The small fishing town providing Japan’s nuclear litmus test

The views from the sleepy coastal town of Kaminoseki could not be more contrasting. From the tip of the Murotsu peninsula on Japan’s Honshu island, one can glimpse the country’s pre-industrial past on an islet just a few kilometres offshore.

There, on Iwaishima, an elderly and dwindling population now down to just a few hundred fishermen, cling to a traditional way of life with little to disturb them bar the mating calls of migratory murrelets.

The view from Iwaishima is different. When the fishermen look back to the mainland they see the site of a long-stalled development that they say threatens far more than their rural idyll. It is here that one of Japan’s most divisive political debates – that regarding the future of nuclear power – is being played out in microcosm.

For the past 35 years, plans for twin nuclear reactors on mainland Kaminoseki have split opinion in this town of population roughly 3,000. When the plans were first unveiled by the Chugoku Electric Power Company in 1982, many on the mainland were wooed by financial incentives that included offers of compensation for the loss of fishing grounds. But those on Iwaishima have always remained almost unanimously opposed, staging protests on hundreds of occasions since then.