rather than a sudden termination; second, it is a revelation of irreversibility,
namely, the way and the degree in which the world has expanded over the planetary
body, and of the fact that the expansion cannot be stopped by its main drive, namely,
capitalist-nation-states, because they have to constantly expand industrially, economically
and militarily in conflicts with each other within the hierarchy of nuclear
exceptionalism13. The reason nuclear power will not disappear is that it is one of the
main instruments for the expansion by its Janus-headed capacities. After Fukushima, we
are thus persuaded that stopping nuclear power is equal to ousting capitalism and the
state; and the project to change the world as an assemblage of human relations and
apparatuses -- revolution -- has to involve a dynamic of decomposing the expansive
movement: totalization of the world by capitalist-nation-states.

But how? We do not know yet. The only thing I can say is: after Fukushima, we
have become truly fed up with the world and all its constituents individual, family,
society, government, nation and international relations -- but with the heterogeneous
struggles, we have a glimpse of the fact that the world is not our only existential territory;
what exists in front of us has many more territories; and it is up to our forms of life that
other territories could open up. For this project, it is necessary to create moments to reencounter and rediscover the earth, that is the veritable, material ground of vital activities.
Here it is necessary to pay attention to the ontological difference between the world and
the earth -- the world as totalization vis--vis the earth as omnipresence. Revolution after
Fukushima should primarily render a shift of value from the totalizing drive to the
becoming of omnipresence. That is to say, in order to offset totalization by omnipresence,
revolutionary politics should involve full interactions of our existential territories:
mind/body, sociality and environment14, beyond the confinement of the political
references of governance -- and this is what innumerable local struggles across the planet
have already been seeking to develop, while opposing the ruling powers.
With these implications in mind, I would like to point out a few aspects of those who go
West that embody re-encountering and rediscovering the earth.
There are two ways to recognize Japans topographical position vis--vis the
Asian continent: insular and archipelago. Insular is an idea coined by the nation state,
while archipelago is the geographical configuration. The territory of the Japanese
nation-state is surrounded/isolated by the sea. If we pay closer attention, however, at least
three sailable routes are ostensible that read more as archipelago: the northern tip of
Hokkaido is not far from Sakhalin, northern Kyushu is in the proximity of the southern
part of the Korean Peninsula via two islands, Tsushima (Japan) and Jeju (Korea), and the
southern end of Kyushu stretches along the line of the Ryukyu Islands up to Taiwan. The
historian Amino Yoshihiko stresses the role that the Archipelago played as a bridge
connecting north and south Asia. With this view, we can envision the history of peoples
migrations and exchanges, especially of Oceanic peoples -- including pirates -- who
created the connectivity by fishing, trading and the seizure of wealth moving in and out
of the archipelago15.
Japanese history is the process through which the archipelago was condensed into
an insular territory -- toward the feudal system, modern nation-state, empire, nation-state
again and then its decomposition after Fukushima. This is the reconstruction of the
planetary body into political, social, economic and military apparatuses. This involved
both material construction of infrastructures that came to re-arrange and connect the
complexity of islands [gunt] into an aligned islands [rett] and immaterial construction
of the identity of being Japanese. The development of Tokyo metropolis played a pivotal
role for this project, in terms of political, economic, industrial and cultural basis for the
reconstruction and expansion. Thus Japan sought to make itself into an isolated territory
of a homogeneous ethnicitythe national body [kokutai] -- which facilitated its
expansion into the Asian Continent and the Pacific. And this was the way it participated
in the formation of our 20th century world.
Now in the fissure of the Fukushima disaster, a possibility has been opened, with
those who go West, to decompose the mono-directional power concentration of the
nation-state and recompose bodies of the people over the decentered and complex

territoriality of archipelago. The archipelagic territoriality echoes douard Glissants

geophilosophical concepts such as Creolization, that is the manifestation of a totality
of the world consisting of irreducible heterogeneity, as present in the history of the
Caribbean16. This embodies a striking contrast with the centralized and fixed territoriality
based in the Continent, that ended up inventing the mega-machine, the prototype of
nuclear power, as conceptualized by Lewis Mumford, that produces, regulates and
controls the entire social body and space by over-coding the land and populace, by
imposing an insanely megalomaniac project17. As such, the archipelagic territoriality also
means archipelagic human relations and interactions, which in the context of those who
go West could create omnipresent territorial struggles or innumerable countercurrents to
the energo-informatic flows originated in Tokyo.
The voluntary evacuation as part of those who go West realizes two important
developments. One is a creation of new modes of life. After leaving their homelands in
the northeastern area or Tokyo metropolis, some have turned to farming in the country or
have become hunters in the mountains (especially in Northern Kyushu near Fukuoka).
Others have become part time farmers and/or hunters, while keeping jobs that come from
the metropolitan network (teaching, researching, designing). This is changing the social
norm in postwar Japan: a decent adult has to have one profession in life, preferably
official work instead of physical labor, to be a respectable part of the middle class
society.
Accordingly, there have appeared new communities of evacuees in Hokkaido in
the north, as well as in Nagoya, Okayama, Fukuoka and many other places in
western/southern Japan. These new voluntary communities are engaged in multiple
projects. Many of them are active in Zero-Becquerelist actions. Some have established
new social centers. Some organize weekly markets where people gather to sell and buy or
barter their products and skills. They are developing a new culture of having everyday
life childcare, food, martial arts, and techniques in general -- detached as far as possible
from the civilization stretching out from Tokyo. They are experimenting with communal
sharing of houses, jobs, cooking, eating and other everyday activities. Some are also
seeking to connect the new communities with the old communes that were established in
the 1960s, in order to learn from their successes and failures.
Another aspect is the development of new associations with friends in East Asia.
As part of the westward movement, increasing number of young activists are visiting
communes, social centers and neighborhoods in Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the
Philippines and Indonesia, as a conscious effort to connect the new communities in Japan
with Asian friends, and exchange experiences of their struggles. People associated with
the group called Amateur Riot are passionately coordinating tours and invitations18.
All in all, however, the movement of those who go West should not and would not
remain just a migration from East to West; it would be imperative to prepare a mobility in
response to radiation expansion; it should offer resources and a basis for the projects to
actively confront and decompose the power in the East: i.e., especially for No Olympics
2020 and the initiatives to organize the radiation-exposed nuclear workers, the two
pillars without which the anti-nuke slogans are futile today, in the fourth years after
Fukushima. That is to say, it is necessary to assume both a geographically solid

territoriality and a massive mobility. And the territoriality in this context includes
multiple dimensions the geographical territory and other territories that make our
bodies/minds, social relations and the environment. For in the post-nuclear disaster
situation, all of our existential territories are battlegrounds. Such is the humble prospect
for decomposing the world and rediscovering the earth after Fukushima.

Flix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London:
Continuum, 2000.
2
Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, Penguin Books, 2010.
3
It can be asserted that a certain number of Japanese congressmen, bureaucrats, CEOs,
and commentators in the media are agents of the CIA. The CIA has an annual budget
prepared to have them operate -- this has long been an ordinary practice.
This information has been widely circulated since the publication of Tetsuo Arimas
book: Nuclear Power, Shoriki, the CIA (Tokyo: Shincho-Shinsho, 2008).
4
< http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/world/asia/radioactive-hot-spots-in-tokyo-pointto-wider-problems.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 >.
5
Zaha Hadid Architects, Japan National Stadium : <
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7II0J_aT7A>.
6
<http://hangorin.tumblr.com/>
7
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World,
Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
8
ECD, Good by Osugi Sakae, included in Osugi Sakae, Tokyo: Kawade Shobo
Shinsha, 2012, and Apocalypse+/Anarchy, Apocalypse and Anarchy After Fukushima,
included in Hapax VOl. 1, Tokyo: Yako-sha, 2013. P. 35.
9
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol.3: Care of the Self, translated by Robert
Hurley, Random House, 1986.
10
Some of the so-called specialists working for the government claimed that the rumors
and panic were more dangerous than radiation itself, sometimes attributing them to
feminine nature.
11
The website of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries:
<http://www.maff.go.jp/j/shokusan/eat/>.
12
Shiro Yabu and Yoshihiko Ikegami, We Don't Need a Society that Tells Us to Eat
Radiation Zero-Becquerelist Manifesto, Tokyo: Shin Hyoron, 2012.
13
Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and Global Uranium Trade, Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2012.
14
Guattari, Flix. Cartographies schizoanalytiques. Paris : Galile, 1989. Guattari, Flix.
Schizoanalytic Cartographies. Trans. Andrew Goffey. London : Bloombsbury Academic,
2013.
15
Amino Yoshihiko, The Oceanic and Archipelagic Medieval [Umi-to-Retto-no-Chusei],
Tokyo: Kodansha, 2013.

16

For geophilosophy, see Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What is Philosophy,
translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994, Chapter 4. For Creolization, see douard Glissant, Poetics of Relations,
translated by Betsy Wing, The University of Michigan Press, 1997.
17
Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. 1, Techniques and Human
Development, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967.
18
< https://archive.org/details/Amateur_Riot >.