Risk politics and the pro-nuclear growth coalition in Japan in relation to the Fukushima

Introduction

The Fukushima disaster has significantly influenced both the government’s and the public’s approach to nuclear power, not only in Japan but also in other countries.^1–3. In recent years, researchers have paid more attention to the risk politics around nuclear power. ⁴ However, most studies have focused on either international relations or the general public and have not paid enough attention to the elite actors who led the politics. This study looks at how a growth coalition and shifting dynamics of risk narratives intersected to shape the risk politics of nuclear energy in Japan. The concept of a growth coalition^a,5,6,53 is based on the public, private, and voluntary sector taking a common interest in the growth of a particular place at various scales. The concept resembles an urban growth coalition ^b in that the actors have a shared interest and cooperate to achieve their aims. By analyzing reports from the media, government, and experts, this paper explores, first, how particular actors promoted nuclear energy agendas before Fukushima, and second, how post-Fukushima risk narratives indicate that those agendas have become fragmented. A historical and actor-oriented approach contributes to the discussion on environmental politics constituted through key actors’ narratives.

This study makes two main arguments. It argues that governmental and nongovernmental actors in Japan and the United States formed a “pro-nuclear growth coalition” soon after World War II. They have cooperated in the promotion of pro-nuclear energy policies and developed a certain type of risk narratives, one that downplays the risks involved in nuclear power. It also argues that post-Fukushima risk narratives involve conflicting interests regarding the risks of nuclear energy and pro-growth narratives, a critical one being the pursuit of growth. Meanwhile, scientific knowledge and the emergence of new media have played an important role in forming and developing communication related to the risks of nuclear power.

To advance these arguments, the paper is organized as follows. As a theoretical framework, the next section looks at previous theories of growth coalitions and suggests the concept of a pro-nuclear growth coalition. The case background of the Fukushima earthquake and the nuclear crisis in Japan in 2011 is then briefly introduced. For findings, this research analyzes how dominant actors formed a coalition, drove agenda-setting, and managed the risk narratives. The second section of the findings focuses on how each actor responded to Fukushima, what narratives key actors produced, and what role those narratives played after the disaster. The conclusion discusses the implications of Fukushima regarding the risk politics of nuclear energy in Japan.

The multi-scalar pro-nuclear growth coalition and the discursive opportunity structure

To understand who has led narratives on nuclear power policies, this paper suggests the notion of a multi-scalar pro-nuclear growth coalition. ⁷ The term “growth coalition” describes a partnership among actors who benefit from the construction and existence of nuclear power plants in Japan (for the establishment of a pro-nuclear coalition in France, the United States, and Finland, see Litmanen ⁸ and Litmanen and Kojo ⁹ ). Since the 1990s, the country’s political leadership has witnessed the emergence of a new partnership and cooperation that, to some degree, has replaced the state’s critical role ^c in the domestic market.^d,10 This implied that new leadership and new partnerships would emerge as part of developments that were more decentralized, partnership-based, and internationalized for nuclear power. ¹¹ New partners include international actors as well as local and national ones within Japan. A pro-nuclear growth coalition has been involved with exchange politics, ^e because each of its actors has different interests and resources while sharing the goal of producing Japanese economic growth through the expansion of nuclear power plants.

The concept of growth coalition contributes to the investigation of the particular ties held by certain actors, because they share the agenda of economic growth of their place for their own sake (Savitch and Kantor, ¹² pp. 2777–2778). One of the most important features of a growth coalition is collaboration between governmental and nongovernmental actors (particularly businesses) in the pursuit of financial profit. In applying growth coalition theory to specific contexts, one essential factor is the role of local business elites. ¹³ A number of previous studies have emphasized the importance of businesses in economic development and local growth, although their involvement is not necessarily the dominant one. ¹³

The concept of the growth coalition takes a political-economy perspective⁵⁰ that focuses on the cooperation of nongovernmental actors and the importance of political forces. ¹⁴ The chief advantage of the growth coalition lies in its offering “a new perspective on the issue of power” because “[i]t directs attention away from a narrow focus on power as an issue of social control toward an understanding of power expressed through social production” (Stoker, ¹⁵ pp. 54–55). The role of the government shifts from commanding action to inducing action. The coalition of particular actors relates to privileged positions these actors took to pursue certain interests in the context of existing power relations. ¹⁶ While growth coalition theory focused on urban development and urban actors, in the case of Fukushima, actors at various geographic scales (local, national, and international) formed a partnership to increase nuclear power plant construction and production.

One of the biggest influences of the growth coalition is that it produces, reproduces, and distributes local or national ideologies of growth^17,54 to the public. Especially in the case of nuclear power, the ideological rationalization regarding risk and growth is critical. Narratives on nuclear power have prompted a major debate in environmental studies, because such power is a carbon-free energy source but is also seen as an immense risk because of the radioactive waste it produces. Due to its double-edged nature and complications, nuclear power will likely continue to prompt conflicting narratives supported by scientific knowledge. ⁴⁰

How actors lead risk narratives depends on the political power of the group as manifested through a discursive opportunity structure.^18,19 “Discursive opportunity structure” refers to structured opportunities through which potential agendas become a priority⁵¹ by being considered sensible, realistic, and legitimate. It is useful for the understanding of actors’ discursive strategy for an agenda, which requires strong legitimacy. The emergence of social media such as Twitter changes the discursive opportunity structure, ²⁰ as social media outlets vocalize and visualize public risk perceptions. ²¹

Research methods

This study used archival analysis to figure out the discursive opportunity structure before and after the Fukushima disaster. By analyzing reports from the media, government, and experts, this paper explores how particular actors, all of whom were pursuing national economic growth, promoted certain agendas before Fukushima. It then looks at how those agendas fragmented after the disaster. As the consequences of the disaster are ongoing and the situation is changing, the ramifications of some important developments, such as the Parliament committee’s report on Fukushima, are not yet clear. This study thus limits the time scope of our research to the end of 2013.

Overview: Fukushima

On 11 March 2011, an earthquake of magnitude (Mw) 9.0 triggered tsunami waves that hit a vast area of the east coast of Honshu Island (Pref Miyagi, Iwate, Fukushima, Ibaragi, Chiba, and Aomori), destroying buildings and injuring and killing people. In all, 18,880 people died or went missing.^f,22 Local and national governmental nuclear safety commissions assessed the risk that the earthquake damage posed to all nuclear reactors in Japan. Many had trouble giving definitive reports. Thus, without any explicit political intentions, all nuclear reactors in the country were shut down after the earthquake (first in 2012, and again as of 14 September 2013).

The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant (Fukushima-I) had six nuclear reactors. Within 1 h of the earthquake, the reactors lost their power supply and underwent a meltdown. The cabinet declared a nuclear emergency on the day of the earthquake (Commission, ⁴¹ p. 12). Days afterward, two hydrogen explosions caused a major release of radioactive substances ^g into the atmosphere. The first explosion occurred at Fukushima I-1 at 15:36 on March 12; the second explosion occurred at Fukushima I-3 at 11:01 on March 14. Based on measurements of radioactivity, an evacuation zone ^h was extended northwest of the nuclear plant.

The formation of a multi-scalar pro-nuclear growth coalition

Four major nuclear tragedies—Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Bikini incident aboard the Lucky Dragon, and Fukushima (Zwigenberg, ²³ p. 23)—are historically related. In the postwar era, Japan relied on nuclear energy for approximately 30% of its electricity.^24,25 The pro-nuclear growth coalition consists of the Japanese government, especially the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI); major electric power companies; politicians supported by those companies; the US government; and major media outlets. Japan’s nuclear policy has been negotiated among the METI, major electric power companies such as TEPCO, and politicians, including those who have received contributions from electricity companies (mainly conservative Liberal Democratic Party ⁱ members of Parliament).

Because of the two US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, as well as the US thermonuclear test in 1954 that contaminated the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon 5, Japan experienced a widespread anti-nuclear movement in the postwar era. ²³ In the era between Hiroshima and Fukushima, Japan and the United States worked together to try to shift Japanese society’s attitude toward nuclear energy. A number of key Japanese figures ^j who had an interest in maintaining Japan’s political power facilitated cooperation between Japan and the United States ^k with respect to nuclear power plants. The key actors of the multi-scalar pro-nuclear growth coalition and their roles are the following.

The Japanese government was a main participant in building the coalition. It convinced the Japanese public that nuclear power was both safe and necessary. As a developmental state, perhaps as one of the “political conditions” underlying the formation of growth coalitions, the Japanese state aggressively pursued an agenda of national economic development. Based on negotiations to prepare a special budget for nuclear research, ^l government officials announced the following in 1954: (1) that nuclear energy should be distinguished from nuclear weapons; (2) that given the country’s lack of energy resources, Japan needed nuclear power for economic growth; and (3) that nuclear power was safe.

Global partnership was critical in the leadership of nuclear power. In 1954, Yasuhiro Nakasone, a Member of Parliament of the governing party who would later become Prime Minister (World Nuclear Association, ⁴² p. 25), led a nuclear research program with a 230-million-yen budget. In the same year, Matsutaro Shoriki, a politician and an influential figure in the media, launched the Atoms for Peace campaign in conjunction with the United States Information Agency. ²⁶ Shoriki has been called “the father of nuclear power” because of his critical contribution to introducing nuclear power to Japan. He owned the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, the world’s largest-circulation newspaper, and he founded the Nippon Television Network Corporation. He enthusiastically used his media powers to change people’s attitudes toward nuclear energy. In 1959, Nakasone became the chair of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission. The first nuclear reactor was built in Ibaraki, a neighboring prefecture of Fukushima, in 1963. The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, where the nuclear crisis occurred in 2011, opened in 1971, with a nuclear reactor manufactured by General Electronics (GE). Subsequently, five more reactors opened in the Fukushima plant between 1974 and 1979.

Nongovernmental actors including General Electronics, Hitachi, ^m and Toshiba ⁿ emerged as key actors in building the pro-nuclear growth coalition. ²⁷ These providers of nuclear generators shared an interest with others in the nuclear coalition. The nuclear power activities of these companies have generally been organized under the umbrella of GE. The relationship between GE and Toshiba goes back to the mid-1960s. In 1978, GE, Toshiba, and Hitachi jointly designed and built the first two nuclear reactors in the Fukushima-I nuclear plant for the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). The relationship among these three companies has since been strengthened. GE, Hitachi, and Toshiba jointly established Global Nuclear Fuel (GNF) in 2000. ^o GE, Hitachi, and Toshiba have transferred their nuclear fuel marketing, design, and development operations to these two GNF subsidiaries. The following year, GE Nuclear Energy and Toshiba Corporation further extended their agreement for the development of advanced nuclear technology; together, they now produce and distribute Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) nuclear plants. ^p These global companies strongly supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), while local businesses have generally been anti-TPPA. A legacy of developmental state characteristics, however, remains embedded in the political economic structure and the structure of nuclear power in Japan. ²⁸ TEPCO has been one of the biggest companies in Japan and has been very powerful politically. ^q

Major media should also be considered part of the pro-nuclear growth coalition. They have helped promote nuclear power among the public and have thus obtained huge advertising fees (estimated at 200 billion yen per year) from the government and electricity companies. Yomiuri Shimbun has been the leading media organ in this regard, promoting nuclear power even after the Fukushima disaster. However, certain other major newspapers, such as Tokyo Shimbun, no longer accept pro-nuclear-power advertisements. In addition, people consider television relatively untrustworthy concerning the nuclear reactors, the safety of food in the wake of the disaster, and the more general effects of radiation. Major Japanese news agencies have lacked diversity of opinion and have often failed to take a critical stance on political issues.^29–31 The same applies in this case. Since the 1950s, as the nuclear power industry established itself in Japan, the media’s role has been mostly to convey government announcements.

Post-Fukushima narratives fragmented

The growth coalition’s pro-nuclear narratives faced fundamental challenges when it came to nuclear energy, the stance on which had been relatively taken for granted in the years leading up to the Fukushima crisis. The challenges to the pro-growth consensus after Fukushima have grown as trust in the government, scientists, and the media has decreased. Those actors who led the narrative formation process lost public trust, especially compared to other governments, alternative scientists, and social media. The Japanese public grew increasingly skeptical of those actors, and the discursive opportunity structure for nuclear power was dismantled.

One factor prompting the challenge to the pro-growth status quo is that, following the Fukushima disaster, the Japanese government did not lead the way in communicating the risks associated with nuclear power. Immediately after the disaster, disclosure of the computer projections concerning the spread of radioactive material from the nuclear plant was delayed (Horikawa, ³² p. 18). The failure in disclosing SPEEDI ^r results increased further exposure to radiation. Some local residents near the nuclear plant moved to places where the released radioactive materials had spread (downwind), thus significantly increasing their exposure. Moreover, the radiation exposure in Tokyo (measured on March 15 and 23) was predicted by SPEEDI, but the predictions were not used to alert the public. ^s This failure in communication puts into question the authorities’ scientific policies and transparency.

In the initial days of the crisis, Prime Minister Naoto Kan admitted that the cabinet had secretly considered the worst possibility: that tens of millions of people might have to evacuate from the Tokyo area if the nuclear plant became uncontrollable.^t,43 The reaction of other governments, including the US government, to the crisis influenced the narratives in Japan. For example, the United States ordered its citizens to evacuate a radius of 80 km around the nuclear plant and, in response to official Japanese government warnings, alerted them not to go outside. The United States also diverted its Navy ships away from Japan (the ship Ronald Reagan was moved from Japan’s east coast on March 14; the George Washington was moved from the US base at Yokohama on March 21). Meanwhile, France ordered its citizens to evacuate all of eastern Japan. While major news agencies either did not report these directives at all or reported them in an unclear way, social network services (SNSs), especially Twitter, blogs, and Internet media, distributed this information.

In the aftermath of Fukushima, trust in scientists was significantly damaged. One study found that the percentage of people who completely trusted scientists declined from 15.9% to 6.0% after the earthquake of 2011, while the percentage of those saying simply that they “trust them” declined from 68.6% to 60.5%. Since the disaster, fewer people think that scientific specialists should determine the policies for society. The percentage of those who completely agreed with this statement declined from 59.1% to 19.5%; the percentage of those who completely disagreed rose from 1.0% to 10.6%. ³³

The most significant group of anti-nuclear skeptics, who have become newly empowered since the Fukushima disaster, consists of nongovernmental scientists and organizations, including: (1) “Chernobyl scientists” (physicists and medical doctors who cooperated with local authorities in areas contaminated by the nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine); (2) former employees of the nuclear industry, who have formed the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center (CNIC); and (3) nongovernmental organizations (e.g., Greenpeace). These people’s opinions have been influential both during and after the crisis. ^u The influence of the a number of scientists have expressed rather extreme scientific interpretations on the Internet, and individuals’ opinions have become even more diverse.

As trust toward the media decreased, foreign news agencies played a critical role in post-Fukushima risk politics. From foreign news agencies and foreign governments, the Japanese people can access information that is independent of the Japanese government and major Japanese news agencies. These information outlets narratives were generally not directed toward influencing the Japanese public. A number of Western news agencies reported the Fukushima nuclear crisis in a sensational manner (Vidal, ³⁴ p. 16).

In the challenges to the growth coalition’s discursive dominance, it is notable that narrative was facilitated by SNSs. SNSs allowed communication between the authorities and nongovernmental opinion leaders. Most people in Japan still rely on television and newspapers for daily information (Horikawa, ³² p. 18). However, concerning specific subjects such as food safety or the effect of radiation, online media narrative is “an important venue in the social construction of risk, and therefore deserves more attention from scholars” (Binder, ³⁵ p. 275). Indeed, SNSs, especially Twitter, became an important communication tool during the crisis. These real-time narratives challenged the government—even though only a small percentage of the general public in Japan uses Twitter and other SNSs, meaning that the impact among the general public may not be as high as one might expect (Horikawa, ³² p. 18). Yet Twitter has become a key communication tool for bloggers, nongovernmental organizations, journalists at major news agencies, and even the government. In fact, the cabinet started a Twitter account, Shusho-kantei.

It must be noted, though, that although anti-nuclear sentiment has increased after Fukushima, it has not coalesced enough to set a coherent agenda against nuclear power. The anti-nuclear groups have not been influential even after experiencing Fukushima disaster. That was partly because, during the dominance of the pro-nuclear growth coalition, many of the organization members have become elderly, out of touch with the media techniques of modern NGOs, and part-timers. ^v It means that the history of the dominance of the pro-nuclear growth regime matters. The established discursive opportunity structure was hard to change because key actors have been constrained within the structure. The discursive opportunity structure that was built and has operated for decades has been challenged and dismantled, but it was not changed significantly yet. Nor did the multi-scalar pro-nuclear growth coalition disappear.

Conclusion

The findings of this research demonstrate that the pro-nuclear growth coalition that took shape after World War II has been a key element in the dynamics of risk politics regarding Japanese nuclear policies. The Fukushima disaster and its aftermath are located within this politics. Because of the disaster, the general public lost trust in the government and criticized it for not providing critical information during the crisis, presumably to avoid panic. The discrepancies in information led some people to rely on unofficial information from the Web to make crucial decisions (e.g., whether to evacuate from Tokyo). Hence, the failure of communication during the crisis has caused the general public to distrust the authorities and science.

A number of studies^36,37 argue that the Fukushima disaster was a turning point in the history of nuclear power policy in Japan. In terms of the social perspective on nuclear power, the disaster was an alarming reminder of potential consequences. So, changes such as the election of an anti-nuclear politician as the governor of Niigata ^w were possible. However, the post-Fukushima social discourses are still conflicting, and the pro-nuclear growth coalition still exists while anti-nuclear voice is bigger than before. Regarding the operation of two nuclear reactors, PM Shinzo Abe was ready to restart two reactors in 2015, ^x and court interventions to ban and allow the restart followed the decision in 2016 and 2017, respectively. ^y

Despite some scientific reports on the biological effects of ionizing radiation, the assessment of long-term risks is scientifically muddy,⁵⁵ mainly because there have been too few radiation disasters to assess their impact. That is why the environmental politics regarding nuclear power calls for more attention to be paid to the power relations among key actors, as well as narratives and geopolitical relations. It is particularly important to acknowledge the existence of the global growth coalition and how it has influenced narratives. In the future, scientists may be more convincing than they are now regarding the epidemiological studies revealing the risk of low-dose radiation. However, the above issues demonstrate the significance of approaching consequences and future policies in terms of risk perception⁵² and narratives among key actors in the area of nuclear power.