A year ago, the geothermal-rich Japan suffered an utterly predictable earthquake, tsunami and nuclear nightmare that is still currently unfurling in terrible ways.
The more we know about what happened, one pattern becomes utterly clear: We should have known more about what was happening, as it happened, but were prevented by those whose culpability in such a predictable disaster was no longer safely hidden.
The same goes for the readout and fallout. From wreckage to radiation, Japan, and the rest of the world that its haphazard approach to hazardous waste has subsequently endangered, is still in the danger zone. Like Chernobyl whose shadow it annihilated, the Fukushima clusterfuck will take decades before we can fully apprehend, must less resolve, its technocratic ravages.
And to think, it all could have been stopped cold if TEPCO, and other nuclear industry titans and teat-suckers, would have just screened these cold-sobering reality checks disguised as harrowing films. With that sad fact in mind, I have resuscitated a cultural critique I submitted in those irradiated weeks shortly after the disaster, which was buried by our unhealthy obsessions with lesser matters.
Nuclear’s Environmental Injustice
Nuclear Cinema: Ten Prescient Meltdowns
Animating Hiroshima: An Interview With Sunao Katabuchi
Nuclear Cinema: In This Corner of the World
