Nuclear ghost: Atomic livelihoods in Fukushima's Gray Zone By RyoMorimoto, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 2023. 339 pp.

What do you do with knowledge? Ryo Morimoto's ethnography of post-3.11 Fukushima, Japan, and the lifeways of residents who choose to stay despite the ongoing damage caused by the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster at the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO)’s nuclear power plant, focuses on Minamisōma, a “supposedly unremarkable place with [a] hypervisualized threat of radiation” (245). Wielding his Geiger counter, Morimoto offers the reading to Hatsumi, the elderly woman whose acerbic, wise, and weary insights orient his analysis. “What do you do with the knowledge of [your Geiger counter]?” Hatsumi angrily asks him (16). In what way would a seemingly “objective” measure of something invisible be mobilized, used, with what intentions and consequences? Morimoto's initial desire to document the harms done to communities as collateral damage of Japan's nuclear complex, structured by the inequalities of rural-urban divides in which the hinterlands sacrifice for the production of Tokyo's electricity, bumped up against Hatsumi's query. And if numerical measures of radiation might be used, so might ethnographic research. There are hazards in replicating damage-centered public discourses. What story should the ethnographer of post-3.11 Japan tells? What are the stakes of scientific knowledge production more broadly, including ethnographic knowledge that parses “shapeshifting science, politics, laws, and media reports” (239)? The “nuclear ghost” of Morimoto's title is a concept offered by Hatsumi early in his research and, like his early fieldwork realizations that he was looking at the wrong things for the wrong reasons, reappears throughout the text. The nuclear ghost encapsulates the experience of post-3.11 Japan in which something invisible and scary becomes hyper-visualized (through public representations, radiation monitoring stations, plastic bags filled with contaminated soil, Morimoto's own Geiger counter), eclipsing the people, lifeways, and stories that, Morimoto argues, are the proper object of attention. However, we should not disregard radiation's dangers. For many of Morimoto's interlocutors, living with radiation in one's home, cultivating the soil that generations have cultivated, is the condition of living a meaningful life and dying a good death. Ecologically interlinked webs of en—ineffable connections—emplace people and their relationships in context. Detangling the often-contradictory science-in-development surrounding radiation exposure and decontamination, Morimoto shows how “reasonable” exposure means different things to different people, and well-being must be understood holistically. Fukushima's “gray zone” refers to both geographical spaces marked by shifting evacuation zone designations (Chapter 3), with equally shifting policies that determine compensation for residents (Chapter 4), and the epistemological indeterminacies surrounding radiation's short- and long-term impacts. Political decisions (that led, rather than followed, scientific determinations) produced the “divided community” of Minamisōma, where “contaminants fell unevenly on top of preexisting social, cultural, and political boundaries, which residents continuously lived within and used to reorient themselves to the post-3.11 world” (52). Reorientations toward the topic of radiation were strategic, pragmatic, and existential. In one key passage (137), Morimoto describes how from the perspective of people holding antinuclear or antigovernmental political positions, “the TEPCO accident had to remain dangerous”; other people had stakes in maintaining specific levels of governmental compensation for lost and damaged property, so “the contamination from the TEPCO accident had to be deemed unsafe.” For others, like Morimoto's elderly interlocutors who hoped to return home to “die well,” “the persistent presence of contaminants and the associated compensation were signs of an extended period of alienation that needed to end” (137). Different actors needed different things from social and scientific consensus, though consensus was not to be found. In its absence, the question was, indeed, what to do—is it safe to go home?—and how desires, in addition to damage, oriented people's actions. In this context, Morimoto's book explores “the limits of science as the dominant approach to confronting an invisible hazard in society” (137), an orientation familiar to many in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a hefty ethnography, and I could imagine teaching chapters in undergraduate and graduate seminars in medical anthropology, environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and Japanese studies. My favorite chapters were the more tightly focused. For instance, Chapter 5, “Radioactive Mosquitoes and the Science of Half-Lives,” juxtaposes Morimoto's participation in Radiation Safety Officer training at Columbia University with a radiation-focused radio show in Fukushima by a scientist called Dr. Tsubokura. The theme for Safety Officer training was to keep radiation exposure “as low as reasonably achievable” (123), while simultaneously, public concern about radiation was represented as “unscientific” and “phobia-driven” (124). In contrast, Dr. Tsubokura understood people's desire for locally specific data. By accounting for local ecologies and social networks, he gave nuanced attention to how residents might make informed risk-reduction decisions. Morimoto's own message aligns with that of Dr. Tsubokura: while radiation is indeed harmful, there are other potentially more devastating harms—like secondary health risks of evacuation—that neither the state nor public discourses about the TEPCO accident sufficiently attend to. These other risks could have been discussed in more detail in the book, and one has the impression that the elision of residents’ narratives is, from the ethnographer's perspective, as devastating as any health impact. Another fantastic chapter, Chapter 9, “A Wild Boar Chase,” focuses on state inattention to ecological context in remediation strategies. It turns out that the Japanese government had been chasing wild boars away from exclusion zones, without considering where the boars went. This chapter beautifully and tragically elaborates how “decontamination has produced an ecology of harm in coastal Fukushima that has rendered locals, wild boars, local food chains, and the land itself complicit in the production of nuclear waste” (216). Boars—which happily inhabit land disturbed by human cultivation, eat the delicious foods humans normally forage, and are normally a human food source—were now hunted only to be incinerated as nuclear waste. This book “about” post-3.11 Fukushima is relevant to topics far beyond. There are many resonances in Morimoto's findings with my own recent work connected to a devastating local fire in the wildland-urban interface of Boulder County, Colorado—in the community divisions regarding who is considered a legitimate “sufferer” (4) and whether it is worse to lose one's home, or have one's home intact but indeterminately contaminated (50). My collaborations with atmospheric scientists on often invisible air pollution made knowable through technoscientific measurements speak to the same complicated relationships between quantifiable data and subjective experiences that Morimoto tracks, in which quantitative “data do not necessarily validate or speak to individuals’ subjective experiences, and, at times, the data might deny them” (134). Morimoto's book presses us to consider anew the role of visibility and invisibility in perceiving and knowing. Technoscientific advances have long made visible otherwise imperceptible phenomena. Is the “nuclear ghost” truly scarier because radiation is invisible (114)? What is intangible is also easier to ignore, and distance enables the illusion of safety. As with other forms of energy generation, “[n]uclear power is a social technology that produces and reproduces a community of the exposable,” and Morimoto reminds us that “public and political discourse [should] pay attention to individual stories and local histories behind exposure” (237). In the North American context, the concept of an environmental justice community might be a double-edged sword, as damage-centered narratives elide the complicated attachments people may feel to their land and even to polluting industries, often a source of livelihood. While highlighting intersectional and disproportionate harms, the concept also cordons off those communities from the rest. There is power in arguing, as Morimoto does, that “[w]e have all been living in the same radioactive world” (234). The stakes belong to all of us.