The Radiant tests “mythologies of radiation” against an actual event, against a reality.[2] The film repeatedly references anime and popular fantasies of mutation, for instance in a shot of a lounge with monitors on which we see the mythical mutants of anime. In the context of Fukushima, these beings are suggestive of the systemic incapability of Japanese society to abandon nuclear energy. Better to change biology than the economy.

In Japan as in the US, the post-war era saw a proliferation of both superheroes and monsters whose existence was in many cases—from Spiderman to Godzilla—explained by references to radiation. For the photographer in The Radiant, the traditional gods inhabiting the landscape and radiation are two conflicting forms of invisibility. Will radiation ever be turned into a god? Under what circumstances could that happen? The new gods of anime and manga seem to be one answer to that question.

"There is a need to re-conceptualize and re-experience our place in time and space, our relationship with the environment. The environment has become a resource rather than a Source, and a resource that we have exploited far beyond the limits of sustainability. We are driven by our constant anxiety and distraction to consume, to accelerate, and rarely have we the capacity to experience our relationship with Nature--with the elements, with other species--in a truly living, vivid manner. So cosmology has to do with re-visioning our interrelationships, overcoming the boundary of our false consciousness of separateness.

Can you imagine how different our experience would be if, rather than opaque skin, we were born with transparent skin? …It would no longer seem that we are separate. We would feel ourselves to be a vortex, a whirlpool within the matter of the Earth, drawing in substance, orchestrating it, configuring it organically, and then substance is released, returns to the environment. We are a vortex in the oceanic experience of the planet.

Experiencing this directly completely reframes our sense of identity and our awareness of the life around us… We have resorted to this very unfortunate word, "inanimate," and we imply to ourselves that stones, clouds, the ocean are inanimate, without anima, without soul, but it's all soul."