“Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age Conference” was an amazing opportunity to see the topics of nuclear time, nuclear risk, and especially writing about nuclear futures from a variety of professors from the fields of both Japanese and Germanic studies. A topic that I noticed was a theme in many of the presentations was the difficulty of writing about nuclear futures. The obvious choice when writing about anything to do with nuclear technology is to choose a desolate post-apocalyptic world with no government or social order. Although it can send an effective message about the dangers of nuclear technology, it rarely offers any way of preventing the disaster, dealing with disaster as it happens or recovering from the disaster. Usually the only solace in these stories is either overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or finding a hidden oasis of natural resources, neither of these solutions are realistic nor even a long-term solution. So creating a myth narrative that does not solely rely on a doomsday or apocalypse scenario proves to be both important and difficult. The importance of dealing with the problems of a nuclear disaster, both during and afterwards, is the myth narrative the scholars in the field of nuclear futures wants to emphasize. Donna J. Haraway calls it “Staying with the Trouble” and the “Chthulucene,” i.e. not relying on the future to fix our problems and instead focusing on the here and now.

Professor Suzuko Mousel Knott offered some incredible insight on the idea of writing nuclear futures as a myth narrative, about which she suggests “myth is a narrative of the past and also explains the present and tries to illuminate the future.” She suggests another problem for the doomsday narrative for nuclear futures is that the idea of an apocalypse is mostly a western and Christian-toned construct. Japanese myth and religion do not really have a doomsday or an apocalyptic event that ends the world: it has a more cycle of life and death, which is a more eastern ideal. She highlights the “untranslatability of catastrophe” as a challenge of writing about nuclear futures. Slow violence, changing time-scales and temporalities are very difficult concepts to explain or visualize in writing. She explains changing time-scales and temporalities of myth through the novel The Emissary by Yoko Tawada. Time-scales are challenged from the start by the two main characters, Yoshiro and Mumei. Yoshiro is over 100 years old and still rather naive and active, and Mumei the sickly child is wise-beyond-his-years. The temporalities of myth come into play as well, both di-temporality and synchronicity, when Mumei views the world map for the first time and passes out. He awakes around 10 years in the future, where he is in a wheelchair and his grandfather is still alive. He goes on to have a wonderful date with the girl he met outside his house wearing the strange suit, who has also aged around 10 years. He is allowed to experience a “normal life” for this short period of time, only to again pass out and awakens as a child again only to die shortly after. His last thought being “I’m all right. I had a really nice dream,” a rather fitting end for this child stuck between shifting temporalities. Dr. Knott stated it best that disasters “ruin known time-scales and temporalities,” as well as “make cyclical time seems impossible,” and “make untold futures seem more likely.” We have to face these problems and many others when trying to write about nuclear futures and environmental humanities.

(https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-emissary/)

Professor Bradley Boovy also offered fascinating concepts on the transcorporeality and transtemporality of nuclear radiation. He describe the boundaries between living organisms and the surrounding ecosystem as a “thin and permeable membrane,” through which radiation can easily pass. Relating this idea to human life may be difficult or confusing, so many authors use animals to describe the thin and permeable membrane between living organisms and their ecosystems. Professor Boovy uses the famous three-eyed fish Blinky from The Simpsons, who is mutated by waste from the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. He suggests the fish depicts how the water systems and fish are more susceptible to radiation and contamination, that the membrane between sea life and their ecosystem is an incredibly thin and invisible membrane. By using animals as an analogy or even as a whimsical lens helps us understand how the borders between our lives and ecosystem are thin, even if we try to ignore it with science and technology. While at the same time providing some relief with some of the difficulties of writing about nuclear futures. Professor Boovy also cites the book Bad Environmentalism and suggests that nuclear futures writers “reject the doomsday aesthetic.” He further suggests that nuclear disasters and radiation “transcend space and time,” and that there is “no ‘outside’ the contamination zone or death zone,” which are concepts that challenge conventional temporality and time-scales. These final suggestions, along with the difficulties of nuclear future writing, stood out to me as one of the most significant challenges facing the environmental humanities as a field of study.

(http://www.sfweekly.com/news/is-blinky-the-simpsons-three-eyed-fish-headed-for-san-francisco/)