For more than a month, day after day, we East Asian STS colleagues, along with the rest of the world, have watched the tragedies and terrible events that have unfolded in Japan in the wake of 3/11. We have much sympathy with the Japanese people, but we also have begun to experience the more immediate, that is, when and how the radiation clouds and sea currents may hit us in other East Asian societies. What's more, having lived over similar geological formations and earth plates, and having lived among almost the same kind of nuclear power facilities as those at Fukushima, we people in Taiwan and other East Asian societies have begun to worry about the “what ifs”: What if similar disasters hit the nuclear power plants along the coastlines of Taiwan, China, or South Korea? What if meltdowns occur in Taiwan, where there is much less space for the so-called evacuations of many more people? Therefore, the editors of EASTSconsider this a good and even necessary occasion for us East Asian STS colleagues to engage in a panel discussion in order to share our experience and observations on Japan's, or indeed East Asia's, present crisis.
