
































Microsoft Word - KILINÇ revised review.docx


 1 

 

Ryo Morimoto, 2023, Nuclear Ghost Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima's Gray Zone, 1st 

Edition, California Series in Public Anthropology, University of California Press, 356 pp., 

ISBN: 9780520394117. 

 

Ryo Morimoto's Nuclear Ghost is a poignant and richly immersive ethnography that probes 

the interwoven lives, ongoing uncertainties, and contested landscapes of post-disaster 

Fukushima, over a decade after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear 

meltdown. The book is positioned at an intersection point of anthropology, environmental 

studies, disaster studies, and science and technology studies (STS), and it engages forcefully 

with Japanese cultural and philosophical framings on risk, loss, and continuity. 

The overarching hypothesis of Nuclear Ghost is that the “Fukushima disaster," determined 

by Morimoto as the "TEPCO accident" to emphasize corporate responsibility, cannot be 

adequately understood by biomedical and technoscientific measures of radiation exposure, 

but instead by situated, lived experiences of people living in Minamisōma and adjacent 

regions. These are "gray zones" where visibility, belonging, trauma, resistance, and 

continuum occur daily. According to Morimoto, radiation is a biophysical agent and a 

sociocultural construct that affects and is affected by stories of space, history, and ways of 

livelihood. 

At its most essential level, then, Nuclear Ghost is a radical departure from mainstream 

disaster ethnographies because it refuses radiation-based narratives of nuclear disasters. In 

contrast to a preoccupation with contamination as a measurable, medicalized danger, 

Morimoto turns the ethnographic eye toward what he terms "atomic livelihoods," lived 

realities, coping strategies, and existential negotiations by people who decided to stay or 

come back to the areas contaminated by radiation in coastal Fukushima. 

The key argument is that knowing about the TEPCO nuclear accident involves decentering 

technoscientific and state-based narratives regarding radiation in favor of noticing the 

multi-faceted, embodied, and at times contradictory terms in which people in cities like 



 2 

Minamisōma live in what Morimoto refers to as "the gray zone." This is not a geographical 

term but a conceptual zone in which binary oppositions break down "safe-unsafe", 

"contaminated-clean", "victim-resister". In this zone, the nuclear Ghost is a ghostly figure 

representing haunting radiation, loss, and uncertainty. It is not metaphorical but an 

ontological state through which people understand their worlds and futures. 

The book is organized thematically into an introduction, nine central chapters, and an 

epilogue. The chapters are not strictly chronological; Morimoto develops concepts and 

narratives in ways that connect with and reinforce one another to build a palimpsestic sense 

of life in the fallout. The organization permits Morimoto to interlace experiences from his 

fieldwork, oral histories from interlocutors, cultural reference points, particularly to Haruki 

Murakami's fiction and cosmologies of Japanese Buddhism, and critical encounters with 

theories of exposure, precarity, and affect. 

Morimoto's narrative voice seems reflexive and ethically committed, where he repeatedly 

interposes his mistakes and develops a grasp as a fieldworker, most notably his 

transformation from a technoscientific outsider with a Geiger counter to a listener sensitive 

to the local textures and silences. By this tiered composition, Nuclear Ghost does not 

provide closure. Nevertheless, it brings ambiguity, contradiction, and coexistence factors 

that make it an exemplar of what Morimoto terms a "social science of the surreal."   

I assessed Morimoto's conceptual design as one of the most rewarding elements of this 

fieldwork research. The "nuclear ghost" metaphor contains an essential insight into how 

people might understand radiation: not merely something that can be weighed and 

measured, but an uncannily haunting presence socially mediated, emotionally charged, and 

temporally open-ended. This Ghost is different from radioactive fallout; it is a cultural 

phenomenon, a felt uncertainty, an ethical residue. In describing it, Morimoto is 

contributing to a larger project in contemporary anthropology to take seriously non-material 

or extra-scientific incidents, which has been termed the "social science of the surreal."  

Another strength of Morimoto’s position is that the book removes the narrative from state 

and science domination. Rather than focusing on national rhetoric, epidemiological 

statistics, or the state's reconstruction efforts, Morimoto focuses on the everyday life of 

individuals, temple caretakers like Hatsumi, altar movers, farmers, hunters, and returnees. 

These people live in the literal and symbolic "in-between" spaces whose experiences are 



 3 

often erased in official reports and media coverage. This research reclaims ethnography 

through this position to challenge and reframe who gets seen and heard. 

Morimoto's deeply personal reflections on his role as a researcher from lugging a Geiger 

counter to grappling with his involvement in "disaster porn" through documentary work are 

not just self-revealing but epistemologically powerful. They provoke essential questions 

about academic extraction, authority, and the moral complexities of witnessing. His care in 

addressing the ethics of representing trauma adds depth and seriousness, particularly for 

readers committed to participatory, decolonial, or reflective scholarship. 

Momentously, Nuclear Ghost challenges how nuclear fallout is typically visualized. 

Through critical reflection on tools like the Geiger counter, radiation maps, and 

sensationalist photojournalism, Morimoto asks readers to confront the unseen aspects of 

radiation and life that cannot be measured or mapped. His concept of "atomic livelihoods" 

is not merely a poetic phrase; it is a methodological stance that insists on holding risk with 

endurance, damage with commitment, and danger with the will to live and survive. 

Morimoto also enters policy conversations indirectly yet consequentially in this book. 

While it does not hand out policy fixes, it quietly critiques Japan's centralized approach to 

disaster recovery and radiation tracking. It pushes readers to consider how harm is defined, 

how compensation is allocated, and how certain lives that do not fit tidy victim or recovery 

narratives are invisible. 

Despite its numerous strengths, Nuclear Ghost also has limitations, some inherent to the 

ethnographic form and others stemming from its theoretical paths. I assess that these 

limitations have no ability to diminish the book's scientific and research value; however, 

they invite a deeper and more nuanced engagement with the tensions running through its 

methodology and scope. 

Morimoto's use of the "gray zone" concept, his conscious commitment to embracing 

uncertainty, strongly critiques binary thinking such as "safe-unsafe," "victim-resister," and 

"contaminated-pure." However, while this position may be regarded as insightful, it 

simultaneously presents a challenge for readers not well-versed in the field of anthropology. 

Though an honest and often painful experience for residents of Minamisōma, ambiguity 

sometimes weakens the clarity of the book's core aim.  



 4 

This research also features many rich, personal narratives; however,  it could have explored 

more deeply how gender, age, class, and social roles shape people's experiences of 

displacement, exposure, and recovery. For example, women's roles in caregiving, domestic 

radiation exposure, or informal post-disaster economies are only partially explored. While 

characters like Hatsumi are well-developed, the book avoids a broader critique of gendered 

labor or reproductive risk in the gray areas of Fukushima. Similarly, the labor involved in 

decontamination, cleanup works, or bureaucratic compensation processes could have been 

more fully addressed through an intersectional lens.  

Furthermore, Morimoto demonstrates self-awareness about the ethical risks of extractive 

research, which he calls "disaster pornography." Nevertheless, the book sometimes veers 

close to the same spectacle it aims to resist. Though he critiques his use of a Geiger counter 

and reflects on working with a European filmmaker drawn to visual drama, his position as 

a U.S.-based academic returning to Japan with institutional backing is not intensely 

interrogated.  

Ultimately, this research's intellectual intensity and cultural specificity, especially its use of 

Japanese cosmological and philosophical ideas such as "en," "obake," "innen," "kū," might 

alienate readers unfamiliar with Japanese studies or Buddhist concepts in an ethnographic 

text. Although Morimoto does explain many of these terms, the text assumes a significant 

level of prior knowledge. As a result, it may be less accessible to non-academic readers or 

policy professionals despite its relevance to both groups.   

Reviving Morimoto's Nuclear Ghost book is a critical experience for understanding what 

happened to residents after the Fukushima disaster and how Japanese culture impacted the 

recovery process. It lingers much like the "nuclear ghost" that shadows Minamisōma, not 

through dramatic spectacle or shock but by slowly accumulating feelings of uncertainty, 

contradiction, and an unsettling closeness to often forgotten lives. What stands out most is 

the book's deep commitment to rehumanizing disaster both as an academic project and as a 

personal one. Instead of leaning on the language of hazard maps, risk assessments, or 

biopolitical trauma, I think Morimoto invites scholars and readers to witness life in all its 

disorder, persistence, and ghostly brilliance. 

From a scholarly view, this book pushes the boundaries of how ethnography is practiced 

and written in the Anthropocene. It also exemplifies an anthropological approach that is 

methodologically reflective, politically conscious, and poetically extensive. It insists 



 5 

scholars or readers do not need to choose between theory and narrative, structure and story, 

or visibility and subtlety. Doing so furnishes a robust framework for scholars engaged in 

the interdisciplinary study of disaster studies, environmental anthropology, nuclear 

humanities, and Japanese cultural contexts.  

I enthusiastically recommend this book; however, with one critical note: this book does not 

provide comprehensive answers related to the Fukushima disaster. It is a book about 

ethnographic questions, ghosts, and fieldwork priorities. It challenges us to notice what 

scholars and readers often overlook, listen for what is not spoken, and consider what it 

means to live ethically in the face of uncertainty. Morimoto's work is both timely and 

essential in a world increasingly shaped by prolonged dangers, and it will help us understand 

the public aspect of the disaster stemming from nuclear energy. This book has the ability to 

impact different studies in disciplines beyond anthropology and ethnography in the future.  

 

Atilla Kilinç is an ethnographer specializing in the energy market. He is a research 

associate at Istanbul Technical University. 

 

© 2025 Atilla Kilinç 

 


