Japanese Organic Farmers: Strategies of Uncertainty after the Fukushima Disaster

This ethnographic study of organic farmers affected by radioactive contamination in Japan illuminates responses to situated uncertainty as an everyday mode of subjectivity and practice. The farmers' strategies vary along a continuum from accommodation with dominant institutions to precautions of possible uncertainty to innovations and oppositions of potential uncertainty. Significantly these strategies are contradictory and they show variations in power and morality. The data indicate a subjective- and practice-oriented response that I call localized, relational uncertainty. It is contextualized in farms and villages with responsibility for family, consumers, and organic agriculture itself and it enables farmers to embrace multiple strategies. Thus, uncertainty brings loss and limitations, but also produces opportunities through, for example, expanded trust in relationships, deepened commitment to place, reinterpretation of organic agriculture, and sharpened critique of Japan's trajectory of economic growth.