“Finally, The Sun Has Been Captured.”
10-19-2011
Several years ago a friend spent a year studying in Tokyo. Upon her return, in the midst of relaying stories from her time there, she--a modest and reserved young woman--confided that to earn a little extra money she had done something she would never have considered in her native city: modeled nude for a drawing class. She had done this work not in Tokyo, but rather in a small village, Iitate, a few hours away. Her description of its marvels left me ready to depart for a land I had never had a great curiosity about or particular desire to visit. She was a trained dancer and, though retired, had retained both her suppleness and strength. As she spoke I imagined light stretching past the mountains and into the studio full of artists. Their hands steady and serene as they rendered on canvas the shape of stillness my friend had choreographed before them.
That village, Iitate, once one of the country’s greatest wonders is now almost emptied after an evacuation order was handed down in May. Evan Osnos takes us back to the town in his excellent report on the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in the October 17th issue of The New Yorker. Twenty five miles from Fukushima, the village’s six-thousand residents have been driven from their homes by the emissions released during the March disaster at the nearby plant. The radiation levels are scored on a large meter in the village, and Osnos helps read the numbers for us. “Being there,” he writes “was equivalent to receiving a chest X-ray every twelve hours.”
The crisis last spring in Japan, and the country’s sordid history with nuclear technology that led up to it, weaves together two strands of Hannah Arendt’s thought. The first, of particular interest to us at the Arendt Center this fall, is her understanding of truthtelling, and the frail existence of the fact in the political sphere. The second is of course the rise of nuclear power in the twentieth century and the influence it had upon Arendt's work. The detonation of nuclear weapons, Arendt writes in the first pages of The Human Condition, marked the inauguration of modern politics that separates humanity from its earthly essence. Fukushima reveals the relation between these two phenomena: the ways in which the modern parodying of truth is itself born of and bound to the modern desire to ‘untether,’ as Arendt would say, from the earth.
Osnos' report details the nuclear fables and fibs that precipitated March’s meltdown, as well as those that were used to try to swathe it. In the decades after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Japanese were forced to prove they could muster an appetite for nuclear technology, both for the sake of diplomacy and because the geography of the country meant, with limited natural reserves of fossil fuels, they needed to turn to nuclear sources to meet their energy needs.
The term appetite is not used merely metaphorically. Osnos brings to the reader’s attention videos run at nuclear plant exhibitions in the early 1990’s, when the country was trying to convince the public to embrace nuclear energy. The videos featured the cartoon character Little Pluto Boy; in one reel he is encouraging a child to drink down a glassful of his noxious namesake claiming, “It is unthinkable that I could cause any effects on the human body!” Plants were increasingly made to resemble amusement parks in order to mollify anxious mothers. Women, the government realized, would be the arbiters of the country’s nuclear future, and an aggressive effort was underway to persuade them there was no harm in bathing their newborn in a tub of uranium or letting their youngster quaff a pint of plutonium.
The misinformation campaigns crafted to buttress the “myth of total safety” around nuclear facilities was carried out, as Osnos discusses, in concert with the aggressive de-regulation of the industry. An uncanny intimacy developed between government regulators and those in the business of fission. Tokyo Electric’s practice of doctoring Fukushima records, came to light in the early 2000’s, followed five years later by the admission that their initial gesture to come clean about the forgeries had itself been a lie, obscuring half a dozen other “emergencies” at Fukushima that had gone unreported.
This nuclear history is certainly a version of both the manipulation of facts that Arendt warned us against, as well as truth’s strange resistance to it. She writes of truth:
“Whatever those in power may contrive, they are unable to discover or invent a viable substitute for it. Persuasion and violence can destroy truth, but they cannot replace it.”
The simple obstinacy of the factual world means that while an un-repaired reactor, or the faulty handling of fuelrods, may be camouflaged, such truths will eventually erupt—in this case literally and catastrophically—back into the realm of affairs.
What is both clear and crucial here is that this obstinate quality of facts, essentially the symptom of the immanence of the human world, stands in direct opposition to our attempted flight from it that Arendt takes up in her writing. The physical wish to transcend our earthly home and its limitations, through space voyage and cellular vivisection, is often accompanied by the attempt to denigrate and deny facts; the earth’s epistemological furniture. A falsehood as blatant as that plutonium is potable, is not just industry spin, rather it is part of the ethos that says the greater the kilowatts the better the chance that we will accomplish that twentieth century feat of finally busting out of our bodies.
Nuclear power, like its nefarious cousin the bomb, both represents and trades on this desire to collapse the distance between man and the heavens. On January 1st 1954, the Japanese daily Yomiuri, ran a series of articles announcing the benefits of nuclear energy: “Finally, The Sun Has Been Captured” the headline sang.
Less than a decade after Little Boy seared shadows onto Hiroshima sidewalks, recovery from the phosphorescent wreckage involved not disowning but ratifying the notion that the best way to proctor prosaic events is to attempt to invigilate cosmic ones. We want nothing more than to arrest the very star on whose charity our orphan planet necessarily depends and owes its very existence.
Nuclear technology is therefore such an important pivot in Arendt’s thinking since what it articulates is a fundamental shift in the ontology of the human condition: the moment at which the species acquired the ability to erase itself. For a thinker who took natality, “the fact that we have entered the world through birth,” as the axiom of her theory, finding ourselves in a state in which the principle of beginning is itself extinguished is both a philosophical and political colossus. Nuclear disaster has the ability to vaporize not just persons but their very origins, meaning its message is ultimately not “you will be gone,” but rather, “you were never here.” That man is a creature, his arrival and departure from the earth unbidden, is part of the quintessence, the truth, of human being. The development of nuclear capabilities marks the threshold of modernity for Arendt because it warps this, not only by dictating man’s departure, as all warfare does, but by expunging the evidence of man’s very arrival.
Iitate’s were only six of the eighty thousand “nuclear refugees” that Japan had on their hands in the aftermath of Fukushima. The government has predicted it will be two years before the village is habitable again. I wonder whether the artists my friend stood for—fastened to the earth by nothing more or less than her own bare flesh—will ever return to their studios. The image of such a class there again seems to me at once both deeply sorrowful and yet also one of the few visions of hope available. From the other side of the globe I can picture the easels encircling the body of a beautiful woman; cool, and lithe, and flecked with light, as she orbits gently in a silence hollowed out by the heat of the world’s worst kind of radiance.
-SR