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Critical Mass
Before leaving my home to take part in this anti-nuke demonstration in Tokyo I spoke with a fifty-something resident of my neighborhood in Yokohama. “Get caught in the rain and you’ll lose your hair.” That’s what the kids used to chant when I was a girl, she tells me. It was the late sixties and radioactive particles carried by the wind from above ground nuclear testing in the South Pacific had pushed radiation levels sky high. “Compared to now, the radiation level was actually much higher around here back then,” she utters with a shrug and look that says she has seen this all before. “Shoganai,” says her nephew. It’s a common Japanese expression, an almost fatalistic resignation that we are powerless in the face of events that have unfolded like the roll of a pair of dice or perhaps fate. It seems to roll off peoples tongues here at the worst of times.
In the wake of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that triggered the monster wave that has swallowed whole towns and rocked the Fukushima nuclear power plant to its core you can here “shoganai” echoing from just about every corner of Japan. While fears of radioactive contamination blowing downwind have touched off a roller coaster of emotional responses in the capitol area 170 miles south of the leaking power plant, anger seems to be the most subdued. Sure, Twitter and internet sites rage with tirades against TEPCO, the owner of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power station, for a chain reaction of failures in response to the accident but the streets have hardly erupted. While Japan’s nuclear nightmare has sparked huge anti-nuke demonstrations as far away as Germany, a rally outside the TEPCO headquarters in Tokyo this Sunday barely drew a crowd of one hundred. A recent survey by a major metropolitan daily newspaper, the Tokyo Shinbun, revealed that residents of Tokyo are evenly divided with more than half willing to accept whatever risks may accompany nuclear power. While for now the breaks have been put on nuclear power plant construction from one end of this island nation to the other, that could all change. The nuclear power industry could be back to business as usual before we know it. If you look at the numbers at Sunday’s demonstration in Tokyo, it would seem that Japan lacks the critical mass of people needed to erase nuclear power from the energy map. Then again when it comes to nuclear physics you need only just enough material to sustain a chain reaction. Let’s hope they have what it takes and remember the words of Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
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J.T. Cassidy
November 12th, 2011
8:39pm
This photo was taken in April of 2010. Since then anti-nuke protests in Japan have grown exponentially.