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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents an analysis of the changing human-soil relations between the Japanese state, citizens, and scientists, through the local practice of Madei (soil care) in Iitate, to grapple with the uncertainties of lingering radioactivity.

Paper long abstract:

In the toxic atmosphere filled with radiation released from Japan's melted nuclear reactors and sunken in farmlands and forests, farmers are now interacting and struggling with soil and other creatures to revitalize an environment that they want to make liveable again.

Iitate is a village in Fukushima demarcated as the forced evacuation zone shortly after the nuclear disaster. After its reopening in April 2017, I lived in Iitate to learn from farmers their actions in response to the state's patchy decontamination efforts. Attending to the practice of Madei, I witnessed how farmers negotiated the state's food safety standards implemented in the name of protecting public health. I ask: what is ordinary life in a radioactive atmosphere, and how can it be made possible?

I trace the collaborations between Iitate farmers, scientists/experts and Tokyo citizens who deploy innovative technologies to take care of the soils on which a new agriculture is experimented. Together, they designed this digitized agriculture to enfold the new givens concerning radiation—bodily permeability, abandonment of farmlands and state violence inflicted on farmers—into everyday realities embedded in juxtaposition and competition with the state's programs of revival and rehabilitation.

In Madei, the emergent human-soil relation repairs the breakdown of ecological cycles that farmers had practiced for centuries; it also opens up a temporality questioning a progressivist future envisioned by the state's technoscience, and re-animating an ordinary livelihood that I posit "contaminated but safe" in the altered ecologies of post-Fukushima Japan.