Introduction

For more than a month, day after day, we East Asian STS colleagues, along with the rest of the world, have watched the tragedies and terrible events that have unfolded in Japan in the wake of 3/11. We have much sympathy with the Japanese people, but we also have begun to experience the more immediate, that is, when and how the radiation clouds and sea currents may hit us in other East Asian societies. What’s more, having lived over similar geological formations and earth plates, and having lived among almost the same kind of nuclear power facilities as those at Fukushima, we people in Taiwan and other East Asian societies have begun to worry about the “what ifs”: What if similar disasters hit the nuclear power plants along the coastlines of Taiwan, China, or South Korea? What if meltdowns occur in Taiwan, where there is much less space for the so-called evacuations of many more people? Therefore, the editors of EASTS consider this a good and even necessary occasion for us East Asian STS colleagues to engage in a panel discussion in order to share our experience and observations on Japan’s, or indeed East Asia’s, present crisis.

By way of introduction, I offer two observations about Japan’s 3/11 crisis and its implications for understanding East Asian earthquakes, tsunamis, and nuclear power technology.

First, the Fukushima nuclear crisis has led me to reflect on particular characteristics of nuclear power technology in earthquake-prone countries. Unlike other much less earthquake-prone areas such as France, where nuclear power plants are built inland and cooled by fresh water, in East Asia there is an essential coupling between earthquake/ tsunami-prone lands and nuclear power plants built along the coastlines and cooled by seawater. As first reported by the Asian Wall Street Journal on March 21, 2011 (see the article by Chang-Chuan Chan and Ya-mei Chen in the present panel discussion), “of the more than four hundred currently operating nuclear power plants in the world, fourteen of them are the most potentially dangerous due to their proximity to geological faults and seas.” Many of the nuclear power plants in Japan and Taiwan, plus China to a lesser extent, are included among these fourteen most dangerous. This East Asian “earthquake-prone country plus nuclear power technology” coupling decisively separates us from most of Europe or even the United States—especially from the “successful” French model. In short, there are two subspecies of nuclear power technology, and it is time for our East Asian STS community to focus upon our own more dangerous and unstable subspecie in its historical, social, and geological contexts. The significance of a French counterexample (80 percent dependency on nuclear power with few crises) to an ideal East Asian nonnuclear future has much diminished for East Asian antinuclear activists and the STS community alike.

Second, due to the proximity of East Asian societies to each other in terms of wind patterns and sea currents, any major nuclear accidents in any East Asian nation would be a crisis for the entire region, if not the world. As also shown by the South Asia tsunami crisis in 2004, no East Asian society, no matter how technologically advanced in its use of nuclear power, can really be exempt from the consequences of a major earthquake and tsunami in the region. In this sense, all East Asian societies are in the same boat, wandering in the high sea of modern technological risk, especially of a nuclear kind. Thus we envision a truly East Asian STS field of study of technological risk and disaster that goes beyond national boundaries and specific national histories. Perhaps this kind of East Asian STS studies would not have been surprising to those who lived in the age of colonial empires in East Asia, be they Japanese, Chinese, or European. But it should not be surprising, either, in the present postcolonial era, when aggressively active nations (including “earthquake nations”) are the rule of the day, aspiring to become developed nations, nuclear nations, bioeconomy nations, or experimental nations.¹

Framing Japan’s 3/11 and Fukushima crisis with...