“Radiation Refugees”: The Role of Gender and Digital Communication in Japanese Women’s Transnational Evacuation after Fukushima

Abstract

Abstract The study of environmental migration has shown how an attachment to land reduces the perceptions of risks, and how women often lack resources to evacuate. This qualitative study of Japanese women’s migration to Southeast Asia after the Fukushima nuclear disaster complicates the debate by showing that the post-disaster attachment to the land is disrupted by unequal gendered social relations and that digital communication among women provides a wide range of resources and emotional support to differently positioned women. This article shows how gendered social relations and digital communication play a major role in environmental migrant decision making processes in Asia.