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.