How are nuclear disasters depicted on screen? Is cinema the best means to communicate nuclear harm? How do these visual representations relate to real world nuclear politics? This lecture takes up these questions in relation to The Days (2023), the Netflix series about the scramble to control the spiraling crisis following the total loss of power at the Japanese Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March 2011. Film and televisual depictions of nuclear environmental disaster often turn into thrillers that focus more on heroism and high drama than on the realities of the nuclear threat. The nuclear accident film presents special challenges because the harm is both local and global, immediate and long lasting. This lecture addresses the epistemological scalar challenges of nuclear conceptualization and the relations to both real world accidents and anti-nuclear activism in Asia.

Rachel DiNitto is professor of Japanese literature at the University of Oregon, working in the environmental humanities with an emphasis on nuclear issues. Her book Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster (University of Hawaii Press 2019) won the Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title in 2020.