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Chronopolitics and the State of Exception: Fukushima Contaminated Water Discharge and Democracy in Japan

Nam, Kijeong 1

1서울대학교

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ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the ocean discharge of ALPS-treated contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant through the concepts of chronopolitics, i.e., the politics of time and the state of exception. While the Japanese government has framed the discharge as a technically manageable measure necessary for decommissioning and reconstruction, civil society actors have understood it as evidence that the Fukushima disaster remains unresolved. Drawing on policy documents, meeting records, expert committee reports, public hearings, and public comment materials, this article argues that the discharge was not the result of a single policy decision, but of a long process in which alternatives were gradually narrowed and one option was constructed as unavoidable. Discourses of “limited storage capacity,” “decommissioning schedules,” “increasing treated water,” and “lack of time” functioned not simply as descriptions of objective constraints, but as political devices that shaped the field of possible choices. Alternatives such as long-term storage, solidification, technological development, or postponement were marginalized as unrealistic because they did not fit the government’s temporal framework. Although public hearings and public comments formally existed, they did not reopen the narrowed policy choices. Instead, participation served to explain, manage, and legitimize a predetermined direction. The article conceptualizes this as a “state of exception without an explicit emergency” and as a democracy with built-in exclusion.

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