Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Japan has a well-developed culture of museum, including museums about nuclear energy. Through a comparative and longitudinal study of three of them, before and after the Fukushima accident, I would like to interrogate the evolution of narrative from nuclear success to disaster-management success.

Paper long abstract

Japan has a long tradition of various museums, including disaster museums. But some museums also deploy a narrative of success, such as the museums of nuclear energy built close to nuclear power plants, which present a narrative accompanying Japan's economic miracle. In 2009, I conducted research on one of them, the Rokkasho-mura PR Center built close to the Nuclear Reprocessing Plant of the village.

However, the situation changed drastically after the March 11, 2011 nuclear disaster of Fukushima. Most of the nuclear museums closed temporarily, but some also closed permanently, such as the Denryoku PR Center of TEPCO, a seven-floor building located in the central district of Shibuya, Tokyo. Others that I would like to study here reopened, such as the nuclear energy PR center of Tomioka, located 10 km south of Fukushima Daiichi, reconverted as a Decommissioning Archive center. Finally, a new memorial has emerged: the Fukushima nuclear disaster memorial in Futaba.

What was the change in narratives before and after Fukushima? My hypothesis here is that nothing radically changed, and that a shift from a nuclear success story to a nuclear disaster management success story occurred.

To explain this shift, I will first explore the narrative of the nuclear industry as irreducibly based on a techno-scientific promise; then I will show that it is combined here with a culture of resilience that I call the Japanese “grammar of disasters”; finally, I will suggest that these narratives have a pragmatist efficiency, rendering possible actions through a counterfactual future.