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10 Nuclear Decision In the early 1980s, a new player emerged in the life of the Kaminoseki hometown. With time, the presence of Chugoku Electric Power Company would seep into the everyday consciousness of townspeople. The company’s branch offices on the main road into Murotsu; the bright green, three-storied Museum of the Future (Mirai-kan), adjacent to the former site of the Chōshū domain’s administrative offices (bansho); the published tide schedules that fishermen consulted morning and night; the sponsorship signs on the Bōchō buses; the monthly newsletters delivered to every household; the small apartment complex for company employees just down from Jōyama Hill: by the early 2000s, these were the everyday markers of a thriving partnership between the municipality and Chugoku Electric. It was less clear how that partnership had begun. As told by the company itself , the time line of events started in June 1982, when a Kaminoseki town councillor asked the mayor, Kanō Shin, about the possible construction of an atomic power station in the municipality. “If the townspeople are in agreement,” the mayor responded, “then we may seek this development.” Subsequently, a subcommittee of the council was established in order to consider initiatives that might attract investment to the town, and, in October 1984, the council formally requested that Chugoku Electric carry out a preliminary investigation (jizen chōsa) for a power plant. In response to this request, the company established a site office, and, in May 1985, it reported that the western tip of Nagashima island was “an eligible candidate site for a nuclear power station.” During this period, the number of voices in Kaminoseki advocating the development of a nuclear powerstationincreased,andinJune1985eighteendifferentpronuclearcivilsociety groups submitted a petition to the town council demanding that an official 150 Hard Times in the Hometown approach be made to Chugoku Electric—something that the council did in September 1985. Finally, in September 1988, the town mayor (now Katayama Hideyuki) made an application to the company formally requesting that it build a nuclear power station in the municipality.1 Two other sources, the regional Chūgoku shinbun newspaper and the Kaminoseki Town History, also begin their time line of Chugoku Electric’s entry into town politics with reference to the summer of 1982. But, as this chapter will argue—partly using evidence from both those sources, complemented by interviews —there was a far more complex back story to the nuclear power station plan than first appears on paper. To tell this story is important for two reasons. First, it adds to our understanding of how and why contentious Japanese infrastructure projects have been sited in the postwar period: although scholars have analyzed the role of private utility companies and the central government in so-called site fights, there is still little understanding of the role that local people played in such controversies.2 Perhaps more important, the nuclear story enables us to understand the extent to which Meiji period hometown structures endured into the late twentieth century. Although the dispute over nuclear power in many ways ripped apart the social fabric of Kaminoseki, thus giving a different intensity to the crisis of the 1980s from those that the hometown had faced in previous decades (see Chapter 11), the ways in which the subject of nuclear power was first broached in Kaminoseki nevertheless underlined the survival of older forms of political and social interaction. In particular, power was concentrated—as it had been in the nineteenth century—in the hands of a few key men, including some from the oldest known households in the town. Just as their political predecessors appear to have used their social and economic status to influence the outcome of village elections in the 1890s, so Kaminoseki’s politicians in the early 1980s practiced “status seduction” in an attempt to accelerate the nuclear proposal—something that depended on the survival of older forms of vertical, hierarchical relations in hometown life. As in analyses of hometown life in the late nineteenth century, identifying underlying structures in the 1980s is one thing, but it is quite another to work out the individual motivations of the key players. In general terms, however, it is clear that the assumptions of many town leaders in 1981–1982 were framed by their experience of the early postwar decades. In this sense, nuclear power, which in national terms came to have added significance after the 1973 Oil Shock, was seen in local terms as simply one more proposal to...

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