Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
91
[…] they draw an imaginary reward for the penance and torture themselves somehow’.
Furthermore, ‘To make their virtual reality more concrete, they stick to their traditional
customs’ and eventually ‘they set an imaginary reward for their painful ceremony’. The
‘Imaginary reward is to remove the radiation risk by training their body to be stronger against
radiation or by persuading god or heaven to clean up the contaminated world.’ Ceremonies
are held ’to measure radiation on thousands of items in a supermarket’. They ’hold these
kinds of ceremony like group enchantment’. In the end: ‘Through the ceremony, they end up
overestimating their communal activity’, which is the same conclusion reached in the report;
the overestimation of the organizational (group) priorities and goals leads to the
underestimation of the risk or of the damage to public health. Again, this cultural explanation
draws on issues of group behavior, self-penance, excessive ritualization in social acts (see
Kuwayama 1999) and biased perception of public vs. private goals and domains.
Conclusion
Whether or not Yanagita’s point on the complexity of providing an emic explanation of
Japanese cultural patters is relevant for this case is less important than pointing out why
cultural(istic) explanations have been found to be extremely relevant, both by those
‘defending’ and by those attacking the management of the Fukushima crisis. Anthropologists
have provided abundant worldwide demonstration of the risks involved in using culture as an
overarching explanatory paradigm. Yet, the task of anthropologists is to detect how cultural
features work, and how they are internalized and externalized in daily practices.
Unfortunately, the Fukusmima case is one in which thick descriptions of culture are turned
into politicized means in order to blame or to essentialize the responsibility of Japan in ways
that are extremely evocative, and at times rather convincing, but confusing. Can this help to
explain why Benedict’s book was so successful? I believe that the answer lies in the ways in
which the nuclear accident has been protrayed: using cultural stigmatizations carries the
obvious advantage of dispensing with requiring more insightful analyses of social and
political responsibilities. This point calls for attention from anthropologists, who are in the
uncomfortable position of studying and describing culture not only in order to contribute to
scholarship and science, but to investigate the use that cultural paradigms may have in
justifying planet-scale failures, such as the management of the Fukushima accident.
