Just answer those question after reading 3 article. Copy and paste is ok.
Kunimoto Namiko, “Olympic Dissent: Art, Politics, and the Tokyo Olympic Games of 1964 and 2020” Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Volume 16 | Issue 15 | Number 2 (August 1, 2018)
Article ID 5180 https://apjjf.org/2018/15/Kunimoto.html
1. What is the “dokken kokka” and what is Nakamura’s critique of it?
2. How does that critique relate to the 1964 Olympics?
3. Takayama Akira organized a tour in 2007. Where did that tour go? What did they do in Harajuku?
4. Who is Makoto, and what is he worried about?
Read Koide Hiroaki and Norma Field, “The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and the Tokyo Olympics,” Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Volume 17 | Issue 5 | Number 3 (March 1, 2019)
Article ID 5256
1. How much more radiation was released into the environment in Fukushima than in Hiroshima?
2. What is the problem with the “melted core” that makes it particularly hard to deal with? (In your answer, you should consider humans, robots, and the current location of the core.)
3. What does Koide think is the only solution to the problem?
4. How long does Koide assume that the protection of the cite needs to last?
5. What did the government do in March of 2017? (Include in your answer, what happened to housing assistance? And what conditions people were told to live under.)
Read Siniawer, Eiko Maruko. “Meaning and Value in the Everyday,” from her Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan, Cornell University Press, 2018. This is the introduction to a book about Japan’s trash, and what Japan wastes.
1. What is Mottainai?
2. What are the different ways of thinking about waste?
3. What class do most people in Japan identify with?
4. What are the gendered ways that the government communicates about waste? Who is assumed to be associated with which place, and what kind of waste?
5. What is the complication to the idea of the “lost” decades that the author proposes?
- 1
Introduction
MEANING AND VALUE
IN THE EVERYDAY
A teenage girl stands in a train on her morning commute to school, her eyes fixed
impassively on the smartphone in her hands. In front of her sit two passengers,
asleep, catching whatever rest they can. This sense of fatigue and weariness follows her as she goes through the day, at one point standing alone in a stairwell
with her face buried in her hands and at another gasping, “I can’t do this.” A teenage boy in his work uniform slumps back against the shelf of a convenience store
stockroom, staring blankly in front of him at a long row of brightly lit refrigerators filled with an array of bottled and canned drinks. When the words of a
co-worker nudge him to sit up, the distant expression on his face shows a hint
of resignation. These two youths were the creation of an animated public service
announcement which inscribed on the screen one word that encapsulated its
message: “wasteful,” or in the original Japanese, mottainai.
1
The ad, a high-quality production in the style of a movie trailer, promised
nothing less than the potential of mottainai to transform melancholy about
daily routines into contentedness with a life worth living. This theme was crafted
jointly by the nonprofit Advertising Council Japan (AC Japan) and the national
broadcaster NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation, or Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai),
and was promoted through the television spot in the summer of 2015 and online
for months thereafter.2
Its ultimately hopeful note was expressed through the arc
of the visuals, as the early scenes of youth dejected with school, sports practice,
and work gave way in the second half to a montage of more heartening moments
like playing at the beach with a friend and taking time for contemplation. This
optimism, subdued and restrained, was underscored by the wistful soundtrack
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2 INTRODUCTION
of piano and strings, joined in the second half by the sparkling of chimes. The
motifs of promise and renewed search for purpose were emphasized by the intentional focus on young people with so much of their lives ahead of them. And they
were well suited to a time when Japan, tested and tried by a series of challenges,
was setting its sights ahead on recovery and revitalization. That the torpor of the
present could somehow give way to a better life was explicitly expressed in a line
presented over the closing scene: “With mottainai, the future will change.”
Mottainai here meant more than just being wasteful. This was not an explicit
definition or pedantic enumeration of practices that should be considered a
waste; it was not that the teenage girl’s absorption with her smartphone or the
teenage boy’s part-time job was being labeled wasteful.3
Rather, what this take on
mottainai urged was serious and purposeful reflection about what was wasteful
in one’s day-to-day life. Throughout the spot, the voice-over listed in a steady
cadence all that could be realized just by being attentive to this single word: you
could be rescued and revived; become courageous, serious, introspective, and
kind; rediscover yourself; figure things out; feel at ease; embrace aspirations; and
start moving forward. What the announcement encouraged was consideration
of the motivations, purposes, and desires of one’s daily life. It was the absence
of such self-reflection, if anything, that rendered one’s time and energy wasteful.
This was a public service announcement not about a discrete social problem but
about the idea of waste—about deliberately figuring out what is wasteful so as to
discover what is meaningful.
FIGURE 0.1. Public Service Announcement about Mottainai. An early scene
from the AC Japan and NHK public service announcement about mottainai.
From “AC Japan CM mottainai,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXODCN6rfTc.
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MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 3
This conception of wastefulness bore the marks of its time. In a long and
shifting past reaching back many decades, waste had not always been understood
this way. As we delve into the history of how waste and wastefulness have been
thought about in Japan, from the immediate aftermath of devastating world war
through the more recent past, we will see how malleable and capacious these
ideas were and how deeply they were etched by the priorities and aspirations
of their historical moment. What the announcement also illustrated so pointedly and elegantly was a fundamental quality of waste: its remarkable capacity
to reveal what is valuable and meaningful. A historical examination of waste can
thus be a story of people’s many and ever-changing concerns, yearnings, disappointments, and hopes. This history of waste is at its heart a history of how
people lived—how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the
acts of the everyday in postwar Japan.
Waste and Everyday Life
To ask what has been considered waste and wasteful is to venture into various
facets of day-to-day life, following the traces of people’s expressions about what
they do and do not value. When attuned to waste, we find its presence in so many
questions asked in the course of modern living. Should this tired sweater be
thrown away? How should all my stuff be organized? Can these old leftovers in
the fridge be eaten? Is it justifiable to spend money on the latest smartphone? Is
it possible to be more efficient and productive at work? Can this evening be spent
playing video games or hanging out at the neighborhood bar? The ubiquity of
waste comes into focus when its conception is broad and inclusive of its many
manifestations.
Garbage, with all of its materiality, may be the most visible and tangible incarnation of waste. As many who study it have written, to categorize a thing as garbage, however mindlessly, is to implicitly reject it as valueless.4
Once the tattered
shirt, used plastic wrap, or paper coffee cup is discarded, it joins on the rubbish
heap all of the detritus cast aside as useless. The amount and composition of
trash itself is a mirror of the society responsible for its creation, and discussions
about what to do with garbage and how to handle the afterlives of stuff suggest
much about people’s relationship to material things, what they want to own, how
and what they choose to consume, and how they treat their possessions.
But waste need not be thought of just as discarded matter; it can also be
understood more expansively as anything, material or not, that can be used and
disused. Electricity, food, money, and time can all be wasted. Indeed, there is a
parallel between deeming something garbage and deeming anything a waste, be it
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4 INTRODUCTION
of energy or money or time. All are determinations of value. This wider conception of waste allows us to see a fuller swath of what might be considered wasteful.
Rubbish, such as a broken refrigerator or outdated videocassette recorder, can tell
us about the societal context in which the decision to discard was made, about
opportunities for repair, attitudes toward disposability, or planned obsolescence.
Other versions of this kind of judgment—to deem the use of a clothes dryer a
waste of electricity or a lengthy meeting a waste of time—can further open the
field of historical vision. They raise questions not just about clothes dryers or
meetings but also about understandings of electricity and of time, household
responsibilities and practices, and attitudes toward work. Thinking about waste
writ large makes more evident the trade-offs in decisions about what to expend
and what to save, like whether money and electricity should be spent on a washing machine to spare physical labor and time. Highlighted too is how a thing or
action could be wasteful in more ways than one, how a television set could be a
waste of money, electricity, space, and time.
Time is a purposeful inclusion, even though it is distinct in some ways from
its material counterparts. Time cannot be accumulated like money or things;
it cannot be reused or recycled like resources; it cannot be discarded; and it is
always, continuously, and necessarily being expended, whether deliberately or
not. Yet time is similar to things, resources, and money in its finite character,
and in the linguistic possibility of its being “used,” “saved,” and “wasted.” The
categorical boundaries between waste of different sorts can also be porous, as
time can be seen as a resource or converted into money. And it is interconnected
with the material. Not depleting natural resources can extend time horizons,
being efficient can translate into earning more money and buying more stuff,
and throwing things away can mean mortgaging the future for the present. Precisely because the material is so bound up with modern, industrial, and capitalist
notions of time, it should not be surprising that garbage, resources, money, and
time have all been sites of anxiety about and hopes for daily life.
Across the various kinds of waste, the question of value remains central. And
these determinations of value are not fixed: no object, use, or expenditure is
inherently and unequivocally a waste.5
To treat or describe something as a waste,
be it pantyhose or buffets or long commutes, is to make a judgment or implication that is thoroughly subjective.6
Because these categorizations are not stable
or universal, something thrown away as garbage could, by a different person or
at a different time, be recharacterized and repurposed as valuable. The washing
machine, the disposable diaper, beer in a can, or golf club membership could
be seen as indispensable, innocuous, or superfluous. It is because these determinations of value have been made in and shaped by a particular context that
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MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 5
examining what has been considered waste and wasteful can reveal the social and
cultural concerns of that historical moment. In addition, explicit conversations
about what should be regarded as a waste, how to distinguish between undesirable stinginess and desirable frugality, how to draw the line between necessity
and excess, and what should be thought of as a luxury have also reflected historical misgivings and desires. It is these historical, subjective definitions of waste
that I am trying to capture, so my concern is not with what I (or you) might
find wasteful in postwar Japan. That would be a very different book. This story
is about how various Japanese people at various times thought about the waste
they saw and experienced in the world around them.
Such ideas about waste were usually forged in and about the everyday, through
the seemingly unremarkable regularity of the day-to-day that in postwar Japan
as elsewhere was a principal domain of experience.7
It was often in and about
the mundane that people expressed their attitudes toward waste as workers, consumers, household managers, community members, and citizens. Questions of
waste were embedded in the small decisions of daily life—about what you might
do with a spare ten minutes between meetings; whether you should try to get
the last bit of lotion out from the bottom of the container; how much effort you
should put into fixing the toaster before you throw it away; how hot you need
to feel before turning on the air conditioner; and when to upgrade to the latest
computer model. For some, these questions elicited opinions, reflections on one’s
own behavior, and advice for curbing waste that were explicitly voiced. For others, it was their acts of the quotidian, intentional or not, that revealed how they
wanted to spend their time, what they thought was worth purchasing, what material things they wanted around them, and what principles or causes they viewed
as worthy of their dedication. What people needed and wanted was reflected in
what they said about and what they did with their things, resources, money, and
time. That people respond to larger existential questions in the everyday was
incisively expressed by the sociologist Anthony Giddens, who argued that “the
question, ‘How shall I live?’ has to be answered in day-to-day decisions about
how to behave, what to wear and what to eat—and many other things.”8
Or put
another way, the assumptions, habits, and decisions about waste and wastefulness were fundamentally about what people found meaningful and valuable in
their daily lives.
Given the centrality of the everyday to shifting constructions of waste and
wastefulness, the various kinds of physical waste that did not intersect visibly
and regularly with day-to-day life appear little in the pages that follow. Industrial and nuclear waste, for example, were not only categorized differently from
household rubbish by professional managers of waste, but also were not terribly
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6 INTRODUCTION
relevant to understandings of waste, as pressing an issue as they were to certain
people and communities. For most of the postwar period, their meanings were
fairly consistent in popular imaginations as dangerous and undesirable substances that required containment. Human excrement also said little about the
individual decisions of the day-to-day and, unlike with household garbage, its
per capita volume neither changed significantly nor could be controlled much.
The relatively straightforward challenge posed by the feces of increasing urban
populations was one that could be addressed with the development of sewer
systems. So it is touched upon only in the context of modernizing efforts around
sanitation, health, and hygiene.9
That these kinds of refuse receive scant attention
should indicate that this book is not centrally about physical waste. Issues of garbage, or municipal solid waste, will certainly be discussed at length because it was
understood as a by-product of a mass-consuming society and of a culture of disposability, and as a barometer of economic growth, views of material things, attitudes toward the environment, and more. But there will not be a march through
the history of various categories of waste, be it medical, chemical, radioactive, or
otherwise. What is of interest is the idea of waste more than physical waste itself.
To write a social and cultural history of waste requires creating one’s own
eclectic archive of sources and drawing from them attitudes and sentiments
about wastage. A wide range of materials about the everyday forms the basis of
this volume, revealing how day-to-day life has been at the crux of different and
shifting thoughts about waste and wastefulness. Some of these sources could be
characterized as mass-market, popular, even lowbrow, be they television programs, newspapers, weeklies that border on the tabloid, women’s magazines,
and so on. These kinds of materials are quite prominent in the pages that follow; they are usually named to make clear who was presenting certain ideas
about waste.
Ideals of waste consciousness have often been articulated in the form of
advice, doled out in newspapers, magazines, and mass-market books, about topics ranging from time management to electricity conservation to decluttering.
Such advice literature has presented conceptions of waste and wastefulness more
than it has described actual acts of waste consciousness. Advice manuals and
books are articulations of aspirations, consumed by those whose lived experiences can be quite distant from what is depicted in their pages. As observed by
the historian Catriona Kelly, “the relationship of behaviour books to real-life
behaviour is complex and oblique.”10 The connections between the constructed
ideal and actual practice have thus been probed carefully and skeptically, with
no assumption that the world of the reader mirrored the world of the advice
literature.
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MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 7
Fictional literature has served, depending on the work, as social commentary, an artifact marked by the economic and societal concerns of its time,
or an articulation, sometimes fairly opaque, of an author’s views of waste.
Whenever possible, information has been presented about how a work circulated and by whom it was read so as to situate it in the social and cultural
landscape of its time. And, following Michel de Certeau’s urging, some attention is given to the ways in which ideas in texts were consumed and used.11
In fact, one chapter is dedicated entirely to the themes of, and responses to, a
single work of fiction so as to examine the contours of discussions about waste
and to explore how ideas could assume different shades of meaning in different hands. Fictional stories have also been told through various media, with
some manga taking up the topic of waste. The translation of manga as “comic
books” or even “graphic novels” does not adequately convey their scope, richness, or artistic and literary depth. Manga have been written in many genres,
enjoyed a readership of all ages, and constituted a lucrative industry. They are
approached here like other works of fiction, but with due attention to and
analysis of their visual element.
Children’s stories and books have offered clear, didactic lessons about how not
to waste. Most that have taken up this topic are nonfiction, and their numbers
and popularity have swelled in the 2000s. Such works have defined aspirational
values for and attempted to shape the behavior of children, though their parents
have been secondary targets. Because most of their attention has been focused
on influencing the values and lifestyles of adult generations to come, they have
been by their very nature oriented more toward the future than to the past or
the present. The same could be said of junior high and high school textbooks
that address issues of waste for a slightly older readership of teenagers. Typically
assigned in home economics or sociology classes, these course materials explain
how and why young people should think about waste. And these messages have
had an official quality to them, presented as they were in textbooks approved by
the Ministry of Education.
The interests of the government have been patently apparent in its many large
surveys that were dedicated to, or asked about, waste and everyday life. There
were questionnaires about free time, daily life, resources, a culture of things, consumer issues, environmental problems, energy saving, and garbage. In addition
to those conducted by the government, others were administered by citizens’
groups, corporations, marketing firms, and research associations about environmental consciousness, attitudes toward saving, time use, energy consumption,
recycling habits, and garbage management.12 That there were surveys and survey
questions about waste reflects the significance of the topic. Even more revealing
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8 INTRODUCTION
is the wording of questions and options for multiple-choice answers, which illustrates the extent to which the surveys were exercises in moral suasion, consciousness raising, and the dissemination of information. When it comes to the survey
results, in some cases they indicate what respondents thought the appropriate
answer might be, while in other cases they suggest how survey takers wanted to
see themselves. Responses that flagrantly buck the slant of the question or contradict the initiatives of the group administering the survey give a possible hint
into how actual attitudes and behaviors deviated from the ideal. From surveys
to children’s books, advice literature to newspaper editorials, these varied and
sundry materials forged the many meanings—the norms, aspirations, purposes,
and practices—of waste in everyday life.
Waste Consciousness in Japan
It may be tempting to assume at the outset that the history of attention to waste
is unique to Japan, that there has existed a uniquely Japanese culture of frugality.
Such a presumption would be understandable given American media stories and
mass-market literature on efficiency in Japanese manufacturing, especially in the
1980s, when there was much fascination with the country’s successes in the automotive industry. More recently, there has been journalistic coverage of exacting
systems for recycling that require residents to sort their trash into numerous
categories, and popular enthusiasm for a decluttering method expertly promoted
as being Japanese.13 Some of these examples of minimizing waste resonate, I suspect, with vague impressions of Zen and its association with clean aesthetics
and simplicity. In scholarly circles, research on generally high rates of monetary
saving relative to the United States has encouraged a focus on Japanese thrift.14
These characterizations have been perpetuated by various Japanese themselves
who have suggested, with heightened enthusiasm since the early 2000s, that waste
consciousness is a distinctively Japanese trait.
Yet waste consciousness in postwar Japan was forged largely and primarily
by the logics of phenomena—mass production, mass consumption, economic
growth, affluence, material abundance, and environmentalism—that assumed
certain forms but were not unique to Japan. The equation of waste management
with modern civilization; the importance of productivity, efficiency, rationalization, and profit; and the indispensability of natural resources have been assumed
and experienced globally and with shared intensity in the developed world. Ideas
and practices like Taylorism, planned obsolescence, recycling, reuse, and decluttering have circulated widely, through and beyond national borders. Attention
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MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 9
to waste in Japan was not singular, even if configured and expressed in particular ways.
The simplistic notion of an inherent and enduring waste consciousness and
frugality also collapses when we consider that there has been no such thing as a
“Japanese conception of waste.” What becomes apparent when we think about
waste more capaciously, when the focus is not solely on the shop floor or the
Zen temple or monetary savings, is that different and often contradictory understandings of waste and wastefulness have existed in Japan at the same time.
Furthermore, the postwar history of waste is one of change more than continuity. It is about how waste consciousness waxed and waned; how what was
considered wasteful sometimes endured and sometimes shifted; how individuals, groups of people, and governments attempted to establish new norms and
practices around waste for many and diverse reasons; and how waste assumed
different meanings, be they practical, didactic, economic, psychological, moral,
spiritual, or emotional.
However complex and familiar, the history of waste in Japan also has its particularities. Certain kinds of waste were the object of especially acute attention.
The disposal of material waste was one such issue of special concern, in part
because of the country’s relatively small geographic area. Discussions of household garbage gained an urgency as space in landfills was depleted and the need to
build incinerators intensified. Of relevance too has been the scant use of limited
domestic natural energy resources, especially after the decline of the domestic
coal industry and the demonstrated insufficiency of hydroelectricity in the 1950s.
Over that decade and in the 1960s, reliance on foreign oil surged such that by the
time of the global oil crisis in 1973, the country was the world’s largest petroleum
importer.15 With comparatively little domestic coal, oil, and natural gas, and the
oft-repeated mantra of Japan as a “resource-poor country,” a sense of insecurity informed experiences of shortages and emergencies, and calls to not waste
resources and energy could be especially insistent. These two aspects of the physical landscape go some way toward explaining why concerns about the waste of
material things, resources, and energy became so tightly interwoven at formative
moments in the construction of waste consciousness.16
Who took up the mantle of promoting waste consciousness, and whose
behavior was the target of waste awareness efforts, were informed by postwar
Japanese understandings of gender roles. Gendered responsibilities and expectations often gave waste consciousness different meanings for women and
men. The figure of the housewife loomed large when it came to the management of waste in the household. When advice was offered and entreaties were
made about minimizing household waste, the targeted readership was typically
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10 INTRODUCTION
housewives. But the boundaries of who was considered a housewife were flexible. Forming the backbone of this category were full-time housewives, but they
were rarely the sole intended audience for messages about waste, which tended
to be quite inclusive and sought to establish widely accepted norms. To have
addressed only full-time housewives would have been limiting because of their
small numbers, especially in rural areas, in the 1950s. And in the entirety of the
postwar period, the full-time housewife married to a salaryman was an idealized
norm but never constituted, as actual lived experience, a majority among married women.17 The implied definition was thus usually broader, with “housewife” referring to a married woman who ran the home.18 It was the status of
marriage, more than that of part-time or full-time employment, that defined a
woman as a housewife.
Expectations that a housewife run the household persisted even as the percentage of women in the workforce increased from the late 1970s onward. A wife
continued to be considered, and to assume the role of, the primary manager of
the home.19 Part and parcel of keeping the household humming along, it was
usually wives who dealt with household waste in its various incarnations, be it
the scheduling of time, household finances, garbage and recycling, or electricity
use.20 This gendering of the household as a female responsibility was reinforced
by the sheer volume of suggestions and expectations about waste management
in one’s family, home, and nonworking life geared toward women. Additionally,
the realm of the household often extended beyond the home to include the local
community. The neighborhood or residents’ associations, consumer organizations, parent-teacher associations, and citizens’ groups that took up questions of
waste usually consisted mainly of women.21 A good number of these organizations had connections to or had the ear of municipal government officials, and
served as sites of citizen activism around issues of waste.22
Juxtaposed with the construction of the household as the domain of women
was that of the workplace as the domain of men. When advice was offered and
entreaties were made about minimizing waste in the workplace, the intended
readership was typically male managers or white-collar workers, especially
through the 1980s. Expectations of waste management for men assumed the
predominance of work in their daily lives and tended to superimpose the goals
of the workplace on the male worker. Office supplies were to be used thoroughly,
electricity was to be conserved, and time was to be spent efficiently for the sake
of the financial bottom line. Gender was thus salient in differentiating not just
realms of waste consciousness but also the purposes of attention to waste.
The centrality of the housewife, business manager, and white-collar worker
in ideas about waste created normative conceptions of gender and waste
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MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 11
consciousness that did not acknowledge diversity in lived experiences of the
home or of work. The same could be said of the related construction of the
middle class. Much of the discussion regarding waste and wastefulness, be it
about work, leisure, or consumption, imagined a virtually universal and relatively homogeneous middle class. In some ways, this was not without basis.
What could be called a middle-class life started to become a majority experience in the late 1950s as urban and suburban areas expanded, metropolitanism reached the countryside, employment in agriculture declined markedly,
the number of nuclear families ticked up, and high school graduation rates
rose.23 These developments helped reinforce the notion that almost everyone
was part of a fairly undifferentiated middle class. Much has been made of the
question, posed annually since 1958 by the Prime Minister’s Office in its survey of people’s lifestyles, about the social stratum in which respondents would
place themselves. Roughly 90 percent of people have identified themselves with
three of the five options, as being in the lower-middle, middle, or upper-middle
class. This consistent result has fed the presumption that there has existed a
large chūryū, usually translated as “middle class,” though it could mean something more like “mainstream.” As the anthropologist William Kelly has argued,
this image of the middle class or mainstream has elided socioeconomic difference and “does not refer to a class category but to a category that works to
transcend class.”24 It also does not posit the existence of a lower or working
class against which the middle is defined.25 Even with increasing concern in
the 2000s about Japan becoming an “unequal society” or “society of disparities” (kakusa shakai), self-identification with the middle has persisted such that
worries about societal and economic gaps might be interpreted as those of and
about the middle class.26
Discussions about waste and wastefulness for much of the postwar period
have been predicated on this vision of Japan as a middle-class society and have
perpetuated this assumption through the definition of practices, values, and aspirations of a middle-class life. Most people who concerned themselves with waste
did so as middle-class women and men, appealing to an audience of the same.
Those outside the imagined mainstream and those on the socioeconomic margins have made few appearances in the construction of waste and wastefulness
and thus also in this book. This relative absence is certainly not to suggest that
socioeconomic disparities have been historically unimportant, nor is it intended
to perpetuate their erasure. It speaks instead to how tightly ideas about waste and
wastefulness were interwoven with middle-class hopes and expectations, such
that it would be only a slight exaggeration to contend that waste consciousness
was constitutive of middle-classness in postwar Japan.
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12 INTRODUCTION
A History of Postwar Japan
This book is at once a history of waste and a history of postwar Japan. By the
very definition of its chronological scope, it makes a case for thinking about the
entirety of postwar Japan as one coherent and cohesive period. This is not to
downplay the premodern history of concerns about waste, consumption, and
luxury. Nor is it to diminish the importance of prewar precursors for many postwar approaches to waste and wastefulness. Continuities and persistence in what
some historians have come to call “transwar Japan” are acknowledged, and historical debts to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are given their
due.27 But the postwar period is now longer than the one that stretched from the
Meiji Restoration to the outbreak of the Pacific War. And it can be distinguished
not just by the longevity of conservative political rule and an international position at once weighty and subordinate, but also by a level of affluence that was
previously unimaginable and a society of mass consumption that was virtually
inescapable, both of which are so central to a history of waste.28 Historians of
Japan have not yet offered many narratives of the postwar as a whole, especially
apart from some notable edited volumes, even after the groundbreaking call
in the early 1990s to treat “postwar Japan as history.”29 Only by examining the
entirety of this period might we have more productive debates about its persistent challenges, moments of fracture, and defining qualities. As one step in this
direction, this book offers a history of the long postwar with its enduring continuities, relentless struggles, and pronounced shifts.
In the years after war’s end, in the late 1940s and 1950s, the country embarked
on a project of re-civilization and re-enlightenment, the postwar version of modernizing efforts past. Language familiar from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about health, hygiene, efficiency, and rationalization was used to
urge waste consciousness in the workplace and the home. And waste was to be
managed not only to tackle the challenges of survival just after the war, but also
to make Japan civilized and modern once again.
When economic recovery shifted gears into rapid growth in the latter half of
the 1950s and the 1960s, societal and cultural adjustments were profound but
not sudden or smooth in these years of transition into an era of unremitting
mass consumption. In the late 1950s, as the financial and material exigencies of
the immediate postwar began to ease, there was both discomfort and excitement
about a burgeoning society of consumers. Different attitudes toward wastefulness took shape as people considered what was acceptable to purchase, which
consumer desires were appropriate, and how tightly to embrace a more convenient and more comfortable life.
Siniawer, Eiko Maruko. Waste : Consuming Postwar Japan, Cornell University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 13
The achievements and changes spurred by high growth were brought into
immediate question in the early 1970s, a sharp pivot point in the postwar period
which sparked ambivalence about affluence, reflection about national goals, and
diversification of individual values and commitments. Concerns about waste
became acute as worries about garbage and resources inspired responses to the
costs and consequences of mass production, mass consumption, and preoccupation with gross national product. With questions about whether the country
had overextended itself, waste came to be equated not with civilizational backwardness but with excess. At the same time, the desirability of a middle-class
life had become so deeply fixed that its conveniences and comforts were not to
be sacrificed but defended. The prospect of scrimping or going without came
to be considered anathema to the better lives that people had come to expect.
Consciousness of waste was thus both to change priorities and practices and to
preserve the hard-won gains and pleasures of daily life.
The 1980s, often excised from a longer history as an aberration because of the
singularity of the bubble economy, should rather be treated as inextricable from
the tapestry of the postwar. The need for the defensive posture of the previous
decade did ebb, waste consciousness was muted, and what in years not so long
past would have been considered luxuries became normalized as markers of the
middle class. At the same time, the 1980s stoked not just exuberance but also dissatisfaction and unfulfilled desires. Questions were asked about what life should
be about in a Japan of financial and material plenty, about the place of both
things and time in a better life. Sometimes coupled with these reflections, waste
consciousness came to be conceived in new terms of psychological, spiritual, and
emotional satisfaction.
The convention of characterizing all of the years from the early 1990s onward
as “lost” is intellectually inadequate, given the languorous shift into economic
malaise over the course of the 1990s and the distinctive notes of optimism in
the 2000s. As societal architecture was strained to reveal and create precarity of
various kinds, there was a pervading and disorienting sense of retrogression and
loss.30 Yet moored by the endurance of relative affluence and mass consumption, there gradually opened a space for more expansive and variegated hopes
for individual and societal futures. A more global environmentalism took firmer
hold, and the broader conception of waste and meaning that had emerged in a
previous time of economic confidence carried over into subsequent decades of
economic malaise. In the 2000s, a broad definition of mottainai captured imaginations, supplementing more prosaic terms that meant waste or wasteful. The
word mottainai, with its alleged Buddhist origins, became an umbrella term for
waste of many different kinds, and came to appear with greater regularity than
Siniawer, Eiko Maruko. Waste : Consuming Postwar Japan, Cornell University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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14 INTRODUCTION
rōhi (which implied a criticism of extravagance and had declined in use since the
early postwar decades) and as frequently as muda (which connoted uselessness
and was a conventional way to express wastefulness). At the same time, challenges
to the purported virtue of mottainai began to appear as people reconceived their
attachments to material things and their very sense of self. In twenty-first-century Japan, the idea of waste expanded to encompass environmental commitments, a search for individual and national identities, and attempts to define
anew relationships with things and with time in continued pursuit of an affluence of the heart, mind, and spirit (kokoro no yutakasa). This constructive and
forward-looking orientation should expose the laziness of continuing to extend
with each passing year the chronological reach of the so-called “lost decades.” In
time, we may come to better understand millennial Japan in terms of its various
attempts at redefinition and at finding itself anew in a world of stagnant affluence.
Bringing this history as far up to the present as possible is intended to illustrate the persistence of postwar Japan as a historical phenomenon and an analytical apparatus, but there are real challenges with writing such a contemporary
history. It is not clear what the implications and impacts of the disasters of
March 2011 will be, and how they will fit into the narrative arc of millennial
Japan. Without the benefit of hindsight, it is not evident whether something like
the new minimalism will prove to be a quickly passing trend or a phenomenon
with lasting influence. That politicians and scholars have repeatedly declared the
postwar over has indicated instead that there has been no unequivocal point
of closure, and it is hard to tell a story with no apparent end. History keeps
unfolding, sometimes in ways that contradict what was written not long ago.31
But I would suggest that histories, perhaps especially of the modern, never really
end and that hindsight can erase the important contingencies and ephemera of
the past. In the case of postwar Japan, we cannot artificially truncate the period
and claim its end because we continue to live in the postwar; there has been no
resolution to the complicated legacies of war, defeat, and occupation; and there
has not been a catastrophic experience on the scale of another world war to mark
unambiguously the period’s conclusion. Nor can we wait until the period seems
somehow over before we attempt to understand the larger stories of postwar
Japan.
At this present moment, many people—not unlike the fictional teenagers
in the public service announcement about mottainai—are grappling with how
to live in, and make sense of, a postwar Japan built on the pillars of economic
growth, financial affluence, and mass consumption.32 This has been a struggle
familiar in some form since the late 1950s and a defining characteristic of these
many decades. Even as people came to marvel at the astonishing availability of
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MEANING AND VALUE IN THE EVERYDAY 15
products to consume and new amusements to pursue, they considered the disappointments, challenges, and unfulfilled promises of economic growth. Even as
the country’s wealth reached levels unrivaled by most in the world, there were
ways in which it was seen to have fallen short in the ways people lived and in their
sense of security and fulfillment. Desires to achieve and defend the privileges of
middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence have existed right alongside
discomfort and dissatisfaction with the logics, costs, and consequences of that
very prosperity. This tension has long endured in postwar Japan, as utterly inconceivable as it would have been to people in late 1945, who could imagine little
beyond the exigencies of daily life in the aftermath of war.
Siniawer, Eiko Maruko. Waste : Consuming Postwar Japan, Cornell University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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Created from upenn-ebooks on 2020-04-05 13:14:54. Copyright © 2018. Cornell University Press. All rights reserved.The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 16 | Issue 15 | Number 2 | Article ID 5180 | Aug 01, 2018
1
Olympic Dissent: Art, Politics, and the Tokyo Olympic Games
of 1964 and 2020
Namiko Kunimoto
Precis
Through an examination of Olympic-related art
and the gendered, labored bodies that produce
the Olympic spectacle, “Olympic Dissent: Art,
Politics, and the Tokyo Games” reveals
continuities in the political and artistic stakes
of the Tokyo Olympic Games in 1964 and 2020.
Keywords: 1964 Olympics, art and politics,
2020 Tokyo games, national identity,
Nakamura Hiroshi, Takayama Akira
The 1964 Tokyo Olympiad was intended to
confirm Japan’s role in the new world order,
implicitly celebrating both its so-called
economic miracle and the central place
accorded Japan in the U.S. strategy for the
“containment of Communism in Asia.”1
The
stakes of political hegemony became
paramount, encompassing spatial, cultural, and
national identity. Noriko Aso has cogently
pointed out how “…culture (bunka) has served,
as in the prewar and wartime periods, as a key
term in postwar articulations of national
polity.”2
As the Tokyo Games approached, the rhetoric
around the role of so-called “national culture”
crystallized, and designers, art museums,
exhibitions, and artists were mobilized in a
manner that recalled the patriotic fervor of the
1930s and 1940s during Japan’s 15-year war.
Some artists, like Kamekura Yusaka, readily
took up the Olympic cause, while other
Japanese artists, including groups such as Hi
Red Center were openly critical of the games.
Nakamura Hiroshi, an artist and illustrator
born in 1932, focused on the unequal positions
of America and its vassal state, Japan, within
the Cold War’s political and cultural order. This
essay discusses Nakamura’s response to the
1964 Tokyo Olympic games and closes with a
brief look at contemporary artwork by
Takayama Akira, a performance artist born in
1969, whose work addresses the upcoming
Tokyo 2020 Olympics in similar terms.
Nakamura was previously a reportage painter
affiliated with the Japanese Communist Party,
and his resistance to the 1964 Tokyo Olympic
Games grew from his involvement with leftwing activist groups such as the Japan Art
Alliance and his awareness that the state was
marshaling art to forward its liberal capitalist
agenda. The patriotic flavor of the state’s
Olympic rhetoric, which called on citizens to
actively clean up their neighborhoods, fund
lotteries to benefit the Olympics, and to
tolerate heightened policing and intensive
construction was distasteful to Nakamura and
his peers.3
Although the state sought to
leverage the Olympics to disassociate Japan’s
fascist, wartime identity from its postwar
democratic and internationally-engaged
identity, the Olympiad demonstrated many
holdovers from the Imperial period. These
continuities included mass mobilization, the
promotion of a unified Japan, and, not least, the
role of the Emperor in building Olympic
momentum and presiding over the opening
ceremonies.
Nakamura used his art to emphasize the
APJ | JF 16 | 15 | 2
2
continuities between the past and the present
through color, the refiguring of Olympic motifs,
and the representation of the steam engine.
The young artist wished to interrogate the
state’s heavy reliance on visual culture and, as
his writings have shown, he believed that
innovative art tactics, along with actions in the
streets, were a vital means to achieve change.
He understood the Olympics to be a key
moment for the state to express a fully
consolidated postwar identity, one that would
ideally cement Japan in place as a loyal
subordinate of American power. Nakamura also
understood this to be a key moment to assert
resistance to this agenda, and perhaps also to
garner recognition as an avant-garde artist.
The games would not only be the first in Japan,
but the first held in Asia, (indeed in any nonWestern country). The perceived ‘symbolism of
global comity’ would ironically render invisible
Japan’s reconfigured postwar economic
imperialism. Nakamura, who had been actively
involved in the anti-ANPO movement opposed
the state’s narrative of harmony and
collaboration with the United States. Moreover,
the state was keen to standardize and
commercialize a new national identity that
would finally escape the shadow of Japan’s
wartime aggression and demonstrate to its own
citizens that the deprivations they had endured
in the 1930s and 1940s would never occur
again. Tokyo underwent vast architectural and
infrastructural development in preparation for
tourists and worldwide viewing audiences, and
trains re-emerged as a highly visible symbol of
Japan’s new modernity, a point that Nakamura
did not miss.
The state was also well aware of the impact and
import of the visual, be it art, design, and
architecture, and invested in Olympic branding
that would assert Japan’s leadership position in
Asia as a peace-loving, economically powerful
nation without reference to the power of the
United States. Cutting-edge design teams
organized by Japan’s Olympic committee set to
work, rapidly creating a cohesive approach to
symbols, pictograms, and typography that
became a model for future Olympic design
planning.
Kamekura Yusaka’s Olympic emblem design
conspicuously incorporated the red circle from
the Japanese flag, the hinomaru, positioned
large and bright above the Olympic rings
(Kamekura Yusaka’s Olympic emblem design,
1964). The image suggested the significance of
the 1964 Olympic Games to Japan’s resurgence
less than twenty years after the end of the
Pacific War. According to Kamekura, the design
was also intended to suggest movement to
convey the kinetic feel of the Olympics, which
simultaneously implied Japan’s upward
mobility.4
APJ | JF 16 | 15 | 2
3
Nakamura’s painting, Sacred Torch Relay, from
1964, also engaged the image of the hinomaru,
but in a critical manner (Nakamura Hiroshi,
Seika senriko (Sacred Torch Relay), Oil on
canvas, 1964, Copyright Nakamura Hiroshi,
Courtesy of the Takamatsu City Museum of
Art). The work was Nakamura’s contribution to
an Olympic-themed exhibition at the Sixth
Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan, an
independent exhibition sponsored by the
Mainichi Shimbun. In this oil-on-canvas
composition, the billowing edge of the
hinomaru flag floats upward to reveal six steam
locomotives, their engines emanating outward
like cannons. Just when the state was proudly
displaying it’s new shinkansen (bullet train)
lines, and leaning heavily on imagery of the
trains to promote Japan as a futuristic nation,
Nakamura used the emblem of the steam
locomotive as an explicitly historical and potent
reminder of the continuities between past and
present.
Nakamura references Sakai Yoshinori, the boy
born in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and
chosen by the Olympic committee to be the
final bearer of the torch, as a symbol of Japan’s
ability to overcome the atomic bomb with grace
and agility. According to Yoshikuni Igarashi,
the media heightened this sense of recovery by
making reference to Sakai’s aesthetically
pleasing body and running style.5
But in Sacred
Torch Relay, the artist multiplies the body
across the center of the canvas, his torso itself
a torch, overtaken by flames, creating an eerie
line of homogenous figures somewhat
reminiscent of the military. Kamikaze planes
sky-write large Olympic rings that are
seemingly blown sideways from the force of the
engines, again summoning the viewer to
consider the continuities between imperial
desire in the 1930s and 1940s and Japan’s
nationalistic desires in the postwar period.
Although hallmarks of celebratory patriotism
such as the hinomaru flag, the Olympic rings,
and the Olympic torch are clearly visible in the
work, the image stops short of pure
triumphalism. The flag is cut from the frame,
billowing up and revealing a teeming group of
abstract mechanical red forms, lending the
painting a menacing edge. In the foreground,
waves rush toward the frame of the painting,
seemingly about to overtake a lone plant
(extending from the whale’s spout) standing
amidst the waves. Sacred Torch Relay
repurposes recognizable Olympic motifs and
expresses ambivalence toward the state,
targeting Japan’s implicit nationalist
motivations.
Still, Nakamura later found the ambivalence he
had expressed in Sacred Torch Relay
APJ | JF 16 | 15 | 2
4
insufficient; indeed, in a recent interview he
was rueful about not taking his 1964 critique
further, remarking that at the time he feared
he would not be included in the exhibition nor
have a chance at winning any awards if he
submitted a heavily politicized artwork.6
Yet,
Sacred Torch Relay and Sightseeing Empire,
completed in 1964 (Nakamura Hiroshi, Kanko
teikoku Sightseeing Empire, Oil on canvas,
1964, Copyright Nakamura Hiroshi. Courtesy
of the Yokohama Museum of Art), as I see it,
connect the disastrous consequences of
imperial Japan’s ambitions to the rhetoric of
new state power embodied by the postwar
emphasis on infrastructure and economic
growth. In other words, his work critiques the
‘construction state’ dokken kokka, the sturdy
triangular relationship between the LDP, major
banks and construction firms that would define
the landscape of postwar Japan.7
Again, in this
artwork, Nakamura opts for the steam
locomotive, an emblem of the mechanized past,
rich with nostalgia. The image situates
masculinized machinery as a national emblem
of power and disaster. Nakamura’s trains are a
vibrant crimson, the hue of the hinomaru flag
and his color of choice for many works in this
period. The engines in Sightseeing Empire,
exuding excessive amounts of red steam (the
same color as the hinomaru), are so powerful
they have literally gone off the rails.
Soon after completing this painting, Nakamura
sought other means to critique the visual
representations of Olympic fanfare. He joined
forces with Tateishi Koichi (born 1941), and
founded the Sightseeing Art Research Institute
(Kanko Geijutsu Kenkyujo). In March 1964,
Nakamura and Tateishi (also known as Tiger
Tateishi) began to exhibit their work outdoors.
Moving outside the structured spaces of
buildings offered a way for these artists to feel
as though they were escaping the heavy hand
of the state’s drive to coopt and control cultural
capital. That the Sightseeing Art Research
group began in 1964, as tourists flooded into
Japan in unprecedented numbers for the
Olympics, makes the organization’s titular
irony plain. Nakamura has pointed out that
while the term “sightseeing” conjures visions of
fun and visual pleasure, businesses that
promote sightseeing are, by their nature,
concerned firstly about profit.8
Tateishi and
Nakamura’s use of the term “sightseeing” also
captures the importance of vision, and they
hoped the movement would bring about a reexamination of painting, representation, and
viewership.
That same year, Nakamura and Tateishi pushed
movement and art together more forcefully by
organizing a one-day guerrilla-style event on
the banks of Tokyo’s Tama River, under a
railway bridge for the Chuo Line. Tateishi had
created a large image (approximately seven
meters by four meters) of Mount Fuji – the
single most powerful symbol of unified Japan –
that was too large to display elsewhere, so the
pair opted for an illegal site. Sam Francis,
Yoshiaki Tohno, and other artists attended the
event, dubbed “The First Sightseeing
Exhibition,” in reference to Mount Fuji as an
international tourist draw for Japan.9
Some
artists crossed the river to join them, wading
through it barefoot. Once at the site, Tateishi
and Nakamura rapidly created and then
destroyed various artworks, thereby locating
the art object within performative action,
defying the cycles of visual commercialism that
Olympic tourism brought with it.10 According to
Nakamura, the event was meant to critique the
notion of sightseeing: for most viewers, the
term suggested whimsy and enjoyment, but
Nakamura states they wanted to point out that
sightseeing is usually an operation by tourism
companies that are only interested in financial
gain.11 Their actions were part of a broader
movement to take art of out the museum and
into the streets in the 1960s.
The Sightseeing Art Laboratory disbanded after
about one year, in part because the topicality of
critiquing Japan’s Olympic fever had waned,
and in part because Tateishi and Nakamura
APJ | JF 16 | 15 | 2
5
had arrived at the limits of their common
ground. Tateishi went on to complete artworks
relying heavily on motifs of Japanese
essentialized masculinity, such as the samurai
warrior, as in Samurai, the Watcher (Koya no
Yojinbo) (1965). It is tempting to describe his
later work as ironic, but the art market has
swallowed them whole, keen to embrace the
traditional Japanese hero represented in a
modern medium. In 1964, Artists went on to be
involved in undocumented art activist events
like NOlympic held at Hijikata Tetsumi’s
Asbestos Hall, but by 1970, Nakamura’s belief
in the ability of artists to step outside the
system he wished to critique had also been
tempered:
I think that anything we call
artwork can never escape from
“the museum.” So that means our
life itself cannot escape from the
state or from class relationships.
Oh, damn it! (aaa, iyada! iyada!).
Even if a piece of art does escape
from “the museum,” outside,
another “museum” awaits – the
state. Then, escaping from the
museum only means getting closer
to the state.12
With the 2020 Games on the horizon, Japan’s
stakes have shifted but much remains the
same. Rather than celebrating its emergence as
a world power, Japan’s leaders aspire to prove
it is still a leading economy, despite lackluster
growth in the post-bubble years of the 1990s
and 2000s and the surging Chinese economy
replacing Japan as the second largest economy
and leading trading nation. A younger
generation of artists has begun to critique
anew the state’s embrace of capitalism and its
disregard for economic inequality. Artists such
as Takayama Akira have created performance
art and installations that critically engage with
the use of athletic and laboring bodies for the
benefit of state development.
Takayama Akira founded “Port B,” an
experimental theatre company, and organized
an event called Tokyo/Olympic in 2007. (The
company is named after the Spanish border
town where Walter Benjamin, 1892–1940,
ended his life). For his first Port B project,
Takayama gathered a group of 30 volunteers in
the Sugamo Jizo-dori shopping district,
chartered a Hato tour bus, and spent a half day
crisscrossing the city to visit places that were
established for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games,
including Yoyogi National Stadium and the
Budokan. The theatrical work featured actress
Neko Akiko, posing as tour guide, as the bus
made its way around the city, reproducing the
performative, spatial, and durational
characteristics of a typical Japanese
sightseeing tour bus. Instead of a nostalgic
tour, participant Ozaki Tetsuya said, “the tour
aimed to dissect images, sensations and
experiences from the ‘high times’ of the 1960s
and reconnect them with the present globalised
cityscape of wider Tokyo.”
Gathering in front of Yoyogi National Stadium,
an iconic Olympic site designed by Tange
Kenzo (1913—2005), the audience was
presented with the first of several
commemorative photographs taken by a roving
photographer with a telephoto lens. Other
aspects of the tour were more disruptive; for
example, while walking down Takeshita-dori in
Harajuku, the group listened to recorded
interviews of workers on the strip, many of
them undocumented workers, conveying
concerns about personal security and anxiety
about the future. Participants also experienced
a demonstration explaining how tour guides
were trained to stand and present to audiences:
one foot strategically placed, tucked behind
and at 45 degrees to the other, a ballet position
emphasizing decorum and idealized femininity.
These kinds of deconstructive activities raised
critical awareness about the ways the Olympics
marshalled bodies in the past and the ways it
will do so in the future.13
APJ | JF 16 | 15 | 2
6
In an installation work displayed in 2016 at the
Mori Art Museum, Takayama took a different
tactic, this time drawing viewers into the
complex relations between bodies and Olympic
building (Takayama Akira, Babel: The City and
its Towers (detail), 2016, Published in My Body,
Your Voice: Roppongi Crossing 2016, (Tokyo:
Mori Museum of Art, 2016), 48-9. Copyright
Takayama Akira). In his piece Babel: The City
and its Towers, Takayama projects video
interviews with two elderly men: one is the
founder of a lucrative construction company,
who previously participated in planning some
of the high-rise buildings in down town Tokyo
in the 1960s, while the other man is a migrant
day-laborer from Niigata, who worked
construction in Tokyo during the period leading
up to the 1964 Games.
Sitting in his makeshift home, sporting an
Oakland Raiders cap, and surrounded by
Doraemon toys and misplaced umbrellas, the
worker known as “Makoto” describes being a
scaffolder during the intense period of
construction leading up the 1964 games. Now,
he says, they are cleaning up the city for the
next Olympic Games, and he will have nowhere
to live.
On the other side of the wall, separate video
projections display life-sized images of four
migrant workers from Iran, Ghana, Turkey, and
Vietnam, posing in front of the construction site
for the 2020 Olympic Games (Figure 5,
Takayama Akira, Babel: The City and its Towers
(detail), 2016, Published in My Body, Your
Voice: Roppongi Crossing 2016, (Tokyo: Mori
Museum of Art, 2016), 48-9. Copyright
Takayama Akira). In a voice-over, they tell
folktales about building towers in their
respective native languages. The same story is
simultaneously voiced over in Japanese and
transcribed in English. The blend of the voices
enacts the titular reference to the story of
Babel, wherein God is angered by their
hubristic tower-building and confounds their
common language. In Takayama’s video art,
after each person speaks, their bodies
gradually become indistinguishable from the
white around them, rendering them invisible,
much like the invisible labor they have
performed to create the next Tokyo Olympic
spectacle.
Takayama’s dissent speaks in urgent tones
about the exacting toll on human bodies,
making clear that it is those most vulnerable, in
terms of class and race, who must make the
greatest sacrifices for the nationalist spectacle
of the Olympics.
As the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games draw closer,
another No Olympics group, referencing the
APJ | JF 16 | 15 | 2
7
1964 name, has organized numerous political
events. The anti-Olympic Arts Council Tokyo
renames the Olympics “Festivals of
Repression.” Takayama is an active member of
the group. In conclusion, both Nakamura’s and
Takayama’s artworks call direct visual
attention to the infrastructure of the Olympics
and the national and/or imperial desires that
foster Olympic development. They make similar
points, although perhaps Takayama pays closer
attention to the human costs of Olympic
spectacle. Though Takayama too may
encounter an exasperating inability to escape
Japan’s tight state-capital nexus, his voice and
vision will be added to Nakamura’s and others
of the postwar generation, encouraging critical
engagement and solidarity in the arts and
beyond.
Related articles
Alexander Brown and Vera
Mackie, Introduction: Art and Activism in
Post-Disaster Japan はじめに 災害後の日本
における アート と アクティビズム
(https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/Vera-Mackie/42
77.html)
Allison Holland, Natural Disaster, Trauma
and Activism in the Art of Takamine
Tadasu 高峯挌のアートにおける自然災害、トラ
ウマ、アクティビズム
(https://apjjf.org/2015/13/6/Allison-Holland
/4282.html)
Linda Hoaglund, Protest Art in 1950s
Japan: The Forgotten Reportage Painters
抗議する美術 忘れられた1950代日本のルポル
タージュ 画 家
(https://apjjf.org/2014/12/43/Linda-Hoaglu
nd/4203.html)
Christopher Gerteis, Political Protest in
Interwar Japan–Part II 戦間期日本の政治的抗
議活動 (下 ）
(https://apjjf.org/2014/12/37/Christopher-G
erteis/4179/article.html)
Namiko Kunimoto
(https://apjjf.org/admin/staff_manage/details/%20https:/osu.academia.edu/NamikoKunimoto)
is associate professor of modern and contemporary Japanese art at Ohio State University and
author of The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art (University of
Minnesota Press, 2017).
Notes
1 Noriko Aso, “Sumptuous Re-past: The 1964 Tokyo Olympics Arts Festival” positions: east
asia cultures critique, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 14.
2 Noriko Aso, “Sumptuous Re-past: The 1964 Tokyo Olympics Arts Festival” positions: east
asia cultures critique, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 10.
3 Noriko Aso, “Sumptuous Re-past: The 1964 Tokyo Olympics Arts Festival” positions: east
asia cultures critique, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 15.
4 National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Design Project for the Tokyo 1964 Olympic Games
(Tokyo: National Museum of Modern Art, 2013), 122.
5
Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture,
APJ | JF 16 | 15 | 2
8
1945-1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 153-55.
6
Author interview with the artist at Fuma Contemporary, Tokyo, May 23, 2017.
7
For more on the construction state in Japan, see Gavan McCormack, The Emptiness of
Japanese Affluence, Japan in the Modern World (Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 1996); Thomas
Feldhoff, “Japan’s Construction Lobby Activities – Systemic Stability and Sustainable Regional
Development,” ASIEN 84 (January 1, 2002).
8
Author interview with Yoshiko Shimada and the artist at Fuma Contemporary, Tokyo, May
23, 2017.
9
Fujieda Teruo, “Painting After the End of the Avant-Garde” From Postwar to Postmodern:
Primary Documents, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012), editor’s notes, Note 1,
page 305.
10 As a result, the works are no longer extant and cannot be included in this essay.
11 Author interview with Nakamura Hiroshi, Tokyo, May 23, 2016.
12 Nakamura Hiroshi, “Akasegawa Genpei: A Proletariat with an Object” in Kagaisha（Tokyo:
Bijutsu Shuppansha, 2003), 147.
13 For more on this, see Kyoko Iwaki, “The Politics of the Senses: Takayama Akira’s atomized
theatre after Fukushima” in eds. Barbara Geilhorn and Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt,
Fukushima and the arts: negotiating nuclear disaster (London: New York : Routledge, 2017),
199-220. - The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 17 | Issue 5 | Number 3 | Article ID 5256 | Mar 01, 2019
1
The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and the Tokyo Olympics
Koide Hiroaki
Norma Field, Translation, Introduction and Notes
Introduction: “No One Who Is Alive Today
…”An introduction to “The Fukushima
Nuclear Disaster and the Tokyo Olympics”
Norma Field
To the question, when did you decide to commit
to the abolition of nuclear power, Koide Hiroaki
replies without hesitation, “October 23,
1970.”1
It was March 2015 when Koide retired
as assistant professor from the Kyoto
University Research Reactor Institute. If we
add together the lead-up to that decision and
his activities following retirement, we come up
with a half-century of dedication to the cause of
stopping the nuclear generation of electricity, a
keystone of postwar national policy.
Koide Hiroaki, Matsumoto, July 2018
How is it that Koide can point so precisely to
that date, to any date? At the time, he was in
his third year in the nuclear engineering
department of Tohoku University. In
adolescence, geology had been his passion. He
was the head of his high school club even in his
senior year, when it would have been
commonsensical to dedicate every hour to
preparing for university entrance exams. (To
that endeavor he conceded a scant month or so,
the January of the year he would matriculate in
April.) Walking mountain trails, noting the
things that geologists study, was the expression
of an individual, a personal, love. At university,
APJ | JF 17 | 5 | 3
2
he was determined to do something beneficial
to society. Like many youths with scientific
leanings, Koide dedicated himself to the dream
of “peaceful uses of atomic energy.”2
Tellingly,
it was only the former imperial universities that
offered programs in nuclear engineering. For
someone who hated hot weather, the only
options pointed north, to Hokkaido and Tohoku.
As campuses exploded in the 1968-69 student
movement, Koide attended his classes still
wearing the student uniform—black, buttoned
to standup collar—already cast off by most
college students. Disliking politics, a position
he asserts to this day,3
he nevertheless took the
trouble to try to understand the point of the
student movement. His conclusion: to
understand the social significance of one’s field
of study and to assume responsibility for it.
He found, close at hand, a site where he could
immediately put this recognition into practice.
In 1968, Tohoku Electric Power Company
(Tepco) decided to site a nuclear power plant in
Onagawa, Miyagi Prefecture, a fishing village
that barely used electricity. Why, Koide puzzled
along with the villagers, would such a project
not be sited in the metropolis of Sendai, where
company headquarters were located? He
searched for the answer, which he
subsequently understood was glaringly
obvious: while the electricity generated by
nuclear power plants was desirable for large
cities, their operation posed too great a risk
and therefore necessitated remote
siting.4
(Recall that the Fukushima nuclear
power stations of Tepco functioned solely to
produce electricity for Tokyo.) He listened to
the villagers and argued with the professors
who promoted nuclear power. October 23,
1970 was the day of the first large gathering of
the Alliance Resolved to Oppose the Onagawa
Nuclear Power Plant (Onagawa Gempatsu
Hantai Kisei Dōmei). Koide began to split his
life between Sendai, where Tohoku University
was located, and Onagawa. He and fellow
carless comrades walked the hamlets of the
area, handing out flyers, talking with lonely
seniors but also jumping into pits dug by power
shovels in order to delay construction. When
arrests were made, they launched the first
lawsuit in Japan to challenge the safety of
nuclear power.
Koide’s direct connection with Onagawa ended
in 1974, when he entered the Kyoto University
Reactor Research Institute.5
There, he would
come to have five like-minded colleagues who
would be critically and then popularly known as
the “Kumatori Gang of Six” (Kumatori
Rokuningumi). The “gang” portion was meant
to invoke the “Gang of Four,” leaders of China’s
Cultural Revolution, later considered
“treasonous” and imprisoned, just as these
nuclear scientists were frequently presented by
their critics as traitors to their mission;
“Kumatori” refers to the location of the
Institute in Osaka Prefecture, inconvenient to
access, far from Kyoto University, which itself
attests to community displeasure over the
prospect of living near a nuclear reactor, even
a research reactor.6
These scientists dedicated
their expertise to making the dangers of
nuclear power understandable to the general
public. They were, understandably,
distinctive—a presence apart from the
academic world of promotions and lavish
grants. Yet Koide has repeatedly denied that he
was subject to any pressure: his speciality at
the Institute was radiation measurement, and
as part of the Nuclear Safety Research Group,
he was tasked with overseeing the disposal of
radioactive waste, including effluent. So long
as he responsibly fulfilled his official
obligations, he was free to pursue whatever
research and activities he chose, including the
antinuclear work with his colleagues. This, he
said, was possible because it was not Tokyo
University that he worked for, but Kyoto, with
its tradition of emphasis on basic research and
respect for the individual researcher. Retiring
in 2015 at the lowest academic rung—in other
words, not having anyone under him—also
suited his inclinations.7
Moving to Matsumoto
APJ | JF 17 | 5 | 3
3
City in Nagano Prefecture, he has cut back on
the punishing schedule he maintained after
March 11, 2011, but continues to participate in
those activities to which he feels he can make a
contribution, mostly in the form of lecturing
and writing. As a citizen committed to opposing
war, he stands on the third day of every month
in front of Matsumoto Station carrying a poster
with the words, “We say ‘no!’ to Abe politics”
(Abe seiji o yurusanai).
It stands to reason that Koide should be asked
to address the matter of the 2020 Tokyo
Olympics. In his Buenos Aires speech on
September 7, 2013, two years and four months
after the start of the Fukushima disaster, Prime
Minister Abe proclaimed to the International
Olympic Committee that the situation was
“under control,” that the Fukushima accident
had “never done and never [would] do any
damage to Tokyo.”8
Abe’s statement was
decisive in bringing the games to Tokyo for the
first time since 1964, even though his
elaboration in a subsequent press conference
that contaminated waters were confined to the
.3 square kilometers of the harbor created
consternation for none other than Tepco: it had
admitted to tank leaks only recently, in late
August. A silt fence, it felt compelled to explain,
could not perfectly keep the contaminated
water within the harbor.9
Such quibbles aside, we might pause over
predictions that the 2020 Olympics-Paralympics
may end up costing 3 trillion yen
(approximately 26.4 billion USD), many times
the original budget for what was promised to
be the most “compact Olympics” ever.10 These
games are often touted as the “recovery
Olympics” (fukkō gorin). It is not hard to
conjure ways that these monies might have
been used to benefit the entire region afflicted
by the triple disaster and especially, the victims
of the enduring nuclear disaster. A pittance of
the Olympics budget would have sustained
modest housing support for evacuees,
compulsory or “voluntary.” Instead, the highly
restricted, arbitrarily drawn evacuation zones
have been recklessly opened for return of
evacuated citizens despite worrisome
conditions prevailing over wide swaths of the
region. The J-Village soccer center, which had
served as a base for disaster workers, where
they slept, donned protective gear, and were
screened, are scheduled to become the training
site for the national soccer team, with hopes
that others might follow suit. It has even been
proposed as the starting point for the Olympic
torch relay. One baseball and six softball games
are to be held in Fukushima City.
Aerial view of temporary storage site for
flexible container bags containing soil
from decontamination. Hōrai District,
Fukushima City, April 2018.
Making Invisible the Visible Artifacts of
Invisible Radioactive Contamination
Radioactivity is invisible, but the decision to
have people live with it has produced an
unsettling crop of white cylindrical “monitoring
posts
(https://www.google.com/search?q=%E7%A6%
8F%E5%B3%B6%E3%80%80%E3%83%A2%E3
%83%8B%E3%82%BF%E3%83%AA%E3%83%
B3%E3%82%B0%E3%83%9D%E3%82%B9%E3
%83%88%E3%80%80%E7%94%BB%E5%83%8
F&tbm=isch&tbs=rimg:CfCbY0TUum1Ijjzxgm0nsMSvYKMpd3_1dY_1s1ob
Q8G8OaRb4UrU63GdbcfZ_1Ou4hTRxZ3x3jR7g
a61XRg1pUzk7YfioSCfPGCbSewxK9EZqOuILty
APJ | JF 17 | 5 | 3
4
raBKhIJgoyl3f91jwR2DaqAFeE9DUqEgnWhtDwbw5pFhEdy0KG
FWnjACoSCfhStTrcZ1txEdefUGEC10-
tKhIJ9n867iFNHFkREVN65UGrTBsqEgnfHeN
HuBrrVRHiiPysOuHw6ioSCdGDWlTOTthEYJt9Ieng0em&tbo=u&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjF
4_DgjfvfAhWo54MKHXR7CK0Q9C96BAgBEBs
&biw=1745&bih=582&dpr=1.1#imgrc=jHDkB
dmBMFOApM:)” to measure its presence in the
air and unsightly banks of “flexible container
bags
(https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C5CHFA
_enUS766US766&q=%E3%83%95%E3%83%A
C%E3%82%B3%E3%83%B3%E3%83%90%E3
%83%83%E3%82%B0+%E7%A6%8F%E5%B3
%B6%E3%80%80%E7%94%BB%E5%83%8F&t
bm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi
3z8_d_MjgAhVD74MKHT03AoIQsAR6BAgEEAE
&biw=1152&bih=529) ” filled with
contaminated yard waste and soil. Both are
awkward for Olympic hosts. The Nuclear
Regulation Authority (NRA) is moving toward
removal
(https://jfissures.wordpress.com/2018/06/14/fuk
ushima-monitoringpost/?blogsub=confirming#blog_subscription-4
) of the posts. Fukushima City, scheduled for
several events, has prepared a temporary
storage site within its perimeters. The green
mass in the center likely represents five rows of
bags covered with a heavy plastic sheet. The
smaller black masses will eventually be covered
wih the same green wrap when their blocks are
filled.
Source
(http://www.tazawa.jp.net/kokushyashin01.html
)
In the meanwhile, French prosecutors have
indicted the head of the Japanese Olympic
Committee on corruption charges over the
bidding process. 1 1 A nuclear physicist
influential with policy makers has been found
to have underestimated citizen exposure by a
factor of three.12 Dr. Yamashita Shinichi,
prefectural health adviser, who ten days after
the disaster was assuring the people of
Fukushima not to worry, that people who kept
smiling would not be affected by radiaton, was
as the same time telling experts that he
believed there was reason for serious concern
about child thyroid cancer.13 In April 2011, Dr.
Akashi Makoto, then director of the National
Institute of Radiological Sciences (NIRS),
advised the prime minister’s office that there
was no need to conduct epidemiological studies
in anticipation of thyroid cancer risk.14 In other
words, we are beginning to have evidence that,
from the earliest days of the disaster,
responsible authorities made a concerted effort
not only to deny the possibility of health effects
from exposure, but to prevent or at least
minimize the creation of potentially
inconvenient records. As medical journalist
Aihara Hiroko observes with not a little irony,
“Surely the Tokyo Olympics will be a superb
occasion for displaying ‘recovery from
disaster,’” but also for revealing to the
international community the “real
consequences of the human-made disaster
resulting from the national nuclear energy
policy: the imposition of long-term evacuation
and sacrifice on the part of area residents.”15
Should foreign visitors fail to see through the
Potemkin Village that will be the 2020 Tokyo
Olympics, however, they will not be exempt
from the grave implications of their
participation, spelled out by Koide Hiroaki in
the essay that follows: “The Tokyo Olympics
will take place in a state of nuclear emergency.
Those countries and the people who participate
will, on the one hand, themselves risk
exposure, and, on the other, become
accomplices to the crimes of this nation.”
APJ | JF 17 | 5 | 3
5
Tokyo 2020 Olympics/Paralympics Mascots
Miraitowa (“future” + “eternity”), the official
mascot for the Tokyo Olympics, is said to be
both traditional and innovative, “with a strong
sense of justice” and also “athletic.”
Someity (a variety of cherry blossom evocative
of the phrase “so mighty”), the official mascot
for the Tokyo Paralympics, is “usually quiet but
can demonstrate great power,” nature-loving
with a “dignified inner strength.”
Source
(https://tokyo2020.org/en/special/mascot/)
The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and the
Tokyo Olympics
Koide Hiroaki
The original Japanese text is available here
(http://www.apjjf.org/2019/05/Koide-Field-Tran
slation.html).
What was the Fukushima Nuclear
Accident?
On March 11, 20011, the Tokyo Electric
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was
assaulted by a severe earthquake and tsunami,
leading to a total power outage. Experts had
been agreed that total outage would be the
likeliest cause of a catastrophic incident. And
just as anticipated, the reactors of the
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant
suffered meltdowns and released enormous
quantities of radioactive materials into the
surrounding environment. According to the
report submitted by the Japanese government
to the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA), this accident released 1.5×1016
becquerels (Bq) of cesium 137 into the
atmosphere—the equivalent of 168 Hiroshima
bombs. One Hiroshima bomb’s worth of
radioactivity is already terrifying, but we have
the Japanese government acknowledging that
the Fukushima disaster released 168 times the
radioactivity of that explosion into the
atmosphere.a
The cores of reactors 1, 2, and 3 melted down.
The amount of cesium 137 contained in those
cores adds up to 7×10^17 Bq, or 8000
Hiroshima bombs’ worth. Of that total, the
amount released into the atmosphere was the
equivalent of 168 bombs, and combined with
releases into the sea, the total release of
cesium 137 into the environment to date must
be approximately equivalent to 1000 Hiroshima
bombs. In other words, most of the radioactive
material in those cores remains in the damaged
reactor buildings. If the cores were to melt any
further, there would be more releases into the
environment. It is in order to prevent this that
even now, nearly 8 years after the accident,
water continues to be aimed by guesswork in
the direction where the cores might be located.
And because of this, several hundred tons of
contaminated waste water are accumulating
each day. Tokyo Electric Power Company
(Tepco) has constructed over 1000 tanks on
site to store this water, but the total volume
now exceeds one million tons. Space is limited,
and there is a limit as well to the number of
APJ | JF 17 | 5 | 3
6
tanks that can be constructed. Tepco will be
compelled to release these waters into the sea
in the near future.
Obstacles to containing the disaster
Of course, the greatest priority is to secure the
melted cores in as safe a condition as possible,
but even with the passage of nearly eight years,
neither their location nor their condition has
been ascertained.b
The reason is that it is
impossible to access those sites. Had this
accident occurred at a thermal power plant, the
problem would have been simple. In the
beginning, there might have been fires burning
over several days, but once they died down, it
would have been possible to go to the site,
investigate, repair, and restart operations. In
the case of a nuclear power plant, however,
anyone approaching the site would die. The
government and Tepco have attempted to send
in robots, but robots do not stand up well to
radiation. The reason is that once their
microchips are exposed, their programs get
rewritten. Accordingly, almost all the robots
sent in to date have failed to return.
Reactor 2 Interior Probe, Fukushima
Daiichi Nuclear Power Station
1. Reactor pressure vessel
2. Melted fuel debris?
3. Tubing attached to camera
4. Primary containment vessel
“The melted core has fallen through the
pedestal and out of the reactor pressure vessel.
It cannot be retrieved. One hundred years from
now, this accident will still not have been
contained.”
-Koide Hiroaki
Source
(https://twitter.com/asahi_designbu/status/8273
35808931606528)
Toward the end of January 2017, Tepco
inserted a device resembling a remotecontrolled endoscope into the concrete
platform (pedestal) under the reactor pressure
vessel. A large hole that had opened up in the
steel scaffolding used by workers during
APJ | JF 17 | 5 | 3
7
maintenance, located directly under the
pressure vessel, made it possible to ascertain
the following: the fuel core had melted through
the pressure vessel and fallen further down.
The investigation yielded something even more
important, however. For human beings,
exposure to 8 sieverts (Sv) will result in certain
death. The area directly under the pressure
vessel measured 20 Sv/hour, but along the way,
levels as high as 530 or 650 Sv were detected.
These measurements, moreover, were found
not inside the cylindrical pedestal, but between
the wall of the pedestal and the wall of the
containment structure. Tepco and the
government had scripted a scenario wherein
most of the melted core had been deposited,
dumpling-like, inside the pedestal, to be
retrieved and sealed inside a containment
structure in the course of 30-40 years.
According to this scenario, the conclusion of
this process would signify the achievement of
containment. In reality, however, the melted
nuclear fuel had flowed out of the pedestal and
scattered all around. Forced to rewrite their
“roadmap,” the government and Tepco began
talking about making an opening on the side of
the containment structure through which the
melted fuel could be grasped and removed.
That, however, is an impossibility. It would
entail severe worker exposure.c
From the beginning, I have maintained that the
only option is to construct a sarcophagus,
covering the plant, as was done at the
Chernobyl site in the former Soviet Union. That
sarcophagus deteriorated to such an extent in
30 years’ time as to require coverage by a
second sarcophagus, put in place in November
2016. The second sarcophagus is expected to
last for 100 years. We do not yet know what
measures will be available at that point. No one
who is alive today can expect to see the
containment of the Chernobyl disaster. All the
more so in the case of Fukushima: the
containment of this disaster will not have been
achieved even after all who are alive today
have died. Moreover, even if it were
hypothetically possible to seal the molten core
inside the containment structure, that will not
mean that the radioactivity will have vanished.
Indeed, it would be necessary to protect any
such structure for hundreds of thousands to a
million years.
Imaging the aerial method of fuel debris
retrieval at Fukushima Daiichi
“[Having determined that the flooding method
of debris retrieval would be too difficult, Tepco]
has been driven to propose an “aerial method”
wherein the reactor core that had melted
through the pressure vessel would be retrieved
through a hole drilled into the side of the
containment vessel. That, however, would
necessitate enormous amounts of exposure.”
-Koide Hiroaki
1. Reactor pressure vessel
2. Primary containment vessel
APJ | JF 17 | 5 | 3
8
3. Melted-through nuclear fuel (debris)
a. Water flooding method of retrieval
rejected
b. Remotely controlled drills and lasers to
scrape off debris bit by bit under
continuous spray of water
Source
(http://www.minpo.jp/pub/topics/jishin2011/201
7/08/post_15296.html)
Declaration of a Nuclear Emergency: The
human consequences
Tragedy continues to unfold in the environs of
the plant. On the day of the disaster, the
government issued a Declaration of a Nuclear
Emergency, and mandatory evacuation zones
were expanded, beginning at 3 kilometers from
the plant, then 10, then 20. Residents in those
areas had to leave their homes, taking only
what they could carry. Livestock and pets were
abandoned. That is not all. Iitate Village,
located 40-50 kilometers away from Fukushima
Daiichi, received no warnings or instructions
immediately after the accident, but one month
later, because of extreme contamination, the
entire village was ordered to evacuate.
What do we mean when we talk about
happiness? For many people, happiness likely
supposes uneventful days, one unfolding after
the other, in the company of family, friends,
neighbors, lovers. This is what was ruptured,
one day, without warning. Evacuees first went
to centers, such as gymnasiums, then to
cramped temporary housing, then to
“reconstruction” housing or public housing
temporarily “declared” to be evacuee quarters.
Family members with shared lives until then
were scattered apart. Their livelihood
destroyed, people have been taking their own
lives out of despair.
This is not all. Even outside the mandatory
evacuation zones, there emerged vast
contaminated areas that by all rights should
have been designated “radiation control
zones.”d
These are areas where only radiation
workers, those who earn their living by
handling radiation, are permitted entry. And
even those workers, once they enter a control
zone, are not permitted to drink water or eat
food. Naturally, it is forbidden to sleep. There
are no toilets. The government, on the grounds
that an emergency situation prevails, has
scrapped the usual regulations and abandoned
several million people to live in contaminated
areas. These people, including infants, drink
the water, eat, and sleep in those areas. They
have of course been burdened with the risks
associated with exposure. And thus abandoned,
they are all surely subject to anxiety. Some,
seeking to avoid exposure, gave up their jobs
and evacuated with their entire families.
Others, wishing to protect at least their
children from exposure, have split up, with
fathers staying behind to pursue their jobs in
contaminated areas and mothers leaving with
their children. But this has damaged household
stability and wrecked family relationships.
Staying in contaminated areas hurts the body,
but evacuation crushes the soul. These
abandoned people have been living in anguish
every day for nearly eight years.
On top of this, in March of 2017, the
government instructed those it had once
ordered to leave, or those who had left of their
own volition, to return to those contaminated
areas so long as the radiation levels did not
exceed 20 millisieverts/year (mSv). The housing
assistance it had offered these people, however
unsatisfactory, was terminated. This has
inevitably meant that some people are forced to
return. In Fukushima today, reconstruction is
considered the highest priority. If people feel
no choice but to live there, then of course,
APJ | JF 17 | 5 | 3
9
reconstruction becomes desirable. They cannot
tolerate living in fear day after day. They would
like to forget about the contamination, and
fortunately or not, radioactivity is invisible. The
central and local governments take active
measures to make them forget. Anyone voicing
concern or referring to contamination is subject
to criticism: they are obstructing
reconstruction.
20 mSv per year is the level of exposure
permitted only for radiation workers, such as I
once was. It is hard to forgive the fact that this
level is now being imposed on people who
derive no benefit from exposure. Moreover,
infants and children, who are especially
sensitive to radiation, have no responsibility for
the recklessness of Japanese nuclear policy, let
alone for the Fukushima disaster. It is not
permissible to apply occupational levels of
exposure to them. The government of Japan,
however, says nothing can be done given the
Declaration of a Nuclear Emergency. We can
understand an emergency lasting for one day, a
whole week, one month, or depending on the
circumstances, even for one year. But in fact,
the Declaration of a Nuclear Emergency has
not been rescinded even after nearly eight
years have passed. The government is eager to
make people forget about the Fukushima
disaster. Media have fallen silent. Most
Japanese have been driven to forget that
conditions are such that make it impossible to
rescind the Declaration even while the
regulations that should prevail have been
scrapped. The principal culprit in radioactive
contamination is cesium 137, with a half-life of
30 years. Even after the passage of 100 years,
it will have diminished by only one-tenth. In
point of fact, even after 100 years, Japan will be
in a state of nuclear emergency.
Holding the Olympic Games in a state of
nuclear emergency
The Olympic games have always been used to
display national might. In recent years, they
have become tools for businesses, especially
construction companies, which create, and then
destroy, large public structures, leading to a
colossally wasteful society from which they
derive stupendous profit. What is important
now is for the state to mobilize all its resources
so that the Declaration of a Nuclear Emergency
can be rescinded as soon as possible. The
priority should be to give relief to those who
continue to suffer from the Fukushima nuclear
disaster, and at the very least, to protect
children, who are blameless, from exposure.
The greater the risks facing a society, the more
those in power seek to avert peoples’ eyes. The
mass media will try to whip up Olympic fever,
and there will come a time when those who
oppose the Olympics will be denounced as
traitors. So it was during World War II: the
media broadcast only the proclamations from
Imperial Headquarters, and virtually all citizens
cooperated in the war effort. The more you
thought yourself an upstanding Japanese, the
more likely you were to condemn your fellow
citizens as traitors. If, however, this is a
country that chooses to prioritize the Olympic
games over the blameless citizens it has
abandoned, then I shall gladly become a traitor.
The Fukushima disaster will proceed in 100-
year increments, freighted with enormous
tragedies. Casting sidelong glances at the vast
numbers of victims, the perpetrators, including
Tepco, government officials, scholars, and the
media, have utterly failed to take responsibility.
Not a single one has been punished.e
Taking
advantage of this, they are trying to restart the
reactors that are currently stopped and to
export them overseas. The Tokyo Olympics will
take place in a state of nuclear emergency.
Those countries and the people who participate
will, on the one hand, themselves risk
exposure, and, on the other, become
accomplices to the crimes of this nation.
August 23, 2018
APJ | JF 17 | 5 | 3
10
Translation Notes:
a. Cesium 137, with a half-life of approximately
30 years, is a major source of long-term
contamination after atmospheric nuclear
weapons tests and nuclear power plant
accidents. It has been the principal
radionuclide of concern in Fukushima. The
comparative calculation given here is based on
Fukushima estimates released by the Japanese
Government in its June 2011 “Report by the
Japanese Government to the IAEA Ministerial
Conference on Nuclear Safety—The Accident at
TEPCO’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations”
(see here
(https://japan.kantei.go.jp/kan/topics/201106/pd
f/coverev_sheet.pdf) for whole report with links
to subsequent revisions and here
(http://japan.kantei.go.jp/kan/topics/201106/pdf
/chapter_vi.pdf) for Chapter VI, “Discharge of
Radioactive Materials to the Environment”),.
The information on releases appears in table
form as part of an August 26, 2011 Ministry of
Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) “News
Release” on “Tokyo Denryoku Kabushikigaisha
Fukushima Daiichi Genshiryoku Hatsudensho
oyobi Hiroshima ni tōka sareta genshibakudan
kara hōshutsu sareta hōshaseibushutsu ni
kansuru shisanchi ni tsuite” [On the estimates
of radioactive materials released by Tokyo
Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daiichi
Nuclear Power Station and the atomic bomb
dropped on Hiroshima] (see here
(http://www.crms-jpn.org/doc/%E8%A7%A3%E
6%9E%90%E3%81%A7%E5%AF%BE%E8%B1
%A1%E3%81%A8%E3%81%97%E3%81%9F%E
6%9C%9F%E9%96%93%E3%81%A7%E3%81%
AE%E5%A4%A7%E6%B0%97%E4%B8%AD%E
3%81%B8%E3%81%AE%E6%94%BE%E5%B0
%84%E6%80%A7%E7%89%A9%E8%B3%AA%
E3%81%AE%E6%94%BE%E5%87%BA%E9%87
%8F%E3%81%AE%E8%A9%A6%E7%AE%97%
E5%80%A4%EF%BC%88Bq).pdf)). For its
estimates of radionuclides released into the
atmosphere by the Hiroshima bomb, this report
cites the UNSCEAR [United Nations Scientific
Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation]
2000 Report to the General Assembly with
Scientific Annexes: “Sources and Effects of
Ionizing Radiation,” Annex C
(https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/12/26
/national/crime-legal/5-year-jail-terms-soughtex-tepco-execs-nuclearcrisis/#.XG2NbZNKiqA), “Exposures to the
Public from Man-made Sources of Radiation.”
The reference is surely to Table 9 (p. 213),
“Radionuclides produced and globally
dispersed in atmospheric nuclear testing,”
wherein the radionuclides are listed in identical
order as the METI chart on Hiroshima, minus,
of course, plutonium 239, 240, and 241 (the
Hiroshima bomb, unlike Nagasaki, was a
uranium weapon).
b. On 13 February 2019, Tepco released photos
showing first contact with melted fuel debris in
unit 2. See here
(http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Te
pco-makes-contact-with-melted-fuel-in-unit-2).
c. See “Important Stories of Decommissioning
2018
(http://www.meti.go.jp/english/earthquake/nucl
ear/decommissioning/pdf/20180827_roadmap.p
df)” by the Agency for Natural Resources and
Energy, METI, for the government account of
the roadmap, especially pages 20-24 on fuel
retrieval.
d. Standards for such designation vary from
country to country and within agencies of a
given country. Koide’s discussion here is based
on the standard of 40,000 Bq/m2
as the
threshold of contamination, above which an
area should be designated a control zone
according to Japanese law.
e. There are currently more than 30 civil cases
winding their way through the courts, but only
one criminal proceeding in Tokyo District
Course, with three former Tepco executives as
defendants, charged with professional
negligence resulting in death and injury. Since
APJ | JF 17 | 5 | 3
11
public prosecutors had twice declined to indict,
the criminal charges and the trial came about
only through the tenacity of a citizens’ group
and a little-known system of judicial inquest,
somewhat comparable to the US grand jury
system minus prosecutorial involvement. See
“Five-year prison terms sought for former
TEPCO executives
(http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ20181226
0052.html),” Asahi Shimbun, December 26,
2018.
Acknowledgments
Let me begin by thanking colleagues at APJJapan Focus—Gavan McCormack, Satoko
Norimatsu, and Mark Selden—for their
encouragement in pursuing this translation. I
am grateful to Eiichiro Ochiai
(https://apjjf.org/-Eiichiro-Ochiai/4382) and Bo
Jacobs (https://apjjf.org/-Eiichiro-Ochiai/4382),
whose work can also be found on this site, for
their patient responses to my questions. Koide
Hiroaki likewise responded generously. Errors
that remain are my own (NF).
Koide Hiroaki wrote the original text in
response to a request by Ms. Kusumoto Junko,
who translated, printed, and shipped it along
with her own statement
(https://cocomerita.exblog.jp/28702652/) to the
various national Olympic committees. I am
grateful to her for these actions. I also thank
Mr. Koide for permission to produce this
translation.
Related articles
“The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Is a
Serious Crime
(https://apjjf.org/2016/06/Hirano.html).”
Interview with Koide Hiroaki by Katsuya
Hirano and Hirotaka Kasai. APJ-Japan
Focus, Vol 14, Issue 6:2, March 15, 2016.
”Save the Town”: Insolvable Dilemmas of
Fukushima’s “Return Policy
(https://apjjf.org/2018/03/Katsuya.html).”
Interview with Namie Town Mayor Baba
Tamotsu by Katsuya Hirano with
Yoshihira Amaya and Yoh Kawano. APJJapan Focus, Vol. 16, Issue 3:2, February
1, 2018.
David McNeill and Paul Jobin, Japan’s
3.11 Triple Disaster: Introduction to a
Special Issue 特 集 3.11
(https://apjjf.org/2014/12/7/David-McNeil
l/4073/article.html). APJ-Japan Focus, Vol
12, Issue 7:1, February 16, 2014.
Notes are by the translator.
The Following are the notes for the
Introduction:
Koide Hiroaki, retired from the Kyoto University Reactor Research Institute (presently
called the Kyoto University Institute for Integrated Radiation and Nuclear Science Research),
is arguably the most celebrated critic of nuclear power and the handling of the Fukushima
disaster. He is the author of numerous books in Japanese, one of which has been translated
into English, Rethinking Nuclear Energy: Autopsy of an Illusion (2014) and French, Penser le
nucléaire: autopsie d’une illusion (2015). For a sustained, thoroughgoing interview in English,
see “The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Is a Serious Crime
(https://apjjf.org/2016/06/Hirano.html)” (2016). A succinct early interview is available in
French: “Pour le nucléaire, il n’y a jamais de responsables. Trop d’intérêsts sont mêlés
APJ | JF 17 | 5 | 3
12
(https://www.sortirdunucleaire.org/Pour-le-nucleaire-il-n-y-a-jamais)” (2011), also translated
into English: “Nuclear Irresponsibility: Koide Hiroaki Interviewed by Le Monde
(https://apjjf.org/-Paul-Jobin/4699/article.html).” A two-part, illustrated presentation at the
University of Chicago is available here
(https://news.uchicago.edu/videos/atomic-age-ii-fukushima-session-1-part-1-english-0) and
here (https://news.uchicago.edu/videos/atomic-age-ii-fukushima-session-1-part-2-english-0).
The Trouble with Nuclear Power (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCbXX3DURd0) is an
extensive presentation at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan (2015).
Norma Field, translator, is a professor emerita, University of Chicago. Recent publications
include “From Fukushima: To Despair Properly, To Find the Next Step
(https://apjjf.org/2016/17/Field.html)” (2016); For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An
Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature
(http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo5828625.html) (co-editor,
2016); Fukushima Radiation: Will You Still Say No Crime Has Been Committed?
(https://www.amazon.com/FUKUSHIMA-RADIATION-Still-Crime-Committed-ebook/dp/B00XKI
ZRX4?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0) (editor and co-translator, 2015); Ima heiwa o
honki de kataru ni wa: Inochi, jiyū, rekishi ([To seriously talk peace today: Life, freedom,
history] Iwanami Booklet, 2018).
Notes
1 Much of the following account draws on Koide’s multiple public lectures and interviews as
well as author interview on July 22, 2018. For the college years, see especially the evocative
essay, “Sōmatō no yō ni meguru omoide” [Like memories swirling on a revolving lantern],
Narisuna No. 201 (September 2005), available here
(https://hiroakikoide.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/narisuna-sep13/).
2 Of course, it was US President Dwight Eisenhower who launched the strategic dream of
“peaceful uses” with its special implications for Japan with his “Atoms for Peace” speech
before the UN General Assembly on December 8, 1953, not three months before the fateful
Castle Bravo shot on Bikini atoll on March 1, 1954. See Yuki Tanaka and Peter Kuznick’s
“Japan, the Atomic Bomb, and the ‘Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Power
(https://apjjf.org/-Peter-J–Kuznick–Yuki-Tanaka/3521/article.pdf),’” APJ-Japan Focus (May 2,
2011) and Ran Zwigenberg, “The Coming of a Second Sun”: The 1956 Atoms for Peace
Exhibit in Hiroshima and Japan’s Embrace of Nuclear Power
(https://apjjf.org/2012/10/6/Ran-Zwigenberg/3685/article.html),” APJ-Japan Focus (February
4, 2012).
3
Even while acknowledging its importance: see interview,
(http://www.asiapress.org/apn/2015/03/japan/post_5462/) “Koide Hiroaki-san ni kiku:
‘Genshiryoku mura’ de wa naku ‘genshiryoku mafia’ da” [Mr. Koide Hiroaki’s views: It’s not a
“nuclear village” but a “nuclear mafia”] (March 24, 2015).
4
The relative poverty of the areas where nuclear power plants have been constructed is an
APJ | JF 17 | 5 | 3
13
integral aspect of siting considerations. Koide is acutely sensitive to these and other
discriminatory practices. “Remote,” in any case, is an exquisitely relative designation in a
country as small and densely populated as Japan. See here
(http://naglly.com/archives/2011/04/nuclear-japan-map.php) for a series of four maps of Japan,
showing nuclear power stations in relation to major cities. If circles with a 20 km radius (12
miles) are drawn around each plant, major cities fall outside their perimeters. But the
situation changes drastically if the circle is expanded to 100 kms (62 miles). Double that, to
200 kms (124 miles), and virtually all of Japan, never mind major cities, will be covered by
overlapping circles.
5
As of April 2018, the Kyoto University Institute for Integrated Radiation and Nuclear Science
(Kyoto Daigaku Fukugō Genshiryoku Kagaku Kenkyūsho).
6 Koide moreover considers the Kumatori site as having been acquired by deception,
inasmuch as Kyoto University signed an official agreement guaranteeing the impossible: that
no radioactive materials would be released into the air or in the effluent discharged from the
Institute.
7
See, for instance, “Tōdai nara katsudō dekinakatta; Kyōdai Koide jokyō ga konshun
taishoku” [I couldn’t have sustained my activities at Todai; Kyodai assistant professor Koide
retiring this spring], Sunday Mainichi
(http://mainichibooks.com/sundaymainichi/society/2015/03/15/post-5.html), March 15, 2018;
and “Koide Hiroaki Kyōdai jokyō teinen intabyū [Koide Hiroaki, Kyoto University assistant
professor, retirement intervew], Tokyo Shimbun, March 23, 2015, available here
(https://silmarilnecktie.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/323%E3%80%90%E6%9D%B1%E4%BA%
AC%E6%96%B0%E8%81%9E%E3%83%BB%E7%89%B9%E5%A0%B1%E3%80%91%E5%B0
%8F%E5%87%BA%E8%A3%95%E7%AB%A0-
%E4%BA%AC%E5%A4%A7%E5%8A%A9%E6%95%99%E3%83%BB%E5%AE%9A%E5%B9%
B4%E3%82%A4/).
8
Text of speech, delivered in English, here
(http://japan.kantei.go.jp/96_abe/statement/201309/07ioc_presentation_e.html).
9
See here
(https://www.huffingtonpost.jp/2013/09/09/fukushima_nuclear_power_polution_n_3896462.ht
ml).
10 Mainichi report, (https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20181005/p2a/00m/0na/003000c)
beginning with actual Board of Audit accounting from October 2018.
11 See “Japan’s Olympics Chief Faces Corruption Charges in France
(https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/world/europe/japan-olympics-corruption-tsunekazu-tak
eda.html),” New York Times, January 11, 2019.
12 “Radiation Doses Underestimated in Study of City in Fukushima
(http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201901090057.html),” Asahi Shimbun, January 9, 2019.
See also “Journal flags articles about radiation exposure following Fukushima disaster
(https://retractionwatch.com/2019/01/17/journal-flags-papers-about-radiation-exposure-followi
ng-fukushima-disaster/)” in Retraction Watch; and especially, Shin-ichi Kurokawa and Akemi
Shima, “A Glass Badge Study That Failed and Betrayed Residents: A Study with Seven
Violations of Ethical Guidelines Can Be No Basis for Government Policies
(https://www.iwanami.co.jp/kagaku/eKagaku_201902_Kurokawa_Shima.pdf),” Kagaku, Vol.
89:2, February 2019.
APJ | JF 17 | 5 | 3
14
13 “Shinsaigo ‘hōshasen niko-niko shiteiru hito ni eikyō nai’ Yamashita Nagasaki-dai kyōju
‘shinkoku na kanōsei’
(http://www.tokyo-np.co.jp/article/national/list/201901/CK2019012802000122.html) kenkai
kiroku (http://www.tokyo-np.co.jp/article/national/list/201901/CK2019012802000122.html)”
[“No radiation effects on people who keep smiling” post-earthquake: Record of “serious
possibility” noted by Nagasaki University Professor Yamashita], Tokyo Shimbun, January 28,
2019.
14 “Kantei ni ‘ekigaku chōsa fuyō’ Fukushima gempatsu jiko de Hōiken riji
(http://www.tokyo-np.co.jp/article/national/list/201902/CK2019021802000125.html)” [“No
epidemiological study necessary”: Director of NIRS to Prime Minister’s Office following
Fukushima nuclear accident], Tokyo Shimbun, February 18, 2019.
15 “‘Seika rirē’yūchi ni hisaichi Fukushima no jūmin ga hiyayaka na wake” [Why the disasterafflicted residents of Fukushima are cool to hosting the ‘Olympic torch’ relay], Shūkan
Kinyōbi (http://www.kinyobi.co.jp/kinyobinews/2018/10/31/antena-356/) (October 31, 2018).
See also her “Follow Up on Thyroid Cancer! Patient Group Voices Opposition to Scaling Down
the Fukushima Prefectural Health Survey (https://apjjf.org/2017/02/Aihara.html),” APJ-Japan
Focus (January 15, 2017).
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