Hard Times in the Hometown: A History of Community Survival in Modern Japan

11. Atomic Power, Community Fission

11 AtomicPower,Community Fission One of the best views of Tanoura Bay, the site of the proposed nuclear power station, is from the stone steps leading up to Iwaishima’s Miyato Hachimangū shrine. On a still day, the bay can feel almost in touching distance from the low, densely clustered houses that form Iwaishima village. Contrary to the residents of Nagashima island, for whom Tanoura may be considered out of sight and out of mind, the residents of Iwaishima thus see the nuclear site as they go about their everyday lives. If the pronuclear lobby in Nagashima can be characterized as Definitely In My Back Yard, then Iwaishima’s opposition to Chugoku Electric is perhaps best explained as Not In My Front Yard. Iwaishima’sfrontalposition,fourkilometersacrossthewaterfromTanoura, accounts for the particular emphasis that antinuclear campaigners placed—and continue to place—on the “dangers” of atomic energy. On 17 November 1982, five months after Chugoku Electric officially announced Kaminoseki’s candidacy , the Loving Our Hometown Association (Aikyō Isshin Kai) was established on the island under the leadership of Kanata Toshio. A boat parade was held at sea, a 976-name antinuclear petition was handed over to the town office, and that evening Kanata addressed six hundred islanders outside the Iwaishima fishing cooperative, reiterating his position that “we shall absolutely oppose the constructionofadangerousnuclearpowerstation.”1 Thisinsistenceonpotential danger would become a central tenet of the antinuclear campaign, bolstered by the critical testimonies of a small number of islanders who had personal experience working in the Japanese nuclear industry.2 At its most basic level, the discourse of danger can be interpreted as an expression of collective fear. During her fieldwork in small communities 172 Hard Times in the Hometown located in the shadow of France’s main nuclear waste processing plant at La Hague, Françoise Zonabend identified the “selective blindness” of residents: It is as if in these hamlets dotted over the plateau, the only inhabited points from which the reprocessing plant is visible, people have decided not to see it, using a fold in the ground, the way a garden faces, or the position of a housefront to eclipse this untidy, deeply disturbing section of the landscape from view. . . . So one way of defending yourself against the invasion of the reprocessing plant with its ever more numerous buildings (and no doubt against the fear that they inspire) is to decide not to see them. In some places this is not hard to do. In others, the landscape needs a little rearranging, but the mechanism is the same, namely denying the existence of the danger by refusing to see its architectural embodiment.3 If, in La Hague, the decision “not to see” constituted a denial of danger, then in Iwaishima a similar mechanism worked in the reverse: the daily unavoidability of seeing the planned site served to exacerbate the sense of danger—the fear that, if there were to be an accident, the islanders would become “refugees ” from their own homes.4 But fear was not the only emotion at play. Gazing east toward Tanoura, antinuclearresidentscouldalsobeforgivenforfeelingasenseofpowerlessnessatthe events of the early 1980s. Before the 1958 merger of Kaminoseki and Murotsu municipalities, Iwaishima men had at times played a leading role in the Kaminoseki village bureaucracy: Ishimaru Hirohito, the head priest of Kōmyōji temple, had been village mayor from 1942 to 1946, for example, and Ujimoto Kuichi was elected head of the Kaminoseki Village Combined Youth Association in 1949. Such prominence reflected Iwaishima’s demographic vitality. According to unofficial statistics, the island population in 1947 was 3,342, out of a municipal total of just under 10,000, making Iwaishima equal with Kaminoseki district as the dominant constituency in the village.5 Once Murotsu and Kaminoseki merged, however, the population center of the new town became concentratedintheportscommunities ,thusmarginalizingIwaishimainmunicipal affairs. The priest of the Miyato Hachimangū shrine, Morimoto Hiromitsu, stood as an Iwaishima candidate in the mayoral election of 1959 but was defeated , and an islander has never since become mayor. Such marginalization was exacerbated by the speed of postwar population decline, which was faster inIwaishima,Yashima,Shidai,Kamai,andShiraida—thehamletsfarthestaway Atomic Power, Community Fission 173 from the ports—than elsewhere.6 When it came to the 1985 invitation vote, therefore,manyislandersfeltdisenfranchisedfromadecisionthatwoulddisproportionately affect their daily lives. For all their sense of fear and powerlessness, however, Iwaishima islanders were not above a little selective blindness of their own. As late as 2004, a map...