My focus is on the parts of Fukushima Prefecture affected by the nuclear disaster which began in March 2011. Many towns and villages in Fukushima remain contaminated by radioactive caesium 134 and 137 released in the triple disaster. The authorities have spent the last nine years attempting to decontaminate the affected landscape. These endeavours amount to a feverous and continuous cycle of shuffling soil around the prefecture in huge quantities, employing the positive connotations associated with ‘recycling’ rhetoric (Wynn Kirby: 2019), whilst simultaneously unable to decontaminate vast swathes of terrain because of the challenges posed by Fukushima’s dominant geographic feature: forested mountains. Toxicity is negotiated on a daily basis, through the monitoring and measuring practices associated with food production, food consumption, disaster compensation, healthcare provision and manufacturing, to name but a few. Those involved in the negotiations include residents, parents, school officials, government officials, businesses, lawyers and scientists. A host of devices are ushered in to adjudicate whether an item, be it a human body, soil sample or fern scroll, is contaminated. In Japanese, 現場 Gemba (or Genba) refers to the ‘real place’. In policing it indicates the scene of the crime, in business it is used to denote the shop floor. Stolz uses Toxic Genba (2018) to designate the ‘real lived site’ of a toxic event. I suggest that the acts of measuring and monitoring contamination is a practice through which Stolz’s Toxic Genba endure.
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