core post 5

Because my scholarly attention generally resides in and through Japan, one of the articles I selected to read from the collection of essays in Medianatures was Yoshida’s comparative work on waste and pollution between the United States and Japan. A comprehensive account of the relationships between the development of high-tech technology and the growing sophistication of material and chemical waste, he also draws the connections between “capitalist business activity, and the environmental problems caused by high-tech development.” (113) Therefore, he concludes that these environmental problems have an economic background. This isn’t surprising, or at least wasn’t surprising when I was reading it. Until I was reminded that he wrote this in 1994. Immediately following his conclusion that high-tech pollution in 80’s and 90’s Japan has economic histories and implications, he cites his earlier work The Economics of Environment and Technology (Tokyo, Aoki Shoten Publisher, 1980), where he analyzes the relationships between business practices and environmental problems. He lists 5 conclusions, but I’ll list the ones that stood out to me: 

1.     “Because of the pursuit of profit and ‘cost-down’ by businesses, svaings on environmental protection apparatuses causes environmental disruption.”

2.     “Severe competition for new brands & chemical developments within a limited time by big companies forces them to omit the installation of safety check of new products.”

Immediately, I thought of the Fukushima Nuclear disaster and the recent acquittal of the three former Tokyo Electric Power company executives accused of criminal negligence for their roles in the Fukushima meltdown. Although the company itself still faces civil litigation, the executives claimed that there the subsequent disaster following the earthquake was somehow unforeseeable. In 2012, Japan’s NAIIC found that the causes of the accident had been foreseeable, but more importantly, TEPCO had failed to meet the basic safety requirements, such as risk assessment, preparing for containing collateral damage, and developing evacuation plans. Such requirements certainly fall under the parameters of the companies opting to omit the installation of safety checks and environmental protection apparatuses, as Yoshida concluded—but more importantly, warned. 

Anne Allison’s Precarious Japan (2013) examines Japan’s structural conditions and socioeconomic lives post-3/11. One of the chapters specifically deals with Fukushima and how the disaster has since affected these families who were forced to evacuate, displacing a lot of their family and work to “safe” regions/towns. However, for those families who weren’t able to find employment in these other areas, they felt compelled to return, or at least reside, in areas that still risked contamination. At the current pace of the clean-up program, it’s estimated that decontamination will take 30-40 years. However, that “time” is something that these families and individuals can’t afford to lose; many of these families and groups are upwards of 40. 

The readings have addressed the subtleties of waste and addressing the myth immateriality/invisibility of waste. Obfuscation has been the leitmotif in many of the weeks of the class, as we have all keenly noted the ways that obfuscation has been configured deliberately or unintentionally, illuminating the ways that technology or the "digital" is this or isn’t that. With that being said, the Fukushima disaster and its aftermath, seems to be the disastrous and explosive culmination of 'immaterial" relations among high-tech, the economic and political relations in hand, the social repercussions being unearthed. It only took one of the largest earthquakes, recorded tsunamis, and natural disasters to show what Yoshida had concluded and warned about 3 decades prior.