Nuclear ghost: Atomic livelihoods in Fukushima's gray zone By Ryo Morimoto. Oakland: University California of Press, 2023. 356 pp.

Nuclear Ghost is a compelling ethnography of the TEPCO nuclear accident in Japan, often referred to as the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In it, Ryo Morimoto urges us to consider the multiplicities of harm and loss that dynamically unfold in relation to the spectacle of radiation. He powerfully argues that when technoscientific actors apprehend nuclear disaster solely as the dehistoricized, decontextualized dispersal of radioactive fallout, they produce invisibilized forms of harm that rupture the social, cultural, and ecological fabric of fallout communities. He names this process “half-life politics.” The central, titular concept of the “nuclear ghost” draws attention to residents’ situated and shifting experiences of nuclear catastrophe and radiation. In this landscape, evacuees and residents of coastal Fukushima pursue “atomic livelihoods” that are nuclear in the sense of being formed in intimate relation to the semiotic production of radioactive fallout, and subject to social disintegrations caused by nuclear disaster and its management. These experiences are affected by the technoscientific production of nuclear disaster, but they are not dependent on it alone. They are shaped by intergenerational dynamics, multispecies relationships, local histories of development, and supernatural orders. By following en, or connections given meaning by one's openness to their guidance and belief in their significance, Morimoto endeavors to depict invisibilized forms of harm that can be understood only through valuing residents’ situated knowledges, memories, and histories. Additionally, Morimoto's concept of “critical ethnography” is a wonderful contribution that names important transdisciplinary work being developed in the anthropology of toxicity. The ethnography consists of an introduction, nine chapters, and an epilogue. They follow a roughly chronological order, expanding on shifting losses occluded by the technoscientific management of the disaster from 2013 to 2022. Chapters 1 and 2 guide us through two journeys in Minamisōma, a city in coastal Fukushima. The first traces discourses that figure Minamisōma as part of northeastern Japan, Tokyo's internal colony, and as an exemplar of what Morimoto terms “the spectacle of radiation exposure.” It stages the differences between how outsiders, multiply defined, might view Minamisōma and how residents navigate these apprehensions. The second chapter retraces Minamisōma alongside nuclear evacuees and residents as they navigate distance, radioactive contamination, and its symbolic primacy in the “post”-disaster environment. This chapter introduces the temporal, spatial, and social displacements produced by half-life politics, as well as the fragmentation of language they cause. These harms begin to gain definition in chapters 3 to 7. Morimoto begins by establishing the intergenerational divisions that are created through half-life politics and how discourses of “harmful rumor” organize space around the specter of symbolic contamination. Chapter 4 explores the contradictions of compensation policies and how they solidify “social, economic, and moral differences” (p. 103) among residents. Chapter 5 explores the effects of demands on residents to simultaneously inhabit the positions of “exposed victim” for the public and “experimental body” for the medical community. It focuses especially on the tensions created by the primacy of scientific discourse, which sometimes invalidates experiences of living with radioactive fallout. By weaving together participant observation of a tour of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and a trip to the town of Futaba as part of a disaster heritage preservation group, chapter 6 further explores the tensions between the hypervisibility generated by “harmful rumor” and the simultaneous unfolding of fūka, or the collective forgetting of the accident. Chapter 7 illustrates how decontamination homogenizes the intimate histories and memories that situate residents in their homes and neighborhoods. The final chapters continue to elaborate on the harms of half-life politics while expanding on the concept of en. Notable here is the attention paid to nonhuman actors such as trees and boars. Chapter 8 explores the losses of local history and spirituality created by half-life politics. The supernatural emerges as part of the invisible realm affecting social life, shaping local engagements with the nuclear disaster. Chapter 9, which culminates the ethnography, poignantly illustrates the harms to interspecies intimacy that are created by the technoscientific management of radioactive fallout. Finally, the epilogue offers a concluding meditation on en and residents’ intergenerational hopes. Despite compelling arguments established through dedicated research, the ethnography could have benefited from a more thorough analysis of the relationship between the technoscientific and the biomedical, and a more thorough sociohistorical contextualization of the particular form of disembodying technoscience that produces “half-life politics.” Though biomedical discourses about radioactive fallout are critiqued throughout, there is a startlingly near-total elision of STS scholarship on biomedical science's relationship to nuclear-affected communities, including established critiques of foundational biomedical studies on atomic bomb survivors as well as contemporary debates concerning Fukushima. Meanwhile, several key sections present state biomedical discourses as unproblematized “science.” This paradoxically makes the biomedical a central object of critique on ethnographic grounds, but exempt on scientific or political economic grounds. Consequently, the ethnography occasionally reproduces conventional binarisms of scientific fact/psychological reality and objectivity/subjectivity. A more expansive definition of technoscience may have strengthened Morimoto's arguments and allowed him to more thoroughly consider how radioactive fallout is made both hypervisible and insubstantial in different spaces within nuclear geography. Yet the extreme difficulty of writing about the TEPCO nuclear disaster while holding the multiplicities of division and harm created through its management should also be acknowledged. Morimoto's work is commendable for the deep care he takes for his interlocutors and the painstaking thoroughness of his fieldwork, which are so clearly evident throughout his ethnography. Moreover, the intellectual breadth of Morimoto's scholarship is admirable. He places his analysis in conversation with political ecology, disaster studies, science and technology studies, environmental anthropology, and Japanese environmental theory. He also substantially counteracts the marginalization of Japanese scholarship on the TEPCO nuclear disaster, though here again the local literature critiquing state biomedical discourse is omitted or not thoroughly engaged. His ethnography is accessibly written and has many compelling moments that convey the multifaceted effects of nuclear disaster management with the granular detail produced by dedicated ethnographic work. This was a powerful and exquisitely written analysis of coastal Fukushima, one that illustrates the contributions that critical ethnography can make to the study of technoscience and disaster.