Earthquake, tsunami, nuclear disaster: culture of obedience and critical voices. An interview with Renata Pisu
In these days post-apocalypse rages in the press one of the usual stereotypes which we love to frame the peoples of the Orient: the Japanese are loyal and compounds. In all our own media are emphasized, with a mixture of admiration and puzzlement, conduct individual and collective student body that gets sorted as they fall in line the walls, the families of victims, which will restore the bodies without showing off the pain.
try to get a bit 'deeper into Japan's culture of cataclysm with Renata Pisu, scholar and journalist who has long lived in Japan. What impact can
have an event like that which occurred on the consciousness of the Japanese?
Many are quite critical of the prevention system. The authorities tell you to keep antiterremoto kit at home to hide under the table when things start to fall and so on. And the Japanese are loyal. In Japan itself, however, there are many people who disagree with this way of introjected obedience to the order without question the rationality of the system.
The same critics also feel that by dint of repeating that there will be an earthquake, one gets used and does not think more.
A catastrophic event of this kind may lead to a different approach? He struck the testimony of a Japanese woman who said: "We have behind the volcanoes and the sea all around, we are on earth as well as seismic activity on the planet and build nuclear power plants. Maybe we need to rethink everything."
Who is critical challenges all the choices that Japan did after the war on, including nuclear. It is possible that the dramatic event they push for change, but you do not understand how to change. The land they have is.
There is a whole literature on the sci-fi cha Japan sinks into the sea. A novel of the 1973 catastrophic Sakyo Komatsu, from which they also filmed, was titled Nihon Chinbotsu, Japan sinks. Within three hundred days disappear the archipelago and the effort is focused on trying to push forward at every country in the world of Japanese shares.
and imagination of the end of Japan, which then determines the culture of the ephemeral: everything is short, life is short. The projects do not exceed five years and there is a certain complacency from which all the poetry and the haiku. It is the impermanence.
Godzilla is the threat that comes from the deep sea: the most earthquake tsunami?
Godzilla - (Gojira in Japanese, ed) - is primarily the nuclear threat: a mutant created by atomic radiation. In the first version are those produced by the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then in the second and third edition, to remove the implicit accusation of the U.S., was blamed on the French nuclear tests.
Now Japan has more than fifty nuclear power plants. A lot.
That consistency has the Japanese anti-nuclear movement?
is strong. In Japan there is a civil society, ignored, which is very active. There are women, many housewives. But I do not have access to political power and that of business.
The point is that the Japanese are confident that there are nuclear radiation and that they are harmful. The popular mentality probably believes that the effects are even more serious than officially reported, as the research on the subject are disclosed. But it all
results in discrimination against those who have suffered the atomic bombing, and even to their children and grandchildren. Suspected to be contaminated, carriers of genetic mutations.
I remember in the late eighties, when I was in Tokyo, the "letter to the editor" of a newspaper a lady asked, "Should I take a trip with us is also a party of Hiroshima. It will be safe to go in the same toilet? "
They call them "affected by the explosion," hibakusha. The same name is given to those who are contaminated by radiation from the civil nuclear. It is thought that they continue to change through the generations.
There is a very complex culture of nuclear energy, but you'd rather not talk about it. When the disaster occurred Chernobyl there was no debate. The problem was settled, saying: "We make the plants are much safer."
I think there is a strong mechanism for removal, which can be seen in another story of which she wrote about the Republic: that of "gypsies of nuclear power," the precarious workers who make the cleaning stations.
The mechanism is that of subcontracting. These are Japanese poor workers who are hired to do the cleaning by companies that have subcontracted subcontracting. When they go to work have the plates to indicate they are exposed to radiation. After a certain limit, they should stop working. Instead they are sent to another center to do the same job. They themselves want, often change even name, so there is no trade union that controls and a system of protections for workers. Take ten times the radiation allowed. If you get sick, no one has ever seen or known. Thousands. Those who get cancer and have the courage to report boil down to a few dozen. There
removal, yes, because everything has to work well, according to harmony. But now we see what consequences it will lead to disaster.
Gabriele Battaglia
Adapted from Peace Reporter, 13/03/2011 article
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