The 2011 Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear disaster was the worst industrial nuclear catastrophe to hit Japan. It contaminated vast areas of the country, created life-changing evacuation, caused economic turmoil, and fueled controversies around the health impacts of radiation. Yet, in contrast to other nuclear tragedies, a discourse of victimization has failed to gather strong political momentum in defining the scope of this disaster, both within Japan and worldwide. Dr. Polleri’s research argues that an official politics of revitalization gained predominance over tropes of harm and trauma, which is intriguing in Japan, since its history is inseparable from the wounds of atomic bombings.
Informed by long-term ethnographical fieldwork throughout Japan, his research examines how different groups clashed and merged to govern something as controversial as radiation risks and post-disaster recovery. It demonstrates that a politics of revitalization was cemented through a complex network of control, including hegemonic discourses, ostracization, self-surveillance, and collaboration. His work incorporates the candid voices of different actors, ranging from government officials and struggling farmers promoting repatriation to Fukushima to displaced mothers and worried citizens unsuccessfully fighting for permanent evacuation.
The main contributions of such research include a critical study of how precarity is transformed into a rhetoric of revitalization. It also explores how radioactive governance shifted from the nuclear secrecy that characterized Cold War era to relying on international organizations and domestic citizens to co-manage the aftermath of disasters. The the research further provides a rich theorization of governance practices by stressing the internal complexities of state management, the role of citizens as agents of governance, and the importance of transnational systems of governmentality. Lastly, it questions the transformative power of catastrophes by examining the changes that occurred since 2011—and those that failed to materialize.
