In trying to understand the situation in Japan I have started reading Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan edited by Jeff Kingston. It is a compilation of essays published in 2012 in a quick response to the disaster at Fukushima. On March 3, 2011 a 9.0 Mw earthquake hit Japan off of the northeast coast near the Iwate prefecture.
The resulting tsunami caught Japan underprepared despite warnings. It is not uncommon for alarms to be set off but in the end the typhoon ends up passing over or the earthquake doesn’t cause as much damage as predicted. This can easily lead to “the boy who cried wolf” approach to emergency response which unfortunately seems to be a contributor in this situation.The bulk of the damage came from the tsunami that the earthquake caused, which aside from all of the immediate and volatile damage such as radioactive contamination, nuclear waste being dumped into the ocean, families being relocated, etc. it still has effects on even the very shorelines of Japan. According to the introduction of this book, Honshu (the main island of Japan) is now permanently shifted 2.4m eastward. It is to date the most expensive natural disaster totalling 210-300 billion dollars in damages.
Rather than repeat the litany of events twice (as I want to visit the “order of events” in a later post) I will leave this for now because I want to focus on why Japan has so much nuclear power in the first place.Focusing on the chapter by Daniel Aldritch, there are networks of power active during all steps of decision making in when, where, and why to build nuclear power plants. There are many factors contributing to the pressure to build nuclear power plants such as the fact that Japan is an island nation and relies heavily on imported resources to meet its energy needs. During a campaign in the 1950s to increase self-reliance, nuclear power was championed as the means to achieve that goal.
Since then, the government and other agencies have molded public opinion to match that of the government in being pro-nuclear power. For example, even at the meetings that they would hold to discuss concerns, the questions were pre-screened so that those that would look favorable for nuclear power would be asked rather than truly challenging questions.
Similar to our case study in Honduras and other instances of exploitation, nuclear power plants are built in places where the population “allows” for it. This means that communities without strong NGOs or other elements of social capital resistant to nuclear power are targeted. Typically they are communities of elderly farmers with population decline that are more than happy to have the benefits of the income that a nuclear power plant provides. I say “more than happy” because many of these people are poor to the point that it is coercion. Not to mention that there is this kind of ethos in Japanese society. While it is beautiful in its own right, there is also something to be said when older people are willing to sacrifice themselves for the “greater good” when the good may not necessarily be all that good after all.In looking at the statistics, before the earthquake and Daiichi power plant meltdown, opposition to nuclear power plants was low. Immediately afterwards there was a spike upwards but it seems like over time the resistance is declining. This is a concept Aldritch pulls from James Jasper called political context, where the public opinion tends to support policy rather than revert to previous norms. It would seem then that nuclear power has been so inculcated as a norm as well as support by policy that not even peoples’ opinions can be swayed by such an event. At least not permanently in large numbers. There were rallies but they paled in comparison to previous rallies such as those in opposition to the presence of the US at Okinawa.
It took an accident of this magnitude for the Japanese government to even begin to reconsider their stance on nuclear power and their plan to execute it. While they have temporarily shut down some plants and ceased building new ones, it doesn’t look like the overall stance has changed all that much. They are putting more into renewable energy but the structure that allows for the perpetuation of the exploitation of disadvantaged communities with the building of nuclear power plants seems to still be intact. Aldritch points fingers at government officials paying more attention to petty party squabbles rather than the good of the people but that is just one side of the story.
This is really interesting! It sounds like without a political ecology approach, we would just think that many Japanese have no problem whatsoever with the nuclear power plants in their communities. But now we can understand the bigger picture!
ReplyDelete- Sophia