When a massive earthquake struck Japan in 2011, sparking a deadly tsunami and nuclear disaster, local mothers concerned about radiation exposure didn’t just sit back silently and wait for political action. According to Associate Professor of Political Science Nicole Freiner, Ph.D., they helped drive a grassroots movement that ultimately held both a nuclear corporation and the Japanese government accountable.
Those efforts are the focus of Freiner’s study, Mobilized Mothers Triumph: Social Movement Protest to the Triple Disaster, which was published earlier this year in the Handbook of Disaster Studies in Japan.
Radiation exposure
In March of 2011, Japan experienced what’s known as the “Triple Disaster”: a 9.0 magnitude earthquake triggered a tsunami that, in turn, prompted a nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which resulted in radioactive material leaking into the local environment.
“There was a lot of concern about radiation being concentrated in certain foods,” says Freiner, who has researched Japanese agriculture for decades and speaks fluent Japanese from having lived in Japan throughout her life.
Even though the government never deemed food unsafe following the incident, residents remained skeptical and purchased their own equipment to test for radiation. Freiner notes that dairy products, for instance, tend to be vulnerable to radiation; many mothers were worried about giving milk to their children.
There was no public health program around food after the Triple Disaster and women quickly became the spokespeople for this social movement, replicating mobilization methods from the country’s 1960s and 1970s environmental movements.
“Japanese women were very vocal, and a lot of what they did was creating networks,” says Freiner, noting that because these women engaged in political activities in their roles as mothers, they possessed a unique potential to influence policy outcomes. “It was about sharing information."
Holding institutions accountable
The most surprising outcome, notes Freiner, was how the women mobilizers were able to use the law to hold political and corporate entities accountable — a particularly impactful outcome given that, in Japan, corporations and government officials are tightly bound.
“That doesn't happen often,” she says. In this case, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant had government funding — making the outcome even more impactful.
She explains that examples of the women's accountability efforts included being part of lawsuits against the Tokyo Electric Power Company and Japanese mothers utilizing digital media, independent radiation monitoring, and direct lobbying to challenge state authority following the disaster.
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“These decentralized accountability efforts successfully achieved lower school radiation thresholds, strict food screening standards, and formal representation in local disaster recovery councils,” Freiner says.
Looking into the future, Freiner is interested in examining how this example of women’s mobilization and their roles as mothers could be used in future movements to hold corporations responsible for when things go wrong. She’s also hopeful that it prompts institutional change.
“Responsibility is tough because leaders will just resign,” Freiner says. “That’s their form of taking responsibility, which means, yes, this person steps down and that’s great, but it doesn’t actually change what is in place.”