Protective abandonment: Risk,data,and surveillance of nuclear workers post Fukushima

Abstract

During the coronavirus disease-19 pandemic, Fukushima marked the 10th anniversary of its nuclear disaster of 2011. And although pandemic scientists around the world used technological surveillance to predict risks, the experiences from the Fukushima health crisis call into question such technological solutionism. The Japanese government and electronic companies had placed nuclear workers under intensive health surveillance for decades, but the health data rarely helped workers to protect themselves. Rather, the government has often used the data to decline workers’ claims for medical compensation. I call this contradictory consequence of data Protective Abandonment, the systematic disposal of people through the promise of protection. Data are collected through surveillance, for the purpose of risk management, but the information ends up protecting only the existing political economic systems. Crucially, data collection disguises protection and hides the unequal distribution of care. I argue that protective abandonment may become a common experience in today’s data-driven societies.

Introduction

During the coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 pandemic, in March 2021, Fukushima marked the 10th anniversary of its nuclear disaster – the serial meltdowns and explosions of reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake. The decade-long nuclear health crisis is still far from over; efforts to clear up debris after the meltdowns are ongoing, the government plans to release into the Pacific the contaminated water used to cool the broken reactors and fuel pools in 2023 (BBC, 2021), and at least 36,000 people are still displaced, due to the high level of radiation remaining in their communities (Asahi Shimbun, 2021). Cancer patient numbers have increased. Two hundred fifty-one people were diagnosed with thyroid cancer by February 2021 – part of a cohort who were 18 years old or younger when they were exposed to radiation from the Fukushima Disaster (Fukuchi, 2021). Though many national and international health research and radiation studies have taken place post Fukushima, science has been unsuccessful in restoring the lives damaged by the technological disaster.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic invoked global technological responses to overcome the health crisis: tracking people’s locations, movements, and contacts through mobile phones or vaccine passports. While the massive collection of personal data gives governments a new means for managing risk, the experiences of the nuclear health crisis in Fukushima call into question such technological solutionism. The health data taken from the local population rarely helped in the delivery of needed medical treatment or the protection of the lives exposed. Why? Government agencies downplay the negative effects of radiation and refuse to see causal relations in data, for example, between increasing cancer rates and the nuclear plant meltdowns. Scientists find other reasons, such as ‘stress’ or ‘excessive cancer examinations’ to explain the rise of youth cancer (Shimura et al., 2015; Fukuchi, 2021). Post-Fukushima experiences show that data and surveillance do not automatically save people. Furthermore, this article argues that the data are often used to prevent patients from accessing medical support and public healthcare.

Of the populations who have been exposed to radiation from nuclear power plants in Japan, workers have the longest history of data collection by authorities. The Japanese government and electric companies have placed nuclear workers under intensive health surveillance during and after work since the 1970s. However, out of 500,000 estimated workers in 54 nuclear power plants in Japan, prior to the Fukushima Disaster (Higuchi, 2011b), only 15 workers had been found to have a causal relation between their work and their illness, and were provided medical compensation, as of 2017 (Iida, 2017). These 15 workers were diagnosed with leukemia or other serious types of cancers, due to the extremely high doses of radiation on the job. But for many others, the government denied causal relations between their radiation exposure and health damage. They are normally classified as ‘low-level exposure’ based on the employer’s record on radiation exposure doses. Crucially, their claims were declined not because of a lack of data, but because of a presence of data, which did not often reflect their actual doses of radiation.

I call this contradictory consequence of data Protective Abandonment, the systematic disposal of people through the promise of protection. Data are collected for the purpose of risk management and individual protection, through surveillance, but results only in protecting existing political economic systems in which individuals are selectively abandoned. Data collection disguises protection, rationalizes exclusion, and conceals the unequal distribution of care.

This article unpacks this contradictory mechanism of surveillance and data in the nuclear risk society. Individual claims of illnesses caused by techno-scientific risk are frequently contested by the institutions that produce the risk (Beck, 1992; Cable et al., 2008; Mix et al., 2009; Petryna, 2003). Governments, corporations, and scientists, including physicians, form ‘organized irresponsibility’ for systematic risks (Beck, 1992, 2013; Curran, 2013, 2018), and the media help them to disseminate discourse that downplays the negative effects of the risks (Kimura, 2018; Pascale, 2017). Recent studies suggest there is uneven distribution of risk and damage among populations, depending on their social position, such as race/ethnicity, gender, or class (Alexis-Martin and Davies, 2017; Davis and Hayes-Conroy, 2018; Shrader-Frechette, 2012). Among the social positions, class is most relevant to the cases of the nuclear workers. Few sociological and empirical studies have been conducted on this marginalized group of people, perhaps due to the extreme secrecy and the high-tech image that governments and industries have constructed around nuclear production. This article offers worker’s rare narrative of nuclear labor and contributes to developing a theoretical framework to understand risk, data, and surveillance in health crisis.

In the following, I start with Ulrich Beck’s (1992) influential concept of Risk Society, to identify contemporary relations among risk, data, and surveillance. Though risk society explains risks stemming from techno-science, a theoretical intervention seems necessary to frame the selective and unequal distribution of damage (Curran, 2013). The state of exception, discussed by Giorgio Agamben (1998), opens a space to situate the exclusion of precarious workers in supposedly universal and democratic healthcare systems. The next method section explains how I conducted an individual-based case study on a former nuclear worker Ryusuke Umeda, who sued the Japanese government for medical compensation in 2012. Then, I provide a brief overview of Japan’s nuclear institution and its discourse on radiation, which consistently underestimates health risks (Lindee, 2016; Perrow, 2013).

Against this historical backdrop, I move onto the details of Umeda’s experiences: how his radiation exposure doses were recorded, what prevented him from filing for the public labor accident compensation (Rosai), and how his claim was declined. Finally, I discuss the paradoxical consequence of Protective Abandonment, which is more insidious than simple exclusion, as it gives a false sense of protection to vulnerable lives until they face catastrophe. Umeda-san literally told me, ‘I was used and abandoned. Please don’t do this to other workers’.

Risk, data, and surveillance: A theoretical framework

Risk Society, a concept coined by Ulrich Beck (1992), refers to the society that exists under risks arising from modernization. Distinct from risks caused by the natural world, these risks are induced by civilization itself, especially by techno-scientific systems and knowledge, such as nuclear, chemical, ecological, and genetic engineering (Beck, 1992; Zinn, 2008). Published originally in the aftermath of the Chernobyl Disaster in 1986, Beck grasps the contradictory role of science in risk calculations; the public depends on scientific knowledge to assess risks, but techno-scientific knowledge inherently fails to recognize risks and avoids admitting risks of its own creation, because the recognition of risks may halt the accumulation of wealth. ‘The sciences are entirely incapable of reacting adequately to civilizational risks, since they are prominently involved in the origin and growth of those very risks’ (Beck, 1992: 57).

Scientists help the governments and corporations to explain risks with the status of a ‘latent side effect’ (Beck, 1992: 22). The latent side effect admits the risk, but simultaneously legitimizes the risk as a sub-product of wealth. Scientific discourses are mobilized to set up ‘acceptable levels’ as standards of legal protection from risks, but acceptable levels are not scientifically proven to be harmless. For example, Japanese regulation set 50 millisievert of radiation doses per year and 100 millisievert per 5 years for workers, which was already 50 times higher than the safety standard for the general population (Shrader-Frechette, 2012). However, in response to the Fukushima Disaster, the government raised the workers’ acceptable level from 100 to 250 millisievert to keep them working to cool the reactors (Iida, 2017; Mori et al., 2016). Clearly, the decision was made not on a scientific, but on a political basis. Furthermore, the International Commission on Radiological Protection admits that there is no threshold for radiation doses to health damage: the more exposure to radiation, the more harm to health. Zero is always the best condition, and there is no harmless level (Higuchi, 2011a; Ozasa et al., 2012). The acceptable levels are hazardous, while creating the illusion that authorities have placed the risks under control.

As such, Beck unpacks the social formation of ‘organized irresponsibility’ by the political, economic, and academic elites in the risk society. Central to the organized irresponsibility is denying causality of damage: ‘Government and bureaucracies exercise well-worn routines of denial. Data can be hidden, denied and distorted. The gap between knowledge and impact can be exploited. Counter-argument can be mobilized’ (Beck, 1998: 19). Risk management not only produces scientific discourse to obscure harm, but also develops strategies and tactics to push back against objections and skepticism to its discourse (Mix et al., 2009). But, who is most likely to face the harm and denial?

Beck’s paradigm of Risk Society shows the limitations of analyzing unbalanced landscapes of risks in a globalized world (Cable et al., 2008; Curran, 2013; Engel and Strasser, 1998; Mix et al., 2009). Beck (1992, 2013) contends that risk society replaces class society because it brings the boomerang effect of massive risks to those who produce risks, which drives an egalitarian transformation of society. However, his hypothesis is increasingly challenged by the literature of environmental illness and environmental injustice, finding that socially marginalized groups are subject to more serious consequences of techno-scientific risks (Cable et al., 2008; Davis and Hayes-Conroy, 2018; Mix et al., 2009; Shrader-Frechette, 2002). Recent studies unveil how the nuclear industry dispossessed and contaminated Indigenous lands and resources in the United Sates (Ishiyama, 2020), and how ‘nuclear necropower’ attacked those who resisted the dispossession and contamination by a nuclear power plant in India (Kaur, 2021).

In this sense, global risks are unevenly distributed among populations. In relevance to this article, Dean Curran (2013) suggests that risk positions are heavily structured by class, in which the rich and powerful would find private escape routes to mitigate risks as well as to recover from damage, even if they are not able to completely escape massive risk. Curran (2018) sees organized irresponsibility for massive risks as a principle in polarized neoliberal societies:

The action of many agents together cumulatively and collectively generates risks for others, but in which all the distinct agents are able to either minimize or fully avoid culpability for these impacts because of the difficulty in tracing the overall damage to the specific harmful action of any one of the agents. (p. 597)

The greater the level of complexity producing risk, the lower the level of culpability found for each risk producer. The difficulty of holding risk producers accountable is not only in untangling the chain of actions and inactions in the risk production processes, but also uncovering various kinds of diversionary tactics that risk producers deploy to avoid liability. Crucially, law and legal institutions tend to normalize the denial of legal responsibility, through which risk producers enjoy impunity (Curran, 2018; Veitch, 2007).

Risk is also one of the most powerful rationales that expand surveillance over the population and generate personal data, as observed in the War on Terror or the COVID-19 pandemic. Risk communication consists of identifying risks, classifying risks, and evaluating risks (Gandy, 2010), which employs surveillance to calculate probabilities and eliminate them before they are realized (Lyon, 2007). Expansion of surveillance reflects the neoliberal ideology of technological solutionism, which has been accelerated by digital technologies and is creating data-driven societies (Lyon, 2022): the more information in hand, the more risks under control.

David Lyon (2007) points out an ambiguous characteristic of surveillance: personal data collection often arises from the tension between care and control in modern societies. The medical monitoring of nuclear workers is projected as surveillance for care, to protect workers from extreme harm. However, the data collected from workers are interpreted by the risk producer, who is driven by his own political economic interests. In this process, surveillance for care readily turns into surveillance for control. Simultaneously, care becomes an indispensable part of knowledge production for control by the nuclear institution. The ambiguity of surveillance enables institutional intervention into individual lives in democratic societies, by which the nuclear institution, not workers, obtain the status to transform data into meaningful knowledge. With the data in hand, the government, corporations, and scientists establish representational frameworks of nuclear discourses, which provide the basis for shared understanding of risk (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997). On this stage, surveillance and data are deeply involved in the truth regime of risks.

As a result, precarious nuclear workers are blocked from access to medical compensation, not because of an absence of data, but because of a presence of data. I call this paradox Protective Abandonment because workers are subject to intensive surveillance under the name of protection, but are systematically abandoned. Under this scientific data regime, protective abandonment is recurrently practiced against marginalized groups of people who disproportionately face the catastrophes of techno-scientific risks. This concept is applicable to the cases in which people give their personal data to authorities because they trust that the data will be used to protect them, but in fact, the data are used to rationalize their exclusion from protection. The data legitimates the systematic selection and disposal of people, in a scientific and objective guise.

To unpack the mechanisms that legalize the systematic, unequal distribution of risk in democratic societies, Giorgio Agamben (1998) offers an insight. In his analysis of ‘the state of exception’, Agamben (1998) explains how democratic states have legally excluded certain groups of people from rights and protections:

[T]he relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. (p. 28, emphasis in original)

Nuclear workers are not simply set outside legal protection. They are heavily surveilled because their work is inherently risky for their health, and their bodies are monitored for their protection by law. Nonetheless, they are banned from receiving medical compensation when the risk turns into harm. It is the paradoxical consequence of data surveillance, what I call Protective Abandonment. Nuclear workers are actively abandoned by the government in the application of law. This legal abandonment, rationalized by data and surveillance, threatens and kills nuclear workers at the bottom of the political economic system.

Methods

This is basically an individual-based case study on a Japanese nuclear power plant worker. I collected data in a multiyear effort through in-depth interviews, document analysis, and participant-observation. I had an opportunity to conduct semi-structured interviews with a former nuclear worker, Ryusuke Umeda, who lived in Fukuoka prefecture in Japan. He is one of a few public figures who identify themselves as nuclear workers, as they are normally under strong pressures from employers not to talk about their work publicly. They are also largely ignored or stigmatized as underclass due to their precarity in Japanese society (Higuchi, 2011a). Mr. Umeda had applied to the Rosai, suffering from a myocardial infarction and other illnesses, since his work in two nuclear power plants in 1979. But the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare declined his claim, so he brought the case to court to reverse the decision. Because the litigation took place several months after the Fukushima Disaster, the local citizens who became aware who needed to respond to the meltdowns at ground level and at heavy cost to personal health, promptly formed a support group for Umeda’s pursuit. The supporters requested me to record his narratives and write his biography, focusing on his work in the nuclear plants. This research came out of the book project.

Thus, my primary data source is 10 interviews with Mr. Umeda, each of which took 2–3 hours from 2011 to 2013. During the same period, I attended his trial, his public talks, and other anti-nuclear power (datsu-gempatsu) events surging in post-Fukushima Japan; I had informal interviews with other nuclear workers, medical experts, anti-nuclear activists, journalists, and photographers, to cross reference to Umeda’s accounts. I attended meetings with Umeda’s legal team, consisting of 14 lawyers, and had access to the administrative documents and court files on his radiation doses, recorded by his employers, and the assessments by the government. I was actively engaged in the entire community formed to support Umeda and continued corresponding with the community members by phone, emails, and letters, until the end of his lawsuit in July 2018.

With the rich sources, the significance of this individual case study is deeply qualitative understanding of nuclear work and nuclear worker’s experience that fall outside data the government or employers gather. My several-year engagement fostered the participant’s trust to disclose sensitive facts and resulted in a life course approach that found his consistently marginalized position in the nuclear risk society. Despite the single participant, Umeda’s narratives bear testimonial value as a historical witness to unsafe conditions in the hidden world of nuclear labor and to what awaits after the risky work.

I do not anonymize the participant in this study because it is the participant’s desire to be public. Mr. Umeda and I agreed to publish his stories including his identity. Umeda’s name and photographs have been already published in the Japanese and international media. ¹ It is my hope that his courage is recognized and adds specificity, credibility, and relatability to the narratives.

From Hiroshima to Fukushima: A genealogy of denial

The history of nuclear power began with nuclear weapons. The United States attacked Hiroshima with a uranium bomb on August 6 and Nagasaki with a plutonium bomb on August 9, 1945. The two bombs together killed more than 210,000 civilians by the end of the year, and since then has continuously killed the survivors and their descendants through the intergenerational effects of radiation (Nagasaki Atomic Bombs Museum, n.d.). The two techno-scientific experiments exhibited the genocidal power of nuclear energy to the world.

While the Allied occupational forces banned Japanese researchers and journalists from publicly reporting on the deadly effects of the atomic bombs until the end of the Occupation in 1952 (Lindee, 2016), the US Army commenced gathering data immediately. In September and October of 1945, Thomas Farrell, Deputy Commanding General of the Manhattan Project, and his US Army inspection team, visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki to assess the effects of the bombs. Farrell said at a press conference in Tokyo that their new weapon successfully achieved the most powerful heat and blast ever. However, he denied any death caused by radiation and denounced as ‘Japanese propaganda’ that survivors were increasingly dying with symptoms of radiation wounds and disorders, including people who visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombing. ‘There is no evidence that the atomic bombs cause death in the long run by radiation, and Hiroshima is now completely safe’, asserted Farrell (Shigesawa, 2010: 93).

For the systematic collection of data, the United States established the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) as a joint project with Japanese scientists in 1947. The ABCC opened clinics within large hospitals in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to which dying victims went to seek relief. But the survivors soon found that the ABCC would only examine their bodies, but provided no personal care (Cram, 2015). In the 1950s, ABCC collected a ‘Master Sample’ of 71,900 people exposed to the A-bombs, including in utero exposure (Lindee, 2016: 190). It set a goal of following the long-term health experiences of about 150,000 people in both cities, through studies of life span, adult health, mortality in the next generation, and pathology. Indeed, ‘Japanese bodies became the primary data source for contemporary nuclear science and regulation’, constituting the first medical model of the ‘nuclear body’ (Cram, 2015: 798). The ABCC did not use the data for the well-being of survivors, but for the well-being of nuclear research. This immoral attitude was inherited by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF, n.d.), the successor to the ABCC, established in 1975, when the funding base shifted from the United States to Japan. Both ABCC and RERF played a central role in developing Japan’s representational framework of nuclear risk discourse.

To start up nuclear businesses in postwar Japan, it was necessary to replace the apocalyptic image of nuclear weapons with something positive. US President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speech ‘Atoms for Peace’, in 1953, created this momentum. At the United Nations, he declared, ‘the fearful trend of atomic military build-up can be reversed, this greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boon, for the benefit of all mankind’ (Voices of Democracy, n.d.). Eisenhower proposed that governments get ‘principally involved’ with nuclear power and join an International Atomic Energy Agency, established under the UN, known as the IAEA now. In 1954, the US Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act Amendment to enable the commercial use of nuclear power by private enterprises. In parallel, the Japanese Diet took the first step to fund nuclear studies.

But 1954 was also the year a US hydrogen bomb test around the Bikini Islands in the Pacific killed a Japanese sailor in Daigo Fukuryu Maru. This gave rise to anti-atomic and anti-hydrogen bomb movements nationwide, upon which American leaders recognized ‘the need for a new psychological program’, ‘not to let the movement benefit communism’ (Arima, 2008: 67). In 1955, the US Envoy for the Peaceful Use of Atomic Energy arrived in Japan. A growing conservative media, the Yomiuri group, reported on the US campaign in newspapers and on TV. The publisher of Yomiuri, Matsutaro Shoriki, who was later revealed to be a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent, became the first chair of Japan’s Atomic Energy Commission in 1956 (Arima, 2008). The Science Council of Japan, formerly against nuclear studies, adopted a new principle, too, that nuclear studies could be conducted under the conditions of independent, democratic, and open ground. According to a pioneering nuclear physicist, Mitsuo Taketani, this was an attempt to create a distinction between military and peaceful nuclear use, but also an effort to ‘catch up with the international competition for nuclear power’ (Taketani, 1976, cited in Muto, 2011: 40).

An experimental nuclear reactor was first built in Tokai village, Shizuoka prefecture, in 1963. Within 3 years, the Japan Atomic Power Company, founded by the government and nine electric companies, generated the first commercial nuclear power at that site. The number of reactors rapidly grew to twenty in the 1970s, sixteen added in the 1980s, fifteen in the 1990s, and five in the 2000s, drawing almost a straight line of increasing 1.5 million kilowatts per year (Yoshioka, 2011: 33-34). Except for local opposition to new plant construction, radical criticism against nuclear energy dwindled in public debates after the 1960s, demonstrating the successful completion of the American psychological program of Atoms for Peace.

However, the Japanese right-wing politicians have never hidden their desire for Atoms for War. Former prime ministers Yasuhiro Nakasone (1982–1987) and Shinzo Abe (2006–2007, 2012–2020) both expressed interest in developing the technological capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons, or have ‘nuclear sharing’ (Asahi Shimbun, 2022), despite Japan’s pacifist constitution banning the state from military power.

Therefore, nuclear power plants in Japan exist officially for peace, but they inherently carry military DNA. Ichiyo Muto (2011) suggests the essential characteristic of nuclear technology penetrating both war and peace: immediate, powerful efficiency, and negligence of later consequences. This characteristic has been demonstrated repeatedly in the systematic denials of radiation risk, the distortion of data, and the delayed reporting of accidents in nuclear power plants. For example, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which runs Fukushima Daiichi and other plants, was accused of systematic data distortion about accidents and safety issues in 13 reactors, from 1977 to 2002. The data distortion included the numbers of cracks in the reactors, failures in the automatic lock systems, and high temperatures of the water circulation systems. A whistleblower reported this to Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency under the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry in 2000, but TEPCO did not admit the cases until 2002 (Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 2007). This is only the tip of the iceberg of organized irresponsibility by Japan’s nuclear institution or what the media call ‘the atomic energy village’ (Genshiryoku-mura) now. The atomic energy village consists of a small group of politicians, bureaucrats, business leaders, and scientists. Behind closed doors, they monopolize state-sponsored profits, policy making, and knowledge production.

The Genshiryoku-mura has constructed Japan’s representational framework of nuclear discourse that is inherently blind to risks. To maintain the paradox of possessing lethal power for peace, it was necessary for them to ignore risks and self-admire Japan’s advanced technologies. The framework was bound up with American nuclear strategies, and represented the interests of military-industrial elites. From Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Fukushima, the institutional message has consistently downplayed radiation risks in a genealogy of denial. Just as US General Farrell insisted there were no deaths caused by radiation in Hiroshima in 1945, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano repeated a phrase while the world was witnessing the serial explosions of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors in 2011. ‘It never causes immediate health damage’ (Kawamoto, 2013).

Data tracked but manipulated: A nuclear worker’s story

Ryusuke Umeda was a healthy 44-year-old plumber when he worked for 3 months in the Shimane Nuclear Power Plant and Tsuruga Nuclear Power Plant in western Japan in 1979. At both sites, he and his colleagues were not directly employed by the electric companies that owned the plants, but by a subcontractor that recruited temporary-contract workers for electric companies. This layered structure is common in Japan’s construction businesses, but particularly with unskilled workers in the nuclear industry; there are up to seven layers of subcontractors between the electric company and the workers (Higuchi, 2011a; Shrader-Frechette, 2012). This puts nuclear workers at the bottom of the employment structure and obscures who is responsible for workers’ safety and health data.

At the plants, Umeda received no training about radiation risks before entering radioactive zones. The inside of the nuclear reactor was extremely hot and steamy, a ‘forest of pipes’, according to Umeda, the temperature around 40 degrees Celsius, with 80% humidity. In addition, the protective jumpsuit and mask made it harder to breathe and made him ‘totally wet, like after swimming’ with sweat. Umeda repaired cracks in the iron pipes and joints by electric welding in the reactors and cleaned the dust and trash around. The work interval was between 15 minutes and 2 hours, depending on the level of radiation filling the air of the location: the more radiation, the less work time. Because of the sweat dripping into his eyes, Umeda often took off his mask to complete his task of electronic welding on time, as other workers did. Presumably, he inhaled the radioactive iron filings and dust directly, which can cause internal radiation exposure, since radioactive elements that are absorbed, damage the body from inside for the long term. But he had no knowledge about the danger, and tried to get his work done.

For safety, workers who enter radioactive zones are required by law to carry three types of dosimeters and an alarm that warns workers when it detects excessive levels of radiation. The data on radiation exposure is recorded every day at the plant by the managers. Once the records show that the worker has reached the daily, weekly, or monthly limits of cumulative exposure doses, the worker can no longer work. Therefore, workers often leave their dosimeters in the low-level area or exchange their dosimeters with others to keep the records low in total (Higuchi, 2011a; Shibano, 2011). Umeda also learned this technique from experienced workers, to leave his dosimeters with a senior worker staying in the low area, and to keep working in the high area without being bothered by alarms.

Certainly, such a practice brings more risks to their health. But workers were uninformed on the seriousness of radiation risks, and their job security was constantly threatened. When their cumulative doses hit the regulatory limits, they were immediately fired and lost their source of income. The employers also preferred to keep the same workers, rather than recruiting new ones, so they wittingly recorded the doses manipulated by workers. Also, workers disclosed that their managers occasionally put down lower numbers than the actual doses in the files (Higuchi, 2011a).

On the final day of his contract in Tsuruga, Umeda went through a medical check-up, also required by law. The whole-body counter, assessing the amount of radiation absorbed inside the body, found 2247 counts in his body, three times higher than average, but he was sent home to Fukuoka. Soon, he began to experience constant nose-bleeds, nausea, headaches, and extreme fatigue. Unable to go back to work, Umeda sought diagnosis at many clinics. Yet, no medical doctor could explain the reason for his sudden illness. Eventually, a whole-body counter at Nagasaki University Hospital found several kinds of nuclei in his body, which do not originally exist in the human body. The physician diagnosed that Umeda absorbed an extremely high level of radioactive elements at the nuclear plants.

With these data, Umeda was going to file a claim for labor accident compensation. But his employer quickly stepped in. The company offered him some cash with one hand, and with the other hand, threatened ‘not to get him in trouble’ with a public disclosure. Nuclear work became an untouchable part of his life history – until Umeda was diagnosed with a myocardial infarction and unable to make a living in 2000.

Staying unwell and poor, Umeda received an envelope from the Radiation Effects Association (REA) in 2006, which refreshed his memory on nuclear work. It was part of a comprehensive survey that traces the health conditions of 200,000 nuclear workers for ‘research purposes only’, asking questions, such as ‘if the subject has already died, please state the names of diseases’. The REA was founded in 1960, to ‘promote nuclear power and radiation use and increase national healthcare’ (Radiation Effects Association, 2018). It retains the dosimetry data in the ‘radiation management book’, which supposedly has been issued to nuclear workers since 1977 to track their own data. The REA does not provide health advice to its research subjects, just like the ABCC and RERF.

Umeda had never received a radiation management book, nor had access to his exposure doses, but he was struck by the fact that the government had conducted medical surveillance over him for ages. Hoping to get any causal clues for his mysterious illnesses, Umeda returned to the Nagasaki University Hospital, obtained newly assessed data on the nuclei in his body, and finally filed for labor accident compensation in 2008.

Over the 3-year examination, the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare disclosed for the first time that Umeda’s employer recorded his radiation exposure doses at 8.6 millisieverts, but declined his claim for the reason of ‘not finding a cause-and-effect relationship between the work and the disease’ in October, 2011. The government admits to only a slight increase in cancer risk (no other diseases or disorders) above 100 millisieverts, and categorizes below 100 millisieverts to be low-level exposure, which is no risk to the health (Iida, 2017). The decision did not take into consideration the risks of internal radiation exposure, which was evidenced by the whole-body counter, nor the long-term consequences of low-level exposure, let alone the possibility that Umeda was exposed to a much higher level of radiation than 8.6 millisieverts. Thus, to reverse the decision, he sued the government in Fukuoka District Court in February, 2012. Umeda said, ‘the Fukushima Disaster made it clearer than ever that the government continued to lie about safety operations at the nuclear plants. I decided to speak up for the workers and their families in Fukushima’ (Supporters of Nuclear Worker Umeda-san’s Lawsuit (SNWUL), 2019: 5).

In court, Umeda and his lawyers claimed that 8.6 millisieverts did not reflect his actual doses. To support Umeda’s narrative, other nuclear workers testified that the practice of lowering doses had been routinized among the workers, because of workers’ precarious positions and pressures from employers to complete tasks by a certain date. Investigative journalists also testified that employers often put down lower doses in the files than the actual dosimeter recorded, so the data in the employer’s files are inaccurate and unreliable. Some physicians and epidemiologists also submitted reports as expert witnesses, that Umeda was exposed to at least 250 millisieverts, based on the symptoms he showed in the aftermath of nuclear work, diagnosing as acute radiation disorder. They also filed the latest research to prove the serious health damage of internal exposure and low-level exposure.

However, the courts declined all the counter evidence for causality of nuclear work to Umeda’s illnesses and ruled that Umeda’s existing conditions and smoking habits might induce a myocardial infarction. In 2018, the Supreme Court dismissed his claim for medical compensation. It was the moment that the judges joined the organized irresponsibility for a damaged nuclear worker, successfully maintaining the post-Fukushima nuclear institution.

Protective abandonment: A threshold of care and control

Clearly, nuclear workers like Umeda are not simply set outside healthcare and welfare systems. The labor accident compensation system was established in 1947 to provide medical support to all workers whose health was damaged due to their work. But the system has repeatedly failed nuclear workers, not because of a lack of data, but because of the presence of data. Umeda needed to find the data of his radiation doses to make a claim, but had no access to his own data for 32 years while the government and industry kept practicing health surveillance on him. When he finally found out his data, it was 8.6 millisieverts, which neither reflected his actual doses nor helped him to access medical aids. For him, the data and surveillance were a trap. Both perpetually anchor nuclear workers to the system that never protects them.

It is a Protective Abandonment, a paradoxical state of exception created by the classification of people by personal data. The duality of inclusion and exclusion enables a trick of actively abandoning certain groups of people from the universal healthcare systems. As the relation of exception is a relation of ban (Agamben, 1998), the government can legally set workers outside of protection through the use of surveillance and data collection; thus, it can avoid public condemnation of the arbitrary treatment of citizens, and maintain organized irresponsibility in a scientific and lawful guise.

Furthermore, Umeda’s case resonates Beck’s (1992) argument that legal standards and regulations, including acceptable levels of radiation exposure doses, do not deliver any substantial protections to workers, because the standards are built by the risk producers to maintain nuclear production, and data are interpreted through the representational framework of nuclear risk discourses. Those regulatory systems are ‘in force without significance’, in Agamben’s words (1998: 51). No matter how many dosimeters workers carry in the radioactive zone, and no matter how long the government tracks their health records, the data turn out not to be significant to workers’ well-being in this trap. Umeda’s case revealed how the data were inaccurately recorded and actively manipulated in the nuclear plants. As a result, the data, in force and without significance, not only fail to fulfill the promise, but also disguise the promise fulfilled. The data misrepresent protection, and eventually stand as defensive walls to those who seek medical compensation. Through the institutional framework of risk denial, worker’s data are mobilized to destroy meaning and to capture workers in an undeclared state of exception.

Surveillance contributes to the process of protective abandonment at the threshold of care and control, simultaneously offering the guise of protection and the final decision of abandonment. Care is control, and control is care, in this ambiguous zone. Surveillance can act freely on the indistinctive threshold between two opposite poles, where information and inaction also stand together.

I cannot overlook class as a factor pushing nuclear workers to the harsh threshold of care and control in healthcare systems. The systematic downplay of nuclear risks by management has made nuclear workers socially invisible – only images of state-of-the-art facilities are shared with the media, with no photos showing workers who clean and repair reactors. With no social recognition, nuclear workers have been treated as a disposable underclass at the bottom of the economic structure. Not only risks, but catastrophes also accumulate at the bottom. The Fukushima Disaster has made them more visible, but the atomic energy village continues to attribute their serious illnesses to personal habits and lifestyles, such as smoking and drinking, as seen in Umeda’s case, as well as in cases of nuclear workers in the United States (Mix et al., 2009). A well-worn neoliberal ideology of self-responsibility deflects public awareness from the systematic disposal of nuclear workers.

Later, Umeda deeply regretted that he had participated in the manipulation of data to secure his job, by leaving his dosimeters in the low-level radioactive area. But he had no knowledge of the long-term consequences of radiation risks on his health. A lack of education and training also indicates a class factor, which affects workers’ decision-making and autonomy in the workplace. Risk producers are reluctant to disclose the deadly effects of radiation to the workers because it makes recruitment difficult. Temporary workers are alienated from mainstream society throughout their lives. They have fewer resources on safety knowledge that fosters critical thinking against the institutional discourse of risk denial (Berglund, 2020). Umeda’s lifelong, socio-economic disadvantage also rendered him to the isolated state of exception.

It is worth noting that both Beck (1992) and Agamben (1998) warn that the state of exception has threatened to become a rule in the 21st century. Today’s data regime has shown infinite appetite for personal data in both governments and corporations, in any sphere of policing, marketing, welfare, immigration and citizenship, to control risks. The collection of personal data for the ostensible benefit of individuals, and its eventual negative or meaningless result, are becoming common experiences in our data-driven societies. Protective abandonment should be understood as a hidden but common technique of the increasingly ubiquitous data surveillance of today, which gains rich information, but provides poor results for people.

Conclusion

In summary, this article examined how health data and surveillance have been used to deny nuclear workers’ access to medical compensation in Japan and theorized the patterns as Protective Abandonment. Since Beck conceptualized the Risk Society in the 1980s, new technologies fed more data into risk management. However, as the workers in Chernobyl were left with serious health damage (Petryna, 2003), the nuclear workers post-Fukushima have suffered from radiation disease and have been abandoned as dispensable labor power. Protective abandonment points to the paradoxical state of exception that exists within legal standards and health regulations, through which techno-scientific risks are unequally distributed to a marginalized group of people. As nuclear workers are continuously excluded from public medical support, nuclear risks are inversely distributed from wealth.

Because of the extreme secrecy that has been built around nuclear production, this individual-based case study has an empirical limit to grasp everyday practices in nuclear plants and health problems that workers have experienced. Future studies should collect more narratives from nuclear workers and trace how their data are used.

In a time that data collection occurs ever more routinely and widely in workplace and in the names of health and protection, the contribution of this article to a larger field of sociology is to draw critical attention to complexity of social institutions that handle personal data, rather than novelty of technologies or size of datasets. Despite risks justify expansion of data collection, data and technologies do not automatically protect the subjects nor solve health problems, as are advertised. No matter how much data surveillance technology collects, ‘[t]echnology can determine only what is seen. It is society and its politics that determine what is known’ (Fiske, 1998: 85). The sociological attention can fill gaps between high-tech surveillance and its low impact on, or even exacerbation of, social problems.

Nonetheless, the aged worker challenged the fraud of data regime against him. After a 6-and-a-half-year lawsuit, Umeda-san was proud of himself for refusing to accept the government’s protective abandonment. He commented, ‘I was poor. But being poor, I was able to keep fighting, up to the Supreme Court. It is an equal victory for me’ (SNWUL, 2019: 152, 154). His legacy is not only passed on to younger nuclear workers, but also to children in Fukushima. In January 2022, the six people who were diagnosed with thyroid cancer aged 17–27 years in Fukushima sued TEPCO for medical compensation. Their voices demand an alternative system, to protect their future from nuclear harm with significance. They also question the fundamental contradiction of possessing lethal technological power for peace.