Containment Contested: Sawada Shoji and the Atomic-Bomb Dosimetry System

• In Event: Opening up Containment: Spaces, Trajectories, and Forms of Life - II

Abstract

In radiation protection, containment and contamination define each other. An area is “contaminated” when radioactive materials become concentrated to a level outside a containment. Yet what scientific knowledge defines contamination and therefore containment?

Perhaps ironically, what underpins the current practices of containment is the worst contamination event in history: the atomic-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since 1947, the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) and its successor the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) have extensively studied the health effects of radiation using data gleaned from the bodies of survivors. Importantly, the atomic-bomb dosimetry system that ABCC/RERF has developed provides individual dose estimates for survivors, allowing scientists to calculate how radiation doses correlate to observed health outcomes. The radiation protection community throughout the world depends on these estimates of risk defined by the epidemiological studies conducted at ABCC/RERF.

This paper introduces theoretical particle physicist Shoji Sawada (1931- ), who is himself a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing. Since the 1990s, Sawada has contested—both in scientific and legal realms—the ABCC’s dosimetry system, which he believes “completely ignores the effects of the residual radiation.” He suggests that a different conceptualization of time, space, and body is necessary when modelling how the survivors were irradiated.

Drawing on interviews with Sawada, published scientific papers, and legal documents, I explore why and how Sawada challenges the established atomic-bomb dosimetry system as the basis of containment practices. More broadly, I examine the instability and epistemological tensions that containment practices may entail.

Author

• Sumiko Hatakeyama, University of Pennsylvania