Connecting Fukushima to Hiroshima and Okinawa: Nuclear Disaster and Global Politics in East Asia

• In Event: Global Concern, Local Solutions: Community, Development, and Eco-politics in East Asia

Abstract

The Fukushima Incident in 2011 triggered heated debate on nuclear power in countries all over the world. In addition to practical issues such as nuclear power safety, radioactive pollution, and nuclear waste disposal, political and social dimensions of the nuclear issue have also been highlighted to expose the political and economic structures and mechanisms that buttress the “nuclear myth.” This paper deals with Tsushima Yuko’s novel The Wildcat Dome (2013), in which a traumatic childhood experience casts its shadow over the lives of mixed-blood orphans of American soldiers and Japanese women. In the story, the Fukushima nuclear disaster evokes memories of US military actions in the postwar period—from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Bikini atomic experiments, the American war in Vietnam, to the September 11 attacks. Discussing how literary imagination works to challenge the ideology of capitalist developmentalism orchestrated by an alliance of Western neo-imperialist and local bureaucrats and capitalists, this paper explores the possibility of a postcolonial, post-development ecocriticism that makes visible the workings of global power relations in environmental issues in terms of race, class, and gender.

Author

• Huei-chu Chu, National Chung Hsing University