Radioactive Rain and the American Umbrella SHUN’YA YOSHIMI Translated by Shi-Lin Loh THE END OF THE “AFFLUENT POSTWAR” W ITH THE EARTHQUAKE OF March 11, 2011, and the expanding nuclear disaster that followed, our “affluent postwar” has finally reached a decisive end. Indeed, this closure had been clearly augured since the 1990s. The collapse of the bubble economy, the close of an era of single-party rule by the Liberal Demo- cratic Party, and the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and Aum Shinrikyo ¯ sarin gas attacks that came in rapid succession in 1995—these events forced upon us the reality that the “affluent postwar” was over. On January 17, sixteen years ago, a huge earthquake centered in the northern part of Awajishima wrought massive devastation on the Hanshin area and the city of Kobe. The dead and missing numbered 6,434; the wounded 43,792; those requiring shelter 30,000; houses destroyed or damaged, 25,000. It was the most severe quake since the Great Kanto ¯ Earthquake of 1923. The region’ s life- lines were severed. The Hanshin Expressway collapsed in over a dozen places, the San’yo ¯ Shinkansen rail line was broken, and subway tunnels collapsed. Many buildings in city centers lay in ruins. The relentless footage of fallen high- ways and burning streets stunned television viewers across the country. Then on March 20, 1995, while Japan was still reeling from the blow of the Hanshin Earthquake, members of the religious group Aum Shinrikyo ¯ launched sarin gas attacks on subways in the heart of Tokyo. Twelve passengers and station staff died; another 5,510 were wounded. Two days after the incident, the Metropolitan Police Department searched the Aum headquarters in Kami- kuishiki Village in Yamanashi Prefecture. They discovered that the building con- tained facilities for manufacturing sarin and other chemical weapons. From the confessions of arrested Aum members, it became clear that the group had perpe- trated several crimes, from a 1994 sarin gas attack in Matsumoto to the Tokyo sarin attack. Until the capture of Aum’ s leader, Asahara Sho ¯ko ¯ , about two Shun’ya Yoshimi (yoshimi@iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp) is Professor of Sociology, Cultural Studies, and Media Studies in the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. He is also Vice President of the above institution. Shi-Lin Loh (shiloh@fas.harvard.edu) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 71, No. 2 (May) 2012: 1–13. © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2012 doi:10.1017/S0021911812000046