KJ Selections

ALICE IN SHIKALAND
Nuclear Power as Theme Park
 Malena Watrous (from KJ#43)
Illustrations by Walderedo de Oliviera

The music began only minutes after I had set down my suitcase on the fresh tatami mats. Staticky and symphonic, it provided an unexpected soundtrack to my new Japanese life. For the first time, I raised the Venetian blinds and peered out of my ground-floor window at rural Japan.

My immediate view included a black Honda Starlet, an empty lot overgrown with beach shrubbery, and a line of tall poles, topped by speakers angled towards every residence on the narrow street. The scene bore little resemblance to the Tuscan landscape evoked by the broadcast recording, and looked nothing like Manhattan, my former home. I realized that I knew next to nothing about Shika, the town of 16,000 where I had been posted to teach. The music lasted for only a few minutes, but it roused every dog in town and their mournful howling carried on long after the broadcast ended.

At six the next morning the orchestral recording once again boomed over Shika-Machi. At school, I cornered my supervisor and asked him what it signified.
 "Oh such things are usual," he said cryptically. "According to town law, the music should play daily at six, noon, and six again."
     "Why?"
 He paused, tilted his head and squinted at me.
    "Maybe," he said finally, "maybe, Shika has a big nuclear power plant."
    'Maybe' there's a power plant? How big is 'big'? And why wasn't it mentioned in the skimpy "Welcome to Shika!" e-mail he'd sent me?
    "Perhaps," he continued, "the town speakers are tested three times per day. In the case of some nuclear evacuation, such a smoothly operating system could be quite important." He led me to the office and pointed out a large silver machine suspended in one corner -- the school's very own radiation monitor. Then he showed me a drawer full of chalky yellow iodine tablets.
    "In case of some radiation sickness, you should take it. Please don't eat like candy! . . . It's joke - Japanese joke."
    "The mayor chooses the music himself," he continued. "Sometimes we can enjoy The Carpenters - 'I'm at the Top of the World.'" As he sang, I wondered how today's radiation count compared with whatever was considered normal.

******

"Maybe you have some time?" the man said, interrupting my library reverie. "I show you around town? Treat you to a cup of coffee?" He looked somewhere between forty-five and sixty-five; his pupils were so dilated that they nearly blotted out his fine gray irises. He introduced himself as Kamono, an English juku teacher.
    For a moment, I balked, may even have snorted incredulously. In New York, I would have muttered, "Fat chance I'm getting into a car to go anywhere with you, buster." But since arriving in Japan, in conversations  I'd become almost liquid. I flowed as I was tilted.  So I climbed into the passenger seat of his tobacco-sour k-car and he drove us out of town. Passing the sea, he apologized for the garbage strewn over the sand, assuring me it was not Japanese.  "It floats in from Russian and Korean ships," he said, although subsequent beach walks revealed a balance of various Asian and cyrillic scripts.
    The trees lining the coast were all trunk and no green, wind-bent. Glazed tiles gleamed a dark, cerulean blue on the roofs of generous coastal homes having little resemblance to the cramped, shoebox Japanese apartments I had imagined. Suddenly, Kamono veered up a long, steep driveway cut into the side of a hill and parked in front of a rounded brick building. He announced proudly that on behalf of S.M.I.L.E (Shika Machiites for International Exchange), he had brought me to the feather in the cap of the town: Alice in Shikaland, Japan's foremost museum of nuclear power, its decor and narrative framework inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
    At the entrance, beaming ladies in aqua uniforms with tiny pillbox hats handed me pamphlets on nuclear energy, and the plant's thick and grammatically impeccable -  if odd - English press kit.
    "As music fills the air, Alice and her friends invite you into their world, hidden beyond the fog-shrouded gate. Now if you would only dare to enter."
    Kamono-san took my elbow, guided me in.
    The museum's stated mission was simple: "Alice and Count Rabbit explain how we can benefit from harnessing nuclear energy, as well as why we need the Shika Nuclear Power Station." My chaperone led me to an exhibit labeled "The Fantasy Theater." He pushed a white button, the curtain lifted and two holograms alit upon an industrial set. A tall white rabbit (an overweight guy in a plush suit) led Alice (a preteen Caucasian model) inside what the press kit informed me was a deserted 1/25 model of the nuclear plant. The child-actress-Alice's lips moved out of sync with the preternaturally squeaky Japanese voice iterating her lines. 
    "Is it not something?" the chairman of S.M.I.L.E. prodded, his own grin as wide as the Cheshire Cat's...
    I understood little Japanese, but the unsubtle acting was easy to read. Alice entered the nuclear plant with much hand-wringing and lip-biting. But as patient Count Rabbit toured her around the immaculate station, she quickly brightened up. "Tanoshikatta," she cried out after ten minutes studying a cross-section of the reactor pressure vessel. How fun!
    It didn't take me long to realize that the Nuclear Power Station provided more than just jobs for Shika Machiites. Community festivals and PTA meetings were held at "Alice". My first Friday night, I was plunked down on the lawn outside for the annual Power Plant Barbecue, where troops of engineers sat alongside buff laborers with yellow bleached ducktails under the hazy night sky. I couldn't have felt more out of my element among the drunk Japanese men who took breaks from munching boiled soybeans and lurid crimson wieners to bellow Japanese enka country music.

* * * * *

A year later, I've transferred to the provincial capital, Kanazawa. The city, with its samurai district and rows of sleepy tea shops, yields something closer to what I had expected from reading Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha than Shika ever did. In some ways, Shika bore more resemblance to The Simpsons' Springfield than Golden's Kyoto.
    Today, I am driving towards Alice with a mission, curious whether the recent radioactive leak at the Tokaimura uranium plant has diminished enthusiasm at Shika's museum of nuclear power. A shiny new bilingual sign (a sure indicator of recent municipal prosperity) marks a nearby intersection. One arrow directs traffic straight ahead, half a kilometer to the power station. The other points up a narrow road towards "Arisu-kan." Thrown for a loop by the Japanese spelling, my traveling companion and I keep missing the turnoff.
    A signboard Alice points up the hill at nothing but trees. In Shika, lack of jobs has led to accelerated depopulation; the high school where I taught is projected to shut down within four years. And yet plant money has afforded velvety roads and glassy, high-tech municipal buildings that, under-staffed, seem like the after-hours set for a Japanese version of The Truman Show. After just a year, could the museum have folded?
    We follow Alice's pasteboard finger up a road that cuts narrowly between newly harvested rice fields. The bare stalks look distressed. Water pooled at their base is oily red; it opalesces in the sun. Only a week after that blue flash at Tokaimura, a mere chainlink fence separates our vehicle from Shika's own massive nuclear power station, the source of electricity for the Hokuriku region. At Tokaimura, workers followed executive instructions to flout national nuclear safety laws. They dissolved massive quantities of uranium in steel buckets, then poured it into a tall cauldron, begetting a chain reaction and critically injuring themselves. We crack nervous jokes about mutant vegetation.
    "Arisu-kan? . . . Alice-land!" We double back, and turn into the museum driveway, which is suddenly glaringly obvious. A lavender tour bus is just ahead of us. It's a bright, windy autumn day, and chandeliers dangling from the bus ceiling refract sunlight into our eyes.
    Despite the accident at Tokaimura, Arisukan is bustling, the parking lot crammed with cars displaying license plates from prefectures near and far. The museum's hilltop perch suggests a holy purpose, removed and sanctified. Wind-generator spokes rotate lazily and then kick into full whirl with a gust of wind. The town's only museum and sole example of brick construction is far grander than I had remembered. On the rolling, perfectly mowed lawn (Shika's only public lawn, at that), children kick giant, inflated, atom-shaped balls. A dozen nail-polish-red, electrically powered convertibles are parked near the entrance.
    Inside the museum, parents hover above text explaining every facet of nuclear energy while their kids dart between the snack bar and "puricura"  (print club) booth. The puricura machine allows you to actually become Alice in Shika Land, by aligning your face in the oval cutout between her pageboy cut and trademark pinafore. The machine then prints your Aliced face onto small, tradable stickers. Everything at the museum - admission, puricura, even snacks - is free.
    While the multi-chambered, multi-media museum is ostensibly intended to provide children with an exhaustive knowledge of the harnessing and usages of nuclear power, most of them bypass the fine print exhibits on atom splitting or nuclear waste disposal. Instead, children beeline for "Alice's Square," where "Alice and her rabbit friends learn about how nuclear power stations are controlled." Here tots swarm and bang, rotating dials, pounding on silver and red alarm buttons, twisting knobs that send the slim needles of sensitive gauges into quivering overdrive.
    The designers of this particular exhibit must have kids of their own. Already, the tender, terrible two year-olds are being shaped into happy customers who will, it is hoped, grow up to perceive nuclear energy as a given and a good for resource-poor Japan. Where nuclear energy is concerned, buying into it and buying it are inextricably bound, and the Hokuriku power executives have furbished a lavishly expensive museum in the interest of ensuring both. The kids who come to Arisu are unperplexed by the enterprise. 
    Born into a power plant town and too little to understand its implications, they scamper happily, playing with all of the flashy toys. A sign reads "Furthermore, don't miss the exhibitions on nuclear power station simulations, ECCS, reactor scrimmages and others." Others? Reactor scrimmages? And we're supposed to believe that this is targeted at children?
    "Tiny children," my companion ruminates as we linger in a pavilion called Alice's Garden of Radiation, "don't worry about what could happen to the uranium within the reactor pressure vessel in the case of an earthquake." I also doubt whether children ponder the effects of gaseous waste in the air they breathe. They toddle right past a cartoony Cheshire Cat's blinking map of local radiation measuring points. Watching the crowds, we become convinced that Arisu-kan was not really intended to educate children. It was designed to keep little hands busy while soothing the greater anxieties of their parents, even as it pretends to do otherwise, presenting complex and scary information in a childish format so that adults can covertly learn without losing face.
    It's the parents, many of whom are old enough to remember the effects of nuclear power's darker uses in Japan, who have questions. Middle-aged men, in particular, linger at every turn, eyebrows knit as they scrutinize technical diagrams and decipher scientific terminology.

* * * * *

Few people here are familiar with Carroll's 19th century text and the original illustrations of a girl who is, by today's standards, un-cute. Thin-lipped and greasy-haired, she is prone to alarming physical changes. In the chapter called "The Pool of Tears," Alice eats that famed cake that causes her neck to sprout from her shoulders. In one stark and uncomely illustration, thick tendons bulge from her trunk-like neck; her Peter Pan collar strains at the bloated flesh of her throat. Mutated, she cannot reach her feet to tie her shoelaces.
    Carroll's morphed Alice reminds me of the potential dangers of radiation - children whose lungs form polyps, fetuses grown stretched or crumpled, any alien deviations from the expected body with its four proportional limbs and twenty digits. But there is nothing at all alarming about Shika's Arisu. Her character is neutralized; her eyes are as huge and limpid as Sailor Moon's, her lips perpetually upturned; she never changes size or shape. The potential irony of "nuclear Alice" is lost here.  In the rice-growing countryside of the only nation ever to suffer the A-bomb, I would never have expected this whimsical celebration of atomic energy.
    While we shadow the cheerful Sunday crowd at Arisukan, the Tokaimura plant workers remain hospitalized with severe radiation sickness. A mere week after a major radiation accident, one would not expect families to be hanging out at a museum funded by and reveling in nuclear power. But Arisukan has the best playground in a two-convenience-store town with neither train station nor shopping center. There's no better public spot - indeed there's no other public space - to spend a sunny Sunday in Shika town.
    "Nuclear plants," the mayor of Shika explained to me, after I had learned about my new town's role as regional power source, "are always built in the country." The reason for this is as evident as it is frightening. An accident — "some evacuation" — is, of course, a hazard, and the sparser the countryside, the fewer the people who could be adversely affected. A cheerful sign at Arisu-kan advises that solid nuclear waste from the Hokuriku plant is trucked out of Shika, to be disposed of in the even more rural Tohoku region.

* * * * *

Many of my Japanese friends and colleagues use the English word "image" to mean not a projection of what is but of what is imagined. Any kimono-clad "Japan images" I may have arrived with were infinitely complicated by my experience of Shika. For much of my year there, I resided in the gap between a Japan I'd imagined and the small, strange corner of it that I physically inhabited. Friends from home began sending e-mail messages to me starting "Dear Alice in Shikaland." In Lewis Carroll's book, Alice is a girl-next-door who accidentally inside-outs her world, exposing the arbitrariness of convention. As a foreigner, newly arrived, I found myself in a privileged position to identify pockets of seeming incongruity which my Japanese neighbors took for granted. The most quotidian details, the ones most taken for granted, often seemed the most jarring.
    Having graduated from an American liberal arts college, I was educated to perceive and to forge connections, to ascertain patterns out of randomness. I would have expected that the massive accident at the Tokaimura nuclear plant, an accident that forced hundreds of thousands of citizens to remain in their homes over a forty-eight hour period, would have somehow affected the atmosphere of cheer and community learning at Arisu-kan. Finding a connection between the two rural power plant towns hardly seems to require an imaginative leap. My mind is also rattled by the very existence and inordinate popularity of Arisu-kan. To my way of thinking, a museum funded, curated and staffed by the Hokuriku power plant, with a stated mission to "educate" kids about the "magic and wonder" of nuclear power seems more than manipulative. It seems like pure propaganda. But when I intimate my discomfort about Arisu-kan to my friends and coworkers from Shika, they look puzzled, even a bit hurt by what they perceive as my dismissal of the town's biggest selling point.
    I've heard it said that most fiction can be divided into one of two conceits: you go away on a trip, or a stranger comes to town. Shika's "Arisu" fits both. She is at once the beloved child playing in her garden who's approached by the big, strange guy in the bunny suit, and she's the stranger at the plant. She enters frightened but learns to trust its safety and beneficence.
    The museum's narrative has an introduction, a trajectory of discovery, and a resolution. In conclusion, the museum invites Shika-Machiites to make themselves comfortable with being a nuclear town, a destiny that ultimately, the average citizen has little control over. The nuclear plant is here to stay in Shika's very own garden. "Arisu" mediates between this deep-rooted rural community and the double-edged potential of progress and disaster that nuclear power represents.
 

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Malena Watrous is originally from San Francisco.When not at Arisu-kan, she spends her days writing and reading fiction, snowboarding, and teaching English, in no particular order.

Copyright held by the author

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