What does the 2011 Japanese tsunami tell us about ...

Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 12, No. 8, December 2011

Commentary

Downloaded by [Andrew Herod] at 10:20 18 November 2011

What does the 2011 Japanese tsunami tell us about the nature of the global economy? Andrew Herod University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA, [email protected]

At 14:46 local time on 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake occurred about 100 miles off the east coast of the island of Honshu, Japan. Initially thought to measure 8.9 on the Richter scale but later upgraded to at least a magnitude 9.0, it was the biggest recorded quake ever to hit Japan and the world’s fifth largest since 1900. Shock waves were measured as far away as the UK. The quake had some 8,000 times as much energy as the magnitude 6.3 one which hit Christchurch, New Zealand, the previous month. It was followed by numerous aftershocks, some fifty in the first 24 hours. Indeed, it was so powerful that geologists estimate that parts of eastern Japan are now 12 feet closer to North America and that Japan has dropped 2 feet in height. The quake has also caused the Earth to rotate faster, thereby shortening the length of the day by about 1.8 microseconds (Brown 2011). The Honshu quake was clearly a remarkable demonstration of nature’s power. As most people know, however, it was not the earthquake per se that caused most of the death and destruction which blanketed eastern

Honshu. Rather, it was the tsunami that it unleashed. With waves over 130 feet high traveling at speeds of up to 500 miles an hour and reaching up to 6 miles inland, residents had little time to seek shelter and myriad houses, factories, offices, and farms were demolished. The result was a human catastrophe of epic proportions. As of mid-July 2011, the Japanese National Police Agency was listing 15,547 fatalities, with an additional 5,344 people still missing and presumed dead.1 The tsunami caused heavy destruction of roads and railways, collapsed a dam, and sparked widespread fires. Approximately 4.4 million households in northeastern Japan lost their electricity and 1.5 million went without water for several days. But perhaps the biggest concern was the destruction wrought on the Fukushima Dai-ichi (Number One) nuclear power plant and the potential for damage to the Fukushima Dai-ni (Number Two) plant, both owned by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). In the aftermath of the tsunami, residents within a 12-mile radius of the Fukushima

ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/11/080829-9 q 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2011.629301


830

Andrew Herod

I plant and a 6-mile radius of the Fukushima II plant were evacuated. Such precaution was warranted, as soil samples subsequently taken beyond the 12-mile exclusion zone have recorded levels of radiation higher than those which triggered the evacuations from Chernobyl in 1986. Although Fukushima I has caused the greatest contamination, there are also issues with Fukushima II, highlighted when, in early June, TEPCO sought to release some 3,000 tons of contaminated water from it into the sea (Japan Times 2011).2 The degree of contamination has in fact been so great that one report from Japan’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization reveals that radiation spread over some 230 square miles, with at least one site 15 miles to Fukushima’s northwest having contamination levels ‘in line with those found after a nuclear bomb test’ (Humber and Biggs 2011). All in all, by early April the Japanese government was estimating that some 452,000 people had been displaced from their homes by the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster (CBC News 2011). By any measure, this has been a tremendous tragedy that has brought with it dramatic social consequences—families wiped out or torn apart, significant national and international trauma, disruption to food and electricity supplies, and pollution of the natural environment, to name just a few. But natural disasters can also be economic ones. In the case here, although there was relatively little damage caused directly by the earthquake, the result partly of stringent building codes,3 the US Congressional Research Service (2011) nevertheless has estimated that the overall cost of the events of 11 March could be between $195 billion and $305 billion, making it the most expensive natural disaster on record.4 Indeed, concerns about the cost caused significant financial panic, such that 3 days after the tsunami the Bank of

Japan pumped ¥15 trillion (US$183 billion) into the banking system to try to stabilize market conditions upon fears of what a shortage of liquidity might do to interest rates. By 17 March, it had injected an additional ¥18 trillion (Congressional Research Service 2011: 8). Certainly, to observe that social calamities can also be economic ones is not particularly insightful on its own. However, what I want to do here is to use this disaster to interrogate how the global economy operates. More specifically, I suggest that it tells us something about how the world is spatially networked and about how work in the Japanese and other economies is increasingly organized.

Commodity chains, capital flows, and the geography of the global economy One of the central characteristics of globalization has been the geographical lengthening of commodity chains and the growing spatial linkage of places that are hundreds or thousands of miles apart. Whereas it used to be the case that perishable commodities like flowers and fresh fruit were generally sourced from places close to their final point of consumption, time – space compression (Harvey 1989) means that few places on Earth are now more than 24 or 48 hours apart in terms of travel times. Consequently, much of the food consumed by humans in many parts of the world travels great distances, while commodities like cut flowers can arrive from the other side of the planet before they have time to wilt. This has resulted in countries like Kenya becoming major producers of flowers for Europe (Hughes 2001) and shelves in Global North supermarkets packed with fish from South America, green beans


What does the 2011 Japanese tsunami tell us about the nature of the global economy? from Zambia, grapes from South Africa, and mushrooms from India. One of the things that this disaster allows us to do, then, is to map some of the global commodity chains in which Japanese producers are embroiled. For example, within a few days many sushi restaurants from the USA to India that had been sourcing from Japan sushigrade fish and other products like seaweed began seeking new suppliers, both from further south in Japan and from other countries around the globe (Chowdhury 2011). Import bans of Japanese produce are also instructive. Although there has been much focus in the media upon seafood, perhaps due to its associations with Japanese culture, a slew of Japanese-grown vegetables familiar to Westerners were soon subject to import bans, including broccoli, spinach, canola, cabbage, parsley, leeks, radishes, cucumbers, and cauliflowers. Other ‘more typically’ Japanese vegetables were also banned by several countries, including leafy vegetables like kukitachina and kakina, together with chrysanthemum greens. Three days after the tsunami hit, the USA became the first nation to block produce from near the accident site, banning Japanese milk, vegetables, and fruit on fears that they had been contaminated. Germany and Britain soon implemented additional checks on food imports while France began testing for radioactivity in fresh food products coming from Japan, particularly fish and shellfish. The Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority commenced supplementary checks of Japanese food imports at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and the port of Rotterdam, Europe’s biggest. In late March, the European Commission published Regulation 297/2011, which imposed special conditions on importing feed and food originating in twelve prefectures close to the Fukushima plant. In Asia, China,

831

Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan either banned imports or increased monitoring of goods coming from Japan. Taiwan’s fisheries agency advised boats not to fish in Japanese waters and indicated that it would destroy all catches with radioactivity exceeding permitted limits. Though not banned, other Japanese exports were also affected. Severe damage to Asahi, Sapporo, and Kirin plants impacted beer exports. In addition, the export of many household products was hindered, including: paper diapers/nappies (due to shortages of the tape used to wrap them); canned food (shortages of cans); bleach (shortages of hydrogen peroxide); and shampoo (shortages of surfactant) (Facts and Details 2011). Damage to a petrochemical plant in Kamisu, Ibaraki Prefecture, led to a shortage of plastic film, which in turn caused problems for many food makers, and several publishers had to postpone the release of magazines because damage to the Maruzen Petrochemical plant in Ichihara, Chiba Prefecture, meant that they could not get ink. Other industrial manufacturers also suspended operations, including Hitachi (equipment for power plants), Renesas Electronics (semiconductors), NEC (electronics), Sony (electronics), and Fujitsu (computers) (Congressional Research Service 2011: 6). A particularly dramatic way in which the disaster revealed the connectivity of the global economy, however, was through what happened in the automobile industry. By 16 March 2011, all twelve automakers in Japan had temporarily stopped production at some of their plants in an effort to conserve electricity. Within 1 week of the earthquake Toyota’s shutdowns had cost it 140,000 vehicles, while Honda lost output of an estimated 47,000 cars and 5,000 motorcycles.5 Japanese producers also began slowdowns in their US plants due to concerns over the availability of parts shipped from


832

Andrew Herod

Japan. With some 500 component manufacturers who are part of the auto companies’ keiretsu6 also affected by the tsunami, Toyota halted production at several US assembly plants, Honda experienced disruptions at five of its facilities in the USA, and Mazda stopped taking US orders for models made in Japan. For its part, Ford—which has a tight business relationship with Mazda—decided to idle its plant in Genk, Belgium, for 5 days in an effort to conserve its supply of parts shipped from Japan. Toyota cut production at its plants in the UK, France, Poland, and Turkey, while Honda did so at its plant in Swindon, England. Renault Samsung reduced production at its South Korean plant. Meanwhile, in the US, Ford told its dealerships to stop accepting orders for cars painted in ‘tuxedo black’ and to limit orders in three shades of red because a component (Xirallic) in the paint which gives it its shine could not be sourced from the only plant that makes it, one owned by the German chemical company Merck located in a coastal town impacted by the tsunami. Closure of Hitachi’s airflow sensor factory also had impacts globally, causing both General Motors and Peugeot Citroe¨n to diminish production at several European factories. Shortages also caused GM’s Louisiana truck plant to close (Arnott 2011). Opel (a GM division) halted production at plants in Zaragoza (Spain) and Eisenach (Germany). At the same time, however, the shutdown of plants in Japan stimulated production elsewhere in the world. Thus, the closure of four Nippon Chemi-Con Corporation plants manufacturing aluminum electrolytic capacitors (used in computers and industrial equipment) led the company to boost production at factories in Indonesia, Malaysia, and China. Nihon Dempa Kogyo, the world’s second-largest maker of quartz components, increased output at its plants in Malaysia and elsewhere to counterbalance

that lost in Japan. Nissan began to look at importing engines from its Tennessee plant because its Fukushima engine factory was damaged (Congressional Research Service 2011: 7) and in June Toyota began importing machine parts from its plant in North Wales (BBC News 2011b). These shutdowns reveal how automobile manufacturing is structured these days, using ‘just-in-time’ (JIT) methods of inventory management. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s in Europe or in the USA, manufacturers typically stored large quantities of components in warehouses close to an assembly plant so that they were always to hand, JIT methods of inventory management rely upon timely delivery of components, sometimes quite literally as they are needed on the assembly line. This model means that companies do not have to spend so much money on warehousing components, that they can realize a return on their investment sooner because they do not have capital tied up in parts sitting in warehouses for several months, and that defects are exposed much sooner than previously—if a part is used within a few days of its manufacture, imperfections are discovered earlier than if it sits in a warehouse for weeks. However, as the events of 11 March showed, JIT can leave companies vulnerable to disruptions in their supply chains. As a result of such impacts, the total value of Japanese exports in April 2011 was 13 per cent lower than it had been in April 2010 and represented the first time in 31 years that Japan posted an April trade deficit. Significantly, for my purposes here, these reductions had a quite particular geography to them and reveal a great deal about how the global economy is spatially networked—overall exports to the USA fell 23 per cent, those to the European Union (EU) fell 11 per cent, but Asia-bound shipments declined only 7 per cent (Yuasa 2011). In May,


What does the 2011 Japanese tsunami tell us about the nature of the global economy? US-bound auto exports fell 44 per cent, those to China fell 40 per cent, and those to the rest of Asia and the EU dropped 28 per cent and 36 per cent, respectively (Associated Press 2011). These figures highlight China’s and the US’s positions as Japan’s two largest trading partners. The tsunami, though, did not only draw attention to how the global economy is networked in terms of the exports of commodities. It also revealed how the planet is connected in terms of financial flows. Through its effect on the value of the Japanese yen, the tsunami contributed to instability in financial markets in Japan, the USA, and elsewhere, significantly shaping global capital movements. For example, anticipating that Japanese firms and the government would curtail or even repatriate overseas investments so as to have the capital available to finance the rebuilding of devastated areas, as well as to pay out insurance claims, international investors pushed the value of the yen to a record ¥76.25 per US dollar on 17 March. Only after monetary authorities in Japan, the USA, the EU, Canada, and Britain agreed to intervene in currency markets did its value return to what it had been before the tsunami hit. Although the yen’s strengthening by some 9 per cent in less than a week made Japanese exports more expensive for overseas consumers, it also had wider consequences.7 The fact that China’s yuan tracks the value of the US dollar gave Chinese manufacturers exporting to the US greater price competitiveness compared to Japanese exporters. At the same time, the yen’s appreciation in value threatened to increase the costs of borrowing for countries holding long-term debt in yen. With about one-quarter of East Asia’s long-term debt denominated in yen, the 9 per cent appreciation equated to about a $2.25 billion increase in annual debt payments. Again, though, there is a distinct

833

spatiality to such consequences—only about 8 per cent of China’s external government debt is denominated in yen, whereas the figures for Thailand are about 60 per cent, for Vietnam about 35 per cent, for the Philippines about 32 per cent, and for Indonesia about 30 per cent (Congressional Research Service 2011: 7 – 8). The cost of indebtedness, in other words, is geographically unevenly born. At the same time, some analysts predicted that Japanese investment into Asia would likely slow down, at least temporarily, as investors focused upon rebuilding and retooling domestic facilities. This would particularly affect countries like Cambodia or Vietnam, which were expecting increased Japanese capital flows into their manufacturing sector and agro-industry (Salze-Lozac’h 2011). The aftermath of 11 March also raised fears about how the behavior of Japanese and other investors might affect interest rates in the USA and what this might mean, in turn, for the global economy, especially because Japan is the US’s second-largest creditor, holding $907 billion in US government securities (US Treasury Department 2011).8 Consequently, some analysts worried that the costs of rebuilding after the tsunami would reduce the willingness of the Japanese government and private investors to buy US government debt. This might both starve the world’s largest economy of capital needed to jump start it out of its current recession and also make the costs of borrowing greater, as the Federal Reserve might have to raise interest rates to attract foreign capital. Increased interest rates would not only affect American consumers who might want to take out loans to purchase houses or cars, USbased companies who might seek loans to finance investments in product development and plant construction, and the US government itself, which must finance its more than $14 trillion public debt, but they could also translate


834

Andrew Herod

into higher relative prices for dollar-denominated commodities like oil.9 On the other hand, some prognosticators argued that Japan had sufficient domestic capital to cover the costs of rebuilding and paying out insurance claims, and that the flight of global capital into the safety of US Treasury securities would more than counterbalance any withdrawal of funds by Japanese investors. Likewise, some suggested that the shutting down of oil refineries in Japan, the world’s third-largest oil importer, and the slowing of its economy had the potential to reduce demand and so lower crude prices worldwide, thereby mollifying the effects of any increase in US interest rates.

Precarious work under neoliberalism If the disruption of capital and commodity flows outlined above tells us something of the geographical structure of the global economy, here I want to explore how the catastrophe provides insight into work organization under early twenty-first century capitalism. In particular, it illustrates the centrality of ‘precarious work,’ which has been on the increase in recent years. Precarious work is work that is nonstandard (Kalleberg 2009). It is typically short term and temporary, invariably poorly paid and insecure, and frequently dangerous. It contrasts with the types of work often found in manufacturing during the period of the so-called Fordist economy of the first few decades after WWII. Thus, whereas the archetypal Fordist industrial worker had fulltime work that was often more or less guaranteed for life, was often represented by a labor union, and had reasonably good social benefits, since the 1970s many of these aspects of work have changed. Although there are several reasons for this, one of the most

important has been the way in which time – space compression has increased capital’s needs for flexibility relative to the early postwar era. Hence, as money, commodities, and information flow from place to place more rapidly, the time horizons capitalists have in which to make decisions get correspondingly shorter. To be able to respond quickly to changes in markets in a faster and increasingly interconnected global economy, manufacturers therefore have sought ever more flexibility through being able to hire and fire workers pretty much at will. The result has been a model of work in which a small core of secure, long-term, and well-paid workers are serviced by a periphery of workers subjected to precarious work. Many have suggested that this typifies the ‘Japanese model’ of labor relations which, despite popular belief that Japanese workers enjoy lifetime employment, is characterized by such a core and periphery structure and which has spread to other countries, often through Japanese companies bringing their practices with them when they open up new facilities overseas (Levine and Ohtsu 1991). Significantly, the Fukushima accident—and especially efforts to curtail its negative consequences—has highlighted the nature of precarious work in the contemporary Japanese economy and, by extension, in other parts of the world where neoliberal policies and corporate restructuring have been encouraging its growth. Hence, of the approximately 83,000 workers employed at Japan’s 18 commercial nuclear power plants in 2010, 88 per cent were contract workers (hiseisha’in). Many hiseisha’in migrate from plant to plant to do the dirtiest jobs in the industry, earning the moniker genpatsu jipusii (nuclear gypsies).10 They are often hired from construction sites or are local farmers looking for extra income and have little training in nuclear health and safety


What does the 2011 Japanese tsunami tell us about the nature of the global economy? issues (Tabuchi 2011a). Many are those on the margins of Japanese society, including burakumin (hamlet people, a social minority group), Korean immigrants without proper work visas, and Brazilian immigrants of Japanese ancestry (Efron 1999). According to Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, hiseisha’in receive more than 90 per cent of all the radiation exposure in the industry.11 Moreover, not only are they exposed to radiation more often than are core workers (seisha’in) but they are also exposed to higher levels. Hence, of those workers who received a radiation dose between 5 and 10 millisieverts (mSv) in 2009, 671 were contract laborers and 36 were regular employees, while there were 220 contract laborers and two regular workers who received between 10 and 15 mSv, and thirty-five contract workers but no regular workers who were exposed to a dose between 15 and 20 mSv (Jobin 2011).12 The Fukushima I plant almost exactly matched the industry percentages in terms of its contract versus core worker distribution— 1,108 regular employees, working either for TEPCO or for companies like Toshiba and Hitachi that helped build and maintain the plants, and some 9,195 contract workers (hirees of subcontractors and sub-subcontractors). These latter were engaged in the most dangerous and dirty jobs, like using mops and rags to clean radiation from reactor drywells and spent-fuel pools and working in the cold to fill drums with contaminated waste. Through this core-periphery system, TEPCO has been able to hand off contamination risks—and thus business risks—to small subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, who are less likely to be able to adequately ensure their workers’ health (Kinoshita 2011). Under such a model, while core workers earn annual salaries of about $94,000, unskilled laborers in the periphery earn between about $18,800 and $34,700 a year (Tabuchi 2011b).13 Despite

835

the poor conditions under which they work, however, in interviews after the accident many spoke of the constant fear of getting fired and trying to hide injuries to avoid trouble for their employers, a sign of the precariousness they felt in these jobs but also of their desperation (Tabuchi 2011a). Indeed, such is this desperation during the current economic recession that many have traveled 600 miles or more to seek work in the clean-up.

Summary The 11 March earthquake and its aftermath has clearly been a huge human tragedy. But it also has revealed a lot about the nature of early twenty-first century global capitalism. Thus, it allows us to trace the geography of the planet’s economic interconnectivity and to see how places that are thousands of miles away from each other are networked in organizational space. But it also exposes a dirty secret in the Japanese nuclear industry concerning working conditions and forces us to ponder what the spread of precarious work means for other industries and, perhaps, our own complicity in this. Indeed, it is significant that, in June 2011, Toyota announced that it would hire up to 4,000 contract workers in an effort to replace its lost production, while Honda indicated it would hire about 1,000 contract workers and Nissan about 200, all to satisfy consumer demand (BBC News 2011a). The disaster, however, also suggests some possibilities for action. In particular, it highlights the weaknesses inherent in JIT production systems and indicates that workers may, perhaps, gain some leverage against transnational corporations by focusing upon ‘choke points’ in the commodity chain, a strategy which a number of labor unions have


836

Andrew Herod

already sought to do (see Herod 2000). Simultaneously, the disaster made visible in the economic landscape—even if for a brief moment—those precarious workers who frequently remain hidden but who are central to how the contemporary capitalist economy functions, generating the electricity that fuels production. This intimates that improving the lot of precarious workers will entail, at least in part, making the economic landscape more transparent so that such workers may be protected to a greater degree than they currently are (Herod 2012).

9

10

11 12

Notes 1 There has been an interesting politics of death in the aftermath of the tragedy. In particular, there have been claims that the NPA has fudged the mortality numbers downwards, so as to make things appear to have been somewhat less devastating than they may actually have been. 2 Although TEPCO argued that the level of radioactive materials detected in the water was below the legal standard for releasing it into the environment, Japan’s Fisheries Agency prohibited the release. 3 It should be remembered that there is a class dynamic to such codes. When the Kobe earthquake struck in 1995, of the more than 6,000 people who died, the majority lived in poorer, working-class districts where the government had failed to implement the higher standards. 4 By way of comparison, Greece’s gross domestic product is about $330 billion. 5 By the end of May, Toyota was estimating that it had lost production of 550,000 vehicles in Japan and another 350,000 overseas, while Honda gave a figure of 58,500 vehicles in Japan (Yuasa 2011). 6 Keiretsu are networks of nominally independent firms which work closely with Japanese companies, manufacturing parts for their products and providing them with capital (Aoyama 2000). Generally, a supplier who is part of, say, Toyota’s keiretsu will not manufacture parts for, say, Honda, and vice versa. 7 The rate had been ¥82.99 on 10 March (www.xe.com). 8 China is presently the US government’s largest creditor, owning $1.15 trillion in government securities, as of

13

April 2011. Britain is the third-largest holder, at $333 billion. All other things being equal, higher interest rates tend to strengthen a currency, thereby making goods denominated in that currency more expensive for others to buy. This name comes from the title of a book written in 1979 by investigative journalist Horie Kunio, who worked for a subcontractor to learn about the conditions under which nuclear power plant workers toiled and was himself exposed to nuclear radiation. Among the places he worked was the Fukushima I plant. These figures have remained constant for at least the past two decades. In Japan, the legal limit for ‘safe’ radiation exposure has long been set at 100 mSv over 5 years (either 20 mSv a year for five years or 50 mSv for 2 years), with a maximum of 50 mSv in any one year. This maximum was higher than the International Commission on Radiological Protection’s guideline of a maximum of 20 mSv a year. After the Fukushima leak, TEPCO asked the government to increase the maximum dose to 150 mSv. The Ministry of Health then went further, raising it to 250 mSv, an action believed by many as a prelude to denying future claims for compensation for occupational disease (Jobin 2011). It is important to note that among these contract workers are actually some highly skilled technicians who supervise maintenance operations and who have much better work conditions and remuneration than do most. They are, though, a minority. Tabuchi (2011b) lists average annual wages for peripheral workers at about $30,000, though commenters on Japanese websites familiar with the plant suggest that the range is about ¥130,000 ($1,560) to ¥240,000 ($2,900) a month for such work (i.e. $18,720 – $34,800 per year).

References Aoyama, Y. (2000) Networks, keiretsu, and locations of the Japanese electronics industry in Asia, Environment and Planning A 32(2): 223– 244. Arnott, S. (2011) Carmakers brace for parts shortages after Japanese quake, The Independent, 28 March. Associated Press (2011) Japanese exports drop 10.3 percent in May. 19 June. BBC News (2011a) Toyota, Honda to hire contract workers to up production. 21 June.


What does the 2011 Japanese tsunami tell us about the nature of the global economy? BBC News (2011b) Toyota’s Flintshire factory exports car parts to Japan. 29 June. Brown, E. (2011) 9.0 Japan earthquake shifted Earth on its axis, Los Angeles Times, 13 March. CBC News (2011) Japan’s nuclear disaster by the numbers. April 8. Chowdhury, S.R. (2011) Once stock run out, sushi in city could be tsunami casualty, The Times of India, 19 March. Congressional Research Service (2011) Japan’s 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami: Economic Effects and Implications for the United States. Washington, DC: United States Congress. Efron, S. (1999) System of disposable laborers, Los Angeles Times, 30 December. Facts and Details (2011) Impact of the great East Japan earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 on the economy, factories and companies, http://factsanddetails. com/japan.php?itemid¼1662&catid¼26&subcatid¼ 161 (accessed 18 July 2011). Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Herod, A. (2000) Implications of just-in-time production for union strategy: lessons from the 1998 General Motors-United Auto Workers dispute, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90(3): 521 –547. Herod, A. (2012) On transparency and opacity in the economic landscape, Labor History 53, forthcoming. Hughes, A. (2001) Global commodity networks, ethical trade and governmentality: organizing business responsibility in the Kenyan cut flower industry, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 26(4): 390– 406.

837

Humber, Y. and Biggs, S. (2011) Fukushima debacle risks Chernobyl ‘dead zone’ as radiation in soil soars, Bloomberg.com, 30 May. Japan Times (2011) Fishermen to Tepco: don’t release water—Agency: No. 2 plant discharge unacceptable, low level or not. 29 June. Jobin, P. (2011) Dying for TEPCO? Fukushima’s nuclear contract workers, The Asia-Pacific Journal, 2 May. Kalleberg, A.L. (2009) Precarious work, insecure workers: employment relations in transition, American Sociological Review 74(1): 1 –22. Kinoshita, T. (2011) Statement by Takeo Kinoshita, professor of Sociology and Japanese labor relations expert at Showa Women’s University, Tokyo. Quoted in Tabuchi (2011b). Levine, S.B. and Ohtsu, M. (1991) Transplanting Japanese labor relations, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 513: 102– 116. Salze-Lozac’h, V. (2011) Economic impacts across Asia from Japan’s disaster. Asia Foundation, http://asiafo undation.org/in-asia/2011/04/13/economic-impacts-a cross-asia-from-japan%E2%80%99s-disaster (accessed 18 July 2011). Tabuchi, H. (2011a) Japanese workers braved radiation for a temp job, New York Times, 9 April. Tabuchi, H. (2011b) Economy sends Japanese to Fukushima for jobs, New York Times, 9 June. US Treasury Department (2011) Major foreign holders of treasury securities. Washington, DC: US Treasury Department. Yuasa, S. (2011) Japan exports sag in April after tsunami, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 25 May.