Writing back to the Capitalocene: Radioactive foodscapes in Japan’s Post-3/11 literature

Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt and Aidana Bolatbekkyzy

Contemporary Japan, 2024, vol. 36, issue 2, 243-260

Abstract: This article examines representations of food and feeding in post-Fukushima literature. Following the hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, radioactive plumes swept across the country, leading to a sharp increase in radioactivity levels in a range of foodstuffs. Yet the government’s Eat and Support campaign, designed to encourage solidarity with local farmers, failed to address contamination issues, inevitably giving rise to the suspicion that economic recovery was prioritized over food safety. Predictably, literary writing about food consumption, production, and feeding became one of the primary ways for authors to express political dissent. We read four of these texts – published between 2012 and 2014 by Satō Yūya, Yoshimura Man’cihi, Kimura Yūsuke and Tawada Yōko – through the theoretical lens of the Capitalocene. In this concept, capitalism is seen not merely as an economic mode of production, but as an all-encompassing system of natural and human exploitation. Zooming in on food issues, we show how these authors expose, and explore, different aspects of the Capitalocene: they criticize authoritarian tendencies in the post-nuclear age, question conventional – highly gendered – practices of food consumption as well as production, and challenge the idea of perpetual progress, be it economic, technological or in terms of human bodies. We argue that by depicting acts of sabotage, or by imagining lives that escape the extractivist logic of our time altogether, Satō, Yoshimura, Kimura and Tawada bring to life characters who refuse to provide cheap work, energy and lives to the capital in the dual sense, to Tokyo and to capitalist accumulation.

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1080/18692729.2023.2208399

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