Suzuki Yūichi (56) was born to a farming family in Namie, Fukushima in 1960. Namie was one of the areas most devastated by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, as well as the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. Besides 565 deaths from the earthquake/tsunami, because the town was located within the 20 kilometer exclusion zone around the damaged nuclear power plant, the entire town was evacuated on March 12. The government of Namie continued to operate in Nihonmatsu-city 39 kilometers from Namie. At the time of the nuclear accident, Mr. Suzuki was working in the Citizens' Affairs Division of Namie and was immediately assigned to the Disaster Management Division established to assist citizens in finding missing family members, locating temporary housing, and evacuating families. Suzuki was subsequently responsible for decontamination efforts, return policies, and establishing clinics for prospective returnees. In the summer and the winter of 2016, I visited Namie with my colleagues Professor Yoshihiro Amaya of Niigata University and Yoh Kawano, a PhD candidate at UCLA, to interview Mr. Suzuki. Mr. Suzuki contends that the majority of former residents of Namie are unlikely to return to the town even after the Japanese government lifts the restriction on residency in certain areas on March 31, 2017.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is often now cited by the remaining band of optimists in Washington as a safe pair of hands, limiting the influence of the foreign policy manias permeating the White House. Unfortunately for both the United States and the rest of the world, Tillerson's public comments during his mid-March visits to Japan, South Korea and China show the precise opposite by threatening China with U.S. encouragement of acquisition of nuclear weapons by Japan and South Korea. Faced with American risk-taking on this order, at a time of mounting tensions in the Asia-Pacific, Australia and other nations in the region require an independent foreign policy focussed on sanity about nuclear weapons.

This essay was the last major published work by Hayashi Kyoko, who died on February 19, 2017, at the age of 86. Born in Nagasaki on August 28, 1930, Hayashi spent most of her childhood in Shanghai, until she returned to Nagasaki with her mother and sisters, in the spring of 1945. On August 9, she was working as a student recruit at the Mitsubishi Munitions Factory. Her story “Ritual of Death” (Matsuri no ba, literally “The Place of the Festival”), a searing account of her experiences that day and during subsequent months and years, won her the Akutagawa Prize in 1975. Her next work, a short story collection, Cut Glass, Blown Glass (Gyaman biidoro 1978), was selected to receive the Geijutsu-senshō-mombudaijinshinjin-shō, a prestigious literary award by the Ministry of Education. Hayashi, however, refused this award on the grounds that, as a hibakusha, she could not accept an award from the Japanese government so long as it maintained the stubborn refusal to acknowledge the effect of internal exposure to radiation—a perspective that is made abundantly clear in the present work. Despite a relatively late debut, Hayashi was a prolific writer whose eight volume collected works was published in 2005.