Living in Post-Fukushima Grey Zones: Family Decisions in the Wake of Nuclear Disaster by Aleksandr Sklyar A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology) in the University of Michigan 2019 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Krisztina Fehérváry, Co-Chair Professor Stuart Kirsch, Co-Chair Associate Professor Rebecca Hardin Professor David Slater, Sophia University Associate Professor Daisaku Yamamoto, Colgate University Aleksandr Sklyar [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-1408-1388 © Aleksandr Sklyar 2019 Dedication To my mom and the mothers of Fukushima. ii Acknowledgements I have benefitted from tremendous academic, institutional, and moral support throughout the eight years that it took for this doctoral dissertation to come into being. I am deeply grateful for my worldwide networks of care and support, which extend from Ann Arbor to Yamagata, from Hamilton to Tokyo, and beyond. I would like to thank some of the most important mentors, colleagues, and friends who have walked either all or part of this eight-year journey with me. First and foremost, to Krisztina Fehérváry: thank you for your willingness to come along with me on this journey to Japan. I can only imagine the number of hours that you have clocked in on my behalf over the course of these eight years of instruction, guidance, mentorship, conversations, and professional advocacy. Specifically with regards to this dissertation, thank you for the repeated and extensive comments and engagement throughout the writing process, our regular check-ins throughout fieldwork, and all of your letters of support. Second, to the rest of my committee. To Stuart Kirsch: thank you for guiding me through the relevant annals of environmental, disaster, and engaged anthropology. You were the one who taught me and my Ethno Lab 2017-2018 compatriots what a “chapter” is and how to get to one; modeled for us all what it is to give at once critical and generous constructive feedback; and offered us all invaluable professional guidance in the final stages of graduate school. Thank you for your generous and grounded mentorship. To David Slater: it is thanks to you and the Sophia University Institute for Comparative Cultures that I was able to carry out this research as planned. Thank you also for mentoring and facilitating the vibrant intellectual community of the Sophia Fieldwork Workshop in 2015-2016, who, as you predicted, have now become my ii lifelong friends and colleagues. To Daisaku Yamamoto and Rebecca Hardin: Your participation in the defense and your perspectives from engaged local and environmental scholarship are an inspiration as I move on in my career into arenas of global environmental justice and engaged anthropology. Next, I would also like to thank other eminent scholars with whom I have been fortunate enough to work not only through the written word, but also in person: Gabrielle Hecht, Mieko Yoshihama, Tom Gill, and Takuya Tsujiuchi. Thank you to other University of Michigan faculty, whose graduate and undergraduate courses and years of moral and professional support greatly influenced my development as an anthropologist: Elizabeth Roberts, Holly Peters- Golden, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Erik Mueggler, Jason De León, Leslie Pincus, and Laura MacLatchy. Thank you to my tremendous base of friends and support in Ann Arbor, including my wonderful cohort and all of my many friendships beyond anthropology. I am grateful for your love, unwavering support, and wholehearted, whole-person caring for me and my well-being throughout this process. Writing and reading day-in, day-out, through the day and late into the night is made easier with compatriots together with you in the trenches of drafts. Thank you: Meredith Henstridge, Laurel Billings, Syed Shah, Hoda Bandeh-Ahmadi, Jennifer Tucker, Courtney Cottrell, Maire Malone, Ha Yeon Lee, Jessica Worl, Carl Haynes, Talha Anwar, Alli Caine, Drew Haxby, Nik Sweet, Cheryl Yin, Laura Yakas, Chelsea Fisher, Paula Curtis, Bess Anderson, Jen Sierra, Moniek van Rheenan, Promise McEntire, Chris Mulvey, John Doering- White, Prash Naidu, Georgia Ennis, Obed Garcia, Rachna Reddy, Irisa Arney, Ainash Childebayeva, Travis Williams, and Anna Antoniou. Thank you to my friends and cheerleaders across Ann Arbor, especially Meatball, Pushkin, Molly, Jelly, and Caddie. In Hamilton, NY, a iii big thank you to my unwavering Colgate support: Nancy Ries, Jon Hyslop, Lulu and Kiki; Karen Harpp; Chikako Ikeguchi, Nii-ban, Yamato, and the memory of Professor George Hudson; Angie Chapman and Packard; the Yamamoto family, Dick Sylvester, Yukari Hirata, Hélène Julien, and Kia Edwards. Thank you to my Connecticut-based support: my mom and dad, Kim, Lea, Mrs. Deer, and my grandparents. Thank you to LST and Tommy Birkett, my two colleagues and friends who visited me in the field, whose mentorship, sharing of their ideas, and engagement with my research sites and interlocutors greatly enriched the resulting ethnography and analysis. There are many others whose kindness and care supported me throughout this process. Thank you all. Please forgive me for not listing you by name. I am grateful for the financial and professional writing support I received from 2016 through 2019. Financially, thank you to the UM Department of Anthropology Block Grant (fall 2017), the Sweetland Writing Center Dissertation Writing Institute 2017 stipend, and the Rackham Graduate School One-Term Dissertation Completion Fellowship (winter 2019). Various parts of the dissertation were presented at conferences, invited talks, and writing groups from 2016 through 2019, including the Joint East Asia Studies conference at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies in September 2016, the 2016 American Anthropological Association annual conference, the 2017 Japanese Studies Association Annual Conference, and 2017 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. I am grateful for the input and feedback of my academic audiences and readers on these initial conference paper drafts. Chapter drafts benefitted greatly from substantial peer and professor feedback in UM Anthropology Ethnography Lab 2016-2017 (led by Damani Partridge, with peer feedback from Courtney Cottrell, Christine Sargeant, Laura Yakas, Allison Caine, and Jessica Lowen) and 2017-2018 (led by Stuart Kirsch, with peer feedback from Allison Caine, Drew Haxby, Adrian iv Deoanca, John Doering-White, Jessica Worl, Jessica Lowen, Georgia Ennis, Prash Naidu, and Jennifer Tucker), office hours meetings with Kriszti and Stuart, Paul Baron and the Sweetland DWI 2017 cohort, and the in-person and Skype-based continuation of the Sophia dissertation writing group with Sonja Dale, Chiaki Nishijima, and Robert Simkins from March 2016 through summer 2017. Thank you all for your generosity of time and mind in reading through my chapter drafts when they were works in progress, penning feedback to me, and sitting down in person with me to share your views on my written work as it developed. I am also grateful for the opportunities I received through these writing groups to learn from your writing processes, too. Last and certainly not least, thank you to my friends and interlocutors throughout Japan. Thank you to the Fulbright program for its tremendous support throughout my Fulbright year and beyond. Thank you to Rie Yamada for connecting me with the Nationwide Accept-and-Welcome Coalition; to Kasumi Hikita for all of her help and exhilarating anthropological discussions across Japan; to Nishimura for taking me under his wing; to Chinatsu for her caring and friendship; to local, small-scale voluntary evacuee NGOs/NPOs throughout Japan and families in Yamagata, Fukushima, and beyond for letting me into their lives and sharing their time and stories with me. Thank you all for letting me enter into your lives. I am sorry to have had to leave. I will be back. The material that follows is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE1256260 for the proposal titled “Child recuperation and refugee mothers’ groups: productive citizen in post-Fukushima Japan” (2013-2014, 2015-2017); the US-Japan Education Commission Fulbright Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship to Japan for the proposal titled “Voluntary Relocation: Family Decisions in v Post-Fukushima Japan” (2014-2015); and the following grants from various University of Michigan organizations: Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant titled “Seven Years of Living in Fukushima Grey Zones” (2018); International Institute Individual Fellowship and Center for Japanese Studies Fellowship titled “Practice and Knowledge in post-Fukushima Citizen Action” (2012). Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, the US-Japan Education Commission, the Fulbright Program, the University of Michigan, or any other sources of funding. Parts of this dissertation, especially chapter 5, are derived from the forthcoming article “Value conflict among voluntary evacuee mothers from Fukushima: protecting children from radiation, respecting family and society,” to be published in Japan Forum. They are used with permission. vi Preface I went to Yamagata in 2014 to conduct ethnographic fieldwork on family decisions following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident. I was especially interested in “voluntary evacuees,” who had evacuated