Return to Fukushima
Format:Paperback
Publisher:OR Books
Publishing:17th Apr '25
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 17th April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Return to Fukushima captures the aftermath of the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, chronicling the resilience of displaced communities navigating life amidst radioactivity. Thomas Bass explores the transformative journey from desolation to revitalization, offering a survival guide to our atomic future.
Fukushima is an ongoing nuclear disaster. The four reactors that melted down and exploded in 2011 are still deadly, even to the robots that get burned up trying to explore them. Over a hundred thousand people remain displaced, their homes frozen in time, eerie ghost towns where slippers sit undisturbed at doorsteps and tables are set for absent guests. Wild animals have moved into the houses. Vines overgrow buildings surrendering to entropy. Visiting these places, we stare at the vacant world remaining after we have ended our brief tenure as overlords of the Anthropocene.
The world is dotted with nuclear exclusion zones. Atolls blown to smithereens. Test sites in the Mojave Desert. Disasters at Soviet bomb-making factories. The red forest around Chernobyl. These zones are growing in number and melding one into another. What if our future demands that we learn how to live in nuclear exclusion zones? Learn how to master the risks and develop resistant crops and other survival skills?
Nowhere is this future more evident than in Fukushima, where the Japanese government is pushing people to resettle in towns that are supposedly decontaminated. These attempts have largely failed. But what has not failed are the grassroots efforts at reviving Fukushima. This is propelled by the ingenuity of local farmers and entrepreneurs, citizen scientists, artists, and immigrants from around the world who are intrigued by starting new lives in the red zone.
In 2018 and again four and a half years later, Thomas Bass travelled to Fukushima. The difference was dramatic The place had been cleaned up and reopened, not fully, but little-by-little people are learning to live with radioactivity, decontaminate their fields, monitor their food, and prepare for the next wave set to wash over this seismically precarious part of the world. After six years of research, including travels to Chernobyl, Bass gives us a remarkable account of how Fukushima’s argonauts of the anthropocene are guiding us into our atomic future.
"This is a fascinating book. It presents a compelling message about a crucial question—one so crucial that it bears on the survival of the earth."
—Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“Eloquent and haunting, this book offers a compact look at what Thomas Bass reminds us is the world’s largest and most costly industrial disaster. Its searing tableau of immense destruction and decades of danger ahead is all the more relevant today as warfare sweeps back and forth across another country dotted with nuclear power plants, Ukraine.”
—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost and American Midnight
“Return to Fukushima is an excellent detailed account of the terrifying meltdowns at the Fukushima reactors, of the subsequent human costs, and the ignorant and almost criminal reaction of the Japanese government and its pronuclear lobby. I would recommend this book to anyone who is as concerned as I am about the ongoing pressure of the international nuclear lobby to construct hundreds of reactors globally as the ‘answer’ to global warming.”
—Helen Caldicott, co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility and nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize
“Return to Fukushima paints a vivid picture of the ongoing Fukushima disaster and the lives of thousands of people upended by the events of March 2011. It exposes the role of the Japanese government in building the nuclear infrastructure that devastated the region. As long as governments around the world refuse to recognize that catastrophic accidents involving nuclear reactors are inevitable—even if infrequent—and continue building new plants, we will likely witness more zones of devastation. This book, thus, offers a preview of potential future suffering.”
—M.V. Ramana, Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the University of British Columbia.
“Return to Fukushima captures the voices of people who are not just victims but survivors of this ongoing nuclear disaster. Thomas Bass has done a wonderful job in bringing their profound messages to the world.”
—Caitlin Stronell, Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, Tokyo
“Japan continues to accept levels of radiation exposure for its people that are without precedent. This book explains how the Fukushima nuclear disaster is far from over and how we ignore its lessons at our peril.”
—Tilman Ruff, Nobel laureate, co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
“This book is a very useful corrective to the Japanese government's immoral efforts to whitewash the Fukushima tragedy and to persuade Japanese people to accept more nuclear power. Thomas Bass is a fine writer as he guides us through this compelling story.”
—Ian Fairlie, former UK official and consultant to the European Union on radiation risks from nuclear power plants
“This book will show you, with remarkable concision, how Japanese officials are pushing the ‘recovery’ of Fukushima with little care for citizens’ well-being, let alone any willingness to acknowledge responsibility. So much for any "lessons" learned from the disaster, as Japan prepares to re-open its reactors and dump tons of nuclear waste into the Pacific.”
—Norma Field, Distinguished Service Professor in Japanese Studies, University of Chicago
ISBN: 9781682195109
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
272 pages