Rethinking the Climate Crisis Here and Now: Mahāyāna Buddhism, Engi Relationality, and the Familiar Pitfalls in Japanese and Taiwanese pro-Nuclear Energy Narratives

Abstract

Climate inaction occurs partly because the ‘problem’ is often perceived as spatially and temporally distant. Contemporary Japanese and Taiwanese pro-nuclear energy narratives stress the necessity of nuclear energy for solving carbon emissions and energy security issues (here) and the urgency to retain and/or modernize nuclear power generation capabilities (now), despite its known vulnerability. This article deconstructs nuclear energy as a here-and-now solution to the climate crisis, and it proposes Mahāyāna Buddhism as a means to go beyond the modernist beliefs that gave rise to both the climate crisis and the nuclear energy solution. Drawing on Mahāyāna Buddhist thought where subjects are seen as being generated through relations with others (engi) and all beings are inseparable from and intradependent with nature (eshō-funi), we argue that the aforementioned narratives offer a false promise to solve the climate crisis. This is because they ignore the relations between current and future generations, and their techno-national, modernist assumptions reproduce human/nature dichotomies.

Keywords

climate change, engi relationality, Mahāyāna Buddhism, nuclear energy, Japan, Taiwan

Author Biography

Naofumi Yamada

Naofumi Yamada is a PhD candidate in International Relations at Ritsumeikan University and an adjunct lecturer at Ryukoku University, Japan. His research focuses on relationality in International Relations, Mahāyāna Buddhism, and the Japan-South Korea “comfort women issue.” His PhD dissertation reexamines the Westphalian relationality embedded in the Japan-South Korea “comfort women issue” through the lens of engi in Mahāyāna Buddhism. His forthcoming article will be published in the Ritsumeikan Journal of International Studies.

Klara Melin

Klara Melin is a PhD Candidate in International Relations at Stockholm University and an affiliated PhD Candidate at the European Institute of Japanese studies, Sweden. Her research focuses on everyday perspectives on international relations and security, critical collective memory studies and East Asian international relations. Her PhD dissertation suggests an everyday approach to rethinking (post)war collective memory and imaginaries, focusing on affective spatiotemporal narratives in peace and war museums in Japan.

Ching-Chang Chen

Ching-Chang Chen is an affiliated research fellow in the Research Center for World Buddhist Cultures at Ryukoku University and (from April 2025) a professor in the College of Asia Pacific Studies at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan. His research fields include critical security studies, sociology of knowledge, and East Asian international relations. Currently, he researches the potential of East Asian medicine as a cosmological approach to rethinking IR’s metatheoretical foundations and dis/harmony in the practice of global politics, primarily drawing on its ontological and clinical imaginaries. His recent publications appear in the International Studies Perspectives, Pacific Review, Third World Quarterly, and the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.