The Fukushima catastrophe marks a turning point in which the civilian use of nuclear reactor technology in East Sea Rim, including Korea and Japan, came to be reconsidered. As with Chernobyl in 1986, the Fukushima nuclear accident led to questions on the relationship between technology, politics, society, capitalism, and the environment. Furthermore, the Fukushima accident implicitly and explicitly transformed the structure of affect in Korean and Japanese civil society. Indeed, given that a specific vital affect can trigger the defying of established conceptions and the reforming of diverse material and immaterial relations, we have to comprehend the performative courses of affect in which Fukushima itself becomes the eventfulness. Here, the eventfulness means the state in which the event itself overflows and exceeds any established interpretations and representations with respect to the catastrophe. In addition, we have to understand the fact that Fukushima forms a planetary atmosphere traversing and superposing local, national and global dimensions or projects; that is, for instance, the different aesthetical practices have capacities through which the planetary atmospheres are singularly emerged. Therefore, this paper focuses on expressing the disaster as an aesthetical affective atmosphere that can be distinguished from the typical emotions of Fukushima.
It is the objective of this study to comparatively analyze the forming of affective communities in the East Sea Rim, after Fukushima.