The Bikini Incident Represented by Archived TV Programmes

Abstract

　In March 1954, when the United States tested a hydrogen bomb over the

Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru, a Japanese fishing

boat, was exposed to the radiation. The crews of the boat suffered from

‘acute illness’, such as burns or loss of hair, within a short period of time, and

one of them died from leukaemia in September same year. This tragedy was

widely reported by the radio, the newspapers, the newsreels and the photo　

journalism magazines, and ever since has been known as ‘the Daigo Fukuryu

Maru Incident’ in Japanese society. Yet, other Japanese fishing boats, the residents

of the Marshall Islands and the US soldiers who participated in the 1953

tests were also exposed to ‘nuclear fallout’ at that time. In such cases, the physical

effect of the radiation started to emerge much later, in the form of diseases

such as cancer. These effects, unlike the ‘acute illness’ of the Daigo Fukuryu

Maru crews, had been overlooked for decades by most of the media, with the

exception of very few TV programmes which documented their suffering. However,

these cases came to receive public interest after the Fukushima Daiichi

Nuclear Power Station Accident in 2011 and the following radioactive contamination

of large areas. It is in this context that the handful of past TV programmes

on the subject became important; in hindsight, by confronting the

‘delayed effect’, they were already describing the wider context of the radiation

exposure of the ‘the Incident’. In that sense, these TV programmes, stored

and now open to the public as part of the archive of television; are important

resources not only for the re-examination of the incident; they also provide

significant implications for post-2011 Japanese society.