Wild Boar Chase: Transgressive Residues and the Anthropocentric Tale of Containment in Coastal Fukushima

• In Event: Residues: Rethinking Chemical Environments - II

Abstract

How has the fallout in coastal Fukushima, Japan and the ensuing governmental decontamination policy potentiated an unexpected material, semiotic and technopolitical assemblage of humans, non-humans and radioisotopes? Drawing from multiyear fieldwork in Fukushima, this paper mobilizes a collection of ethnographic tales to explore the pathway of radioactive residues as they emerge in a negative symbiotic relationship between humans and wild boars. These stories focus on local residents’ uncanny encounters with wild boars in their abandoned homes, tracing residents’ confrontation with boars as both familiar species and transgressive ecological agent, whose radioactive bodies escape the governmental policy’s binary logics of safety and danger.

Lurking out from the deep woods, boars have overrun the evacuated land where the government has been storing decontaminated waste since the triple disaster in 2011. As decontamination efforts advance and more people are allowed to return to their original residences, locals come to experience the hunting down and disposal of boars—a process that transforms the boars from irradiated life to radioactive waste—as a kind of return of the repressed. The unruliness of boars—and the persistent, residual nature of the irradiated materials that they consume and embody as they move across former evacuation zones—challenges the government’s anthropocentric narrative of containment that depicts nuclear waste to be locatable and containable. In this way, following the wild boars’ lives and deaths in relation to people’s shifting conceptualization of “exposure” and “contamination” illustrates a more inclusive model of radioactive waste that accounts for its uncontainable flows.

Author

• Ryo Morimoto, Princeton University