Race Made Radioactive: How Yuko Tsushima Fused Multiracial Identity and Military Occupation

In the author’s note to her next to last novel, Wildcat Dome, Yuko Tsushima explains the provenance of the book’s title by invoking the nuclear testing that the United States conducted on the Bikini Atoll islands, as well as the Enewetak Atoll and the Marshall Islands, from 1945-1958:

The people who lived there were forcibly relocated and were not allowed to go back until 1980, when the U.S. military completed decontamination work. When the residents returned, however, they found that some of the islands had disappeared due to the nuclear tests.

Moreover, a huge concrete dome called Runit Dome had been constructed on Runit Island to collect the enormous amount of contaminated material that had accumulated during the decontamination work. Around the dome, signs were erected in Marshallese and English that said: Warning! Do not Enter.

The reader is left to infer the connections between the dome and the novel itself, a text that begins in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011 but spirals backward in time, to the immediate postwar period in Japan following the dropping of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Though there are a number of ways you could interpret this connection, to me the dome is a metaphor both for refuse and refusal, at once a giant trash can lid for nuclear waste and an unwillingness—typical of imperial powers—to take accountability for their crimes. The dome, in other words, is a physical manifestation of the denial of history, the refusal to look at or deal with the past.

I admit that although I have long been a reader and lover of Tsushima’s work, identity played a role in my curiosity about this novel in particular, which features a cast of mixed race characters who communicate telepathically with each other and seem to exist on several planes of time at once.

I am also mixed-race, and while I have an extreme antipathy to that particular genre of writing that exceptionalizes one’s personal feelings about this identity, one thing that does interest me is the way that, in Asia in particular, the mixed race subject is specifically tied to, and invokes the memory of, U.S. military occupation.

That is because, wherever you find the U.S. military, you will find sexual violence against women, and the unwanted children left in its wake. And in this way, the mixed race child becomes a visible reminder of colonial domination, evoking a contradictory mix of humiliation, adulation and xenophobic panic among the general population.

Even if not personally tied to that history, as a mixed race person in Asia you inevitably remind people of it. I have been surprised by the number of times in my life I’ve been asked if my father was in the military (he wasn’t) simply by virtue of the fact that I am mixed.

It’s worth noting that Tsushima herself is not mixed race, and while she must have done quite a bit of research to write the book, she sometimes relies on tropes that come across as naive and racially insensitive. Still, for me there are interesting connections I think she is trying to draw between mixed race people in Japanese society, war, and nuclear colonialism.

Born directly after the war to Japanese mothers and abandoned by their American G.I. fathers, Kazu and Mitch, the main characters in Wildcat Dome, live on the edges of society, an invisible but ever-present reminder of Japan’s unholy collusion with the American empire in the wake of World War II.

After the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the U.S. military, which occupied Japan from 1945-1952, enacted strict censorship laws on any public discussion of nuclear radiation and its effects on the body.

They quickly collaborated with Japanese elites to set up the first nuclear reactors, assuaging people’s understandable distrust of nuclear energy through a massive propaganda campaign called “Atoms for Peace,” in which Dwight D. Eisenhower attempted to decouple the idea of nuclear energy from the terror of the atomic bombs, which would have been still fresh in people’s memories, by convincing the public that it was a safe, effective and affordable source of energy.

The propaganda campaign used images associated with science and technology to convey the idea that nuclear energy was “the way of the future.” In this way, the rapid construction of nuclear reactors across Japan in the 1950’s and 60’s was predicated on mass historical amnesia for the sake of economic “progress.”

The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster of 2011 wasn’t the first nuclear accident in Japan, but the scale of the devastation was unprecedented. Although the catalyst for the accident was a massive tsunami off the coast of northeastern Japan, TEPCO—the company that built the reactor—failed to address malfunctions in the reactor even when employees had previously exposed the potentially lethal problems left unaddressed to cut costs.

At the beginning of Wildcat Dome, Mitch, an elderly man, returns to Japan just after Fukushima, and flashes back to his childhood:

Distant memories, long submerged inside him, begin to wriggle and squirm as though irradiated. However much he tries to deny it, images of the tsunami and the nuclear accident remind him of the bombs during the war. The newscasters call the surviving children tsunami orphans. The moment he hears the phrase, a part of Mitch’s brain collapses, leaving a small but deep hole inside him.

The mixed race characters in Wildcat Dome, like the radioactive substance seeping into the soil at the beginning of the novel, are an invisible presence—they are not acknowledged because to do so would require Japanese society to face the legacy of the American occupation. Similarly, acknowledging the dangers of nuclear energy would mean confronting the fact that it originated as a weapon of war used to subjugate Japanese people to the will of the American empire.

Of course, the American occupation of Japan was only possible with the collaboration of Japanese elites, the same elites that had themselves colonized and subjugated much of the Asian continent prior to 1945—an issue that Tsushima takes up at length in her other novels from this period.

Most readers of Tsushima’s work in English will know her for Territory of Light, Woman Running in the Mountains, and other stories that she published in the 1970s and 80s. These works from her early period tend to hew closely to what we might call autofiction, and were largely interested in the daily lives of single mothers struggling to raise their children alone.

Beginning in the 2000s, however, there is a dramatic shift in her writing, not only in theme, but also in scale and style. Gone are the minute descriptions of changing a baby’s diaper, the patterns of light on an apartment floor.

Instead, her writing spirals outward to vast historical timescales, the language fracturing as her characters’ consciousnesses stretch across decades and sometimes centuries. While her essential interest in people living at the margins of Japanese society remains, her late novels move beyond the experiences of single mothers to Indigenous people in Japan’s former colonies, mixed race orphans, and even animals.

Tsushima’s late work is committed to exposing what scholar Peichen Wu has called the “buried history” of the Japanese empire.

Wildcat Dome shows us that this history is also our own.

______________________________

Wildcat Dome by Yuko Tsushima and translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda is available via FSG.