Farmers’ Resilience in Tohoku after the Fukushima Accident

Ethnographic Work in Fukushima Prefecture: At the third key field site of the Small-scale Economies Project, Fukushima, we anticipated that the magnitude of the environmental damage caused by the 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Plant Accident may have been too large to test our hypothesis of the importance of food diversity, social networks and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK).

Contrary to our expectation, however, our interviews of farmers in Fukushima revealed the critical importance of TEK and local networks for maintaining residents’ identity and pride.

Fukushima farmers have deep connections to their land. Here, a shrine located on a Farm in Nihonmatsu City, Fukushima, Japan, 2016.