| 12 Sep 2025
A Drop in the Ocean: Photographic Witnessing and the Fukushima Wastewater Release
Abstract. Ever since the Japanese government’s 2021 announcement, approving Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) plan to discharge this wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, there has been widespread public dissension. In efforts to control public opinion and mistrust, words such as ‘treated’, ‘purified’ and ‘diluted’ circulated amongst official government and scientific discourse concerning TEPCO’s plan. These words are mundane, deceptive and distracting. For example, remaining traces of tritium were proposed as so diluted that the water is akin to drinkable standards. Furthermore, the vast scale of the Pacific Ocean reinforced just how diluted the Fukushima wastewater would ultimately become, totalling to 0.000183 %, meaning quite literally a drop in the ocean. This article responds to this context by exploring how this language of dilution and trace function to mask the slow eco-cultural violence embedded in Japan’s wastewater release. Specifically, I focus on how my photographic series Listening to Seaweed attempts to visualise what is largely imageless—diluted trace evidence of tritium. Through close readings of these artworks, I explore how photographic film’s inherent sensitivity to ionizing radiation can register, and thereby witness, not just radioactivity but also, by proxy, the ideological contexts which continue to perpetuate nuclear power as a safe by-product of the technology developed to produce nuclear weapons. Methodologically framed via artist and theorist Susan Schuppli’s (2020) conception of material witnessing, I argue for forms of politicised witnessing that move beyond visibility itself; instead, quantifiable evidence of nuclear ideology is physically embedded in the image. This article questions how these materially oriented methods can establish forms of socio-ethical listening and material witnessing that promote transgenerational nuclear justice concerning this current geo-political moment.
It was a pleasure to read this article. It is not often that an artist writes about their own work with such intellectual and academic insight. The article contains several interesting and well-chosen references, and the work itself is compelling—both poetic and deeply political. At a time when Japan is releasing “safe” treated water from the Fukushima accident, the artist’s work functions as a form of micro-resistance, revealing another truth alongside the official narratives. In fact, her work is far more than “a drop in the ocean,” so to speak.
I can see only one possible suggestion to improve a piece that is already strong: perhaps the artist might one day create a work situated in Fukushima as well. However, I imagine this may already be part of her future projects. In any case, the article is excellent as it stands. It would be a valuable contribution to the field of nuclear art. So I strongly recommend publishing it.