Reframing 3.11: Cinema, Literature, and Media after Fukushima

Panel 1

Lisette GEBHARDT, "Japanese Literature after Fukushima – Between Protest and ‘Healing'"
For over two years the Japanese literary scene has been dealing with the Great East Japan Earthquake (Higashi Nihon daishinsai) and its consequences. Japanese authors and artists see it as their task to find words that — "after Fukushima" — somehow measure up to a catastrophe of such an historic scale. In the meantime there has been a great outpouring of poems, short stories, essays, and novels or other longer prose pieces, thereby offering an interesting body of so-called "catastrophe literature" (shinsai-bungaku).

In an attempt to categorize the texts, one can identify two main themes: healing and protest. The protest category attends to the longstanding responsibility of the nation in the realm of atomic power and argues against a "Japanese system" whose failures are not limited to the damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima, insisting that a day of reckoning has arrived. The healing fraction seeks above all to show solicitousness, to encourage the victims and, with a biblio-therapeutical approach, to clear a horizon of hope for the future of the nation. In this presentation, I will explore the role of Japanese writers as public intellectuals, the political positions that these writers assume, as well as the impact of their works on the shifting contours of the "Post-Fukushima" literary field.

YUKI Masami, "Ecocriticism and Literature after Fukushima"
The nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi in March 2011 exposed various interrelated aspects of Japan's sociopolitical environment. One such aspect is the curious correlation between the locations of Japan's nuclear plants and rural environments known as satoyama, a mosaic of forests, mountains, arable land and human settlements. Like the exploited English pastoral countryside, which has been so vital to the first-wave environmentalism of the 19th century, satoyama has come to play an important but ambiguous role in shaping the critical horizons of ecocriticism in post 3.11 Japan. On the one hand, satoyama has been suffering from the effects of de-population and economic degradation, conditions that made the construction of nuclear plants an attractive economic buoy. On the other, satoyama is increasingly gaining attention as an ideal eco-tourist destination due to its symbiotic socio-ecological environment. Though seemingly unrelated, this double aspect of satoyama reflects something of the colonial and postcolonial realities of modern Japan.

I would like to explore the implications of this double-faced reality of post-nuclear Japan from an eco-critical approach, examining literary works that responded to the accident at Fukushima Daiichi, including works by Kawakami Hiromi, Takahashi Genichiro, and Taguchi Randy. I would also like to examine a curious tendency in post Fukushima literature that brings Fukushima into dialogue with Minamata, another iconic site of disaster in Japan's environmental history. The emerging comparative framework that sees Fukushima through the lens of Minamata, I argue, poses new challenges and possibilities for understanding the ongoing discussion of the interface of humans and the environment.

Panel 2

Jonathan ABEL, "Letters, Quake, Media: Comparing 1923 with 2011" This paper compares the ways pundits and theorists talked about disaster and the media in 1923 after the great Kanto earthquake and in the wake of the triple catastrophes of 3-11. Despite the putative advent of new media, concern for mediation itself comes to the fore during both crises. However the rapid speed of the more recent mediations of disaster and combined with problems specific to the reporting of radiation have made writing on 3-11 a distinct discourse of its own. What can we learn from the past about the present crisis? What can the present help us understand about the historical one?

Aaron Michael KERNER, "The Daigo Fukuryu Maru as a Touchstone: From Gojira to Chim Pom"
On March 1, 1954 the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (the Lucky Dragon Number 5) was showered with radioactive fallout, following an American test of the world's first Hydrogen weapon in the Bikini Atoll. The radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, of the vessel died a few months later. The Daigo Fukuryu Maru incident, and the death of Kuboyama, which played out in Japanese news reports, fueled vocal protests against nuclear weapons, and nuclear energy. Years of censorship under the Occupation (1945-1952) prevented any large scale, or public discussion of nuclear issues — the Daigo Fukuryu Maru changed that. The Daigo Fukuryu Maru is a potent symbol that plays an important part in Japanese visual culture: the first Gojira (Godzilla) film, which premiered in 1954, opens with a "reenactment" of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru incident, Kenji Yanobe incorporates the Daigo Fukuryu Maru into his visual vocabulary including a piece that was exhibited in the Fukushima regional airport, and the artist collective Chim Pom "detourned" a large Taro Okamoto mural depicting the Daigo Fukuryu Maru incident mounted in the Shibuya JR station incorporating an image of the Daiichi Fukushima Nuclear facility.

Panel 3

Mary KNIGHTON, "Disaster's Comic Affects: The Representational Crisis of 3.11"
At the two-year anniversary of 3.11, NHK broadcast a documentary interview between psychiatrist Saito Tamaki and mangaka Shiriagari Kotobuki. Prominently featured was the collection, Manga Ever Since: 2011. 3. 11 (「あの日からのマンガ 2011.3.11」), wherein Shiriagari interpolates amidst his comics a newspaper account and visual documentation of his fact-finding and volunteer trips to Tohoku soon after 3.11. Traveling there both for Asahi Shimbun and as a private citizen, Shiriagari's role unexpectedly expanded to "public mangaka" and journalist. Before intellectuals, politicians, or the public could form a consensus on the Event, already Shiriagari was criticized for figuring tragedy, fear, anger, and most of all, an absurd break (zure) within the everyday. His 3.11 manga grapples with social justice and the aesthetic and ethical issues of representing the Event and its victims in real time. Shiriagari's uniquely dark and cynical voice emerges between the extremes of silly gag humor in four-frame comics that include the artist himself and the speechless panels of his special feature manga on Fukushima and Tohoku. Shiriagari's representational crisis can be read within a lineage from Nakazawa Keiji's Barefoot Gen and Yamagishi Ryôko on Chernobyl, inevitably bound up in thorny questions of whose disaster it is and what kind of political and affective investments are possible when a crisis is both unfolding and repeatedly disavowed.

Ryan COOK, "Fiction Film after Fukushima"
In less than three years, approximately 300 nonfiction films about Japan's 3/11 disasters (including television documentaries and shorts) have been produced. Of those, nearly a third have primarily or substantially addressed the effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, or the risks of nuclear power and radioactive contamination more generally. In contrast to this abundance of documentaries (many with admittedly limited distribution), there has been a notable scarcity of fiction films that depict stories of 3/11, especially of Fukushima. A variety of factors have been offered to explain why the media climate is not conducive to fiction: from the pressure to exercise self-restraint, respect the suffering of those most affected, and let a sufficient amount of time pass, to the rhetoric that has made filmmakers vulnerable to the charge of propagating (especially economically) "harmful rumors." This talk will consider a handful of films that, in spite of such pressures, have deliberately used fiction as a means of confronting the challenges and fears of Fukushima. Placing these films in the context of earlier cinematic hibaku fiction (including Kurosawa's 1955 film I Live in Fear, as well as the more recent Tokyo genpatsu of 2004, among others), the talk will examine both common themes and differences. Fictional representations that have taken a more oblique approach, including the sensationally popular 2013 NHK "asa dora" series Amachan, will also be considered. The talk will ultimately examine the stakes of cinematic fiction in relation to the disaster.

Panel 4

David SLATER, "The Work of the Visual in Mourning the Dead in Post-Tsunami Japan"
3.11 was probably the most minutely documented disaster in history. And yet for all of these images, the impulse to archive representations of loss points to another set of images that have themselves gone missing: hundreds of thousands of family photo albums that were washed away by the tsunami. This talk addresses the various issues that have been raised therein, including the anxiety and ambivalence surrounding the uncontrolled circulation and handling of other people's photos; the role of the visual in the larger project of the 'work of mourning;' and the problems of politics and representation when these pictures end up in galleries around the world.

Marilyn IVY, "Photography's Catastrophe 3.11.11"
Thinking through the photography of catastrophe (and the catastrophe of photography: the catastrophe that it constituted, at its inception, for the given nature of the visible world), I intend to look closely at the photographs of the important Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama, both before and after 3.11. I want to think, in particular, about the relationship between the commemorative photograph (the kinen shashin) and the so-called fine-art photograph (aato shashin) as it is thematized in the work of Hatakeyama and others, in an effort to think again the relationship of catastrophe and Japanese photography now.