Vol.:(0123456789) Metascience (2021) 30:83–86 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-020-00592-2 1 3 BOOK REVIEW The visible and invisible atom: from Hiroshima to Fukushima Morris Low: Visualizing nuclear power in Japan: a trip to the reactor. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xiii+260pp, 83.19 € HB Maxime Polleri 1 Accepted: 27 November 2020 / Published online: 2 January 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. part of Springer Nature 2021 Visualizing Nuclear Power in Japan: A Trip to the Reactor is a historical account of how Japanese society came to embrace nuclear energy despite having witnessed the pitfalls of nuclear power during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book examines how proponents of nuclear power, both Japanese and foreign, have attempted to naturalize nuclear power to the point where it successfully became part of everyday Japanese life. The author starts with a simple, but important prem- ise: what Japanese citizens were permitted to see or not to see crucially shaped pub- lic attitudes toward the use of civilian nuclear power. While numerous historical works studying nuclear power in Japan already exist, the book takes an original approach by stressing the active role of the visual in understanding post-war Japanese history. To do so, the author analyzes an impres- sive range of archival materials, focusing on media representations, exhibitions, models, information panels, paper theater, popular culture, and flms. The author describes the immersive settings where Japanese citizens visualized nuclear power by means of specifc tropes. In talking about visuality, Morris Low does not solely focus on what could literally be seen; he equally underscores the aspects of nuclear power that were carefully controlled, so as to achieve a relative consensus around a positive depiction of nuclear power. The book takes a chronological approach (starting from Hiroshima and fnish- ing with the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster) and weaves its rich materials amid broader historical events, such as the Cold War nuclear arms race and the evolving US–Japan relationship. Chapter 1 introduces the outline of the book, while Chapter 2 examines the atomic bombings of Japan and their aftermath. In particular, this chapter explores how issues of visuality were a major consideration for the use of the atomic bombs * Maxime Polleri maxime.polleri@mail.mcgill.ca 1 Biomedical Ethics Unit, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University, Peel 3647, Montreal, QC H3A 1X1, Canada