“Skin of the Earth”

Abstract

This article explores soil and the multiple pathways it has provided for the coconstitution of forms of life that might be possible following the Fukushima nuclear fallout. In Iitate, a former evacuation zone where radiation still lingers, farmers and concerned citizens deploy a coproduction framework that involves experts in making their own science. Incorporating tactile knowledge of the environment, they make life-strengthening claims on the future amid state promises of revival and progress. Soil becomes alive in madei, which emerges from the processes of separating radiocesium from topsoil, growing rice, and other improvisations for relating to soils that cascade to regenerate a livable world. This article discusses how the Japanese state utilizes temporal scales that orient its citizenry to a future associated with accelerated and intensified productivity as a sign of progress, incorporating decontamination technologies to assert control over organic lives and inorganic matter to make them productive for humans. Through madei, this article addresses how soil guides human attention to the rediscovery of interspecies temporalities, paces, and rhythms, reconfiguring radioactivity to create what I conceptualize as a regenerative time to underscore how actors reanimate the future(s) in the here and now.