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Harvest

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

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“Harvest” is a story about the aftermath of a criticality accident that occurred at the Tokaimura nuclear fuel processing plant in Ibaraki Prefecture on September 30, 1999. Hayashi first learned about the accident from watching the TV news in a hotel room in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the night before she was to visit the Trinity site where the first atomic bomb was tested. After returning from New Mexico, Hayashi visited Tokaimura where she met an old farmer who had refused to evacuate. “Harvest,” which grew out of that meeting, seems eerily prescient today, six years after the Fukushima disaster, for in it, we find the same cloud of misinformation concerning the dangers of radiation, which threatens the survival of a rural community and its way of life.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2017

References

Notes

1 Ryan, Michael E. “The Tokaimura Accident”

2 Ibid.

3 According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock, which had stayed set at three minutes before midnight for the last two years, has now moved up to two minutes, 30 seconds. See here.

4 A kiseru is a long, slender wooden pipe with a metal mouthpiece at one end and a small metal bowl for tobacco at the other.

5 Urashima Tarō is the protagonist of a Japanese folk tale, a fisherman who is taken to Ryūgūjō (the Dragon Palace) by a grateful turtle whose life he saved. After spending what he thinks is three days there, he returns to his village to discover that 300 years have passed.

6 30,000 yen was about 285 US dollars in 1999.