Radioactive decontamination in Fukushima and the fabric of a collective memory

During the years following the nuclear accident of Fukushima Daiichi in Japan, a decontamination work was undertaken by Japanese authorities in the prefecture of Fukushima on a scale unprecedented even compared with the decontamination following the Chernobyl nuclear accident: around 16 000 workers removed more than 20 million m3 of radioactive soil, for a cost estimated at 24 bn €.

My project RADMemCo aims to understand the genesis of this decontamination work, focusing on the collective memory of disasters.

In their argumentation concerning the Fukushima crisis, the managers of the plant frequently use analogies with diverse earlier crises to explain and cope with this new type of disaster.

They have compared the ongoing decontamination process, for example, with the techniques used in the past by Japanese peasants to remove the ashes of the soils after a volcanic eruption.

The RADMemCo project asks: Did a particular Japanese way of dealing with disasters play a role in the choice of a large-scale radioactive decontamination in the affected areas of Fukushima?

Conversely, did this decontamination work influence the perception and collective memory of the nuclear accident of Fukushima Daiichi?

To answer these questions, I will engage in an ethnographic study of actors of this decontamination work in the village of Iitate, situated about 40 km northwest of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The evacuation order was lifted in 2017, but few inhabitants decided to return.

Among them, two citizen groups are monitoring constantly the levels of radioactivity, and seek to develop various ways of coping with the situation.

One group that I will follow in particular, composed of local peasants and agronomists of the University of Tokyo, experiments with and designs new techniques to remove the radioactivity from the fields.

Doing so, they might remove the radionuclides not only from the soils, but also from the collective memory of this disaster.