École Francaise d’Extrême-Orient EFEO
Scuola Italiana di Studi sull'Asia Orientale ISEAS 
 (European Consortium for Asian Field Study, ECAF)   

KYOTO LECTURES 2016  
Wednesday, December
7th, 18:00h  

co-hosted by Institute
for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
This lecture will be held at the Institute for Research in
Humanities (IRH), Kyoto University (seminar room 1, 1st floor)  
  

 Voices from the Fukushima
nuclear village  

Speaker: Arnaud Vaulerin  

Since March 2011 and the beginning of the nuclear disaster in
Japan, nearly 50,000 men from all over Japan have worked in the Fukushima
Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant run by Tokyo Electric Power Company. If Tepco
and the major Japanese conglomerate firms were the main suppliers in the
beginning, a myriad of subcontracting companies, organized in a vast
pyramid, are now the main providers of workers on a huge construction site
which will last at least for the next forty years. 
Who are these men? What are they doing? Why did they decide to
work on a contaminated place and in a desolated region? What kind of threats
and dangers are they facing? What is the place for these
"gypsies" in the Japanese nuclear village? Arnaud Vaulerin
spent two years trying to understand their reasons in an environment where
secrecy and silence prevail. 
Even if Fukushima is not Chernobyl, the accident that occurred
five years ago is not only a Japanese crisis but a global challenge for our
societies. It reveals how our countries and industries have built their
dependency on nuclear power, and also shows the weakness of our
democracies. 
 

Arnaud Vaulerin is the Asian correspondent for the French daily newspaper Libération,
based in Japan. As a reporter traveling mainly in Asia and Europe (Balkans,
Italy), he has been working on ethnic, migrant, politics and post-war situation
issues for nearly twenty years. With Isabelle Wesselingh, he wrote a book
on Bosnia in 2003: Bosnia, Raw Memory, a long reportage on
reconciliation, international justice and refugees greeted by The
Economist and the New York Review of Books. 
In Japan since 2012, here he has been focussing on Japanese
society and politics to understand how this country in crisis tries to reinvent
itself. 
 
 

For detailed directions:
http://www.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/e/institute/access-institute/access_e.htm  
École Francaise d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO)
 Italian School of East Asian Studies (ISEAS)  

 EFEO 
Phone: 075-701-0882 
Fax: 075-701-0883
e-mail: efeo.kyoto@gmail.com 
 ISEAS
Phone: 075-751-8132 
Fax: 075-751-8221 
e-mail: iseas@iseas-kyoto.org

 kyoto lectures