In this introduction to an excerpt from Durian Sukegawa's travel memoir A Dosimeter on the Narrow Road to Oku, I give an outline of Sukegawa's biography, his reasons for undertaking a journey by bicycle in 2012 along Matsuo Basho's route in The Narrow Road to Oku, and the reasons for my own particular interest in this text. The translation covers the section of his journey from Fukagawa to Nasu. It won the 2021 Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize in Japanese Literature, Thought, and Society.

A decade ago, Japan learned some bitter lessons from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, after ignoring global and local ones over the preceding four decades. But elements of the country clearly haven’t, whether it comes to the atom or dealing with an international event like the Tokyo Summer Olympics during a global pandemic. Because of Japan’s mishandling of the pandemic and new variants resistant to vaccines, whether the games, which a majority of the public wanted cancelled or postponed again, would have become a super-spreader event, trigger a new variant or create an explosion of COVID-19 cases or a combination thereof remained a continuing concern. What’s clear is that Tokyo put political, bureaucratic and commercial interests ahead of the health and wellbeing of the overall public —similar to what happened in the decades preceding Fukushima.

Safecast is a network of concerned citizens created after 3.11 to measure nuclear radiation and provide these measurements in real time on the Internet. This is one among many instances of the production of information on radiation risks after 3.11. While Safecast has contributed to the collective intelligence on these risks, its members have claimed that such measurements and data are “politically neutral”.

This Diary written by twentieth-generation sake brewer of Futaba, Tomisawa Shūhei, from March 11, 2011 until April 21, 2011, depicts the experience of his family as they navigated the forced evacuation of their ancestral home as a result of the disastrous nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The Diary is translated to reflect the original and only occasionally adds names or descriptions for clarity.

The recently released eight-part Japanese docudrama THE DAYS (Netflix 2023) ostensibly concerns the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami, nuclear reactor explosions and subsequent meltdowns at Fukushima. We highlight the problematic rendering of this particular Fukushima screen history by analysing THE DAYS' narrative veracity and reliance on ‘heroic’ disaster tropes, absent-presences, the glossing over of the radiological legacy, and the context of related nuclear accident teledramas and docudrama re-enactments.

March 11, 2021 marked the tenth anniversary of Japan’s triple disaster of 2011. Residents of Fukushima towns which endured the greatest environmental, social, and economic impact of the Fukushima Daiichi NPP accident have lived with uncertainty about the future for a full decade. Major infrastructure projects are fully or nearly complete, and decontamination efforts in reopened towns have largely concluded. Nevertheless, evacuee return rates have been low in most towns which had been placed under full evacuation orders. As a result, the current populations of many affected towns are less than 20% of their pre-disaster levels, and the majority of current residents over 65 years of age. Despite the huge challenges, the energy and know-how of the people of Fukushima are tremendous resources. Many see the possibility of new forms of long-term viability that capitalize on technology, the age of the population, and the ready availability of land and other resources. What has been achieved so far in realizing these visions has been made possible by an emergent network of informal community leaders, who display a charismatic, soft leadership style.

The book presents personal accounts by veterans of an Army nuclear weapons storage base in Henoko Village, Okinawa during the 1960's in the context of nuclear weapons history, Cold War tensions, and the proposal to use them in Vietnam. They describe their entrances into the Army, training, leave times, re-entry into civilian life, and illnesses associated with radiation exposure three of them later suffered, one of whom died in 2015.

The first tsunami that hit northern Japan in March 2011 was a big wave of salt water. The second tsunami was comprised of cement dikes designed to protect against a tsunami. The third tsunami is a socio-political process that erases memory of the disaster. The nuclear disaster that followed the first tsunami has reactivated the dispute over the effects of low-dose radiation. This controversy, which dates back to the experience of the hibakusha in 1945, includes a problem of hermeneutics—a conflict of interpretation—over what is being counted as “data”.

Amid the radioactive fallout of the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and across what would come to be known as the Exclusion Zone, Japanese members of the nuclear lobby laboured to contain the political fallout of the Fukushima disaster. This article scrutinizes the profuse rhetoric over recycling as mobilized by nuclear boosters and the wider operations of circularity in waste management in Japan. Japanese leant heavily on the notion of recycling to attempt to frame the clean-up in Fukushima in more ideologically convenient terms. This led, for example, to officials trumpeting plans to ‘recycle’ over 16 million cubic metres of radioactive topsoil scraped from hundreds of square kilometres of Fukushima Prefecture, as well as efforts to achieve ‘thermal recycling’ by generating electricity from the incineration of collected irradiated vegetal matter and the large amounts of protective clothing and other material used in the ‘decontamination’ campaign. By scrutinizing this appropriation of recycling rhetoric and its leveraging across Japan's nuclear waste management apparatus, the article exposes contradictions and distortions in contemporary Japanese policy that have considerable socio-political ramifications.

Radiotherapy (RT) plays a key role in the tumour microenvironment (TME), impacting the immune response via cellular and humoral immunity. RT can induce local immunity to modify the TME. It can stimulate dendritic cell maturation and T-cell infiltration. Moreover, B cells, macrophages and other immune cells may also be affected. Tertiary lymphoid structure (TLS) is a unique structure within the TME and a class of aggregates containing T cells, B cells and other immune cells. The maturation of TLS is determined by the presence of mature dendritic cells, the density of TLS is determined by the number of immune cells. TLS maturation and density both affect the antitumour immune response in the TME. This review summarized the recent research on the impact and the role of RT on TLS, including the changes of TLS components and formation conditions and the mechanism of how RT affects TLS and transforms the TME. RT may promote TLS maturation and density to modify the TME regarding enhanced antitumour immunity.

The war in Ukraine raises concerns for potential hazards of radiological and nuclear incidents. Children are particularly vulnerable in these incidents and may need pharmaceutical countermeasures, including antidotes and cytokines. Searches found no published study comparing pediatric indications and dosing among standard references detailing pediatric medications for these incidents. This study addresses this gap by collecting, tabulating, and disseminating this information to healthcare professionals caring for children. Expert consensus chose the following references to compare their pediatric indications and dosing of medical countermeasures for radiation exposure and internal contamination with radioactive materials: Advanced Hazmat Life Support (AHLS) for Radiological Incidents and Terrorism, DailyMed, Internal Contamination Clinical Reference, Medical Aspects of Radiation Incidents, and Medical Management of Radiological Casualties, as well as Micromedex, POISINDEX, and Radiation Emergency Medical Management (REMM). This is the first study comparing pediatric indications and dosing for medical countermeasures among commonly used references for radiological and nuclear incidents.