I began to sweat profusely when my Geiger counter registered a radiation level of 13 microsieverts per hour—a number that indicated a high level of radioactivity. Worried, I glanced at my guide, Mr. Kan’no. The latter seems unperturbed, replying with a wry smile: “See? I told you the radiation level would be high near the gate!” Mr. Kan’no is not …
by Anne Allison
Duke University Press, 2013. 246 pages
The March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster in Northern Japan illuminated and deepened a sense of vulnerability for people across the nation that, as Anne Allison argues in Precarious Japan, significantly predated this “triple disaster.” Author of three other major books on the cultural …
Fukushima: from the coasts of India’s Tamil Nadu to the halls of the German Bundestag, the word now stands for danger and deception, contamination and vulnerability. Every day brings new distress. Cesium-137 clings tenaciously to the soil and buildings of northeastern Japan. Radioactive fish promenade across the Pacific. Over 40% of children examined by the Fukushima Prefecture Health Management Survey …
The March 11, 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami caused the deaths of approximately 16,000 persons, left more than 6,000 injured and 2,713 missing, destroyed or partially damaged nearly one million buildings, and produced at least $14.5 billion in damages. The earthquake also caused a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Japan’s eastern coast. After reading the …
CULTURE AND NATURE
It is important to consider the role that societal and institutional factors play in the relationship between ‘natural’ disasters and the causes of social suffering. It is too simple to call natural disasters ‘natural’, as they happen in a particular social and cultural context. When attempting to understand how and why natural disasters can cause social suffering, …
This post was contributed by Sarah D. Phillips (Indiana University, Bloomington)
For a time, it seemed as if the 25th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster might come and go relatively unnoticed and unremarked, at least by those persons with no direct experience of it. The nuclear accident at Chernobyl (Chornobyl’ in Ukrainian) came to be seen as a …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology