Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
83
Cultural Reverberations among Fukushima Radiations:
Institutional vs Emotional Versions of the Nuclear Accident.
Davide Torsello
(CEU Business School, Hungary)
For centuries, Japanese culture has attracted the interest of foreign scholars of different disciplines, who were
intrigued by several aspects that appeared to them of difficult understanding. One feature that has been of
particular concern, mainly among anthropologists, is the overt contradiction between some forms of thought,
values and customs. The management of the Fukushima nuclear crisis has offered the world yet another example
of this contradiction. On the one hand, Japan has been able to recover from the natural disaster with a quickness
and firmness of ground-level responses that seems unprecedented. On the other hand, the slowness and lack of
preparation in dealing with the nuclear accident have raised concern across the world. In this article I show that
cultural explanations have been used to justify this discrepancy and to attribute the inability to manage the crisis
to regulatory and organizational forces. Cultural analyses have been politicized to allow both rhetoric of
justification and one of accusation. I analyze some Japanese sources that explain this contradiction from the
standpoint of the official report of the Fukushima case and of an unofficial, independent blog.
Keywords
: Japan, anthropology of organizations, nuclear accident, Fukushima
One point on which scholars, anthropologists and other social scientists, and observers of
Japan have often found agreement is the coexistence, and in many cases the juxtaposition, of
different and conflicting sets of cultural responses; a fact that became obvious since the first
‘westerners’ visited the country in the late XV century. These ‘unaware ethnographers’ were
Catholic missionaries mainly from Spain, Italy and Portugal, who planned to expand their
proselytism to what at the time was named Cipangu. Reading some of the early accounts of
these religious personalities, one finds intriguing semi-ethnographic descriptions of the
Japanese population. The Japanese were depicted as extremely courteous, sincere and gentle
people, who in the eyes of these enthusiastic proselytizing agents could, much better than any
other populations encountered until then in the ‘Indian territories’, be liable to true
conversion (Tamburello 1998). This enthusiasm started to gradually cool down when the
European priests got to know better the local population and some of them witnessed directly
social acts such as some of their barbarous forms of punishment for apparently futile crimes
(such as theft of vegetables at the marketplace), or their absolute lack of emotion when
witnessing or participating in cruel events, such as executions or ritual hara-kiri (Cooper
1995). This discovery of a contradictory set of ‘cultural features’ came to the fore quite soon,
as in 1593 all missionaries were forcedly expelled out of the country and what came
infamously known as the Christians’ hunt produced several hundreds of martyrs, mainly
converted Japanese, a small group of which are still celebrated on the 6
th
of February in the
Catholic calendar.
