Introduction: Nuclear Futures—Intertwined Histories and Imaginative Visions in Post-Fukushima Japan and Germany

To consider nuclear futures requires a turn to the imagination but also a studied grounding in the past. This introduction to Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age: Literature, Film, and Performance from Germany and Japan therefore offers a brief overview of the development of nuclear power’s global reach, the specific events that culminated in the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns, and the particular political and cultural resonances of the Fukushima disaster in both Japan and Germany, in order to establish a common framework for considering the imaginative post-Fukushima representations taken up in the following chapters. Through a deep engagement with the cultural exchange between Japan, the nation most directly victimized by nuclear science, and Germany, the world’s leader in nuclear abolition, this volume sheds new light on the place of the nuclear within urgent considerations of energy futurity.