Speaker: Satsuki Takahashi, Toyota Visiting Professor, Center for Japanese Studies, the University of Michigan; Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, George Mason University

Since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown, the future of the sea is precarious. Radioactive wastewater continues to be poured into the ocean, while consumers continue to fear the possibility that their seafood is contaminated. Nevertheless, the post-disaster sea is filled with hopeful narratives about a bright future. Even as they acknowledge the ruins of today, these narratives gaze at the future, by talking about hope, ranging from the recovery of fish population, to the improvement of marine conservation, and to the development of floating offshore wind farms. But given the heightened precarity, how do people actually imagine the future in the ruined seascape? How does the future that is imagined in the present link to the past? While these questions in the background, the presentation will build from my ethnographic and historical research on fishing communities in and near Fukushima, and discuss how Japanese modernization efforts have repeatedly ruined the seascape and yet simultaneously regenerated hope for the future.

Dr. Satsuki Takahashi is an assistant professor of anthropology at George Mason University, and currently Toyota Visiting Professor with the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan (2015-2016). Her research interests are in environmental anthropology, eco-development, and ocean-human relations in Japan and around the world. She is a co-editor of the Japanese-English bilingual anthology: To See Once More the Stars: Living in a Post-Fukushima World (2014, New Pacific Press).