This thesis examines the infrastructure of Fukushima Daiichi’s Marine Organisms Rearing Test as an environmental architectural history. It reads the plastic laboratory container — the “bucket” — from the standpoint of an Other-than-human participant, Hirame (Paralichthys olivaceus, the Olive Flounder). The bucket, its lighting and optics, and the 24/7 YouTube livestream are treated as a single architectural system that organises what can be sensed, recorded, and believed.

On 11th March 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the northeastern coast of Japan triggered a tsunami that breached the ten-metre seawall of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, severing external power and disabling on-site backup. The resulting loss of power precipitated core meltdowns in Units 1-3, leading to hydrogen explosions that critically damaged the reactor buildings. Since 2013, contaminated wastewater has been processed through the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), which removes most isotopes bar tritium; more than a million tonnes of treated water are stored on site, awaiting gradual discharge into the Pacific Ocean, with bioassays — centrally, Hirame — substantiating safety claims.¹ Under this regime, the fish becomes a living archive of exposure, its tissues both repository and proof of environmental safety.

This project takes Hirame in her bucket as its point of departure, rejecting her position as an inert instrument of measurement, and instead framing her as an epistemic collaborator embedded within a highly controlled architectural and infrastructural milieu. The ALPS bucket is an epistemic device and an architectural environment designed to produce legible knowledge; it also structures a multispecies encounter that is asymmetrical, coercive, and saturated with political significance. Approaching the apparatus as a historical architectural site means tracing the spatial and material conditions through which environmental knowledge is made, and how the bucket, the laboratory, and Hirame’s own body participate in the production of scientific “truth”.

In the folkloric tradition of early-modern Japan, seismic disturbance is attributed to the Namazu— a giant catfish pinned by the Kaname-ishi, the “pivot stone” of terrestrial stability.² The Kaname-ishi is, in effect, the original bucket; a containment apparatus calibrated not only to suppress an Other-than-human agent’s disruptive potential, but also to sustain a cosmopolitical relation with it. The contemporary testing bucket inherits this dual function. It is both a site of physical holding and an epistemic architecture, translating disturbance into legible signs for governance — a more-than-material containment.

Unlike the Kaname-ishi, the bucket is modular; off-the-shelf Sanko Jambox 1000s (blue for control water, yellow for ALPS-treated wastewater) chosen for transportability, durable polyethylene, and compatibility with filtration, aeration, and monitoring hardware. Its geometry limits unplanned ecological variation, and supports the demand for environmental constancy. This bucket logic extends into media via a 24/7 YouTube livestream. The result is a volumetric Panopticon — a ring of sensors that collapses unmonitored space. The observing eye is no longer a single inspector; it is a machinic network that records, transmits, and archives. In this sense, the bucket produces a tele-Panopticon — surveillance is intensified and deterritorialised.

Therefore, in its material, spatial, and media dimensions, bucket logic is an architecture of coercive legibility. It pins Hirame in place — much like the Kaname-ishi— disciplines her body through environmental control, and renders her visible through an integrated camera apparatus. Yet, in doing so, it exposes its own fragility. Metabolism, behaviour, and mortality are never entirely predictable. These deviations are architectural events — moments where the bucket-camera system fails to produce the seamless legibility it promises. Thus, bucket logic is a spatial-material methodology of environmental governance in which a contained Other-than-human body is enlisted to produce legible knowledge about conditions beyond the enclosure. Physically, it isolates, stabilises, and disciplines; epistemically, it translates environmental complexity into standardised, communicable metrics through the intermediary of a living proxy.

Sensing otherwise begins where the translation of a life into metrics is neither seamless nor complete. Read from Hirame outwards, the bucket is not a neutral pseudo-seabed, but a strange and uncanny world; channels of sensation (lateral-line, benthic vision, chemoreception) are remapped by the apparatus in ways that stabilise the human view and potentially destabilise orientation for Hirame. The task is to specify how architecture might hold those worlds open; to treat the Other-than-human as a co-constitutive participant whose differences must be maintained rather than engineered out.

A design for sensing otherwise composes a public capable of enduring opacity, accommodating partial connection, and recognising refusal as information — interfaces that withhold closure by design and make that withholding legible as a civic condition.

A process of becoming radiant names an ethic and method of co-exposure, partial opacity, and shared sensing within altered and strange ecologies. It substitutes purity with co-exposure, transparency with attunement, and consensus with negotiated encounter. Architecturally, that means apparatuses that hold contradiction in suspension by design, enough control to meet obligations of safety, and enough openness to sustain Other worlds. Ultimately, this project reads a bucket to read a politics, asking how testing architectures become stand-ins for entire ecosystems, how fish become diplomats, how images perform regulatory work — and how this bucket logic might be turned outwards toward a breathable, equivocal ground on which an Other-than-human politics proceeds as the choreography of interspecies meetings that do not end.