ABSTRACT
The Introduction outlines the background and central goal of the book. In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following this experience, Japan banned the ‘military use of atomic power’. Simultaneously, leaders pursued a national policy of developing nuclear power plants, with the ‘peaceful use of atomic power’ becoming an important part of Japan’s post-war national identity. For this reason, over 70% of the public supported nuclear power before the Fukushima disaster. This consensus changed rapidly once the disaster occurred, with fierce anti-nuclear sentiment voiced in newspapers, TV stations, and magazines and by scientists and intellectuals from the humanities and social sciences. A significant proportion of the public shifted their view, with the majority now in favour of abandoning the use of nuclear power. However, the anti-nuclear power arguments after Fukushima are quite diverse. Although some of them discuss the problems of democracy and climate change, others touch upon the ‘taboo’ subject of Japan’s latent capacity for developing nuclear weapons. Intellectuals frequently seek to question Japanese modernity critically. Therefore, the author suggests that we ought to locate post-Fukushima discourse within the context of ‘disaster culture’ in modern Japanese history.
