{"id":364,"date":"2017-06-03T11:34:20","date_gmt":"2017-06-03T11:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/?p=364"},"modified":"2017-06-11T09:59:11","modified_gmt":"2017-06-11T09:59:11","slug":"i-like-big-boats-and-i-cannot-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/trip-day-5\/i-like-big-boats-and-i-cannot-lie\/","title":{"rendered":"I Like Big Boats And I Cannot Lie"},"content":{"rendered":"

But in all seriousness, today was one of my favorite days.\u00a0We went to the \u7b2c\u4e94\u798f\u7adc\u4e38 (Daigo Fukuryu Maru<\/em>, or Lucky Dragon No. 5) Museum in Tokyo. I have to apologize for my behind-ness of posts… and for the length of this post. I wanted to do this visit justice.<\/p>\n

We did\u00a0the following readings, but I’m going\u00a0to focus on the first one because it was more impactful for me:<\/p>\n

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  1. The contentious death of Mr. Kuboyama: science as politics in the 1954 Lucky Dragon incident\u00a0<\/em>by Aya Homei<\/li>\n
  2. Constructing Sustainable Japan<\/em> by Peter Wynn Kirby<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Because it is thought as an objective truth, science has been used to put forward a political agenda.\u00a0<\/strong>This was a small museum, but I think there was a lot to take in. First, I will describe some historical background then I will talk about my experience at the museum and how the reading shaped it. On March 1, 1954, the United States conducted its first nuclear test called Castle Bravo on Bikini Atoll. A tuna fishing boat, \u7b2c\u4e94\u798f\u7adc\u4e38, felt the fallout as white, irradiated\u00a0ash\u00a0from coral fell on the ship for approximately three hours. The crew eventually started to experience radiation poisoning symptoms, like nausea. One of the crew members,\u00a0Aikichi Kuboyama, died six\u00a0months later and the Japanese declared him as the first victim of the Hydrogen bomb.<\/p>\n

    The first impression upon entering the museum is just seeing a giant, deteriorated boat that is at least a couple\u00a0stories high. This was a pretty small museum, with a series\u00a0of informational panels and encased items underneath them. The first item we see is\u00a0a glass bottle of\u00a0\u6b7b\u306e\u7070 (shi no hai<\/em>, or death ash). Pretty powerful stuff. Next, there were\u00a0various items collected from the ship itself. I thought this was unusual, as these items did not have much significance to me besides just being from the boat; to be fair, I could\u00a0not read the context\/descriptions accompanied these items.\u00a0Selinger \u5148\u751f suggested that they showed wear from\u00a0faded color, which was probably a result of the H-bomb. Then to provoke more sympathy, there was a display of children drawings wishing the fishermen well. They were accompanied by\u00a0a heartbreaking photograph of crying children. It also served as a\u00a0transition to Japanese citizen response.<\/p>\n

    An \u304a\u3082\u3057\u308d\u3044 part was about how Japanese people treated all the washed up contaminated fish. Eventually they\u00a0decided to bury the fish in order\u00a0to help make\u00a0up the foundation of Tsukiji, as it was made from reclaimed land.\u00a0Selinger \u5148\u751f mentioned the day before that there was a small reference to this\u00a0at Tsukiji (we only learned about this after the fact). The contrast between building something that emphasizes purity so much (i.e. Tsukiji) with something the opposite of pure (the contaminated fish) and the act of burying\/hiding the impure things and showcasing the pure is so interesting to me. I mean, the museum itself is built on reclaimed land and they didn’t bury the fish there, so there is significance to bringing the fish to Tsukiji.<\/p>\n

    Next, there were newspaper articles displaying the\u00a0media response less than a month after the bombing. From what Selinger \u5148\u751f translated, the\u00a0general goal of the news articles\u00a0was\u00a0to mitigate fear of contamination. They implied that wearing vinyl hats would help protect from contaminated rain, but the word choice was ambiguous. The sense I got was that it was not trying to be scientific (like hey there was a study that showed you won’t get radiation from rain by wearing these hats) but comforting (like hey wearing this hat is probably better than not wearing it). I wish I knew my nuclear chemistry better, but my first instinct is that plastic is not going to protect from radiation. Perhaps if radioactive\u00a0metals were somehow part of the composition of the rain then the hats would prevent direct absorption of those metals into the body? But protection from the high-energy waves that actually cause mutations in DNA? \u3044\u3044\u3048\u3002Unless you’re wearing a lead hat, a sheet of plastic won’t do anything. That’s why the dentist or doctor\u00a0always leaves the room when you get an X-ray. But it’s also unrealistic and unsafe to ask all children to wear lead hats.\u00a0Plus they probably thought it would be\u00a0easier\u00a0to have people perceive the hats as helping than to have them\u00a0actually help. I don’t doubt that this happened other\u00a0times in history and not in just Japan (Christmas \u5148\u751f \u306f \u3069\u3053 to give some environmental history background?). Nonetheless, a win for the government, really! Also, there were stores displaying signs to reassure customers that their fish was not contaminated, but who regulates that?<\/p>\n

    There was also information on the citizen activism that arose from this incident. What happened was pretty amazing. My understanding is that a group of people started a petition and it eventually got\u00a0around half of Japan’s population’s signatures. The exhibit then shifted from\u00a0the scope of Japan to the scope of the world. It was about how nuclear testing has affected people in other parts of the world, from Tibetans to Native Americans. It ended on a\u00a0optimistic and sing-songy note of a “nuclear free future.” The description listed the various treaties against nuclear weapons. Where was the mention of nuclear energy?<\/p>\n

    There was no mention of the disagreement\u00a0between American and Japanese doctors.\u00a0<\/strong>This was a huge point in the article that we read today. I mentioned before that the Japanese declared Kuboyama-san as the first victim of the H-bomb. Well, the Americans disagreed with this statement because\u00a0he died\u00a0from\u00a0problems with his liver, which was not a direct result of radiation poisoning but rather from the treatment. But if you think about their motives, Japan was trying to take control of this case and use it to get prestige, as radiation was a relatively knew phenomenon, so being able to study its effects and talk about it increased some kind of social currency.\u00a0There was a lot of back-and-forth in discrediting the other, with science being the tool they used\u00a0to do so.<\/p>\n

    In reference\u00a0to the first bolded line I put in this post, the author was arguing that the general\u00a0acceptance of science as\u00a0neutral and fact can be used to manipulate the public. This is a bit different from my initial reading of the article (which was that science is never objective but laden with social and political context… not that this isn’t true, but that there’s a bit more to it than that), so I’m glad that\u00a0Selinger \u5148\u751f made that distinction. This reminded me of an article I read a few months ago about the media response to Flint’s water quality. The actor Mark Ruffalo (he played Hulk in the Avengers) advocated for a magic sponge that could clean water, but the science he tried to explain was wrong and the sponge did not do what he claimed it did do. I am sure Ruffalo was more of a spokesperson thinking he was doing a good thing, but this was also\u00a0an example of science being used to manipulate the public (but in this case it was to sell products rather than put forth an agenda). In both examples, doctors were being viewed as heroes.<\/p>\n

    Other interesting points from the reading: historical and political context (here are the\u00a0points I liked:<\/p>\n