we are talking today with dr robert jacobs dr robert jacobs is a historian studying the social and cultural aspects of nuclear technologies at the hiroshima peace institute of hiroshima city university in japan he is the principal investigator of the global hibakusha project that explores the social and cultural aspects of radiation exposure is around the globe primarily and nuclear test site communities nuclear production communities and nuclear accident sites he is the author of the dragon's tail americans face the atomic age the editor of filling the hole in the nuclear future art and popular culture respond to the bomb and coeditor  so tell us how did you get interested in nuclear issues i actually got interested in nuclear issues by being afraid of nuclear weapons when i was a child i was taught in school in the sixt s i don't know that it was duck and cover but it was some similar material it was about how to how to recognize a nuclear attack and what to do in case of a nuclear attack there was a variety of programs in the fifty's especially to train children how to survive nuclear attacks directly and so i remember i receive this training in third grade and always in this training they say that you need to be hyper vigilant for the flash the bright white flash of a nuclear weapon that's the first sign and then you're supposed to know what to do after you see the flash and i remember going home to my house in suburban chicago after school that day and sitting on the front steps of my house and imagining the house behind me dissolve ing and imagining the houses on the street where i was sitting all dissolve ing and i was sitting there waiting for that white light and i think it was i think was probably the time when i had first was aware of my own mortality but it was completely connected with nuclear weapons and i became very afraid of nuclear weapons so my means of coping with that was i began to read books about them and i pretty much still still reading so it was fear childhood fear of nuclear attack  that made me fixate on nuclear issues and i've stayed largely fixated on it for most of my life just occurred to me that must've created an entire generation of children that reacted badly to the flash of like polaroid cameras we're talking about about the same time well you know one of the things that i've read over the years a lot of his accounts by baby boomers of their atomic fears when they were teenagers and when they were children and there's one there's one that i recall reading where there was some bright flash that happened something flash in the kitchen and a kid was talking later about how he this is the most embarrassing moment of his childhood he jumped behind the couch and he held there you know it's happening it's happening the war is happening you know and then and all the family laughed at him because it was just something that that flashed in the kitchen but people walked around with a lot of anxiety and i think one of the things that's always occurred to me is that for for that in american culture for americans after world war one the depression world war two when you have a cold war i think after seeing all capacity or the maturity to do what it takes to avoid that so i think kinds of people walked around with a lot of anxiety you know here one of the things that's most compelling about nuclear weaponry is that we have essentially powers that that had been reserved to the gods in earlier civilizations the power to destroy life on earth the power to end the world these are things that gods could do not human beings w after world war two we realized human beings now have this power and we know human beings are mundine spiteful petty creatures we hope gods have higher motivations and higher insight but we know what human beings are like so for human beings to have this godlike power just seemed it's seemed almost as though there was no way to avoid a tragedy and yet it seems today in our current society that that feeling of inevitable use of these weapons it has disappeared but the chances of them still being news is just as high as it was back during the cold war yes absolutely as a matter of fact in some ways it may be higher because in cold war in the during the cold war because of the danger of escalating to a full global thermonuclear war i think there was a lot more pressure in place to keep the slightest thing from happening because because it did lead to that potential whereas now it's much more likely you could have a nuclear weapon detonated it would not trigger a massive exchange between the nuclear powers so i think that that sort of creates a little space for it to occur so i think it's even better potentially a more dangerous time right now so how institute akademi for me was a second career i had i had four kids fairly young i had four kids before i was thirty and i started my bachelor's degree when i was thirty with four kids so i had been a chef and i had been working in the natural food business and they were in it produce business for years and i finished my ph d in my mid forty's and and as i finished my p and i was looking for academic jobs one of the jobs that was advertised was as a historian and they were a small piece institute and i had never thought about specifically working in japan but it just was a perfect fit for them having an american who studies nuclear issues and studies american representation of the bombing of hiroshima and things like that it was just kind of a perfect fit so so i ended up living in hiroshima which is which has been really wonderful i've been there nine years now and it's great because here ocean to me like it is to most people is a mythic place and it was a mythic place and when i the first night i was there walking around by the dome it was like being in a dream but all is just home you know it's where my wife and i are going to go out for dinner it's we're going to pick up the groceries it's where all the normal things happen and it's kind of a pleasure for me too for hiroshima to shift from being this tragic place that has to bear the weight of the world or the weight of human frailty you know instead it's just home it so it was a really lovely city wonderful place to live so talk about the global project how did that come about the other the global hawk shot project is is a research project that i've been working on for several years with a colleague dr mick broderick from murdoch university in australia and there's a couple of different it it's a project that had a vision at the beginning i guess like so many things and then it it altered and we were changed by the process and it became something different than we intended it to be originally base part of the basic idea is that in in hiroshima and nagasaki there are some things idea about how to stand against nuclear weapons once the generation of people who experience nuclear attack is gone and it you know it studying nuclear the history of nuclear weaponry especially you know it was clear to people like mick and myself that unfortunately millions of people can testify to the destructive power of nuclear weapons because they have been so many nuclear weapon tests since the nuclear attacks in hiroshima and nagasaki and so in a sense i think i first heard the phrase global schon robert lifton's book where he said we are all all of us in the world because of the reach of fallout and the fear of nuclear war and we started to think about the notion of him which is a japanese word for survivor of hiroshima and nagasaki literally means explosion affected person  that that word him really needed to be expanded to have a global perspective and not just a world war two focused perspective because there were so many victims of nuclear weapons during the cold war and so what we set out to do was to collect a lot of oral histories we set out to do a couple things to collect a lot of oral histories from people living in especially nuclear test sites in nuclear production sites during the cold war about their experiences and create a book of testimony that was global in perspective most of the work that have been done on nuclear test site communities is very site specific you know which is very which is really appropriate but we saw that there was an ability to do a book of testimony that  gave that gave somebody a sense of the the breadth of this testing and how many different kinds of people and different people were affected in different places in the world the only two continents that haven't had nuclear testing are antarctica and south america every other continent has had nuclear testing so we set about to interview people and do a cross cultural history of these nuclear test site locations and and that was originally what our goal was so we began to do field work in a lot of nuclear test sites and a lot of places where nuclear accidents had happened and places of nuclear production for example hanford near here and and also with different cohorts different communities of people who had experienced exposure to radiation so we also did a lot of interviews with soldiers who took part in nuclear tests in different countries so that wasn't near the test site that might be back in france or that might be in england or here in the states  but these were people who didn't count who had you know encountered nuclear weapons and mushroom clouds on fake battlefields you know running doing maneuvers and things like that like they did in nevada so we began to talk to a lot of people who had experienced nuclear weaponry and who had experienced exposure to radiation and as we did it began to it began to shift of course what we thought when we started in a couple of different change in a couple of different ways one of the main things is that we began to really understand the depth and the invisibility of the trauma to people who who did not get sick but they don't people don't it so for example if if you were exposed to radiation from nuclear weapons has to fall out fell downwind from the test in your village on your home you wouldn't know if you were exposed to radiation or not you would think you were exposed to radiation but you wouldn't know how much radiation you were exposed to you would know how dangerous it was to stay there in that space over the course of several decades later people from your town would be dying at a higher rate because of this exposure but you don't know if that's you or not and so even people who at the end of their lives in essence they find out at the end of their lives well it didn't kill me i have led a life of trauma and a life of tremendous anxiety because of the threat of what being exposed to radiation means and so we began to talk a lot with people about how they were affected by that on certainty how they were affected by the not knowing if their children had been exposed to radiation not knowing if they had been exposed and we began to understand that that was a devastating toll that radiation and nuclear weapons took on lives that was never included in our analysis we when we talk about the cold war especially here in america when we talk about the colder we're talking about in the soviet union and maybe we're talking about some imagined spies in germany in east germany or west germany or something like that but the  cold war there were over two thousand nuclear weapons tests the cold war happened to people it happened you know in our imaginations to us and we were anxious about the cold war but there are communities that were ruined by the cold war ruined by these weapons ruined by the production of these weapons ruined by the testing of these weapons and most of those communities are in the third world there's a there's a very strong correlation between nuclear test site locations and colonialism  you don't have the french never tested weapons inside france the british never tested weapons inside the u k the french tested it first in algeria where there was a war of independence being fought so since france knew that eventually they would lose algeria they began even before the end of that war to prepare a new nuclear test site location in french polynesia so once algeria achieved independence france could move its nuclear test operations to the south pacific while in both cases these are in the far flung colonial reaches of the french of the former french empire even when you have countries testing inside their own nation they're typically testing near marginal populations for example in the us where we tested in nevada near native american tribes and mormon communities who had no political power at that time and the former soviet union existed in kazakhstan where the conflicts were not russian people and there was they were very much  stalin's security chief was in charge of their atomic program set of the cause ox that there are nomadic people they don't really have a culture so there's this kind of colonial dismissal of the integrity of societies in the and the value and worth of communities in choosing to locate nuclear test sites by those communities since there's so much nuclear weapon testing there's really a redefinition among historians of the cold war as essentially something that really was fought in the third world  we have this imaginary cold war that wasn't fought in the first world between us and the soviet union and and all kinds of people suffered anxiety worrying about nuclear war which i certainly did and worrying  about conflict and worrying about the cold war but there were a lot of places that actually were destroyed by the mechanisms of putting the cold war into place and preparing to fight the cold war those are real people and those are real bodies that were injured in communities that were destroyed and typically they were people of color they were people there were people not living in first world countries they were people that could be pushed anyways so we began to understand  we began to understand the depths of the devastation that this kind of these exposures in this testing had caused completely separate from the illness that that the weapons cost so we began to talk to people about about the  to we began to focus on the non epidemiological aspects of nuclear testing the ways in which fear of radiation devastates communities and it creates tremendous anxiety inside people and a couple of different things happened one was we were in the beginning of this work we were just to get one or two years into doing these kinds of interviews and then fukushima happened so in real time we're watching so much of what we're studying in the past be enacted in real time and as it's going on we're seeing all of this discourse be trotted out that has a long history of being used to manipulate people in lie to people and it's all being done again and and it was it was infuriating it was infuriating in a lot of ways to hear that to hear people told be told oh yes we were going to decontaminate your house when the people clear clearly they're not going to be able to decontaminate this city you know that that this is foolish but or that people who are evacuated from areas with high radiation levels will be moved back into their houses soon we hope won't the government of japan know is that a lot of these people are not moving back into their houses any time soon and it's disingenuous to lie to them so we begin to see some of the mechanisms of manipulating people's perceptions of radiation all come into play again so that in some ways started me focusing on the origins of some of that discourse for example ideas like radio phobia that it's irrational to be afraid of radiation and that this is what we're told a lot of housewives  suffering from quote radio phobia unquote which is that all of their problems are that they have undue anxiety about radiation or there's a history to how this idea of radio phobia came to be and who uses this phrase to talk about to criticize people so i began to look into the discourse of how people talk about radiation and how people minimize anxiety over radiation which has been done by the nuclear industry since the beginning of nuclear power generation so anyways seeing  shima happened just gave a real it it made us realize that people are suffering through these kinds of traumas in real time and this will keep going on you know we're historians we're looking at we're looking at what happened forty fifty years ago at a nuclear test site locations but there are people who are being dislocated from their homes being severed from their traditional lifestyles having their communities dissolved right now in northern japan because of fukushima so so we began to understand that there was a usefulness to people understanding how we talk about radiation and how we treat people who have been exposed to radiation because there are people who need to try to survive as best they can and they're in the middle of that struggle right now in japan but in terms of the project itself partly what we began to focus on in addition to this was  memory is inherited and traumatic memory is inherited in communities so how is history passed down from people who experience nuclear attack or nuclear testing once that generation passes one and one of the things that we found was that in the past between intestate communities there's been a lot of linkages but the linkages have always been at an elite level of one or two people who speak english who have the capacity to travel internationally go to conferences and tell the story of how people suffered in say the marshall islands or kazakhstan or a specific test site or a specific place where people were radiated and a lot of those connections between tests and communities have frayed as people have gotten older and people travel less while traveling to these communities we realised there was this capacity for people in communities to connect through youth partly because of the internet we were in the marshall islands and we were giving a talk to students about nuclear testing in other places other parts of the world and because the students had to write a response paper the teacher took out or the teacher asked them to write a response paper so they all took out cell phones and started to videotape us so they so they would have our talk so they could write a response paper so we realized that this was really a tool was that young people are connected in this way so we began to stage events to connect young people between nuclear tests and communities skype conversations between students in hiro students in the marshall islands and partly what we thought was that if there's a building a friendship and a building of a networking between some of these communities then they'll have more political power that part of the reason that they remain environmentally devastated and economically devastated is these are post colonial societies and they're really still suffering the ravages of colonialism so the more we network people from the young people from these places together the more capacity they have to to build political community so this last spring on the sixtieth anniversary of the bravo nuclear test in the marshall islands we had a workshop in the marshall islands with third generation  youth from kazakhstan hiroshima and in the marshall islands these are the grandchildren of people who experienced nuclear attack or nuclear testing and we trained them for four days to record oral histories how to get informed consent how to record oral histories how to edit them and now they're all gathering oral histories in their own communities in their own languages there's a certain oral history that somebody like you and i will get if we go into a community but there's a very different oral history that can be obtained by members of the young members of the community so there's so there's been a bonding now between some of the youth from these test site locations or from these nuclear locations will have another workshop this year in hiroshima so we're starting to work on networking young people from these communities together as well but we're also as i say focused a lot on looking into the history of community devastation from radiation exposure will some of these oral histories be made available to the general public you know like websites absolutely yeah we're definitely build a website and one of the things is that all of the world histories that we do are remain the possession of the person who gave the oral history we certainly found that it was the case that a lot of there was a lot of skepticism in a lot of communities when we came in like oh one more one more white academic here to record my oral history and that there'd been a long history of people showing up shoving a microphone in someone's face and then leaving and nothing changing at all there and nothing nobody even knowing what happens to their interview so we always so we always make sure that the people know that they own the interview and we won't reproduce it with their permission so it's a fairly complicated thing to assemble the website we also have we're also focused on translating the interviews into the languages of all the participating culture so that we feel it's important for a marshallese person to be able to hear the testimony of a casaca villager and hear it in marshallese instead of everybody have to come to the colonial language of english in order to communicate so but anyways it was it was partly understanding the way that these that stories are sort of the last resource in a lot of these communities that are being extracted colonial me by journalists and academics and people like myself that led us to start thinking about what it was how we could bring resources to communities to these communities which began to focus on young people so my colleague mick broderick had been doing work training young filmmakers in rwanda how to make films using cell phone cameras and things like that so he just basically adapted some of these techniques to teaching students how to record oral history with cell phones so it seems with the nuclear catastrophe at fukushima multiple catastrophes there it seems somewhat surprising that with all that had happened to japan with the nuclear bomb ing and multiple nuclear nuclear bombings in the past that they would've then adopted the model that they did which is basically the you know on their to their own people the colonial model did you find that surprising well no in the sense that japan was was very much  a willing partner to america after the war and whatever america chose japan chose and so these are american reactors sold by american companies so it's  not at all surprising in a lot of ways living in japan today it's very much a post world war two american kind of society you know it's japan obviously it's not america but but it's so embrace american culture a d american corporations and american lifestyles in a lot of ways so it wasn't surprising on the one hand it was surprising that part of the way that the history came down was a little surprising originally the the idea was to put the first nuclear power plant in japan in hiroshima because if the people of hiroshima except nuclear power then how could anybody oppose nuclear power right there the highest moral authority on anything nuclear and so for a year th peace museum in hiroshima in the one thousand nine hundred fifty six i think it was the peace museum was taken over and made into an adams for peace exhibition over a million people went through the atoms for peace exhibition in hiroshima and there was also manipulation example some of the hippie groups in hiroshima in order to advance legislation that they wanted in the national in the diet the national legislature the increasing compensation for him and increasing the who could be listed box in order to have support from the ruling party for their for the legislation they backed they were they were brought to support nuclear power so it's a sort of a quid pro quo like if they support nuclear power then the government will support the passage of the bill is that they're supporting in the legislature so in a lot of ways these groups were manipulated into supporting nuclear power and so there's a there's some soul searching in hiroshima about having been complicit in in bringing nuclear power into japan but it was it was inevitable in a lot of ways japan is sort of energy poor there's not a lot of fossil fuels in japan so much like france they depend on importing energy so they have anxiety about producing their own energy so japan is a natural place to to consider something like nuclear power although being the home of twenty percent of the world's earthquakes though it's an besides the u s bombing of hiroshima nagasaki japan was directly impacted by tests in the marshall islands and specifically the bravo test you talk a little bit about that absolutely  the test was the first it was the largest nuclear test the u s ever conducted it was the first deliverable thermo nuclear weapon first h bomb that the u s could deliver and the test in one nine hundred fifty four march first one hundred fifty four went wildly bad there was a massive fall out cloud that contaminated a broad swath of the mid pacific and specifically it there was a fifty mile exclusion zone around bikini atoll where the test was done and far outside of that they're worth i believe now some researchers put it over a thousand fishing boats that were impacted by this fallout cloud but the most important one for us historically is a fishing boat called which in english we call the lucky dragon in japanese it's the dago for moto this is a tuna fishing boat that was there was out in the marshall islands japanese fish tuna in the middle of the pacific and then it takes a few weeks to get out there and then to get back to port they freeze the fish there in the middle of the ocean so so this tuna this tuna boat was out about one hundred miles away from where the bravo test occurred and about three hours after the tast ash started to fall on the boat and it was about three inches thick and this was this fall out ash from the bravo tast and it was so powerful and so radioactive even three hours later this actually falling one hundred miles away on this boat that by the time the bo got back to port in japan the entire crew had to be hospitalized because of radiation sickness and one of the crew members died so for the japanese part of the way that that was framed was that the japanese were the victims first victims of the a bomb and the japanese were also the first victims of the h bomb of course there were a lot of marshallese and a lot of american servicemen who were also contaminated in a radiated in the in the catastrophe of the bravo test but the but the japanese but one japanese fisherman did die and so one of the things that we what that demonstrated to us as a world which was something that was covered up until then was the potential scale of radioactive fallout because that boat got to port in a free nation where there's a press we were able to understand that you could be one hundred miles away from a nuclear detonation have no experience of the explosion itself of the blast or the heat of the explosion and it could kill you so there was this is a radically radically different understanding of the weapon than we had of nuclear weapons before that where we thought of nuclear weapons primarily as things that inflict blast blast and heat no we understood that it was possible really to contaminate huge areas with radioactive fallout that would be on if unaffected by the blast or the heat of the weapon so the japanese  have a very powerful interest in the marshall islands in the testing in the marshall islands and the and there's still a lot of research actually going on around the bravo tass and what it's what its impact was is one japanese researcher who's determined were a thousand boats out there because there's not just one boat out there it's just that there was one boat that made it to port that got newspaper attention but there were a lot of people exposed to radiation during that test but for the japanese the japanese have always felt as though there's this strange involvement with radiation that they have i forget who it was one japanese writer that said japan's like a valley and all the radiation of the world runs into it  so there's a sense about that that when catastrophic radioactive things happened you know much like godzilla rising out of the sea they always seem to find japan it's interesting that the  now up to a thousand potential two thousand fishing boats were impacted in and as we record this today the tepco in the japanese government is talking about releasing vast quantity of highly radioactive water into the sea and they're trying to get the fishermen's ok to do that yes it's pretty much a centrally the it's it's a situation where there's just catastrophic things that are going to be happening continually over the course of a decade in terms of radioactive releases from fukushima so there's this this ritual dance that tepco or the government goes through of having to have some group of people agree to something or other before they do it as though that as the fishermen have a choice first of all and as though there's any possibility that they do anything else with that water besides when he said so it's all it's all done it it's just there's no way around it there's going to be a continual this story will hear it again and again that the japanese government has decided to go ahead and release all of this radioactive water into the sea but they have to go get the permission of the fishermen or somebody or other before they do it again and then it will happen again and again and again and again and again because the water won't stop and how soon after the bravo incident did japan have its arm twisted to accept the new us built nuclear plants was really being pushed in japan in fifty five and fifty six so as immediately after that there was that a lot of use in japan of that adams for peace notion that well we've seen the damage and the destruction that nuclear power can cause so now we should embrace it's ability to give life and give hope and energy and build the future and so this message this appealing message was was really pushed in japan quite a bit and when did the after the war occupying power over japan ran japan so in a way was there a i don't know residual infrastructure from the us during that time period when they were accepting the nuclear power plants  there it was an independent sovereign government however was very dependent on the us and very intertwined with the us and so i think in a lot of ways to pan was not in a so talk more about the concept of radio phobia and talk about it sounds like in the same a way that radioactive particles break down our if we expose them break down our genetic coding it sounds like they also break down our social coding and historical coding  and everything else they touch yeah yeah i agree well you know there's there's two things to talk about there are one is one is the there way in which radiation does have this incredibly destructive capacity so for example if in places near a nuclear test sites communities either are removed from land which brings all kinds of traumas and people are removed from their traditional homes in a traditional lifestyles or they're left living in contaminated land so living there has ongoing health risks and anxiety and and also results and in a kind of a desolate landscape you have places like the villages near the test site in kazakhstan where people are living a subsistence life growing food in their gardens and and living off their livestock and this is all in contaminated land so the that are touched by radiation are forever scarred and changed in ways that were unanticipated ways that it changes communities and one of the ways one of the ways that we react to it  there's a lot of social construction and control around issues related to nuclear technologies so for example it's very important to the nuclear industry that people not be afraid of radiation and that people not be afraid of nuclear power plants and so there's a lot of public relations involved in the nuclear industry in promoting the image of nuclear power as positive and and also casting doubt on those that criticize the nuclear power industry this is one of the ways that this has been done and was especially this is especially true after chernobyl was that there was talk about people suffering from radio  phobia which is that people are convinced they were exposed to radiation they're convinced they're going to die they're convinced that radio radiation will kill you and so it's irrational how afraid of radiation people are and people need to learn the facts about radiation and stop being so afraid they're you know they'll be you'll hear this condescending sort of thing that oh you get more radiation from eating a banana than you do they're not intelligent enough to understand this material using technical terms to confuse people's understanding so that it's difficult to grasp what experts are saying about radiation and this this is frequently the idea is that if people knew what experts knew they would completely not be afraid of radiation they would know that nuclear power is safe they would they would say all the opposition to it comes from anxiety and irrationality and fear yes if somebody was attacked with a nuclear weapon that would probably be you know they would kill them and but for most of us living living were completely unaffected by radiation and well course this isn't true but this  discourse protects the industry and it protects public opposition to the industry which is the main thing which is a primary thing that is dangerous to the industry after chernobyl after three mile island in in the industrial west nuclear power basically fell apart and it fell apart from their perception largely because of public opposition because of irrational public opposition and so they are there's a strong campaign to create positive nuclear discourse to confuse to confuse issues about nuclear danger and to and to attack people who have ings idea about nuclear issues one of the ways people are attacked is by saying they suffer from radio phobia that it's irrational to be afraid of nuclear radiation or nuclear technology this is this is frequently employed as a lies told to the public for three months tepco that owns the fukushima plant and the government of japan for three months they said there were no nuclear meltdown set at these sites they knew they were nuclear meltdowns by the end of the first day they knew there was one nuclear meltdown and more likely three and by the end of the second day they knew there were three new full nuclear meltdown they lied about this for three months they lied about it how do you think people feel who live five miles away or ten miles away from having been about having been lied to about this dire potentially catastrophic event having been completely lied to and realizing that they had been lied to for years about both the safety of the plant itself and second the rigor of the regulations keeping the plant up to code there was lax regulations there was lax safety culture inside fukushima there are other nuclear power plants closer to the earthquake that didn't melt down it's partly the these plants that led them to meltdown so people had been lied to people had and now people were suffering as a result of that they were being lied to about whether there was meltdowns they were being lied to about how much radiation was being released they were being lied to about all kinds of things then some a lot of people are evacuated forcibly evacuated other people are told you should evacuate but we're not going to do anything to help you or pay anything but you should probably evacuate you have all of that this tom all in all of this disruption going on in this community there is really conflicting information about how much radiation has been released there manipulated information about how much radiation is being released and then afterwards you have over three hundred thousand refugees that have left that have left the area over one hundred thousand people living in temporary government housing three in for three and a half years and you have a lot of misinformation about radiation levels so you have fields that are clearing and said to be decontaminated and people can walk around with geiger counters and find much higher levels of radiation in those same fields you have schools that are decontaminated down to what is considered a safe level and parents showing that two inches outside of this fence you can find a much higher level and even inside the school fence you can find much higher levels so you have a lot of people who are understanding that they're not being told accurate information about dangers to their children dangerous to themselves they had been lied to there was all of this disruption where now their communities are people have moved away the economic basis of the community is falling apart the value of their homes is going down to zero the value of their businesses is going down to zero and they're expressing disbelief in what they're being told about radiation and the nuclear industry and the government of japan come in and say you people are just suffering from radio phobia you people need to just stop thinking crazy thoughts about radiation and you need to listen to what experts have to say about radiation and these are people whose lives have been completely disrupted they don't know if though if they have been exposed to radiation and if they'll get sick they don't know if they're children they don't know if they're being terrible parents by remaining living in these places they don't know if they're being terrible parents by leaving these places and leaving the resources in the home they don't know so they're cast into this situation where they don't have a lot of social support they don't a lot of community support they have a tremendous amount of anxiety about their their capacity as parents about their health in the long run about the health of their children and inst and when they  you're just crazy you just believe crazy things that you read on the internet or you should just listen to what experts say that's a that's a really brutal way to treat people whose lives have been so disrupted due to no no fault of their own to take them and take the anxiety that they feel and the uncertainty that they feel because of what they've been through and to tell them that they're crazy and they just need to calm down and just do what they're told that's just a further victimization and a further abuse and so there's this traditional discourse of attacking people who are expressing anxiety about radiation especially close to radiation contamination sites like at hanford taking the people who express their anxiety and victimizing them and telling them they're crazy they believe crazy things using technical jargon to confuse them so they can't so they can't engage in discourse on an equal basis and so there's all these ways that people who are in that situation because some targets  and and this is this is a strategy of supporting the industry strategy of supporting the nuclear power industry it's seen almost always in these events like fukushima when something happens inside the industry itself and inside governments there's a sense that the very first danger is panic so you have to manage public perceptions so there's a full effort to manage public perceptions almost from the start at the same time that managing the physical realities of the the nuclear crisis are much more sketchy much less straightforward there's not it's not always clear what to do it's not always effective actions to be taken but the public relations machinery just kicks into gear and  and begins to immediately try and control what people think and believe about radiation because that's seen by the industry by the nuclear industry as the biggest danger to the industry is people's understanding and people's perceptions so the crisis management teams are the first ones that are learned when something happens absolutely and from the point of view of tepco the utility that runs the fukushima daiichi plants they lied about there being meltdowns for three months and when they finally admitted that there had been three meltdowns that news was on page twenty of the newspaper instead of page one of the newspaper so from a crisis management point of view that's a success the fact that there were three meltdowns the fact that there are all these destroyed lives that somebody else's problem but from a crisis management point of view or managing the crisis while we cut the word meltdown off the front pages of the paper we are minimizing people's perceptions of how bad the problem is we're creating a sense that this area can be cleaned up easily none of those things are true but that's considered successful public relations so it sounds like these people that are being affected whether they come down with exposures to the radioactive materials that they are psychologically suffering from either post traumatic stress syndrome or like continuing traumatic stress syndrome absolutely  you have all kinds of continuity so that give people support in their lives are suddenly removed for a lot of people they have they can't live in their house anymore because their houses in a radioactive area or they choose to leave because it's in a radioactive area a lot of times you have families that have been living this is a rural area of japan relatively rural area so you have a lot of traditional old villages there a lot of homes are multigenerational homes so you have elderly grandparents and great grandparents that are being taken care of in the home by extended family you have childcare available to parents that are working because you have aunts and uncles and grandparents and there's all of the social support you have families that may have lived in these homes for many many many generations they're very tied to this land there's gardens planted by ancestors there's buildings built by ancestors and you suddenly you just remove people from this world you split this family into four or five different small modular places to live where you don't have care for the elderly great grandparents anymore you don't have childcare support for the family for the young parents anymore you don't have neighbors who know who the children are you don't have an entire community that's watching out for children and that's supporting the various members of the community you have people who have had generations and generations of providing a little living for themselves in maybe as farmers maybe as fisherfolk maybe doing some sort of a craft or some sort of  a manufacturing something or making food and and now people have been self self sustaining and passing on tradition and passing on knowledge to their children to work suddenly all of these people are removed placed into temporary housing and either dependent on the government because they've been removed from their homes and removed from their jobs or are now looking for jobs in the service industry in the suburbs of tokyo or something like that you have this radical shift in identity this radical shift in self sustainability and this radical shift in interdependence in the community you have changes in diets because people are not producing their own foods people are not cooking large meals in big kitchens you have a different orientation towards the state in the government because people are now dependent on it because their ability to support themselves has been removed but beyond that you have these these ruptures of knowledge and culture and identity that are that are really among the most brutal a lot of the people that i've talked to are people who experienced radiation exposures fifty years ago so looking back on that the kinds of things that that are most brutal for a lot of people in this i know is true in in fukushima area as well is one of the things that happens when you when communities go through this kind of disruption is that there's there's a breaking of connection to ancestors and to tradition and for a lot of people this can be really devastating we in america live a life largely free of connection with our ancestors but that's unusual most people in the world live a life of connection with their ancestors they don't live so far from where their ancestors lived as we do in japan one way to look at it is there's a traditional japanese holiday called obama on obama is when people in japan return to the village where their families are from originally where they're from and gather and maintain the graves of their ancestors clean the graves of their ancestors and decorate them welcome the spirits of their ancestors back to earth for three days and the family stays gathered in that in the home and has meals and spends time together scorch the spirits of the dead ancestors back to the graves which have been cleaned and decorated and their spirits are honored and this is means of continually keeping the graves of our ancestors clean their memories honored and respected because in most traditional societies it's understood that we walk in a world that the ancestors built and so we thrive because of their blessing well if you remove people from this from this relationship to their ancestors it's really damaging and for a lot of people who lived close to the nuclear power plant they will not be able to observe this ritual anymore it's too radioactive close to the power plant so they will not be going and cleaning the graves of their ancestors they will not be decorating the graves of their ancestors they will not be singing the songs to welcome the spirits of their ancestors back at the gravesite as has been done for generation after generation after generation after generation for a lot of people i know that they can they can say well i didn't do anything wrong this is this catastrophe maybe in the future i'll be able to clean these graves and honor them but but probably for some number of people that won't be the case and so they'll find themselves fifty years from now looking back and thinking there was continuity and tradition in my family between generations for ten generations twenty generations and i'm the one who broke it i broke this chain and the ancestors the spirits of the ancestors are wondering why doesn't anybody care about them any more why isn't anybody taking care of their cleaning their graves and maintaining their memory and singing songs to them at the appropriate time and there's all kinds of rationalizations you can place about what the ancestors will understand this or but there's a way in which it feels like a failure if you like it and it's hard for people not to internalize that these are the kinds of deep  fractures that accompany this dissolution of community because of toxic technologies that never gets counted all of these people who all of this this rupturing of continuity in this culture in northern japan where there's been a lot of continuity it has it takes countless tolls in that are an under the surface but really impact people's lives people's sense of wellbeing people's sense of emotional wellbeing but it can even go beyond that you have for example in australia you have the british did nuclear testing in australia and in near marilyn in southern australia one of the one of the things that happened was you the outback is a very very difficult place to live it's a very harsh environment and so you have the british would take a group of people that had been living near the test site and just pick them up and plop them down a couple hundred kilometers you know to the western the easter something like that another way that these the way that these communities could live in such a harsh environment was by passing down really detailed information about how to survive songs traditional songs that are song that have detailed knowledge about where to find water when to find water in different places the migratory patterns of animals when to hunt various animals and that's how people can survive in that harsh climate if you pick them up and you them two hundred kilometers away they don't have that knowledge their knowledge chain is broken they now become dependent they're unable to take care of themselves in traditional ways on this land because they don't have hundreds and hundreds of years of accumulated knowledge about how to survive the being passed on in a coded form instead you just have now a group of people just plopped down in the desert with no ability to take care of themselves so they will all become dependent on the state and so here you have the disconnect between the british colonial power in this case and any understanding of the functioning or value of the community that they're tampering with just oh you know these are just native people you just pick them up move more over there what's the difference it's desert so there's there's that there's that violence and that cultural disconnect but but you're also ending that that community civility to survive traditionally they will now become dependent on the state eating processed foods all all all of the things that come along with joining into the modern capitalist workforce leaving the traditional lifestyle behind so radiation a nuclear technologies are definitely affecting all kinds of people have been affecting all kinds of people in all kinds of places in ways far beyond causing cancers and immune disorders and other illnesses that's just the most evident and and critical risk of radiation is illness and death but the other things that it does it just continues to do it destroys societies communities and families well with that we are in for santa time i want to thank you very much for spending time with us and morning oh it's been my pleasure thanks a lot m