Fukushima. Silences that count
Résumé
In places such as Fukushima that have been contaminated after a nuclear disaster, attesting to the presence of radioactivity is a challenge for the people there, who all know that one cannot touch, nor see, nor smell it. Nevertheless, since 2011, they have had to learn how to cohabit with radionuclides by—among other means—measuring their environment and every single item that populates it. Although when talking about a nuclear disaster, one often imagines the kind of ‘crackle’ sound produced by Geiger counters, life in the Fukushima region is strangely soundless. Most of the time, Geiger counters are calibrated to visualize an amount of rays via numbers, but by choice they are set to mute mode. This silence is echoed by the peculiar sound of deserted areas. Looking back over the history of the Geiger counter and ethnographical depictions, it will try to grasp and render the texture of sites such as these that force us as human beings to confront this deficiency in our senses.