Dwelling in a post‐fallout landscape: re‐shaping and sustaining life in a former evacuation zone in Fukushima

This article explores the activities of daily life in a village neighbouring the TEPCO nuclear power plant in Fukushima. It argues that one of the potentials of taking a dwelling perspective – a phenomenological approach to living within the ecological and social environments – emerges most compellingly within a polluted landscape. The 2011 nuclear accident abruptly recast residents’ daily routines in the village, historically tied to the surrounding environment, into sites of potential radiation exposure. Despite this, residents have resumed practices of growing vegetables and gathering wild edibles for self‐consumption, reshaping their relationships with the landscape. The perception of toxicity visualized through radiation‐measuring techno‐scientific devices is interwoven with sensory experiences, everyday knowledge of foodstuff, local habitats, and socio‐natural geography, forming a vernacular knowledge for living in the now‐altered environment. People also repurpose materials, including post‐disaster waste, to work on their habitation spaces. Pollution disrupts the notion of the frictionless circuit between body and environment, undermining the secured sense of being‐in‐the‐world. The dwelling perspective highlights these frictions and disruptions, and people's various responses to them through daily, routine practices. This reveals how the power structure underlying the uneven distribution of pollution impacts the everyday physical sphere and how people react within it.