Nuclear Power in Japan

In recent months UH Press author Martin Dusinberre has written online editorial pieces on the history and future of Japan’s nuclear program for Reuters, the History Workshop, and The Guardian.

Dusinberre is lecturer in modern Japanese history at Newcastle University, UK. He is the author of the forthcoming Hard Times in the Hometown: A History of Community Survival in Modern Japan, available March 2012.

Hard Times in the Hometown tells the story of Kaminoseki, a small town on Japan’s Inland Sea. Once one of the most prosperous ports in the country, Kaminoseki fell into profound economic decline following Japan’s reengagement with the West in the late nineteenth century. Using a recently discovered archive and oral histories collected during his years of research in Kaminoseki, Martin Dusinberre reconstructs the lives of households and townspeople as they tried to make sense of their changing place in the world. In challenging the familiar story of modern Japanese growth, Dusinberre provides important new insights into how ordinary people shaped the development of the modern state. His account comes to a climax when, in the 1980s, the town’s councillors request the construction of a nuclear power station, unleashing a storm of protests from within the community. This ongoing nuclear dispute has particular resonance in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima crisis.