Intra-mediary expertise: Trans-science and expert understanding of the public

Trans-science, expertise, and justice

The role of experts and their expertise became challenged in the wake of the nuclear accident in Fukushima, as debates erupted over the safety of low-dose exposure to radiation. Nuclear physicist Alvin Weinberg (1972) has used the term ‘trans-science’ for issues that may be raised as scientific issues but cannot be answered by science alone. The realm of trans-science has expanded with modern military and industrial developments that put in place highly complex technologies like nuclear power plants. These technologies have to be put in place first to find out what their risks might be, making risk calculation impossible (Beck, 1992; Perrow, 2011). This has required societies to manage and tolerate, or more commonly, forget about, uncertainties of the risks they are constantly exposed to until they become salient enough (see Fortun, 2001).

The nuclear disaster in Fukushima brought to bear a trans-scientific question of the safety of low-dose exposure to radiation for the health and well-being of the general public. In the absence of a scientific consensus on what levels of radiation exposure to consider safe, the question of safety has shifted from a clear demarcation of safety and danger to negotiations on what levels of exposure to consider ‘reasonable’ for the general public (Cram, 2016; Kumaki, 2021). Science became a locus of uncertainty rather than a source of an answer.

What counted as reasonable in Japan diverged and shifted in the years following the nuclear accident, even among radiation experts. For example, initially, experts deployed by the prefectural government communicated to Fukushima residents that exposure under 100mSv was safe. This number was based on research on the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which showed statistically significant increase in the rate of cancer for acute radioactive exposure above 100mSv (Reconstruction Agency, 2012, p. 2). After much criticism by experts and the public that the dose was too high, the Japanese government set 20mSv/year as the emergency exposure limit based on recommendations by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). This became the threshold for determining evacuation and compensation in Japan (International Commission on Radiological Protection [ICRP], 2007, pp. 108–111; Reconstruction Agency, 2012).

However, the exposure limits put in place by the government did not necessarily answer questions for residents in and around Fukushima. While those living in areas with exposure of 20mSv/year or more were evacuated, those outside the area and those who returned after evacuation orders were lifted still had to live with elevated levels of radiation. The legal limit of exposure normally allowed for the general public is 1mSv/year. The exposure limit in areas controlled for radiation work, including nuclear power plants and radiology rooms where people are legally prohibited from eating or staying overnight, is 5mSv/year. Naturally, residents were alarmed by the new standard of 20mSv/year, and questioned the safety of their living environments. Nevertheless, without scientific consensus on the health effects of everyday low-dose exposure, most scientific and medical experts have been reluctant to make any claims about safety and danger. Residents were left in uncertainty, weighing what the government had considered reasonable and what they were willing to consider as acceptable to protect their health and well-being (Kumaki, 2022).

In what follows, I examine a shift in the role of experts and their expertise in the face of such uncertainty following the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident. I draw on observations during 18months of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan from 2017–2018. This was a time when public debates on the safety of radiation exposure were re-surfacing with intensity, as the Japanese government was lifting evacuation orders in large parts of the mandatory evacuation zone. My research was conducted at sites in Fukushima and elsewhere where these debates emerged, in workshops, reporting sessions, local meetings, and people’s homes. In addition, I engaged with documents produced by governmental and nongovernmental organizations, residents living in and outside of Fukushima, the experts they have worked with, and scholarly work in STS produced before and after the disaster on science communication and expertise.

I begin by tracing the transformation of discourses around experts and their expertise among scientific experts, STS scholars, and the Japanese government in the years following the nuclear accident. I then discuss two kinds of expertise emerging to respond to the citizens’ everyday needs to address low-dose exposure to radiation, which I call ‘co-expertise’ and ‘intra-mediary expertise’. By examining the transformation of expertise in discourse and practice following the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, I ask what forms of expertise are adequate in the context of scientific uncertainty, to address the everyday needs of the exposed public.

Literatures on science communication, particularly the field of the ‘public understanding of science’, have identified and challenged the deficit model of the public, which attributes the public’s distrust in science to its lack of understanding. Elucidating common assumptions in scientific practices that marginalized lay knowledge, these literatures have upheld public participation as valuable to scientific decision-making (e.g. Irwin & Wynne, 1996; Sismondo, 2009; Suryanarayanan & Kleinman, 2013). In this framework, the issue of lay ignorance becomes a ‘problem of extension’ that asks to what extent expertise is to be extended to include non-professional experts and their knowledge practices (Collins & Evans, 2002, pp. 235–236). For instance, Wynne (1992) proposes ‘socially extended peer groups’ to complement existing scientific peer review processes that had internally legitimated scientific knowledge. Extended peer groups were to take part in scientific knowledge production by providing external criticism to scientific bodies of knowledge, thereby encouraging scientists to become reflexive about their own knowledge production and facilitate public legitimation of science.

These literatures have contributed to epistemic justice by challenging science communication that considers the ‘lay’ public to be ignorant of and always on the receiving end of scientific knowledge. However, there has been little discussion on the relationship between scientific expertise and diverse publics that centers on the publics’ need to address their everyday issues through engagement with scientific expertise. In other words, the focus on epistemic justice has often left out other questions of justice—which I will call ‘civic justice’—on how to live, and live well, with issues that are debated in scientific terms but pertain to the realm of everyday well-being.

Civic justice places the stakes, objectives, and temporalities of diverse publics on an equal footing to, if not above, those of science and policy. It can encompass political stakes of people and communities mobilizing for activism, litigation, and lobbying. In this article, however, instead of focusing on the role of the public in scientific and political processes, I focus on the role of experts and their expertise in addressing civic justice around everyday concerns and decisions. I ask to what extent experts and their expertise might become engaged in the public domain of decision-making, to address everyday normative stakes of people and communities affected by trans-scientific issues. This shifts the project of scientific expertise from facilitating the public understanding of science for the sake of science and policy, to what I call ‘expert understanding of the public’ for the sake of diverse publics.

The conditions of our time increasingly require people and communities to live in uncertainty of environmental risks and exposures and deal with trans-scientific issues with limited governmental, regulatory, and expert support. I argue that the case of Fukushima challenges us to consider the role of experts and their expertise beyond epistemic justice, to address civic justice that pertains to the ordinary lives of those most affected by scientific uncertainty and environmental injustice.

Paradigm shift in science communication

Before the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japanese policymakers relied heavily on scientific experts and their expertise to make important decisions on behalf of the general public. The epistemic and political landscape in Japan was characterized by a division of labor between science and policy, with the public at the receiving end of both. For instance, discourses around the safety of nuclear energy show that scientific facts provided by experts, particularly engineers, were considered the foundation of policy decisions (Kobayashi, 2016, pp. 15–16). Unquestioned value was placed on science as the arbiter of truth, and expert knowledge was uncritically accepted to make decisions on issues of nuclear safety (Shimazono et al., 2016, p. 210). These relations received acute scrutiny in the wake of the nuclear accident.

STS scholars in Japan have discussed the nuclear accident in Fukushima as a turning point, in which trust in scientific expertise and experts plummeted in the face of uncertainty around safety of low-dose exposure to radiation (Fujigaki, 2016a, p. 159; Sakura, 2016, p. 168; Shimazono et al., 2016, p. 5). As different experts began to communicate divergent views of the situation, citizens were not the only ones who did not know to whom to listen. Tadashi Kobayashi’s interviews with first responders in the Japanese government shows that governmental officials themselves were confused by the lack of data and contradictory evaluations on safety among scientific experts. Like the Iitate villagers, the officials themselves were not sure to which experts to listen (Kobayashi, 2016, p. 20). Previous assumptions about the role of experts and their expertise, as a source of definitive answer for policy and everyday decisions, began to falter.

Some of the major lessons in the wake of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, therefore, were that experts could disagree to a great extent, and that there were many things that experts could not answer, even as they claimed expertise in the area. The acceptance of plural voices and indeterminate knowledge were nothing new to the experts themselves. However, before the nuclear disaster, plurality and indeterminacy were not necessarily made explicit to the general public or to governmental officials (Fujigaki, 2016b, p. 131; Science Council of Japan [SCJ], 2014, p. 4): Experts possessed specialized knowledge, and had reliable answers to highly technical issues, such as the management of nuclear materials and health effects of radiation exposure (Fujigaki, 2016b, p. 133). The sudden exposé of divergent expert opinions in the wake of the nuclear accident led to confusion among those who expected and hoped for a single answer. This was reflected in the question of the Iitate villager, who asked why experts who had dedicated their life to research on nuclear issues ended up with different answers on the question of radiation safety.

Furthermore, heightening the sense of confusion was that, in the initial phase of the disaster, experts themselves considered their role as unifying their divergent perspectives to provide a singular voice on the issue of radiation safety. In the weeks after the nuclear disaster, the Science Council of Japan (SCJ), a publicly funded independent organization that represents experts in all disciplines, criticized the Japanese government and experts for causing confusion by conveying conflicting messages on safety. They recommended that the government provide unified information and guidelines for action based on scientific judgment (SCJ, 2011). Here, experts themselves attributed the plummeting of trust among citizens towards experts and the government to the absence of a singular guidance on what the risks of radiation exposure were and what should be done about them. Thus the public, policymakers, and experts themselves all expected singular expert guidance which did not materialize, leading to confusion, suspicion, and disillusionment towards the government and scientific experts.

Providing a unified voice, however, is not always possible in the context of trans-science. Fujigaki (2005) argues that the lack of a unified voice partly derives from different responsibilities that experts negotiate as they become torn between scientific and social stakes. Experts are often torn between their responsibility towards the academic community, to maintain the quality and precision of their research findings, as well as towards the public, to address urgent everyday questions it is facing (Fujigaki, 2005, p. 231). To be accountable to the academic community, experts would often hesitate to make any conclusive statements until enough research has been done and sufficient data have been collected. However, the public, seeking an immediate answer, would take this as a sign that experts were hiding information from them or being untruthful. The expert’s effort to maintain academic integrity backfires, as it fails to meet the expectations of ‘response-ability’ towards the public’s concerns (Fujigaki, 2016b, pp. 129–130).

Since the nuclear accident, much national and transnational discussion has taken place, to address how to regain the trust of the public following expert dissensus and failures in risk communication. In 2016, the Japanese Journal of Science and Technology Studies published a special issue on the accident, which reflected many of these discussions. In particular, there was heavy criticism of expert deployment of the deficit model that blamed the public for their lack of understanding of science, which led to a one-sided and alienating dissemination of scientific knowledge to citizens (Fujigaki, 2016a; Sakura, 2016; Sato, 2016; Yamaki, 2016). Epistemic justice was emphasized, acknowledging citizens as important participants in scientific practices and debates.

A different set of approaches also emerged that shifted attention from public understanding of science to ‘expert understanding of the public’, identifying experts and their expertise, instead of the public and their knowledge, as targets of intervention. In November 2013, Fukushima Medical University and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) co-hosted an International Academic Conference in Fukushima, featuring discussions on medical education and risk communication. In the conference, the failure in risk communication in Japan after the nuclear disaster was attributed to the lack of general education among medical practitioners and scientific experts, who focused on communicating their scientific expertise but did not necessarily understand the everyday concerns of the general public (Fujigaki, 2016a, pp. 162–164). The IAEA recommended that the Japanese government and scholars actively incorporate STS in their medical education and risk communication efforts.

In 2014, the Science Council of Japan (SCJ) overturned its aforementioned statement in 2011, which had advised the government and experts to provide a unified voice to citizens following the nuclear accident. Its 2014 statement now argued that the emphasis on reaching a singular perspective on radiation safety was one of the major reasons for the loss of trust in scientific experts and their expertise following the nuclear fallout. Instead of occluding multiple perspectives and debates among experts, the new statement emphasized that it was important for the government and experts to provide all possible information, even when conflicting, so that citizens could decide their course of action based on their own situation and priorities (SCJ, 2014, p. 17). A call for a unified voice turned into a call for ‘organized’ knowledge that balanced divergent perspectives and did not place disproportionate emphasis on safety or danger (Fujigaki, 2016a).

The kind of expertise that this encouraged was not authoritative, but instead acknowledged the diversity of experts and publics. It placed emphasis on diverse and shifting stakes of different publics, beyond the question of whether they understood science or could contribute to scientific practices. It further urged consideration of response-ability of different experts towards these different publics, rather than merely towards their academic community. This shift in discourse and practice of expertise has been taken up by experts across Japan and has been described as a ‘paradigm shift’ (Yamashita, 2013).

Expertise in the intermediary sphere

In the paradigm shift from the ‘public understanding of science’ to the ‘expert understanding of the public’, there has been increasing pressure on experts to develop expertise that would enable them to work alongside citizens to understand and respond to the issues and anxieties they faced. Experts have been pushed to move beyond contenting themselves with the mere incorporation of citizen’s perspectives into their scientific practices. They have had to develop different ideas about what kind of expertise is necessary and what the roles of experts should be if they are to be response-able to the everyday life of the general public dealing with trans-scientific issues.

While ‘organized’ knowledge has been upheld, building in multiple voices and room for ambiguity in the practice of expertise has not been enough, as it has led to confusions among citizens who did not know who to listen to or trust. Having raw scientific data and knowing that expert knowledge is limited are not helpful for citizens who have to navigate divergent expert claims and make high stake decisions, often in urgency and with a lack of resources. Such approaches only intensify the public sense of uncertainty and abandonment by experts and the government. Expert understanding of the public therefore requires experts to come out of their comfort zone to engage with citizens beyond the boundaries of their specific expertise (Fujigaki, 2022). It requires them to develop expertise that balances their sense of responsibility towards their scientific community and their response-ability towards the society at large (Fujigaki, 2016b, pp. 129–130; Shimazono et al., 2016, pp. 224–225).

Since the nuclear accident, STS scholars in Japan have debated what kind of expertise might bridge the scientific and the everyday in practice. Junko Nakanishi (2012) argues that experts themselves need to go beyond their academic territory and beyond the division between science and policy. She suggests that rather than merely presenting people with objective facts and leaving it at that, experts must be ready to engage in processes of normative social decision-making (Nakanishi, 2012, pp. 10–12). Kobayashi (2016), in turn, questions whether such an approach is practical, particularly in the Japanese context where experts are trained to specialize in certain areas of expertise. Rather than waiting for an extra-ordinary expert figure to emerge and take on such role, he suggests training people in a form of expertise that specializes in the mediation between scientific expertise and social decision making (Kobayashi, 2016, pp. 25–26, 2022).

Despite the acknowledgement of a need for a different kind of expertise in the realm of trans-science, not many experts have actually taken up that role (Murakami, 2022). For experts trained and operating in specialized fields, participating in the production of social value judgements often threatens their assumed stance of neutrality and objectivity. Yet, with increasing prevalence of trans-scientific issues, the ‘intermediary spheres’ characterized by explicit entanglements between science and policy, or scientific facts and social value, are expanding (Eyal, 2019, p. 257). It is becoming indispensable to ask what expert social responsibility and expertise might look like when addressing trans-scientific issues in the intermediary sphere.

The ongoing aftermath of the nuclear accident in Fukushima presents a window to examine the kinds of expertise that have been emerging in this intermediary sphere between the scientific and the social. In the next two sections, I discuss two formations of expertise emerging in Japan in response to the trans-scientific issue on the safety of low-dose exposure to radiation. I call them ‘co-expertise’ and ‘intra-mediary expertise’. Both reflect the paradigm shift from ‘public understanding of science’ to ‘expert understanding of the public’, as they go beyond the conventional, more authoritative, one-directional transmission of knowledge to incorporate accountability to citizens and their everyday concerns. Those who have taken part in cultivating these expertises have included both scientific and medical experts who have taken the rare step of moving outside of their specialization to engage public concerns—the kind of expertise Nakanishi (2012) envisions—as well as those who were trained as specialists in mediating between scientific knowledge and everyday concerns of the public—the form of expertise Kobayashi (2016) proposes. However, I distinguish them by the degree to which they were willing to engage normative questions and transform themselves in their engagement with diverse publics.

In brief, co-expertise is characterized by a partnership between scientific experts and the lay public in understanding and addressing issues of scientific uncertainty. It is a form of expertise upheld by the Japanese government and international regulatory institutions. Co-expertise is different from the conventional notion of expertise in Japan in their acknowledgement of the entanglement between science and politics. They attempt to move beyond the deficit model and one-sided dissemination of scientific knowledge to the public, towards a more collaborative interaction. Nevertheless, I show that co-expertise still insists on maintaining in its interactions the boundaries between science and politics, and expert and lay. In the end, the emphasis remains on maintaining the legitimacy of scientific and regulatory policies, rather than on addressing the public’s everyday needs in their diversity.

Intra-mediary expertise, on the other hand, steps further into the domain of social value and relationality. I borrow from Barad’s (2007) notion of ‘intra-action’ to emphasize how expertise has been constituted through an intra-action between the social and the scientific. That is, instead of scientific experts and lay publics coming together as separate stakeholders to interact and share their expertise, intra-mediary expertise emerges through intra-action of divergent actors who themselves are shaped and reshaped through their entanglement. They enact their response-ability not as separate beings, but as part of interactive becoming, through the connections and commitments they forge, changing themselves and opening different possibilities (Barad, 2007, pp. 391–396). In contrast to co-expertise, then, intra-mediary expertise is open to engage questions and matters beyond those that matter in scientific and regulatory realms, and is more willing to be affected and shaped by divergent politics and everyday conditions that inflect the aftermath of the nuclear fallout.

This is a particularly salient moment to analyze experts and their expertise in the expanding realm of trans-science, as scientific uncertainty is increasingly managed through deregulation and the imposition of choice on individuals. Experts and their expertise have been part of techniques of governance that have enabled governing bodies to rule indirectly through mobilization of knowledge, affect, and uncertainty (Masco, 2006, Rose, 1993). They have shaped what Murphy (2006) has called ‘regimes of imperceptibility’, shaping what is perceptible and worthy of engagement, and therefore what can become sources of policy and individual decision-making. In the context of Fukushima’s nuclear accident, scholars have shown that expert engagement with governmental projects, including science communication, have shaped uncertainty and affective engagements in ways that forward the government’s political economic goals, to contain the disaster and pursue its goals towards technological progress (Felt, 2017; Polleri, 2020; Takahashi, 2024; Valaskivi et al., 2019). However, analyses of expertise in the intermediary sphere shows further that emerging forms of expertise have not only reproduced but also challenged regimes of imperceptibility, political economic trajectories, and risk governance practices by questioning the limits of citizen participation and political control.

Co-expertise

In the years following the nuclear fallout in Fukushima, the Japanese government developed risk communication projects that communicated the risk of low-dose radiation exposure to its citizens. Responding to STS scholars and expert communities critical of the paternalistic and top-down form of expertise that the government had initially mobilized, the Ministry of Environment has trained experts and non-experts to become risk communicators who would engage in mutual dialogue with citizens in the intermediary sphere. These risk communicators included medical practitioners, public health nurses, governmental officials, and citizens themselves. They held lectures in the communities and measured radiation levels with citizens to communicate the science behind policy decisions and to address citizens’ concerns about radiation in their bodies, food, and living environment. I call this form of expertise co-expertise.

An important momentum for cultivating co-expertise among scientific and medical practitioners in Japan emerged through the already mentioned International Academic Conference in Fukushima co-hosted by Fukushima Medical University (FMU) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2013. At the conference, insights from STS were presented as the main solution to the lack of trust in science. Medical schools began to train their students not only on radiation and its health risks, but also on how to communicate their knowledge to citizens in ways that did not alienate them. The documentary film Healing Fukushima (2016), directed by Sulfikar Amir and written by Shi-Lin Loh, shows the kind of education developed at FMU. In the film, medical students learn about the concerns of Fukushima residents, learn to reframe their medical and scientific knowledge in ways that are accessible to the residents, and go into the communities to measure and discuss radiation levels with community members. For example, in a seminar course, students come up with creative ideas to explain the physics of radiation to the general public. One student comes up with a metaphor of Godzilla as a radioactive material. In this metaphor, the beam that the Godzilla emits is the radioactive wave and the level of physical destruction it causes is the radiation level in units of Sieverts per hour, which are shown on monitoring posts across Fukushima Prefecture (Amir, 2016).

Loh and Amir use the term ‘serviceable expertise’ for such expertise in radiation emergency medicine developing at FMU (Loh & Amir, 2019). Their insight builds on Jasanoff’s concept of ‘serviceable truth’ for what serves in place of scientific truth in legal procedures in contexts of scientific uncertainty. Emphasis on serviceable truth shifts the question from whether something can be said with scientific certainty to how science can be mobilized to support those affected by issues of scientific uncertainty, without having to wait for scientific evidence to be finalized (Jasanoff, 2015, p. 1730).

FMU doctors developed serviceable expertise in the face of immediate needs to address the radiation fallout and to engage concerns in the community. In this effort, they became part of a network of radiation experts that produced knowledge with both clinical and everyday concerns in mind. Nevertheless, I characterize their expertise as ‘co-expertise’ as they fell short of becoming ‘serviceable’ in the normative sense. While FMU doctors engaged their communities in multiple ways, they ultimately defined their role as ‘determining the calculus of risk’ and asked residents themselves to decide on what to do about the risks in their lives (Amir, 2016; Loh & Amir, 2019, p. 348). In other words, they kept themselves in the realm of the scientific and the medical, refraining from making normative claims about the situation (Loh & Amir, 2019, p. 349). Although this expertise entailed bilateral conversations, boundaries between expert and lay were maintained and recreated through the process.

Co-expertise nevertheless at least gestured towards engaging citizens’ normative concerns about how to live after the nuclear fallout. During my fieldwork in the former evacuation zone, I sat in a tea gathering at a public housing building, where a public health nurse was invited to speak about radiation safety. The public health nurse was trained by the Ministry of Environment as a risk communicator after the nuclear accident. She was invited by the residents to discuss the safety of consuming wild mushrooms and wild plants that residents were eager to harvest that fall. Using handouts she had acquired from her training, the public health nurse discussed the level of Potassium-40, a naturally occurring radiation, in common food products such as milk, seaweed, potato chips, and beer. She then asked residents to fill in the blank boxes underneath the drawing of each food with the level of radiation contained in each. Using that as a comparative framework, she instructed the residents to make their own assessments when considering the consumption of wild harvests. She indicated that they might consume them if they felt comfortable after comparing their potential exposure with other everyday exposures. ‘Is it actually safe though?’, a resident asked. ‘That you have to decide for yourself’, she answered. The residents did not seem content with the answer but did not pursue it further either. They appreciated that the public health nurse acknowledged and engaged their concern to the extent she was professionally able to. It was now up to them to decide what to do.

Co-expertise therefore proved useful for some citizens who did not focus on questioning the standards set by governmental and regulatory bodies, who instead sought ways to reestablish their everyday life in their current situation, under radiation levels that these institutions deemed reasonable. It seemingly opened spaces for citizen participation and dialogue, helping citizens make sense of their situations and to address what mattered in their everyday lives. Yet, co-expertise rarely engaged social values beyond what the guidelines specified. Moreover, citizens’ engagement with co-expertise did not mean that these citizens supported the regulatory and governing bodies at the level of policy (Ando, 2019; Polleri, 2019). It only meant that these citizens focused on everyday concerns and did not actively challenge existing policies. Co-expertise operated in such spaces, engaging with concerns that did not interfere with the implementation of existing policies, while refusing to engage with citizens whose concerns did not align with them. This was clear in the interactions that took place between citizens and regulatory bodies across Fukushima, even years after the said paradigm shift (See Kimura, 2018).

For example, in March 2017, I visited the Decontamination Information Plaza (current Environmental Regeneration Information Plaza) in Fukushima City, established by the Ministry of Environment as a resource center for citizens on issues related to radiation. Placed in a prime location, just a few minutes’ walk from Fukushima Station, a whole floor of a building was dedicated to providing information about radiation released into the environment after the accident, and how the government was dealing with it. As a hub of risk communication, it functioned as a place where individuals and groups could visit to discuss their questions and concerns with experts, in a manner that was more personalized than large lectures common in earlier risk communication.

As I entered the building, I was immediately overwhelmed by the handwritten numbers across the wall that showed the average level of air dose radiation measured in each district of Fukushima Prefecture, and how they had changed after decontamination work. Along with explanations on the physics of radiation and methods of decontamination, there were also numerous leaflets, pamphlets, and book-length reports lined up at each section of the exhibit, which visitors were free to take home. The exhibit did not make any claims about safety, nor were the staff members there to help visitors understand the exhibit unless explicitly asked. Following the emphasis on individual decision-making, the center provided all manner of publicly available data, and the visitors were left to decide for themselves on how to think about them.

Nevertheless, I soon found out that while visitors were free to come to their own conclusions about the effects of radioactive contamination, not all decisions were equally valued. As I went through the exhibit, a woman in her late 70s came into the facility. She greeted one of the staff members, a man in overalls with a logo of the Ministry of Environment embroidered on his chest. He was one of the risk communicators stationed there. ‘Today, I brought you data’, she said and carefully took out a sheet of paper from a plastic folder. She explained that there was a mountain behind her house and the wind carried fallen leaves to her house. Radiation levels of the leaves were high, and she wanted the government to do something about it. She had consulted the municipal offices of her town and city, but they would not decontaminate her place. ‘I used to deal with the leaves on my own, but since I became old, I can’t deal with them by myself anymore. My grandchildren come to visit once in a while, so I want something to be done about this’, she pleaded. After being turned down by the municipal governments, she came to the Decontamination Plaza as a last resort.

In response, the risk communicator explained to her that even when high levels of radiation were measured in one part of the soil, that did not speak to the overall level of radiation on her land. He acknowledged that the contamination level in the part of the land from which she took her sample exceeded governmental limits. However, he suggested that other areas of the land might have lower radiation levels and the average contamination of the land might be lower. What mattered was the average level. Therefore, he concluded, they cannot do anything about it. ‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘Fukushima City has already declared that fallen leaves were safe in 2012 so …’ he suddenly lowered his voice and said, ‘there is no (health) effect.’

Once declared safe, there was no effect, even if there were above-standard levels of radiation. The elderly woman continued to argue with the risk communicator, until finally, in an apparently irritated voice, he told her, ‘You are free to think whatever you want. It is freedom of speech after all. But as far as we are concerned, we think there is no effect, and we cannot do anything for you.’ The woman’s data, her interpretation of them using governmental standards, her concerns, and her decision about what to do about it, were all nullified in the name of a core democratic principle—freedom of expression. Even under a paradigm involving mutual dialogue, situated knowledge practice, and sympathetic engagement as the core of risk communication, and even when citizens made extra effort to collect scientific data and make their claims legible, governmental risk communication had no room for engagement with citizens beyond what the guidelines offered. While organized around the language of working with citizens to address their concerns, co-expertise was more accountable to the institution rather than to citizens.

Scholars working on Fukushima have repeatedly shown that such dynamics were not uncommon. In the wake of the nuclear fallout, citizen radiation labs were launched across Japan and citizen science seemed to flourish. This was partly in response to the deficit model initially mobilized by governmental experts and the governmental neglect of citizen concerns, which made it necessary for citizens themselves to acquire scientific knowledge and tools to produce their own data and analyses on radiation. However, despite the enormous amount of data and knowledge produced by citizen scientists, and despite the emphasis on expert understanding of the public, they remained excluded from political processes that have shaped risk governance in Japan (Hirakawa & Shirabe, 2015; Kimura, 2016; Morita et al., 2013; Sternsdorff-Cisterna, 2018).

Analyses of co-expertise reveal the larger political arrangements that shape risk governance in democratic states (Jasanoff, 1986, 2005). Risk governance emerges from within a tension in democratic governance, in which governments manage demands for citizen participation with administrative efficacy. Different democratic states have developed different institutional and procedural arrangements to balance the contrasting needs for freedom and control, to enable citizen participation at the same time as maintaining the efficacy of political objectives (Jasanoff, 1986). Governmental projects of science communication embody this tension. On the one hand, science communication could empower citizens and open avenues for citizen participation in decision-making processes. On the other hand, it could also become a tool to impose dominant and reductive scientific knowledge on citizens in an authoritative manner (Wynne, 2006). The ways in which co-expertise is unfolding in Japan through science communication show that administrative efficacy has been prioritized over democratic participation. The government seemingly gave citizens the right to choose their own paths, until those paths conflicted with the government’s. Freedom was therefore in the choice granted to citizens on how to understand and act on their situation, but not in having their decisions heard or supported.

It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that the governmental risk communicator dismissed the elderly woman’s claim as ‘freedom’ of speech. He was letting the woman know the space of freedom granted to her in the current regulatory structure, in which she was free to make her own interpretations and decisions about radiation levels in her environment—though these would not affect administrative decisions that had been made. Thus, although governmental risk communication in Japan was no longer trying to unidirectionally persuade citizens, the government itself was still resisting being affected through dialogue with citizens. Instead, it was more readily willing to let go of those who did not agree and leave disagreement at that, as an isolated issue that did not merit public response. In other words, co-expertise has become a form of expertise that cultivates a political structure of exclusion. It has become a tool to harmonize and disseminate radiological protection guidelines that ultimately enable the government to continue pursuing political economic opportunities based on the nuclear industry and technological innovation (Kumaki, 2022).

In recent years, co-expertise has been advocated by international regulatory bodies as a solution to the failure of risk communication (ICRP, 2019). To advocate for more co-expertise and formalizing it without challenging the political structures that shape risk governance, however, amounts to further exclusion of citizens in the name of freedom and inclusion. Juraku and Sugawara (2021) identify a deep-rooted ‘structural ignorance of expertise’ in Japan that is fast to implement international standards as if they are the state-of-the-art solution, neglecting to engage with potentially controversial aspects of the imported standards. Co-expertise reflects such practice that fails to engage with what may not neatly fit into existing frameworks or what can be controversial. Intra-mediary expertise presents a potential move beyond such structural ignorance, challenging the political structure and the space of freedom granted to citizens.

Intra-mediary expertise

Since the nuclear fallout in Fukushima, citizens have been forced to make decisions about their safety in extreme uncertainty, while navigating a regulatory structure that assumed their exposure and excluded them from its decision-making processes. Risk communication based on co-expertise often failed to address everyday concerns, particularly of those whose concerns and decisions did not align with that of governmental and regulatory institutions. Instead, many citizens began to work with sympathetic expert figures who took seriously their questions of how to make everyday decisions in scientific uncertainty. I call the expertise emerging around these normative decisions intra-mediary expertise to emphasize the openness of experts and non-experts to learn from one another and change through their ‘intra-action’ with one another (Barad, 2007).

Intra-mediary expertise emerged where co-expertise left in its response-ability towards citizens. Similar to co-expertise, intra-mediary expertise involved experts going into the affected communities, outside of their clinical and institutional settings, to engage with citizens in their homes and fields. It involved measuring radiation levels in the living environment, discussing scientific frameworks for risk analysis, and encouraging citizens to make their own decisions. However, intra-mediary expertise went a step further, to consider each resident’s situation and discuss what one might do in their shoes. In the process, it did not exclude engagement with those who did not conform to the existing views of the government or regulatory institutions on safety and danger. It acknowledged the diversity of the public as well as its shifting stakes and objectives, beyond questions of whether they were knowledgeable or ignorant, rational or irrational, and whether they conformed to existing policies.

The nuclear engineer, Sato, who worked with Iitate villagers, offered such intra-mediary expertise. This was clear in his statement following the opening scene of this article, when silence filled the room as he suggested that experts were not there to provide an answer on the issue of safety. He continued that while he could not give the villagers an absolute answer, he was willing to discuss his personal views on the matter. ‘As a man in his late sixties’, he confided, ‘I would not be worried about health effects from radiation exposure by living in the village. But I would have concerns for my children and grandchildren to do the same. That’s because long-term health effects from low-dose radiation exposure remain uncertain.’ This was his view. By sharing this, he did not expect the villagers to reach the same conclusion. He was merely discussing how he would think about the risks, given his specific circumstances. He encouraged the villagers to make their own decisions based on their own circumstances. He was there to help them think through this. However, his willingness to discuss the issue beyond existing guidelines on safety, which argued that the region was safe for all, and beyond his scientific expertise stood out in contrast to co-expertise.

Those who cultivated intra-mediary expertise were not necessarily formal experts on radiation, as Sato was. What mattered for the community members was social credibility. This was determined by a combination of educational and experiential background, institutional affiliation, and their ability to mediate between concerns of bureaucracy, science, and the everyday. Most importantly, these intra-mediary experts showed commitment to a long-term relationship with the community and its members, often becoming community members themselves. Rather than telling residents what to do and how they should change, these experts were willing to learn from residents and change themselves and their activities. Communities working with intra-mediary experts were therefore concerned less with whether these experts were professionally qualified to provide knowledge on radiation or how well they were able to establish authoritative knowledge through their performance of intimacy with their specialization (Boyer, 2008; Carr, 2010). The expertise that mattered was instead the experts’ knowledge of and intimacy with the specific public in their situatedness.

For instance, in Minamisoma, a city north of the nuclear power plant, the name of a young physician, Dr. Tanaka, was often brought up as a credible source of information on how to understand radiation. I first encountered his name while visiting a temple in the northern part of the city. A monk there offered me a regional crab dish made from crabs that he openly declared slightly exceeded governmental standard of safety. The crab measured 120Bq/kg when the safety standard was 100Bq/kg. I asked how I might understand these numbers. The monk explained that there were only a few dozen grams of crab in the dish, so the actual amount of radiation was small. His wife followed up, ‘We actually asked an expert, Dr. Tanaka, about this. He said it was almost impossible to eat contaminated food to the extent of danger from internal radiation.’ She mentioned Dr. Tanaka’s name in a matter-of-fact way, as a trusted source of information. I assumed that Dr. Tanaka was an expert on radiation.

It turns out that he was actually a physician specializing in internal medicine. He started coming to the region from Tokyo after the nuclear accident to volunteer at one of the main public hospitals in the area. He came without much knowledge of radiation, but he started learning about it after he was asked by local mothers to hold lectures on the health effects of radiation exposure. The mothers originally asked him because of his educational background in medicine and institutional affiliation with the main hospital in the region. Responding to the mothers’ requests, he studied about radiation and its health effects, measured radiation levels in the community and in the food with residents, and discussed what the levels might mean for them and their children. Through these intra-actions, Dr. Tanaka was gradually transformed into a radiation expert to whom mothers and other locals would turn to for advice. Six years after the nuclear accident, a picture booklet with the title ‘Radiation and health seminar by Dr. Tanaka’ could be found in all parts of the town, reflecting the trust he had earned from the community. Responding to questions that residents asked him, the booklet illustrates in easy terms how radiation spreads in the environment, how to understand the measurements, and what to watch out for in their everyday lives. Many residents in the region used this information as a trustworthy guidance to make sense of radiation in their living environment.

Dr. Tanaka’s intra-mediary expertise was undergirded by his exceptional social credibility. In a city where there was no university and where being a physician was considered extremely prestigious, Dr. Tanaka, who graduated from a prestigious medical school in Tokyo and worked for the main hospital of the city, was very well respected. In addition, his approachability, as a man the same age as the mothers, worked well in reaching out to community members. Unlike experts who adopted authoritative stances or who refused to engage beyond certain regulatory and scientific frameworks, he was willing to learn from and think with community members about how to live in post-fallout environments. Moreover, as he stayed to live and work in the community, many of the residents came to know Dr. Tanaka in person. Dr. Tanaka engaged residents as a fellow resident, blurring the boundaries between expert and lay, as well as science and every day.

Intra-mediary expertise, in its willingness to engage everyday concerns of citizens, is ‘serviceable’ in the normative sense that Jasanoff has described (Jasanoff, 2015; Loh & Amir, 2019). Intra-mediary experts work with citizens to make normative decisions on how they should live after the nuclear fallout, without having to wait for science to give the final verdict (Jasanoff, 2015, p. 1730). In addition, in contrast to co-expertise, which is built on a strict lay-expert interaction, intra-mediary expertise can been characterized by mutual ‘intra-action’ and transformation of both experts and citizens (Barad, 2007). It was carried out by those who lived locally or who frequented the affected area to work closely with residents, often engaging as fellow residents and parents themselves. It engaged questions outside of academic or professional concerns and upheld conclusions that may not conform to existing policies. In so doing, it has supported citizens’ decision-making in ways that were most relevant for citizens themselves based on their specific situation.

Furthermore, unlike Wynne’s ‘socially extended peer group’, intra-mediary expertise rarely became part of the scientific peer review process (Wynne, 1992). Neither did it strive to develop ‘contributory expertise,’ in which citizens were to contribute to and affect scientific decision making (Collins & Evans, 2002). Rather than providing criticism of scientific processes and administrative decisions based on them, the main focus and source of credibility of intra-mediary expertise have been on staying close to residents and their concerns. Its commitment therefore exceeded the epistemic justice characterized by a mobilization of the public for science and policy. It was also committed to civic justice marked by a mobilization of science for different publics and their diverse needs.

For certain citizens whose concerns were dismissed by bureaucratic responses, intra-mediary experts and their expertise were not merely sources of knowledge but also sources of moral support. Intra-mediary experts engaged in immediate intra-action with affected people and communities, responding to their needs in their complexity and messiness. They moved beyond a mediated model of the public as either knowledgeable or ignorant, rational or irrational, and conforming to or discontent with policy decisions, to provide moral support by taking seriously the residents’ concerns in their situatedness and diversity. Intra-mediary expertise therefore cultivated an acknowledgement of humanness of both experts and the public (see Boyer, 2008).

Intra-mediary expertise is not without its limitations, however. In the wake of the nuclear fallout, different publics have made divergent and often conflicting claims and decisions. This meant that the more the experts were involved in certain communities, or certain constituents of a community, the more their intra-mediary expertise would be shaped around their specific needs and orientation towards radiation. As a result, intra-mediary expertise developed around actors with similar positionalities or that made similar normative decisions following the fallout. Intra-mediary experts became divided as they engaged different publics holding often incommensurable agendas on what issues to make relevant and actionable. After a few months of fieldwork, I soon learned to listen to the names that were raised as sources of information about radiation. The names not only allow me to identify intra-mediary experts involved, but also the networks that they were a part of and their inclinations toward radiological protection.

For example, Sato’s network was composed of those who practiced more caution against radiation exposure. The network of actors that developed around Sato’s intra-mediary expertise included scientific experts, villagers, citizen radiation labs, health recuperation projects, and advocates, organized around encouraging evacuation and minimizing radiation exposure. The Iitate villagers who gathered in the gym with Sato in Fukushima were mostly middle-aged to elderly men who were opposed to the government’s decision to open their village after forced evacuation, but still hoped to maintain their ties to the village. The younger villagers, particularly those with children, had mostly decided to raise their families elsewhere and were not part of this gathering. As the positionality of those who gathered at the gym also contradicted that of government officials and the village mayor who was promoting the return to the village, Sato became an ever-present sounding board for participants to discuss their situation and to help them make decisions on their return.

In Minamisoma, where people had stayed, evacuated to, or returned, the network was shaped around those who were cautious of radiation but were oriented towards finding ways to live safely in areas exposed by the nuclear fallout. While their positionality did not overtly contradict that of the central government, they felt alienated by its policies, that were seen as disregarding their everyday concerns. Dr. Tanaka filled the void where a sense of confusion and abandonment prevailed, through his willingness to be there and to learn with the residents to assist in their everyday decision-making. The mothers, other residents, citizen radiation lab, health recuperation projects, and the municipal government came together around Dr. Tanaka’s intra-mediary expertise to figure out how to live well in the aftermath of the fallout. In the meantime, the central and prefectural government, as well as regulatory institutions, formed their own network of co-expertise, mobilizing experts and risk communicators to uphold their regulatory policies.

Intra-mediary expertise therefore expanded through increasingly diversifying networks that assembled different actors, institutions, theories, and practices around shared social values on how to live in the aftermath of the nuclear accident. For residents, engagement with intra-mediary expertise enabled them access to different kinds of networks that were working towards different goals (Eyal, 2013). This has made it all the more important for residents to discern and choose which experts, and therefore, which networks to work with, as it determined whether their particular concerns would be taken seriously. This was reflected in the question that the Iitate villager asked in my opening scene, about the need to choose experts before learning about the effects of radiation exposure. Choosing experts meant choosing which networks to be a part of, and therefore, making a statement of what fundamental values they upheld about health and well-being, as well as their ways of life more generally, in relation to the radiation fallout.

Thus, while intra-mediary expertise enabled communities to find support to deal with everyday concerns, it inadvertently strengthened divides among those who made divergent decisions. The difference in orientation of different networks was often observed geographically. For example, the farther from the evacuation zone, the more the networks were inclined to emphasize the dangers of radiation. The closer to the evacuation zone, the more the networks were willing to discuss how to live with radiation. There was very little overlap in membership between networks that pushed for zero risk and those who sought to minimize risk while living in post-fallout environments. Experts themselves often recognized that once they became involved in certain communities, it would be difficult to work with other communities that held different positions. For instance, Dr. Tanaka noted that when he published the booklet on radiation, he knew this would prevent him from working with concerned parents who had evacuated afar. As experts themselves rarely communicated with one another to work out these differences, the networks became increasingly siloed.

Furthermore, as Kobayashi apprehended, the emergence of intra-mediary expertise was often left to chance, for charismatic figures to emerge and take up the role of intra-mediation. Without public support, intra-mediary experts were those driven by a sense of mission and with resources to prioritize their commitment to communities they worked with rather than to their career advancement. They tended to be scientists who were near retirement or retired, medical practitioners who originally did not specialize in radiation science, and non-scientists, mostly men, with exceptional professional, financial, and/or social resources. Developing intra-mediary expertise otherwise, to bridge science, policy, and the everyday, without relying on happenstance and without dividing alongside divergent decisions and stakes, remains a challenge. Nevertheless, by engaging diverse publics beyond what is considered worthy of engagement by regulatory policies, and by taking the stance that every decision made after the fallout merits acknowledgement and public support, intra-mediary expertise has the potential to push the limits of existing political structures that shape risk governance.

Conclusion: Expert understanding of the public

In the wake of the nuclear accident in Fukushima, the role of experts and their expertise came under acute scrutiny in face of uncertainty over the safety of low-dose exposure to radiation. Facing an issue of trans-science, conventional authoritative forms of expertise became challenged. Debates emerged among experts and STS scholars in Japan on whether the role of experts was to provide a unified view of the situation and a singular guidance on what to do, or whether it was to offer all possible data available to citizens so they could make their own decisions. As the latter approach was gradually taken up, expertise shifted from one based on specialization to intra-mediation (Kikkawa, 2022).

Expertise in the realm of trans-science has been discussed in STS with respect to epistemic justice, to address the public understanding of science and to incorporate lay knowledge into scientific decision-making processes. Here, science communication emphasized the dissemination of scientific knowledge and the incorporation of citizen perspectives into scientific practices. Expertise emerging in Fukushima, on the other hand, began to address issues of civic justice, to consider how to extend ‘expert understanding of the public’ to address situated decision-making processes of diverse publics. The question for science communication shifted from how much experts were able to perform and shape their scientific knowledge in engagement with citizens to how much experts were willing to step outside of their comfort zone, away from their specialization and responsibilities towards their scientific communities, to become response-able to urgent public concerns.

Two types of expertise emerged in this context: co-expertise and intra-mediary expertise. Both forms of expertise became prevalent after the nuclear accident in Fukushima, as a result of efforts to mediate science, policy, and citizens’ everyday concerns around low-dose exposure to radiation. Yet, co-expertise ultimately adhered to professional standards and left those who did not conform to existing guidelines to fend for themselves. In other words, it was only willing to acknowledge a public that was knowledgeable and rational according to their own institutional standards. Intra-mediary expertise, on the other hand, was more open to engage diverse publics whose everyday concerns required engagement beyond what was outlined in official guidelines and that may not be addressable through scientific framework alone. It was more willing to engage the normative realm of social values in their diversity and transientness, to address what mattered most for the affected people and communities.

Analyses of expertise following Fukushima’s nuclear accident show that the political arrangements that inform risk governance in Japan has been characterized by a structure of exclusion, in which the government did not fully support the concerns and decisions of the affected residents beyond their guidelines. Intra-mediary experts and their network of agenda-driven expertise were often the last resort for citizens left out of administrative decision-making processes and left to make high stakes decisions without public support. Networks of intra-mediary expertise expanded to support citizens at the margins of official responses.

Yet the responsiveness of intra-mediary expertise to normative concerns also made it a divisive practice. As intra-mediary expertise developed around publics with different priorities and that made different decisions, its networks often became divided and siloed. Moreover, as expertise of intra-mediation was about response-ability to the concerns of citizens rather than to professionally driven agendas, it did not directly feed back into scientific debates or policy decisions. Intra-mediary expertise, therefore, have had minimal impact on the political shaping of risk governance in Japan that prioritized administrative efficacy over citizen participation.

Nevertheless, by being open to normative issues emerging in the realm of trans-science, intra-mediary expertise has kept alive the potential for political critique and transformation. For example, Sato concluded his remarks to the Iitate Villagers with a critique of the political structures that has informed risk governance in Japan:

What I want to say the most is that whatever decision people in Iitate Village make, whether they return to the Village, stay where they had evacuated, or evacuate outside the country, the people of Iitate Village are victims. The government and TEPCO have the responsibility to take care of them, regardless of their decisions.

In a political structure that did not guarantee support for all decisions, intra-mediary expertise kept an alternative possibility in view, in which decisions that did not conform to existing guidelines would also be taken into account and be equally supported—pushing the boundaries of existing policies and leaving the potential to reshape the terms of citizen participation in risk governance.

By being accountable to the communities rather than to scientific or regulatory institutions, the work of intra-mediary expertise urges consideration about what scientific expertise might look like in the context of trans-science that challenges the larger political structures that shape risk governance. It begins to raise questions about response-ability, not just of experts, but also of the government, the nuclear industry, and regulatory institutions towards different publics and their diverse everyday concerns after the nuclear accident. As Sato argued, the first step may be to push the government and TEPCO to listen to, acknowledge, and support the claims and decisions of citizens, regardless of whether they align with their own policies.

Intra-mediary expertise with a political edge may mean promoting a political structure in which the villagers, whether they decide to return or not, would be able to not only express their decisions but also receive public support without political filtering. It may mean that the data and knowledge produced by citizen scientists would be acknowledged as key interventions in policy decisions. It may mean that the elderly lady, who asked for her backyard to be decontaminated, would actually receive that support without having to go through multiple bureaucratic hurdles to ultimately be dismissed in the name of freedom of speech. To build that mechanism of response-ability is important for a paradigm shift from public understanding of science to expert understanding of the public, that is not just about expanding the realm of expertise beyond specialization or training people who could navigate the intermediary sphere, but also about seeking ways to challenge and affect the existing political structure and its risk governance.