Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. xiv, 210 pp. (Table, maps, illustration.) US$23.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6199-2.
The triple disaster and especially the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plants on March 11, 2011 posed and still pose serious problems to food safety, the livelihoods of Tohoku farmers, and citizen trust in government institutions and the nuclear industry. However, six years after the triple disaster, the Japanese government assures its citizens and the international community that the situation at the destroyed reactors, as well as radiation in air, soil, and food, is under control thanks to continued decontamination efforts and new food safety thresholds for radionuclides. Accordingly, there is nothing to worry about ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Aya Hirata Kimura’s book on the politics of food contamination in post-Fukushima Japan challenges this proposition. She subtly shows how the government, together with economic and civil society actors, worked hard to achieve a quick solution and to construct an endpoint for the radiation problem. This was achieved with a particular type of food policing that emerged from the interplay of neoliberalism, post-feminism, and scientism. The book focuses on how this food policing affected the everyday lives of concerned citizens and especially women and parents. Kimura discusses how their worries about possible radioactive contamination of school lunches and food in general were silenced by discrediting and ridiculing them as irrational “radiation brain moms” (hōshanō mama, a pun with the words for radiation and brain) who spread harmful rumors (fūhyō higai) and were suspected of questioning and undermining national solidarity, progress, and reconstruction. Drawing on the concept of food policing, which “refers to the censoring of people’s concerns about food safety in the name of science, risk analysis, and economy,” Kimura analyzes “the complicated relationship between citizen science and politics in post-Fukushima Japan” (5). She asks what happened to those citizens and citizen scientists who challenged the picture of normalcy, why they did not play a larger role in the antinuclear movement, and why food did not become an effective rallying point for social movements in post-Fukushima Japan.
This timely and well-researched book is the second monograph by gender and food sociologist Aya Hirata Kimura. Based on the author’s deep knowledge of scholarship from science and technology studies (STS), food studies, and gender studies, this empirically saturated study is grounded in extensive fieldwork in Japan from 2011 to 2014. In five chapters, the author presents exciting and often disturbing insights into (1) gendered food policing in Japan; (2) women’s and civil society’s role in radiation risk communication; (3) the school lunch movement; (4) the emergence and activities of citizen radiation monitoring organizations (CRMOs); and (5) the temporality of CRMOs and radioactive contaminants. Drawing on interviews with activists from the school lunch movement, members of 65 CRMOs, and (local) government officials, their perspectives, experiences, and realities are captured in this book and provide strong evidence for the author’s claims. Most importantly, Kimura argues that the understanding of post-Fukushima dynamics would be severely limited if it were simply seen as a case of effective government information control that silenced citizen scientists. Rather, it is the notion of the citizen itself that has changed and constrained citizen activism and citizen scientists due to a combination of the broader forces of neoliberalism, scientism, and post-feminism. This has led to collaborations between civil society and the government, the idea of individuals’ self-responsibility in coping with risks, and has reinforced notions of citizenship that largely excluded political activism as inappropriate, especially for women. Instead, they are “expected to act in accordance with dominant scientific knowledge and as rational economic beings and to eat foods despite safety concerns so as not to disturb economic prosperity” (5). CRMOs were founded against the backdrop of the government’s risk communication efforts that increasingly included local women, because of people’s distrust in the Japanese government’s claim that food on the market was safe. Although they claimed they were apolitical and only interested in testing food, Kimura calls their practices “survival politics” and stresses their subversive character. However, due to the temporality of contamination and financial difficulties, the number of CRMOs has been declining since 2013. Kimura argues not only that this is a great loss for a society not immune from radiation threats, but that CRMOs ought to be considered a feature of the normal governance of food safety.
Because of its interdisciplinary character, this book contributes to conversations in many scholarly fields, such as gender studies, food studies, STS, Japanese studies, and the study of social movements and civil societies. Unimpressed by disciplinary boundaries, Kimura gives a full account of the complexity of the issues she addresses by creating cross-disciplinary linkages that help readers to see the radioactive contamination of food in post-Fukushima Japan from new and multiple perspectives. And this is not only a book on Japan: Kimura situates and connects post-Fukushima Japan with previous nuclear disasters and the international radiation governance system. In a more general sense, this book stands out, because it reminds us that scholarship is never objective, that social science scholars have to position themselves and that the thin line between scholarship and activism is often blurred. The greatest achievement of this book, however, is to give the marginalized women and citizen scientists a voice outside of Japan.
In summary, this book is a must-read for everyone who is interested in the perspectives of concerned citizens in post-Fukushima Japan and their strategies to cope with the government’s and other actors’ pressure to return to normal, as well as for scholars and students of Japan and food safety and social movement researchers. For scholars of Japan’s civil society, the book illustrates the plurality but also limitations of citizen activism and challenges older and more conventional definitions of activism, social movements, and civil society.
Cornelia Reiher
Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
pp. 816-818