Ryo Morimoto, 2023, Nuclear Ghost Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima’s Gray Zone, 1^st Edition, California Series in Public Anthropology, University of California Press, 356 pp., ISBN: 9780520394117.

Ryo Morimoto’s Nuclear Ghost is a poignant and richly immersive ethnography that probes the interwoven lives, ongoing uncertainties, and contested landscapes of post-disaster Fukushima, over a decade after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. The book is positioned at an intersection point of anthropology, environmental studies, disaster studies, and science and technology studies (STS), and it engages forcefully with Japanese cultural and philosophical framings on risk, loss, and continuity.

The overarching hypothesis of Nuclear Ghost is that the “Fukushima disaster,” determined by Morimoto as the “TEPCO accident” to emphasize corporate responsibility, cannot be adequately understood by biomedical and technoscientific measures of radiation exposure, but instead by situated, lived experiences of people living in Minamisōma and adjacent regions. These are “gray zones” where visibility, belonging, trauma, resistance, and continuum occur daily. According to Morimoto, radiation is a biophysical agent and a sociocultural construct that affects and is affected by stories of space, history, and ways of livelihood.

At its most essential level, then, Nuclear Ghost is a radical departure from mainstream disaster ethnographies because it refuses radiation-based narratives of nuclear disasters. In contrast to a preoccupation with contamination as a measurable, medicalized danger, Morimoto turns the ethnographic eye toward what he terms “atomic livelihoods,” lived realities, coping strategies, and existential negotiations by people who decided to stay or come back to the areas contaminated by radiation in coastal Fukushima.

The key argument is that knowing about the TEPCO nuclear accident involves decentering technoscientific and state-based narratives regarding radiation in favor of noticing the multi-faceted, embodied, and at times contradictory terms in which people in cities like Minamisōma live in what Morimoto refers to as “the gray zone.” This is not a geographical term but a conceptual zone in which binary oppositions break down “safe-unsafe”, “contaminated-clean”, “victim-resister”. In this zone, the nuclear Ghost is a ghostly figure representing haunting radiation, loss, and uncertainty. It is not metaphorical but an ontological state through which people understand their worlds and futures.

The book is organized thematically into an introduction, nine central chapters, and an epilogue. The chapters are not strictly chronological; Morimoto develops concepts and narratives in ways that connect with and reinforce one another to build a palimpsestic sense of life in the fallout. The organization permits Morimoto to interlace experiences from his fieldwork, oral histories from interlocutors, cultural reference points, particularly to Haruki Murakami’s fiction and cosmologies of Japanese Buddhism, and critical encounters with theories of exposure, precarity, and affect.

Morimoto’s narrative voice seems reflexive and ethically committed, where he repeatedly interposes his mistakes and develops a grasp as a fieldworker, most notably his transformation from a technoscientific outsider with a Geiger counter to a listener sensitive to the local textures and silences. By this tiered composition, Nuclear Ghost does not provide closure. Nevertheless, it brings ambiguity, contradiction, and coexistence factors that make it an exemplar of what Morimoto terms a “social science of the surreal.” 

I assessed Morimoto’s conceptual design as one of the most rewarding elements of this fieldwork research. The “nuclear ghost” metaphor contains an essential insight into how people might understand radiation: not merely something that can be weighed and measured, but an uncannily haunting presence socially mediated, emotionally charged, and temporally open-ended. This Ghost is different from radioactive fallout; it is a cultural phenomenon, a felt uncertainty, an ethical residue. In describing it, Morimoto is contributing to a larger project in contemporary anthropology to take seriously non-material or extra-scientific incidents, which has been termed the “social science of the surreal.”

Another strength of Morimoto’s position is that the book removes the narrative from state and science domination. Rather than focusing on national rhetoric, epidemiological statistics, or the state’s reconstruction efforts, Morimoto focuses on the everyday life of individuals, temple caretakers like Hatsumi, altar movers, farmers, hunters, and returnees. These people live in the literal and symbolic “in-between” spaces whose experiences are often erased in official reports and media coverage. This research reclaims ethnography through this position to challenge and reframe who gets seen and heard.

Morimoto’s deeply personal reflections on his role as a researcher from lugging a Geiger counter to grappling with his involvement in “disaster porn” through documentary work are not just self-revealing but epistemologically powerful. They provoke essential questions about academic extraction, authority, and the moral complexities of witnessing. His care in addressing the ethics of representing trauma adds depth and seriousness, particularly for readers committed to participatory, decolonial, or reflective scholarship.

Momentously, Nuclear Ghost challenges how nuclear fallout is typically visualized. Through critical reflection on tools like the Geiger counter, radiation maps, and sensationalist photojournalism, Morimoto asks readers to confront the unseen aspects of radiation and life that cannot be measured or mapped. His concept of “atomic livelihoods” is not merely a poetic phrase; it is a methodological stance that insists on holding risk with endurance, damage with commitment, and danger with the will to live and survive.

Morimoto also enters policy conversations indirectly yet consequentially in this book. While it does not hand out policy fixes, it quietly critiques Japan’s centralized approach to disaster recovery and radiation tracking. It pushes readers to consider how harm is defined, how compensation is allocat