¹ The Ministry of Environment maintains a large “Decontamination Information Plaza” (Kankyō saisei purazā) at 〒960-8031 Fukushima Prefecture, Fukushima, Sakaemachi, 1-31. In addition to extensive decontamination charts updated regularly at the plaza, the Ministry maintains interactive web-maps of “prefectural decontamination information by every city, town and village.”

² A script of Abe's September 2013 speech to the International Olympic Committee in Buenos Aires is here. Documentary-makers Yoh Kawano (Human Error, 2017) and Kawai Hiroyuki (Nuclear Japan, 2014) both include a clip of the opening lines to underscore how defensive Abe's Olympic bid sounds when he insists Tokyo is “one of the safest cities in the world, now and in 2020.” Despite the widely-reported dishonesty of this statement (see for instance www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-nuclear/abes-fukushima-under-control-pledge-to-secure-olympics-was-a-lie-former-pm-idUSKCN11D0UF), the 2020 benchmark is being honored, both with the games at large in Tokyo and with baseball and softball events which will take place in Fukushima, to “show the world the extent of its recovery.” See here.

³ These towns include, from north to south, Iitate, Kawamata, Minamisōma, Namie, Katsurao, Futaba, Tamura, Ōkuma, Kawauchi, Tomioka and Naraha. Fukushima Prefecture updates its status maps in nine languages. As Katsuya Hirano points out in his interviews with both Namie municipal worker Suzuki Yūichi and Namie mayor Baba Tamotsu, policies of “return” (帰還) and “recovery” (復興) do not make total sense even to those charged with implementing them. Nevertheless, that they are the only recognized government benchmarks is clear from the naming of the affected areas. Every effort is made to turn the most toxic “difficult to repatriate” zones (帰還困難区域) into purportedly less polluted “residence-restricted zones” (居住制限区域). In turn, “residence restricted zones” are assigned dates for transition to a third category, “zones in preparation for the cancellation of evacuation” (避難指示解除準備区域). Upon cancellation, these zones return to “normal.”

⁴ Wendy Brown. Undoing The Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015) 219.

⁵ Kana Inagaki, Leo Lewis and Ed Crooks, “Downfall of Toshiba, A Nuclear Industry Titan,” The Financial Times, February 14, 2017.

⁶ “Mitsubishi Heavy Doubling Down on Areva with Fresh Investment,” Nikkei Asian Review, April 24, 2017.

⁷ In the interview Kamanaka paraphrases their complaint as “江戸時代に戻るわけにはいかないんだ.”

⁸ Kawai Hiroyuki, Nuclear Japan, documentary, (2014; Tokyo: K Project), iTunes, 0:40:00.

⁹ Brown, Undoing, 27.

¹⁰ Ibid., 206.

¹¹ In English, some of the best work on Kamanaka to date is by film scholar Hideaki Fujiki of Nagoya University. Fujiki discusses Kamanaka's films in the larger context of these jishū jōei, local self-screening events, in “Networking Citizens through Film Screenings: Cinema and Media in Post-3/11 Social Movements.” Media Convergence in Japan. Ed. Patrick W. Galbraith and Jason G. Carlin. Online Publication: Creative Commons, 2016. Fujiki discusses Kamanaka's position on science, environmentalism, and documentary technique in “Problematizing Life: Documentary Films on the 3.11 Nuclear Catastrophe.” Fukushima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster. Ed. Barbara Geilhorn and Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt. London: Routledge, 2016.

¹² See Yamashita and Repacholi, Chernobyl Telemedicine Project 1999 - 2004: Final Report of the Joint Project with the World Health Organization, the Sasakawa Memorial Health Foundation and the Republic of Belarus. In the introduction to her study of Chernobyl, anthropologist Adriana Petryna cites the key role played by the World Health Organization in minimizing the accident's significance for local and global health (xv). Petryna's analysis of the supporting roles played by NGOs and other providers of “international assistance” singles out “the Japanese Sasakawa Fund” in particular for sending foreign experts to the Zone to abstract data without understanding the “complex interdependencies between thyroid and other physiological systems” (159). See Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

¹³ Clinton Rossiter in Constitutional Dictatorship (1948), quoted in Giorgio Agamben. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 9.

¹⁴ Agamben, 205.

¹⁵ See here.

¹⁶ It is in this context that the legal efforts of the “Complainants for the Criminal Prosecution of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster” (Fukushima genpatsu kokusodan) are so significant. Norma Field and Matthew Mizenko have translated their publication Will You Still Say No Crime Was Committed? Statements by 50 Complainants, as an e-book available on amazon. For updates on the trial, see here and here. For accounts of activist Mutō Ruiko's central role in bringing the case to trial, see Tomomi Yamaguchi, “Mutō Ruiko and the Movement of Fukushima Residents to Pursue Criminal Charges against TEPCO Executives and Government Officials, APJ-Japan Focus, July 1, 2012. Also on Mutō Ruiko see Norma Field, ”From Fukushima: To Despair Properly, To Find the Next Step, APJ-Japan Focus, September 1, 2016, and Katsuya Hirano, “Interview with Mutō Ruiko”.

¹⁷ On the raising of annual allowable radiation exposure, see Note 18.

¹⁸ Until April 2011 the Japanese government followed standards set by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (IRCP) allowing a maximum exposure of 1 millisieverts per year for the general public and 20 millisieverts per year for nuclear workers. When Kamanaka remarks that Fukushima's local newspapers “did not know that by Japanese law people cannot live” (日本の法律で[放射線管理区域に]人は住めない) in areas with official measurements above one millisievert per year, she is referring to these standards. For more on the standards themselves, and the Japanese government's decision to raise them in April 2011, see Norma Field, “From Fukushima, To Despair Properly”, note 7, and Katsuya Hirano, Yoshihiro Amaya and Yoh Kawano “Reconstruction Disaster: The Human Implications of Japan's Forced Return Policy in Fukushima,” note 1.

¹⁹ On Mutō Ruiko, see Note 16.

²⁰ In science and technology studies, see Bruno Latour, especially We Have Never Been Modern, Trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993) and Facing Gaia, Trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017). In philosophy of science, see Isabelle Stengers, especially In Catastrophic Times, Trans. Andrew Goffey (Online: Open Humanities Press, 2015) and Another Science is Possible, Trans. Stephen Muecke (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018). In feminist philosophy, see Elizabeth Grosz, especially The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics and the Limits of Materialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

²¹ Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science. Trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 126.

²² Hida Shuntarō, quoted in Kamanaka Hitomi, Hibakusha: Dokyumentarii eiga no genba kara (Tokyo: Kage shobō, 2009) 33. For a biographical sketch of HIda, see here.

²³ For a biographical sketch of Smolnikova, see here. After Chernobyl, Smolnikova's town of Buda-Koshelvo, 150 km from the disaster, accepted many refugees from towns that were closer and more contaminated. But she is careful to document significant health problems from radiation exposure among children from her own town, and among children born long after 1986.

²⁴ For a biographical sketch of Kamata, see here. On the Japan Chernobyl Foundation (JCF), see here.

²⁵ For a biographical sketch of Kodama see here. In his capacity as Tokyo University Radioisotope Center Director, Kodama was assigned a leadership role in Fukushima decontamination. In July 2011 he delivered a livid speech before the House of Representatives Health Labor and Welfare Committee (shūgiin kōsei rōdō iinkai) decrying the government's failure to acknowledge the scale of the public health crisis or deal with it adequately. For Kyoko Selden's translation of the speech, see here.

²⁶ This is the conclusion drawn in anthropologist Aya Hirata Kimura's major new book Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima (Duke, 2016). Kimura argues that mothers who band together to monitor food safety after Fukushima are constrained by three mutually constitutive social forces: “scientism,” neoliberalism, and post-feminism. When they measure and publicize radiation in food, their work is recognized as “scientific,” but only to the degree that it satisfies the neoliberal expectation that private citizens take care of themselves rather than count on state protection. Like the philanthropic work of civil society writ large, which is allowed to compensate for aggressive profiteering but never question it, citizen science is gendered female: nurturing, non-productive, and non-threatening. In Kimura's analysis, the result is classic post-feminism: female citizen-scientists are allowed “an entry into the public sphere, but only on the condition of complacency with the existing power structure and of adherence to hegemonic femininity”(17). See Aya Hirata Kimura, Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima (Duke University Press, 2016).

²⁷ The respite care center in Shiribeshi, Rusutsu-mura is run by Noro Mika and her organization “Bridge to Chernobyl,” which began collaborating with Smolnikova's non-profit “Children of Chernobyl” in the early 1990s. For a biographical sketch of Noro, see here. The vegetable co-op is overseen by Sasaki Ruri at the Shingyōji Temple run by her husband, Pure Land priest Sasaki Michinori. For profiles and interviews with both Ruri and Michinori, see Iwakami Yasumi, Hyakunin hyakuwa dainishū (Tokyo: San'ichi shobo, 2014) 189-209.

²⁸ We see them react incredulously as the Review Board (kentō iinkai) of the 14^th Fukushima Prefectural Health Survey (kenmin kenkō chōsa) announces that a 100-fold increase in thyroid cancer is the result of more extensive screening, not actual illness. For the published results of the survey see here. One of the anti-nuclear rallies they attend is the “Million Mothers' Tanabata Project” (Hyakuman'nin no hahatachi tanabata purojekuto) on 7 July 2013. For background see here.

²⁹ The map charts standards outlined in a piece of Belarusian legislation from November 12, 1991 that Kamanaka also introduces visually (in Russian,) “On the Legal Status of Territories Contaminated as a Result of the Chernobyl Accident.” See English translation.

³⁰ In another scene we see Smolnikova explain to mothers in a Belarusian community center that “you can remove half the radiation in a child's body in 21 days” (1:09:05). At the hoyō center in Hokkaido, Bridge to Chernobyl NPO Director Noro Mika discusses hoyō in terms of one month: “It's hard work to go from 20 Becquerels to ND (not detected) in one month” (1:35:20). Interpreting the results of the Hokkaido urinalysis by bar graph (1:38:14), Kamanaka's voiceover highlights one boy whose numbers plummeted by 70% in just 12 days. As if in response to viewers' surprise that so much can be accomplished in so short a time, Noro says, “back [when we first started treating children from Chernobyl], we didn't understand why they recuperated so quickly. But now we think the reason kids recover in three weeks is because they're kids.”