Interdisciplinary Studies of Radiation Effects on the Everyday Life of Victims

Keywords

radiation effects,uncertainty,everyday life

Objectives

The following studies have investigated the radiation effects caused by nuclear tests or accidents at nuclear power plants on society: natural sciences relating to the effects on the human body and the natural environment, historical studies to clarify the responsibility for damage, political studies to determine the standards for the radiation effects, and social and anthropological studies to clarify the social effect.
However, remarks of sufferers who complain about the uncertainty about genetic diseases and food tend to be disregarded as emotional arguments. Although such uncertainty has been clarified scientifically by studies on the radiation effects, suffering from “the viewpoint of people living their everyday lives,” who live in the uncertainty caused by the radiation effects, is still not fully understood in terms of the response to damage or suffering and disaster prevention in the real world.
　
Therefore, this joint research aims to clarify the outlook on damage and suffering from the viewpoint of “the overall lives and the everyday lives” of the sufferers. While our research centers on the anthropological areas studied by members of this research team, we will integrate and deepen individual studies about the U.S.A., the Marshall Islands, Japan and the Pacific by aligning them with medical science, politics and history.

Research Results

The objective of this research project was to portray the people and communities that must live amidst the uncertainty and excessive politicization of radiation effects and the extremely high specialized scientific knowledge related to radiation effects. We believed that this would enable us to uncover details of the complex structure surrounding radiation effects.
This inter-university research project lasted three and a half years, and we held a total of ten workshops during that time. Two of the workshops were held outside the museum, in Hiroshima and at the Maruki Gallery in Saitama Prefecture, and we had three guest lecturers and one of workshops was a symposium open to the general public . Project members did not know each other at the beginning, so first members took turns introducing the research they conducted so far, and then presented reports with a focus on final results. In the final year, the project received an inter-university research project grant for international projects from the National Museum of Ethnology, and we had a panel presentation on part of our research results at the 40th UGAT Annual Conference / an International Gathering held in the Philippines (8-10 November 2018).
Project members’ research spanned a broad range of regions, including Fukushima, Hiroshima, Okinawa, Marshall Islands, Republic of Kiribati, and French Polynesia. Furthermore, a wide variety of themes were covered, including anti-nuclear protest art, local knowledge, industry after nuclear weapons testing, interaction with victims of nuclear weapons testing, foreign victims of nuclear weapons testing and hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), definition of tojisha (“concerned party”), practice of education on nuclear issues, and the problem of decontamination after the Fukushima nuclear accident.
Taking an extremely trancedisciplinary studies approach and looking from a variety of different angles, we found that there are a wide variety of tojisha affected by radiation and that the tojisha-ness (direct individual experience with the matter concerned) asserted by them differ and do not intersect (i.e. are difficult be understood by one another).
However, the project also illustrated the difficulty of extremely trancedisciplinary studies. Particularly problematic was to defin the word “tojisha.” The first issue was that people with diverse experiences and emotions are involved targeted community for research or research topic. The second was the diversity of the experiences and values of the researchers. In other words, there are different standpoints among those being researched and among those doing the research. Since the members of this research project are made up of experts from a variety of academic fields, we found that the difficulty in defining tojisha was twofold.