Three pulses

Only three photographs remain. They are grey, blurred, dotted with drip marks and a glass screen barricades us from the outside terrain. I had chosen not to revel (as I saw it) in the landscape. It would be crude and insensitive, while the world’s media elbowed in with commentary as gloating as it was goading, to add my own western gaze to an already bloated photo album of tragedy.

Some seven months after a tsunami tanked its way across the north eastern coast of Japan in 2011, I sat with a coach-full of Japanese women on our way to Tohoku province to volunteer. Even then it felt absurdly… obvious. Affected. But I was almost Japanese(?), I felt deeply connected to the people I had lived and worked with in two years. It seemed quite right that I extend my affection to those families whose daily lives had been so severely disorientated as to disavow the foundations of their ordinariness.

These three photographs represent three moments of lost control in a six or so hour coach journey: my astonishment at the landscape beyond those safe reinforced windows took hold in three pulses. Because the outside, in the worst-affected areas that we drove through, was to my un-trained eyes (now the eyes of a nuclear historian) an apocalypse.

In this in-land, the coast was not meant to be present. Perhaps a cloud bound bird might glimpse the ocean – its infamous waves – but it should not have saturated my view, not by many miles. Here an upturned fishing boat on a washed out field; there an immaculate tarmacked road obscured by tidelines of weeds (of sea and land), plastics, metals; a giant rag and bone man had strewn his wares across the countryside. And the colour; gun metal grey is too kind, it was silty, slick, stuck, drenched, dosed. Colour the antithesis of water.

I cannot remember being at all anxious about the nuclear crisis occurring in the same region – the destruction of the Tokai Mura power plant raised many unanswered questions about nuclear contamination. Only a few lines in my original blog refer to the world we saw that day: ‘mountains of collected rubbish – large enough to contain whole cars, walls of peeling paint, uprooted cement curbs, dangling telephone lines’. I did not want to undermine or sensationalise the experiences of those whose lives were now that place. The sight of three-storey high columns of mangled, rusted car bodies, piled up like dystopian totem poles spoke directly to simpler human vulnerabilities. I wanted to think about the people I met, not the situation we met in: over-sensitive to the privilege of departure contained in the act of my arrival. Everything was fragile.

As we closed in on our destination we also edged closer to the sea, the coast appeared in its proper place and that was scary. Lapping playfully on the sand as if to say ‘it was just a bit of fun’. My travel companions told me that roadside stone effigies were associated with local fishing communities. Facing out to sea, they symbolised the villagers’ gratitude to the ocean for a peaceful and supportive relationship. I imagined those same statues in the terrifying moment that the tsunami tore in and was reminded of the giant Buddha in Kamakura, famous for his dense and dominating presence. Reminded because in 1498 a tsunami tore his inland residence away, leaving his commanding figure bereft of shelter.

Miniature deities were suggestive of a highly vulnerable, deeply resistant human relationship with nature: humans were always the subjects and the elements the actors. Environmental dangers are fundamental to the humility with which we conduct ourselves in the world. Now, in my work and research, I wonder what the consequences of radioactive elements have done to our relationship with Earth. At the time, I was not so concerned about the nuclear accident (I did, after all, eat a bag of apples bought in Fukushima that week). Yet that catastrophic landscape informed my understanding of nuclear futures as much as it became a personal memory of human suffering. Somehow, non-nuclear and nuclear vulnerabilities merge together in my mind, reconstituting what a memory means and re-shaping a vision of the future.

More than meteorological pressures. Cold war maps and civil defence experiences

Having last posted a blog about the value of digital mapping to my interpretations of the physical and psychic layers of people’s lives in the past, I became map-mad again last week at a Cold War Geographies symposium. In conjunction with Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line, the current exhibition at the British Library, the conference considered ways in which the humanities use tangible and intangible maps as means by which to understand how people located themselves in the cold war world. I left thinking about how we recalibrate ourselves in any geopolitical space and time, through visualised ‘workings-out’ of our local, regional and global places in the physical world.

The exhibition was an excellent reminder that maps are not simply uniform, paper diagrams; looking at one map of your local area will not give you the same information, experience, or knowledge of that place as another map of exactly the same terrain.  And with this in mind, I’d like to turn to an anachronistic group: the Civil Defence Corps, bound for cold war obsolescence, and determined to defend against thermonuclear war using redundant Second World War equipment and training.

A square from an ordnance survey grid map, 1940s-1960s – National Library of Scotland http://maps.nls.uk/os/national-grid/

My interview participants from this group fondly remembered civil defence training – a heady mix of learning to tie knots, remembering formulas for fallout half-life and practicing exercises on location with dress, equipment, vehicles and pre-scripted ‘missions’. Many interview participants remembered map reading, some of them liken it to ordnance survey tests, some chuckled at getting lost in the countryside, some recognised that map-reading was an essential emergency skill in the spontaneous and precise movements of mass evacuation. One wrong turning and escape could turn to a head-on collision with radioactive winds.

At face value, these experiences of maps in green belt villages, local transport depots, walking holiday locations, and on well-known municipal roads, are evidence of enjoyment, pleasure and a degree of comfort. As Matthew Grant has shown, traditional civil defence cultures of camaraderie and community spirit, combined with emerging postwar individualism and the growth of leisure and spare-time hobbies to create a social atmosphere in Corps training. In that context, maps were classic tools to plan war, affiliate with the state, and participate in military culture in a self-composed and relaxing environment. However, the nuclear markings, fallout graffiti if you like, drawn and printed on those maps, reminded everyone that there was more at stake in these excursions than navigating the next roundabout.

In order to impart a sense of realism on training exercises, organisers devised complex and infinite attack hypotheses. In those scenarios, the blasts might be different strengths, in different locations, during the night or in the daytime, after rain or under snow – any of these conditions would affect the impact, drift, deadliness of nuclear contamination. These nuclear nightmares – an emerging postwar phenomenon that initiated a new era of warfare – were depicted through newly designed map keys and hand-drawn notes. So despite appearances, and suggested experiences, those training maps were being reconstructed and written over with new nuclear knowledge and expectations. My participants, though they may have enjoyed such an experience, were not simply replicating the map-reading exercises of their Home Guard, Scouts, or hiking days.

Present day depictions of nuclear blast and radiation by Alex Wellerstein, historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology.

In his keynote speech, Klaus Dodds suggested that current geographers and historians of the cold war view the conflict as a series of pressure points acting on personal, local, national and geopolitical experiences. These tiny indications of a nuclear clouds and winds on traditional maps signified more than meteorological pressures on individual life. Map-interpretation, as the exhibition shows, is under constant pressure. In an era in which broad and quotidian cultures clashed with official nuclear narratives, as Jonathan Hogg argues, it is hard to underestimate the extent to which civilians engaged with their nuclear selves via small pressures like these. Whether hand-drawn or complete with new cartographical symbols these civil defence maps, and memories of them, signal a re-positioning of self in the nuclear age.