Review of Takahashi’s Fukushima Futures | James W. Seabrooke III

[fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEW[/blanc][/fond noir]

__0__

Fukushima Futures:
Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape
by Satsuki Takahashi

University of Washington Press
2023. 194 pp
ISBN 978-0-295-75134-4

__0__

Reviewed by James W. Seabrooke III

Environmental Futurism and an Ethnography of Fishermen in the Joban Seascape

Views of a sustainable future can become quickly obfuscated and disjointed for coastal communities when they are affected by life- and society-disrupting disasters. As a longtime resident of the Gulf Coast of the United States, I am quick to draw comparisons between the lasting cultural and local economic impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the Fukushima nuclear accident, both of which occurred within a year of each other. While Japan faced fears of radioactive contamination of young anchovies, flounder, and abalones, Northwest Florida feared the consumption of major commercial fish populations such as tuna, amberjack, and red snapper. While many Floridians and other Americans displayed concerns for the environment, the well-being and condition of local fishermen who endured the Deepwater Horizon oil spill went relatively unnoticed by historians. On the other hand, Satsuki Takahashi explores the cultural framework and history of Japanese fisher families in Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape, examining the precarious relationship between Japanese modernization, the Joban seascape, and the fisher communities of the Ibaraki and Fukushima prefectures throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with the Fukushima nuclear disaster as a focal point.

Takahashi frames the core of her ethnographic study with her central claim that