As of now I am thinking of using the following question as a more focused way of investigating my topic; What types of local, regional, and national responses to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi meltdown suggest resilience to nuclear disaster? This question allows me to do a few things that my larger framing question does not. First off, being situated in Japan offers a context that includes a strong cultural sense of place, an already present disaster culture for both earthquake and tsunamis, and has a unique relationship with the nuclear power industry. Secondly, the question allows me to investigate whether or not resilience is more or less important at different scopes of Japanese society. I mention this second point primarily because of role that evacuation and rehabilitation play in the disaster response. For many resilience models, being able to rehabilitate a place and adapt a new lifestyle accordingly plays a role in the response, but with nuclear disaster that component will likely need to be adjusted. That being said, if rehabilitation is not the backbone of resilience to nuclear disaster, what is? This question will help be determine if the focus should be shifted to higher scopes than that of the immediate surrounding area of the disaster.
Some issues with this question that could lead to slight changes are that it does not offer much in the way of directing the focus of more intensive research. The question targets who (local, region, national) and why (responses that suggest resilience), but fails to target how. Part of the reason for this is because I don’t know how yet. As this is still the beginning of this project, finding the best proxy, in a sense, for resilience is still a work in progress. I say proxy for a few reasons, namely that the modeling of human resilience is complex and still changing. To me, a better way of understanding the theory in relation to nuclear power is to understand one aspect that I think can tell us more about the relationship as a whole. I image this being something like, the economic and population success of rehabilitating Fukushima, or Japan’s ability to restart the country’s nuclear plant industry while also adapting to changing laws and safety regulations as a result of the disaster. This deeper inquires, as one can image, are so many and so different from one another that it is likely I will go pretty far into my research before coming back and revising this question to fit a more thorough approach.