¹ This is Kamanaka Hitomi's third co-authored piece for Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. She discusses her 2006 film Rokkasho Rhapsody in Kamanaka Hitomi, Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Norma Field, “Rokkasho, Minamata and Japan's Future: Capturing Humanity on Film,” trans. Ann Saphir, The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 5, Issue 2 Dec 1, 2007. She discusses her 2011 film Ashes to Honey: Toward a Sustainable Future in Kamanaka Hitomi and Norma Field, “Complicity and Victimization: Director Kamanaka Hitomi's Nuclear Warnings,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 9, Issue 18 No 4, May 2, 2011.

² The Chugoku Electric Power Company is one of ten government-regulated electric companies supplying power over two separate grids. Three companies cover the Eastern Japan grid (Hokkaido Denryoku, Tohoku Denryoku, Tokyo Denryoku (TEPCO), and seven cover Western Japan (Hokuriku, Chubu, Kansai, Chugoku, Shikoku, Kyushu and Okinawa Denryoku). In 2008 Chugoku Electric was granted a license to begin landfill in the Seto Inland Sea to build two reactors at a new Kaminoseki Plant. It made slow progress amidst the active local protests Kamanaka documents in Ashes to Honey. Operations were suspended in 2011 after Fukushima but in 2016 Yamaguchi Prefecture renewed its landfill license citing national energy policy.

³ Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs English website states “On April 1, 2014, in accordance with the NSS, the Government of Japan set out the Three Principles on Transfer of Defense Equipment and Technology as a set of clear principles on the overseas transfer of defense equipment and technology that fits the new security environment. The new Principles replaced the previous ‘Three Principles on Arms Exports and Their Related Policy Guidelines.‘”

⁴ In 2004, in response to legislation that allowed the LDP to override opposition and send Japanese Self Defense Forces to fight in Iraq without a UN Mandate, a group called Ribbon Project collaborated with the publisher Magazine House to produce a bilingual children's book titled The Way War Is Created (in Japanese) and What Happens Before War (in English). In 2015 an animated version was produced by a group of filmmakers and artists concerned that 3.11 and the Fukushima nuclear accident were also being used as a pretext for militarization. Kamanaka sells the dvd for educational use on her web shop and it is also widely available online.

⁵ This interview originally took place in October and December 2015. Here Kamanaka references the Paris terror attacks of 13 November 2015. The figure “600,000” corresponds to the World Health Organization's estimate for the number of children under fifteen who died during seven years of the Iraq War. Kamanaka discusses this figure in the first chapter of her book Hibakusha: Dokyumentarii eiga no genba kara [Hibakusha: From Ground Zero of Documentary Filmmaking] (Tokyo: Kageshobō, 2006), 23.

⁶ The nuclear businesses of the American conglomerate Westinghouse were sold to British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) in 1999 after Westinghouse purchased the communications company CBS in 1995, renamed itself CBS, and divested from non-broadcast operations. BNFL sold a 77% share in Westinghouse to Toshiba for $5.4B in 2006 at a time when the global market for nuclear power was expected to grow in China, India, the UAE and Eastern Europe. In late 2015 when Hirano interviewed Kamanaka, Toshiba had already weathered an accounting scandal centered in part on its failure to disclose Westinghouse losses. But it had yet to suffer the full impact Kamanaka predicts, which the Financial Times would call in February 2017 the “Downfall of Toshiba, a Nuclear Industry Titan”. In early January 2018, Toshiba sold Westinghouse to the Canadian company Brookfield for $4.6B. In contrast, Mitsubishi remains sanguine about its investment in the French multinational group Areva, with which it began partnering in the early 1990s to sell nuclear fuel and established a joint venture in 2007 to make reactors. Here Kamanaka references Mitsubishi's decision to purchase more shares in Areva just as the German company Siemens was pulling out, in part over failures at the Olkiluoto NPP in Finland. Losses of almost $9B motivated Areva in 2017 to spin off its reactor unit as “Areva NP,” selling about 50% to the French Government company Electricite de France (EDP) and 20% to Mitsubishi. According to the Nikkei Asian Review, Mitsubishi's investment in Areva is now $621M.

⁷ The Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in Finland had two reactors built in the 1970s and in 2005 commissioned Areva to build a third. Originally scheduled to be completed in 2010, the project has gone 200% over budget and is still not finished.

⁸ Wikipedia's English entry on Yamashita is incomplete but indicates the controversy that surrounds him. He served as chair of the Japan Thyroid Association after co-authoring several Chernobyl papers under the auspices of the Sasakawa Foundation and in collaboration with the World Health Organization. The Sasakawa Foundation was funded by Sasakawa Ryōichi (1889-1995), a controversial right-wing figure who made money in China and Manchuria during the Fifteen Years' War and through a gambling empire in post-war Japan. It is worth noting also that many regard the United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO), with which Yamashita collaborated, to be compromised by the close relationship with the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) mandated by a 1959 agreement in which the two agencies promise always to act in “close collaboration.” The WHO rebutted this argument in a 2001 statement.

⁹ Kamanaka is quoting a line from Yamashita's 3 May 2011 public meeting in Nihonmatsu, Fukushima, in which he defends the claim that exposures of up to 100 millisieverts per year are safe. One of the people who asks him a question is Jodo Shinshu priest Sasaki Michinori, who appears in both of Kamanaka's post 3.11 documentaries. A transcript and video of the 70-minute meeting is available from ourplanet-tv.org.

¹⁰ An important exception to the tendency for perpetrators of nuclear disasters to go legally unpunished is the mandatory indictment (kyōsei kiso) seeking criminal penalties (keijibatsu) for three TEPCO executives currently making its way through Tokyo District Court. See here.

¹¹ As 2016 ended, 99 U.S. reactors produce 19.5 percent of U.S. electricity. Many of these reactors will reach the end of their current licenses and could close by mid-century. A number of these reactors are at risk of near-term closure due to market competition and the possibility that expensive major components will need replacement. Two reactors are currently under construction in the United States. Georgia plans to go ahead with two new reactors, just after South Carolina backed off. See an August 2017 article from New York Times as well as World Nuclear Association website updated February 2018 (KH)

¹² It should be noted that Saudi Arabia decided to build two large nuclear power reactors in 2015. This is a significant scale-back from its original plan to build 16 reactors over next 20-25 years at a cost of more than $80 billion. It projects that nuclear reactors provide 15% of energy by 2040, along with over 30% of solar capacity. This indicates that Saudi Arabia is investing more resources into the development of solar and other renewable energy than nuclear even though nuclear energy is by no means insignificant. (KH)

¹³ In 1995 the Monju “fast breeder” nuclear plant in Fukui Prefecture suffered a sodium leak and explosion that was subsequently covered up. The close of the plant was announced in September 2016.

¹⁴ The series ran from October 2011 to March 2016 and has since been edited into nine total volumes by Gakken Publishing.

¹⁵ Weapons enhanced with depleted uranium (DU) were used by the US military for the first time in the Persian Gulf War in 1991 to penetrate Iraqi tanks. They were subsequently used in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq again in the Iraq War of 2003-2011. Widely reported health consequences led to requests for a global moratorium on their use.

¹⁶ “Nuclear fuel cycle” (kakunenryō saikuru), refers to the multi-stage process by which uranium is mined, enriched and burned in a standard reactor, then either stored as spent fuel (nuclear waste) or reprocessed into mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel for use in a “fast-breeder” reactor.

¹⁷ Kamanaka gathered what she learned into a book co-authored with Dr. Hida Shuntarō. See Naibu hibaku no kyōi: genbaku kara rekka urandan made [The threat of internal radiation: From nuclear bombs to depleted uranium bullets] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 2005).

¹⁸ Hida Shuntarō (1917-2017) survived the atomic bombing in Hiroshima and devoted his life to caring for victims of radiation exposure. He became a mentor of Kamanaka after her return from Iraq; she describes the process in the first chapter of Hibakusha: Dokyumentarii eiga no genba kara. Dr. Hida plays major onscreen roles in her films Hibakusha at the End of the World (2003) and Living Through Internal Radiation (2012).

¹⁹ Dr. Jawad Al-Ali of the Sadr Teaching Hospital in Basrah is quoted widely in global media accounts of cancers caused by depleted uranium in Iraq. See for instance here.

²⁰ Founded by media activist Dee Dee Hallock in New York City in 1981, Paper Tiger Television continues to pioneer alternative community media and curate an extensive archive of independent and DIY programming.

²¹ See Katsuya Hirano's interview with Koide.

²² For the first few years after release, Kamanaka's films are generally shown only through jishu jōei or self-organized screenings. Her website gives detailed instructions on how to book, advertise, and stage events. For a detailed account of their significance for community formation and social activism see Hideaki Fujiki, “Networking Citizens through Film Screenings: Cinema and Media in Post-3.11 Social Movements,” in Patrick W. Galbraith and Jason G. Karlin, eds., Media Convergence in Japan (Creative Commons, 2016).

²³ Mutō Ruiko is a long-time antinuclear activist based in Fukushima and a key figure in the movement to hold TEPCO executives and government officials criminally liable. To understand the movement's evolution from a group of “Complainants” to “Supporters of a Criminal Lawsuit,” see this video at the Fukushima genpatsu keiji soshō shiendan website. For Asia Pacific Journal pieces about Mutō, see Tomomi Yamaguchi's essay from 2012, Katsuya Hirano's interview from 2015, and Norma Field's essay from 2016.

²⁴ Japan's Basic Law of Education (kyōiku kihonhō) enacted in 1947 was amended under the leadership of Abe Shinzo in 2006 to de-emphasize equality and critical thinking and emphasize “patriotism.” For facts see Wikipedia. For analysis, see McNeill and Lebowitz.

²⁵ “Those who discriminate” can refer to school bullies calling Fukushima evacuees “radioactive,” or people who practice marriage discrimination against prospective partners who have been exposed, or those who exert social pressure on parents who speak openly about thyroid cancer. Norma Field provides an overview and a wealth of citations in her essay “From Fukushima: To Despair Properly, to Find the Next Step.” As Kamanaka notes here, however, the term “discrimination” (sabetsu) has also been appropriated by the pro-nuclear faction to silence those who speak out about radiation's effects, on the grounds that they too are practicing sabetsu.

²⁶ All four “dispatches” (tsūshin) take the form of documentaries. The four-disc set is available from ILL and also from Kamanaka's website.

²⁷ Kamanaka's program about the German fantasy and children's book author Michael Ende (1929-1995) aired on NHK in May 1999. A book version by Kamanaka's production company Group Gendai and NHK producer Kawamura Atsunori was published in 2000 by NHK Press. It remains in print in a bunko edition by Kodansha.