Japan's nuclear revival and the fight over indigenous land – DW – 07/11/2025

DW

11-07-2025

Nuclear power is making a comeback in Japan. But in Hokkaido, indigenous Ainu communities are being sidelined as their ancestral land is eyed for nuclear waste storage. The Ainu musician Oki Kano leads a quiet resistance - raising questions about justice and who gets a say in the race to decarbonize.
Transcript:
In a dimly lit club in Kyoto, Japan, the sound of the Tonkori — a five-stringed instrument once silenced by cultural assimilation — cuts through the air. On stage is Oki Kano, a 68-year-old musician who's spent decades reviving the music and spirit of Japan's indigenous Ainu people.
Oki Kano: "It's like salmon knows where they were born, always back to the same river. So I'm, I was one of the salmon. That's why I returned to my Ainu background.."
Oki's music blends rock, dub, and traditional Ainu folk — a sound that's both a celebration and a protest. He doesn't call himself an activist, but his work speaks volumes about identity, survival, and resistance.
Oki Kano: "My father was Aino, you know. And my parents divorced when I was like four years old. And my mother hid my Aino background, you know. Then I found out that I was in like a 20 something-"
Stories like Oki's aren't unique. For generations, Ainu families were forced to hide who they were. After Japan annexed their homeland - the northern island of Hokkaido - in the late 19th century, the government banned traditional hunting, fishing, and language. Many Ainu were pushed into poverty and silence. Today, the exact number of Ainu in Japan is hard to pin down. A 2017 government survey identified around 13,000 in Hokkaido, but advocacy groups believe the true figure could be ten times higher.
Oki Kano: "The time of my grandfather, they decided not telling Ainu language to the kids, my father's generation, you know. Four survived, you know, so Ainu needed to acting like a ordinary Japanese. That was the best way to survive in Japan."
Today, Oki is one of the most well-known Ainu musicians in the world. He's helped bring Ainu culture back into public view - even as the legacy of colonization continues to cast a long shadow. And now, he's worried about a new and toxic threat to his homeland.
Oki Kano: "Nuclear is totally against the Aino philosophy.'
…the threat of his homeland being used as permanent storage site for nuclear waste. This week's episode of Living Planet brings you a story about energy, identity, and the cost of progress. It's about who gets to decide what happens to the land - and who gets left out of that decision. I'm Neil King.
Music
March 2011. A massive earthquake strikes off Japan's northeastern coast. The tsunami that follows devastates entire towns and triggers one of the worst nuclear disasters in history.
At the Fukushima nuclear plant the tsunami wrecks the power supply and cooling systems. Three reactors melt down. Radiation leaks into the air, the soil, the sea. Over 24,000 people are forced to flee their homes. Following the disaster, all of Japan's nuclear reactors are shut down.
And the shock ripples far beyond Japan. Germany and Switzerland announce nuclear phaseouts. Anti-nuclear sentiment surges across the globe.
But more than a decade later, the tide is turning again.
Japan, like many countries, is under pressure to decarbonize and fast. With few natural resources of its own and the specter of energy insecurity and inflation the Japanese public appears to be warming to nuclear energy again. Since 2015 it has gradually ramped up nuclear power to about 8.5% and the Japanese government is planning to get 20% of its electricity from nuclear by 2040. But there's still a problem no one has solved: what to do with the waste?
Jacopo Buongiorno: The amount of high-level waste generated by nuclear reactors is exceptionally small.
That's nuclear scientist Jacopo Buongiorno from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT.
Jacopo Buongiorno: And that's because the energy density of uranium is exceptionally high. Just to give you a comparison, compare to, say, burning coal or natural gas, kilogram for a kilogram. If you are using uranium as your fuel, you get about 10, 20 million times, not just 10 to 20, but 10 to 20 million times more energy out of the same material…
If an individual like myself or you would use only nuclear energy for all their energy needs throughout the lifetime, so not today, not a month, not a year, but our lifetime, say 80 years, then the amount of nuclear waste generated would fit within a coffee cup. That would be it. So that's the amount of energy, how energy dense that fuel is. And therefore, the amount of waste that you generate is exceedingly low.
The bad news is that it's highly radioactive and it has to be sort of handled with care
And that waste he's referring to - which essentially is the spent fuel rods - stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years. And it has to be stored somewhere, ideally underground.
In 2020, two tiny fishing villages in Hokkaido — Suttsu and Kamoenai - volunteered to be studied as potential sites for Japan's first permanent nuclear waste repository. In exchange, they received millions in government subsidies.
But there's a catch: these villages sit on traditional Ainu land. But the Ainu – who number about 25,000 in Japan were never asked.
Ann-Elise Lewallen: 'This is Ainu land. And so technically speaking, running like the whole idea of having nuclear power anywhere in Japan is always an Ainu problem.
Ann-Elise Lewallen is an American scholar who's spent years researching Ainu rights. She describes what's happening to the Ainu as 'energy colonialism' – that's when Indigenous lands are used for energy projects without consent.
Ann-Elise Lewallen: "With energy colonialism, it's a particular kind of settler colonialism that is targeting some kind of resource. For example, it often involves both removing uranium or some other sort of raw material that will be made into nuclear fuel on the one end of the nuclear fuel cycle and then the other end is to sort of hollow out the land and use that land as a permanent wasting ground.
In 2011, just months after Fukushima, Oki Kano stood before the United Nations in Geneva. He warned that nuclear energy was not just a safety issue - it was a justice issue.
Ann-Elise Lewallen: 'And he was the first person that I recall having asked the question and really trying to sort of link this question of sort of who is really bearing the burden of nuclear waste'
The answer, increasingly, seems to be Indigenous communities - not just in Japan, but around the world.
Suttsu and Kamoenai - two quiet fishing villages on the western coast of Hokkaido. Combined, they're home to just over 3,600 people. Nearly half are over the age of 60.
These towns have seen better days. The fishing industry is shrinking. Young people are moving away. So when the Japanese government offered billions of yen in subsidies to communities willing to be studied as potential nuclear waste sites - they said yes.
The money has helped repair piers, build nursing homes, and fund local infrastructure. For some, it's a lifeline. For others, it's a gamble with the future.
The Ainu weren't part of that decision. Not when the villages volunteered. Not when the studies began. Not even when the government's own agency - NUMO, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization - came to town. Since then NUMO have said they'd be happy to address any concerns. But critics say that's too little, too late.
Ann-Elise Lewallen:
"You can't sort of say, on the one hand, we support the UN DRP and we pass this new law, but Ainu have no right to speak about nuclear waste."
Japan signed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples or UNDRIP in 2007. It explicitly states that hazardous materials should not be stored or disposed of on the lands or territories of Indigenous peoples without their free, prior and informed consent. Even if the declaration is not legally binding it is a moral commitment.
But in Hokkaido, that principle appears to have been ignored. The decision to move forward now rests with the village mayors — and the governor of Hokkaido. The governor has voiced opposition, citing a 2000 ordinance that bans nuclear waste from the island. But under current law, the first phase of study can proceed without his approval.
Deep beneath the surface of Hokkaido, Japan has been testing what it would take to store nuclear waste underground - permanently. The site is called Horonobe. It's an experimental facility meant to simulate what a real repository might look like. The facility includes shafts and tunnels that go down to 350 m, allowing research into hydrogeology and rock stability as well as radionuclide behavior in sedimentary formations
But there's a problem: water.
Shaun Burnie: "I think it was around 300 cubic meters of water per day were coming into their facility. That's underground water.'
Shaun Burnie is a nuclear specialist with Greenpeace East Asia. He's worked in Japan and South Korea for over a decade. And he says water is a dealbreaker.
Shaun Burnie: 'Water is a transport mechanism for radiological materials. So if you can't isolate your facility from water, I mean, the containers that the waste is put into, of course, that will corrode over potentially hundreds of years, certainly thousands of years. There will be no containment as such. And therefore the radionuclides will migrate through the water system, water course. So Hokkaido is completely unsuitable as a geological repository.'
Japan is one of the most seismically active countries in the world. Earthquakes, groundwater, and long-term corrosion - these are not small risks when you're talking about waste that stays radioactive for tens of thousands of years.
But not everyone agrees. At MIT, nuclear scientist Jacopo Buongiorno sees things differently.
Jacopo Buongiorno: 'The radioactivity contained within these fuel rods is not particularly mobile. It doesn't really want to go anywhere…because it's 99% it's actually in solid form…so it's also very easy to shield.'
He says the waste is stored in solid ceramic pellets, encased in steel and concrete. First, it cools in water pools for several years. Then it's sealed in dry canisters that can last a century or more.
Jacopo Buongiorno: 'In fact, in all the environmental impact assessments, our assessment studies done for these repositories, you have to assume that at one point your containers are completely rusted away. So at one point you assume that there is complete failure. And so now you've got these radionuclides. They are maybe a couple of hundred meters underground. And then the question becomes, how do they diffuse underground? And so the bulk of the analysis and assessment that go into the licensing of the repository is exactly how are the radionuclides, once they are outside these canisters or these containers, how are they going to diffuse underground? And that's why the selection of the proper geology is very important.'
The science, he says, is sound - if the geology is right. But that's exactly what critics like Burnie are questioning in Hokkaido.
Shaun Burnie: 'The materials in there will be hazardous for millions and millions of years. It removes the problem from this generation, from this government, these scientists, these companies, for someone in the future to deal with the problem when it starts affecting them.'
And that raises a deeper question: even if we can store nuclear waste safely, should we? Especially if the people most affected - like the Ainu - never agreed to it?
Japan's nuclear future is still uncertain. The government wants nuclear to make up 20% of the country's energy mix by 2040. But experts disagree on whether that's realistic - or even wise.
Shaun Burnie: 'If they get the best case scenario…they could possibly reach around 15% of national electricity from nuclear energy by 2030. And that assumes that there's not problems with the reactors... and they still have huge problems seismic problems design problems security problems.'
Burnie believes Japan is clinging to a fading dream. He says nuclear energy diverts resources from renewables - and risks locking the country into fossil fuels when nuclear falls short.
Shaun Burnie: 'The biggest problem I see with maintaining nuclear is that they will fail on the nuclear target…that's where there's a very close relationship between the nuclear industry and the fossil fuel industry um so the fossil plants will basically be retained uh of course. But when the gap becomes clear, it will be filled most likely by fossil fuel plants. So Japan will undermine its own decarbonization progress by maintaining a nuclear share. They need to signal that they can go fully 100% renewables, which they can.'
But MIT's Jacopo Buongiorno sees nuclear as essential - not just for Japan, but for the world.
Jacopo Buongiorno: 'If you're trying to decarbonize your grid exclusively with intermittent renewables such as solar and wind, the average cost, the aggregate cost of your grid goes up dramatically. Yes, it is true that a solar panel or a wind turbine have become cheaper. But if you don't have a reliable base load source like nuclear, and you're trying to meet your electricity demand 24-7, 365 days per year, no matter what the weather is, no matter what the load is, et cetera, then in order to meet that demand, you need to overbuild and overgrow the amount of solar and wind and, importantly, energy storage batteries that goes with it to meet that demand. And the aggregate cost of all that equipment far exceeds the cost of having also a nuclear baseload in the mix. It's really the combination of nuclear and renewables that gives you the least cost decarbonized system.'
Two visions. One sees nuclear as a bridge to a cleaner future. The other sees it as a costly detour - one that risks repeating old mistakes.
But all the experts interviewed for this episode agreed on one thing: communication matters.
Jacopo Buongiorno: You can't simply say it's safe, therefore accept it. You got to engage them from the beginning, try to explain what the risks are, what the benefits are, what the value of nuclear is.
Ann-Elise Lewallen: 'All Ainu need to be given an opportunity to participate in whatever way they feel is appropriate, which means there's many, many different groups and they need to be approached in good faith'
Back in Kyoto, Oki Kano finishes his set. The crowd cheers. But his message lingers - a quiet reminder that this isn't just about energy policy. It's about respect. It's about balance.
Oki Kano: 'We need to make some harmony in between people and nature… We get together and face up to the problem and do some activity …I think this is not only the Ainu issue, you know. Everybody's issue.'