Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster 0824877977, 9780824877972

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Fukushima Fiction

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Fukushima Fiction The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster

Rachel DiNitto

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

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© 2019 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: DiNitto, Rachel, author. Title: Fukushima fiction : the literary landscape of Japan’s triple disaster   / Rachel DiNitto. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2019] | Includes   bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018043546 | ISBN 9780824877972 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Japan, 2011, in literature. |   Japanese literature—21st century—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PL721.F87 D56 2019 | DDC 895.63/60936—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043546

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

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Contents



Acknowledgments / vii

Introduction: Disaster Strikes, Literature Responds  /  1 1. Voices from the Debris: Cultural Trauma and Disaster Fiction  /  22 2. Tohoku on the Margins: Furukawa Hideo’s Horses / 57 3. Hiroshima Encore: Return of the Hibakusha / 89 4. Chernobyl and Beyond: A New Era of Nuclear Literature  /  121 Epilogue: Writing toward the Future  /  160

Notes / 167



Bibliography / 197



Index / 221

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Acknowledgments

I have many people to thank for helping bring this book to life, but I must first thank John Treat and Kuroko Kazuo. I thank John not only for sending me to consult with Kuroko, but for his sustained interest in the project and for continually scouting sources for me. I could not have written this book without the guidance of Kuroko Kazuo. He shared his thoughts and research on the topic, pointed me to must-read texts, and sent me home with a suitcase full of books. His support has been invaluable. The seeds of this book were planted in the spring of 2011 as I sat in my office at the College of William & Mary and talked to Sara Caudill, a student of mine who had been forcibly sent home from an exchange program in Japan. My conversations with Sara inspired me to teach about the disaster, which turned into classes at William & Mary and the University of Oregon. I want to thank all the students in these various classes, especially Elizabeth Denny, Tim Hogge, and Jordan Sutlive, for their interest in the disaster fiction we read together. I also want to thank Maram Epstein and the graduate students in her proseminar at UO, who carefully read and commented on my introduction. I am also extremely grateful to those who made time to read and comment on chapters: Davinder Bhowmik, Will Gardner, Melek Ortabasi, Jenifer Presto, and Doug Slaymaker. Special thanks go to Doug, who generously read more than one chapter, and to Jenifer, who patiently helped me work through multiple versions of the introduction. Thanks also go to Jenifer for the book title and for sharing her research and friendship with a newcomer like me. Francie Cate-Arries and Magali Compan inspired me with their work on other global tragedies and helped me find innovative ways to think across disasters. I have many people to thank for reading grant proposals, sugvii This content downloaded from 75.69.46.187 on Mon, 01 May 2023 02:33:45 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

viiiAcknowledgments

gesting sources, and offering ideas and much needed moral support, including Bruce Campbell, Michael Cronin, Maryse Fauvel, Ichikawa Makoto, Aiko and Hiroshi Kitamura, Mary Knighton, Rob Leventhal, Ogushi Hisayo, Dorothee Ostmeier, Lily Panoussi, Silvia Tandeciarz, and Sibel Zandi-Sayek. For their insight on 3/11 and for reminding me of the importance of continuing to work on this disaster, I am grateful to Norma Field and Yuki Miyamoto. Toshi Ohwada has been very generous, making time to meet with me to talk about how 3/11 has continued to impact Japan, as well as keeping me abreast of important sources. Kimura Saeko pointed me to important texts and hosted an inspirational conference on 3/11 literature with Anne Bayard-Sakai. Furukawa Hideo patiently answered questions about his novel and gave a stunning performance of Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure at University of Oregon. For help with translation I thank Jay Rubin and Tomoko Kato for enduring Satō Yūya’s painful story about a mother who purposely poisoned her baby with irradiated food. Thanks also to Jay for including 3/11 fiction in his new anthology. Many people and organizations kindly provided an opportunity for me to present or publish this and related research, including Jon Abel, Barbara Geilhorn, Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, and Mark Selden. I want to thank the organizers of the following conferences and panels I participated in: the American Comparative Literature Association, the Association for Asian Studies, the Association for Japanese Literary Studies (at Oberlin College and Pennsylvania State University), the Between “Cool” and 3/11: Implications for Teaching Japan Today Conference, the Japan Studies Association, the Literature After 3.11 Today Conference, and the Southeast Regional AAS, as well as all my fellow panelists. This book benefited tremendously from a series of invited talks. Thanks go to the organizers and their engaged students, colleagues, and audience members: Davinder Bhowmik at University of Washington; Rebecca Copeland at Washington University in St. Louis; Darryl Flaherty and Rachael Hutchinson at University of Delaware; Will Gardner at Swarthmore College; Livia Monnet at the Rethinking Radiation Ecologies Conference in Montreal; Ogushi Hisayo at Keio University; and David Slater at Sophia University. Pamela Kelley at the University of Hawai‘i Press took an early interest in the project, which inspired me to keep writing, and she also kept me on track as I moved across the country. The anonymous

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Acknowledgmentsix

reviewers provided insightful and tremendously helpful comments; the manuscript is much improved as a result of their input. This book would never have been written without a year of sabbatical from William & Mary and the writing circles at University of Oregon that provided support and helped me find time in a crazy schedule to dedicate myself to research. Joining the circles was a lifechanging event, and I thank Gordon Hall, Rafael Lopez, and all the members of the various writing circles. Special thanks go to my family for putting up with my nuclear obsession, long work hours, and cranky, tired moods. I thank Niels for his good humor, editorial help, and for pinch-hitting on the home front so I could keep working. To Elias, I apologize for all the long hours I spent at my desk when we could have been having fun together doing something else, and I thank you for your interest in Yoshirō and Nameless. May your world be brighter.

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Introduction Disaster Strikes, Literature Responds

T

he earth shook on March 11, 2011, unleashing a massive earthquake and tsunami upon the northeast coast of Japan. The disaster was one of the worst in Japan’s postwar history, with close to 16,000 dead, over 330,000 displaced, and large swaths of land in three northeast prefectures devastated by massive structural damage.1 But, for a nation perched on the ring of fire and long used to catastrophic rumblings, it was the nuclear accident—the level 7 meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP)—that turned this natural disaster into an environmental and political catastrophe of unimagined proportions.2 The disaster also had a profound impact on Japanese artistic production. As the nation struggled to come to terms with this triple disaster, it witnessed a cultural florescence, an outpouring of literary works responding to the tragedy.3 The short stories, poems, and tweets of the early days flowered into novellas and novels more capable of engaging the disaster in all its complexity. The disaster was a defining moment for contemporary fiction, jolting it out of the twenty-year malaise that had followed the collapse of the Japanese economy in the early 1990s. Writers came to observe, experience, document, re-create, historicize, and provide hope for the victims.4 For these authors, the disaster was a turning point, a moment of selfreflection, a crisis of representation, and for some, a mandate to critique. Many wrote in anger, as they tried to give voice to intense feelings of betrayal and incredulity. This intense, provocative writing reshaped contemporary Japanese literature, as authors, established and new alike, picked up their pens to “wield their words like a 1 This content downloaded from 75.69.46.187 on Mon, 01 May 2023 02:33:49 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

2Introduction

shovel to confront the wasteland of our imagination, and shake the foundations of this reality to unearth another” (Ichikawa 2012, 6). Out of this tragedy was born literature with a new purpose; as they had at other moments in Japan’s history, fiction writers drew on the power of the imagination to bring to life the human experience of disaster for twenty-first century Japan. This book focuses on “serious fiction,” the belles lettres (junbungaku) of Japan, the one area of cultural production that has consistently dealt with the disaster and its aftermath.5 As early as 2012 it was said that “[popular] novels dealing with the disaster do not sell, movies do not draw audiences, and TV shows have low ratings” (Genkaiken and Iida 2017, 11). The disaster hardly featured in entertainment or popular fiction either in the immediate aftermath or in the years after 2011.6 Although the 2016 Japanese movie Shin Godzilla (aka Godzilla Resurgence) was inspired by and is a political satire of the 2011 disaster, many of the other films on the subject were amateur or independent productions that did not play to large-scale audiences.7 Some writers have turned to other themes, but serious fiction continues to address the disaster, and these literary works play an important role in keeping it and its fallout in the public imagination. It is tempting to divide this disaster fiction into neat categories for easy analysis—namely, earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdowns— especially because in many ways these disasters were quite different in their effects. As Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt argues, the destruction from the earthquake and tsunami was “massive, immediate, and undeniable.” By contrast, the nuclear accident was limited in terms of both its visual impact and lack of immediate victims (Iwata-­ Weickgenannt 2015, 188). The fiction that was written in the months after the disaster overwhelmingly focused on the earthquake and tsunami, but soon turned to the nuclear problem. Given the ongoing nature of the Fukushima Daiichi NPP accident, the nuclear stories deal with different issues and their characters suffer different fates from those in stories about the earthquake or tsunami. But many victims were affected by more than one of these threats, and causally they are intimately intertwined. To treat them separately is to risk hiding their overlapping and interrelated nature, while viewing them together risks downplaying any one aspect of this triple disaster. Given the multidimensionality of the triple disaster, this study treats its entire literary landscape—meaning fiction written in response to the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns—­

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Introduction3

either singularly or collectively, and also fiction written as a reaction to the government and industry (mis)management of the disaster. To include only fiction about the nuclear meltdowns would be to exclude the earthquake and tsunami from the rest of the disaster, to fail to acknowledge the actual temporal unfolding of the disaster, and to disallow those caught up in these “natural disasters” from being counted as victims. This book traces the evolution of this literary production as it moved past more traditional notions of disaster ­literature—specifically one based on earthquakes—toward a grappling with the ethical and global consequences of the nuclear disaster, which could not so easily be blamed on Mother Nature, although the owners of the plant tried to do just that. Had the nuclear accident never happened, this disaster known as 3/11 would still have ranked as a major natural disaster for Japan, but the dead would have been mourned and buried, and the nation would have moved on. The nuclear accident was not only the culmination of the triple disaster, it radically changed the nature of this disaster from natural to man-made; or better stated, the meltdowns revealed the very man-made nature of the disaster as a whole, including not just the systemic failure of the nuclear industry to safeguard against such knowable dangers but the Japanese public’s misplaced trust in seawalls, warning systems, and the government’s ability to respond effectively. The nuclear accident forced a discussion of guilt and responsibility that is still unresolved, but would not have come to the fore as the result of a solely natural disaster. The literary resurgence, and the issues that animate it, are in no small part due to the nuclear crisis facing Japan. The accident at the Fukushima NPP forced literature to deal with these ethical issues and raised it to a new level of critical engagement. In recognition of the transformative nature of the nuclear accident, I use the label “Fukushima fiction” to refer to all literary works written in response to the 3/11 disaster. If Fukushima fiction is not solely earthquake or tsunami literature, it is also not solely nuclear literature. It is local to Japan, but is not a mere extension of the atomic-bomb literature written about or in response to the events of 1945. Unlike atomic-bomb fiction that was primarily penned by survivors, Fukushima fiction is not so limited. Atomic-bomb fiction was written in the face of the potential annihilation of mankind, taking up the “final theme of writing” (Treat 1995, 2). Following in the historical wake of Hiroshima and

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4Introduction

Nagasaki, Fukushima fiction did not have to recross this divide separating the two halves of human history or struggle to the same degree with questions of literary representation (Treat 1995, xii). In this sense, Fukushima fiction is less about inventing new literary methods (with exceptions like Furukawa Hideo) or imagining the end of mankind. However, these differences do not mean, either, that Fukushima fiction is simply global nuclear fiction. The atomic bombings remain an important touchstone and subtext of Fukushima fiction that may not exist for other global nuclear literature. In addition, the stigmatization of Japan’s nuclear victims (both of the atomic bombs and the Fukushima accident) rises out of the particularity of Japanese social dynamics that cannot be generalized to fit other cultural and national contexts.8 Lacking the instantaneous and cataclysmic nature of the atomic bombs, the contamination from the Fukushima NPP meltdowns is an example of insidious, slow violence. In this sense, Fukushima fiction is a reminder of the lessons we should have learned from Chernobyl. The Chernobyl accident was written off to the ageing Soviet system and to a society characterized by secrecy and information control that did not allow for citizen action. The Fukushima accident proved that disasters at nuclear power plants are inevitable even in technologically advanced, democratic countries like Japan. Fukushima fiction shows that, regardless of our geographical place of residence, we are now in a meltdown world where the true menace of so-called peaceful nuclear power plants has been revealed and we are all at risk of becoming nuclear victims. But, unlike either the end of humanity imagined by atomic-bombs writers or the Cold War anxiety of a nuclear global war that never materialized, the nuclear works of Fukushima fiction bring forth a recognition that life with radiation is the new normal, and they imagine that very life for us, even if we would prefer they did not. Rather than organizing this book by type of disaster, literary genre, or author, I took a spatial approach that explores the landscape of serious fiction thematically from the epicenter outward. This approach emphasizes the importance the disaster, specifically the nuclear accident, has not just for Japan but for the world at large. My analysis moves from depictions of the local experience of victims on the ground, through the regional and national conceptualization of the disaster, to considerations of the disaster as history, and last, to the global concerns common to nuclear incidents world-

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Introduction5

wide. The spatial approach calls to mind the concentric circle model that the Japanese government used to evacuate citizens based on their proximity to the ailing plant. Used metaphorically, this model allows us to encompass wider and wider literary and thematic scopes as the effects of the disaster ripple outward. But, as the Japanese government found with their concentric evacuation model, the disaster does not map neatly onto a centrifugal pattern. As we move through these fictional works, we encounter hot spots and no-entry zones, and traverse landscapes fractured by the disaster where community and social institutions break down and identity is tenuous. The Japanese government sought to contain the nuclear disaster, but serious fiction acts like radiation itself, refusing to respect normal boundaries or adhere to dictates that seek to discount or silence it. My analysis begins with literary hot spots that can run counter to the logic of proximity. Victim experience varies not only in terms of the distance from the epicenter but depending on which of the three disasters they were affected by. These factors affect the retelling of that cultural trauma. From there I move to a regional analysis of the impact on the Tohoku area when the disaster cleaved it from the nation. In the discourse of the state, the disaster had to be stopped at the borders of Tohoku so as not to threaten the rest of Japan, or at least Tokyo. My spatial approach takes on a temporal cast when I read Fukushima fiction via the historical and literary landscapes of the atomic bombs and World War II. The birth in 2011 of a new generation of nuclear victims (hibakusha) was a shocking déjà vu; my analysis pays attention to the historical repetition and geographical overlapping that override any simple outward concentric movement. Last, I expand my analysis to its widest reach by examining Fukushima fiction’s intersection with global nuclearity and its dark vision of Japan’s irradiated future. In looking for comparable bodies of disaster fiction, I turn to 9/11 as well as to previous Japanese disasters. There are significant factors that differentiate 9/11 from Japan’s 2011 disaster, and the comparison is not uniformly accepted.9 However, in their work on Fukushima, a number of Japanese writers discuss 9/11, and the terrorist attacks gave birth to a similar body of national fiction with a range of writers and styles.10 Both canons also turned to realist prose as the preferred method for grappling with the unimaginable. Previous disasters in Japan, natural or man-made, however, do not always yield ready comparisons. The 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake that

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6Introduction

struck Tokyo radically changed the city and was seen as a cultural break along the lines of World War I, but did not result in a similar body of fiction specifically about the earthquake, although it did have an impact on modernist and experimental fiction in Japan.11 The 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake in the Kobe area was a regional disaster and hence did not produce a national fiction.12 The atomicbombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 did result in an outpouring of fiction and poetry, but that material was written primarily by immediate victims, was censored by the occupying American military, and was later shunned by many in the Japanese literary establishment.13 The disaster of 2011 represents a moment of wide literary participation not limited by region or first-hand experience of the disaster. Just as not all 9/11 works are openly political, neither is all Fukushima fiction. I examine these works for their complexity and multivocality, but nonetheless argue that Fukushima fiction reaches its full critical and imaginative potential when taking on the nuclear disaster. Multiple Disasters, Multiple Names Long swaths of ravaged coastline, mountains of debris, buckled roads, abandoned towns, ominous black waves breaching seawalls, crippled power plants, and grieving victims—these were the images that flooded the media after the March 11 disaster. This disaster was multiple in nature: the 9.0 earthquake created a tsunami that reached staggering heights of 43 meters (141 feet), compromising the reactor cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, leading to three meltdowns and the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. Anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith reminds us that disasters are multidimensional, but also have iconic images (­Oliver-Smith 2002, 25). But what is the site of memory for this disaster? Unlike the World Trade Center towers smoking and crashing to the ground, or the skeleton of the Hiroshima dome, there is no single image by which to remember the disaster of March 11, 2011. It is multiple and ongoing. The triple nature of this disaster creates a complexity when naming or even discussing it. Known as the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake Disaster (Higashi Nihon daishinsai), it has also come to be called “3/11,” a shorthand for the date that echoes 9/11.14 The term “Great Eastern Japan Earthquake Disaster” is problematic because it emphasizes the natural disaster and does not appear to

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Introduction7

include the nuclear crisis.15 While “3/11” encompasses all three aspects of the disaster, some resist it because the static nature of a single calendar date fails to capture the ongoing threat of the nuclear situation. Some scholars use “Fukushima” to refer specifically to the nuclear disaster.16 This usage, especially when written in the katakana phonetic script (a type of italics), links the meltdowns to other nuclear disasters in Japan, specifically to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet some residents of Fukushima resent this linking of the disaster with the name of their prefecture and capital city.17 Kawamura Minato is also critical of this emphasis on Fukushima, arguing that “the people of Fukushima prefecture are not the only ones who bear the pain of the disaster. On the contrary, if we overemphasize Fukushima, we risk further endangering it by allowing harmful rumors to spread even more” (Kawamura 2013, 34).18 Japanese citizens are suffering from normal compassion fatigue, but the disaster and the naming of it are still sensitive and explosive topics in Japan. There are no easy answers. In using the term “Fukushima fiction,” I do not mean to overlook the thousands who lost their lives in the earthquake and tsunami that wreaked havoc on three prefectures of Tohoku, nor to add to the stigmatization of those living in Fukushima prefecture who have been dogged by “damaging rumors” that they are radioactive.19 However, Fukushima was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl spewed its poison a prophetic twenty-five years earlier. Its effects are ongoing and without foreseeable end. An additional reason for using “Fukushima” in the title of this book is because I aim to speak to a wide audience of English-­ language readers for whom “Fukushima” has a currency and meaning that 3/11 does not.20 The term “Fukushima” links this disaster to other nuclear accidents and tragedies worldwide. As atomicbomb literary specialist Kuroko Kazuo argues, the Fukushima accident is of global concern and is not reducible to Japan alone (Kuroko 2011, i). In an attempt to be sensitive to the concerns regarding overusage of this term, within the book I differentiate between 3/11 as a reference to the disaster as a whole and Fukushima as a reference for the nuclear disaster. I also clarify when Fukushima is used for the geographical locations of Fukushima prefecture or city. However, I employ the term “Fukushima fiction” to refer to the prose works of serious fiction that emerged in the wake of this triple disaster.

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8Introduction

Narrating Disaster Fukushima fiction ranges widely in terms of genre, style, voice, and the treatment of the disaster. There is no unified vision in this literature and the themes are varied.21 Many stories deal with the disaster as aftermath, with very few attempting to re-create the experience of the earthquake, tsunami, or nuclear accident itself. The realist prose that dominates the canon of Fukushima fiction rarely depicts the moment the disaster struck. Some stories do re-create the circumstances of the aftermath through depicting fictional characters who attempt to put their lives back together in the disaster zone or in temporary housing. Fiction brings to life the voices of evacuees, emphasizing the local experience. It allows the reader to imagine the wrenching decisions evacuees had to make to leave the contaminated area, the costs of social dispersal as communities were ripped apart, and the pain of discrimination felt by Japan’s new generation of nuclear victims.22 Other stories focus on different types of victims, telling the story via the perspective of characters who are not immediate or obvious victims, thereby expanding the reader’s ability to sympathize with their suffering. For some works, the disaster is a legendary event from the past; an unnamed and sometimes peripheral background event; or an intrusion into a seemingly unrelated story. Some authors write autobiographically, describing their travels into the disaster zone or their experiences on the day itself. Other stories use nuclear motifs as a metaphor for social issues, such as the plight of social outcasts in contemporary Japan. Last are those works that move into the realm of the fantastic or futuristic, truly unearthing new realities and dark visions of what is to come. Public and scholarly discourse on Fukushima was initially dominated by social science and science, and by a surety of numbers and data. Azuma Hiroki lamented the way that words lost out to numbers after the disaster (Azuma and Wagō 2011, 188). Many authors felt this crisis of representation professionally, as they feared their words would fall flat in the face of such a catastrophe. Kristina IwataWeickgennant discusses this crisis of representation, as artists were unsure how to respond, what language to use, or what role the arts should play in interpretation. She argues that a “documentary approach” and a struggle with language are defining features of many 3/11 cultural representations (Iwata-Weickgenannt 2015, 192). Author Henmi Yō talked about the inexpressibility of his expe-

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Introduction9

rience and his sense of powerlessness: “The disaster destroyed not just people and things, but preexisting concepts, words, and grammar” (Hen­mi 2012, 15). But there was no single response to 3/11. A writer like Tawada Yōko, a known experimenter with language, chose to write in a traditional, conservative narrative style not usually associated with her work. Furukawa Hideo wrote about the disaster in multiple stories with widely ranging styles and narrative structures. Jinno Toshifumi discussed the new methods authors created to deal with the disaster; some, like Furukawa and Kawakami Hiromi, chose to adapt previously written works and in the process pushed the limits of literature itself (Jinno 2011, 107).23 In the end, writers returned to literature to validate fiction as the only option for capturing such a world. Authors Furukawa Hideo and Shigematsu Kiyoshi compared fiction to reportage, concluding that literature can capture or at least grapple with the problems of lost time and space in ways that a date-driven, presentist reportage cannot. For them, the conceptual framework of the disaster exceeds the bounds of reportage to fully comprehend. Some Fukushima fiction does adopt a journalistic style, re-creating the moment of the disaster or the experience of the aftermath, but other stories take a wider historical scope as a tactic to place the temporal largess of the disaster in a frame that is big enough to hold it. Other works, like Furukawa’s Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (Umatachi yo, sore de mo hikari wa muku de, 2011) (hereafter Horses), turn to the mythical to make sense of the incomprehensibility the disaster presented. While reportage edits down the story, it has always been literature’s task to work with the excess (Furukawa and Shigematsu 2012, 187). Of all these various approaches, what is significant about Fukushima fiction is that serious fiction did address the disaster, and in doing so, turned to concerns that had traditionally been beyond its scope. Kawamura Minato traces the postwar history of the nuclear from the atomic bombs to nuclear power plants and argues that nuclear power was not a topic easily tackled by writers of serious fiction. Rather, it had been the purview of science fiction, mystery, and fantasy genre writing (Kawamura 2011, 165). Atomic-bomb authors wrote viscerally about the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that fiction was marginalized by the literary establishment in Japan and never became a widely addressed topic in domestic fiction. Nor did literary or political anti–atomic-bomb movements necessarily take an oppositional stance toward nuclear power.24

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10Introduction

Perhaps that is why Kawakami Hiromi’s short story, “God Bless You, 2011” (Kamisama 2011, 2011) baffled critics as “incomprehensible” (Komori 2014, 74). Her story opens as the narrator goes for a walk by the river with her neighbor, who happens to be a bear. The story is a rewrite of her award-winning “God Bless You” (Kamisama, 1993) in which the narrator and a bear also go to the river, but the rewrite is set in a post-disaster Japan. In the new version, the narrator goes outside in regular clothing for the first time since “that incident,” exposing her skin to the toxic environment. Besides herself and the bear, all other humans they encounter are covered in protective gear, but she and the bear had decided to stay inside the exclusion zone, and the story details how they manage life with radiation. At the end of the story, the narrator records her daily and annual exposure levels to radiation, and Komori Yōichi notes that readers would quickly realize with horror that she had far exceeded her annual limits (Komori 2014, 88).25 Kawakami’s story was published in the June 2011 issue of the literary journal Gunzō. When she was finishing it in late March, the nuclear disaster had been declared a level 6, but by the time her story hit the stands in early May, the full truth about the disaster at the Fukushima NPP had been revealed (Komori 2014, 82).26 Her story presents a shocking before-and-after scenario. “God Bless You, 2011” was also striking because words like “hazmat suit” (bōgofuku), “decontaminating the ground” (dojō no josen), and “accumulated radiation” (ruiseki hibakuryō) had entered the realm of serious fiction, and entered in a way that needed no explanation as the disaster became a part of everyday life (Komori 2014, 80–81, 84, 86). Fukushima Fiction highlights the ways in which writers mediate the experience of disaster as they strive to give it shape in language and the important social role fiction writers play in turning a disaster into narratives of trauma that speak to the concerns of global, national, and local audiences. Disaster management studies discuss Fukushima as a “failure of the imagination.” I argue that fiction’s critical contribution lies in its power to restore our ability to imagine the unimaginable and the unforeseen in the wake of such disasters. Ichikawa Makoto, literary critic and editor of Waseda bungaku, Japan’s oldest literary magazine, emphasized the importance of literature when he expressed the need for fiction writers in post-­ disaster Japan to “push the limits of the imagination” as they engaged with this landscape of disaster (Ichikawa 2012, 8–9).

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Introduction11

Literature and the Immediacy of Danger As Japanese citizens struggled to recover from the losses and shocks of the massive earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011, the Japanese chief cabinet secretary, Edano Yukio, reassured the public that there were “no immediate health risks” (tadachi ni eikyō wa nai) from the radiation spewing from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi NPP.27 While the foreign press depicted chaos and a worsening nuclear crisis, the Japanese news repeated “official pronouncements that all was under control” (Broderick and Jacobs 2015, 220). The government subsequently evacuated citizens based on their proximity to the ailing plant via the concentric circle model. Those within 20 km were evacuated while others further out were given conflicting messages about whether they should voluntarily evacuate or shelter in place (Makinen 2011). All the while, a radioactive plume, driven by the wind and rain, refused to be constrained by geographic or civic boundaries as it spread to the northwest. This plume defied the neat circular models as it rained down radioactive material well outside the 20-km exclusion zone.28 The Japanese government delayed the release of critical SPEEDI (System for Prediction of Environmental Dose Information) data that would have predicted the movement of this toxic cloud, leading some citizens to unknowingly flee into areas of higher radiation, exposing themselves to even more danger.29 These examples of disaster response begin to tell the story of the mismanagement by the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the company that owns the Fukushima plant that generated electricity for Tokyo some 160 miles away. These executives and government officials withheld information, misinformed the populace, and continued to put citizens in danger, while expending efforts to erase the tracks leading to their own culpability. The “organized irresponsibility” of this so-called unforeseeable (sōteigai) disaster continues unabated.30 Seven years later, the disaster is hardly old news. Victims are still in temporary housing, the accident at the NPP is far from cleaned-up, as toxic water still seeps into the ground and ocean, and although TEPCO has admitted some guilt, it continues to cling to the excuse that nobody could have been prepared for a natural disaster of this scale.31 Fear, anxiety, and anger are quickly reignited, as they were on November 21, 2016, when a 6.9 earthquake knocked out the cooling sys-

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12Introduction

tem for the storage pools for spent nuclear fuel at the Fukushima Daini NPP, sending them off-line for ninety minutes and reprising fears of 2011. This was a further reminder that the NPPs are still not safe, even those like Fukushima Daini, which has been shut down since the disaster in 2011. For many, tension remains barely below the surface; for those in the disaster area, it has become the “new normal.”32 The government and nuclear industry have attempted to clamp down on and control the discourse surrounding the disaster.33 Their actions range from withholding advertising dollars from antinuclear programming to the new State Secrecy Law that threatens jail time for citizens who leak information they may not even know has been classified as a state secret.34 This attempt at controlling information is nothing new. Secretary Edano’s assurances of “no immediate health risks” echo the reactions of government and plant owners of other nuclear disasters, from the well-known Chernobyl accident to the less-publicized toxic spills and orchestrated releases at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the plutonium production reactor in eastern Washington State. After the accident in Chernobyl, the authorities made repeated claims that the situation was under control, despite a burning reactor core that was releasing radiation into the surrounding area (Gessen 2008, xi). In Japan, the government corporation that manages the Monju fast-breeder reactor responded to a 1995 coolant leak at the site by not reporting the accident immediately and doctoring video footage (Aldrich 2010, 139).35 As Noriko Manabe argues, “there is no taboo against helping tsunami-stricken areas or discussing relief efforts.” However, “antinuclear debate on television has been minimal, and entertainers who speak out against nuclear power have been ignored or openly persecuted. This taboo extends to everyday life, where teachers, coworkers, and even family members avoid discussing it” (Manabe 2015, 8). Author Henmi Yō similarly decries the groupthink he sees in post-disaster Japan. Under this coercive power, individuality disappears as the “I” is merged with the “we” of the national agenda (Henmi 2012, 30). Henmi also argues that any disaster-related censorship has not been a solely top-down model. Rather, he blames Japanese societal norms that restrict expressions of “discontent, anxiety, and anger” lest they disrupt the community (Henmi 2012, 85). Direct, pointed, provocative speech is avoided (Henmi 2012, 83). Henmi labels this self-­ censorship he sees in the media, society,

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Introduction13

schools, and mass culture as “twenty-first century Japanese-style fascism” (Henmi 2012, 85–86). In an interview with critic Azuma Hiroki, author Takahashi Gen’i­chirō talked about “correctness” (tadashisa) and the pressure to bow to a “correct” discourse after 3/11 (Nyūzu No Shinsō: Daishinsai to Bungaku No Yakuwari. Gesuto Takashashi Gen’ichirō 2012). In Ta­ka­hashi’s opinion, it is literature’s job to resist this correctness. Authors should feel free to write what they want rather than what is expected of them. Yet in this environment of correctness, many have lost their words because of the many voices telling them what they should write. Takahashi argues for a new relationship between literature and politics. Edano’s comment about “no immediate health risks” was meant to temporarily allay fears, but as Yagasaki Katsuma argues, “Japanese citizens should recognize radioactivity pollution as a de facto state of affairs” (Yagasaki 2016). Many authors reprised Edano’s infamous phrase to reveal the intentional obfuscation that lay behind it.36 Others, like Satō Yūya, twisted Edano’s words as proof of the long-term consequences the nuclear accident represents. Serious fiction captures both the immediacy of the nuclear threat and the endless temporality of radioactive contamination to show the lives of those unable to escape the consequences of the disaster. Prior to 3/11, serious fiction featured characters who mirrored the unemployed, disenfranchised, and social outcasts of contemporary Japan, as well as the otaku immersed in the virtual world of the information society.37 Post-disaster, that fiction has not shied away from depicting the Fukushima accident’s dire consequences for Japan and the global community. Critic Fujita Naoya writes about a change in literary themes, with an increase in Orwellian-type dystopic novels that warn of censorship and doublespeak à la 1984 (Fujita 2017, 24, 47). Serious fiction takes on this doublespeak, especially one of the core symbols—the nuclear “myth of safety” (anzen shinwa)—that was the basis for convincing a nation scarred by atomic bombs to adopt nuclear power. Government and electric-company dictates aside, the profitdriven culture industry imposes its own restrictions. Furukawa Hideo lamented that publishers were no longer interested in fiction about the 3/11 disaster because nobody wants to read it.38 However, for environmental humanities scholar Rob Nixon, that in itself is an argument for why literature needs to continue to address the menace

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14Introduction

of the nuclear crisis. The earthquake, tsunami, and explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi NPP were the type of cataclysmic disasters that make for “visceral, page turning potency” (Nixon 2011).39 However, it may be generations before we know the full extent of the medical damage attributable to the radiation from the accident, not to mention the social impact on those isolated from communities that were torn apart by the earthquake, tsunami, nuclear destruction, and evacuations. Nixon argues forcefully for literature’s role in “giving imaginative definition” to such slow violence: “In a world permeated by insidious, unspectacular violence, imaginative writing can make the unapparent appear, rendering it tangible by humanizing drawn-out calamities inaccessible to the immediate senses” (Nixon 2011). Amitav Ghosh criticized serious fiction for its failure to address environmental issues such as climate change and questioned whether modern literary forms are even capable of capturing such concerns.40 In addressing the fallout from the nuclear accident, Fukushima fiction serves as an important counterexample to Ghosh’s argument. I do not mean to imply that all writers of serious fiction took on the nuclear issue, nor to malign those writers who chose to depict the crises and losses that beset the earthquake- and tsunami-stricken areas. Fukushima fiction ranges from the openly political to those works that are hardly identifiable as disaster fiction.41 Many writers were approached by literary publications and asked to contribute something on the disaster, and at least in the initial aftermath, there was tremendous demand for disaster fiction. As Japanese authors wrote about the disaster from a range of different viewpoints, it is not possible to reduce those various agendas and motivations to a handful of representative positions. Some writers may have chosen to not write about the nuclear disaster out of fear of causing further damage to the residents of Fukushima prefecture. Others, like Gen’yū Sōkyū, penned short stories that examine the nuclear issues from a variety of political positions as voiced by characters who are residents of the affected communities. It is difficult to know if writing on the nuclear situation affected an author’s reputation negatively or positively or to accurately measure the societal impact of the clearly political works of Fukushima fiction without doing a large-scale statistical analysis of editorial decisions and book/journal sales that is beyond the scope of this study. However, Japanese publishers chose to print these works of Fukushima fiction, unlike the music and manga industries that censored

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Introduction15

their artists (Manabe 2015; Brau 2017). The decision to publish speaks to a level of freedom of expression enjoyed by serious fiction despite public pressure to suppress such critical discourses. Fukushima fiction makes an important contribution to public discourse on the disaster regardless of whether that can be gauged in terms of votes, legislation, or profits. That said, some writers have rightfully been criticized as nuclear apologists. Although the nuclear industry was temporarily silenced after the Fukushima accident, Kuroko Kazuo takes various literary figures to task for not adequately addressing their responsibility with regard to allowing the expansion of nuclear power in Japan, and for not recognizing the work done since Hiroshima and Nagasaki by antinuclear literary movements (Kuroko 2013). It is hard to take issue with the critiques of writers like Ogino Anna. Ogino has been heavily criticized by Kuroko, Kawamura, and others for her failure to address the nuclear disaster in Fukushima even though she was one of the first to visit the area; she made multiple trips (April 15–17, May 3–5) to Sendai with the Kyodo News reporters to deliver relief supplies and take photographs. Yet she barely mentions the word genpatsu (nuclear power plant) in her writing on the disaster. This is especially noticeable because Ogino had written a book in 2004 titled Anna’s Energy Guide (Anna no enerugii annai), a childish explanation of nuclear power that the industry paid her to write as a public relations piece meant to assure readers that nuclear power is safe (Kawamura 2013, 29). Kawamura also takes aim at Takashima Tetsuo for his Disaster Caravan (Shinsai kyaraban, 2011). The novel is about a woman working in a Chinese restaurant in Kobe who travels home to the disaster area with relief supplies. Takashima does not deal with the nuclear accident or the radiation damage, and the work has a happy ending. As already mentioned, not all authors wrote about the nuclear accident, but Kawamura is especially troubled by Takashima’s avoidance of the nuclear because Takashima was a researcher at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI), and as a writer specialized in nuclear issues.42 Takashima also made comments about being able to leave the worrying about the disposal of nuclear waste to future generations, something Kawamura sees as beyond irresponsible (Kawamura 2013, 33). Satō Yūya was critical of his fellow writers who hesitated in the face of the disaster and chose silence rather than risk their literary

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16Introduction

reputations on a highly volatile situation.43 There are certainly writers who may not have written about the disaster or may have chosen not to continue to write about it after an initial foray. I do not claim that all literary production in Japan post–March 11, 2011, addressed the disaster, but the volume of works on 3/11 is impressive, includes a wide range of writers and styles, and constitutes a major trend in contemporary fiction. For many authors, writing after Fukushima was an attempt to understand the new world that the nuclear accident had thrust upon Japan, a world where time itself had broken and the only option for representation lay in the medium of literature and art. Reassessing 3/11 as Rupture After the initial shock, the disaster opened the door to political and social change in Japan. It seemed 3/11 had finally put an end to Japan’s long postwar, ushering in a new era and a new referendum on nuclear power.44 Post-disaster polls showed a huge reversal in public support for nuclear power, from 60 percent in favor in 2009 to 74 percent desiring denuclearization in June 2011 (Hindmarsh 2014, 56). Citizens actively demonstrated against the nuclear industry and a government they felt they could no longer trust (Manabe 2015). Even the nationalist right wing saw the disaster as the “longawaited opportunity to escape from the postwar régime” of “social and moral degradation,” as voiced by then governor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintarō.45 While the memory of the disaster remains searingly vivid, public discussion is closing down. The immediate sense of change has turned to resignation and disappointment over the government’s actions or lack thereof. Residents are anxious about being moved back into supposedly decontaminated areas, and the government has successfully restarted some of the idle nuclear power plants.46 Before even a year had ticked by, there was a growing sentiment that the moment for change had passed, or maybe that it had only ever been illusory. The disaster was not the hoped-for break with the postwar or post-­economic crash eras, nor was it a referendum on the old political order, but merely a continuation of business as usual.47 For Yoshimi Shun’ya, the disaster was merely a part of Japan’s long postwar decline and the end of postwar affluence (Yoshimi 2012). Even the antinuclear sentiment has begun to wane as constitutional reform, the upcoming Olympics, and other issues capture public attention.

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Introduction17

The idea of 3/11 as rupture gave way as the national agenda returned to normal. After an initial silence immediately following 3/11, the nuclear industry began promoting itself again, although not without some resistance. Nuclear power companies restarted advertising campaigns inside Japan, and globally the pronuclear lobby is making its voice heard. The Asahi Shimbun reported on TV commercials for a TEPCO advertising campaign that started in June 2015. It was being run in Niigata prefecture in an attempt to “gain support for its plan to resume operations at some of the seven reactors of its now-idle Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant in the prefecture.” However, the ads that aired 320 times a month met with outrage from disaster evacuees who had resettled in Niigata (Akada 2016). Similarly, Chūbu Electric Power Company has been showing commercials in Shizuoka since 2015. “The utility is preparing to resume operations at some of the Hamaoka reactors, despite anxieties about the safety of the nuclear plant. The plant has been described as the most dangerous in Japan, given its proximity to a long-­expected huge earthquake off the prefecture” (Akada 2016).48 On the international stage, pronuclear supporters like technology investor and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel quote the 2013 United Nations researchers’ predictions that “no discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects are expected” as a result of the Fukushima accident in Japan. In his New York Times op-ed “The New Atomic Age We Need,” Theil rehearses the industry’s old rationale that Chernobyl was a fluke, “a direct result of both a faulty design and the operators’ incompetence” (Theil 2015). However, Sarah Phillips demonstrates how the Japanese, despite their high-tech reputation for safety, repeated many of the mistakes of the former Soviet government when dealing with the nuclear disaster (Phillips 2013). As further arguments for nuclear power, Thiel contrasts the fifty people who were reported to have died at Chernobyl to the thirteen thousand estimated to die from smoke from coal-fired power plants every year (Theil 2015).49 His article is part of the low–carbon-energy movement that relies on mortality rates from major organizations like the WHO that Adriana Petryna argues are selective and grossly misleading (Petryna 2002).50 As Gabriel Hecht laments, “the prospect of the imminent apocalypse of global warming has allowed nuclear power to reemerge as a commonsense and desperately needed energy source” (Hecht 2012, 10).51 On the cultural front, many critics saw the sense of national

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18Introduction

unity that swept the country as hollow. They turned their attention to societal concerns, commenting on the preexisting ruptures that the disaster exposed. If the disaster shattered anything, they argued, it was the illusion of social harmony. Azuma Hiroki’s essay, “The Disaster Broke Us Apart” (Shinsai de bokutachi wa barabara ni natteshimatta), openly questions the assertion that the disaster brought Japan together in an act of national solidarity (Azuma 2011b, 8).52 Azuma had hoped that the country would snap out of two decades of stagnation; however, neither he nor the disaffected youth of Japan saw any real change. Rather, the disaster unmasked the underlying inequities that had been hidden, not by the postwar ideology of a homogeneous middle class—a discourse that had already broken down—but by newer theories of an internet and consumer pop culture that was supposed to have brought people together regardless of their economic differences (Azuma 2011c, 221–222). The disaster made these social gaps visible, along with the government’s powerlessness to bridge them. But it is not just the government Azuma blames; he questions the ability of consumer culture to suture these rents in the social fabric, and he predicts that the situation will most likely not improve in the coming years (Azuma 2011b, 14; 2011c, 222). Critics like Oguma Eiji and Akasaka Norio shifted the discussion to speak of the fragmentation in regional/national terms. Oguma argued that, after 3/11, the “Fight on Japan!” (Ganbare Nippon!) slogans no longer made sense. “The Great East Japan Earthquake, however, has made it painfully clear that the regional gaps have become so wide in modern Japan that we cannot bring the regions together and generalize them as Nippon (Japan)” (Oguma 2011). Akasaka Norio argued that “the veneer of prosperity” in the Tohoku area “had been washed away by the tsunami, revealing structural prejudice alive and well amidst the wreckage and carnage.”53 Akasaka and others discuss the regional inferiority that areas like Tohoku suffer in their relationship to Tokyo. Towns like Futaba that accepted nuclear power plants benefited greatly from the nuclear subsidies that improved their quality of life with enhanced municipal facilities, but these subsidies did nothing to protect residents from the accident at the Fukushima NPP.54 Serious fiction addresses this question of rupture, arguing both for and against. Works set in the disaster zone show lives irrevocably changed by both the natural and the nuclear disasters. Fukushima fiction depicts the new normal of life with radiation, a new genera-

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Introduction19

tion of nuclear victims, and new additions to the list of social outcasts in Japan. For writers and critics, 3/11 revealed existing problems that had been papered over with yen from the nuclear power industry. If there is continuity, it is to be found in a larger historical perspective on war and nuclear testing, but also in the government and industry deception used to convince an unwilling public that nuclear power is safe. The government is targeting 2020, the year of the Tokyo Olympic Games, as the end date for reconstruction and cleanup from the 3/11 triple disasters, even though there are areas that are not slated for repopulation.55 The year 2020 will surely bring another false moment of solidarity to cover up both the ongoing problems at the Fukushima NPP and the fragmentation in contemporary Japanese society. Serious fiction is already looking into this future. Chapter Overview Japanese writers have responded to the triple disaster in works that vary widely in style, theme, genre, and approach. This book does not cover all fiction or literary works written after 3/11 but is an examination of those works that illuminate compelling and significant issues regarding the disaster and the development of new literary trends. I trace Fukushima fiction as it moves outward from the local to the global. Although the Japanese government is attempting to regionalize and contain the 3/11 disaster, it remains a concern of vital importance not just for those in the disaster zone but for everyone potentially affected by the Fukushima accident or related nuclear threats. This book tells the story of the disaster through the words of fiction writers who re-create the experience, give voice to the struggles of the victims, write new histories of the affected regions, locate this disaster alongside Japan’s history of natural and atomic tragedies, and imagine a dark future where living with radiation has become the norm. My chapters analyze Fukushima fiction for its own merits, but also as a commentary and a window on the various crises facing contemporary Japan. Chapter 1 uses the framework of cultural trauma to take on the thorny question of “who is a victim?” or, stated otherwise, “who narrates the disaster in Fukushima fiction?” Successful narratives of cultural trauma require that victims be identified, related to a wider audience, and that responsibility then be attributed. Given the realities and uncertainties of the disaster zone, the narratives of cultural trauma in Fukushima fiction do not always “succeed” or reach such

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20Introduction

consensus.56 I consider the portrayal of victims both inside and outside the disaster zone, and how these different positions affect the narrative of trauma. But it is not always easy to compartmentalize these victims. My analysis moves from local residents directly affected by the disaster to stories with no direct reference to 3/11 but with characters suffering from trauma nonetheless. In the middle are victims living outside the disaster area—some as close as Tokyo, others as far away as Europe. The victim identification process is complicated and at times verges on voyeurism. The Japanese government used the concentric-circle model to designate evacuees, and by extension victims. This model provided one answer to the question of who is victim, but it can complicate that question as well, especially when it comes to the nuclear disaster. Many stories about the earthquake and tsunami describe the painful reality of life in the disaster zone and the inability of characters to move beyond it. This insistence on the present can be read as a political statement that resists the narratives of recovery. There are many disaster stories that eventually offer a sense of closure for these victims, but this closure is not available to characters affected by the endless threat from the nuclear accident. In this chapter, I consider the multidimensional nature of 3/11 as a means to question and test the limits of the very narrowly defined category of victim produced by the governmentmandated evacuation model of concentric circles. When considering the body of Fukushima fiction, we cannot ignore the impact the very different disasters had on the retelling of those events. Chapter 2 expands the scope to a regional level through an analysis of Furukawa Hideo’s Horses, a powerful work that is one of the earliest and most experimental pieces of Fukushima fiction. Horses is a mix of documentary and fiction, a play with literary and generic form, and a novel born of Furukawa’s struggles to put the disaster into writing. He uses Horses to reveal the ways in which 3/11 has only further marginalized the Tohoku area vis-à-vis the national space of Japan. The chapter looks to Tohoku studies as well as to Hurricane Katrina in order to better explore the linkages connecting the colonial status of Fukushima, the marginality of Tohoku’s culture and people, and Furukawa’s history of the region. Through this mixed-genre work, Furukawa crafts an alternate history of Tohoku that employs the very myths and folklore used to marginalize the area but which he reemploys to criticize the Japanese state. In the process, he creates a new form of regional disaster fiction.

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Introduction21

Amid the unrelenting crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, writer and atomic-bomb victim Hayashi Kyōko lamented the tragic irony that Japan, itself victimized by the atomic bombs, had given birth to another generation of nuclear victims (hibakusha). Chapter 3 begins with Hayashi’s concerns and examines the literary attempts to mediate 3/11 by contextualizing it within Japan’s history of disaster and war. The chapter is concerned with the new generation of nuclear victims depicted in Fukushima fiction, examining their reactions and struggles to resettle and live with radiation as they face discrimination from their fellow citizens. Their plight echoes that of the earlier nuclear victims of 1945, and the chapter also describes the contentious debates surrounding the comparison of these two nuclear tragedies. Last, I widen the historical scope to consider stories that link 3/11 to Japan’s engagement with World War II, and its relationship to nuclear testing in the Pacific, as the disaster is written into a history of Japan and East Asia. In chapter 4, my analysis reaches its widest scope, as I rethink Fukushima fiction via nuclear fiction and explore Japanese writers’ new relationship to the nuclear. The Fukushima accident engendered new fictional story lines that moved beyond the unfolding disaster, both geographically and temporally, to imagine new realities and new futures in these irradiated spaces. The setting shifts from a world of atomic-bomb warfare to one of menacing nuclear power plants, and writers envision both utopian and dystopian worlds therein. A defining feature of the stories is the premise that life with radiation is the new norm, regardless of whether the characters accept it willingly, or unknowingly. I explore the engagement of Fukushima fiction with the culture of the nuclear by using the framework of “nuclearity,” a concept borrowed from Gabriel Hecht that enables me to look to humanities and social-science research on the nuclear and heightens the critical potential of Fukushima fiction. The Epilogue looks toward the future as the decade heads to its end with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The chapter considers the various and at times conflicting messages coming out of a Japan that has learned to live with this nuclear disaster. I consider how these messages intersect and clash with the unrelenting bad news emanating from the Fukushima NPP, as previously unseen damage continues to be discovered, and gaffes by TEPCO executives show their disdain for the lives of returnees.

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Chapter 1

Voices from the Debris Cultural Trauma and Disaster Fiction

I

n the days following the 3/11 triple disaster, the news media was flooded with images of the earthquake and tsunami victims surveying and searching the ruins as they stood amid debris fields so vast as to challenge the imagination. Yet, there were other victims who were perhaps harder to identify but no less affected. For these victims of the nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), the damage was not visible, but their towns were so irradiated as to require immediate evacuation.1 The multifaceted nature of the 3/11 disaster makes the task of identifying victims all the more complicated. Who is a victim? Certainly, we would recognize those under the rubble, washed away, displaced, and irradiated. But how far outward does the circle of victims extend? What about those residents of Tokyo who felt the ground rumble but were not directly affected by the disaster? What about people in other parts of Japan or in other countries who live near radioactive hot spots or have inadvertently eaten contaminated food? How inclusive or narrow a definition of “victim” is useful or productive? In an attempt to limit compensation payments, the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the company that owns the nuclear power plant, have opted for a narrow one based on the government-defined evacuation zones of the concentric circles. Serious fiction, however, has cast a much wider net. In the case of Fukushima fiction, we can shift the question of “who is a victim?” to “who speaks for or narrates the 3/11 disaster?” As Japan is no stranger to natural disasters, we could look to prior examples for answers: literature from the Great Hanshin Earthquake 22 This content downloaded from 75.69.46.187 on Mon, 01 May 2023 02:33:54 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Voices from the Debris23

of 1995, the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, or even further back to earlier earthquakes of the premodern era.2 But the triple nature of the 3/11 disaster—earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear m ­ eltdowns— sets it apart from these prior “natural” disasters. For those affected by the nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima, the comparison with historical precedent—the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—is not a straightforward act.3 The victims (hibakusha) of the atomic bombs thought of themselves as “proprietors of an experience wholly beyond the ken of others—and even themselves—to comprehend in its entirety” (Treat 1995, 225). For atomic-bomb writers, it was not just the divide between victim and non-victim; even if one had firsthand experience of the unprecedented destructive power of this new weapon, that experience itself was incommunicable to others (Treat 1995, 26–27). Fukushima gave birth to a new generation of nuclear victims, but these hibakusha have not taken ownership of the experience in the same way their predecessors did in and after 1945.4 Unlike atomic-bomb literature, 3/11 fiction has been predominantly written by non-victims, meaning those not directly affected by the disaster, and tells the stories of both immediate victims and those far removed. A few writers from the area were in residence at the time of the disaster and experienced it firsthand. However, unlike the 1923 earthquake that hit Tokyo—Japan’s economic, political, and literary center—3/11 struck a region that, although not geographically far from Tokyo (160 miles), is otherwise quite far removed. Japan’s rural northeast has long been regarded as a periphery. A number of voices that emerged from Japan’s northeast prefectures of Tohoku were lesser-known figures, like poet Wagō Ryōichi, who garnered attention through their disaster writing (Angles 2017, 146). Within days of the triple disaster in Tohoku, artists, writers, and filmmakers joined the army of news reporters who trekked to the disaster area. These outsiders not only traversed the debris fields but trespassed into the lives of victims. The interaction of outsider and insider, of visitor and victim, is a motif in the fiction and film from the 3/11 disaster and is one means of framing the discussion about how we define its victims. Documentary film opened itself up to the charge of voyeurism, and some 3/11 fiction is also guilty of this.5 However, the inclusion of outsiders in Fukushima fiction serves an important purpose in widening the scope of victim identification and allowing non-victims to come to understand the disaster and

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24

Chapter 1

their own position as a result of it. Fukushima fiction reveals not only the struggles and losses of the immediate victims, but the mindset of outsiders who went to the disaster area and experienced guilt and trauma as they also tried to come to terms with what had happened. This chapter will look at the portrayal of victims inside and outside the disaster zone and how these different scopes affect the narrative of trauma, narrowing or widening the ability of the reader to identify with the victims, and the problems that presents. Here, I invoke the concentric-circles model of radiation exposure and evacuation as a metaphor to think about how victim identity expands outward from the disaster zone. The Japanese government issued a mandatory evacuation for citizens within 20 km of the NPP, but this circle represents only the narrowest of definitions. This chapter starts with the experience of the local victim who was present during the disaster and struggles with loss and traumatic memories. From there, it moves outward to those living in other parts of Japan or overseas and their experience of the disaster regardless of whether or not they visited the affected area. However, this metaphor does not speak only to the identity and location of the victims but to the relevance of the disaster as a theme or event in the fiction itself. Just as victim identity shifts as geographical distance from the disaster increases, so the relevance of the disaster to the story can change from a direct, almost documentary style to a recounting of an unnamed or legendary historical event from some unspecified time in the past or future. In this chapter, I consider how this proximity—both spatial and temporal—impacts the telling and retelling of the disaster. However, the concentric-circles model is faulty. Years of nuclear testing has shown that radiation does not fall out in neat circles but in “uneven and patchy” patterns to form a “mottled, dynamic map with unpredictable ‘hot spots’ scores of miles” away, while areas close to the source can have very low readings (Phillips 2013; Brown 2013, 6).6 This was indeed the case for the Fukushima accident. After the disaster, hot spots were found 160 miles away in Tokyo that were equal to those in some areas of Chernobyl (Tabuchi 2011).7 The radioactive plume from the Fukushima Daiichi NPP was pushed by the winds to the northwest, leaving high levels of contamination in areas far from the plant. This “uneven” and “mottled” spread of radiation should force us to rethink or refine a proximity-based

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Voices from the Debris25

model for victims. It is not only a question of distance from the events, but the very nature of those events. Stories about the earthquake and tsunami are often able to find resolution or bring closure in ways that fiction about the nuclear situation does not or cannot. Cultural Trauma The death toll from 3/11, close to sixteen thousand people, qualifies it as one of the major disasters in Japan’s modern history.8 In its aftermath, various narratives began to contend for interpretative power. Although the disaster struck Japan’s northeastern shore, a region thought of as far removed from major metropolitan centers, the story of this disaster initially played out as a national crisis. Slogans such as “Fight on Japan! Our hearts as one for Japan!” (Gambarō Nippon! Kokoro o hitotsu ni Nippon!), helped construct the narrative of national bonding in order to move citizens beyond the suffering of individuals in the disaster zone.9 Victims of the disaster were also nationalized, meaning they were “made exemplars of core Japanese values,” either those long in decline or those that continued to show Japanese “excellence” (Hopson 2013). In this chapter, I draw on theories of cultural trauma to analyze the various framing devices used to tell the trauma story of 3/11 and to evaluate their effectiveness in imagining into being a collective identity of suffering (Alexander and Breese 2011, vii). Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander argues that in order for such disasters to remain relevant and rise above the specifics of the immediate victims—in other words, to be successfully transformed into a collective ­representation— they must be narrativized as trauma. This narrative is not one of individual psychological trauma, but of cultural trauma, a representation of the event that establishes significant meaning for the social group. Alexander describes his approach to cultural trauma as a theoretical concept that emphasizes the collective, socially constructed nature of trauma as a creative process that constructs a “we.” His approach differs from psychoanalytical models, which are concerned with the power and objectivity of an originating traumatic event that is subsequently repressed, distorted, and rendered inaccessible to the victim. Psychoanalytical approaches are ultimately interested in restoring the objective reality of the brutal events and separating them from distorted memories in order to finally lift repression (Alexander 2004, 7). But theorists of cultural trauma argue that

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“events do not in and of themselves create collective trauma” (Alexander 2004, 8). Trauma is the work of human agency that occurs when the structure of meanings is destabilized, for it is the collective meaning that provides the “sense of shock and fear, not the events in and of themselves” (Alexander 2004, 10). There are instances of individual, repressed traumatic experiences in the fictional texts under consideration in this book, but I am examining these texts specifically for the ways in which they play a role in the creative process of constructing a narrative of that trauma as cultural trauma in order to speak to or for a particular community or society. The work of creating collective trauma narratives requires “access to the means of symbolic production,” which means not only spokesmen for the media and the government, but artists with mastery of the discursive forms of plays, speeches, movies, and storytelling (Alexander and Breese 2011, xiii). It is here that I locate the role and importance of fiction in crafting these narratives. As cultural trauma theorists argue: “It is not inevitable that massive individual suffering will produce a collective trauma process, much less an ameliorating social narrative to repair social fragmentation” (Alexander and Breese 2011, xx). Alexander and his colleagues describe other events for which the process of creating collective narratives was stalled or stopped, often because those able to craft them did not have access to the means of symbolic production or the power to disseminate their works on a large enough scale. Examples include the “disappeared” in Argentina or the victims of Franco’s brutal rule in Spain, who were not allowed to create narratives of their suffering until many years later. Similarly, those women in Asia used as sexual slaves by the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War—­euphemistically known as the “comfort women”— are still fighting over the narrative of their enslavement. The disasters of March 2011 rose to the level of national trauma, not because of any inherent qualities of the events themselves, but because they were socially constructed in this way. These narratives are important for reasons of solidarity. As Alexander argues, “It is by constructing cultural traumas that social groups . . . ‘take on board’ some significant responsibility for it.” The participation in this process is crucial, because “if social groups restrict solidarity” they isolate the victims, who are left to “suffer alone” and, we could add, fade into oblivion (Alexander 2004, 1). As mentioned, 3/11 was initially constructed as a national narrative,

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Voices from the Debris27

but this shifted to regional narratives, which, although they may have been intended to support the disaster area, also served to isolate it.10 The slogans “Fight on Japan!” gave way to “Fight on Tohoku!” or “Fight on Fukushima!” This was partly the result of campaigns that encouraged consumers outside the disaster area to support the agricultural products from these regions.11 However, narratives like Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s speech to the International Olympic Committee regarding Japan’s successful bid for the 2020 Olympics have intentionally regionalized the disaster, geographically and socially isolating Tohoku. In his speech, the PM emphasized the safety of Tokyo and the fact that the situation in Fukushima is “under control. It has never done and will never do any damage to Tokyo” (“Presentation by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the 125th Session of the International Olympic Committee (IOC),” 2013).12 Abe’s speech met with outrage from the affected communities, but it clearly indicated the central government’s plans for containing the disaster in Tohoku. What was once a national disaster became the problem of a region long considered an “internal colony” (naikokuteki shokuminchi) of Japan, a place that was backward and peripheral.13 One consequence of this shift away from national responsibility and solidarity has been the stigmatization of the nuclear victims. There is “no taboo against helping tsunami-stricken areas or discussing relief efforts,” but media coverage of antinuclear debates has been minimal, and those public figures who have spoken out against nuclear power have suffered censure (Manabe 2015, 8). The victims from the irradiated areas have also been discriminated against, as children are bullied and denied entry into schools, and adults fear future marriage rejections (Iwata-Weickgenannt 2015, 201).14 This stigmatization accounts for part of the reason why the Fukushima hibakusha have not taken ownership of the disaster narrative and are reluctant to identify themselves as victims.15 My study of the narratives of cultural trauma for 3/11 shows that the circles of solidarity can spread outward, but can just as easily contract, as narratives shift and reprioritize. Alexander also argues that successful narratives of cultural trauma require that victims be identified and related to a wider audience, and that responsibility be attributed—steps that are difficult and controversial. As already noted, the process of identifying victims is fraught due to a number of factors, including the multifac-

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eted nature of the disaster and the spread of radiation and irradiated food beyond exclusion and evacuation zones. Identifying victims via the designated disaster zones may focus relief efforts, but it can isolate those victims and hinder the process of relating them to a wider audience. It can also ignore the victims who were not in officially designated evacuation zones but who voluntarily chose to evacuate. This can lead to the idea that the disaster is solely a problem of the Fukushima/Tohoku area, in other words, a problem that can be forgotten by those on the outside. Adriana Petryna warns of the dangers of narrowly defining victims, as was done in the wake of the Chernobyl accident by major medical organizations such as the WHO, which limited the health monitoring to “highly exposed cleanup workers and children with thyroid cancers,” ignoring residents of five thousand contaminated areas because their “confounding variables” were “unlikely to provide useful scientific information on radiation effects” (Petryna 2002, xv). Petryna laments the fact that the human toll falls out of the medical narrative or, if it is acknowledged at all, it is as “noise in the system of present day knowledge of human radiogenic risk” (Petryna 2002, xvii, xiv). These victims are unaccounted for and uncounted. Like the radioactive plume and hot spots that defy the boundaries of the evacuation zones, these victims are evidence of real danger for those willing to acknowledge it. At the other extreme, attempts to universalize the victims of 3/11 by recasting the disaster along global lines risk severing those victims from their local contexts. Critic Luc Boltanski discusses this process in his work on the “politics of pity,” a system in which victims must be “hyper-singularized” and be able to be someone else. “Around each unfortunate brought forward crowds a host of replacements. The suffering made manifest and touching through the accumulation of details must also be able to merge into a unified representation. Although singular, they are none the less exemplary” (Bol­tan­ski 1999, 12). These politics also require a “division and separation of the unfortunate and the fortunate” that can increase the distance between victim and outsider and make solidarity harder to come by (Boltanski 1999, 13). My approach in this chapter is to look at the victims via their specific circumstances and not to make them exemplary. However, in my final chapter, I do consider Fukushima fiction within the larger framework of nuclear literature. The question of blame, Alexander’s third step, is also challeng-

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Voices from the Debris29

ing in the context of the 3/11 disaster. Critic Takahashi Tetsuya argued that the Japanese must not repeat the failures of World War II, namely, by not determining the “locus of responsibility” for the Fukushima accident. However, the Japanese government and TEPCO have virtually evaded responsibility through a characterization of the disaster as “beyond expectation” (sōteigai).16 From this characterization followed the idea that TEPCO could not possibly have anticipated a disaster of this scale; yet longtime antinuclear activists such as Hirose Takashi argued that the accident at the Fukushima NPP was a disaster waiting to happen. All the warning signs were present, but TEPCO chose to ignore them due to the high cost of the safety measures required to protect against them, and the need to maintain the myth of safety surrounding nuclear power (Hirose 2012). TEPCO did eventually take some responsibility for the accident in March 2013, and in June 2016 admitted that their avoidance of the term “meltdown” was equivalent to a cover-up (Associated Press 2013, 2016). Additionally, some of the responsibility shifted away from TEPCO and the government as Japanese citizens questioned their own culpability in allowing the advancement of nuclear power.17 However, as Kurokawa Kiyoshi, chairman of the The Official Report of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission argued, although the report criticizes individuals and organizations, “the goal is not—and should not be—to lay blame,” a sentiment that directly contradicts Takahashi’s warning (2012, 9). The disaster did give birth to a new citizen activism, but it is questionable how effective the antinuclear campaigns will be in the face of Prime Minister Abe’s plans to restart the reactors (Tabuchi 2014). Abe’s plans have met with roadblocks—district courts have issued injunctions to stop the restarts because the plants failed to meet new safety measures.18 However, as of August 2017, five reactors were online. On June 20, 2016, twenty-year license extensions were approved by Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) for two reactors at the forty-year-old Takahama plant, and more plants are moving closer to restarting.19 Also, a nationwide phone survey conducted after the ruling party’s overwhelming victory in the July 10, 2016, Upper House election showed that “nuclear power and energy” ranked last on a list of six policies that respondents wanted the PM to focus on (Asahi Shimbun 2016). In the face of results like this, it is hard to argue that activism is changing government policy or citizen views.

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Concentric Circles of Victims Using concentric circles as a spatial and temporal metaphor for victim identification, I move through those circles, from those closest to the NPP—local residents directly affected by the disaster—to the farthest away, or largest of the circles—stories with no direct reference to 3/11 but with characters suffering from trauma nonetheless. In the middle are a variety of victims, those living outside the disaster area, some as close as Tokyo, others as far away as Europe. These victims all have some connection to 3/11, be it family or prior experience living in the affected area or through their identity as Japanese nationals. As the circles move outward in terms of spatial, temporal, and personal connections, my analysis considers how the stories change. As we move farther away from the epicenter, do the stories provide more closure? Is there more hope to be found among those less affected by the disaster? Does this concentric-circle approach help answer the question of who is victim, or does it complicate that question? Throughout, I keep an attentive eye on the narratives of cultural trauma generated at these various levels. As already noted, the concentric circle model is faulty for not considering the patchy fallout from the disaster. With this in mind, I pay particular attention to the hot spots that complicate and enrich our understanding of 3/11’s complexity and multifaceted nature. On the Ground Within the innermost circle are fictional characters who experienced the disaster firsthand. These works focus primarily on the earthquake and tsunami. They are not survivor testimony; unlike atomic-bomb literature, firsthand experience of 3/11 is not a prerequisite for writing about it.20 Fukushima fiction does not work from the same logic of proximity that defined atomic-bomb writings.21 Although these works are written about firsthand victims, they seem to lack the immediacy associated with some disaster fiction in the West. For example, there are no scenes akin to the sheer chaos of the Twin Towers falling to earth as they do in the opening of Don DeLillo’s 9/11 novel Falling Man: It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through the rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their

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faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars. The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall. (DeLillo 2007, 3)

By contrast, much of Fukushima fiction is set in an externally calmer aftermath. Characters reunite with friends at evacuation shelters, visit relatives in nursing homes, receive mail sent to their dead parents, or even return to memories of an earlier, less destructive earthquake that temporarily suspended their school entrance exams. But this disarming calm is ultimately misleading. It is a cool rationality that belies the danger of the situation and the potency of memory. In this innermost circle of stories, characters relive and retell their experiences on that day, and although they have the benefit of a temporal distance not granted to Don DeLillo’s protagonist, their trauma is no less palpable. Lacking the singularity of a 9/11, Fukushima fiction does not focus on re-creating any one moment of the disaster—earthquake, tsunami, or nuclear meltdowns; the multiple nature of 3/11 makes this impossible. However, immediacy does appear in flashbacks, retellings, and images of the dead. The local victims memorialize their trauma and find themselves bound to the present, unable to move forward or back. By emphasizing the lack of closure, these stories counter the national and local narratives of recovery and rebuilding that sought to move the nation beyond the tragedy. Immediacy is most often found when these fictional characters relive a moment from the disaster. In Gen’yū Sōkyū’s “The Cricket” (Korogi 2011), the disaster is told through the grueling account of a father and son, both Buddhist monks. The two men were trapped and tossed about by the giant waves, eyewitnesses to the destruction. In Saeki Kazumi’s “Hiyoriyama” (2012), Beppu recalls running away from the tsunami as it licked at his heels, pulling the ground out from under him (Saeki 2012, 169). Later he talks about fleeing up

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an emergency stairway as water rose in the evacuation center (173). In Ishii Shinji’s “Lulu” (2012), the narrative is told from the point of view of a dog living at a shelter with disaster orphans. When Lulu climbs into the cots of the most unresponsive children, she sees and feels what they experienced in the tsunami in graphic detail. Falling into the dark hole of their memories, “Lulu dangled, clinging to the edge of the hole, as the furious wind of the scream whipped her, destroying pieces of her body. She could not imagine what had happened to the girl: she didn’t want to know” (Ishii 2012, 78). Fukushima fiction is peopled with characters who are unable to move beyond their trauma. In “The Cricket,” Michihiko’s father has been rendered unresponsive and spends his days spinning around in his room at the institution, mimicking the turning motion of the waves. Michihiko is also unable to speak of his experience, and a young woman who comes to live at the temple cannot tolerate being near any sort of water or liquid. Similarly, in “Lulu” the emphasis is on the damaged psyches that remain. The story ends with a reunion many years after the disaster. The survivors reminisce about the dog that lived at the shelter, yet five of them remain quiet, distant, and disengaged. These five were the only ones who traveled from afar to attend the reunion. After leaving the center, they were unable to find a school or workplace in a town that was willing to take them on. They were estranged from one person to the next, until finally reaching a place that offered no sense of belonging, they slipped right through junior high school and landed jobs that did not require human contact. (Ishii 2012, 88)

Even as adults the survivors are still vulnerable to the memories of the disaster “as soon as the lights were turned off, when the darkness became a wave, a thick wall, slamming into them, sweeping them into turbulence, into the depths of darkness” (Ishii 2012, 90). “Lulu” does not confine itself to the immediate time line of the disaster. By revisiting the victims twelve years later, it insists on the permanence of the psychological damage the disaster inflicted on these children’s lives. The others may have moved on, but for these five the tsunami retains its immediacy; the anxiety and loss it represents still terrorize them years after the event. For these orphans, life never moves on and the broken past is never repaired.

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While these stories use the menacing wave as a metaphor for the physical and mental damage that continually threatens to overturn the characters’ lives, other works focus on the lack of physical evidence of this loss—a corpse—that keeps the characters from moving forward and working through their grief. Of the total number of confirmed victims of the 3/11 disaster, 90 percent drowned (Kyodo News 2011). Many bodies were never recovered, and these missing bodies are an important literary absence for Fukushima fiction. Without confirmation of death, many characters are unable to bring closure to their grieving. Some seek substitutes and defer to symbolic markers. In Shigematsu Kiyoshi’s “The Bookmark” (Shiori, 2012), Sanae mourns the loss of high school classmate Shin’ya who died in the tsunami. She seeks resolution for his death, a grave to visit, or some certainty that will allow her to mourn him. His parents eventually file for his death certificate on the Ministry of Justice’s website and disenroll Shin’ya from school, but Sanae cannot accept these steps. The story ends with her looking at a handmade bookmark Shin’ya left behind, the symbol of a future he never had (Shigematsu 2013c). The protagonist in Shigematsu’s “To the Next Spring” (Mata tsugi no haru e, 2013), Hiroyuki also struggles to come to terms with the loss of his parents in the tsunami, especially as their bodies were not recovered. His parents’ town is trying to move forward after the disaster and needs to shore up the land that flooded and sank, but cannot do this until the search for the missing is concluded. Hiroyuki’s parents are the only ones still listed as “missing.” The town’s inhabitants tell him to put his parents’ deaths behind him, as all has been lost—the house, town, neighborhood, the town history, and even individual memories (Shigematsu 2013b, 206). But Hiroyuki still longs for something to which to anchor his sadness; without a body or some kind of memorial, he continues to be haunted by his feelings of grief (Shigematsu 2013b, 215). He finally comes to terms with his parent’s death by finishing the paperwork for a memorial bench in Hokkaido that they had paid for before their deaths. These symbolic markers of death—a bookmark, a bench, or, in other stories, a hairbrush, a saying, a Buddhist statue—provide a literary presence for that which is not visible. Fiction writer Ikezawa Natsuki commented on the invisibility of disaster corpses in an essay collection titled I Won’t Resent Spring: Thoughts on the Disaster (Haru o urandari wa shinai: Shinsai o megutte kangaeta koto):

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I learned of the circumstances of these many deaths through the media, but the Japanese media would not show these remains as dead bodies. The weekly magazines had no more than a few shots of bodies in their photo pages. They showed lots of pictures of the tsunami inundating the towns, but scenes where people actually died were skillfully avoided. The camera averted its gaze. But the corpses were there. (Ikezawa 2011, 6–7)

Ikezawa affirms a convergence of public discourse and art to avoid images of bodies. His comment also suggests a conscious decision to self-edit.22 Many Japanese suggested to me that the lack of representation of bodies could be attributed to the actual lack of human victims, who were evacuated from the nuclear exclusion zone, or were washed out to sea by the ominous black waves of the tsunami. The landscape was forcibly depopulated, yet there were bodies buried under the rubble in those areas hard hit by the earthquake. Writer Furukawa Hideo wryly remarked: “People have been chased out, the town thrown away. Dogs and cats, cows, and horses too. Even the work of collecting dead bodies was not done. They were thrown away” (2016b, 25). Residents in Fujiwara Toshi’s documentary film No Man’s Zone (Mujin chitai, 2012) talk about hearing people calling out for help from under the rubble.23 Dead bodies were left behind in the exclusion zone, unable to be claimed due to the dangers of radiation exposure. The Western press reported that as many as a thousand contaminated bodies remained in the hot zone, presenting difficulties for families wanting to bury their loved ones (Huus 2011). As Ikezawa argues: “A lot of people had seen a lot of bodies,” from the rescue workers to families seeking missing loved ones. “Nobody said anything, but . . . [t]hey loomed in the background of our thoughts.” He imagines these deaths permanently affecting the public mood in Japan, a spectacle that will not easily be exorcised from national memory (Ikezawa 2011, 9). Indeed, these bodies have not been exorcised; rather, they haunt the characters in Fukushima fiction. Given the taboo against showing bodies, it is all the more shocking when they do appear.24 In “The Cricket,” Michihiko avoids memories of the moment when the tsunami overtook him. Yet every morning when he offers the sutras, the sight of that desolate debris field opens in his mind: “The corpses of cats and dogs entangled with trees and telephone poles in an abnormal stance. The heads, legs, and arms of people buried in the

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debris and mud” (Gen’yū 2013c, 35).25 Similarly, Hiroyuki from “To the Next Spring” is haunted by images from his visits to the morgues when he was looking for his parents. He sees body after body covered in mud, limbs bent in unnatural ways. “It all came back to him, hundreds of bodies lined up on the floor of that gym dark from the blackout, the smell of mud mixed with seawater, and the moisture that could only be the thick presence of death hanging over everything” (Shigematsu 2013b, 216). These narratives continually return the reader to the site of the disaster and remain temporally in that space—be it through setting a fictional story in the early days after March 11, through flashbacks, or through characters too traumatized to move forward with their lives. Despite national narratives of recovery, works like Saeki Kazumi’s “Hiyoriyama” present a bleak future.26 Set in the month immediately after the disaster, Beppu’s family does not want to stay in the area and rebuild either their home or their lives. There is no clear path to recovery for the local victims, nor a sign that they are willing to stay and commit themselves to the town’s future. The story does not include any talk of rebuilding or recovery. “Hiyoriyama” confines itself to the immediate aftermath, and in so doing provides a narrative with no resolution, because it does not allow the reader to look into the town’s future. Saeki rejects both symbols of endurance and national narratives of recovery. As the disaster happened in March, the image of cherry blossoms was used to signal rebirth and showcase the beauty of Tohoku.27 But when Beppu and the narrator notice a branch of cherry blossoms amid the debris, Beppu remarks with bitterness that it was “Not a great year for flower viewing.” Rather than serving as a symbol of the Japanese ability to endure or recover in the face of transience, the cherry branch in “Hiyoriyama” is just another piece of debris— “having been mowed down along with the pines”—no better able to withstand the destructive power of the tsunami than the buildings, trees, or people (Saeki 2012, 177). By remaining in the moment, these stories speak to those victims who may be alienated by the “Fight On!” (Gambarō!) rhetoric of recovery. In “To the Next Spring,” the local men complain to Hiroyuki that at age fifty they are too old to restart their lives. Some struggle financially, others suffer permanent mental damage from the disaster (Shigematsu 2013b, 194–196). The language of recovery is either nonexistent or is voiced as bitter words. These stories also

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confirm the narrative of the 3/11 disaster as rupture.28 Clearly, for these victims the disaster created pre- and post-disaster temporalities and represents a gulf that for the foreseeable future is unbridgeable. Even in stories that offer some sense of resolution, like “To the Next Spring,” that resolution is just another form of displacement. Unable to come to terms with the loss of his parents, both their death and the lack of bodily evidence to support it, Hiroyuki transfers his grief to a memorial in Hokkaido that commemorates settlers who relocated from Hiroyuki’s hometown in the early twentieth century. The path forward from the trauma of 3/11 is only possible for him to find by physically displacing his parents’ death from the site of the disaster. Nevertheless, the Fukushima fiction of this innermost circle keeps bringing us back to that site. The reader remains focused on the present moment of damage and loss. This narrative insistence can be read as a political statement that keeps the reader in that physical and temporal space of the disaster, thereby resisting the narratives of recovery and moving forward. As I write seven years after the disaster, the Japanese government is planning on having the cleanup and relocation finished in time for the Olympics in 2020 (Field 2016). However, stories like “Lulu” show that, although the government is relocating victims back into former evacuation zones, the mental damage cannot so easily be repaired. The individual instances of trauma and loss seen in these stories combine to create a narrative of cultural trauma for both those in this innermost circle and those outsiders looking in. Entering the Zone Moving outward from the epicenter, the middle circles of the model are occupied by victims who range from what I term “insideroutsiders” to pure outsiders who verge on disaster tourists. The former term describes characters who do not live in the area and did not experience the disaster firsthand but who have a personal connection to the disaster area. The focus in these stories switches from the trauma of the immediate victims to that of outsiders. The characters in many of these stories first learn about the disaster through the news media, and their own reaction to that news, or to the disaster area itself, becomes the focus of the story. They are often dealing with some kind of personal trauma, and the experience of visiting the disaster zone allows them to come to terms with it and with their

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guilt about being an outsider. As such, these works offer more resolution and closure than the innermost set of stories. They also create a wider circle of solidarity by drawing in outsiders, a key component of Alexander’s successful narratives of cultural trauma. But this focus on the outsider has its complications. It can gloss over the difficulties faced by those victims attempting to rebuild affected towns and allow outsiders to easily adopt a victim identity that requires little or no commitment to the disaster area or its immediate victims. By criticizing these stories, I do not mean to discount their contribution to Fukushima fiction. These authors chose not to remain silent after 3/11, and not everyone felt they could write from the position of immediate victim. But in a situation where the government would like nothing better than for the problems in the disaster area to become invisible, the easily acquired and easily discarded victim identity in these stories supports this government agenda. My analysis in this section focuses on two stories about insideroutsiders who seek to reestablish their relationship with disaster towns, and two stories about characters who have no connection to the affected area and enter it only for a short visit. In the former category are Ikezawa Natsuki’s “Grandma’s Bible” (Utsukushii sobo no seisho, 2012) and Shigematsu Kiyoshi’s “The Charm” (Omajinai, 2011). In “Grandma’s Bible,” the protagonist is a middle-aged man named Kimura who is the last remaining resident at an evacuation shelter. Kimura is from Matsubetsu, an area that was leveled by the disaster; however, he had only lived there until age six, when he moved to Tokyo. When Kimura recently got a job offer in America, he sent a few of his belongings—eyeglasses and a Bible from his grandparents—for safekeeping with his brother in Matsubetsu. The items were to have been delivered on March 11 between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m.—the exact window of the disaster. These keepsakes were lost at sea, along with Kimura’s brother (his only kin), and his sisterin-law, whose body has yet to be recovered. “The Charm” describes the traumatic experience of Machiko, who lived one year of her childhood in a town by the sea that was “devoured by the ocean” in the 3/11 disaster (Shigematsu 2012c, 13). Watching the disaster on TV some forty years later, Machiko feels “guilty going on with her comfortable, carefree life in Tokyo as if nothing had happened. She felt the need to apologize to someone, to say, Forgive me, I’m sorry. The fact that she had no idea to whom she could make that apology only made it harder to bear”

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(Shigematsu 2012c, 16). This sense of guilt permeates other Fukushima fiction as well, as characters find themselves unable to square their everyday normalcy with the realities of the disaster.29 But it is more acute for characters like Machiko and Kimura who feel a connection to towns hit by the disaster. In these stories, both Ikezawa and Shigematsu focus on outsiders rather than describing the experiences of the immediate victims. In Ikezawa’s story, the connection is even one step further removed, as the story is told from the point of view of a volunteer worker who finds Kimura closing up an evacuation shelter. The men have a meal together, and Kimura tells his story to the volunteer. This lens of the insider-outsider provides a critical distance on the events while maintaining a close emotional tie. In Kimura’s case, it is a tie to the hometown itself. Kimura considers leaving for the job in America, but his conscience stops him: “You going to turn your back on all that you saw? That’s your hometown even if you never spent a lot of time there. You didn’t know anybody but your brother. The place was practically terra incognita. But still . . .” (Ikezawa 2012, 105). Although Ikezawa’s decision to have Kimura commit to life in Matsubetsu provides a means for Kimura to have a meaningful relationship with the town, it risks romanticizing insular country life and glossing over the controversial and difficult decisions made by many victims, especially nuclear victims, to leave their hometowns. Kimura decides to stay in Matsubetsu, asserting the importance of outsiders to the rebuild­ing process given the “drastic shortage of manpower” (Ike­ zawa 2012, 106). He realizes that the rebuilding process will be difficult but does not express any of the ambivalence or reluctance seen in the earlier set of stories. Kimura’s unproblematic commitment to rebuilding the town overlooks the issues faced by areas that were already dealing with depopulation and ageing. In “To the Next Spring,” Hiroyuki initially encourages his friends to stay in the town and rebuild but realizes that the town lacks the (man)power to recover (Shigematsu 2013b, 200). His friend Kōichi is a returnee (U-tān), but rather than reconnecting with his roots, he is unemployed and alienated (Shigematsu 2013b, 198). By contrast, “Grandma’s Bible” reaffirms the deep connection to the hometown (furusato) in a decidedly conservative move that echoes the early slogans used to nationalize the disaster and shift citizen attention away from individual stories of tragedy. Kimura has the option of leaving for a job in America and admits

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that life in Arizona as a “foreigner” would be far easier than adjusting to this countrified town, but he opts to stay. In doing so, he confirms the importance of his local—and by extension, national— identity. In this respect, Saeki Kazumi’s “Hiyoriyama” is far more radical in having Beppu express newfound feelings of freedom and a willingness to leave: “It’s strange to say this, but it’s also kind of a relief to have it all gone like this. I’d been feeling a little stuck lately, like I was at a dead end, going nowhere” (Saeki 2012, 178). Saeki’s characters are unwilling to pay lip service to national narratives of recovery or dedicate themselves to the idea of the hometown as the ultimate solution. Both positions have their complications, and neither is without controversy. These works demonstrate some of the various political positions expressed in Fukushima fiction. Despite their status as outsiders, both Kimura and Machiko affirm their insider/victim identity through the losses connected to their old hometowns, as well as incidents of personal trauma. In addition to losing his immediate family in the tsunami, Kimura seeks resolution for events in his past. His life had fallen apart a couple of years before, when his wife left him and he was pushed out of CEOship of his own company. Matsubetsu represents a new start. In Machiko’s case, she falls into a depression from worrying about the fate of the town. Struggling with her guilt, she finally visits the town, makes donations, and leaves copies of her fourth-grade class picture at the evacuation center with a note about herself. But she soon loses confidence in her actions and worries that they will appear insensitive to the victims. Through the character of Machiko, Shigematsu addresses the guilt complex felt by outsiders who were unsure how best to help disaster victims. Despite Machiko’s anxiety about the possible insensitivity of her actions, the story is solely focused on her personal journey. She was originally troubled because she could not remember the faces of any of her classmates and ostensibly travels to the town in an attempt to find them. But once there, she overcomes her anxiety by realizing that “[t]he one she had wanted to meet most of all in the town was herself—herself from long ago” (Shigematsu 2012c, 31). She finds proof that she lived there, and with that realization is able to weep for someone—though it is unclear whom she is weeping for. Perhaps she is mourning her own lost childhood rather than the fate of the disaster victims. When she does get a call from one of her former classmates, she lies and tells him she has returned to Tokyo rather

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than meet with him and his family, who are living in a shelter. Machiko’s urgent need to remember her old classmates disappears once she is able to revive her own memories of having lived in the town. She promises to return to the town in a future year, putting off her visit until life has returned to normal. In a positive sense, stories like “The Charm” allow for an expansion of the circle of solidarity; the many outsiders who observed the disaster via the TV news can “take on board some significant responsibility” so as not to leave the victims to “suffer alone.” As Machiko’s husband says, he had read on the Internet that many identified strongly with the victims and hence suffered “lethargy and depression” (Shigematsu 2012c, 17). But, unlike Kimura in “Grandma’s Bible,” who moves back to his hometown to help rebuild, “The Charm” makes no pretense that Machiko will be part of the recovery process, and her future connections with her former classmates are tenuous at best. In focusing on her personal trauma, “The Charm” allows for the adoption of a victim identity that requires no commitment to the actual disaster victims or towns. Kuroko Kazuo critiqued an overemphasis on a victim mentality that prevented the Japanese from recognizing how their toleration of the building of fifty-four reactors in Japan made them perpetrators in the Fukushima disaster.30 Even the indictment of the Japanese mindset by Kurokawa Kiyoshi in The Official Report of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission allows room for a passive victim identity. Kurokawa characterized 3/11 as a man-made disaster with fundamental causes in the “ingrained conventions of Japanese culture” (2012, 9).31 The mindset that supported the culture of nuclear negligence resides in the Japanese “reflexive obedience,” “reluctance to question authority,” and insularity bolstered by selfconfidence (ibid.). However, in arguing that “[h]ad other Japanese been in the shoes of those who bear responsibility for this accident, the result may well have been the same,” Kurokawa provides a way out for both the average Japanese citizen and authority figure alike. His calls to “reflect on our responsibility as individuals in a democratic society” stop short of forcing the perpetrator identity on which Kuroko insists (Kurokawa Kiyoshi 2012, 9).32 However, “The Charm” is not the only story in which an outsider enters the disaster zone seeking resolution for their own trauma, be it intentional or unintentional.33 There are other works in which characters identify with the disaster victims despite their

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Voices from the Debris41

own status as pure outsiders. Taguchi Randy’s protagonist in “Into the Zone” (Zōn ni te, parts 1 and 2), Hatori Yōko, tours the disaster area, specifically the nuclear exclusion zone, and uses it as a means to come to terms with the death of her sister, who died in a plane crash unrelated to the disaster.34 The protagonist in Kimura Yūsuke’s Sacred Cesium Ground (Seichi Cs, 2014), Ms. Nishino, volunteers at a cattle farm in the disaster area, thus escaping an abusive husband and an uncertain future. In choosing to keep the focus on outsiders and their personal trauma, which is unconnected to the disaster, these stories redefine the category of victim for 3/11, shifting it away from firsthand victims. In Taguchi’s stories, Hatori is guided around the disaster zone by a local, Kudō Ken’ichi, who is living in a shelter because his farm is inside the exclusion zone. Kudō would seem to be a natural choice for examining the effects of the Fukushima nuclear disaster on residents. Early in the story he is identified as a victim (hisaisha) who is living in the shelter because his ranch has been contaminated (Taguchi 2013b, 11). However, Taguchi shifts the narrative away from characters like Kudō to her real focus: Hatori and her experience of the zone. Hatori clings to her role as observer; despite her status as a published writer, she refuses to interview anyone and shrinks from the opportunity to use her literary skills to help the residents publicize the plight of their children. Ultimately, Hatori’s willingness to enter the zone, even the most highly irradiated areas, is underwritten by her status as a temporary visitor. At the end of their trip, Kudō plans to take her to his ranch, but warns her that the radiation there will be high as they are so far into the no-go zone (Taguchi 2013b, 47–49). She finally agrees to go when she realizes that she will not be in the zone very long. Short-term exposure to high doses is not a major concern for Hatori because, as she says, “It’s not like I’ll be here forever” (zutto iru wake ja nai; Taguchi 2013b, 50). Kudō wryly echoes her comment, revealing his precarious situation as a longterm resident. This comment Hatori makes about her temporary status in the zone is indicative of her position as an outsider. Still, Hatori feels a deep connection to the zone. It becomes a way for her to deal with the grief she still feels over her sister’s death. The sister was a stewardess who died in an airplane crash, and Hatori still has nightmares of falling from the sky. For Hatori the zone represents the absolute bottom. She finds comfort in a place from which she can fall no further (Taguchi 2013c, 78). She projects her own

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personal tragedies onto the disaster site, incorporating it into her own trauma narrative. Hatori is identified as a victim—at one point she is even misidentified as a resident of the evacuation shelter—but has no reservations about adopting the zone for her own purposes. Using the disaster as a way to heal her own psychological wounds, she seeks to be both an insider and an outsider, having the freedom to walk away from the disaster zone, yet also feeling deeply connected to it. Taguchi makes Hatori the victim and the Fukushima disaster a backdrop for her trauma narrative. Hatori does suffer from the loss of her sister and could benefit from the rhetoric of healing (iyashi) that surrounds the disaster. Taguchi does create a link to the outsider, yet in regionalizing the nuclear disaster as Fukushima prefecture’s problem, she makes that link one that can easily be broken. Kimura’s Sacred Cesium Ground is told from the viewpoint of Ms. Nishino, a thirtysomething housewife who travels into the nuclear exclusion zone to volunteer at “Fortress of Hope,” a fictional cattle ranch modeled on the real Ranch of Hope in the exclusion zone, where ranchers, in defiance of government orders, care for those cattle that were not euthanized after the nuclear explosion. Nishino is one of many who come from outside the Tohoku area to help at the ranch; she is part of what one veterinarian dubs the “Foreign Legion” of volunteers (Yūsuke Kimura 2014, 48).35 This phrase is used jokingly but makes it clear that Nishino is not the only outsider, and the story questions the commitment or motivation of some of the volunteers. One couple leaves after venting concern that Mr. Sendō, the rancher, is using the cows for his own political purposes. Though his purposes seem nobler than that of a young politician who comes to the ranch to take photos of the dying calves in order to forward her own success. Nishino’s reasons for volunteering are entirely apolitical. She is escaping both an unhappy marriage and childhood memories of an abusive father. For her, the ranch is an “ideal” space (Kimura Yūsuke 2014, 37). She is not the only character who comes there for personal reasons. The ranch and volunteer opportunities give purpose to those outside the exclusion zone, like Mr. Itoi, a computer coder who tells Nishino that he “needs” to come to the ranch once a month (88). Nishino resembles outsiders in other works of Fukushima fiction who come to the exclusion zone at a moment of crisis in their personal lives. Ostracized at work, Nishino began having panic

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Voices from the Debris43

attacks and had to quit her job. She has difficulty fitting into society, and her husband berates her for her social dysfunctionality. She heard about the cattle ranch on Facebook at a point in her life when she was close to giving up any hope of a happy future for herself (39). In society’s view, she is as useless as the irradiated cows. This theme of humans as cattle and cattle as humans reverberates throughout the story. Sacred Cesium Ground has its share of scenes of dying and dead cattle, now a symbol of the meaningless loss of life in the irradiated area. These images are readily available on the Internet and feature in other Fukushima fiction like Taguchi’s. Nishino feels the cows’ pain as she anthropomorphizes them. There are similar scenes in Taguchi’s work of Hatori’s wondering how the cows feel. In Nishino’s story, the suffering of the cows is often a stand-in for the suffering of the Fukushima victims. Both are mere “resources” for the use of the nation. Just as Hatori vicariously plays the victim when she is mistaken for a shelter resident, so Nishino denies herself a hot dinner because she wanted “even a little to get a taste of living in a disaster” (Yūsuke Kimura 2014, 38). On some level, her actions seem to be playacting, especially considering her ignorance of the dangers of radiation and its effects on her reproductive system. Her husband warns her not to go to the ranch for this very reason (even though the couple has no expressed desire to have children). Nishino is willing to trade her reproductive health for vicariousness and freedom from her husband, but she seems naïve about the somatic threat of radiation. But Nishino’s time at the ranch has real consequences. After three days of volunteering, the narrator finds the resolve she needs to make a break from her husband and live her own life, focusing on “her own survival” (Kimura Yūsuke 2014, 94). The reader does not know her fate but assumes she will split from her husband. What is left unstated is the fate of the ranch. At various points in the story, Sendō says that he cannot sustain his work at the ranch forever and will most likely die from radiation or stress. The narrator, now having found a path of hope out of her oppressive marriage, no longer seems to need the ranch to give her purpose. She says she will return, but it is not clear when or how. Sacred Cesium Ground presents the reality of life in the exclusion zone and a range of opinions regarding the ranch and Sendō’s politics. It criticizes the government’s rhetoric of cleaning up the disaster in time for the Olympics and exposes its treatment of the victims

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as “disposable people” who serve only to fill Tokyo’s need for electricity.36 However, the narrative thrust of the story appropriates the Fukushima disaster in order to tell Nishino’s personal story. On one level, these stories serve an important function as narratives of cultural trauma. They widen the circle of solidarity and allow an entry point for outsiders. However, on the other hand, their shifting of victim identity away from the firsthand victims to outsiders can serve as a means to assuage the guilt of outsiders and allow them to move on with their personal lives, leaving the problems of the disaster area behind. Regardless of which position we take, these stories signal an important shift in the definition of victim away from those in the immediate disaster area, complicating that term. The Outer Rim of Trauma Inhabiting the widest of the victim circles are characters who are only tangentially connected to the 3/11 disaster. Some are displaced either by geographic or by temporal distance. Others react to circumstances that resemble those of 3/11 but the disaster is never named or mentioned. In some of these works, the victims are used as a means to comment on the social problems of contemporary Japan. The authors craft a larger trauma narrative that moves beyond 3/11 to incorporate a variety of outsiders into this more expanded definition of victim.37 These stories do not present a view of a unified Japan; rather, they emphasize the broken nature of society itself. In this category are works like Tawada Yōko’s “Island of Eternal Life” (Fushi no shima, 2012). Her narrator, a Japanese expatriate who has been living in Germany for thirty years, experiences the disaster from afar.38 Unable to get to Japan, she is powerless to intervene. In Abe Katsushige’s “Ride on Time” (2011), the disaster is represented as a legendary wave from the past, “a monstrous swell that appeared a decade ago” (Abe 2012, 184). Mythical stories about the wave have been passed down through generations of surfers who await its return. But, unlike Tawada’s narrator who is a paralyzed bystander, Abe’s narrator has more agency, as he and his fellow surfers feel they can use the knowledge from the past to help them conquer the wave. In this section, I examine two works in which the narratives have no direct reference to the disaster but the female protagonists are victims nonetheless: Matsuda Aoko’s “Planting” (Māgaretto wa ueru, 2012) and Akikawa Tetsuya’s “Box Story” (Hako no hanashi, 2011).

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The female protagonists in “Planting” and “Box Story” are stand-ins for the social problems associated with youth and young women in Japan, specifically, those without steady work, the socially withdrawn, and women who do not marry or reproduce. Marguerite in “Planting” is socially isolated: her search for the perfect job is complicated by her inability to work with friendly people or those who have dreams. Unable to rely on others, she wants a job working alone where she does not have to talk to anyone. In Japanese society, where teamwork and fitting in are part of the national mantra, Marguerite is the outlier. She finds a job that involves planting the contents of boxes delivered daily to her house. She plants them in her yard, and the first items bring her joy—figurines, bells, T-shirts, and the like. However, they soon become troubling—a dead rat, mudsoaked clothing and stuffed animals, and body parts, even emotions of hatred, anger, sadness, and anxiety. As the emotional burden increases, she plants faster and faster. In the process of planting fear, Marguerite has an intense physical response: she “stopped breathing deeply. Her field of vision narrowed. . . . She gasped. . . . She noticed she was sticky with sweat. She felt uncomfortable” (Matsuda 2012, 57). She also begins to question herself and the assumed identity of Marguerite that she had adopted when she started the job, using this identity to cover up the coward she thought her real self, Makiko, to be. Marguerite’s physical response is reminiscent of Machiko in “The Charm” who loses weight and suffers from depression, or the children in “Lulu” who relive the moment of the tsunami in all its terror. The items Makiko pulls from the boxes and the descriptions of her garden recall the debris-strewn landscapes of 3/11’s tsunamiravaged coastline. Fear hangs “low in the air,” and the garden becomes a “mire sucking Makiko down” (Matsuda 2012, 58). Initially she is disturbed by these changes, but, realizing she has no choice in the matter, she resumes her planting with new purpose. She plants the fear without averting her gaze, deciding that, if she waits long enough, someday the boxes will yield good things again. She finds a purpose and resolution that allow her to continue with the work and move past her trauma, or at least come to terms with herself. The protagonist in “Box Story” also finds a way out of a depressing situation. Miss Sato, who works for the Hamster Electric Power Company (HAMPO), is traumatized by a job that requires her to

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crawl through the multilevel structure at the plant to feed and encourage the exhausted hamsters or to replace the dead ones. Having lost her parents, she lives alone. Already emotionally taxed by work, she is not excited about the new city hall initiative for the town to grow boxes as a means to deal with a shortage. The farcical basis for the story, however, turns serious as Miss Sato becomes attached to her box. She speaks to it, pouring out her emotions of loneliness and her anguish over the hamsters. This process brings her relief, “as if untold toxins had leached from her being” (Akikawa 2012, 154). Before the city comes to retrieve the box, she takes it for a picnic. Grieving for the loss of this companion who helped her unburden herself, she pulls the box down over her and cries for her lost parents, for the dead hamsters, and for this box that will soon be cut up as material to make new boxes. The story ends with Miss Sato disappearing into the black space inside the box and dematerializing into the universe (Akikawa 2012, 156). Both stories link to the 3/11 disaster through indirect references. The connections in “Box Story” to the Fukushima NPP accident are many. Faced with a crisis, the legislature bickers over a solution to the box shortage, unable to define the problem (Akikawa 2012, 151). This deadlock is reminiscent of the inability of the Japanese government to move effectively in responding to the 2011 disaster. The comments in “Box Story” about legislative “locked rhetoric” recall TEPCO’s purposeful avoidance of the word “meltdown” in favor of “milder descriptions,” despite the reality of the situation at the NPP (Akikawa 2012, 152; Associated Press 2016). HAMPO, a wonderfully clever stand-in for TEPCO, represents a place where everything is replaceable; the hamsters “who’d expired one after the next for the sake of humans” can be compared to the famous “Fukushima 50,” the group of workers who remained at the Fukushima NPP after others were evacuated from the crippled plant (Akikawa 2012, 156). Their heroism was praised by the press, but what often went unstated was that, like the hamsters, these fifty workers were being repeatedly swapped for another fifty, with the count reaching eighteen thousand in as little as six months (Petryna 2002, xxiii).39 Life is dangerous for these workers: “During any one job, subcontracted workers have received two to three times the annual dose absorbed by utility employees.” The NPP does not include data on the exposures of these workers in their annual reports on the collective dose for plant employees (Hecht 2013). These workers are truly

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Voices from the Debris47

expendable, as are the female protagonists in these works of Fukushima fiction. Stories in the innermost circle drew on the imagery of the disaster as a symbol of the characters’ inability to move forward. Those in the middle focused on how outsiders create connections with the disaster area. Both stories in this section use images of boxes and burying as metaphors for the containment of the disaster and any trauma it has created. The toxins or poisons that leech from Miss Sato are contained in a box that will be recycled and reused for other purposes. This is a symbol both for the poison that leeched from the NPP and for the containment of her trauma. The Japanese government and TEPCO’s plans to contain the radioactive water leaking from the plant have so far proven much less effective than the narratives used to divert attention away from the ongoing trauma of the victims.40 In the end, it is Miss Sato herself who is contained by the box and removed. She conveniently disappears along with any evidence of her trauma. In Japan, the victims of the triple disaster have been similarly removed from the national discourse as the news shifts to other topics and the government meets its reconstruction goals. Marguerite plants the contents of the boxes, but once those contents become dark and troubling, she wishes she could bury instead of plant them: “She wanted to bury them so deep in the earth that no shoot could ever reach the surface” (Matsuda 2012, 57). Initially she wants the items to wither, but by the end of the story she has regained her faith in the process of planting. Whereas “Box Story” allows for the containment of Miss Sato’s trauma, it also implies that the city government is assuming the crisis has been resolved. But in “Planting,” the trauma is placed in the ground with the hope that it will come back as something good. This is reminiscent of other stories that hope for positive change. Murakami Ryū’s “Little Eucalyptus Leaves” (Yūkari no chisa na ha, 2012) ends with the narrator’s assurance that “buds of hope” are emerging from the tragedy of 3/11 (Murakami Ryū 2012, 196). Shigematsu Kiyoshi’s Map of Hope ends with a young middle-school shut-in finding the means to return to school and to life in general. These positive endings support national narratives that encourage victims, and the nation as a whole, to move on. For many, that was necessary or desired. But, containing or burying the problems of 3/11 does not necessarily mean that they have been solved. Despite ongoing fears of radiation in the affected areas, the Japanese government has set

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deadlines by which victims must return to their homes or forfeit compensation payments.41 In making the circle of solidarity for 3/11 more expansive, the disaster can also serve as a metaphor for the problems of contemporary Japan. In “Box Story” and “Planting,” it is the phenomenon of single, unmarried, unproductive women. The boxes in “Box Story” are “breeding boxes” (yōshoku), and the reference to breeding in contemporary Japan is shorthand for the reproduction crisis, one that has been exacerbated in disaster towns that were suffering from severe ageing and depopulation.42 Unmarried women like Ms. Sato and Marguerite are not reproducing; in other words, they are not contributing to the rebuilding by having children who will repopulate these towns, and by extension the ageing nation. Similarly, neither is Ms. Nishino from Sacred Cesium Ground. This crisis refers not only to physical reproduction but also to social and economic reproduction. As Anne Allison argues, the “reproductive failures” that youth in Japan are blamed for include “declines in pension funds, [and] regular employment” (Allison 2009, 91). Initially unemployed, Marguerite can be categorized alongside youth who have been criticized for not pursuing full-time careers and for withdrawing socially.43 By linking Marguerite to the 3/11 disaster, Matsuda ties the disaster to a larger social crisis in Japan. Earlier I argued that the stories in the middle section focused too much on the outsider’s personal issues, directing attention away from victims in the disaster zone. In this set of works on the outer rim, the 3/11 victims are being replaced by or grouped together with social outcasts in contemporary Japan. This is not to say that the two groups are necessarily separate. Children from Fukushima have suffered discrimination when they have relocated to other parts of Japan; the Asahi Shimbun ran a series of articles on Fukushima children who were bullied in school once their status as radiation victims receiving compensation payments was made known.44 Certainly, the widening gaps in Japanese society that created the social disparity problem (kakusha shakai) have only become more visible in the wake of 3/11, as the disaster revealed existing fissures and continues to create new ones.45 However, by adding the 3/11 victims to the growing list of social outcasts in Japan—NEETs (not in education, employment, or training), shut-ins, dropouts, victims of bullying, unmarried young women, irregularly employed youth (freeters), and the working poor—we risk losing some of the particularities of

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Voices from the Debris49

their circumstances.46 They can become a part of a larger “politics of pity,” to use Luc Boltanski’s term, where they become “exemplary,” and hence to some degree, as exchangeable as the “Fukushima 50.” Within the specifics of Japanese society, grouping disaster victims with these disenfranchised communities can allow for new bonds of solidary. But this aggregation can also cast 3/11 victims as part of an existing social problem, making them invisible as individuals in the eyes of the neoliberal government. Uneven Fallout By following the movement outward of these concentric circles of victims, I do not mean to give the impression of a temporal progression, implying that earlier works focused on firsthand victims, whereas later ones identified those farther away from the disaster zone. The majority of stories in this chapter were written within a year of the disaster. Similarly, there is no clear distinction in terms of narrative voice; the stories are evenly split between first- and thirdperson voice, regardless of the victim’s distance from the epicenter. In this last section, I consider the multidimensional nature of the disaster and the uneven fallout from the nuclear plume as means to deconstruct the clean lines of the concentric circles. I do this through a comparison of Shigematsu Kiyoshi’s short story “To the Next Spring—Obon” (Mata tsugi no haru e—urabon’e, 2011) and Ikezawa Natsuki’s novel, The Two-Headed Boat (Sōtō no fune, 2013).47 A comparison of these works takes into account the difference between those victims of the earthquake and tsunami—disasters Japan has a long history of dealing with—and the nuclear victims, the hibakusha. These groups of victims experienced the disasters differently, and the impact on lives and livelihoods was not the same. In Shigematsu Kiyoshi’s “To the Next Spring—Obon,” the nuclear disaster has permanently robbed victims of their communal past and future, while Ikezawa Natsuki’s The Two-Headed Boat presents a hopeful view of a community coming together to rebuild lives for those who lost homes and loved ones in the earthquake and tsunami. When examining the body of Fukushima fiction, we must always take into consideration the nature of the disaster and its impact on the fictional retelling. Shigematsu Kiyoshi: No Past, No Future Shigematsu’s characters in “To the Next Spring—Obon” are from a small mountain village recently evacuated due to an accident

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at an industrial plant that contaminated the area with radiation. His protagonist, Nobu, chairman of the Residents’ Association, struggles over whether to have the annual summer festival, knowing that even though the residents are allowed home for three days, few of them will return out of fear of the radiation. The festival takes place with far fewer participants than the previous year and soon devolves into bickering and bitter recriminations as residents direct their resentment at those who have chosen to abandon the town by moving away to restart their lives elsewhere. Shigematsu’s story is an unequivocal argument for the Fukushima disaster as rupture. In his work on 9/11, Neil Smelser asserts that disasters mark time in irrevocable, indelible ways, creating preand post-disaster temporalities and spaces (Smelser 2004, 265–266). Certainly, this rift was felt by those in communities decimated by the earthquake and tsunami, and it is possible to read “To the Next Spring—Obon” as another “On the Ground” story about firsthand victims. But the radiation from the Fukushima NPP altered the landscape in ways that will take decades or possibly hundreds of years to fix, if that is even possible. It reinforced the finality of the break with the land and its past. This unique temporality of nuclear accidents creates a rupture unlike that of the more “natural” and recoverable disasters of earthquake and tsunami. This difference is reflected in the fiction itself. With regard to the outward movement of the concentric circles discussed previously, here it is not just distance from the disaster that affects the story, but the nature of the disaster itself. Shigematsu’s decision to center his story on the summer holiday of Obon drives home the severity of the temporal rupture. The Buddhist custom of honoring the dead is observed nationally in Japan; during this holiday, people return to their hometowns to welcome back their ancestral spirits. The festival in the story has been held in the same location for the past thirty years, emphasizing both the temporal and spatial continuity of the community up to the point of the nuclear accident. Nobu thought it was important to hold the festival this particular year because the community had been split up in the evacuation. The occasion of Obon is an important event for marking time and emphasizing connections to the past. Without this ceremony, the villagers would not have the opportunity to return home (as access to the area was restricted because of radiation), and neither would their ancestral spirits, who depended on the festival to guide them back.

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Voices from the Debris51

The reunion occasioned by Obon allows the community to reflect on the loss of a shared physical space. The villagers have been scattered into temporary housing, and the narrator comments that, even though they could still get in touch by e-mail or cell phone, the loss of the space of the village has permanently shattered the community’s bonds. More than the loss of the physical space, however, is the severing of the community from their past and future. The pollution from the unnamed industrial accident is the agent that brought about this lost future. The villagers have been told that it could take hundreds of years before the contaminated soil is back to normal, and Nobu comments that the pollution soiled not only the ground but the future of the village itself. The most powerful image of this severed future comes in a scene when Nobu and his friend Kōji go to the village temple to visit the Ema-dō. In this shrine building, parents imagine a life for their dead children through the colorful votive picture tablets that memorialize them—some are pictured in wedding clothes or given items they would use in the next world. These images, and the hopes they represent, are futures that were impossible. The lost souls of these children embody the unattainable future of the villagers, who will be unable to return to the village for hundreds of years due to the contaminated soil. Kōji half-jokingly says that the children in the Ema-dō cannot be evacuated, and in some strange way Nobu imagines that the votive tablets are the “only happy future that remained for the village” (Shigematsu 2012d, 134). It is not only the future that has been lost. When discussing the fate of untended gravesites, the narrative comments: “It seemed that its [the village’s] past too was being ripped up by the roots” (Shigematsu 2012d, 135); the disaster has violently severed the villagers’ sense of time from the ground itself. Their old lives, “those up to that day” are now “too far away” to imagine returning to (160). The only solution that would allow the villagers to stay would be to remove the topsoil, but Nobu doubts this could possibly be done for all the fields, pastures, and woods (124). This decontamination process is exactly what the Japanese government has been doing in the disaster area, but it has been controversial, and not all areas are designated as ones to which residents can return. As readers, we wonder which is the preferable fate: Shigematsu’s community who can never return home, or residents like those in Ian Thomas Ash’s film A2-B-C who continue to live with radiation after the so-called decontamination has been completed?

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The story ends as Nobu reluctantly comes to terms with the idea that the villagers may never be able to return home permanently, and Kōji wonders what will happen to the spirits of their ancestors at this time next year. The timeline that bound the community together has been irrevocably severed. The villagers, alive and dead, are temporal and spatial refugees (nanmin), who exist in a timeless, inescapable present without access to a past or a future (Shigematsu 2012d, 137; 2012b, 170). In this sense, Shigematsu’s “To the Next Spring—Obon” is one of the bleakest of the Fukushima stories, in that it offers no hope, regardless of the characters’ decisions to stay within close proximity to the village or to move away. The story is obsessed with the idea of the hometown, or in Japanese, the furusato, an emotion-laden term that Shigematsu uses seven times in the opening paragraphs alone. Unlike Kimura’s longing in “Grandma’s Bible” for a hometown he barely knew, the hometown in Shigematsu’s story is a reality embedded in the villagers’ daily lives: “Home was not some faraway thing. It was here. They were here. They were connected to this home by the soles of their feet” (Shigematsu 2012b, 151). This physical home is also a temporal existence stretching from the dead to the elderly to the youth. Shigematsu emphasizes the loss of this furusato. Unlike Kimura, these villagers can never go back, making Shigematsu’s retitling of the story as “Homecoming” deeply ironic. The spatial and temporal rupture experienced by the characters in “To the Next Spring—Obon” echoes the work of cultural critics like Azuma Hiroki. For Azuma, this rupture exposed long-­ standing discontinuities and fractures in the fabric of Japanese society, and Azuma doubts the nation’s ability to create solidary across these rifts (Azuma 2011b).48 In addition, the disaster created new fractures as residents of the affected towns were shunned for being “radioactive.” Shigematsu includes one such scene (Shigematsu 2012d, 124–125). For him, the rupture of time and community for these nuclear victims works as a counterdiscourse to the narratives of recovery and continuity. For this community there will be no recovery or continuity. The pre- and post-disaster spaces cannot be rejoined, and the community cannot be reconstituted. Ikezawa Natsuki: Community Lost, Community Gained Ikezawa Natsuki’s Two-Headed Boat captures the pain and dislocation of the disaster victims and the rupture of 3/11, but unlike

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Voices from the Debris53

Shigematsu’s “To the Next Spring—Obon,” it offers a hopeful vision of a post-disaster community.49 Ikezawa emphasizes the possibility of continuity and a future for the victims of the 3/11 disaster. This future is romanticized, but represents a critical revision nonetheless; the victims decide their own fate and construct new lives of their own accord rather than having that fate decided for them. This future is possible because the characters in Ikezawa’s story are victims of the earthquake and tsunami, not the nuclear disaster. Unlike the community in “To the Next Spring—Obon” who are permanently displaced, those in the Two-Headed Boat can rebuild their communities and reestablish a connection to the land. The novel takes place on a boat that travels Japan’s northeast coastline offering aid and shelter for disaster victims. The ship, the Cherry Blossom (Sakuramaru), becomes home for two thousand displaced victims when a small town is constructed onboard. Parents build stable lives for their children, and broken families form new ones as widows marry widowers and start over. The ship magically grows larger as it offers homes not only to the victims, but to the disaster dead and the socially isolated who have nowhere to go. In this way, Ikezawa builds a wider circle of solidarity by including the stories of the volunteers, some of whom are hiding from their own past or who never felt at home in contemporary Japanese society. In the end, the community splits into two. One group is given a smaller ship, and they head out to sea, relinquishing their connection to the land and the state in order to create a new, independent nation: The Cherry Blossom Republic upon the Sea. The other group, led by the ship’s captain, seeks to retain its national identity and returns to the land. Convinced that a connection with the land is the only way the passengers can continue to hold memorial services for the dead, they run the ship aground, and it turns into a peninsula. They then create a graveyard nearby and plant cherry trees. The idea of return or repatriation is a major theme for the book, and Ikezawa provides continuity for the community through a connection to both regional and national identity.50 In regional terms, Ikezawa offers numerous ties to the Tohoku area. The opening chapter is about a man named Beaman who is returning a bear to the woods of Tohoku. His final destination is Tōno in Iwate prefecture, a locale made famous by folklorist Yanagita Kunio’s (1875– 1962) Legends of Tono (Tōno monogatari, 1912), a collection of tales that celebrated the area’s local legends. The mention of a bear in

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Iwate also recalls the beloved stories of Tohoku native and author Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933), especially his “The Bears of Nametokoyama” (Nametokoyama no kuma), part of a collection that comprises Miyazawa’s best-known portraits of Iwate prefecture’s natural universe of forests and animals.51 Interest in Miyazawa reemerged in post-3/11 Japan. Furukawa Hideo rewrote Miyazawa’s famous Night on the Galactic Railroad (Ginga tetsudō no yoru, 1934) as a play that he performed in the disaster area and other parts of Japan.52 The reference to Miyazawa is particularly apt for the Two-Headed Boat because the train in the original story transports the dead to the next world, as does Ikezawa’s boat. One of the dead in Miyazawa’s original was the protagonist’s friend, who drowned. In Two-Headed Boat, the image of water evokes the fate of the tsunami victims. Not only is the repatriation theme tied to the regional identity of Tohoku, Ikezawa also connects his story with national identity through his use of the cherry-blossom motif. The visual archive of the 3/11 disaster is replete with images of cherry trees in full bloom, as the disaster happened in the spring. Documentaries like Fujiwara Toshi’s No Man’s Zone (Mujin chitai, 2011) and Lucy Walker’s The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom (2011), confront the viewer with beautiful images of cherry blossoms. Walker uses the return of the cherry blossoms to signal hope for the recovery of Japan (Walker 2011). For Fujiwara, the cherry blossoms complete his nostalgic view of the traditional, verdant landscape of Tohoku.53 Saeki Kazumi rejected the redemptive power of this iconic image in his “Hiyoriyama,” but in Ikezawa’s novel there is little of Saeki’s irony. Rather, Ikezawa’s descriptions are filled with nostalgia for an earlier, idyllic rural lifestyle. This is on display in his chapter 7, when the ship holds an Obon festival (Ikezawa 2013, 202). Unlike the festival in Shigema­ tsu’s “To the Next Spring—Obon,” which deteriorates into fighting and bitterness, the ceremony aboard the Cherry Blossom is a bittersweet opportunity for victims to say goodbye to those who were lost in the disaster, as the living commune with the dead while giving thanks for their new families.54 By contrast, the characters in “To the Next Spring—Obon” find no comfort in a national identity, and their regional identity is turned against them in the form of discrimination. In fiction about the nuclear accident, the local community is shattered, and, given the betrayal by the national government, national identity is cold comfort. Ikezawa’s community decides collectively on repatriation, and

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Voices from the Debris55

the reconstruction process happens through their own will and design. This contrasts with communities that had to fight to design their own reconstruction plans as opposed to following ones laid out by the government. It is also a sharp contrast to those victims who were forced to return to formerly contaminated areas because evacuation orders were lifted and compensation payments ended despite continued fears of radiation. Unlike the victims in The Two-Headed Boat, the nuclear victims who can return home often do so reluctantly and with great anxiety. Although Ikezawa’s story is primarily about the earthquake and tsunami victims, he does acknowledge the problems of the nuclear disaster in two scenes: a dream-like reference to the Soma Nomaoi medieval horse festival that has been held in Fukushima prefecture since the tenth century, and a scene with a Dr. Doolittle–type veterinarian, who mentions going south to a place where the “sky fell” due to an explosion (Ikezawa 2013, 92). PostFukushima accident, the former reference reminds the reader that, due to forced evacuations in towns like Minamisoma, as of summer 2016 many residents of the exclusion area were still refugees.55 The latter reference recalls the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, the acknowledgment of the nuclear disaster in The Two-Headed Boat remains just that, an acknowledgment; it never alters the course of the main story line. Overall, Ikezawa’s vision for a post-disaster community is positive. He describes the creation of solidarity across previously broken lines—namely, via outreach to those who were on the margins of society before the disaster. As already mentioned, it is not only the disaster victims who find a home aboard the Cherry Blossom, but those who have felt socially isolated in contemporary Japanese society. Ikezawa does not depict Azuma’s discourse of rupture, but his outcasts are characters familiar from other stories like Ms. Sato, Marguerite, Ms. Nishino, and the children in “Lulu.” Ikezawa’s vision stands in contrast to works of fiction that cannot or do not offer such hope or community. The loss of community in post-3/11 Japan was felt acutely in areas decimated by the earthquake and tsunami, but those towns can and may rebuild. Such an option may never be available for those who suffered forced relocation after the nuclear disaster, as seen in Shigematsu’s “To the Next Spring—Obon.” But even in Fukushima fiction, Ikezawa’s story is romanticized. Other works paint a picture of locals struggling with life in the shelters: victims stuck in temporary housing who fall prey to drinking

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and gambling due to the lack of employment, others who are traumatized by the memory of the tsunami, and those who return (U-turners) only to feel alienated from their former communities. In addition, the stories expose the underside of life in the disaster area when relief supplies fail to arrive, donations are used as kickbacks, and fraud plagues the renovation process. Gen’yū Sōkyū goes so far as to have one of his characters compare temporary housing to an internment camp (Gen’yū 2013d, 125). Yet, The Two-Headed Boat offers a necessary hope in an otherwise bleak landscape. Indeed, some towns have rebuilt, and this possibility does exist for tsunami and earthquake-ravaged zones. Circling Back The concentric-circle model of cultural trauma allows us to see a variety of victims, both those affected by the disaster and those shut out by contemporary Japanese society. This chapter has considered the position of immediate victims; the insiders-outsiders who visit the disaster area; and those in the largest of circles, who are only tangentially connected to the disaster. While the innermost circle of stories works to keep readers in the space and crisis of the disaster, stories further out build connections to outsiders and encompass a wider scope of Japanese society, addressing a range of contemporary problems. In general, stories farther from the epicenter provide more closure, some seeking to move readers past trauma to recovery. But we can also question that closure as false hope. I have pointed out that this concentric circle model is faulty in that it ignores the actual fallout patterns of radiation that are “uneven and patchy.” Proximity to the disaster zone does affect the retelling of the events, but the nature of those events themselves—the earthquake and tsunami versus the nuclear accident—strongly influence the narrative possibilities. Those stories about the nuclear accident cannot offer the hope of rebuilding or the comfort of community (local or national) found in tsunami or earthquake fiction. In Fukushima fiction, we see both the consensus-building and polarizing narratives of cultural trauma that reflect the realities of life post-­ disaster and impact the imaginative retellings of it.

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Chapter 2

Tohoku on the Margins Furukawa Hideo’s Horses

F

urukawa Hideo’s groundbreaking novel Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (Umatachi yo, sore de mo hikari wa muku de, 2011; hereafter Horses) is one of the earliest and most experimental works of Fukushima fiction.1 The novel expands the scope beyond individual victims encompassing the Tohoku region as a whole, with special emphasis on the three prefectures of Japan’s northeast coast that bore the brunt of the 3/11 disaster—Fukushima, Iwate, and Miyagi. Furukawa’s novel is based on a trip to the affected area he took within a month of the disaster, but Horses is not simply a journalistic account of this trip. Rather, Furukawa infuses the text with characters and passages from The Holy Family (Seikazoku, 2008), his fictional chronicle of another road trip through Tohoku, and it is only by reading The Holy Family as a subtext that Horses acquires its full rhetorical power. A combination of these two narratives, Horses traverses the concentric circles of the 3/11 disaster zone as it follows Furukawa’s road trip but simultaneously spirals back through Tohoku’s history. The novel traces this history from the construction of medieval castles to nuclear power plants, specifically the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) that provided electricity for Tokyo, the capital city located some 160 miles away. Furukawa mixes fact and fiction in a literary tour de force that reveals Tohoku’s status as an “internal colony” (naikokuteki shokuminchi) of Japan with a long-standing tributary relationship to the nation. This status was shockingly revealed when the disaster stripped away the prosperity of nuclear subsidies to reveal a region teetering on the brink of survival. When reading Horses it is important to remember that it was 57 This content downloaded from 75.69.46.187 on Mon, 01 May 2023 02:33:57 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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among the earliest works of Fukushima fiction. Furukawa began writing in early April and finished before the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), who owns the NPP, admitted to the meltdowns in mid-May (Furukawa and Shigematsu 2012, 187).2 The novel stands out as a rejection of the national disaster narratives that drove the slogan “Fight on Japan!” (Gambarō Nippon!). Such slogans were ubiquitous in the days and months after the disaster, and they rallied the nation around a collective victim identity. As time passed, these slogans morphed into “Fight on Tohoku!” (Gambarō Tōhoku!) or “Fight on Fukushima!” (Gambarō Fukushima!), indicating that the disaster was shifting away from national concerns. Prime Minister Abe Shinzō officially confirmed the regionalization of the disaster in his remarks to the International Olympic Committee in September 2013, when he assured them that the disaster “has never done and will never do any damage to Tokyo” (“Presentation by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the 125th Session of the International Olympic Committee (IOC)” 2013). Although other writers centered their stories on victims in the disaster zone, Horses uses its regional focus on Tohoku to question the characterization of 3/11 as a national disaster and reveal the fault lines in the national landscape. Furukawa is not in any way suggesting that the nation should turn a blind eye to the disaster or that national support for Tohoku would be misplaced. Rather, Horses shows how the 3/11 disaster revealed the region’s long history of suffering for the nation. In this case, Tohoku, specifically Fukushima prefecture, bore the brunt of the nuclear meltdowns for a power plant that sent all of its electricity to Tokyo. But Furukawa shows how Tohoku’s sacrifices stretch back long before the Fukushima accident and the construction of nuclear power plants; the region has been excluded from national narratives dating to the formation of Japan itself. Writing in April to early May, Furukawa was one of the few who questioned the hollowness of the national narrative and pointed out the true cost of the 3/11 disaster. Although Kawakami Hiromi’s short story “God Bless You, 2011” (Kamisama 2011) was published one month earlier, it does not provide this regionally based focus or critique when addressing the problem of radiation. This chapter seeks to restore the power of Horses’ critique, a power that may have diminished in the intervening years since 2011 as the national dialogue and interests have shifted. I examine Furukawa’s novel as a literary experiment in both

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Tohoku on the Margins59

disaster and regional fiction. He plays with literary form and genre, moving between fiction and nonfiction, autobiography and mythic tales, real and imagined narrators, all the while pushing the boundaries of literature to create a new type of regional disaster fiction. I characterize Horses as regional fiction, meaning a fiction that intentionally emphasizes its locality and resists being subsumed by national narratives. In this case, those narratives are the very ones that excluded Tohoku. Horses combines history and legend to both embrace and write against the differences (regional, ethnic, and cultural) that have marked Tohoku off from the nation. In the process, Furukawa presents not only a record of the 3/11 disaster, but an alternate history for this region that has long been excluded from other narratives. My analysis of the novel is in dialogue with the scholarship on Tohoku (Tōhokugaku), but also with minority fiction such as the work of Naka­gami Kenji. Throughout this book, I call upon a disaster fiction and literature ranging from 9/11 to the atomic bombs. For Horses, I look to Hurricane Katrina to better explore the linkages connecting the colonial status of Fukushima, the marginality of Tohoku’s culture and people, and Furukawa’s alternate history. Horses: An Experiment in Disaster Fiction Furukawa traveled to the affected area within a month of the March 2011 disaster in a rental car with three people from the publishing firm of Shinchōsha. He is one of many writers and filmmakers who entered Fukushima prefecture in the wake of the disaster, and like these others Horses features a description of the journey itself written in a semiautobiographical style that records both the destruction and the observer’s own psychological reaction to the disaster.3 On the surface, the novel is about Furukawa’s trip to the disaster area, the various things he sees, and the places he goes. It is also about his reaction to the disaster as an author and about the impact it had on his writing. But Horses is also a fictional tale that harks back to an earlier Furukawa novel, The Holy Family, and specifically to one of its main characters, Gyūichirō, a time traveler of sorts. Gyūichirō inexplicably appears in Horses, engages the Furukawa narrator in conversation, and then takes over the narration to tell the story of the feudal samurai lords of the Sōma domain (han) and their seven-hundredyear history from the time before modern Japan was formed. Sōma is an area in current-day Fukushima prefecture, the southern bor-

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der of which is close to the exclusion zone for radioactive exposure from the damaged nuclear power plant. In his narrative, Gyūichirō cites historical figures and events mainly from Japan’s Warring States era (mid-fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century), with dates for battles and other disasters such as earthquakes, famines, and epidemics.4 He tells his story primarily through the history of the native horses that lived in that area and survived warfare and other disasters. Gyūichirō passes the storytelling back to the narrator at the point when his history of building in Tohoku, up to then mostly castles and fortifications, reaches the construction of the nuclear plant in Fukushima prefecture in 1970 (Furukawa 2011, 98–99). Gyūichirō time travels through feudal Sōma history, and his last such trip leaves him in present-day, post-3/11 Fukushima prefecture, where he frees a descendant of the native Sōma horses whose history he has just recounted, and that has been left behind in the rush to evacuate after the 3/11 disaster (Furukawa 2011, 129). The novel ends with a description of this horse wandering around the nuclear exclusion zone. Within the larger field of Fukushima fiction, Horses stands out for its experimental nature. Much like 9/11 literature in the United States, the canon of Fukushima fiction is dominated by realist narratives that aim to document the disaster. Works such as Shigematsu Kiyoshi’s Map of Hope: A Tale That Starts with 3/11 (Kibō no chizu: 3.11 kara hajimaru monogatari, 2012) have been labeled “documentary novels,” because although the primary characters are fictional, the places they go and people they meet in the disaster area are real (Shigematsu 2012a).5 Furukawa himself wrote a more standard narrative of a visit to the disaster area in his short story “Sixteen Years Later, In the Same Place” (Jyūrokunengo ni tomaru, 2012) for the charity volume March Was Made of Yarn (Furukawa 2012). In this short piece, the narrator talks about a May 2011 visit to his hometown in the disaster area. The story reads as a thinly veiled autobiography of the Furukawa family. The title draws its meaning from the sixteen years that have passed since the narrator’s wedding, and the story is structured around his conversations with his family. Time is marked by events related to the disaster—TEPCO’s admission of the meltdowns (May 15, 24), the banning of Fukushima prefecture’s shiitake mushrooms grown in open air, the suicide of a family friend in late March—and the narrative style is traditional and straightforward. It does not interfere with the discussion of the effects of the

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Tohoku on the Margins61

nuclear disaster on farming families (like Furukawa’s) and their struggles to move forward with their lives and livelihoods. Horses is a radical departure from this more standard, realistic recounting and represents a clear narrative choice on Furukawa’s part. The novel functions on a number of levels: it is simultaneously a record of a trip to the disaster area, a narrative of self-reflection, a mythical history of Tohoku, and a metacommentary on writing disaster fiction. The work is unique within the canon of Fukushima fiction; nothing even approaches its deeply experimental nature. Horses is not broken up by chapters; neither does it predictably bounce back and forth between the main plotlines as other fictional works often do. It defies standard conventions of genre, moving between documentary and purely fictional modes. The choppy, fragmented sentences, nonstandard narrative modes, and unexpected shifts between characters and story lines in Horses makes for a daunting reading experience that is a testament to Furukawa’s struggle to shape the disaster, and his experience of it, into a literary work. Form is important when considering how Furukawa was able to craft his history of Tohoku out of a work that started as a journalistic record of a trip to the disaster area. Horses is self-consciously literary. Like many other authors, Furukawa felt the “paucity” of language when faced with the reality of the disaster (Furukawa 2016b, 60). On the textual level, he pays attention to words and place-names, fleshing out their full meaning: “in Sōma there are horses—the placename holds horses within it: Sō points to a long history, to physiognomy, and ma is the character for horse. There are in fact horses there” (Furukawa 2016b, 16).6 In the case of Sōma, this linguistic play is meant to reveal a history of horses that is vital to his novel and to the retelling of Tohoku’s own story. Furukawa also switches genres: at one point, he uses poetry to write of his experience in New York City when visiting Ground Zero the day after Osama bin Laden was killed by the United States (Furukawa 2011, 107–109). Narratively, he often backtracks and resists the forward progression of time essential to the retelling of the road trip. As disaster fiction, Horses recalls Don DeLillo’s Falling Man or East German writer Christa Wolf’s Accident: A Day’s News.7 DeLillo’s novel has a similarly fragmented structure; he eschews standard narrative methods, and his dispersed, indeterminate prose represents the disjointedness of the experience of 9/11.8 For Furukawa, the sense of disjointedness often rises out of the experience of being

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caught between the fictional recounting of The Holy Family and the reality of the 2011 disaster. The work opens with a scene of the two brothers from The Holy Family but switches topic to the atlas the Furukawa narrator consults in order to follow the rental car’s route to the disaster area in Tohoku. I closed the atlas. The bound atlas closed with a slap. Or with a clip. Like the flapping of some great bird’s wings. The UFO Friendship Center might be within the Fukushima city limits, or maybe it was Kawamata city, or maybe some other city. I didn’t bother to check. Either way it was north of Nihonmatsu, and then east. East, then north. I won’t forget the scene I just recalled. I am unable to forget it. An older and younger brother. The younger replies, “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Once the melody starts in your head it won’t stop. I hear it now. Maybe I’ll be hearing it forever. “Forever.” This is a scene from a novel. I’m the author of that novel. The place that is north and east is Tohoku. That voice again. It echoes through the song, overlapping with the melody. It commands me: “Go there.”9

The narrative shifts from the atlas and its geographical locators back to the fictional brothers and the scene that keeps replaying in the narrator’s mind. The Holy Family then leads back to the directions on the map and the narrator’s original purpose in seeking out the disaster area in Tohoku. Just as in Wolf’s novel, the stream-ofconsciousness, first-person narrative in Horses moves seamlessly between story lines. In Horses, it oscillates between fiction and fact, text and reality, held together only by the presence of the Furukawa narrator. This scene also showcases the narrator’s preternaturally heightened sense of sound—from the atlas closing to the Beatles to the unnamed voice—an attention to both real and fictional stimuli. At times the orality of the text pushes the limits of the written word.10 These techniques and the metacommentary on writing draw attention away from the story to the form itself, as the novel engages in authorial commentary on the creative process. The narrator keeps insisting that he is not writing and cannot write a novel (Furukawa 2016b, 50, 29). He says that writing fiction was not an option for him because it required a degree of planning that was not possi-

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Tohoku on the Margins63

ble amid the chaos of the disaster’s aftermath (Furukawa 2016b, 7). Horses is certainly a chaotic reading experience, but this is the result of an intentional stylistic choice. Horses posed challenges for Furukawa not just in terms of literary form but also because he is a native of Fukushima prefecture, the home of the stricken NPP. Although I am not privileging biographical details of the authors of Fukushima fiction, in Furukawa’s case his personal connection to Fukushima is a prominent theme in the novel. Furukawa can call up his Fukushima accent and pass as a local, but since he moved away many years ago, he no longer considers himself a native. In fact, he has a strong resistance to being labeled a Fukushima writer. He is unable to ethically represent himself as a Fukushima writer, even though post-3/11 he has been tagged as such.11 When the disaster struck, he was in Kyoto, and the narrator in Horses seems to suffer from survivor’s guilt, continually questioning why he was not among the victims (Furukawa 2016b, 22–23). The narrator feels the need to enter the disaster zone, but when he does, it is as an outsider, something the reader is continually reminded of by the travel on highways and the license plates on the rental car that mark Furukawa and his companions as being from the greater Tokyo area and well outside Tohoku itself. This border crossing from the outside in reminds the reader of Tohoku’s demarcation from the nation. Once in the disaster zone, Furukawa’s sense of himself as a trespasser is heightened, especially when he comments on his presence in the massive debris fields: “there was no way but to feel that that is a violation” (Furukawa 2016b, 62). Critic Kawamura Minato criticized Furukawa for trespassing, calling him a “useless observer” and a “rubbernecker,” because Furukawa neither helped with the cleanup nor benefited society by his actions (Kawa­ mura 2013, 34–35). The idea of trespassing is a trope of Fukushima fiction and film; Furukawa was not alone in making such a trip; many writers and filmmakers traveled to the area to garner material for their artistic works without ever picking up a shovel or distributing relief goods.12 Both Furukawa and his narrator in Horses are very self-­ conscious about this trespassing and about any type of victim identification. Yet, in some ways Furukawa is akin to the insiders-­ outsiders I described in chapter 1, who identify as victims even though they are neither from nor were in the affected area when the disaster struck. Furukawa and fellow writer Shigematsu Kiyoshi

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talked about the right of the author to tell the story as something separate from the right of the victim. Furukawa had a hard time acknowledging his right as author, because he felt the victims should speak first. He carefully avoided using a first-person voice that could be construed as that of a disaster victim telling his personal story (ichininshō no “hisaisha no monogatari”). Furukawa was assiduous in his efforts to separate his narrative voice from those of the victims, to the point where he did not visit his family home in the disaster area until he had finished writing Horses (Furukawa and Shigematsu 2012, 180). Yet in a way Furukawa seeks to become a genuine victim in Horses; in one scene, the unnamed voice heard by the Furukawa narrator tells him to go to the exclusion zone: “ ‘Go.’ There was the voice. ‘You must go there. Inside the concentric circles’ ” (Furukawa 2016b, 25). The meaning of this command is more explicit a couple of pages later: “The voice again. ‘Go! Expose yourself to the radiation (hibaku shiro)!’ ” (Furukawa 2011, 27). The Furukawa narrator admits his suicidal wish, but this command for the narrator to irradiate himself and essentially become a nuclear victim goes well beyond any victim identification in Fukushima fiction. Other authors include characters who put themselves at risk by knowingly entering the exclusion zone or ignoring the danger of entering irradiated areas. But the Furukawa narrator’s recklessness verges on a voyeurism that makes light of a dire situation, namely of the many who did not choose to be in the area when the plant melted down yet were unwillingly and unknowingly exposed to radiation. Furukawa passionately resisted being labeled a Fukushima writer, yet his narrative alter ego seeks not only to become a disaster victim, but a nuclear victim at that. The term Furukawa uses for radiation exposure, hibaku, recalls the one that was used for the victims of the atomic bombs, known as hibakusha.13 As I explain in the next chapter, to apply the term hibakusha to the 2011 disaster victims is controversial, and this term was not and is still not widely or lightly used in Japan by the media or the average citizen.14 It is possible to read the desire of the Furukawa narrator to irradiate himself as a way for Furukawa the author to bring attention to the issue of radiation contamination at this very early stage in the unfolding of the disaster. Furukawa does not label the disaster victims as hibakusha, but his text points to that controversial designation as a means to emphasize the high price Tohoku victims paid for Tokyo’s electricity.

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Mixing Reality and Fiction Furukawa turned to fiction in order to create a novel out of his journalistic account of the road trip (a non-novel). His strategy for dealing with the overwhelming realism of the material from the disaster zone was to infuse Horses with scenes and characters from his “meganovel” The Holy Family (Furukawa 2008).15 This 1,300-plus-page novel is about the Inuzuka (dog mound) family— Gyūichirō (elder brother), Yōjirō (younger brother), and Kanaria (younger sister)— and in it the two brothers run from the law as they traverse the six prefectures of Tohoku. Furukawa included scenes from The Holy Family in order to replicate the blurry boundary between the real and the fictional that he experienced while watching TV coverage of the disaster; for many the magnitude and horror of 3/11 made it seem unreal.16 Critic Jinno Toshifumi praised Furukawa’s experiment— turning a journalistic piece into a novel—as some of the best of Fukushima fiction (Jinno 2011, 115).17 But not everyone was in agreement. Kawamura Minato had a hard time making sense of the work. He asks: “Is it a novel or a tale? Or is this the daydream of a writer who went to the site of the nuclear tragedy, and since his mind was ravaged by radiation, he created this absurd fictional space confused by the mixing of the imaginary and the real?” (Kawamura 2013, 36). Kawamura is correct in saying that the novel is hard to follow or to categorize. Horses is confusing, but by design. This mixing is intentional and there is method to Furukawa’s madness. The tension between fiction and nonfiction, the imaginary and the real, is what binds together and drives the novel. The reader is not meant to be able to parse the work easily. The confusion in Horses replicates the disorientation of the early days of the disaster. However, the Furukawa narrator does provide some signposts: the world of the documentary or journalistic is marked as the “real”; the narrator is supposed to be a stand-in for Furukawa himself; and the journey is based on his actual trip with the people from Shinchōsha. The Furukawa narrator attempts to document his journey in a nonfictional or journalistic style. The sights the narrator sees in the disaster zone may exceed his ability to comprehend or describe, but he faithfully documents the trip itself, at times in exacting detail. Throughout the book, he constantly refers to an atlas (even providing the scale of the map) and gives detailed descriptions of the towns through which the group travels and the national and prefectural highways on

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which they drive, as if the reader could follow along with a map of her own and chart their progress through the disaster area. He also takes care to cite dates and times for certain events, such as the group’s arrival in one of the disaster areas. The reader learns of food and supply shortages at local convenience stores, of earthquake and tsunami damage, and of exclusion zones the team crosses into or are blocked from entering. The reader also trusts that the sights the narrator describes in the various disaster areas are verifiable. The Furukawa narrator of Horses continually asserts that what he is writing is the “real thing” (honmono), not “fabrications” (uso; Furukawa 2011, 63). At multiple places in the text he insists he is not writing a novel because he cannot write a novel (Furukawa 2011, 48). Nevertheless, the route traveled by the Furukawa team is similar to that taken by the brothers in The Holy Family, except for the fact that the nuclear power plant is never mentioned in the earlier work (Furukawa 2016b, 33; Jinno 2011, 113). The Furukawa narrator consciously evokes this other journey in the act of documenting his own trip; characters and scenes from The Holy Family constantly intrude upon, undermine, and contend with Furukawa’s reportage. This literal intrusion into the narrator’s reality throws into question both Horses’ validity and the narrator’s confidence in his ability to document his own journey. The narrator insists on verisimilitude (honmono), yet his desire for and ability to write the real is tested when he sees Gyūichirō, the older Inuzuka brother, in the backseat of the rental car. I was the last into the small rental car with the Kashiwa plates. Young S was already in the driver’s seat with his hands on the wheel. Ms. S was in the passenger seat punching an address into the car navigation screen. Y was in the backseat. And there he was tightly squeezed into that space where one expects the armrest. I was the last one to get into the car. It was him. Write this down! I must commit this to writing. Inuzuka Gyūichirō was there. A fifth passenger. The fifth person in our party. The oldest brother of The Holy Family, the one with “dog” and “cow” in his name, was in the car with us. This has to be written down! (Furukawa 2016b, 66–67)18

This is not the car that the two brothers stole in a scene from The Holy Family, but the one rented by Shinchōsha. Yet the narrator

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slips from reality into the fictional world of his imagination, or more accurately, the fictional character Gyūichirō breaks into the reality of the travelogue. In the passage above, and throughout the novel, it is unclear who is commanding the Furukawa narrator to write or act. Here, it appears that the narrator’s mind is warring with itself, trying to reconcile the appearance of Gyūichirō with the reality of the rental car. At other moments, the voice seems to belong to Gyūichirō, as he calls the narrator back to Tohoku. Horses features long conversations between the narrator and Gyūichirō as they travel through the disaster landscape. The story Gyūichirō tells contends with the Furukawa narrator’s 3/11 travelogue for the reader’s emotional investment and continually pulls the narrator/author Furukawa simultaneously away from and closer to the disaster he has set out to see and to speak of. The delineation between the two narratives, or between the real and the imaginary, is not always clear, nor is it meant to be. Horses opens with the aforementioned scene from The Holy Family, a seemingly nonsensical and irrelevant conversation between the two brothers, in which the older brother asks the younger if he were in a UFO that had the equivalent of a car stereo, and he could hear one Beatles song, which one would it be? The younger brother answers Strawberry Fields Forever, not for any specific reason, but because he could not think of anything else. Yet there is a significance to this song. In opening Horses in this way, Furukawa immediately and intentionally introduces the reader to a dream landscape where, in the words of the Beatles, “nothing is real.” This opening sets the stage for the intrusion of the fictional/imaginary and also serves to interject The Holy Family into Furukawa’s journalistic record of 3/11. The mechanism is similar to the one used in the scene when Gyūichirō appears in the rental car; it is not clear to the reader how these conversations from The Holy Family fit into Horses until the narrator sees Gyūichirō there. The narrator resists the urge to commit this vision to paper, for if he does, then his writing will turn irrevocably into a novel, into fiction: “But if I write that, I’ll end up with a novel. This sentence will turn into a novel” (Shikashi sonna koto kaite shimattara shōsetsu da. Kono bunshō ga shōsetsu ni natte shimau; Furukawa 2011, 62–63). This fictionalization is something the Furukawa narrator has been trying desperately to avoid. If the appearance of Gyūichirō creates problems for Furukawa, why include him in the story at all? Why would Furukawa complicate his own writing in this way?

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Horses: A Story of Tohoku Furukawa includes Gyūichirō because ultimately Horses is not just a journalistic record of 3/11. Rather, it is a story of Tohoku including and preceding the 2011 disaster. Gyūichirō allows Furukawa to experiment with storytelling form, and he is the main vehicle through which Furukawa creates and disseminates his history of Tohoku. Although Gyūichirō is a fictional character, his retelling of Tohoku’s history becomes part of the nonfictional record of the disaster. Before examining Furukawa’s Tohoku, it is necessary to review the standard history and image of Tohoku in Japan. Fukushima, and by extension Tohoku, has occupied a place in the national imaginary as “Japan’s timeless heartland and producer of traditional foodstuffs” (Broderick and Jacobs 2015, 226). This idea permeates post3/11 literary and filmic texts in the form of pastoral nostalgia. In his documentary film No Man’s Zone (Mujin chitai, 2011), Fujiwara Toshi includes beautiful landscape shots of the verdant rural spaces of Iitate, a town spared the ravages of the earthquake and tsunami but evacuated for extremely high levels of radiation. For him, this space represents community and a traditional way of life untouched by modernization. It also represents the core identity of Japan as a nation of farmers that, up to the disaster, had continued to exist only in Tohoku. Author Taguchi Randy echoes this sentiment in her story “Into the Zone II” (Zōn ni te II, 2012) when her protagonist comments on the vast, verdant spaces of Tohoku that are easy on the eyes of Tokyo city dwellers (Taguchi 2013c, 75).19 Tohoku is one of the nation’s less developed areas that came to symbolize the “spaces of tradition” and sites of “ethnic or cultural essence” (Hoyt Long 2011, 226–227n56). The idea of developing Tohoku as a “place of natural beauty, historical sites, and hot springs” dates back to the pre–World War II era when it was seen as a means of rescuing an economically depressed region. The National Railways’ campaigns later capitalized on this image of historical and pastoral beauty (Hoyt Long 2011, 94). However, the image of Tohoku as the “timeless heartland” or “place of natural beauty” can also be read negatively as rural, backward, and poor. Indeed, the positive image of Tohoku competes with another far more negative one of the region as an “internal colony” (naikokuteki shokuminchi) of Japan. In the context of the

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Fukushima disaster, intellectual historian Kawanishi Hidemichi adapts that label by identifying the region as Japan’s “nuclear power colony” (Hopson 2013). This idea of internal colony predates the Fukushima disaster and the building of nuclear power plants in the 1960s–1970s, however, and critics have discussed Tohoku’s longstanding tributary relationship to the nation, specifically to the capital of Tokyo (Oguma 2011; Tetsuya Takahashi 2014; Jinno 2011; Akasaka, Oguma, and Yamauchi 2011). In Horses, Furukawa dates this history back to the early formation of Japan, but it is more commonly discussed as a function of the national modernization campaigns of the late 1800s (Hoyt Long 2011, 87–92). The region was said to pay tribute to Tokyo in soldiers, prostitutes, and rice, and the image of Tohoku as underdeveloped and backward was dominant by the 1920s (Akasaka, Oguma, and Yamauchi 2011, 15; Hoyt Long 2011, 88). Hoyt Long argues that Tohoku has a history of being regarded as a “qualitatively different cast than other subnational spaces,” and Tohoku’s people have been denigrated as some of the least culturally developed in the Japanese empire (Hoyt Long 2011, 30, 92–93). Marked by its poverty, the region has suffered its ups and downs in terms of producing needed supplies for the nation. In the postwar period, after Japan lost its external colonies Korea and Taiwan, it turned to Tohoku as the “nation’s rice production center,” although the cool climate of Japan’s northeast was not best suited to raising that crop (Oguma 2011).20 Rice prices historically fluctuated with gluts to the market and poor summer crops, leaving Tohoku locals desperate enough to sell their daughters into prostitution. The Jōban coal fields in eastern Fukushima declined after a peak in the early 1950s and closed in the 1970s (Oguma 2011). The area also produced cheap labor for the auto and electrical industries during the postwar economic boom (Oguma 2011). Tohoku already had a history of producing hydroelectric power for the capital with “the majority of electricity produced by Tohoku’s eleven power plants” flowing to Tokyo (Hopson 2013; Oguma 2011). In other words, the building of nuclear power plants in Tohoku was only the latest form of resource extraction. The poverty of the area left it vulnerable to the enticement of economic aid associated with nuclear power plants (government subsidies, grants, tax revenue, and jobs). As Daniel Aldrich has demonstrated in Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West, the towns that end up with

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nuclear power plants are those that do not have the cultural, social, or economic capital to resist them (Aldrich 2010). These communities are struggling with shifting populations, weak local bonds, and atomized societies—­conditions that can be observed in Fukushima itself. Takahashi Tetsuya criticized the nuclear power industry in Japan as a “sacrificial system” in which “the benefits accruing to some parties are made possible at the expense of others’ lives.” In the case of nuclear power, that sacrifice “entails serious human rights violations.” Towns like those in Fukushima that took on NPPs are valuable only because they are “expendable” (Takahashi Tetsuya 2014). The idea of expendability also lends itself to the disposable ecosystems of slow violence and their “disposable people,” a term that encompasses not only the nuclear gypsies who clean the plants, but the residents of the towns where the NPPs are sited.21 Classifying Tohoku as an internal colony puts it in a category with Okinawa and Hokkaido, areas that were annexed by Japan in the drive to modernize in the late 1800s and that have since been exploited to serve the needs of the nation. Okinawa bears that burden by housing a disproportionate percentage of the US military presence.22 Michele Mason argues that Hokkaido was Japan’s first colony, seen as a limitless source of “untapped resources awaiting Japanese ingenuity and civilization” rather than as a home for its native Ainu residents (Mason 2012, 34).23 Tohoku’s most recent burden has been the siting of nuclear power plants. Takahashi recognizes this by linking Okinawa and Tohoku as colonies in his book The Sacrificial System: Fukushima Okinawa (Gisei no shisutemu: Fukushima Okinawa, 2012).24 Author and political activist Medoruma Shun assailed the prime minister for ignoring the needs of places like Fukushima, drawing an analogy to the central government’s disregard for his native Okinawa: Okinawa is geographically and mentally faraway, so they can do what they want. Fukushima is the same. Four years have passed since the nuclear accident, but there are still people forcibly displaced in temporary housing. If Prime Minister Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide, and the like wanted to hear these small voices they could, but they don’t even try. If they stopped belittling Fukushima’s and Okinawa’s problems as local, and instead saw them as their problems and Japan’s problems, they would immedi-

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ately sense the danger in these situations. They should have the imagination to do this. (Mishina 2015)25

This characterization of Tohoku as a colony filters into Fukushima fiction in works like Tawada Yōko’s The Lantern Bearer (Kentōshi, 2014), a futuristic story in which she upends the power relations by depicting those areas in Japan that were formerly peripheral or even “colonial”—Tohoku, Okinawa, and Hokkaido—as thriving economically, while cities like Tokyo have become backwaters (Tawada 2014, 40). In this story the former colonies enforce strict immigration policies limiting the ability of Tokyo residents to relocate there.26 The framing of Tohoku as an internal colony allows us to understand the ease with which 3/11 was turned from a national into a regional disaster. As mentioned previously, initially the country rallied in support of the victims of 3/11, and on some level even identified as victims themselves, if only for purposes of solidarity. However, as the government began to move forward with its national agenda to host the 2020 Olympic Games and restart nuclear power plants, the disaster of 3/11—especially the nuclear disaster—had to be relegated to Tohoku in order to demonstrate that it would not threaten Tokyo and the Olympic events. Rather than being a problem of the nation, the disaster became a problem for northeastern Japan. This regionalization was not just a discursive move but one with real consequences for the region as it suffered government neglect.27 When looking for historical comparisons to 3/11 as a means of understanding this regionalization, an obvious choice might seem to be the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake in the Kobe area of Japan. Despite the severity of the earthquake, that disaster never threatened the nation or created a shared sense of victimhood in all Japanese citizens.28 The regional nature of the 1995 earthquake can be partially written off to the long-held rivalry between eastern (Kantō) and western (Kansai) Japan, but those differences do not corollate to the colonial relationship that exists between Tokyo and Tohoku.29 (The atomic bombs are another possible reference point for Fukushima, but the comparison to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is complicated and controversial, as I discuss in the next chapter.) Hurricane Katrina and the discourse that accompanied it provide a framework for understanding the regional quality of the 3/11 disaster. Of course, there are many important differences between

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Katrina and 3/11. Whereas 3/11 started out as a national disaster, Katrina was only ever a regional one. Unlike 9/11, where we were all “New Yorkers,” Katrina never impelled the American public to feel that they were all “New Orleanians.” In contrast, the 3/11 disaster did initially create a national consciousness, even if it was primarily due to the proximity of the disaster to the capital of Tokyo. Another important distinction when comparing these disasters involves the racial identity of the victims in New Orleans. Katrina was a disaster of racial proportions that had no corollary in the public discussion of 3/11 in Japan. Even so, the people of Tohoku have been dogged by the stereotype that they are of a lesser ethnic or racial identity, one that marks them as some of the least culturally developed people in Japan. Last, the failures of Katrina came to haunt the Bush administration in ways that Fukushima has not for Prime Minister Abe or the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Nevertheless, both 3/11 and Hurricane Katrina were manmade disasters that ensued from natural disasters, revealing the vulnerabilities of the regions’ populations and the true place of these regions within the national discourse and power structure. Akasaka Norio, folklorist and critic, remarked that the 3/11 disaster washed away the “veneer of prosperity,” to reveal the continuing colonization of Tohoku and to strengthen the ancient Shirakawa border that had marked it as a northern territory separate from the state (Hopson 2013). The “veneer of prosperity” had been most recently built from nuclear subsidies that flowed into local budgets. In the case of Katrina, the unmasking of economic inequality was stark and shocking; the most vulnerable segments of society were unable to leave the city and suffered inhumane conditions in the aftermath of the hurricane as they waited in vain for national assistance. Both Katrina and 3/11 were economic disasters that revealed a lifestyle barely kept afloat. Much like Tohoku, and specifically Fukushima, “Louisiana has always been treated as a colony from which natural resources could be extracted.”30 For Fukushima, the resource—electricity—was generated by coal, hydroelectric, and later, nuclear power. For Louisiana, it is oil. Louisiana has a similar tributary relationship to the US government as Tohoku has with Tokyo; because Louisiana’s “offshore oil wealth is beyond the three-mile limit, revenue from oil and gas leasing has accrued to the federal government.”31 This situation left Louisiana to clean up the mess of industrialization and oil acci-

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dents, but “without the funds to restore the protective wetlands, which have been compromised by industrialization, and shore up the levees that everyone from the top down has always known were vulnerable.”32 Both New Orleans, Louisiana, and Fukushima prefecture have suffered environmental disasters that often disproportionally affect the economically disadvantaged.33 Although New Orleans is now a smaller version of its pre-Katrina state in terms of population, the land could potentially be reopened for construction if the levees were shored up, even this is a big “if” given the rising sea levels predicted by global warming (Martinez, Eads, and Groskopf 2015). For Fukushima, however, the area around the plant is likely fated to become a permanent nuclear waste site with no hope of future rehabitation, as has already been hinted at in Japanese government reports (“VOX POPULI: There’s No End to Fukushima Crisis while Melted Fuel Remains” 2016). Writing Tohoku’s Regionality as Alternate History Like Akasaka Norio, Furukawa sheds light on those aspects of Tohoku that were brought to the fore by the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident—namely, the region’s status as long neglected and ostracized by the nation. He uses the regionality of Tohoku to destabilize the dominant national order and undermine its hegemonic discourses—one of which is the myth of safety and the promise of prosperity that it was claimed would accompany nuclear power and guarantee Tohoku a better status within the nation.34 In Horses, Furukawa does not write 3/11 as a national disaster; rather, his version of history focuses on the local and emphasizes its break from the national. In doing this, he embraces the hybrid, backward nature of his characters and their outcast region. Furukawa does not shy away from the image of Fukushima as irradiated—the very real cause of its contemporary ostracization.35 Furukawa places the nuclear power plant and irradiated Fukushima at the center of his story about Tohoku and Japan. As an alternate or unofficial history of Tohoku, Horses casts doubt on Japan’s official history and recognizes yet rejects the image of Tohoku as a colony that exists only to serve the nation and, most recently, to deliver electricity to Tokyo. Furukawa forcefully rejects official history and how it is written primarily because it has excluded Tohoku. By way of historical texts, he references the Kojiki (early eighth century), the oldest extant work written in Japanese and a foundational text known for its mythologi-

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cal origin story of Japan. But he will not countenance another early history, the Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720), because he says it is too “structured” and “rationally systematized” (Furukawa 2016b, 64). This latter text is the first of Japan’s comprehensive state histories written in Classical Chinese. Given that the Nihon shoki includes numerous variants of Japan’s key myths, Furukawa might well be drawn to its possibilities for undermining the enshrined nature of the official origin story in the Kojiki. But its status as an “official history” based on Chinese models counts against this work. The Furukawa narrator in Horses argues that “when history is treated as ‘official national history,’ it is almost inevitable that you are going to get biases,” and that Japan’s love of its own history leads to the “power to suppress . . . inconvenient facts” (Furukawa 2016b, 78–79). One such “fact” for Furukawa is that the famous Japanese military rulers who united Japan, Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582) and Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598), were no more than murderers, and that Japan’s history is “nothing more than a history of killing people” (Furukawa 2016b, 78). Furukawa’s Gyūichirō is also a murderer, and although his crimes pale in comparison to those of these famous leaders—“his murderous past is deemed a match to the murderous past of the ‘nation’ ”—the nation’s own transgressions justify Gyūichirō’s criminal acts (Furukawa 2016b, 133). Furukawa’s comments about Japan are tantalizing, but he does not take them beyond the premodern era. Furukawa reaches back beyond the 2011 disaster to tell his story of Tohoku. He starts with the Kojiki and its mythical origin story that does not treat Tohoku as a part of Honshū, the main Japanese island, even though geographically it is (Furukawa 2011, 92). The historic exclusion of Tohoku is referenced in Horses when the Furukawa narrator visits the Shirakawa and Nakoso barrier gates, two important sites that served as official borders marking Tohoku off from Kantō, the part of Japan to the southwest that includes Tokyo. Both barriers were important sites for traditional Japanese waka poetry, but both also warned of entry into the noncivilized, barbaric north.36 Furukawa explains that the name “Nakoso” roughly translates as “Do not come here, you northern barbarians” (Furukawa 2016b, 121). These gates and the designation of Tohoku as barbaric date back over a thousand years to the formation of Japan by the Yamato royal court (Jinno 2011, 87).37 Gyūichirō and his younger brother in The Holy Family have a conversation about these borders, tracing them back to the divide between the Yamato and non-Yamato, with the under-

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standing that the Inuzuka family descended from the latter (Furukawa 2008, 1:603). Later in Horses, Furukawa retranslates the name Nakoso as a more direct rebuke: “You people from Tohoku, you indigenous peoples from up there, do not come down here to our Kanto” (Furukawa 2016b, 121; italics in original).38 This history of exclusion illuminates remarks like Akasaka Norio’s that, after the 3/11 disaster, a clear border was drawn at the Shirakawa Barrier and Tohoku was rediscovered as Michinoku, the remote frontier to the north (Hopson 2013). Furukawa and Akasaka emphasize the separation of Tohoku and reveal the hollowness of the slogans that framed 3/11 as a national disaster. Furukawa and Akasaka made their critiques at the point when the disaster was still being discussed in national terms and the full information about the extent of the nuclear disaster had not yet been revealed.39 Neither discounts the suffering caused by the earthquake and tsunami, but the nuclear disaster truly cleaved Tohoku from Japan and laid bare the dangerously high cost Tohoku has and will continue to pay as an internal colony. Because Tohoku’s history was excluded from Japan’s official rec­ords, Furukawa has to create a new method for recording it. He envisions his task as a process of writing in the blank spaces, the margins of the official historical texts. In those spaces, he says, “I cram my own notes, copious notes that are not yet articulated thoughts, and in the end weave a new book solely from the notes in the margins.” He calls this process a way of writing a “parallel history,” something he realized in The Holy Family, and his only means as a novelist to critique that “official history” (Furukawa 2016b, 79). Furukawa imagines his writing as existing in the literal margins of history, and Gyūichirō represents a marginalized people. Furukawa’s unofficial history begins with the oral histories of the Inuzuka clan in The Holy Family. The Inuzuka represent the “unofficial/folk history” (haishi) of Tohoku. Furukawa contrasts this to “official history” (seishi) as less of a written record than the memory of an oppressed people literally manifested in the Inuzuka brothers themselves (Jinno 2011, 90). Gyūichirō talks about his family’s embodiment of that history, namely the memory of those humans and animals who have been oppressed for hundreds of years by the central government (Jinno 2011, 91, 106). Gyūichirō embodies difference not only through this somatic memory but in the physicality of his own body and his name. His

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surname means “dog mound,” and the first Sino-Japanese character in his given name is “cow.” Furukawa draws attention to this animalhuman mix by commenting on the inclusion of animal names (cow and sheep) in Gyūichirō and Yōjirō’s names; he even recalls these characters when he sees and hears of abandoned animals in the disaster area (Furukawa 2016b, 32–33, 50–51). Physically, Gyūichirō is also marked as other; there is something strange about his tough, swollen hands. This characteristic ties him to the Shugendō mountain monks (yamabushi), who exist on the periphery of official Buddhism and are said to have subjected themselves to extreme martial arts training to mold their hands and feet into killing machines in order to serve as “invisible soldiers” for the warlords (Furukawa 2016b, 80–82). According to the Furukawa narrator, these monks adopted sons in order to hand down their secret traditions but had to resort to kidnappings to acquire heirs. One scene in Horses obliquely refers to such a kidnapping: it tells the story of a child who is spirited away on the three mountains of Dewa; the child was in a trance and met a karasu tengu, a crow-billed goblin (Furukawa 2016b, 85–86). While the narrative does not clearly identify this child as a young Gyūichirō, given the context it is reasonable to expect it is his story. The tradition of the monks intersects with local legends about human-beast encounters, and as the Furukawa narrator explains, the Sino-Japanese characters for yamabushi contain the character for “dog,” further linking the monks to the Inuzuka clan and their mongrel identity (Furukawa 2016b, 80). This idea of human-beast encounters and a hybridized identity is a central feature of the region’s legends, as demonstrated in Yanagita Kunio’s The Tales of Tōno (Tōno monogatari, 1910), a collection of oral narratives from Iwate prefecture in Tohoku, a land said to have been originally inhabited by the Ainu, whose presence remains inscribed in many place-names (Morse 2008, xxi). In The Holy Family, Gyūichirō expounds on the Inuzuka’s own hybrid identity. He talks about them as irui (a different, nonhuman, species) with wings, who can change form into these crow-billed tengu goblins (Jinno 2011, 92).40 The Inuzuka live on the margins (kyōkai) and are close to other animals: birds, dogs, horses, cats, and mythical creatures like the tengu. Furukawa splits the Sino-Japanese characters for tengu (heaven and dog) to emphasize the heavenly “dog” origins of the Inuzuka clan (Jinno 2011, 90–92). As further evidence of their difference and liminality, the Inuzuka are identified as ijin

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and izoku (a different race) in The Holy Family. Gyūichirō says, “We are ijin who crossed over,” a reference to the ghosts, goblins, mountain men, foreigners, and mysterious strangers, as well as tales of the divine kidnappings known as kamikakushi (Jinno 2011, 90–92).41 Furukawa is not the only person to identify the Tohoku people as descendants of a separate race or to describe them as racially or ethnically different (izoku) from the historical Yamato. Furukawa does not mention the reference to these northern barbarians in the Nihon shoki, but that historical text describes the inhabitants of the provinces of Mutsu and Dewa (which comprise modern-day Tohoku), as animal-like barbarians. There are long-debated theories that these people, the Emishi, were racially different as well, identifying them as the modern-day ancestors of the Ainu (Friday 1997, 3).42 The Nihon shoki describes them in animal/mythical terms: “In winter they dwell in holes, in summer they live in nests. Their clothing consists of furs. . . . In ascending mountains they are like flying birds; in going through the grass they are like fleet wolves.” The text also warns of “malignant deities” and “malicious demons who beset the highways and bar the roads” (Friday 1997, 3). These discriminatory ideas may seem ancient, but they have resurfaced in disparaging remarks about Tohoku’s “allegedly dodgy racial makeup” like those made by Suntory’s president Saji Keizo in the 1980s, when he balked at the suggestion of relocating the national capital to Tohoku (Hopson 2013). Saji’s comments connect directly back to Horses, for he characterized the people of Tohoku as the Kumaso, a reference to the ancient tribes who resided in the present-day Kyūshū area of Japan (Jameson 1988).43 This group is known from famous passages in the Kojiki where the Kumaso are vanquished by the Yamato (specifically by Yamato Takeru) in their campaigns to unite the nation. More recently, Tohoku has been marked as different by the presence of citizens repatriated from Manchuria at the end of World War II (Oguma). Those Japanese citizens who helped to colonize Japan’s overseas empire were simultaneously seen as representatives of Japan and as tainted by their time spent among a foreign population of lesser colonial subjects. It is perhaps not surprising that after the war the area they were repatriated to in Aomori, Rokkasho, was selected as a site for a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility. Furukawa himself framed Fukushima in clearly racial terms in a comment he made in which he compared the Fukushima disaster to

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an imaginary nuclear disaster in the American South where only black people were affected.44 The most obvious corollary is Hurricane Katrina, and Furukawa furthered the connection between African Americans and residents of Tohoku by suggesting that, because horses were brought to Japan as slaves (dorei), the people in Tohoku who cared for the horses were also treated like slaves. He added that, given the close quarters in which they live, there is very little difference between the animals and their keepers.45 Furukawa’s use of America’s racial history to discuss discrimination in Japan recalls the work of outcast author Nakagami Kenji, who wrote of difference by looking “laterally to imagine a series of structurally similar and racially based identities outside Japan” (­McKnight 2006, 151). In treating Tohoku as a marginalized area, Furukawa follows the lead of writers like Nakagami and Yanagita, and critics like Akasaka Norio. But the 3/11 disaster presented new issues, because discrimination is not just a matter of race/ethnicity or geographic location. Rather, Tohoku residents have been further stigmatized by radiation. They represent a new generation of nuclear victims, and, as such, they join the ranks of atomic-bomb victims from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, another group that has suffered marginalization and discrimination in Japanese society because of their exposure to radiation.46 Nevertheless, the story of the Inuzuka family, and by extension, of Tohoku as marginal and marginalized, is not just one of oppression but also of resistance. In The Holy Family, Gyūichirō and his brother are fugitives guilty of murder. The story builds toward a scene at a convenience store in Sōma city where Gyūichirō meets his end at age twenty-six (set in 2003) when his brother supposedly lets him escape time and the story (Furukawa 2008, 1:605–607). This act later allows Gyūichirō to reappear in Horses as an interloper, a transient figure who is able to transgress temporal boundaries to appear at different points in Japan’s history. Gyūichirō survives, as do the native horses of northeastern Japan he visits on his time travels, comforting them as he recounts their suffering from warfare, famine, epidemics, and most recently, the nuclear accident. Gyūichirō travels from one historical point to another via the liminal spaces of the torii of Japan’s Shinto shrines. The Furukawa group in Horses visits various shrines as they traverse the disaster area, finding both official shrines and meager ones that do not rise to the official level of even a village shrine (Furukawa 2016b, 65).

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The Inuzuka’s and Tohoku’s histories are intertwined with the history of these unofficial shrines that resisted the Meiji-period (1868– 1912) government consolidation of Shinto shrines into one per administrative unit. In The Holy Family, Gyūichirō talks about the torii he saw in the South Seas and associates this and his family with the ura, the backside or underside of official history and State Shinto.47 Furukawa recalls a controversial history of local resistance to national directives. As Gerard Figal explains, the shrine consolidation was meant to enhance reverence for the deities by basically preserving only those shrines with a recorded association with the Imperial house. However, local communities often felt that their clan deities had been taken from them and moved too far away for regular worship. Local patriotism was to be sacrificed to national patriotism, as the state sought to standardize worship and practices and redirect them to the national level embodied by the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo (Figal 2000, 205–207).48 The emphasis on a written record of shrines associated with the Imperial family is exactly the type of history that excludes the oral and unofficial histories to which Furukawa lays claim. By contrast, his alternate history allows for Gyūichirō to come into existence. Spirited Away: Disaster Time The idea of time travel as transgressing or being held prisoner by time is a major theme not just for Furukawa but for Fukushima fiction and disaster fiction in general. In a conversation with fellow author Shigematsu Kiyoshi, Furukawa expanded on the concept of disaster time, summarizing the problem facing writers when he asked: How do you write about a world where time itself has broken (jikan ga kowareta)? (Furukawa and Shigematsu 2012, 184). In their respective fiction, the authors explore this concept of “broken time,” and the literary and imaginative challenge of living in the present progressive tense (genzai shinkōkei)—in other words, living permanently trapped in the present moment of the disaster or its aftereffects. Shigematsu laments the temporal challenges to literature: What means are there to write about the disaster when the half-life of cesium is so long? (Furukawa and Shigematsu 2012, 185). For these authors, the medium of literature is the only option for describing such a world. This conceptualization of time is a feature of disaster writing. The idea of “frozen time” appears in Art Spiegelman’s famous 9/11

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comix In the Shadow of No Towers, both in words that narrate the stoppage of time and in the repeated image of the “Glowing Bones” of the North Tower moments before it fell—an image that exists only in Spiegelman’s mind (Spiegelman 2004).49 The traumatic repetition of this image signals Spiegelman’s inability to escape the trauma of the events (Keeble 2014, 36). Fukushima fiction is similarly preoccupied with time and with the inability to conceptualize, understand, or share it in the wake of the disaster. Those displaced by the nuclear accident were affected by this rupture and its nuclear time lines that exceed the boundaries of individual lives. Writers grappled with the challenges that nuclear temporalities pose, not only for literature, but for victims trying to recover a collective past and imagine a future. In Shigematsu Kiyoshi’s “The Anniversary” (Kinenbi, 2013), evacuees ask for donations of old calendars and are upset when the calendars they receive have the months that preceded the disaster ripped out. The evacuees were hoping to reclaim not only a future but a past as well (Shigematsu 2013a, 92–95). In Kawakami Mieko’s “March Yarn” (Sangatsu no keito, 2012) the protagonist, who is pregnant, has a dream that she gives birth to a baby made of yarn. The baby came from a world where everything was made of yarn, even time itself. Kawakami’s protagonist explains: “When something unpleasant or dangerous happens, things suddenly come apart,” literally unravelling as life seemed to have done in post-3/11 Japan (Kawakami Mieko 2012, 63). The idea of being trapped in an inescapable present is terrifyingly palpable in the poetry that Wagō Ryōichi tweeted from Fukushima in the days after the disaster struck.50 Wagō captured this sense by repeating certain motifs such as the clocks all being one minute behind, because they are set to the temporal moment of the disaster (Wagō 2011, 224). He also refers to televised images of the tsunami as the “threat of the moment that is the present,” as the TV clips are repeated over and over again (Wagō 2011, 225). His protagonist is severed from the forward progression of time and forever stuck in the present, forced to keep reliving the moment the disaster struck. In Horses, Furukawa recast disaster time as “spirited away time” (kamikakushi),51 the experience of existing in a space devoid of time, a reference to the Japanese folk belief that the spirits can abscond with someone and take them back with them to their spirit realm. The narrator first enters this “spirited away time” when he begins

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watching the TV coverage of the disaster in a hotel room in Kyoto. His temporal dislocation is tied to the suspension of regular TV news cycles, as he is caught up in the temporality of “ecstatic news”:52 “I was unable to establish any sense of frequency. The unit of time known as ‘one hour’ disappeared. One day was no longer made up of twenty-four. The commercials had disappeared from TV. Beginning and endings were gone. Things that cannot happen in one day are happening, unfolding, exploding” (Furukawa 2011, 5–6). Passages such as these capture the loss of control and panic the narrator experiences as he tries unsuccessfully to reconcile the images he sees with the usual indicators of reality, such as a steady conception of time itself. In these moments, the surety of a documentary mode also escapes his grasp. Prisoner to this state, he loses consciousness of the date and day of the week: “I experienced one day as though it was a week. Or three days that felt like a month. This is how ‘spirited-away time’ works. I was not the only one that lost all sense of days of the week, I was not the only one for whom the dates of the calendar disappeared” (Furukawa 2016b, 6). For the Furukawa narrator, “spiritedaway time” was not solely an individual experience but a communal one. This could refer to the sense of unreality the Japanese public felt as they watched the disaster unfold on TV. Furukawa links the victims in Tohoku to those around Japan who were traumatized by the TV coverage of the disaster, questioning the government’s method of victim identification that was based solely on proximity. This idea of lost or frozen time can also be read as another link to Tohoku’s backward history as an internal colony. Tohoku was seen as being out of sync with the “imagined singular present and a predefined timeline of historical progress.” With its long-standing image of backwardness, the region was “ ‘out-of-step’ with the singular historical time of capitalism” (Hoyt Long 2011, 30–31). In washing away the “veneer of prosperity,” the disaster once again revealed Tohoku’s backwardness—temporal, economic, and cultural. But, Furukawa also argues that it is important to think about such places where time and space have gone crazy, not as places that are ending, but as places with a mythical beginning—such as the disaster area that allows for Gyūichirō’s appearance in Horses (Furukawa and Shigematsu 2012, 185). Gyūichirō also experienced spirited-away time as a child, but once his brother lets him escape time, he has the opposite experi-

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ence of the Furukawa narrator. Gyūichirō is constantly transgressing temporal boundaries and appearing in different historical eras but is unable to linger in any one time. “He is essentially expelled, from one space to another” (Furukawa 2016b, 134). In escaping the story, and by extension history, Gyūichirō can exist only in places such as the disaster zone where time is warped and frozen or stretched across radioactive temporalities that exceed individual lifetimes.53 His story is intimately linked with a war-torn and disaster-struck Tohoku, the very history he recites in Horses. Narrative Hybridity and Political Critique The hybridity of Furukawa’s characters as animal/human and the story they embody as historical/mythical is part of the novel’s fascination with borders and boundaries, and the liminal spaces created in crossing those divides. In Horses, the characters and story lines transgress temporal, historical, regional, and spatial boundaries in terms of the physical space of the disaster zones and the narrative space of the story. These boundaries are both visible and invisible; in addition to traversing the geographical spaces of northeastern Japan and the disaster zone, the Furukawa narrator crosses from the “reality” of his journey into the fictional space of Gyūichirō’s story and vice versa. Driving amid the debris-strewn spaces of Tohoku, the narrator encounters roadblocks and no-entry zones as well as worries that he has crossed into the irradiated spaces surrounding the nuclear power plant. Making Gyūichirō visible—the narrator is shocked to see him in the rental car—is a powerful means and metaphor for also making visible the post-disaster condition and historical position of Tohoku. The narrative form of Horses is itself a literary hybrid, crossing boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. Jinno Toshifumi calls the book a “deformed” or “misshapen” (bukakkō) work, the outcome of Furukawa’s attempt to turn his non-novel into a novel (Jinno 2011, 115–116). This new attempt at literary form, at disaster fiction, resides in the space between the novel and the non-novel. For Jinno, the unease of this borderland captures the feeling of the disaster itself (Jinno 2011, 115–116). This diametric shifting also applies to the image of Fukushima prefecture. In his documentary Metamorphosis (2013), NHK reporter Jun Hori voiced his astonishment “at the instantaneous transformation of the public perception of Fukushima from that of Japan’s timeless heartland and producer of tradi-

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tional foodstuffs into a hideous monster that was horrifying and contaminated.”54 The misshapen, mongrel form of Furukawa’s writing aligns with the shifting form of the region itself. Jinno’s characterization of Horses as bukakkō is also a metaphor for and horrible omen of the deformities that may emerge in the future as radiationinduced birth and genetic defects. Horses is truly a product of this disaster. I have been discussing the central tension in Horses as a struggle between the real/nonfictional and the fictional; however, on a stylistic level, there are different narrative modes associated with the storytelling and storytellers. Furukawa’s alter ego and Gyūichirō are the primary narrators in Horses; the three people from Shinchōsha never narrate the road trip. Although the Furukawa narrator strives for an objective, realistic account of the disaster area, Horses is never free of his subjective reactions to 3/11. His narrative shifts between journalism and a semiautobiographical style of writing that is reminiscent of the I-novel (shishōsetsu), a genre that became popular in pre–World War II–era Japan and arguably still holds some sway within serious fiction. These two modes both reinforce and undercut each other. In his journalistic moments, the Furukawa narrator asserts that “there has not been a single fabrication in what I have written thus far” (Furukawa 2016b, 67).55 As the tendency in I-novels is to conflate author and protagonist, the autobiographical nature of Horses adds to the air of reportage. Yet Furukawa undercut his assertion of nonfiction when he commented in an interview that he neither intended nor felt qualified to write reportage about his trip to the disaster area (Furukawa and Shigematsu 2012, 177). Horses is exempted from the realm of pure journalism or pure nonfiction by the subjective nature of the I-novel, Furukawa’s play with language, and the metanarrative about disaster literature. Horses moves between these various modes as the narrator keeps changing his mind about what he is or is not writing. Historically, the subjective, autobiographical mode of the I-novel clashed with the need for realism in the case of the atomic bombings. John Treat notes that for atomic-bomb writers the demand for a new realism meant “a renunciation of the tradition of the highly subjective and introspective I-novel and in its stead a commitment to the pursuit . . . of a more objectifiable historical, social milieu” (Treat 1995, 68). Furukawa also claims to be interested in this more objectifiable history, yet he does not abandon the subjec-

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tive I-novel mode, and he complicates the storytelling by introducing Gyūichirō as narrator of his own story or monogatari. Strictly speaking, in terms of literary history, monogatari (telling of things) refers to a premodern genre of writing that embodies an orality and is best represented by epic tales with variants and multiple authors. Although some monogatari have a basis in history, such as the Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari) that narrates events of the Genpei War (1180–1185), the genre is also characterized by a fictionality or narrative embellishment and a decentered narrative voice that undercut the journalistic objectivity to which Furukawa clings.56 Rather than committing to any one narrative mode, the various narrators and stories in Horses collide and intersect on the spatial, temporal, and imaginary planes. Furukawa engages multiple modes of narration in order to tell this particular disaster story, as the work is pulled between reportage (non-novel) and fiction. Once the Furukawa narrator sees Gyūichirō in the backseat of the rental car, Horses switches out of the I-novel mode and into the fictional storytelling mode marked as monogatari, as Furukawa exploits the latter genre’s potential to “depart from realist conventions and limits” (McKnight 2006, 153). Furukawa’s engagement with a monogatari mode is clearly marked within the text itself. Gyūichirō uses the term monogatari to refer both to the storytelling that he passes back to the Furukawa narrator in Horses and to the story from which his brother lets him escape in The Holy Family (Furukawa 2016b, 106, 190; 2011, 84–85). Kawamura also uses the term in his critique of Furukawa’s novel (Kawamura 2013, 36). When Horses enters the monogatari mode, there is a relaxing of the requirement for realism. In this mode, the Furukawa narrator is less certain of the “real,” as for example in the route marked by the atlas: “The route might have been slightly different. I don’t fully remember” (Furukawa 2016b, 70). This contrasts sharply with his earlier reliance on the geographical factuality of the maps. Although the form has origins in Asia, it is often held up as a native form that stands in contrast to the imported, modern Western novel. However, monogatari was also a critical tool in debates in 1960s–1980s Japan, when critics used it to translate the Western term “narrative” in the writings of Roland Barthes and Gerard Genette (McKnight 2006, 153). Writers like Nakagami Kenji saw possibilities and restrictions in the monogatari. The form was both “loose, unfixed . . . and, un-systematic in nature” and simultaneously representa-

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tive of a system or code that reinforced hegemonic views—­specifically for Nakagami—of outcast (hisabetsu burakumin) discrimination (­ McKnight 2006, 152–153). Nakagami employed monogatari techniques in his fiction to create a communal narrative voice and multiple perspectives that had the potential to undermine the authority and authenticity of the novel.57 This work was done from a position on the periphery, aligning with the form itself, for as literary critic Karatani Kōjin argued: “the modern monogatari was an ‘excluded space’ in the early modern period; it fought an uphill battle, becoming visible only in the process of being relegated to the margins” (Zimmerman 2007, 128).58 Furukawa is not the theorist that Nakagami was, but we can see him experimenting with the monogatari to create a new form of disaster fiction. He is not seeking the self-destructive characters and paradoxes of Nakagami’s fiction. Neither does he ascribe noble origins to his characters as Nakagami did for the hisabetsu burakumin. However, both writers see the Kojiki as a type of system or code, and both seek to overturn or decenter it through the act of rewriting.59 Like Nakagami’s characters, the Inuzuka are “exiles from national histories,” and Furukawa is interested in the “relationship between the imperial center and its peripheries” (McKnight 2006, 146, 159). This is evident in his rewrite of the premodern military monogatari, the Tale of the Heike (Furukawa 2016a). In addition to converting the classical language into a modern vernacular, Furukawa revives forgotten characters and brings to life the northeastern (Tohoku) dialect of the barbaric yet ultimately heroic Genji warriors in this work that is also a mix of fiction and history.60 Furukawa’s use of the monogatari recalls Noriko Mizuta Lippit’s description of the genre as “twice-told” tales that refer to stories that precede them. As a twice-told tale of The Holy Family, Horses functions like the monogatari that “chafe against the constraints of straight realism, bend narrative time, and ruminate on the powers of storytelling.” As Eve Zimmerman argues, it is in these monogatari that “[w]‌e see literature in the act of contemplating itself.”61 Horses is an example of Furukawa contemplating the form of disaster fiction. He uses the monogatari as a marginalized twice-told tale to decenter narration away from the authority of works like the Kojiki that exclude Tohoku.62 Writing from the margins, he tells the story of these exiles and their peripheral history through the multiple narrative perspectives in Horses.

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However, Furukawa’s choice of the monogatari may have ultimately limited his ability to engage in a clear political critique. The monogatari’s shortcomings have traditionally been viewed as “incoherence and failure to enunciate in a consistent manner” (­McKnight 2006, 153). Furukawa came close to making a serious critique of Japan in his comments about it being a nation of murderers. However, as mentioned earlier, he limited his remarks to the premodern era. The clear modern referent for Japanese government-sanctioned murder would be the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese during the Asia-Pacific War—acts that are still hotly debated in Japan. Alternatively, Furukawa could have commented on the failure of the government and TEPCO to take responsibility for the Fukushima meltdowns and the lives endangered in that man-made disaster. However, he avoided such openly political statements. Originally he had a line in Horses questioning how Japan, the only country to be victimized in wartime by atomic bombs, could be at the forefront of nuclear power. But he took out the line because he could not reach his own conclusions regarding questions of blame and self-blame (Furukawa and Shigematsu 2012, 181). In Horses, when the Furukawa narrator travels to Ground Zero in New York, he realizes that 9/11 “had an enemy,” but as there was “no mastermind behind Japan’s tragedy,” the Japanese have “no one we can hate”: they must go forward with “no thoughts of revenge,” “with no thoughts of retribution” (Furukawa 2016b, 116). The reader has to wonder if Furukawa would have come to the same conclusion had his novel not been written so soon after the disaster. But, when asked in 2017 about who was responsible for the Fukushima accident, Furukawa was still reluctant to blame TEPCO or, by extension, the Manhattan Project. Rather, he sees a communal responsibility and an understanding that nuclear power was meant to improve people’s lives.63 Nonetheless, within the decentered, mythical language of the monogatari, Furukawa asks provocative and powerful questions. He centers his critique on the Kojiki. The act of referencing this ancient text is in itself far from controversial; the Kojiki is the text used to justify the divine nature of Imperial rule in Japan and has long been favored by pro-emperor, right-wing conservatives. But Furukawa borrows the metaphors and symbols of that foundational text to question Fukushima/Tohoku’s continued exclusion from the nation. He asks: “Then what of the Kojiki phrase to ‘honor the land’? How does one sing praises to this national land? Especially now, given that

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there is a second sun in the nuclear core? A meltdown that has taken its name from Fukushima. Can a name be given to this particular sun deity?” (Furukawa 2016b, 65). Scenes of honoring the land in foundational Japanese texts served as symbolic acts of consolidating Yamato rule.64 The land referred to in Horses, however, is not the historical Yamato territory but the disaster zone of Tohoku. The “sun deity” in the line quoted above is a reference to Amaterasu, the sun goddess of the Kojiki, one of the most important of the myriad gods in that book and the direct ancestor of the first Japanese emperor. Furukawa rewrites the origin story to identify the Fukushima Daiichi NPP as the “core” of the new Japanese nation, as a new “land of the sun,” a new “sun deity”: However, this “big circle” around the Daiichi plant, the large 30 km ring of shelter in place, subsumed the little 10 km evacuation circle of the Daini plant like the corona of the sun. At the core of this concentric circle was the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the sun itself. The land of the sun. A new Japanese nation.65

Furukawa renationalizes Fukushima/Tohoku, forcing the nation to claim this irradiated land as its own through Japan’s most sacred, national symbols: “this newly born Japan pronounces Fukushima to be its own. The entire world associates it with this place” (Furukawa 2016b, 24). He writes the word “core” with the Sino-Japanese characters for “nuclear” (kaku). Although he uses the phonetic gloss “core,” his meaning is clear: Japan cannot dissociate itself from this nuclear accident. He tells the story of Fukushima/Tohoku as marginalized and excluded, only then to tie it back into the history and identity of Japan itself. Fukushima is the second “Land of the Sun,” and hence will always belong to Japan. Furukawa was criticized for paying attention to the fate of abandoned animals in the disaster zone rather than to the human refugees (Kawamura 2013, 35–36). But the focus on animals, or the subhuman, is part and parcel of Furukawa’s method for telling the story of a marginalized people in a marginalized part of Japan. Horses is a mixture of documentary and monogatari, of fact and fiction. It is a novel that moves in fits and starts, like the rental car along the broken highways and dead ends of the Fukushima disaster zone. It is neither fully realistic nor fully fictional. It does not directly address

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the human suffering, and its critique of the Japanese government and the nuclear industry is couched in wordplay and mythical pseudo-history. However, Furukawa’s alternate history of Tohoku becomes the backdrop for the current and ongoing story of the disaster. It is a story of the sacrifice of an entire region to a power plant that generates electricity for Tokyo some 160 miles away and of the ongoing human tragedy of displacement that is being forgotten by the lawmakers and politicians in Tokyo and elsewhere, who argue in favor of restarting the nuclear power plants in Japan.66 It is also the story of centuries of discrimination against a region that holds a place in the national imaginary as traditional Japan but has also been ostracized by the nation. Furukawa tethers his literary creation to Tohoku’s reality; as the Furukawa narrator says, he had written of “invisible worlds and invisible people,” but Gyūichirō’s “reality is not fabrication” (Furukawa 2016b, 67–68). Furukawa’s Horses writes a parallel history for Tohoku that brings the 3/11 disaster into its tragic and marginalized story.

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Chapter 3

Hiroshima Encore Return of the Hibakusha

A

mid the unrelenting crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), writer and atomic-bomb victim (hibakusha) Hayashi Kyōko lamented the tragic irony that Japan, itself victimized by the atomic bombs, had given birth to another generation of nuclear victims: “We who were made hibakusha in the twentieth century spoke and wrote of our experience and lived our lives in the hope of being the last of this new race. But in the twenty-first century, our nation, our irradiated nation (hibakukoku), has given birth to yet another generation of hibakusha (nuclear victims)” (Hayashi 2013, 13).1 As Japan faced the consequences of its decision to embrace so-called peaceful nuclear technology, radiation leaking from the crippled plant contaminated the landscape, displacing and endangering thousands. Compounding the shock was the resurrection of this term hibakusha, a word many thought was confined to the horrors of 1945 and its aftermath. For Japanese writers, the Fukushima nuclear accident was an incitement to political engagement and an opportunity for painful self-examination. For established atomic-bomb authors, especially victims like Hayashi, it was a tragic historical repetition with no apparent end. The question of how the nuclear accident at Fukushima should be historicized vis-à-vis the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has not yielded a simple answer. The different origins of the events—one, the deliberate use of a new weapon, the other, the result of so-called safe energy—would seem to distinguish the two. There are other reasons for treating them differently: the number of victims, the singularity or multiplicity of the events, the nationality 89 This content downloaded from 75.69.46.187 on Mon, 01 May 2023 02:34:05 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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of the perpetrator, and so on. Yet, in tying the Fukushima nuclear accident backward in time to the atomic bombs, Hayashi easily bridges the gap separating these two groups of nuclear victims. She crosses sixty-six years of Japanese history to view the suffering of these new nuclear victims in northeast Japan alongside those of the atomic victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hayashi’s comments echo those of Ōe Kenzaburō, who wrote in The New Yorker on March 28, 2011, that the construction of nuclear power plants in Japan was “the worst possible betrayal of the memory of Hiroshima’s victims” (Ōe 2011).2 Scholars also affirm the need to include Fukushima in a discussion of the atomic because, as atomic-bomb literature specialist Kuroko Kazuo argues, the accident at the Fukushima NPP was a global event on the order of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one that easily exceeds national bounds and affects the future of humanity (Kuroko 2013, 7). Kuroko is one of many who express their position by writing “Fukushima” in the phonetic katakana script, used for emphasis or to mark words of foreign origin, rather than in traditional Sino-Japanese characters.3 There are only two other cities whose names are regularly written this way: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.4 For atomic-bomb specialists and writers of its literature, the need to tie the nuclear to the atomic is vital given the historical struggles of anti–atomic-bomb movements to protest against nuclear weapons, and of their victims to gain recognition and health benefits from a recalcitrant government.5 Hayashi links the two groups of victims through the term hibakusha, but the application of this label to victims of the Fukushima accident is controversial in Japan. The word hibakusha can be written in two ways, using different combinations of Sino-Japanese characters to distinguish between victims of atomic bombs and those of exposure from sources such as nuclear power plant disasters, a distinction Hayashi makes. Soon after the nuclear meltdowns, critic Yamauchi Akemi discussed the stigma attached to hibakusha and the difficulty of applying this label to the new generation of victims (Akasaka, Oguma, and Yamauchi 2011, 34). It is not uncommon to hear the 3/11 nuclear victims called hisaisha, a more neutral term that simply means a victim of a disaster. This is the term Taguchi Randy uses in her “Into the Zone” (Zōn ni te) for the character Kudō (Taguchi 2013b, 11). Even though Kudō’s ranch has been con­taminated by radiation, and he makes multiple and illegal trips

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into highly irradiated areas, Taguchi does not refer to him as a hibakusha. Many Japanese are reluctant to call the Fukushima accident victims hibakusha, even though they recognize that they were exposed to radiation from the NPP accident. Victims are also reluctant to identify themselves as hibakusha because of the societal stigma associated with this label.6 However, there are those who purposely and politically use the term hibakusha to refer not only to the Fukushima accident victims but to anyone who lives under the threat of radiation, arguing that, in essence, “we are all hibakusha.”7 John Treat argued this very point in his 1995 book on atomic-bomb literature: the “concept of the potential hibakusha now has to extend to everyone alive today in any region of the planet targeted by warhead-carrying missiles, or, in our newly fragmented post–Cold War world, any region contested by any of the rapidly expanding ‘nuclear club’ of nations” (Treat 1995, x). As I write in the summer of 2017, North Korea is testing ballistic missiles portending nuclear war, radiation continues to leak from the Fukushima Daiichi NPP, and the Trump administration threatens to cut the budget for the US Department of Energy that funds the superfund cleanup at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington, where ageing tanks of nuclear waste threaten “­Fukushima-level events that could happen at any moment” (Lewis 2017).8 I agree with Treat that we are living in an age where all life is threatened not just by nuclear weapons but, for many, by the very source of our electrified livelihoods. Yet, the label of hibakusha carries a particular valence for those evacuated from or living near a nuclear exclusion zone who have been exposed to radiation but are reluctant to self-label for fear of being ostracized. I may be able to self-identify as a hibakusha given my current proximity to Hanford, but the impact on my daily life is not in any way comparable to those living in northeastern Japan. Fukushima fiction does not necessarily trace itself back to the legacy of Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic-bomb literature. However, neither does it ignore their historical or political significance, as do many of the cultural productions that came out of 9/11.9 While much of 9/11 fiction dehistoricized the terrorist attacks, this chapter considers how Fukushima fiction is written into Japan’s historical encounter with atomic bombs, nuclear testing, and war. I consider the stakes of writing about the Fukushima disaster in a context wherein historical precedent exists as a prominent intertext. Follow-

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ing Hayashi’s lead, this chapter expands the analysis of Fukushima fiction, linking it geographically and temporally to the atomic bombs and Japan’s wartime past. Although these events may overlap in a moment of historical repetition, the Fukushima accident reveals its own ruptures and challenges. I begin by contrasting the statements of Murakami Haruki and Hayashi Kyōko, writers who, like Ōe Kenzaburō, spoke as public intellectuals about 3/11. The issues they raise are woven through the short stories of Gen’yū Sōkyū, Satō Yūya, and Kawakami Hiromi, who represent these new nuclear victims (hibakusha) as embedded in the political debates swirling around the disaster itself. I end by considering Tsushima Yūko’s sprawling Mountain Cat Dome (Yamaneko dōmu, 2013), a novel that moves from the 1920s to the present day, encompassing the disaster and its nuclear victims, as it writes them into a history of victimization and aggression that is both Japanese and global. Although these writers may not all directly reference historical precedent, their characters are nonetheless hibakusha. Critical Debates Ōe Kenzaburō was one of a handful of Japanese writers and critics who spoke about the 3/11-Fukushima disaster on an international stage through editorials in major Western dailies.10 A number of the most outspoken authors are those who, like Ōe, either wrote or advocated for atomic-bomb literature and have been actively involved in the antinuclear weapons movements that took shape after World War II, as well as the new antinuclear power movements post-Fukushima.11 In this opening section, I treat public statements on Fukushima by two writers, Murakami Haruki and Hayashi Kyōko. Murakami is an international star with book sales reaching into the millions.12 Hayashi is an author known for her post-Nagasaki atomicbomb writings and her status as an atomic-bomb victim, but she does not share the international acclaim or readership of Murakami. They provide a study in contrasts and an opportunity to delve into the national and international discourse on the disaster. Murakami Haruki: The Japan That Did Not Say “No” to the Nuclear One of the better-known literary responses to the 3/11 disaster came from fiction writer Murakami Haruki, who was in Barcelona on June 9, 2011, to accept the International Catalunya Prize. The

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award is given annually “to persons who made key contributions to the development of cultural, scientific or human values.”13 Murakami joined the ranks of such luminaries as former United States president Jimmy Carter, the then leader of Myanmar’s opposition Aung San Suu Kyi, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, French oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Indian economist Amartya Sen, and former Czech Republic president and writer Václav Havel (Fernández Noguera 2011). In a March 18 e-mail expressing his thanks to the Catalan government, Murakami said he hoped the prize could provide some relief for the Japanese who were suffering from the 3/11 disaster. The title of his acceptance speech, “Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer,” is a reference to those Japanese who questioned nuclear power and were marginalized for their unrealistic views by a nation that prioritized “efficiency” over safety. Murakami quoted from the inscription on the Hiroshima Memorial Cenotaph—“Please rest in peace. We will not repeat this mistake”—as a sign that the Japanese are both victims and perpetrators.14 He says, we are perpetrators because we “uncovered the power of the atom, and we have failed to stop the use of that power.” Murakami clearly identifies the Fukushima accident as one the Japanese brought upon themselves. “This is a historic experience for us Japanese: our second massive nuclear disaster. But this time no one dropped a bomb on us. We set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives” (Haruki Mura­kami 2011). His speech in Barcelona offered the world an interpretation of the events of March 2011. The Guardian praised Murakami for assailing not only Japan’s failure to stop this tragedy but its betrayal of the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s victims (Flood 2011). The thrust of Murakami’s speech was highlighted in the article’s subheading: “The novelist has declared that his country should have said ‘no’ to nuclear in 1945.” Murakami’s speech was acclaimed internationally for its criticism of Japan’s position on nuclear power and the nation’s complicity in creating another nuclear disaster within its borders. But Murakami’s speech was not without its critics, and the debate it engendered reveals the intricacies of the Fukushima disaster as it relates to Japan’s complex history with the nuclear (Kuroko 2013; Suzuki 2011). What is at stake is no less than questions of

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integrity, responsibility, and complicity in promoting the so-called peaceful use of nuclear power, as Japan, in spite of the legacy of the atomic bombs, rushed to become the third most nuclear-dependent nation on earth. In addition, there is the question of who has the right or social standing to be an international spokesman advocating for an antinuclear Japan. Kuroko Kazuo was outraged at what he saw as Murakami’s irresponsible comments indicting Japan for not having said “no” to the nuclear. As Kuroko argues, in his book Writers on “the Nuclear and Fukushima”: Yoshimoto Takaaki, Ōe Kenzaburō, Murakami Haruki (Bungakusha no “kaku, Fukushima ron”: Yoshimoto Takaaki, Ōe Kenzaburō, Murakami Haruki, 2013), Murakami has missed key points in his understanding of postwar Japanese history and hence misrepresents Japan’s resistance to the nuclear (Kuroko 2013, 159). For Kuroko, Murakami’s comments that Japan should have kept saying “no” to the nuclear are blasphemous with regard to the work of the atomicbomb writers and the postwar antinuclear weapons movements that started after the 1954 Bikini Atoll bombings (Kuroko 2013, 161). In his view, Murakami’s comments only serve to show his ignorance of Japanese literary and political history. Kuroko criticizes Murakami precisely because he is so well known and has so many readers that he has a particular responsibility to be more careful. He is not only one of Japan’s best-selling writers and a perennial hopeful for the Nobel Prize, but an author with a truly international following, who speaks to an audience perhaps larger than that of any previous Japanese writer. For Kuroko, the danger is in Murakami’s Spanish audience, or worse, his fans around the globe, wondering why the Japanese did not say “no” to the nuclear, when in fact many of them did (Kuroko 2013, 178). As evidence, critic Kan Takayuki draws our attention to the atomic-bomb writings of Tōge Sankichi, Hara Tamiki, Ōta Yōko, Ibuse Masuji, and Inoue Mitsuharu as resounding rejections of Japan’s decision to embrace the nuclear (Kan 2011, 110). But rather than an anti–atomic-bomb or antinuclear power spokesman capturing international headlines for the Fukushima NPP accident, it was Murakami. For writers and critics who have devoted their lives to the antinuclear cause, Murakami’s self-appointed role as the one to point out the faults of his fellow citizens is suspect. It is true that Murakami has never been a spokesman for anti–atomic-bomb or antinuclear movements. But since the mid-1990s he has become more engaged with

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political and social crises through his literature and public speeches. He criticized the Israeli occupation of Palestine in 2009 and has directly and indirectly touched on Japan’s wartime past, the Aum terrorist attacks, and the 1995 and 2011 disasters in his literature.15 In the year and a half since the Catalunya speech, Murakami had not spoken out on the Fukushima accident, nor had he participated in the various demonstrations or fund-raisers. But he is not the only literary figure to come late to the antinuclear movement. Kuroko explains that he himself is not in any way questioning the writers who voiced their opinions against nuclear power in the Japan Pen Club’s volume, Now, Especially, I Oppose Nuclear Power (Ima koso watashi wa genpatsu ni hantai shimasu, 2012), but his first impression on reading the essays was of an ignorance on the part of the writers of the damage the nuclear has caused in Japan. Kuroko also senses an insufficient self-awareness on the part of the writers regarding their own positions as perpetrators; their silence allowed nuclear power to advance to the point of the Fukushima meltdowns (Kuroko 2013, 12). Kuroko’s comments seem contradictory. On the one hand, he criticizes writers for not acknowledging their own complicity, yet when Murakami speaks of complicity, he lambasts him for not crediting the antinuclear movement. Atomic-bomb victims claimed ownership over the experience and literary representations of the events of August 6 and 9, 1945. This proprietary relationship led to debates in Japan over who had the right to speak about the atomic bombs.16 Yet, in the case of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, victims and non-victims alike have written about the disaster, regardless of whether or not they participated in antinuclear demonstrations. Kuroko’s critique of Murakami points to the high stakes of the discussion for those who have been deeply committed to the antinuclear movement. Many authors, ranging from postwar writer Nosaka Akiyuki to contemporary writers like Kawakami Hiromi, have admitted their complicity in accepting the conveniences of modern life without questioning the costs of nuclear-powered electricity in Japan (Nosaka 2012; Hiromi Kawakami 2012a). Both Kan and Kuroko detail the complications and factionalism within the antinuclear movements; many from the old and new left wings were accomplices to the theory of a “peaceful” nuclear, including the Communists who supported nuclear technology. Additionally, the organizers of the antinuclear movements in the 1980s took the antinuclear power stance

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off their agenda in an effort to make the movement as inclusive as possible (Kan 2011, 113–116; Kuroko 2013, 161).17 Critics have pointed out that we must also blame the Japanese government that, in its rush to promote nuclear power, agreed to secret pacts that betrayed Japan’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles of non-possession, non-production, and non-introduction of nuclear weapons.18 Kan Takayuki argues that the Japanese have to admit that their “no” failed to have an effect on the actions of their political leaders (Kan 2011, 113). Roger Pulvers argues that Murakami’s “linking the radiation released in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with that released in Fukushima, effectively renders the three issues of the bomb, the no-nuclear principles, and nuclear power as one.” Mura­ kami’s use of kaku, a term used for atomic weapons but not for nuclear power plants, erases the line separating the peaceful from non-peaceful uses of the nuclear and points to the government betrayal. For Pulvers, Murakami reset the “anti-nuclear agenda in Japan” (Pulvers 2011). We can view Murakami’s speech positively as a writer using his international reputation to criticize the Japanese government or, cynically, as a bid for the Nobel Prize that usurped the antinuclear platform. Either way, we cannot deny that Murakami put the Fukushima accident and questions of responsibility on the global map in a way that few can. Hayashi Kyōko: The Memory of the Atomic Bombs Hayashi Kyōko also commented publicly on the Fukushima disaster in “Another Letter to Rui” (Futatabi Rui e), a semifictional essay published in a literary journal in Japan in late 2013. Her response did not receive the level of international press coverage that Murakami’s did, yet as a hibakusha from Nagasaki she has far more credibility within the discourse of the antinuclear in Japan. In this piece, she recalls a trip she took in 1999 to the Trinity Site in New Mexico where the US government first tested nuclear weapons. The plutonium weapon tested there had the same design as the one detonated over Nagasaki. In remembering the atomic bombs, Hayashi also speaks of the recent nuclear disaster in Fukushima. She criticizes the Japanese government for their evasiveness, lies, and incompetence in handling the Fukushima disaster. She also argues, as many others have, that the Fukushima nuclear accident was far from unforeseen (sōteigai), and that we should not believe it presents “no immediate health risk” (tadachi ni kenkō ni eikyō wa nai), as

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Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and the government continue to insist (Hayashi 2013, 12).19 Rather than blaming the Japanese public, Hayashi is interested in assailing the Japanese government for their failure to deal effectively with the Fukushima accident, behavior that for nuclear victims like Hayashi is not new. When it comes to the public, Hayashi fears that the memory of the nuclear has been lost. In an interview with Kuroko Kazuo, she mentioned that she grew depressed when she realized that the kind of information that was coming out right after the disaster—information she thought anyone who lives in a nation that has been victimized by atomic bombs would know—turned out to be new to the Japanese populace (Hayashi and Kuroko 2011, 3). This loss of public memory is one of the reasons Kuroko despairs that the memory of 3/11 is also destined to fade from public consciousness. Perhaps to combat that, Hayashi feels the need to educate her readers about terms like “half-life” and the effects of plutonium on human cells, organs, and bones.20 She brings to bear the tragic knowledge that atomic-bomb hibakusha have had to live with for years, such as the problem of “internal exposure” (naibu hibaku) and the spread of radiation (Hayashi 2013, 18–19). Hayashi highlights some differences between the cities that fell victim to the atomic bombs and the areas affected by the 3/11 disaster. She argues that the total destruction of Nagasaki deprived the residents of their memories and hence left them without the capacity for an emotional response. In contrast, the 3/11 debris along the Sanriku coast, as unforgiving a landscape as it presents, still stands as a trace of the lives and hopes that were lost. Yet, there is a strong kinship between the victims of these two tragic events, including the physical symptoms long familiar to the older hibakusha. She reminds us that in the twentieth century we came to fear the nuclear because of the atomic bomb, and in the twenty-first century we are menaced by the nuclear via accidents at nuclear power plants (Hayashi 2013, 18–21). Hayashi is also concerned about the loss of status and voice for nuclear victims in the public discussion of the Fukushima accident. She mentions a fear among atomic-bomb hibakusha that the nuances of public discussion prevent them from commenting on the new nuclear disaster. If they spoke out, they would make the situation worse; their comments would be disregarded as “damaging rumors” (fūhyō higai), because they would only contradict government rec-

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ommendations that victims stay in areas with supposedly low radiation levels. Hayashi wants to tell the victims, especially those with children, to get as far away from the plant as possible, but for now she will keep her mouth shut. She was afraid that her advanced years (she was over eighty years old at the time she wrote the work), could have been used against her as evidence that the nuclear is in fact safe (Hayashi 2013, 20).21 She clearly felt silenced by past and present discourse on the dangers of radiation. Unfortunately, her voice will no longer be heard, as she passed away in February 2017 at age eighty-seven. The irony and tragedy of this situation is not lost on critics like Kuroko. The nuclear victims of the atomic bombs who are in a position to speak out about the Fukushima disaster feel silenced, while a writer like Murakami is not only allowed to speak but is given an international stage upon which to do it. Part of this is testimony to the different expectations and freedoms of an international versus a domestic audience, but also to the evolution of public discourse around the Fukushima accident in Japan. The New Generation of Hibakusha The disaster inspired both established and new writers to address the effects of the nuclear accident on the lives of the Japanese, with or without a conscious nod to the earlier generation of wartime victims. Fukushima fiction reveals the complexity of the disaster, espe­cially with regard to Japan’s role in creating a new generation of nuclear victims. A number of writers have drawn on the memory of the atomic bombs in their stories about the Fukushima accident. In Takahashi Gen’ichirō’s A Nuclear Power Plant in Love (Koisuru genpatsu, 2011) and Kurokawa Sō’s “The Wave” (Nami, 2012), Hiroshima looms as a seminal memory for an older generation. In Takahashi’s novel, the protagonist’s mother lost her family in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Takahashi Gen’ichirō 2011, 183–190). She was supposed to go to Hiroshima and care for a family member but sent her sister instead on August 5, 1945. When the protagonist’s mother followed some days later, she found the burnt remains of her home and family. She married her sister’s fiancée and continually tells the protagonist that his real mother is dead (Takahashi Gen’ichirō 2011, 188). Kurokawa’s story includes a grandmother who was born in Hiroshima but moved to eastern Japan. She often says that, had she stayed in Hiroshima, she would have died in the bombings and her grandson would not have been

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born. As she and her grandson are stranded atop floating debris from the 3/11 tsunami, she tells the story of the great biblical flood and Noah’s ark, but unlike for that disaster, the gods gave no warning for Hiroshima or for the Fukushima accident (Kurokawa Sō 2012e, 52–53). Despite such references, Fukushima fiction is not always selfconsciously tied to the legacy of the atomic bombs, but this does not mean that the two events are separate. Rather, Fukushima fiction takes up the plight of this new generation of hibakusha in light of that earlier history and its political stakes. In the following sections I examine the work of three writers whose stories are embedded in and comment on these political stakes. Gen’yū Sōkyū takes up the privatization of risk that is happening in the post-3/11 context where individual citizens are having to take on risks that should have been shouldered by government or corporate entities. Rather than stressing the way in which hibakusha have been victimized, Satō Yūya pushes the issue of blame, specifically by identifying the victims them­selves as perpetrators. Last, Kawakami Hiromi dramatizes the social ostracization of nuclear victims and their double victimization at the hands of a society that does not accept them. Gen’yū Sōkyū: The Privatization of Risk Social scientists have documented the “global social trend” of shifting risk and responsibility from organized entities—such as governments and corporations—to private citizens. The Fukushima nuclear disaster has become a case study for this privatization of risk (Nadesan 2013, 2–3). After the accident, the Japanese government increased the maximum allowable annual dose for radiation exposure. This affected not only individual citizens who may have been harmed by the explosion at the plant but also government and personal decisions regarding evacuation from and relocation back into contaminated or formerly contaminated areas.22 As Adriana Petryna argued in her work on Chernobyl, the increase in dosage also allowed workers to labor longer at the stricken plant, but the dosage in Japan was raised for the general public as well.23 The question of dosage and exposure is multidimensional, affecting not only evacuation but decontamination targets. Controversy swirled around these targets, as well as the policy of stopping relocation subsidies for residents once an area had been officially “decontaminated.” This meant that many had no choice other than to return to areas they

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may have felt were still unsafe.24 Despite these concerns, the decision to return was only the beginning of a series of decisions about daily life: whether to send children to school, let them play outside, let them eat school lunches, and so on. In the absence of clear and trustworthy leadership on the part of the government and the nuclear industry, individual citizens were forced to bear the burden and costs of their decisions; as risk became privatized and domesticized, government and industry responsibility was eliminated. Gen’yū Sōkyū examines this process in the short stories in his collection Mountain of Light (Hikari no yama, 2013), which is set in the disaster zone. Genyū opens a window onto the careful and complex negotiations that occur when individuals must bear the social burdens of this privatized risk as they try to balance concerns for their health against the pressure and need to keep families and communities together. These negotiations are complicated by unreliable information about radiation levels and by the strains they put on relations between family and friends. Those relationships can exert their own form of censorship upon individuals who prioritize their health over that of their community. Gen’yū’s characters are stuck between the “political logic of risk containment and a personal logic of survival” (Petryna 2002, xvii). The last three stories in Mountain of Light address the problem of radiation, and Gen’yū’s characters deal with it in a variety of ways, from open criticism to anxious resignation.25 Set in Futaba, a highly irradiated town inside the exclusion zone, Gen’yū’s “Water Strider” (Amenbo, 2012) takes up the question of risk in the context of families with young children as they make decisions about staying or leaving their hometown, which has officially been decontaminated. The story narrates the crisis experienced by the protagonist, Sayuri, when her childhood friend Chiharu and her five-year old daughter Mika, return for Obon, the annual Buddhist festival for honoring one’s ancestors.26 Chiharu is not the usual returnee but represents a new type of disaster returnee; having fled with her daughter because of fear of radiation, she left her husband Naoki behind in temporary housing, thus splitting up the family. Sayuri wonders if Chiharu is home for good or only there for the festival. The reader experiences Sayuri’s shock and discomfort over Chiharu’s decision to leave and her strained family reunion. The story is told in the third person from Sayuri’s point of view. Her encounter with Chiharu forces her to rethink the words she uses and the food she buys. Their time together is filled with anxiety and

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tension. After seeing Chiharu’s family reunited, Sayuri affirms her decision to remain in the contaminated zone and her belief that families should live together, regardless of the cost (Gen’yū 2013a, 75, 86, 89). Sayuri wants the community to stay together, and her stomach churns when she remembers the ways in which the disaster harmed the town. For instance, they were unable to sell a very good rice crop because it was contaminated, and there were malicious rumors on the web about animals born with physical abnormalities (Gen’yū 2013a, 77, 74, 100). An old woman in town warns that they cannot do away with the Obon festival, and Sayuri confirms her belief in the need for such customs to sustain the community (Gen’yū 2013a, 79). The reader is given glimpses of Chiharu’s struggles as the town’s residents keep their distance from her at the Obon festival and she has to face her estranged husband and former friends. Despite this, Chiharu will not come back to live in the contaminated zone, and the story never presents the option of her husband resettling with them elsewhere. Chiharu feels the eyes of the community judging her for having left. Gen’yū offers the two families as representative of two possible futures for residents in the zone. In many ways Sayuri’s family is a mirror of Chiharu’s (they are similar in age and both have a young child), but Sayuri’s remains together in the zone. The reader is left to wonder about the cost and how the risk they face will be privatized. It is unclear to what extent the central or prefectural government will bear the costs of relocation or of any health effects that arise from the exposure to radiation; as the town has been decontaminated, the government has met its stated responsibility. The characters in the story are attempting to educate themselves and making decisions about whether to stay or to go without a full understanding of the level of their actual exposure to radiation. Sayuri and Chiharu have to make their own risk assessment and live with the consequences of their anxiety-ridden choices. Gen’yū clearly demonstrates the privatization of risk, because the costs (social and medical) are being shifted to individual citizens who are acting on the conflicting impulses to save themselves and their communities—priorities that do not necessarily align. Sayuri struggles with this decision when she worries about her family’s safety (Gen’yū 2013a, 87). There are hints in the story that the residents are in danger. Sayuri measures the radiation in the local vegetables to avoid internal exposure, and she fears that her husband is

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exposing himself through his gardening work. Chiharu’s decision to leave the area, and her volunteer work helping children obtain thyroid cancer screenings, all point to a potential danger for children that the community seems unwilling to publicly recognize. Besides Chiharu, Gen’yū presents only one voice from inside the contaminated community that argues for moving children out; Sayuri says that she had been advised to send her son away for the summer, but she was unable to act on this: her son was too young to go alone, and she could not leave during this busiest of times (Gen’yū 2013a, 87). She will not participate in this new phenomenon of boshi hinan, or mothers evacuating with children. She feels powerless, but she cannot follow Chiharu’s lead. Yet there is little sympathy for Chiharu in the story. She is literally demonized when she dons the Hannya Noh mask at the end of the story, a mask that is traditionally used for demonic female characters who range from frightening to sorrowful in their obsessive drives. On the one hand she represents the vilification of those who left disaster communities, an act that was seen by some as betrayal. But on another level Sayuri tries to understand Chiharu’s dilemma. She has a dream that the two women are separated by the flowing gold liquid of cesium that threatens to drown her (Gen’yū 2013a, 98–99). The story opens with Sayuri whispering the word se-shi-u-mu, but once Chiharu has left, she finds this mysterious element has lost its appeal, as she can no longer continue to think of it in the abstract (Gen’yū 2013a, 73, 106). Sayuri has to give up her strange childhood fascination with cesium, and Chiharu’s visit is the catalyst that forces her to face the illusions she has regarding her decision to stay in the zone. In siding with Sayuri and the community, the story can be read conservatively as reinforcing government rhetoric that the disaster areas are safe for families and children to occupy. However, Sayuri’s anxiety shows that it is not easy for residents of Tohoku to criticize the community’s decision or the nuclear power industry. Noriko Manabe details these struggles in her study of musicians from the area. She describes the “rift between the antinuclear activists and the people of Fukushima” (Manabe 2015, 303). Many locals relied on the power plant for their livelihoods, and thus the nuclear became part of their local identity. For many residents, the meltdown was a “betrayal” and a “violent denial of cherished myths” (Manabe 2015, 305). Yet efforts to support the area, like Project Fukushima’s festival that was held within the prefecture, were also

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heavily criticized for not having warned participants about the dangers of radiation (Manabe 2015, 311–314). “Water Strider” puts these conflicting emotions on display. Gen’yū takes a different approach to this question of evacuation and repopulation in his story “Praying Mantis” (Ogami mushi, 2013), in which he is more critical of the decontamination process. Decisions about moving residents out of and back into contaminated areas around the Fukushima NPP revolve around the measurable standard of maximum annual exposure. Although this dosage may appear to be a scientific constant, these legal limits were raised to allow cleanup crews to work longer at the stricken plant and residents to remain in affected areas, a decision that speaks to the fact that such standards are less hard science and more questions of permissibility or social acceptability. This is especially relevant when we consider the controversy around permissible dose and the National Research Council report (2005) that contradicts any idea of a “permissible dose” by concluding that “there is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial” (Hecht 2006, 328). In “Praying Mantis,” Gen’yū takes on this controversy in the context of the decontamination work meant to enable resettlement. His protagonist, Yamaguchi, decides to volunteer for decontamination work after he is diagnosed with bile duct cancer and given six months to live. His business in Fukushima was destroyed, his wife killed by the tsunami, and he now lives alone in one of the many temporary housing communities.27 He spends his days cleaning roofs with rags, his only protective gear a mask and plastic gloves, like the other workers. Gen’yū’s story points to the lack of skilled workers and adequate protection for the day laborers and nuclear gypsies who have been employed to conduct this dangerous decontamination work.28 As Petryna argues, “there is nothing obvious about how people come to be engaged in this dangerous work,” but they are clearly forced into a “moral calculus of risk” (Petryna 2002, xxiv). Yamaguchi further comments on this when discussing the government’s attitude toward the workers. The stated goal is to reduce readings to below 0.23 microsieverts per hour, so that the annual 1 millisievert limit can be secured and residents can move back into the area. However, Yamaguchi remarks on the very contradictory nature of the work itself: the process of decontamination is in essence one of exposure for workers. In his view, decontamination

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work is undertaken because of a fear of exposure, but those who are afraid of being exposed do not do the decontamination work. He comments on the favorable conditions that allow the government to continue this work: “The nation is lucky that there are both those who are afraid and those who are not” (Gen’yū 2013d, 120). In other words, there are people who have no choice but to do the government’s dirty work of decontamination while taking on the inevitable somatic risk. The existence of the “willing,” or better stated the “disposable,” allows for the shift of responsibility away from the government and nuclear companies to individuals.29 In the end, the risk Yamaguchi takes by exposing himself to radiation is meaningless: “But no matter how much he cleaned it, the radiation levels on the roof hardly dropped at all. All he managed to do was clean it, not decontaminate it. But the heavy equipment had significantly lowered the levels of radiation in the yard. After all, that was the goal” (Gen’yū 2013d, 122). Similarly, nobody is worried about what happens to the water from the pressure washers used to clean houses; it is left as radioactive runoff. He knows that it is important to lower the radiation levels, but he worries about the health effects of longer-term exposure to low-dose radiation, something that falls outside of the immediate goals of the cleanup and the rush to reach decontamination targets so residents can return (Gen’yū 2013d, 121–122). Yamaguchi sees the contradiction in this blind adherence to numbers, an abstract exercise of meeting the so-called standards set for recovery, while victims and residents play a game of risk with their lives and livelihoods. The idea of risk taking, or gambling, is a reoccurring motif in the story. Yamaguchi remembers his late wife’s habit of placing small wagers and her thrill when she won. He did not want to bet on whether his wife would evacuate and warned her about the tsunami, but she laughed it off, and he found her dead body, hands raised to her face like the praying mantis of the title, simultaneously praying and fighting (Gen’yū 2013d, 110). He and his wife had similarly gambled when they bought their house by the beach only three km from the NPP, never thinking of the danger (Gen’yū 2013d, 118). Now widowed, he realizes that he is betting on his health by doing decontamination work and wonders what his wife would think of the odds (Gen’yū 2013d, 122–123). A doctor who visits the temporary housing units lectures the residents on the danger of internal exposure, the naibu hibaku that

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Hayashi Kyōko saw so many friends die from in the years after 1945 because the Japanese government refused to recognize it as a true cause of atomic-bomb disease. “Praying Mantis” creates a bridge between the two nuclear tragedies. Gen’yū’s story becomes even more powerful when we remember Hayashi’s comments on the 2011 disaster: “For many, this [naibu hibaku] was a new word. But it was a problem of the nuclear and the human, of nuclear waste and life, that hibakusha had been dealing with for over sixty years” (Hayashi 2013, 18). When Hayashi hears a government official say the words naibu hibaku in a post-Fukushima accident press conference, she is shocked and embittered at the knowledge that the government had been aware of the negative effects all along (Hayashi 2013, 13). However, Takimoto, the doctor in Gen’yū’s story, is not necessarily a positive force in the community. Although he travels around the temporary housing units measuring victims’ radiation exposure with a whole-body counter, giving talks on the dangers of internal radiation, and doing door-to-door house calls, he ultimately reassures the locals that the exposure limits are safe. Takimoto tries to dispel the idea that monitoring accumulated radiation is important, as he argues that the body has ways of recovering. Yamaguchi is shocked at Takimoto’s overly optimistic outlook regarding low-level radiation exposure. Certainly, Takimoto’s actions are not as egregious as those of Dr. Yamashita Shun’ichi, the radiological healthsafety risk-management adviser for Fukushima prefecture, who not only reassured residents there were no health risks from the meltdowns but infamously asserted that radiation does not affect people who are “happy and laughing.”30 Takimoto’s arguments for the relative safety of exposure are driven by ulterior motives. He wants to marry a local woman and have the ceremony at a shrine near his fiancée’s hometown in an area that is highly contaminated (Gen’yū 2013d, 132–136). Takimoto’s agenda is personal, but it points to the fact that medical recommendations are subject to alternative agendas, the primary aim of which may prioritize economic factors or the expediency of repopulating contaminated areas over healing victims. Gen’yū’s characters question these decisions, but ultimately are powerless to change them. Rather, they take on the risk that should be shouldered by the government and power companies as that risk becomes domesticated and privatized. Their gambling never pays off.

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Satō Yūya: Toxic Nurturing, and the Blame Game The theories of cultural trauma discussed in chapter 1 argue that a vital part of successful trauma narratives involves placing blame or identifying those responsible for the tragedy, crisis, or disaster. In the case of the Fukushima accident, everything from the National Diet Report to TEPCO’s strategies for avoiding litigation have pushed questions of blame to the sidelines or onto individual citizens. These strategies are problematic for various reasons discussed here and in other chapters, but in general it is safe to say that this avoidance of blame extends to some of Fukushima fiction as well. The lack of blame may seem unusual or puzzling, but if we look back to atomic-bomb fiction, we find a similar case. “Little atomicbomb literature notes, much less denounces, the human hand that ultimately inflicted the suffering. ‘America’ remains relatively absent from the pages of atomic-bomb literature” (Treat 1995, 364).31 As John Treat argues, this absence has inspired controversy. Ōe Kenzaburō’s Hiroshima Notes and the documentary work of writers such as Hara Tamiki and Ōta Yōko were criticized because they lacked a discussion of culpability.32 Treat discusses the difficulty of defining “victim” and “victimizer” within a modern atrocity on the scale of the atomic bombings and argues that questions of blame can “incapacitate in a way that prefigures our own recent powerlessness under the nuclear hegemony” (Treat 1995, 367).33 The many historical differences warn us to be careful when drawing analogies between the act of war that caused Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the “accident” at Fukushima. Yet the “accidental” nature of the meltdowns should not rule out questions of culpability. Satō Yūya takes up these questions on the level of the personal in his short story “Same as Always” (Ima made dōri, 2012).34 Unlike the privatization of risk, which shifts blame away from the nation, in Satō’s story, personal blame is not only enabled but justified by the national rhetoric. His work implicates the individual and the nation equally. Satō’s story is controversial for a number of reasons, not least of which is its focus on a mother and child: a dominant victim code of the media, an iconic image from atomic-bomb art and manga, and one of the most vulnerable segments of the population in post-­ Fukushima-accident, irradiated Japan.(Slater, Morioka, and Danzuka 2014, 485–486).35 However, rather than portraying the struggles of

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mothers in the disaster zone to protect and get medical care for their children, a plight that others have documented, Satō writes about a mother purposely poisoning her child in an attempt to kill it by feeding it food that has been contaminated by an explosion at a nuclear power plant.36 Rather than engage in the emotionally intense political debates over the role of activist mothers in antinuclear campaigns, Satō approaches this mother-child relationship with detachment. His concise, efficient, staccato-like prose rejects any emotional connection, maternal or otherwise, as seen in the mother’s list of irradiated vegetables she purchases to feed her child: “Spinach. Lotus root. Napa cabbage. Watercress. Sweet potatoes. Mizuna. Mustard greens. I went to a few different supermarkets, carefully choosing those vegetables we’d been warned to avoid, the ones with high radiation levels” (Satō 2012a, 126; 2018, 500). The mother takes heart from the nuclear disaster because it provides her with a means of killing her child that is less messy and difficult than the alternatives she had previously considered of beating, starving, or neglecting it. Not only is she calculating in her efforts to kill her child, but she is dispassionate, describing how she prepares the baby’s contaminated food “without a tinge of emotion” (Satō 2012a, 126; 2018, 501).37 The mother finds justification for her personal choice to poison her baby in the reality of life after the nuclear explosion where it is impossible to protect a child. She admits that she is acting more intentionally than others by going out of her way to purchase contaminated vegetables for the child’s food, but that does not make the other mothers blameless, as everyday activities, especially those done to make a child comfortable, were filled with danger. Even if other mothers weren’t doing it intentionally like I was, they were filling their children with poison, too. I wasn’t the only guilty one. There was no real difference between what I was doing to my baby and what they were doing to theirs. . . . it was impossible to guard against radiation completely. A nuclear power plant had exploded in the middle of our country. Every day, little by little, radioactive material was building up inside those tiny bodies. No matter how careful you were, nothing could change that. (Satō 2012a, 128; 2018, 502)

This mother carelessly brushes aside questions of intentionality in a way that echoes the very labeling of the meltdowns as an “acci-

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dent” or a “natural disaster,” a situation that obviated the need for blame (Treat 2012). She finds further justification for her decision to poison the baby in the words of the state: “The national government keeps telling us that there is ‘no immediate danger’ from contaminated food or tap water, which amounts to them declaring that there is bound to be a danger at some point. So if I keep giving the baby contaminated food and water, it will die. I had the nation’s word on that” (Satō 2012a, 127; 2018, 502). Satō uses the words of the state—Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio’s controversial phrase of “no immediate danger” (tadachi ni eikyō wa nai) was intended to reassure an anxious public after the meltdowns. But many saw his words as representative of government mismanagement, misinformation, and an attempt to shift blame and obfuscate. Satō uncovers the real meaning behind the warning—that danger is inevitable. But it is not only the state that is to blame. Satō forces Japanese readers to recognize their own complicity. Satō pushes the issue of complicity through both his first-­ person narrative and the iconic image of a baby. First, the claustrophobic narrative does not allow for other viewpoints, as it forces the reader to identify with the mother and accept her logic. The reader only experiences the disaster from her perspective. Second, Satō uses the baby to question the public’s ability to overlook the victims of Fukushima. In the opening to the story, the narrator wonders how child abusers get away with it, as it is impossible to escape society’s judging gaze. However, in this story the baby is suffering from internal radiation, the naibu hibaku that atomic-bomb victims fought desperately and unsuccessfully to make the government recognize.38 The Japanese government refused to recognize this health effect of the atomic bomb, and the mother in the story is also allowed to ignore the effects of her actions because the baby shows no outward physical signs of ingesting radiation—“no hair loss, no odour, no discolouring of the skin or clouding of the eyes” (Satō 2012a, 127; 2018, 502). The invisible nature of the harm makes it possible for the mother to continue poisoning the child. Satō’s story does address damaged bodies—from the “ooze and broken body parts” the mother has to clean up when she kills bugs, to the descriptions of the various ways one could hypothetically hurt or kill a baby—but the actual baby who is being poisoned suffers no visible harm (Satō 2012a, 125; 2018, 499). In the real world, there has yet to be externally visible harm

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from the Fukushima disaster outside of things like the bodies of mutated butterflies or the thyroid scans of children. The story forces us to ask important questions about society’s willingness or ability to identify this baby as a victim if the effects of radiation are not visible. The population that has been harmed by the Fukushima meltdowns has tried in its own way to become invisible in an effort to relocate and reintegrate into Japanese society. Yet these victims have been identified, not through evidence of their bodily harm, but by their regional dialects, which link them to the affected area.39 The harm to Satō’s victim is also easy to overlook because the child has been dehumanized. The mother speaks of the baby repeatedly as a “thing” (buttai). The reader never learns the baby’s name or gender, but nobody in the story has a name. Satō shows that, despite our efforts to care for each other, the nuclear disaster has made this impossible and has dehumanized both mother and child. This is no “paradise built in hell” where communities join together to help each other in the wake of a disaster (Solnit 2009). For those actual mothers living in the zone, this message would be beyond demoralizing while at the same time being an accurate picture of their post-Fukushima accident reality.40 In the end Satō’s message is clear: there is no escape. He moves the reader away from the bodies of immediate victims in the disaster zone to this helpless, most fragile of bodies in order to point out the realities of life post-Fukushima accident—namely, that there is no choice but to kill your children. At the end of the story, the mother and child are forced to go live with her in-laws in the countryside at a safer distance from the disaster. At first she is troubled because she fears she will not be able to continue poisoning the baby, but as she is researching the disaster on the Internet late one night, she finds maps showing the worst possible scenario for the dispersal of radiation. She does not deceive herself into thinking that things will return to normal, as her husband hopes. Rather, the story ends with her expression of relief knowing that “hell was spreading all around us” (Satō 2012a, 129; 2018, 504). The reader is shocked when the mother enumerates the various means of killing a child; however, Satō does not allow readers to absolve themselves by singling out this mother for blame. He places the reader in the uncomfortable position of not only sympathizing with this dispassionate, murdering mother but seeing themselves as perpetrators.41 In doing so, he drives home the helplessness and powerlessness of the situation. As

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the title warns us, the story offers little hope for change: things will continue the “same as always.” Kawakami Hiromi: Nuclear Victims, and Social Marginalization Kawakami Hiromi’s short story “God Bless You, 2011” (Kami­ sama, 2011) was the first fictional work to comment on the nuclear disaster.42 Appearing one month before Furukawa Hideo’s Horses, Horses, In the End the Light Remains Pure, the work is striking for its engagement with the effects of radiation on the local population at a time when many writers were approaching 3/11 as a natural disaster and writing about the earthquake and tsunami (Kimura Saeko 2013, 17–18). It is not just Kawakami’s treatment of radiation but her characterization of nuclear victims, human and animal, as marginalized figures in Japanese society that stands out. Fukushima nuclear victims suffer from the phenomenon of double ­victimization—harmed by the accident, they were subsequently shunned by society. This experience connects them to other victims in Japan, notably the atomicbomb victims, but also those affected by incidents like Aum Shinrikyō’s sarin gas terrorist attacks on the Tokyo subways.43 The atomic-bomb victims suffered from forms of discrimination in Japanese society such as difficulty finding marriage partners, as dramatized in Ibuse Masuji’s famous Black Rain (Kuroi ame, 1966). John Treat discusses Ōta Yōko’s historical narratives about “Japanese responsibility for the continuing degradation of hibakusha living in reduced health and wretched poverty” (Treat 1995, 94). Kawakami draws our attention to the peripheral status of such victims in Japanese society. By setting her story in the irradiated zone, she prefigures arguments like Furukawa’s about the marginalization of Tohoku as a whole. Kawakami’s story opens as her protagonist is invited to take a walk to the river by her neighbor, who happens to be a bear. She remembers the last time she had walked there, but then she had worn protective clothing (bōgofuku; Hiromi Kawakami 2012a, 37). Given the warm weather, this would be the first time since that “incident” (ano koto) that she would go out with her skin exposed (37). The bear, which had recently moved into the apartment down the hall, is rather formal and old-fashioned. They walk through an area that is very close to Ground Zero; the road, although recently repaved, had been off limits for a long time; the workers repairing the area are still clad in protective gear (39). The narrator and the

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bear spend a few hours by the river as the bear catches fish, takes a walk, and they both nap, before heading home. This story is set a few years into the future, and although the terms “Fukushima” or “The Great Eastern Japan Earthquake Disaster” never appear in the story, the reference to the 2011 nuclear accident is obvious. Critic Komori Yōichi writes that the very mention of such words as “protective clothing,” “decontamination” (josen), and “accumulated dosage” (ruiseki hibakuryō), as well as the image of decontaminated rice paddies and spring weather, would immediately tip off a Japanese audience that the story is about the Fukushima accident (Komori 2014, 80–84, 86). It is a rewrite of Kawakami’s 1993 story “God Bless You” (Kamisama), which also centers on the narrator’s trip to the river with a bear but does not mention accidents or radiation. The rewrite emphasizes the impact the nuclear disaster has had on daily life in the irradiated zone, clearly showing life both before and after.44 The bear is one of the many animals in Fukushima fiction— horses, cows, dogs, chickens, ostriches—­carcasses and live animals abandoned in the disaster and nuclear zones. Both Shigematsu Kiyoshi and Taguchi Randy use animal bodies as substitutes for human bodies as a way to talk about death and mourning (DiNitto 2017). Kawakami is similarly concerned with humans, but for her they are living ones, specifically those who have been and continue to be irradiated. After they return home, both the protagonist and the bear test their bodies for radiation. The narrator admits her fear of radiation, but as she made the decision to stay in the contaminated zone, she is resigned to this new life. The idea of life in the nuclear zone assumes that bodies are already damaged by radiation, and when the narrator records her daily and annual dosage in her diary at the end of the story, they are over the allowable limit.45 The damage is accentuated in the story by the lack of healthy bodies exposing themselves to the landscape. The only other bodies in the story besides those of the woman and the bear are those of the men involved in the cleanup (along the road and by the river), but the men’s bodies are covered in protective gear.46 Given that the original 1993 version was republished with the 2011 rewrite, the reader’s attention is drawn to the depopulated landscape, especially the missing healthy bodies of children playing by the river. As Kawakami’s protagonist says: “Before the ‘incident,’ this had been a lively place where people swam and fished, and families brought their children. Now however, there

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were no children left anywhere in the area” (Kawakami Hiromi 2012a, 40). Postmodern writer Takahashi Gen’ichirō was jarred by the stark contrast between the two versions of the story and argued that their coexistence forces the reader to wonder which world is real. Unfortunately, the world of protective clothing is real and the children are ghosts, an echo of a past world that no longer exists. The reader does not know the fate of these children, but Takahashi argues that, even if they did not die in the Fukushima incident, they will die in the future, at least according to the politicians and scientists who warned of “no immediate danger” (tadachi in eikyō ga nai) from the nuclear accident (Takahashi Gen’ichirō 2011, 210–212). Takahashi reads the absence of the children’s bodies as future deaths and as a form of mourning for that inevitable loss (211). Kawakami Hiromi draws attention to “difference” in this story to highlight the damaged versus healthy body and, more broadly speaking, to comment on the division between the nuclear victims (hibakusha) and those not exposed to radiation, as well as on the place of the foreigner in post-Fukushima accident Japan (Kimura Saeko 2013, 95). The bear in Kawakami’s story is marked as different in terms of his customs, his body, and his ability to handle the radiation. He remarks that, as he is larger compared to humans, his exposure limits are higher (Kawakami Hiromi 2012a, 39). When they encounter two men in protective gear by the river, one of the men admits his envy of the bear because he can withstand strontium and plutonium. The only explanation the man needs for his purported resistance to radiation is that he is a bear (Kawakami Hiromi 2012a, 40). After their outing, the bear asks the narrator if he can hug her, as it is the custom of his native region. She consents but is concerned because the bear does not bathe much and thus will have more radiation on his fur. He smells different and he growls. The bear seems to be better able to see the fish swimming in the water, and the narrator wonders if bears and humans see things the same way (Kawakami Hiromi 2012a, 41–43). Difference in “God Bless You, 2011” represented by the bear translates directly to the discrimination (sabetsu) and marginalization experienced by nuclear victims in post-Fukushima Japan, and by extension, the victims of the atomic bombs as well. Yet, in important ways the bear is not so different from the narrator; both narrator and narration treat him the same as any human

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character. Both are victims of the disaster and both decided to stay in the contaminated area. After the men leave, the bear corrects their mistaken assumption that he is resistant to radiation; he does have a slightly higher tolerance for it, but that does not mean he is resistant to it (Hiromi Kawakami 2012a, 41). Although the story often contrasts bear and human being, there is a kinship between the two characters. They share a plight as victims—specifically as nuclear victims. As they walk along the road to the river, the narrator comments that the cars made a wide circle around them. She speculates, “Maybe they’re keeping their distance because we’re not wearing protective suits” (39). Never once does she suppose that people are avoiding her because she is walking with a large bear. Rather, the implication is that they are being avoided because of their common status as irradiated. It is this status that overrides the divide between animal and human. She never expresses any fear of the bear. Instead, when she is trying to decide whether or not to let the bear hug her, she comments, “But I’d chosen to remain in this contaminated zone, so from the beginning I had no intention of letting such things bother me” (72). It is not the fact that he is a bear that concerns her, it is the radiation, but even that she is resigned to living with. The bear is just as affected by the disaster as the narrator. Or, put otherwise, the disaster has rendered the narrator’s circumstances no better than those of the bear, or any of Fukushima’s animals. The takeaway from “God Bless You, 2011” is that, as victims, both humans and animals have been reduced to pariahs living in an inhospitable landscape. Just like Gyūichirō and the Sōma horses discussed in the previous chapter, or the victims of the atomic bombs, the characters in Kawakami’s story live a marginalized existence both in their day-to-day life on irradiated land and in terms of their status in Japanese society. The animals of Fukushima fiction occupy the boundaries of society along with the nuclear victims and the marginalized people of the Tohoku area (Parker-Starbuck 2006, 654). These animals mark Tohoku as rural and reinforce stereotypes about it as backward and less developed. As mentioned in chapter 2, Akasaka Norio and others refer to Tohoku as one of Japan’s internal colonies, adding a level of geographical confinement to the biopolitical confinement imposed upon it by Fukushima. The hibakusha born of Fukushima, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki have experienced and continue to experience the double victimization of having been irradiated and subse-

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quently shunned by society. However, post-Fukushima accident, these animals and victims at the boundaries served to reveal the scientific and cultural narratives of knowledge and progress as empty and false.47 The myth of nuclear safety was exploded as the reactors melted down at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, irradiating the surrounding areas and waters. The collapse of the plant also exposed the tributary status of the victims of Tohoku vis-à-vis the cultural, economic, and political capital of Tokyo, as Tohoku paid the price for Tokyo’s electricity. The electricity from this plant belongs to the Tokyo Electric Power Company and services the Tokyo area. Furthermore, cases where the animals in these stories (horses, cows, ostriches, and bears) continue not only to live but to thrive in the irradiated zones also expose the hubris of our assumption that the world would end if it could no longer be inhabited by humans (Kawamura 2013, 38). As if the earthquake and tsunami were not enough to undermine the modern belief in our ability to control nature and in the necessity for human presence, the animals and lush plant life thriving in the people-less zones of Fukushima prefecture (and by extension the area around the Chernobyl NPP) put the final nail in the coffin. 3/11 and Memories of War The 3/11 disaster and its aftermath stirred up memories of World War II for the Japanese, as images of decimated cities and a populace struggling in the wake of defeat surfaced strongly in the national imaginary. The debris fields recalled the burnt-out ruins of Japan’s war-torn cities (Furukawa 2016b, 42; Henmi 2012, 52). Everyday citizens spoke of 3/11 as war in fora like the current-events senryū (satirical haiku-like poetry) in the newspaper Yomiuri, where one poem described nuclear-power-plant workers as “soldiers” (Brink 2018, 146). For psychologist and critic Saitō Tamaki, the only other time the Japanese experienced this suspended state of normal, everyday existence was during the war. The 3/11 disaster stands out as the only warlike experience of the postwar period (Saitō 2012, 29). Writer Murakami Ryū is one of the few who found occasion to praise the government response to 3/11, but he accomplished this through a comparison to World War II. In his short story “Little Eucalyptus Leaves” (Yūkari no chisana ha, 2012), Murakami’s autobiographical protagonist commends the efficient deployment and

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recovery efforts of the Self-Defense Forces during 3/11 by contrasting them to the Japanese battles in the Pacific during World War II and the reckless military planning that led to the useless death by starvation of hundreds of Japanese soldiers (Murakami Ryū 2012, 191–193). A range of artists and critics also made the same connection, but one that is far from neutral or complimentary to the Japanese government. Unlike Murakami, they employ the analogy of war to bring home the destructive toll 3/11 took on the Japanese public and their trust in the government.48 In an interview with the newspaper Asahi about his documentary film Inherit the Earth (Daichi o uketsugu, 2016), director Inoue Jun’ichi made the link between the number of people still unable to return to their homes five years after 3/11 and the hundred thousand who died in the Tokyo fire bombings of World War II, an event forever memorialized for residents of that city (Tainaka 2016; Inoue 2015). His comments remind readers that even five years after the disaster the number of displaced was still shockingly high. Author Setouchi Jakuchō compared the Fukushima accident to the war as yet another “man-made disaster” (jinsai), countering TEPCO’s claims that the blame lay squarely with the natural disasters of earthquake and tsunami (Setouchi 2012, 435). Satō Yūya recalled the term for “wartime” (senjika) to describe the post-3/11 and post-Fukushima accident climate in his Sennengo ni ikinokoru tame no seishun shōsetsu kōza (Lectures of Novels to Survive after 1000 Years; Satō 2013b, 83–87).49 He also revives the term “national crisis” (kokunan) to emphasize that the 3/11 disaster is the “big one” Japan has been waiting for since the end-of-the-world fad of the 1980s. Satō senses the memory of the war lurking everywhere and sees the connections made daily in the Japanese language itself. He demonstrates this through a series of pairings of words from 3/11 and World War II: earthquake and scorched earth; nuclear power plant and atomic bombs; the antinuclear movement and the left wing; the nuclear evacuations (hinan) of Fukushima and the wartime evacuation of the populace (sokai); the slogan “Fight on Japan!” (Gambarō Nippon!) of 3/11 and the incitement to battle (sen’ikōyō) of World War II propaganda (Satō 2013b, 87). With the exception of “the antinuclear movement and the left wing,” all of the above pairings cast a negative light on the 3/11 disaster, comparing it to the scorched-earth and hollow slogans of the war. The antinuclear movements post-Fukushima accident may

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not appear to be necessarily undermined by the comparison to the left-wing protest movements of the immediate postwar, but those movements failed to stop the ratification of the US–Japan Security Treaty (ANPO), and the left arguably collapsed in the face of postwar affluence. Read this way, Satō predicts a grim future for the antinuclear movements. Takahashi Gen’ichirō also found himself besieged by war memories post-3/11: Days after the earthquake, supermarket shelves were empty, long lines of cars had formed outside gas stations, parents were taking their children out of Tokyo. The television showed endless images of demolished towns; the numbers of the dead and missing climbed mercilessly upward into five digits; and refugees in dark gymnasiums lay trembling in the freezing cold, waiting for help. These are scenes from a war (senjika). (Takahashi, Numano, and Ikeuchi 2011)

Takahashi further mentions the 2011 televised address from the emperor as another link to war; this was the first address since the emperor’s father, Hirohito, made his famous radio address that ended World War II. But for Takahashi, the comparison moves into the realm of condemnation when he recalls the iconic image of the war, which was re-created in 2011. The footage of the mushroom cloud that escaped the explosion of reactor 3 at the Fukushima Daiichi NPP was, in Takahashi’s words, an image that caused the “resurfacing of memories long since sealed off, memories of another, enormous nuclear cloud that brought an end to the war sixty-six years ago.”50 The inclusion of the 3/11 disaster, specifically the nuclear accident, into a history of atomic bombs and war argues in favor of these events as continuity rather than rupture, as described in my introduction. However, such a continuity does not mean the return to normalcy promised by the Japanese government. Rather, it means the return of a history that is violent and unpredictable. It recalls the mistakes, misguided leadership, and discrimination that came out of these earlier events and is an indictment of the Japanese government and its people. The remarks and comparisons of these critics and authors bring us full circle to Ōe’s condemnation of nuclear power as a betrayal of the hibakusha and the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Ōe 2011).

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Tsushima Yūko: The Legacy of War and Nuclear Testing For novelist Tsushima Yūko, the war is also ever-present: the characters in her Mountain Cat Dome (Yamaneko dōmu, 2013) are forever tied to the war through their lineage as orphans born of American soldiers and Japanese women. As adults, they live through the history of the postwar period and find themselves in an irradiated Japan after an accident at a nuclear power plant in March. Mountain Cat Dome follows the sprawling personal history of Tsushima’s main characters, Mitch (Michio) and Kazu (Kazuo), who traverse the globe as wartime and postwar history are tracked through their lives and those of their orphaned, mixed-heritage friends.51 Tsushima touches on major events in world history from wars and nuclear accidents (World War II, the atomic bombs, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War, and Chernobyl) to the events of the American Civil Rights era (Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and Malcolm X’s and John F. Kennedy’s assassinations), to domestic and international terrorism (hijackings in Japan and 9/11) and a range of other events both unique to Japan (kidnappings of Japanese by North Korea) and experienced globally, including the oil shocks of the 1970s and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this broad-brush approach to history, Tsushima’s characters are haunted by the legacy of the war as well as their parents’ memories of the atomic bombs. The war provides a touchstone to which the narrative always returns. The images of the nuclear disaster and tsunami recall the traumatic images of the war and the bombs (Tsushima 2013, 9–10). The war is also at the root of the main characters’ marginal existence in Japan. Mitch and Kazu, as children of mixed marriages, belong neither to Japan nor to America. But they are not the only characters affected by the war. A neighborhood boy, Tābō, and his mother, although Japanese, are also marked as “other” because of their experience of living in the Japanese colonies during World War II. According to rumor, they were repatriated after having been abandoned by a Chinese man. Tābō is a social outcast, and his house is reminiscent of refurbished war barracks (Tsushima 2013, 133, 130). The characters are also haunted by their personal past, specifically the death of one of their childhood friends, Miki, who may have been killed by Tābō. The war and its legacy also play a role in the rumors swirling around Miki’s death. The story on the street is

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that black and mixed-heritage children like Mitch and Kazu were involved, or that an atomic-bomb victim from Hiroshima turned the malice he felt for America on the GI orphans whose existence he could not countenance (Tsushima 2013, 135). When Miki died, she was wearing an orange skirt, and the color symbolizes the violence of her own death, but also of war itself. Orange is associated with the Vietnam War through famous photographs taken against the backdrop of the jungles burned orange by napalm.52 Mitch also has an orange-colored dream sequence in which a man rapes a Vietnamese woman, and the narrative even associates orange with uniforms worn by Chilean army death squads (Tsushima 2013, 145, 173). On a local scale, Miki’s death is followed by a string of serial killings in Japan of women wearing orange. There is a sense that this color— and by extension, violence and death—lie in wait everywhere. The characters are haunted by the legacy of the war, the very real threat of radiation from atomic bombs, nuclear testing, and, most recently, accidents at nuclear power plants. The Fukushima accident is present in the novel from the very beginning. Four pages into the novel Tsushima mentions the nuclear accident in March. The characters worry about inhaling irradiated air and wonder how people can go on living when such an unimaginable thing has happened (Tsushima 2013, 7–8). The Fukushima accident is linked with earlier nuclear accidents and tragedies through a series of layered memories and intersecting histories. The memories themselves are stirred up by the radiation: “Distant memories, long since shriveled deep within his body began to squirm, bathed in the radioactive alpha, beta, and gamma rays” (Tsushima 2013, 9). The mention of the Fukushima NPP and the radioactive rain makes Tābō’s mother think of the black rain of the atomic bombs. When she hears the “nostalgic” words “plutonium,” “strontium,” and “Geiger counter,” she finds herself unable to sort the present from the past (Tsushima 2013, 27–28). While Mitch’s son has no connection to the atomic bombs or the Fukushima accident, he too is threatened by the radiation when the Chernobyl plant explodes while he is living with his mother in Stockholm (Tsushima 2013, 253). For Tsushima, the Fukushima accident was not an isolated incident. She voiced her concern with this legacy of the nuclear in an essay in Now, Especially, I Oppose Nuclear Power, in which she traces the history of nuclear weapons testing from Bikini Atoll up to the nuclear accident at the Fukushima NPP (Tsushima 2012). From the

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aborigines in Australia who mined the uranium used at TEPCO’s plant, to nuclear testing in Kazakhstan and the Marshall Islands, to the Taiwan Power Company’s nuclear waste-storage facility, Tsushima’s history highlights the various indigenous peoples of the Pacific who have been harmed by nuclear weapons and power. She adorned the cover of Mountain Cat Dome with a photograph of the concrete Cactus dome on Runit Island, an atomic blast crater filled with radioactive soil and debris from the US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. In a note at the end of the novel, Tsushima cautions the reader that the warning signs at the dome, written in both English and in the Marshall language, have faded over the past twenty-five years, to the point that soon they will no longer serve their purpose.53 She echoes Hayashi’s fears that knowledge of the nuclear has and will continue to disappear from public consciousness. For the characters in Mountain Cat Dome who must confront the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, the nuclear has not disappeared from consciousness. It shadows her characters through Japanese and world history. They are not the indigenous peoples of her essay, but they are people who have historically been marginalized inside Japan. Through Mitch and Kazu, the reader is given a picture of a nondiverse, xenophobic Japan (Tsushima 2013, 263). Tsushima presents history through the eyes of these characters rather than reciting a standard history of Japan’s role in the AsiaPacific War, a topic that continues to be controversial in Japan. Like Furukawa Hideo, who writes an alternate history that allows for a reconceptualization for Tohoku, Tsushima also writes an alternative history of postwar Japan. Tsushima’s decision to tell this story via these marginalized characters allows her to comment on other marginalized peoples, specifically those affected by the nuclear disasters mentioned in her essay and the new generation of nuclear victims born of the Fukushima disaster. Tsushima’s characters are themselves part of this new generation of hibakusha, and their troubled relationship to Japan echoes the problems of the 3/11 nuclear victims. Mitch realizes that people like him are problematic in Japan, and his relationship to his birth country is deeply ambivalent (Tsushima 2013, 273). He hates Japan, but both he and Kazu feel they are turning into ghosts—losing their identity—when they spend too much time away from Japan and the Japanese language (273). Tsushima does not make a specific case for the Fukushima accident; rather it is one of the many nuclear betray-

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als in global, postwar history. She allows us to see the Fukushima accident as part of a longer history of nuclear testing, clearly linking the accident at the NPP to the atomic bombs and US nuclear testing in the Pacific. The connection she draws between nuclear power and nuclear bombs is one that some in the antinuclear movement have resisted. But she seeks to move beyond the bounds of Japan by linking the nation’s nuclear victims (of atomic bombs and powerplant accidents) to those around the globe who have labored for the nuclear industry. In my next chapter, I take up the larger question of nuclear literature as a writing that reaches beyond Japan to the global industry. Although there are Japanese writers who draw comparisons between 3/11 and global events like 9/11 or even the Holocaust, World War II and the atomic bombs remain an important touchstone and reference for Fukushima fiction, and for Japanese society as a whole.54 The authors examined in this chapter may not necessarily see themselves as part of a lineage dating back to the atomic-bomb writers, but they do not shy away from or ignore the historical and political significance of writing about this new generation of nuclear victims. In contrast to Kamilla Shamsie’s critique of American 9/11 fiction, the Fukushima accident is not “as ahistorical as an earthquake” in Japanese fiction (Shamsie 2012). Rather, writers examine the issues of personal risk and the failure of the government and the nuclear industry to take responsibility for the disaster. They also refuse to allow individual citizens to regard themselves as blameless in Japan’s rush to nuclearize and in the willing blindness that came with the cheap energy of a thriving postwar economy. Last, Fukushima fiction also depicts the isolation of nuclear victims who are shunned by that very society that shies away from its own complicity. However, as I have shown, the stance of spokesman is politically fraught, as is seen in Kuroko Kazuo’s critique of Murakami Haruki’s famous speech. Murakami’s speech did bring global attention to the victims of Fukushima in a way that was not possible for a writer like Hayashi or the other writers mentioned in this chapter. If his speech inspires global action to aid the plight of the Japanese and prevent future danger from nuclear power plants, then perhaps even activists will see it as worth the cost.

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Chapter 4

Chernobyl and Beyond A New Era of Nuclear Literature

T

he Fukushima nuclear crisis forced a rethinking of Japan’s relationship to the nuclear and engendered new fictional story lines that moved past the unfolding disaster, both geographically and temporally, to imagine new realities and new futures in the nuclear spaces of contaminated Japan and the world at large.1 In this chapter, my analysis moves outward to consider how Fukushima fiction reaches beyond the 3/11 disaster and Japan to engage with the global culture of the nuclear. I characterize this trend of Fukushima fiction as “nuclear fiction” and expand the meaning of that term for Japanese literature. Although the Fukushima disaster has entered the pages of world fiction, such as Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and Alexander Kluge’s The Fifth Book (Das fünfte Buch, 2012), this chapter limits its focus to the work of six Japanese writers who employ the imaginative potential of literature to depict life in this irradiated world (Ozeki 2013; Kluge 2012).2 Nuclear fiction in Japan finds its origins in Oda Makoto’s ambitious novel Hiroshima (1981).3 Oda created a new critical framework that connected with the global concerns of the 1980s and radically expanded the scope of post–atomic-bomb writings (Treat 1995, 383).4 Oda started his novel with the Trinity tests in New Mexico, identifying the first nuclear victim not as Japanese but as a Native American who was irradiated by this test on July 16, 1945. The novel rewrote the atomic bombings of Japan, turning them from a national tragedy into an international nuclear event (Treat 1995, 376–378). John Treat uses the term “nuclear literature” to distinguish Oda’s work from earlier atomic-bomb literature that relied on the testifying first-person narratives of a limited number of individual survi121 This content downloaded from 75.69.46.187 on Mon, 01 May 2023 02:34:13 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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vors (Treat 1995, 384). Oda removed Japan’s argument for uniqueness with respect to their suffering the “only nuclear attack in history” and widened our understanding of the scope of the effects of the nuclear (Treat 1995, 392). Oda’s Hiroshima represents a critical shift in post-Hiroshima writing at a time when the nuclear was a topic of vital concern. The 1980s were preceded by the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island (1979) and witnessed both Chernobyl (1986) and the end of the Cold War–era arms race. In addition to the real world nuclear threats were the disasters that did not happen and the depiction of that nuclear anxiety (Broderick and Jacobs 2012; Cordle 2008). With the end of the Cold War, the meaning of the nuclear shifted, as it became incorporated into other narratives and took on new associations, such as a tool for global terrorism. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the nuclear was touted as the low-carbon-energy solution to global warming, a move meant to salvage an energy industry in “terminal decline” (Lowe 2014, xxv).5 But it was not just the power companies that were promoting the nuclear. In films like Armageddon (1998) and Sinking of Japan (Nihon chinbotsu, 2006) nuclear detonations are used to save the earth from a threatening asteroid, or at least save the Japanese islands from being subducted into the ocean.6 The use of what appear to be multiple nuclear bombs in the climax to Sinking of Japan represents a sea change in Japan’s relationship to the nuclear, wherein the threat of annihilation had given way to the promise of ending global destruction. These movies have come full circle back to the films of the 1950s and 1960s that Susan Sontag argues used the nuclear to save the world from alien invasions and attacks from prehistoric monsters à la Godzilla.7 But given the ongoing menace from the nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima, it is hard to imagine this vision of the nuclear as the ultimate solution being used after March 2011. I extend Treat’s definition of nuclear literature to encompass the works written after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, shifting from a world of atomic-bomb warfare to one of menacing nuclear power plants, from military weapons to civilian “peaceful” energy sources. Unlike the apocalyptic predictions of atomic literature that foretold the annihilation of humanity, Fukushima nuclear fiction depicts a world that did not end. This differs from Cold War–era nuclear fiction in which characters are frozen in a suspended state of anxiety awaiting the oncoming apocalypse. It also moves past works like Shi-

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gematsu’s “Homecoming” where the characters struggle with their anger, resentment, and confusion about an accident and its impact that they do not fully understand or have only just begun to come to terms with.8 Although Kawakami Hiromi’s “God Bless You, 2011” (Kamisama, 2011, 2011) moved the clock a step forward by having her characters agree to remain in the irradiated zone, a defining feature of the stories under consideration in this chapter is the premise that life with radiation is the new norm, regardless of whether the characters accepted it willingly or unknowingly. We are in a literary landscape well past any lamenting of the disaster or fighting over the cleanup. Radiation and its culture of nuclearity have become embedded in daily life, and there is no going back. In order to fully explore the engagement of Fukushima fiction with the culture of the nuclear, I place this literature within a larger framework of “nuclearity.” I borrow this term from historian Gabrielle Hecht, who asks questions about how the nuclear is defined in order to reveal key inconsistencies, like the failure of national and international agencies to count uranium mining in Africa as official nuclear activity.9 For Hecht, “nuclearity” is the contested terrain around what makes something nuclear (Hecht 2012, 14). Borrowing this idea of a contested terrain, I consider how Japanese writers set their stories in nuclear landscapes that feature depleted uranium munitions, nuclear power and processing plants, nuclear waste sites, communities built on irradiated ground, and the culture of secrecy and knowledge that surrounds the nuclear.10 Hecht’s term also provides a methodology for my analysis of this literature. It is possible to examine the stories in this chapter solely from the perspective of the fiction that has been written since the March 2011 disaster, or even to expand that scope to encompass the atomic bombings of Japan. However, I seek an even wider lens. For that, I look to humanities and social science research on the nuclear. In their work on Chernobyl and the plutonium cities of the wartime and postwar arms race, scholars such as Adriana Petryna and Kate Brown confirm the particularities of nuclear environments—their social, political, and cultural conditions—and the reproduction of those conditions in other places and at other times. They show that we have learned little from our tragic engagement with the nuclear, as victims continue to be sidelined and dangers downplayed. For example, in her analysis of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Sarah Phillips demonstrates how the Japanese govern-

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ment and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), owner of the Fukushima plant, reproduced the mistakes of Chernobyl despite Japan’s supposed technological and organizational advancement over the ageing Soviet system that had led to Chernobyl twenty-five years earlier. As Phillips lays out a chilling comparison of the ineffectual responses, she makes her case for how the Japanese failed to “unroll a state-of-the-art nuclear disaster response for the modern age.” Rather, they reproduced the conditions and failures of the nuclear dating back to World War II. By using the framework of nuclearity, I emphasize the ways in which Fukushima fiction engages with larger geopolitical and national discourses on the nuclear. For author Kurokawa Sō, it is through an expansion of the geographical scope, shifting the location from the Fukushima NPP and its surrounding area to other sites damaged by the nuclear—Chernobyl, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, and the Balkans—be it through power plants or depleted uranium bombs. Taguchi Randy and Gen’yū Sōkyū exploit the nuclear trope of the utopian in order to discredit it, while Tawada Yōko, Satō Yūya, and Yoshimura Man’ichi reveal the other side of this coin—the world of Big Brother surveillance, secrets, and lies that created and sustained nuclear processing and power plants and the communities around them. These authors set their stories in past and present communities affected by the nuclear, as well as in dystopian nuclear futures. In doing so, they comment on the Fukushima nuclear crisis and the myriad social problems of contemporary Japan. This analysis of Fukushima fiction via nuclearity places the stories within a larger, global framework; reveals the commonalities wrought by the nuclear; and heightens the critical potential of these works. Kurokawa Sō: The Global Nuclear Landscape Kurokawa Sō’s short-story collection Things That Once Happened in This World (Itsuka kono sekai de okotte ita koto, 2012) brings post-­ Fukushima accident Japan into contact with nuclear and environmental disasters across the globe (Kurokawa Sō 2012b).11 His Japanese protagonists are linked with residents and victims of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State and the Chernobyl accident in Belarus, as well as those living with the legacy of depleted uranium bombs dropped by NATO in Sarajevo. Kurokawa’s stories build bridges connecting the experiences of nuclear

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accidents, nuclear war, and environmental damage. His “documentary fiction” writes characters and story lines into historical locations affected by nuclear disasters.12 This work not only depicts and imagines disasters and tragedies but educates readers about the nuclear through mini-lectures on the dangers of radiation and atomic weapons. Refusing to limit his work to Japan, Kurokawa has his characters move through these contested global nuclear landscapes—like Belarus, eastern Washington, and Sarajevo—where residents are already living the new nuclear normal. Issues of a global, post-nuclear reality and questions about responsibility surface strongly in “The Crying Man” (Naku otoko, 2012) set in the American Pacific Northwest (Kurokawa Sō 2012d). The story takes place in the wake of an unnamed nuclear disaster in Japan and flashes back to a study tour of the Pacific Northwest in 1977. The study tour visits a Native American reservation and hears about their internal problems (alcoholism and unemployment) as well as the injustices perpetrated by the US government. Mr. Washington, the tour’s Native American guide, tells the group about the Navaho in Arizona who mined uranium on their reservation during World War II. Not only were the Navaho poorly compensated for the use of their land, they suffered as the rates of cancer and leukemia increased (107). The Japanese tour group also visits the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the famed plutonium production reactor, and listens to the stock speech given to visitors regardless of their n ­ ationality—namely, that the dropping of the bomb provided a necessary path to the American victory and the end of the war. The students learn that Hanford is where the Americans made the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb, which may have included some of the Navaho uranium as well (108). This circle Kurokawa draws from the Navaho to the atomic bombs is reminiscent of scenes in Oda Makoto’s Hiroshima in which Native Americans are dying from radiation-induced sickness brought on by uranium mining in the American Southwest (Treat 1995, 381). Kurokawa makes the link explicit when Mr. Washington tells the tour group, “It wasn’t just the Japanese at the end point of this uranium, but the Navaho at its starting point who were also irradiated” (Kurokawa Sō 2012d, 108). Kurokawa weaves in mini-lectures on nuclear dangers as voiced through David, a Fairhaven College professor; through conversations with Mr. Washington, the tour’s Native American guide; through an e-mail exchange that takes place years after a nuclear disaster in

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Japan between a former Fairhaven College student and a young Japanese man who had been on the tour; and through speeches by the Japanese tour organizer. The group learns about the contamination of the land around Hanford and of the government’s refusal to accept blame. These mini-lectures are voiced by a range of speakers, as Kurokawa refuses to privilege any one speaker, perspective, or nation with regard to these disasters. Japan does not claim sole ownership on the nuclear. He is also careful not to fictionalize the events of March 2011. For him, the Fukushima disaster, as well as the other disasters he mentions, are treated as historical realities.13 Kurokawa’s “documentary fiction” is meant to entertain, but also to educate. “Chekhov’s School” (Cheehofu no gakkō, 2012) takes the reader to Russia and shifts from the uranium mining and atomic bombs in Kurokawa and Oda to the threat of nuclear power plants. The story moves from descriptions of Russian writer Anton Chekhov’s life and local Slavic food customs to the present-day travels of a Japanese writer who goes to Moscow to give a series of lectures and visit literary sites (Kurokawa Sō 2012a). The arc of the story follows the writer’s interest in Chekhov and Russian history and customs; however, it is interrupted at various points by vignettes of victims of the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters. In structuring the work in this way, Kurokawa demonstrates the unavoidable nature of the nuclear: it is no longer possible to tell the story of a Japanese writer traveling to Russia without discussing the effects of these nuclear accidents. As Dan Cordle argues in States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose, even though the fears of the Cold War nuclear annihilation never came to pass, “after 1945, nuclear technology became part of the fabric out of which everyday experience was woven.” It became a “new condition of reality” (Cordle 2008, 2). This new reality invades Kurokawa’s story, which opens with a scene of mushroom hunting, emphasizing its historical importance to the Russian seasons and cuisine. But this recounting of the Russian love for mushrooms is interrupted by a quotation from Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel laureate who argued that, after the accident in 1986, Belarusians all became Chernobyl-ites, and their world completely changed (Kurokawa Sō 2012a, 137).14 As a way of showing the radical changes to the Belarusians’ world, Kurokawa’s narrator refers extensively to a handbook published by the Belarusian Radiation Safety Research Group on how to prepare food so as to

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reduce the amount of radiation exposure for your family, as it is impossible to find non-contaminated food anywhere in Belarus (138–139).15 Mushrooms still grow in these contaminated areas, but due to the high levels of radiation they absorb, they are now forbidden. The era of mushroom-based cuisine ended in April 1986, leaving this “new condition of reality.” Other effects of life in this new world include school-aged children trained to wear dosimeters and to measure the radiation in their food. At one point, Kurokawa turns from Russia to Japan and describes a family separated by the 3/11 disaster. Written as a Che­ kho­vian tragedy, the story tells of a father who works and lives in an area of high radiation in order to support his family. The wife takes the children to Tokyo and moves from shelter to shelter, as they have lost their old neighborhood connections and support networks. The family bears the scars of the nuclear crisis: the wife suffers from anxiety and the children from nosebleeds and asthma (Kurokawa 2012a, 161–162). “Chekhov’s School” moves the reader from the new realities of life in Belarus to those of irradiated Japan, and they are frighteningly interchangeable on many levels. The wife’s anxiety can be attributed to radiophobia—a term that redirects blame for the nuclear disaster back on victims who are seen as overly sensitive to the stress associated with these disasters.16 The children’s nosebleeds also serve as a marker of radiation poisoning. Kurokawa shifts the stage from Russia to Eastern Europe in “Kamikaze” (2012), which reveals the realities of life in the nuclear age via the dangers of depleted uranium bombs, as we move from uranium mining to nuclear power plants to twenty-first-century warfare (Kurokawa Sō 2012c, 206). The protagonist, Irena, is an older female singer from Sarajevo who lived in Japan for over twenty years until she left after the Fukushima accident, as did many foreigners. Irena’s sister in the Balkans died of cancer, and Irena attributes her death to depleted uranium bombs dropped on her hometown in an aerial bombing ten years before, which resulted in an unnatural increase in cancer cases. The reader gets a mini-lecture on these munitions—or as Irena characterizes them, the “nuclear trash” (kaku no gomi) that causes internal radiation—and on their effects on the Balkans, Iraq, and Gaza (206–207). Kurokawa’s mention of these depleted uranium bombs echoes Hecht’s comments about the debates circulating around these munitions. While many question their legality and morality, the US and

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UK governments have downplayed their nuclearity and denied causality between the bombs and birth defects: “they asserted that the radiation levels released by the DU munitions fall within permissible dose ranges, and would not cause discernible health effects” (Hecht 2006, 329). In Kurokawa’s story, Irena laments that the link between cancer and the depleted uranium munitions is unproven (Kurokawa Sō 2012c, 208). Kurokawa uses this global approach to connect Fukushima to other sites of nuclear disaster, but also to criticize the handling of the situation in Japan and to discuss the effects of the Fukushima accident on the region’s residents. The mention of the children having nosebleeds in “Chekhov’s School” recalls the controversy in the manga Oishinbo, when writer Kariya Tetsu depicted his protagonist coming down with a nosebleed after having visited the irradiated area. The manga drew the ire of both the residents of the affected area and the government for spreading “harmful rumors” (fūhyō higai). This negative reaction indicated both a resistance to linking nosebleeds to radiation exposure and to countenancing the dangers of radiation levels in the disaster areas.17 In “Kamikaze,” when Irena asks the narrator, her manager, about the meaning of the word “kamikaze,” the narrator explains the propitious winds that repelled the Mongol forces long ago but also talks in detail about the winds after the nuclear explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Kurokawa uses this as an opportunity to criticize the Japanese government’s evacuation plan, which was based on the concentriccircle model that measured residents’ distance from the plant rather than the actual spread of radiation. Kurokawa’s narrator explains that the government hid the SPEEDI (System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information) data that would have taken into account wind and weather patterns. Hence some residents fleeing the crisis did not know which way the wind was blowing or which way to run, and many headed into areas of higher radiation (Kurokawa Sō 2012c, 210–212).18 Kurokawa references other disasters as a means of critiquing the situation in Japan post-nuclear accident. In a story titled “The Wave” (Nami, 2012), one of the characters recounts his experience working as an engineer on an oil and natural gas pipeline in Sakhalin (Kurokawa Sō 2012e).19 Despite the immanent possibility of accidents, the Japanese were disinterested in Sakhalin’s environmental problems. For the locals in Sakhalin living in a harsh, unforgiving

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climate, a compromised environment meant that people would die; but for the Tokyo elite living comfortable lives, environmental issues were a mere inconvenience. These comments about oil and gas mining across the La Pérouse Strait take on new meaning in light of the Fukushima accident. Kurokawa prompts the reader to think about how victims living in the irradiated zones perceive environmental damage differently from those Japanese who are far, or seemingly far removed, from the disaster area. Japanese Prime Minister Abe’s statement to the International Olympic Committee that the disaster in Fukushima was contained is indicative of the rhetorical strategies that allow for such disassociation.20 Kurokawa brings the weight of other disasters and accidents to bear on his criticism of the Japanese. When he places Fukushima on a par with other global tragedies like Chernobyl, it undercuts any governmental reassurances of “no immediate danger.”21 Utopian Nuclear Spaces Well before the creation of atomic bombs and nuclear power, the idea of the nuclear held the promise of a utopian dream. Early American and British novels and plays from the 1910s–1930s imagined world governments that would realize utopian universal disarmament through a monopoly on atomic bombs.22 Although the utopian potential of these bombs was questioned in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the utopian dream reemerged in the form of “unlimited energy” in the US-driven Atoms for Peace campaign that introduced nuclear power to Japan in the 1950s. Like the energy itself, the “possibilities for mankind” were also touted as “unlimited” by the media blitz accompanying the campaign.23 The attribution of a utopian dream to something as destructive as atomic energy is not unique to this campaign, which attempted to convince the Japanese to adopt nuclear power.24 Those same dreams were sold to Americans through advertising and proclamations from the US Atomic Energy Commission (Hecht 2012, 7–8). The idea of utopia is built into the very fabric of the nuclear. This dream became a reality for those living in the idyllic communities surrounding the plutonium production plants in eastern Washington State and the southern Russian Urals. In Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, Kate Brown describes how residents of these planned “company” towns, or “plutopias,” “recall never having to lock their doors, chil-

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dren roaming safely, friendly neighbors, and the absence of unemployment, indigence, and crime” (Brown 2013, 3). News media described Richland, Washington, as “paradise” and “utopia” (Brown 2013, 43). We may wish to consign this alignment of nuclear reactors and middle-class lives to these two sites, but as Brown argues, the connection between “nuclear power and high-risk affluence” extends easily to cities like Pripyat near Chernobyl, a “rare modern city of urban conveniences in an otherwise poor, rural Ukrainian landscape,” but also to places like the nuclear villages surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi NPP and others across Japan, whose residents saw their daily lives enhanced by nuclear subsidies (Brown 2013, 4).25 Next I examine this utopian promise in the fiction of Taguchi Randy and Gen’yū Sōkyū. In these stories, however, the fictional utopias are not associated with the privilege of a middle-class lifestyle. Rather, these utopian spaces are found in an abandoned, irradiated area that becomes a refuge for two women who reject society and at a makeshift nuclear waste site that takes on religious healing powers. The stories reveal that socioeconomic privilege provides no protection against radiation: both the affluent plutopias and these marginal spaces were equally exposed. Both stories raise questions of social acceptability in terms of who resides in or near nuclear spaces. In Taguchi’s work, these residents are social outcasts, and the story shows that the utopian resident and the outcast are essentially two sides of same coin. When we consider the reality of where NPPs get sited, it is easy to see the underside of the utopian dream: broken communities that lack the cultural, social, and political capital necessary to keep an NPP out of their backyard. As Richard Hindmarsh elucidates: “Siting targeted poor and peripheral local communities where the acceptance of the initial sites for nuclear power was brokered through the introduction of various economic incentives and subsidies, which had induced their dependency as ‘one-industry towns’ ” (Hindmarsh 2014, 61). The characterization of these communities as having “welcomed” the plants or additional reactors says more about their need for economic stimulus and desensitization to risk than their desire to live in the shadow of a potentially dangerous nuclear facility.26 Taguchi Randy: Irradiated Refuge The setting for Taguchi Randy’s story “Guinea Pigs” (Morumotto, 2013) is reminiscent of the 30 km Zone of Alienation around

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the Chernobyl plant, an irradiated area that is technically off-limits, but where residents choose to live illegally (Taguchi 2013a).27 Taguchi’s story is narrated in the first-person by a young woman who walks away from her life in the city to take up residence in a former commune, now located in a contaminated zone. When she first arrived in October 2011, seven years before, the only other resident, an older woman named Toki, warned her that she should leave. She ignores this warning at risk to her own health. In September 2013, the region was designated a “semi-permanent evacuation zone” (han’eikyū taihi chiiki), and those areas with high levels of radiation were fenced off with barbed wire. The story does not name the Fukushima disaster directly, but a clear link to 3/11 is made via references to an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident in 2011; Toki’s warnings of contamination; and the narrator’s memories of the Sanriku coast before the disaster. From the narrator’s perspective, life with Toki is utopia, and although the story presents hopeful possibilities for life in the contaminated zone, the outside world invades and puts an end to this dream. Toki and the narrator become illegal residents after they refuse to evacuate, and eventually society decides to ignore them (Taguchi 2013a, 199). As the narrator says: “The former residents of the zone were given a pension, safe land, and a place to live, nothing extravagant. But if you wanted to stay in the contaminated area, you were left to fend for yourself, to live at your own risk” (Taguchi 2013a, 200). Toki and the narrator make their lives in this place that has no postal, electricity, gas or water service, a place that has been “erased from the map of Japan” (184). However, for Taguchi’s narrator, this nuclear zone represents a utopian space free from the trappings of modern life, work, and men. The two women live harmoniously off the land, amid great natural beauty, generating the green energy of solar power. They make a life for themselves in the no-go zone. The story imagines a different future for the irradiated spaces of northeast Japan and for those residents forced to evacuate, some with little hope of ever returning. The space is utopian for Toki and the narrator, but within the wider scope of the story, those who choose to live in such spaces are marked as socially unacceptable and/or foolishly willing to take on high somatic risk. As Sharon Stephens reminds us in her research on radiation experts working in a post-Chernobyl climate, socially acceptable and tolerable limits for radiation exposure are set cultur-

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ally and politically, not scientifically (Stephens 2002, 91). This was clearly seen in Japan when the government decided to raise the annual allowable exposure limit to twenty times the normal amount after the Fukushima meltdowns, thereby reducing the number of residents who would need to be evacuated.28 Within the cultural and political context of postwar Japan, both Toki and the narrator fit the bill as socially unacceptable. The narrator walked away from a good job in the city and from society at large. She had been suffering from a new form of depression that afflicted the younger generation, falling ill when she could not align her personal interests with her work responsibilities (Taguchi 2013a, 192–193). In turning her back on society, the narrator joined the ranks of the “nonproductive” members of Japanese society—the shut-ins, NEETs, and freeters—who are among those an older, conservative generation sees as failing to work for the national cause.29 Toki also turned her back on Japan by walking away from the high-growth economy and dropping out of Japanese society; she is currently listed as a missing person (yukue fumeisha; Taguchi 2013a, 183). She was one of the founding members of the commune that started forty years ago in the town, but the locals did not welcome their presence. In the 1990s, the residents of the neighboring town worried that the hippies were from the religious cult Aum Shinrikyō, whose adherents perpetrated the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subways in 1995 in an act of domestic terrorism. The story equates those willing to live with radiation with adherents of dangerous religious cults like Aum. By the time the narrator arrives at the commune, most of the residents have already relocated to Okinawa, which although it is touted in the story as a desirable place because it is “radiation free,” in reality is another of Japan’s politically troubled spaces (Taguchi 2013a, 201). Along with Hokkaido and Tohoku, Okinawa has been regarded as one of Japan’s “internal colonies.”30 One former commune resident, Mark, left for Okinawa rather than wear a dosimeter (garasu bajji) to collect data on radiation exposure for the government (Taguchi 2013a, 200).31 Toki reminds the narrator that she too is a guinea pig taking part in a human experiment (Taguchi 2013a, 218–219). The narrator’s identity as a test subject is ironic considering that she left her job in the city testing cosmetics on animals. The association of nuclear spaces with outcasts and test subjects is reminiscent of the downwinder communities of “soldiers, prisoners, minorities, farmers, and migrant workers” who provided much

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needed labor for nuclear-processing plants (Brown 2013, 5–6). These workers were kept separate from the elite, middle-class communities of plant workers in plutopia, who were theoretically shielded from the dangers of the nuclear. The downwinders were temporary workers, and the exposure they received from their dirty work was unmonitored. When the job was finished, they moved on, never lingering long enough to provide proof of the medical dangers of radiation (Brown 2013, 5–6).32 The space the two women occupy in “Guinea Pigs” loses its utopian markings when science and modern institutions invade. At the end of the story one of the former residents of the commune comes with a doctor and a videographer to extricate Toki and the narrator. The doctor wants to examine the women, as the effects of radiation should be evident in their bodies. The men bring a large Geiger counter, and everything they point it at turns an ashen color, withers, and loses its luster. Toki shrivels into an old woman (Taguchi 2013a, 227–228). These scenes are painful, as the men pepper the narrator with questions and accusations, treating her like a criminal or fool for having forsaken society and for needlessly exposing herself to radiation in this dangerous, forgotten space. They ask if she is a criminal or a leftover from the terrorist cult (Taguchi 2013a, 229). All the while, the cameraman films the scene, trespassing into their lives just as filmmakers and newsmen were accused of doing to victims in the immediate wake of 3/11.33 Toki chases the men away with a shotgun, but the damage has been done: she takes to her bed and the narrator falls ill with a virus. The story ends as Toki dies, and in keeping with her namesake, time literally runs out for the two women.34 The narrator leaves, and the place disappears in a huge snowfall. The reader never sees the narrator reintegrated into society and her destination remains unstated. Like a good downwinder, she moves on and takes any medical evidence of radiation poisoning with her. Taguchi’s story further collapses the distance between Brown’s middle-class workers and downwinder communities, clearly marking them as two sides of the utopian/dystopian coin. The invasion of the outside world forces the reader to step back and question the utopian image of this abandoned, irradiated space. The story presents the women in a sympathetic light, and there are many in Japan who have chosen or been forced to remain in or return to areas with high levels of radiation.35 For these people, the pull of family, home, community, and jobs is strong enough to make

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them live with the risk of radiation exposure. Toki and the narrator have different reasons for staying in the zone, but they represent these real-life victims. The entry of society, male-gendered and presented in a negative light, smashes the utopian dream, revealing the women as fools and the commune as even worse than a homeless encampment.36 For Toki, age sixty, the radiation is less of a health concern, but the narrator is still young, and it is her life, health, and reproductive potential that are in danger. Taguchi shows the risks that residents of contaminated zones take, willingly or unwillingly, to find or keep meaningful connections in post-­disaster societies. Gen’yū Sōkyū: From Waste Site to Pilgrimage Gen’yū’s “Mountain of Light” (Hikari no yama, 2013) tells the story of an old man who offers up his property as an informal dump site for radioactive waste, as government officials—from the prime minister down to local leaders—are unable to reach a consensus on an official site (Gen’yū 2013b).37 Locating his story in the contested terrain of nuclear-waste sites and radiation exposure, Gen’yū creates a tongue-in-cheek story about a radioactive dump site that becomes a destination of religious and medical pilgrimage. The story is narrated by the old man’s son who now runs the religious site, and is styled in a conversational voice as though he were speaking to the pilgrims. The story accepts, even embraces, life with radiation. Gen’yū plays with the ideas of hormesis—the benefits of low-level radiation exposure—to turn Japan’s controversial and long-term problem of storage for irradiated waste into a utopian dream of human longevity. “Mountain of Light” lambasts the government and the scientific community for their willingness to push the nuclear risk onto individual residents of the contaminated zones. The story opens thirty years in the future and looks back on a time when there were still nuclear power plants and the earthquake known as 3/11 led to the destruction of the NPP in Fukushima prefecture (Gen’yū 2013b, 149). Unlike other stories that mention an unnamed large earthquake, tsunami, or nuclear disaster, “Mountain of Light” makes an unequivocal link to the disaster of March 2011. Gen’yū starts the story years after 3/11, when further disasters in ­Japan—a large earthquake in Tokyo and the eruption of Mount Fuji—have led to the depopulation of Tokyo and a repopulation of the areas affected by the Fukushima nuclear accident.

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The narrator tells the story of his father, who worked collecting debris—earth, branches, gravel, and lumber—even after it had been contaminated by the nuclear disaster. The father allowed others to leave their radioactive debris on his land, and the dump site grew in size and radiation levels as people traveled farther distances to reach it. By the third year it had grown to a veritable mountain forty meters long and twenty meters high. When the narrator comes from Tokyo to check on his parents, he remarks that it looks like a huge “battleship” (Gen’yū 2013b, 155). The narrator is alarmed by the high levels of radiation coming off the mountain. His father casually explains that, despite even higher levels in places like Belarus, people continued to live there. The narrator is concerned because, three years before, the same levels had forced the town of Iitate in northeast Japan to be completely evacuated (Gen’yū 2013b, 156–157). Despite these high levels, the old man is not afraid of cancer and lives another twenty-five years, finally dying at the age of ninetyfive (Gen’yū 2013b, 157). The narrator holds a funeral for his father and over two thousand residents and dignitaries attend. When the priest cremates the old man’s body atop the mountain, the whole mass glows a fluorescent purple, like the purple cloud (raigō) upon which the Amida Buddha is said to descend to guide believers to the Western Paradise (Gen’yū 2013b, 165). The mountain is converted to a royal grave of sorts (kofun), and visitors come as pilgrims to walk its religious circuit.38 The story ends as the narrator, now tour guide, assures the pilgrims that, even though the radiation levels have dropped in the past five years, there is still plenty to go around (Gen’yū 2013b, 166–167). The genesis of the story, the problems of agreeing on a dump site for nuclear waste, reflects the situation on the ground in Fukushima prefecture. As of March 2016, the Japanese government had not yet managed to convince the absentee landlords in the area around the Fukushima Daiichi NPP to sell the necessary land for building a permanent or semipermanent storage facility (Kirby 2016). Nuclear and environmental specialist Peter Wynn Kirby argued that, unlike at Chernobyl, Japan’s dense population makes it difficult to convert the large area of contamination around the Fukushima plant into an abandoned zone for natural decay.39 Kirby ends his article with the only two viable, albeit grim, options for ­Japan: the imposition of a secure nuclear-waste facility on an un­will­

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ing community, or what he sees as obvious: that “the core of Fukushima’s exclusion zone will become a gigantic de facto nuclear waste dump indefinitely” (Kirby 2016). Locals have balked at this death sentence for Fukushima prefecture, and in a 2016 editorial in the Asahi Shimbun, the paper expressed its surprise over the use of the term “sarcophagus” (sekkan)—a reference to the concrete entombment at Chernobyl— in a government report on decommissioning the Fukushima NPP. Local governments raised objections, and the Fukushima governor expressed his outrage that this solution meant acknowledging a condemnation of the site and no possibility of return for former residents. In response, the government deleted the word from their report, despite the lack of a clear solution for dealing with the melted fuel (“VOX POPULI: There’s No End to Fukushima Crisis While Melted Fuel Remains” 2016). The government has been removing topsoil from affected communities in the evacuated zones in an effort to move residents back into them. This contaminated soil is stored in one-ton tarp bags with a shelf life of three years. These bags, which numbered over nine million as of fall 2015, are being moved around the disaster area on trucks from provisional to temporary storage areas while the government looks for a permanent dump site (Kirby 2016). In June 2016, Inoue Shinji, Senior Vice Environment Minister, reported on new plans to dispose of the contaminated soil. The government plans to recycle radioactive soil in public works projects across the country in order to raise “the ground level in the construction of roads, seawalls, railways and other public works projects.” Inoue acknowledged the expected opposition, but affirmed the ministry’s plans to move forward regardless (Kotsubo 2016). This is a reprisal of earlier plans from 2012 to spread the irradiated waste around the country; at that time, the government offered financial incentives for local governments that agreed to incinerate disaster debris, despite the fact that local facilities were not equipped to handle radioactive material (“Eco-Model City Kitakyushu and Japan’s Disposal of Radioactive Tsunami Debris” 2011). In having the narrator’s father create a dump site that other NIMBYs will not permit, Gen’yū expresses his frustration with the Japanese government and the scientific community.40 His narrator criticizes the government’s response to 3/11, lamenting the gridlock in the Diet and the lip-service slogans linking Fukushima pre-

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fecture’s recovery to that of the nation, as voiced by a prime minister who could not be bothered to actually visit the disaster area. In the story, the government decided to gamble with the lives of residents by enacting special countermeasures after the disaster that allowed for residents to be exposed to higher levels of radiation and for the unemployed and those in temporary housing to do decontamination work despite its questionable effectiveness (Gen’yū 2013b, 154, 151). The narrator speaks with resignation and disgust over the lack of a rational discussion about the real dangers of living in the irradiated zones. He complains that the ICRP (International Commission on Radiological Protection) was no help and in fact suggested raising the allowable limits from twenty times higher to one hundred times higher (Gen’yū 2013b, 160).41 “Mountain of Light” captures local frustration with the admission by experts in Japan “that they know little about the health effects of long-term exposure to lowdose radiation,” yet make policies about evacuation and relocation nonetheless (Fackler 2014). Despite his criticisms, as the narrator grows older he starts to believe in the healing powers of this mountain of nuclear waste; his father did live into his nineties, and at his mother’s funeral three years earlier his father credited their long lives to the radiation (Gen’yū 2013b, 159). The narrator cites the increased popularity of radon hot springs and the rebounding population of Fukushima prefecture as evidence of the validity of this belief (Gen’yū 2013b, 161). But the utopian dream of longevity hides a dark history of denial; the Japanese government long failed to recognize radiation exposure as the cause of illnesses that plagued atomic-bomb victims for decades. Hayashi Kyōko, writer and nuclear victim (hibakusha) from Nagasaki, is well acquainted with arguments questioning the negative health effects of radiation. As discussed in the previous chapter, she felt silenced in the post-Fukushima accident climate, unable to speak out against the government (Hayashi 2013, 13, 20).42 Gen’yū pushes the denial of nuclear dangers to the utopian extreme. In having his narrator switch sides and promote the health benefits of low-dose radiation exposure, Gen’yū infuses this Buddhistinspired story with a dose of humor that is meant to further expose the urgent issues of living in irradiated Japan. The tongue-in-cheek optimism and utopianism of this story clash tragically with Fukushima’s controversial future as a permanent nuclear-waste site.

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Dystopian Nuclear Temporalities The 3/11 disaster is often said to have been beyond imagination, or, as TEPCO described it, “beyond any reasonable expectation” (sōteigai). The unprecedented earthquake and tsunami were events that only happen once in a thousand years, making them impossible to plan for, or so TEPCO claimed in their defense as they tried to explain why they had not better fortified the Fukushima NPP.43 But critic Kawamura Minato avers that 3/11 was not beyond imagination (Kawamura 2013). Japanese popular culture is inundated with images of apocalyptic destruction: the end of Japan has been imagined over and over again, from the nuclear explosions of World War III in the anime Akira to Komatsu Sakyō’s fictional sinking of the Japanese islands in his novel Japan Sinks (Nihon chinbotsu, 1973) to the predictions of the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyō.44 For Kawamura, this post-apocalyptic cultural production had already provided the images and story lines for a nuclear, end-of-the-world landscape. Yet, as Kawamura observes, the apocalyptic predictions of Japan’s demise or of a massive world-ending nuclear accident did not come to pass after the Fukushima meltdowns (Kawamura 2013, 6). Critic Uno Tsunehiro took the argument further: rather than confirming the end of the world, the Fukushima accident invalidated the idea itself. The world did not end, it simply changed.45 This lack of an ending is reflected in Fukushima fiction. Cold War– era Western nuclear fiction moved from images of nuclear holocaust to anxiety about a world-ending apocalypse that never came to pass. Fukushima fiction similarly deals with a world that did not end, but with one key difference: Cold War–era fiction depicted worlds that were spared nuclear contamination, but the spaces of Fukushima fiction are fully irradiated. It is not anxiety about contamination that is the norm, but the contamination itself that has seeped into and defined daily life for Japan (Cordle 2008, 32). Despite the real-life contamination of northeast Japan by radioactive fallout from the Fukushima NPP accident, Uno argues that, for the majority of Japanese society, normalcy resumed and it was only those places hidden from view that experienced significant changes.46 Indeed, those living in non-contaminated zones have been able to resume their lives and “forget” about the disaster in ways that the residents of temporary housing and the victims of the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdowns have not. But the accident at

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the Fukushima NPP and the government’s efforts to control the flow of information about the disaster have led to legislation that affects everyone living in Japan. Rather than agreeing with Uno that normalcy resumed, I argue that a new nuclear normalcy was instituted after Fukushima wherein life with radiation became an inescapable reality. One characteristic of this new normalcy examined in the following stories is control of information—namely surveillance, censorship, and systems of self-regulation—deemed necessary in an irradiated world. This new nuclear normal is, in fact, not so new, nor is it confined to the world of fiction. The control of information and people is one of the conditions of nuclearity, a necessity in this contested terrain. Kate Brown argues: “As the Cold War promise of affluence, upward mobility, and the freedom to consume materialized in plutopia, anxious residents gradually came to trust their leaders, the safety of their plants, and the rightness of their national cause. As plutopia matured, residents gave up their civil and biological rights for consumer rights” (Brown 2013, 5). The citizens of Richland, Washington, who worked at the Hanford plant willingly gave up their civil rights and lived without any “democratic institutions, free press, free market, or private property,” all for the promise of good jobs and safe, comfortable, middle-class neighborhoods (Brown 2013, 143–144). Similar things happened in the cities that received subsidies for having sited nuclear power plants in Japan. These subsidies funded libraries, schools, municipal buildings, and other perks that enhanced daily life but did not protect residents from the accident.47 But, in the three stories analyzed in this section, the citizens are never given the opportunity to exchange civil for consumer rights. Rather, the darkly futuristic writings of Tawada Yōko, Satō Yūya, and Yoshimura Man’ichi all depict a Big Brother world of surveillance, where information is restricted, the populace is kept uninformed or misinformed, and certain technologies, facts, and even words are outlawed. These works are representative of an increase in dystopian-themed fiction in post-Fukushima Japan (Fujita 2017, 24, 47). The citizens of these irradiated worlds get little in return for their sacrifices. They live their lives constantly exposed to danger. The fear of a Big Brother government is not unfounded in Japan. The Specially Designated Secrets Protection Law (tokutei himit­su no hogo ni kansuru hōritsu) or State Secrecy Law came into

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effect in December 2014, enacted against serious protest.48 The law “allows the heads of government agencies to designate information related to diplomacy, defense, counterterrorism, or counterespionage as secrets” (Manabe 2015, 64). Given the ambiguous wording of the law, it could produce Big Brother scenarios in which someone could be jailed for leaking information they did not know was secret (Manabe 2015, 64–65; Repeta 2014). As Noriko Manabe explains, the law was criticized by the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, numerous municipalities, and individual citizens. If nuclear power plants are tied to issues of national security, discussion of the Fukushima meltdowns, their broader effects, and plans to bring reactors back online could become off-limits (Manabe 2015, 64–65). The press in Japan has been criticized for failing to report on antinuclear protests, having been muzzled by advertising agencies that represent the nuclear power companies and exert great control over the media (Gaulène 2016). The State Secrecy Law will only further empower the government to stop whistle-blowers, investigative journalists, or anyone seeking to expose wrongdoing.49 The Japanese may not have given up their right to a free press as the residents of Richland did, but for media that were already overly reliant on government news sources, and for journalists who were granted access “in exchange for refraining from writing critical stories,” this law could be the death blow to exposés about nuclear power and the nuclear industry in Japan (Repeta 2014). As Yamada Kenta argues, “the secrecy law reinforces and extends an existing structure in which the government already controls information flows and conceals critical information from the Japanese people” (Repeta 2014). The Orwellian imagery of such a state may not be new for Japanese cultural production, but it is becoming a new non-wartime reality for contemporary Japan. The Big Brother governments depicted in the following stories may seem extreme. But in light of the Abe government’s successful efforts to enact legislation to control and restrict information, these stories provide an “alarm bell” of sorts, one that warns of possible futures and state controls, some of which are becoming more real with legislation like the State Secrecy Law.50 Tawada Yōko: Japan’s Closed Future Through her penchant for humorous yet incisive language play, author Tawada Yōko exposes and exploits the euphemisms and

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linguistic manipulation used by the government in its efforts to control information. Language has been and continues to be a contested site with regard to the Fukushima accident. In the early days after the nuclear accident, citizens were overwhelmed and confused by the “new” terminology of the nuclear—half-life, cesium, sievert— that flooded the media and pervaded government reporting on the Fukushima accident, at times seeming to obfuscate rather than clarify.51 Both the government and TEPCO have twisted language in their attempts to cover up the truth. As mentioned earlier, the term “sarcophagus” (sekkan)—a reference to the concrete entombment at Chernobyl—was deleted from a government report on decommissioning the Fukushima NPP in order to appease residents, even though the solution remains a possibility (“VOX POPULI: There’s No End to Fukushima Crisis While Melted Fuel Remains” 2016). Similarly, TEPCO admitted that its president instructed officials to avoid using the word “meltdown” for two months after the disaster despite its knowledge otherwise, purposely misrepresenting the situation as a less serious state of “core damage” (Associated Press 2016). Tawada wields her interest in and distrust of language in these stories, where her fictional state, much like the Japanese government, speaks in euphemisms instead of enacting solutions. The public is kept in the dark at future risk of their health and livelihoods. In Tawada’s short story “The Island of Eternal Life” (Fushi no shima, 2012), her first foray into Fukushima fiction, she depicts a Japan rocked by coups and natural and nuclear disasters (Tawada 2012b). The country has become an international pariah, in part due to its own policies, but also because fear of contamination by nuclear fallout has embargoed all flights into Japan. In “The Island of Eternal Life” the narrator wryly remarks that in 2011 Japan had elicited sympathy, but with the intervening years of disasters, by 2017 that “sympathy had changed to prejudice” (Tawada 2012b, 4).52 The narrator, herself a Japanese citizen who has lived in Germany for a long time, tries unsuccessfully to get to Japan where her family resides. Instead, she learns of the situation through The Strange Journey of the Grandson of Fernão Mendes Pinto, a book that details Pinto’s secret visit to Japan. He describes how everyone over a hundred years old at the time of the Fukushima accident is still alive, robbed by radioactivity of the ability to die. The youth, on the other hand, are sick and in need of constant care: “too feeble to walk or even stand up, with eyes that can barely see, and mouths that can barely

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swallow or speak” (Tawada 2012b, 9–10). The government assures the citizens that there is no radiation leakage from the four most recently damaged nuclear reactors, but the citizens are skeptical. The privatized government in the story has lost the nation’s trust, much like the actual Japanese government did after the Fukushima accident. The Japan of Tawada’s story has reverted to a closed-door policy reminiscent of the sakoku years of Japan’s Tokugawa or Edo era (1600–1868), when the military government imposed a foreign relations policy that restricted the flow of goods and people both coming into and leaving the country.53 Tawada’s imaginary return to a closed-door country may seem fanciful, but the Japanese did voice their fears about becoming an international pariah after the Fukushima accident. Furukawa Hideo, discussed in chapter 2, talked about a trip he took to the United States shortly after March 11, noting that a number of nations advised against travel to Japan. He feared that “radioactive pollution . . . is going to drag us back into a period of isolation not seen since the Edo period 150 years ago,” and that soon the Japanese themselves would be “handled as radioactive material” (Furukawa 2016b, 112). His anxiety about future screening stations at international airports for “Japanese only” comes close to the situation in “Island of Eternal Life” where the narrator is stopped at a German airport when the inspector sees her Japanese passport; the narrator fears the authorities want to make sure that she herself is not contaminated. Her luggage containing Japanese foodstuffs purchased in New York never makes its way to Berlin, and she imagines the airport staff confiscating the suitcase, thinking the Japanese food to be radioactive waste. The German airport authorities cannot read the foreign labeling, rendering the Japanese language devoid of its original semantic content only to be replaced by stereotypes and fear. As Tawada’s narrator warns: “rumors and myths had been multiplying like maggots, which had hatched into flies now winging their way across the world” (Tawada 2012b, 4). Two years later Tawada returned to the basic setting of “Island of Eternal Life” for her novella The Lantern Bearer (Kentōshi, 2014), in which she created a darker yet still humorous vision of life in the surveillance state of post-nuclear meltdown Japan (Tawada 2014).54 This is a world of state secrets, where the threat of a law enforced irregularly keeps citizens in line. Not everyone agrees with the

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closed-door policy that has shut Japan off from the rest of the world, but it cannot be publicly debated. Unlike the earlier story in which international condemnation resulted in Japan’s isolation, in The Lantern Bearer Japan has chosen to shut itself off from the world. In this nearly futuristic setting, Japan suffers environmental and human crises: it has been many years since children have been able to play outside in nature, and wild animals have virtually disappeared. The climate has become fickle, leading to snow in August and sandstorms in February. Ninety percent of children are physically debilitated, are plagued by constant fever, and have brittle teeth that are too weak to chew most food. The act of eating is painful and the food itself is toxic. The Lantern Bearer does not explicitly mention any natural or man-made disasters that created the current situation in Japan, but using “The Island of Eternal Life” as a backstory, the reader can imagine the environmental and health crises to be the result of a nuclear disaster, and the similarities to a post–Fukushimaaccident Japan are chilling. The Lantern Bearer tells the story of Yoshirō and his great grandson Nameless, one of the nation’s many sick children. They live like evacuees in temporary housing that is cheap and poorly built (Tawada 2014, 103).55 The Tokyo area, formerly the political and cultural center of Japan, has been relegated to being a backwater. The residents have fled, leaving behind houses that have lost all value due to the danger from prolonged exposure to the land, which the reader can assume has been contaminated by radiation as in the earlier story (Tawada 2014, 52). Tawada’s fictional world echoes not only post-disaster Japan, but a contemporary Japan that has been plagued by banking and real-estate crises, a lack of jobs for college graduates, a loss of faith in social institutions, a graying population, a low-birthrate crisis, and social dissolution. The great grandson in the story hardly knows his father, and his mother is dead. Added to these social and economic problems are the effects of radiation on the populace. The story’s main focus is on Yoshirō, a writer who is over a hundred years old. He is a potential security threat to the surveillance state, not only because of his political background of taking part in demonstrations in his youth and his memories of life before the nation shut its doors, but because his facility with language puts him in a position to criticize the state. Yoshirō remembers abandoned technology (washing machines, cars, and electricity), a time when

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the natural world was not toxic, and a life of open travel before the closed-door policy. His knowledge of the foreign makes him especially dangerous in the eyes of the state, as reference to things foreign is now highly regulated: it is illegal to sing songs lasting over forty seconds that contain foreign words, and translated novels are outlawed (Tawada 2014, 60). Even mentioning the name of a foreign city is considered breaking the law. Foreign words have all but disappeared from the public realm, but older people like Yoshirō still use them in secret. Yoshirō has all the dead, unused, and forbidden words in his head and refuses to forget them (133). Nameless shares his great-grandfather’s resistance to the edicts against foreign words, and Yoshirō worries that this will land him in trouble. The government’s need to control words is an indication of their subversive power. Tawada clearly links the story to the current situation in Japan where the government is increasingly bringing the free flow of information under tighter control. In one scene, Tawada makes an unequivocal reference to the State Secrecy Law. Remembering the days when the Japanese could travel abroad, Yoshirō imagines himself taking the now nonexistent express train to Narita airport (33– 37). He does not purposely try to call up an image of the abandoned airport, rather it enters his brain and demands to be written about (shōsetsu ni kaitekure, kaitekure). But Yoshirō knows that to write about such a place is dangerous (37). He worries that the airport might be used as a repository of hidden state secrets, and he has no plans to sneak into an off-limits site to uncover such information. If he were to publish his fictional story, he could be accused of leaking state secrets. Yoshirō knows that this overlapping of fantasy and reality, although incidental, would not spare him arrest. He is not afraid of going to jail, but his concern for Nameless keeps him silent. In addition to this fear of the law, Yoshirō has suffered from other types of censorship and self-censorship. He was unable to find a publisher for an editorial of his that questioned the closed-door policy. Another story of his that was critical of the dictatorial state was censored (103–105). Knowing the power of the state to silence writers, Yoshirō is cautious, and his criticisms are known only to the reader. On the one hand, he represents a public that has been silenced. But in drawing attention to this airport scene in a reading of her book, Tawada makes her criticism known.56 Although Yoshirō is silent in public, the reader clearly hears his opinion of Diet mem-

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bers who tampered with laws that the citizens are never allowed to see, of government officials who fled the contaminated area, of the whimsical enforcement of the law, and of a state that chooses to bury its problems rather than deal with them. This surveillance state recalls the plutopias of the West where residents willingly gave up their civil and political rights and chose to “overlook the radioactive waste mounting around them” (Brown 2013, 4). Yoshirō, however, is unwilling to overlook the toxic environment and increasingly totalitarian state, and Tawada draws on a well-used literary practice of setting a story in the historical past to criticize the current government’s handling of the disaster. The Lantern Bearer is set in the near-future, but the reference to premodern, Tokugawa-era Japan in this story and in “The Island of Eternal Life” recalls a government known for its censorship and strict laws governing everyday life. Information in Tokugawa Japan was highly controlled, especially the reporting of certain current events, and publishers regularly censored themselves to escape punishment. Tawada skillfully uses this historical reference to compare the current government’s actions to extreme examples from the past, casting into question current-day Japan’s democratic institutions and commitment to freedom of information. In portraying Japan’s future as a return to the past, Tawada mocks the pronuclear advocates who argued that giving up on nuclear progress would mean giving up on the very progress of mankind. Kuroko Kazuo excoriated Yoshimoto Takaaki, well-known 1960s era left-wing intellectual, for his unflagging support of nuclear power even after the Fukushima meltdowns.57 Yoshimoto asserted that if nuclear power and the development of it were halted, the “long years of effort that advanced civilization would come to naught. All the atomic technological developments that humanity cultivated would become meaningless. This would in essence be a denial of mankind’s achievements since he separated and evolved from the monkeys” (Kuroko 2013, 54). In The Lantern Bearer and “The Island of Eternal Life,” it is the very pursuit of advancing ­civilization—the nuclear itself—that fails in its promise and throws Japan back into a premodern state, where the Japanese would appear “uncivilized to the outside world, their land ripe for colonization, had foreign ships still been coming to Japan” (Tawada 2012b, 10). References to the State Secrecy Law, the toxic environment, and the unreliable information on children’s health are clear links

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to life post–Fukushima-nuclear accident. In The Lantern Bearer, the government’s obfuscation has normalized this situation and its accompanying problems. Tawada uses the word sabetsu (discrimination) in “The Island of Eternal Life” to talk about the world’s treatment of the Japanese, but this term has special meaning in the postFukushima irradiated environment where residents of affected areas hide their origins rather than risk discrimination because they are considered to be radioactive (Tawada 2012a, 12–13).58 However, in The Lantern Bearer life in the radioactive environment and its effects on children and living things have been normalized to the point where very few citizens question or fight it. The young generation has no qualms about their life of confinement or their poor health. Yoshirō describes the effect of this normalization on the Japanese language itself. Strange changes in plants are described as “environmental adaptation” rather than “unexpected mutations” (Tawada 2014, 14). The human body is changing too, and Yoshirō puzzles over the accompanying shifts in aesthetics; what was once seen as “degeneration” (taika) is now considered “evolutionary progress” (shinka; 21). The children like Nameless, who have not been raised by their own parents, are called “independent children” so society does not have to admit their status as “orphans” (94–95). They might as well be nameless too, considering their lack of ties to a personal past. Yoshirō’s own condition, that of being unable to die, places him in the category of a “new species” (shinjinrui). This term was used earlier in Japan’s history to refer to the generation born into a life of prosperity after World War II who shared little with their parents who struggled to rebuild the country after the defeat. In Yoshirō’s case, the word is twisted to indicate a species unable to end their natural lives due to the effects of radiation. The story ends with Nameless being chosen to become an envoy, the kentōshi or lantern bearer of the title. In Tawada’s story, kentōshi refers to a secret civilian project that attempts to undermine the government’s closed-door policy by selecting children to be sent overseas for medical research in hopes of finding a treatment for their condition (101). The title of the book is also a homophone for the Japanese envoys sent to the imperial Chinese court during the Tang dynasty (seventh to tenth centuries). Like the envoys of old, these children embark on a dangerous journey with no guarantee of return. Nameless is chosen to make this secret trip to an international medical research center in India; however, his fate is unclear,

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and there is a dreamlike sequence in which he seems to die (159– 160). Although Nozaki Kan sees hope in the novel in that children like Nameless “live in grateful appreciation of each new day,” Yoshirō, who knew life before radiation, sees how miserable their physical condition and lives truly are (Nozaki 2016, 3). The children’s acceptance of their plight is further proof that life with radiation has become the new normal. Although Nameless holds the potential for a future cure, his overseas trip would mean the loss of the one truly meaningful relationship in the novel, that between him and Yoshirō. In these stories, Tawada brings the power of language and fiction to bear on Japan’s Fukushima nuclear crisis. Language has long been a site of struggle in Tawada’s fiction. The experimental language of her stories mimics the disorientation of her characters, who often find themselves in foreign environments where they cannot effectively communicate or control language. Even though Tawada chose a fairly straightforward narrative style for these two stories, she emphasizes the “dislocations and slippages between language and reality” that are a hallmark of postmodern authors (Cordle 2008, 38). Tawada rallies the potential of this literature to capture the fragile, arbitrary, and meaningless nature of life in the nuclear world. Dan Cordle, in his study of postmodern Cold War– era fiction, argues that the nuclear holocaust outstrips “the power of language and imagination to make sense of it” (Cordle 2008, 38). Tawada shows how, in an irradiated world, a Big Brother government is compelled to reestablish its hold on language in order to control a populace anxious about contamination. But language is not only a tool of the state; through the character of Yoshirō, Tawada shows its potential for political struggle as well. Satō Yūya: Nuclear Murder Mysteries Returning to his roots in genre writing, Satō Yūya took on the Fukushima disaster in a series of murder mysteries set in an irradiated landscape: The Case of the Bedside Murders (Beddosaido mādā­ kēsu), The Case of the Bedroom Community Murders (Beddotaun mādā­ kēsu), and The Case of the Bedroom Murders (Beddorūmu mādākēsu).59 The stories begin with an investigation of serial killings of pregnant women whose babies, it turns out, suffered from birth defects due to the lingering effects of a worldwide nuclear disaster a thousand years in the past. Like Tawada’s story, Satō sets his in a surveillance state that exercises a high level of control over its citizens. Using the detec-

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tive genre as a vehicle, he digs into questions of truth and cover-ups, and blurs the line between perpetrator and victim. He portrays a system that regularly conceals information about health and safety, exposing citizens to radiation without their knowledge. But he also raises important questions of complicity. His protagonists hunt for the truth behind the serial murders and expose corruption, but in the process uncover their own guilt as well. Satō points a finger at both the Japanese government and TEPCO, but does not let the Japanese public off the hook for having accepted nuclear power during the many years of postwar economic prosperity. The first story in the series, The Case of the Bedside Murders, opens as the narrator awakens to find his wife murdered in bed, a kitchen knife in her neck. He flees the scene and meets Rokujō, a man whose wife was killed in the same way and who theorizes that this death is the latest in a string of serial killings of women that stretches back thirty years. Rokujō asks the narrator, later dubbed “Calculator,” to help investigate the killer Dr. Funazu, a local ob-gyn. The two men discover that the murdered women were all pregnant. Funazu has been protected by the state and police in a huge cover-up that has kept the murders out of the press and silenced the victims’ families with hush money. It is only when the men confront Funazu that they learn of the connection to radiation and the dirty history of global infanticide. Calculator cannot believe that the state would condone the murder of innocents, but Dr. Funazu gives him a history lesson: a thousand years ago natural disasters had led to the collapse of nuclear power plants and weapons facilities, turning the earth into a death star (Satō 2013c, 24). Large numbers of children were born with birth defects, but the state argued against any scientific link to the radioactive material (Satō 2012b, 133; 2013c, 25). In the end, civilization decided that the only way to move forward was to kill these irradiated babies the world over (Satō 2012b, 134). Dr. Funazu’s killings were similarly condoned by the state as a means of getting rid of fetuses suffering from radiation damage (Satō 2013c, 39). In the second installment, The Case of the Bedroom Community Murders, Yamada, a shady character from the Special Public Security Police Unit explains to Rokujō that the cost of medical care for the victims of radiation was enormous and the nation had to find a cheap way of disposing of the children. Known for having dumped large amounts of radioactive material after the disasters, the nation

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had to project an image of itself as free of contamination if it was to have any hope of hosting the Olympics. The country had to become known as a safe place that was kind to children and good for travel. As Yamada explains, a good public relations campaign was more effective in achieving the nation’s goals than decontamination or reparations (Satō 2013c, 55). The appearance of these radiation babies in the present is itself the result of a government cover-up. One thousand years after the original global disaster, the radiation levels had not dropped, but the population had rebounded, leading to a need for housing. With the fear of radiation having faded, the contaminated land (Area 7) was opened once more for use. The government built fancy condos and sold the land for cheap. There were no immediate health effects on the residents. Special ventilation systems were installed in the rooms, and residents were advised not to be outdoors for long periods of time, but nobody seemed to be bothered by these warnings. The residents willingly forgot about the radiation from the past in order to live happy lives in the present (Satō 2012b, 135–136). The story goes on to explain that the effects of radiation only manifested in their babies, who were found dead in the womb or died soon after being born. The babies payed the price for the nation’s amnesia (Satō 2012b, 136). Satō’s stories intentionally reference the real Japanese government’s response to the Fukushima disaster, pronuclear campaigns, and the conditions of nuclearity, effectively employing the vocabulary of the disaster itself. In The Case of the Bedroom Community Murders the state assures citizens who buy homes in the contaminated area of “no immediate danger to human bodies” (Satō 2013c, 36), just as Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio had reassured an anxious Japanese public that there were “no immediate health risks” from the meltdowns at the Fukushima NPP.60 In the stories, the nuclear accidents from the past were caused by natural disasters, just as TEPCO tried to argue was the case for the earthquake and tsunami (Satō 2013c, 24). Tokyo was seemingly removed from the ravages of the 2011 disaster in Tohoku, and in Satō’s stories the contaminated Area 7, replete with violence and death, initially appears to be at a safe remove from the capital (Satō 2013c, 64). When the story of Dr. Funazu’s life is recounted, Rokujō reluctantly acknowledges that Funazu’s murders were “foreseeable” (sōteinai), as his wife killed herself and their young daughter to save the daughter from the rav-

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ages of internal radiation. The use of this term is a clear counter to ­TEPCO’s characterization of the “unforeseeable” (sōteigai) nature of the disaster that damaged the Fukushima NPP (Satō 2013c, 59). In portraying terrorists, weapons of mass destruction, and irresponsible governments, Satō’s stories powerfully critique the idea that technology such as the nuclear can be controlled, rejecting the myth of safety that enveloped and enabled nuclear power in Japan. Satō continues to spear the Japanese government through references to the state’s desire to win the bid to host the Olympic Games through public relations tactics, a strategy that was on display in Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s speech to the International Olympic Committee in 2013 wherein he emphasized the safety of Tokyo and downplayed the threat from the disaster area.61 Satō’s comments about the PR campaign were prescient: his story was published in August 2013, a month before the PM’s remarks. However, as Ryan Holmberg points out in “Pro-Nuclear Manga: The Seventies and Eighties,” the nuclear power industry had been using public relations campaigns to paper over problems for years. The utilities had been hiding safety issues at the NPPs and cutting corners by delaying repairs, yet they presented an image of the nuclear as “safe” power in their advertising campaigns. As Holmberg argues, “a full-page ad in a major national daily from a major cartoonist” meant to reassure the public about the safety of nuclear power “cost infinitesimally less than upgrading a reactor. But that is precisely the point. Improving public relations was cheaper than improving public safety” (Holmberg 2016). Satō’s stories reproduce a number of the conditions of nuclearity, this disputed terrain of the nuclear, including the state’s resistance to linking birth defects to radiation, an echo of the problems mentioned earlier with regard to depleted uranium munitions used in international conflicts, but also to the Japanese government’s refusal to recognize internal radiation exposure (naibu hibaku) for victims of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.62 In addition, the use of contaminated land for the bedroom communities in Satō’s stories recalls the planned communities in and around the plutonium processing and nuclear power plants in both the United States and the Soviet Union. Richland, the home for workers at the Hanford plant, was an “exclusive bedroom community” that became the model for subsequent “upzoned” communities throughout the United States (Brown 2013, 37). Similarly, Pripyat was a modern planned city for the families of workers at the Chernobyl NPP. It was

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“built to order, according to plan, all in one style, as a modern garden city.” It offered “the late Soviet version of the prosperity and nuclear family-centered contentment epitomized by post-war American suburbs” (Brown 2015, 49–50). Neither Richland nor Pripyat was built on contaminated land, but that land soon became contaminated through its proximity to the plant, a fact that the government and plant owners continued to hide until that became impossible because of major disasters like the Chernobyl accident. In Satō’s story, the deception is intentional from the beginning. Dr. Funazu’s granddaughter Aya explains that, a thousand years before, the land was so contaminated that nobody could live there, but if the level of radiation was lowered, people could choose to live there at their own risk. She explains that the damage from low-dose radiation exposure was a matter of chance, as the effects varied from person to person (Satō 2013c, 36). Hideaki Fujiki criticizes this very logic of choice that was forced on residents in post-disaster Japan where the government has implemented “a decontamination program that nudges the residents to choose to remain in the 1–20 mSv areas rather than leave.”63 The option of evacuation is thus shifted from government responsibility to the personal decisions made by individual residents (Fujiki 2017, 92). Daily life in the planned communities where Satō’s characters live is permeated by an all-encompassing surveillance. This is reminiscent of life in the plutopias where “security agents and doctors watched residents anxiously, with networks of informants, phone taps, and mandatory medical exams” (Brown 2013, 3). Rokujō has been living as a fugitive since his wife’s death eighteen years earlier. It is hard for him to survive in the surveillance state where there are cameras everywhere and you cannot ride the bus or buy food without an ID (Satō 2013c, 12, 24). Rokujō explains that this surveillance state arose as a necessary measure in a world that had abandoned the nuclear. Using good Cold War–era logic, Rokujō explains that, having lost the “security” of the nuclear, new rules and control systems had to be put in place to check the recklessness and violent tendencies of both individuals and nations (Satō 2013c, 25–26). Everyone was subject to ID checks, and all the information was sent to a central database (25). But unlike the promises offered to the residents of plutopia, the citizens in Satō’s story had their rights taken away by the surveillance state with no guarantee of safety or peace of mind (26).

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As a murder mystery series, the stories are supposed to be about the thrill of the chase and the satisfaction of catching the bad guy, and Satō overindulges in genre conventions. His stories include film-noir-style interrogation scenes in an abandoned factory. The daring escapes, fights, and mistaken identities recall action films and detective novels. The genocide re-creates the horror of zombie movies, and in a nod to Dr. Watson’s penchant for naming cases, Rokujō describes Calculator’s adventure as that “Bedside Murder Case,” referring to the title of Satō’s original story (Satō 2013c, 23).64 The reader is set up to expect a classic whodunnit replete with modern gore, but Satō’s genre writing does little to elucidate the facts. Rather, repetition drives home the tragedies of radiation and homicide, fictional and historical. The experience of waking up in bed with a dead wife replays over and over in the first and second stories, as the memory of the dead wife switches from Calculator to Rokujō. This scene subjects the characters and the reader to the repeated trauma of these serial killings, played out in cinematic fashion, but does not get us any closer to the truth or a solution. A discussion about truth and trust arises when Satō’s characters discuss the scientific findings about radiation. Funazu argues that, just as science had never proven the harmful effects of cigarettes, the link between radiation and birth defects is based on information that is “subjective” (Satō 2012b, 128, 134). In the story, the pronuclear and antinuclear factions continue to tangle without any scientific proof for their arguments. In real life, after the Fukushima accident the divide between these two factions became even greater, as each side rallied its own scientists and facts, making dialogue nearly impossible in Japan. The government in Satō’s story is clearly hiding information, but Satō also casts responsibility back onto the citizens. Aya says that people believe in a reality they want to see (Satō 2013c, 27). After the Fukushima meltdowns, the discourse of national selfreflection and self-blame made on both the international and individual scale arguably shifted some of the responsibility away from the government and TEPCO, as Japanese citizens questioned their own culpability in allowing the advancement of nuclear power.65 Sociologist Yoshimi Shun’ya argued: “In the throes of high economic growth, people gradually consigned Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as The Lucky Dragon, to the realm of memories past” (Yoshimi 2012, 329).66 Satō continues to pursue the question of blame when the sec-

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ond story climaxes in an act of terrorism threatened by Rokujō’s abandoned son Yutaka, whose name ironically recalls the verbiage appearing on the archways of nuclear towns in Japan that promised a “prosperous” life, hometown, and future.67 Yutaka wants the government to lift the restrictions on artificial insemination, which would allow babies to be raised outside the womb, protecting them from internal radiation (Satō 2013c, 81). Satō uses the threat of genocide to complicate the clear identification of victim and perpetrator. The weapon of mass destruction Yutaka threatens to use was developed by Dr. Funazu to brainwash citizens into killing each other (43–48). The government has already covered up genocides in two towns where parents, children, lovers, and neighbors turned on one another, making it impossible to tell perpetrator from victim (10–11). The reader learns that Rokujō, himself, one of the few characters fighting the good fight, secretly wanted his wife dead (18, 30, 48, 68). Even the evil Dr. Funazu was doing good deeds, donating money to orphanages to raise the children of the mothers he had murdered (78). Satō further drives home the issue of complicity through the voice of Special Agent Yamada. At the end of the story Yamada lets the men in on a secret: although radioactive material is still around, nobody is dying from it. The stories of radioactive damage from a thousand years ago were only partly true, and the reported levels were artificially inflated. World leaders decided to outlaw the nuclear, all the while profiting from the economy that ran off the perceived dangers of radiation and its cleanup. The birth defects were in fact caused by additives in the processed foods needed to feed the world because animals and produce cannot be raised on irradiated land (88–90). Yamada questions the citizens’ freedom to blame radiation and additives on the government while not changing their lives to avoid such dangers (91). Satō not only assails the government and utility companies for their failure to protect the populace but questions the urge of that very populace to hide as victims. In his short story “Same as Always,” his protagonist, a mother purposely trying to kill her baby with irradiated food, calls into question the innocence of all other mothers trying to raise children in contaminated Japan.68 In the bedside murder-mystery series, the accusation takes the form of a suicide note left at the site of the serial killings: “Don’t forget.” We could take this as a warning to the Japanese who had forgotten the dangers

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of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite that memory, and an active antinuclear movement, Japan still constructed fifty-four nuclear reactors. Does the “Don’t forget” now work as a new reminder about the dangers of the nuclear post-Fukushima accident? Or has the forgetting already come to pass, as atomic-bomb literary specialist Kuroko Kazuo feared in 2013 (Kuroko 2013, 7–11)? The story ends with Rokujō’s son Yutaka being taken away to pay for his crimes. His father is immobilized and left in the dark with no sign of the coming dawn. The guilt and knowledge of the past offer no solutions for the future, only painful reminders of complicity. In the end, both Rokujō’s quest and Satō’s detective genre fail to uncover an unequivocal truth. Japanese readers can blame the government and TEPCO but must accept their own guilt as well. Truth is not so easy to find, or to come to terms with once exposed. The line between perpetrator and victim is blurry at best. The certainty and closure of Arthur Conan Doyle is out of reach, but Satō effectively uses the detective genre as an apt tool to reveal the mire of Japan’s Fukushima disaster. Yoshimura Man’ichi: Contaminated Return Yoshimura Man’ichi’s Bollard Syndrome (Borādobyō, 2014) has been praised as a masterpiece of dystopian fiction by a writer who is known for his near-futuristic, apocalyptic settings (Yoshimura 2014).69 In Bollard Syndrome, Yoshimura takes aim at the post-disaster reconstruction and repatriation plans for Tohoku. His story about a community of returnees who band together to rebuild their town after eight years living in shelters, turns into a nightmare for his young protagonist Kyōko, who slowly comes to see the town for the contaminated site it is. In their fervor for the ideal of the hometown (furusato), the residents, much like their counterparts in plutopia, overlook the dangers all around.70 Yoshimura crafts a dark world where a wartime-like ideology enforces loyalty to the hometown and its myth of safety, while an intricate surveillance network silences those who dare to speak otherwise. Yoshimura’s story of a young girl losing her innocence about the world around her serves as a metaphor for a willfully ignorant Japanese public coming to terms with the truly horrifying nature of reality post-Fukushima accident. In the months after the 3/11 disaster, both the central and local governments established reconstruction commissions to plan a future for the decimated municipalities of Tohoku. The report of

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the central government’s Reconstruction Design Council presented wide-ranging goals from rebuilding towns to revitalizing the entire region.71 Despite the realities of radiation contamination, depopulation, and ageing that plagued many of these towns, plans for reconstruction imagined a combined effort of young and old joining together to rebuild lost communities, or Tohoku as a “dreamland of twenty-first century civilization” (Tōgo 2012). The plans for reconstruction have been criticized, but Yoshimura stands out for his incisive depiction of the ignorance and deception necessary to buy into the idea that these disaster towns, specifically those that were irradiated, could possibly offer former residents a safe return.72 Although it is unclear what happened to Yoshimura’s fictional Umizuka, the residents express their desire not to lose the town again. However, the place is filled with problems. Its children are sick and unexpectedly dying, with seven having been lost since the start of the semester. No explanation is given for these deaths, but the smokestacks from the chemical plant that employs the town’s residents loom ominously in the background, leaving the reader to wonder if it was an accident at the plant that caused the evacuations (Yoshimura 2014, 43, 65). There is also an implication that the local food is contaminated. The colorful safety stickers that cover the food in the supermarket mimic the labels on food in post-disaster Japan, reassuring consumers of safety, even if those labels indicate the amount of radiation in the food rather than claim that the food is radiation-free. Kyōko’s mother only buys food at the supermarket so others can see her doing it. Unlike other citizens, she throws away all raw food or anything grown outdoors and never serves the local fish at home. Kyōko is repulsed by the sight of it when they are forced to eat sashimi at a public gathering (Yoshimura 2014, 119). Despite banners celebrating the town for having been the first to meet the safety standards, the ocean is the color of lead and appears lifeless (Yoshimura 2014, 107–108, 110). Yoshimura shows how even icons of traditional Japanese food are not beyond contamination, making them objects of disgust rather than national pride. In fact, the myth of safety is most pronounced in Bollard Syndrome with regard to food. This is one of the many instances in the book that recall wartime ideologies and practices. During the AsiaPacific War, Japanese government campaigns aimed at Japanese citizens living in the colonies (gaichi) urged mothers to prepare and eat Japanese food as a show of support for the nation and a means to

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instill national identity in their families (Lee 2012). After the Fukushima accident, there were various food campaigns encouraging people throughout Japan to buy food from Tohoku to support the local economies. Yagasaki Katsuma criticized the policy of “locally grown and locally consumed” for children’s school lunches, arguing that, unlike Chernobyl where “uncontaminated food was distributed to residents of contaminated areas,” Japan is “not attempting to avoid internal exposure” but encouraging it (Yagasaki 2016). The consumption of local food in Bollard Syndrome is tied closely to local identity, mimicking the “support by consumption” campaigns (tabete ōen) in Japan that encouraged solidarity and aid for Tohoku and the nation. At his daughter’s memorial service, the father of one of the dead students mentions that she had loved the town and ate the local fish and vegetables. Kyōko’s neighbors, who attest to the safety of the local food, are also described as “good citizens who loved Umizuka,” unlike Kyōko’s mother (Yoshimura 2014, 67, 138). The residents of Umizuka sing of their love for their hometown, and the children discuss the topic at school. These public pledges of loyalty and allegiance seem to come naturally to Umizuka’s citizens, but the presence of a menacing security force—the men in suits—indicates otherwise.73 Kyōko’s mother warns her to stay away from them, and the town has a dark history of dealing with those who do not toe the company line. The suits appear at a variety of places where they interrogate, chase, and rough up citizens (Yoshimura 2014, 82, 113–114, 126–127). At the end of the story, Kyōko reveals that, after returning from the shelters, her father was taken away, most likely because of his involvement in a protest movement. The family was targeted because of her father’s political activities and forced to live in an expensive rental under the surveillance of the suits and the “good citizens” of Umizuka (Yo­shi­mura 2014, 159–160). This surveillance network recalls the thought police (tokkō) and neighborhood associations (tonarigumi) of interwar and wartime Japan. However, the pressure to remain silent can also be found in the post-disaster communities of Tohoku. Slater, Morioka, and Danzuka, in their work on Fukushima mothers, detail the ways in which the “micro-politics” of the family can put pressure on Fukushima mothers, especially those in farming communities, to remain with their children in the contaminated areas as part of their duties to their husbands, mothers-in-law, and extended families as a whole

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(Slater, Morioka, and Danzuka 2014, 494–495). These women are also pressured not to voice their concerns about radiation (488, 493). One Fukushima mother confided that amid the ubiquitous cheers of “Stay strong!” (Gambarō!) and “Reconstruction!” (Fukkō!), verbalized fears about radiation were viewed as threatening to the community (493–494). Bollard Syndrome ends with Kyōko as a thirty-year-old prisoner of the thought police, being held at a secret detention site. The stakes of good citizenship and the future and safety of the hometown are so high that the suits are willing to lock people up to enforce this illusion. Earlier in the story, Kyōko came to realize that her problems fitting in—problems that seemed to stem from her overly childish personality and prepubescent angst—were due to a disease she and her mother shared. Kyōko tries to cure herself by participating in a “voluntary” cleanup activity. The town anthem—“Umizuka, Umi­zuka, our Hyper-Paradise”—blares from the loudspeakers, and as Kyōko allows herself to move to its rhythms, she feels numb and strangely happy (Yoshimura 2014, 142–146). As though her dirty glasses have been cleaned, she sees the world as beautiful and easily slips in with the crowd that had shunned her in the past. Her work “cleaning” the town is a form of brainwashing. Kyōko is convinced that she is cured, but it is too little too late, and she is handed over to the suits (Yoshimura 2014, 157). The reader learns of Kyōko’s fate when the story radically switches the narrative voice at the halfway point in section fourteen, and again in the concluding eight pages. Whereas the rest of the story is written in a fairly simple style that represents young Kyōko’s evolving view of the world, in the sections mentioned above, the adult Kyōko writes from her small lice-infested room at the detention center, where she has been kept prisoner for the past twenty years. She alternately sees her body as beautiful and as sickly, with liquid spurting from the cuts in her flesh made by her jailers collecting blood samples. No longer deluded by her childhood innocence or the town’s brainwashing, Kyōko knows that the nation’s children were born with a poison that invaded their bodies. The defects are also visible in her pet rabbit, which in actuality had no front legs. She is kept in this secret prison so that others can continue to believe that they are healthy. She asks questions of the reader, forcing them to accept the realities of life in Umizuka; now that she is locked up, “Who can speak the truth about this world of falsehoods?” (Yoshimura 2014, 165). Kyōko compares

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the townspeople to a boat adrift in a storm, while she keeps her feet firmly on the ground, as their bollard, their lifeline (Yoshimura 2014, 164). This ending is familiar from science-fiction stories and films where a sole survivor who understands the truth is outnumbered by a system that hides her existence. Kyōko cannot be set free because she knows too much. But she realizes that she cannot blame the residents of Umizuka for having returned to the town, believed in its myth of safety, or given up on the hope of any resistance, because the nation has turned a blind eye to its problems. Umizuka is no different than any other place. As she says, if everywhere is the same, why not go home? (Yoshimura 2014, 161). Here Yoshimura makes his strongest critique of the desire of the Japanese to move forward with reconstruction plans and forget about the problems of the Fukushima accident. His use of the term “myth” (shinwa) recalls the myth of safety (anzen shinwa) regarding both nuclear power and the various public-works projects of seawalls and coastal dikes meant to protect seaside communities from tsunamis. The 3/11 disaster exposed the fallacy of these myths, not only for northeast Japan, but for the nation as a whole. The Fukushima NPP may have been located in a seemingly isolated region of Japan, but studies have revealed the widespread nature of radiation and irradiated food. Kyōko, a returnee, is in fact a test subject, but she may be no different from the children currently wearing dosimeters in irradiated areas—in effect the guinea pigs of Taguchi’s work. If Kyōko is living a fiction, so too are those who promote a trouble-free repatriation for the former residents of contaminated areas. Much like Satō, Yoshimura draws a clear picture of the complicity necessary to support the building of nuclear power plants and the concurrent beliefs in decontamination and “safe” living. A Word in the Darkness The new nuclear fiction of post-Fukushima accident Japan imagines alternate spaces and times, and relentlessly and insightfully questions life after and beyond the meltdowns. The spatial and temporal metaphors that structure this study reach their largest scope in this chapter, extending past the dangers of the Fukushima NPP and its fallout to engage with the problems of the nuclear worldwide. The stories examined in this chapter shift the location from Japan to other sites of nuclear disaster and contamination.

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They also shift the temporality, projecting beyond the immediate time line of the accident to dark futures where life with radiation has become the new norm. The framework of nuclearity reminds us that nuclear technology and accidents reproduce the conditions necessary to support them regardless of where or when the plants are sited and operated. Rather than obscure the local specifics of the Fukushima disaster, this framework allows us to see the power of these fictional stories from Japan, as they continually remind us of the failed lessons of our shared nuclear past and future. Rather than buy into the utopian promise of nuclear technology and progress, these authors excoriate a Japan that is willing to sacrifice freedom of information and individual rights in order to promote nuclear power. The dark discourse of nuclearity invades these alternate futures, as fiction mirrors the real. Yet, amid this dizzying mix of fiction and reality, utopia and dystopia, are characters and writers who see through this illusion, this myth of safety, in order to reveal the dangers of the system. Although these fictional characters may not be empowered to bring about change, and may not incite the hoped-for political revolution in Japan, neither are the stories there to dupe the reader. Rather, these works reveal the power of the word, and the power of Fukushima fiction—be it documentary, mystery, popular, or elite—to make visible the very “foreseeable” nature of the Fukushima disaster, to expose the euphemisms of power and surveillance, and to force painful self-reflection on questions of complicity.

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Epilogue Writing toward the Future

W

hile in Tokyo doing final research for this book in the summer of 2017, I was struck by the conflicting messages coming out of Japan. Bad news continued to leak about the cleanup at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP); North Korea threated nuclear war; and the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award, went to a story that featured a death from the 2011 tsunami in Iwate prefecture. Despite the ongoing disaster and nuclear threat, Tokyo thrummed with its usual consumer frenzy. The air conditioning in public spaces across the city was running on low, but video monitors continued to blare and the city lights blinded. There was little indication that only five of the nation’s operable forty-two nuclear reactors were running, and that Japan was living on borrowed electrical time. Prime Minister Abe Shinzō is determined to restart the nuclear power plants, arguing that Japan cannot survive without them (South China Morning Post 2016). His comments are representative of the lamentable yet standard Liberal Democratic Party’s support for nuclear power, and, in reality, Japan is spending heavily to import fossil fuels, a situation that is not economically sustainable (Orcutt 2012). In a country where renewable power accounts for less than 10 percent, nuclear restarts are a reality. But, as I walked through the crowded, tony shopping area of the Roppongi Hills, I was surrounded by images of the “Summer 2017 Mirai (future) Tour,” an installation replete with armies of Do­rae­mon statues, dancing cartoons, giant inflatable cat balloons, and saccharine pop music.1 The tour included summer camps for children, virtual reality, media labs, art exhibits, movies, and food. If 160 This content downloaded from 75.69.46.187 on Mon, 01 May 2023 02:34:17 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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this is what the future looks like, it did not seem that the 3/11 disaster had significantly darkened Japanese pop culture, nor was there any surface indication of the looming domestic and international problems. This festival was about a future that, one could rest assured, would be cute and bright. It would be foolish to think that marketing companies would try to inspire consumerism by forcing potential buyers to think about Japan’s energy crisis, radioactive contamination, or the problems facing repatriation for disaster evacuees. It would also be unreasonable to expect that six years later any disaster would retain its initial urgency. But the Summer Mirai Tour’s vision of a bright future clashed jarringly with the ongoing crises at the NPP and in the disaster area. The veneer of mindless consumerism recalls sociologist Miyadai Shinji’s concept of the “endless everyday” (owarinaki nichijō) of consumer culture.2 Coming after the 1980s fascination with endof-the-world narratives, this endless everyday of ceaseless consumption provided a means of survival in a world that no longer offered the possibility of radical change or the apocalypse prophesied by popular culture. In an interview a few months after 3/11, Miyadai argued that even with the disaster’s disruption of the everyday, the “endless everyday” has not ended (Shiokura and Miyadai 2011). Fukushima fiction also speaks of the endless everyday, not of consumerism, but of victims trapped in the memory of the disaster or those living the “new normal” of life with radiation. For many, the promise of political change that emerged with citizen activism in the wake of the disaster has also faded as the Japanese government returned to business as usual. Despite the Summer Mirai Tour’s promise of a bright, amnesiac future, the ruptures of everyday life wrought by the disaster remain barely below the surface and are readily invoked. The Summer Mirai Tour spoke of introducing children to “unknown worlds” (mita koto no nai sekai) and the “cutting-edge technology” (saisentan no tekunorojī) of global inventions.3 Certainly, the nuclear disaster introduced Japan to unknown worlds for all, as many in Tohoku faced the possibility of living the rest of their lives exposed to low doses of radiation and the government and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) struggled to figure out how to clean up a level 7 accident, the likes of which had not been seen since Chernobyl. The idea of “cutting-edge technology” was at work in August 2017, but not just in the virtual reality labs of the Summer Mirai Tour. In an

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effort to control the water flow at the Fukushima Daiichi NPP, the last part of an underground ice wall surrounding the damaged plant was activated. The ice wall is an attempt to keep water from flowing into the plant, which then becomes irradiated. In addition to complicating the cleanup inside the plant, the contaminated water has also seeped into the ocean. As of August 2016, TEPCO had built over a thousand ninety-five-foot tanks on site to hold the water; nearly 40,000 gallons flood in daily, and TEPCO is running out of space to contain it. This technology of creating an underground permafrost wall has never before been tried on such a large scale, and not everyone is confident that this “cutting-edge technology” will work (“Last Part of Fukushima Ice Wall Being Frozen” 2017; Fackler 2016; Sheldrick and Foster 2018). Confidence in TEPCO’s leadership has been further shaken. On July 20, 2017, the Asahi Shimbun carried stories about gaffes by TEPCO executives regarding the disaster. Chairman Kawamura Takashi had to retract comments he made about the release of contaminated water into the ocean, which had inflamed local fisherman. President Kobayakawa Tomoaki mischaracterized the current state of evacuation in Futaba, the town that co-hosts the plant, showing his ignorance of and disregard for returnees in the disaster area (Yonetani et al. 2017). A second article in the same edition detailed previously unseen damage to the NPP from melted nuclear fuel; the images were retrieved by a robot as parts of the plant are still too radioactive for humans to enter (Tomida 2017). One day before this grim news, the literary magazine Bungei Shunjū announced the winner of the 157th Akutagawa Prize, the most coveted literary award in Japan for new writers of serious fiction. The winning story, “Behind the Shadow” (Eiri, 2017) by Numata Shinsuke, is a fictional depiction of life in Iwate prefecture, including the disappearance of the main character’s fishing friend, Hiasa, who is thought to have died in the tsunami that struck this northeast shore in 2011 (Numata 2017). The author, a virtual unknown, is from the northern island of Hokkaido but has been living in Iwate for the past five years. Numata’s protagonist fishes for a hobby, and the work features detailed descriptions of Iwate’s trees and rivers teeming with fish and wildlife. The story pays homage to the image of Tohoku as a site of natural beauty, as described in chapter 2. However, “Behind the Shadow” turns away from this pastoral landscape when Hiasa disap-

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pears. At the end of the story, the narrator visits Hiasa’s estranged father because he is worried that his friend was swallowed by the tsunami. The protagonist imagines Hiasa at the coast to fish only to find himself unable to escape the menacing wave (Numata 2017, 32). Not all critics saw Numata’s use of the 2011 disaster as an effective or necessary plot device; both Murakami Ryū and Miyamoto Teru of the Akutagawa Prize committee felt that the disaster was not well integrated into the story and its significance was unclear (Yamada et al. 2017, 380–381, 383). The Akutagawa Prize jury was not unanimous in selecting “Behind the Shadow,” and prize-winning stories have been questioned in the past, such as in 2004 when the award went to two young female writers. Critics saw that award as a marketing ploy to increase the appeal of literature for a younger generation not inclined to read (DiNitto 2011). The Akutagawa Prize is not immune to politics; in 1971 the committee awarded the prize to Higashi Mineo for Okinawan Boy (Okinawa no shōnen, 1971) on the eve of Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese control after twenty-seven years of US military rule.4 We could turn a jaundiced eye to the selection of “Behind the Shadow” as a safe choice because of its uncontroversial representation of the 3/11 disaster. Numata’s work does not deal with the ongoing nuclear crisis, a topic that continues to be taboo in Japan (Manabe 2015, 8). However, in place of the nuclear disaster, the story takes up a different controversy: homosexuality and transgender identity in Japan. A few months earlier, the journal Bungakukai also awarded its prize for new writers to “Behind the Shadow,” and novelist and selection committee member Matsuura Rieko praised it as a work of “minority literature” (mainorite bungaku; Matsuura 2017, 39).5 The protagonist is not clearly identified as gay, and the nature of his relationship with Hiasa is left unstated, but he reconnects over the phone with an old male lover, Kazuya, who has undergone sex reassignment surgery. Numata’s restrained prose mutes any potentially sensational details that might titillate the reader. He does not play to the reader’s curiosity about his gay protagonist, as Matsuura argues, but neither does he reveal much about any of his characters (Ma­tsuura 2017, 39). Matsuura also praised “Behind the Shadow” as a “superior work of disaster literature” and Numata for going against the grain in depicting the loss of family members (Matsuura 2017, 39). Hiasa was estranged from his family, and it is only when the protagonist goes to

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see Hisasa’s father that he learns of his friend’s checkered past. The family had cut him off and seems to take no interest in his fate. Most Fukushima fiction that deals with death from a disaster portrays it as the loss of a loved family member or friend. Matsuura commends Numata for depicting the loss of those who are not mourned, and who may in their own way represent a minority group. “Behind the Shadow” also stands apart from other Fukushima fiction because it does not include images of the ravaged and debris-strewn coastline that are normally associated with the disaster. Rather, the protagonist notes that the area in which he lives (Morioka) was little damaged and suffered fewer shortages than did his sister’s Tokyo neighborhood (Numata 2017, 29). Yet it is possible to read the tension and looming crisis in the story as representative of the anxiety that descended on Japan after the disaster and that, for some, has yet to lift. In this respect, “Behind the Shadow” easily fits in with the stories discussed in chapter 1 in which the disaster is presented as a peripheral event or is used to draw attention to those on the outside of contemporary Japanese society. Numata’s story joins the ranks of Fukushima fiction concerned with those on the margins, from the social outcasts who seek comfort or community in the disaster zone to those in Tohoku who historically have been ostracized by the nation, as described in Furukawa Hideo’s Horses. In contrast to Numata, who skirts various controversies, mystery writer Kirino Natsuo addresses the place of minorities in post-­ nuclear-accident Japan head-on in her novel Baraka (2016), in which she depicts a future for Japan’s children that is far from the bright one promised in the Summer Mirai Tour (Kirino 2016). In Baraka, Kirino tells the story of a Brazilian-Japanese girl found in the irradiated area by a group of old men who are rescuing abandoned animals after a nuclear disaster. Baraka undergoes surgery for thyroid cancer, which leaves her with a visible scar that marks her as a hibakusha. Because she survived, she becomes valuable to both the antiand pro-nuclear factions. The former seeks to protect her from a menacing, powerful pro-nuclear government, while the latter forces her to live in irradiated Fukushima as proof that exposure to radiation is not fatal. In chapters 3 and 4, I examined Fukushima fiction that depicts the new generation of nuclear victims (hibakusha) and points to the development of a new nuclear literature. Other writers and critics

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are beginning to imagine the place of minorities in the post-disaster areas, but the connections linking minorities to the slow violence of the nuclear disaster have yet to be fully tackled by writers of serious fiction or Japanese society as a whole. With the Olympics approaching such issues will most likely be swept under the carpet by slick public-relations campaigns, as Satō Yūya predicted in his murder-mystery series.6 The Olympic committee in Japan is pressing forward with preparations for 2020 despite massive budget overruns and a shortage of construction workers due to the rebuilding in Tohoku (Yoshida and Osumi 2016; Yamaguchi 2017). One cannot help but wonder how much of restoration funding is being diverted from the disaster area to pay for the games. The Tokyo Olympics expect to host some events (baseball, football, rowing, and canoeing) in Tohoku, but none in areas that experienced evacuations (Berkman 2017). The committee claims they want to showcase a rebuilt Tohoku, but are they not also trying to show the world that the disaster is truly over (McCurry 2017)? Certainly, that was the feeling I had as I walked through the Summer Mirai Tour, which spoke of a future for children that should be “easy to understand, simple, and fun” (kodomo ni wa wakariyasukute, tanjun de, tanoshii mono dake de ii).7 Although such a sentiment may evoke the fun of nostalgic childhood summers or the upcoming Summer Olympic Games, it is certainly not the future imagined by Fukushima fiction. Critics predict that Japan will look back on the 2010s as a critical decade that cannot be understood without considering either the 3/11 disaster or the 2020 Olympics (Genkaiken and Iida 2017, 10). Fukushima fiction continues to delve into the effects of the earthquake, tsunami, and ongoing nuclear crisis, keeping these issues in the minds and imaginations of the public and providing an important voice to challenge a government and a nuclear industry that want nothing more than this bright, simple, amnesiac future.

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Notes

Introduction 1.  The National Police Agency of Japan reported 15,889 dead as of November 10, 2014; as of March 11, 2012, the BBC reported over 330,000 in temporary accommodation. Citing figures from the National Police Agency of Japan, the BBC further reported that “almost 300,000 buildings were destroyed and a further one million damaged, either by the quake, tsunami or resulting fires. Almost 4,000 roads, 78 bridges and 29 railways were also affected” (“Japan Quake: Loss and Recovery in Numbers,” n.d.). 2.  Level 7 is the highest and most dangerous rating on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. 3.  Other areas of cultural production also responded to the disaster, such as manga, art, performance art, film, and music (Geilhorn and IwataWeickgenannt 2017; Gebhardt and Masami 2014; Thouny and Yoshimoto 2017; Starrs 2014; Angles 2016; Abel 2014; Manabe 2015). Also see the section on “Literary, Artistic and Press Responses to Earthquake, Tsunami and Meltdown” in the “3/11 articles” section of the online Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. http://apjjf.org/3-11.html (accessed March 1, 2018). 4.  There were a variety of literary charity projects that donated profits to the disaster victims. Takahashi Gen’ichirō is very critical of literature’s role in these various charity projects. This critique is embedded in his novel A Nuclear Reactor in Love (Koisuru genpatsu, 2011). For more on literary charity projects, see Rosenbaum 2014. 5. I borrow the term “serious fiction” from Amitav Ghosh (Ghosh 2016). See the Genkaiken volume for more on serious fiction’s role in 2011 disaster literature in Japan (Genkaiken and Iida 2017, 10–11). I include a few writers who have written and continue to write on the disaster but whose work would not be classified as serious fiction, like Shigematsu ­Kiyoshi. 6.  Neither the popular webnovels nor “light novels” aimed at teens 167 This content downloaded from 75.69.46.187 on Mon, 01 May 2023 02:35:51 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Notes to Pages 2–6

addressed the disaster in any significant way. There are also no s­ cience-fiction novels that directly address the disaster (Genkaiken and Iida 2017, 10–11, 17). There have, however, been a number of manga about the disaster, and some like Oishinbo created national controversy when they implied that the disaster area was unsafe due to the radiation levels (Brau 2017; Funahashi 2014; Kageyama 2014; Ochiai 2014; “ ‘Oishinbo’ Manga on Hold after Criticism of Fukushima Episodes,” n.d.). 7.  Schilling and Alt both have reviews of Shin Godzilla (Schilling 2016; Alt 2016). For more on Shin Godzilla, see the blog posts from March 18 and 20, 2017, on Genkaiken’s website: http://d.hatena.ne.jp​ /­ genkaiblog/ (accessed September 4, 2017). 8. Unlike in the Ukraine, the Fukushima nuclear accident victims have not been able to turn their resulting illnesses into a claim for biological citizenship (Petryna 2002). 9.  Manabe argues against this comparison because “they are comparable in neither cause nor geopolitical implications” (Manabe 2015, 7), whereas Iwata-Weickgennant argues that it is justified because of the “enormous impact of the disaster on each of the societies concerned” (IwataWeickgenannt 2015, 188, 205n10). 10.  Furukawa Hideo is one of the authors who draws this comparison (Furukawa 2016b). Takahashi Gen’ichirō’s A Nuclear Reactor in Love was originally written in response to 9/11 (Kimura Saeko 2013, 194). Takahashi talks about 9/11 in the “Theory of Disaster Literature” (Shinsai bungakuron) chapter in his novel. 11. See Bates and Weisenfeld for more on literary and cultural responses to the 1923 earthquake (Bates 2015; Weisenfeld 2012). 12.  See my discussion of the 1995 earthquake as regional in chapter 2. Murakami Haruki’s short story collection After the Quake is ostensibly about the 1995 earthquake, but it is equally about the Aum Shinrikyō sarin gas terrorist attacks on the Tokyo subways that same year. See Starrs for more on cultural responses to pre-2011 disasters (Starrs 2014). 13.  As John Treat argues, atomic-bomb literature has been “shunned and embraced, hidden and proclaimed.” Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain (Kuroi ame, 1966) is “the only atomic-bomb novel even in Japan to have achieved what we may call a canonical status,” but “its claim to that status has never been free of controversy, and the reasons why are not unrelated to the generally hostile reception accorded most literary works concerned with these epochal events” (Treat 1995, 21, 92). See Treat’s discussion of how by the late 1960s atomic-bomb literature was virtually out of print and the “first proper academic studies” did not appear for thirty years after the bombs

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Notes to Pages 6–9

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themselves (Treat 1995, 85). For more on the marginal status of this literature and the debates over the bombing as a proper theme for art, see Treat’s chapter 3. 14.  The disaster is also called the “2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tohoku” (Tōhoku-chihō Taiheiyō oki jishin). 15.  It can be argued that the earthquake and tsunami were not solely natural disasters but had a man-made component (DiNitto 2014). 16.  Both Manabe and Kuroko use “Fukushima” in this way (Manabe 2015; Kuroko 2011, 2013). Geilhorn and Iwata-Weickgennant used “Fukushima” in the title of their anthology (Geilhorn and Iwata-­Weickgenannt 2017). 17.  Manabe mentions that Project Fukushima cofounder Ōtomo Yoshihide rejects this label as a “lack of understanding of the ambiguities of Fukushima’s situation or the conflicting feelings of its residents” (Manabe 2015, 7). Manabe does, however, use “Fukushima” to distinguish the nuclear situation from the earthquake and tsunami. 18. Kawamura’s remarks are in reference to Furukawa Hideo’s novel Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (Umatachi yo, sore de mo hikari wa muku de, 2011) examined in chapter 2. He refers to an overemphasis on Fukushima prefecture, but also to the writing of it in katakana, meaning he is also critical of the use of the term as shorthand for the nuclear disaster. 19.  The label “damaging rumors” (fūhyō higai) has been used to censor public expression, discouraging concerned citizens and victims from voicing their fears about radiation in order to protect their communities (Slater, Morioka, and Danzuka 2014, 497–501). 20. The terrorist bombings of the Madrid trains in 2004 also happened on a March 11. This book is also a way to introduce an Englishreading audience to a range of writers, many of whom may not be well known outside of Japan. Where possible, I reference English translations of the fictional stories so as to make the works more accessible. As is common in Japanese literature, many of the works originally appeared in literary journals and were later collected into edited volumes or published as books. I provide original publication dates where possible. 21. See Fujita for a list of themes and representative works (Fujita 2017, 29–32). 22.  The voices of 3/11’s victims have been recorded in documentary films and nonfictional works, such as Funahashi’s Nuclear Nation, Ash’s A2-B-C, and Birmingham and McNeill’s Strong in the Rain. These works echo Sveltana Alexievich’s classic text, Voices from Chernobyl.

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Notes to Pages 9–11

23.  Manabe discusses a similar tactic in post-3/11 music. See her discussion of kaeuta (songs with substituted lyrics) as one type of formalistic response to the disaster (Manabe 2015, 121). 24.  See Hayashi Kyōko’s comments regarding this as well as my discussion in chapter 3 (Hayashi and Kuroko 2011, 3, 10). 25.  The Japanese government raised the acceptable level for annual individual radiation exposure from 1 mSv pre-3/11 to 20 mSv after the disaster (Phillips 2013). In August 2012, the government brought the limits back down to pre-disaster levels (Hecht 2013). 26.  The disaster was confirmed a level 7 on April 12. 27.  Edano used this phrase on March 16 after explosions at reactors 1, 2, and 3 and a fire at number 4. He repeated this phrase on seven occasions (Manabe 2015, 49). Also see Manabe for a list of officials who said the conditions were safe post-meltdown (Manabe 2015, 125). Edano’s tadachi (immediate) was nominated for buzzword of the year (Manabe 2015, 139). I use the phrase “no immediate danger” in the heading to this section to echo both Edano’s comment and Rosalie Bertell’s book, No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth, written after the Three Mile Island accident (Bertell 1985). 28. See Phillips for more on fallout patterns (Phillips 2013). Such concentric-circle models are standard outside of Japan as well. I used to live within ten miles of an aging nuclear power plant in the American southeast and would receive an annual calendar from the plant that had an evacuation circles map appended to the last pages. 29.  The Japanese government delayed the release of this data to the public until March 23, although they gave it to the US military on March 14 (Phillips 2013). In the early days of the disaster, residents were getting conflicting information about whether to evacuate or shelter indoors (Makinen 2011). The government has continued to reevaluate the status of certain areas. See, for example, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) website for more on the disaster, specifically for nuclear victims. http://www.meti.go.jp/earthquake​/­nuclear​/kinkyu.html​#shiji (accessed August 28, 2017), and METI reports on the evacuation zones, such as Hinan shiji kuiki no minaoshi ni tsuite. http://www.meti.go.jp​/­earthquake​/nuclear​ /pdf​/131009/131009_02a.pdf (accessed August 28, 2017). See also maps made by the citizen action group Safecast (“Safecast,” n.d.) and the Fukushima Prefecture Radioactivity Measure Map, http://www.pref.fukushima​ .­ lg​ .jp/site/portal-english/en02–01​ .­ html (accessed August 28, 2017), for up-to-date radiation levels. 30.  The term “organized irresponsibility” is from the Asahi Shimbun’s

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Notes to Pages 11–16

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interview with Ulrich Beck (“JAPAN | INTERVIEW/ Ulrich Beck: System of Organized Irresponsibility behind the Fukushima Crisis,” 2011). TEPCO described the disaster as “unforeseeable” (sōteigai) in an attempt to absolve themselves of responsibility. Hirose Takashi argued that the disaster was far from “unforeseeable” given the placement of NPPs along fault lines and the history of safety problems at the plants (Hirose 2012). 31. See the official Reconstruction Agency’s website for more updates: http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/english/. 32.  See Art Spiegelman’s use of the term in his comix on the 9/11 disaster, In the Shadow of No Towers, to refer to life under the Bush administration’s recasting of the attacks to justify their political agenda. 33.  A number of scholars have written on media censorship (Gaulène 2016; Knighton 2013; Broderick and Jacobs 2015); on rumors on the Internet of government censorship (Slater, Morioka, and Danzuka 2014, 498); on nuclear village censorship and watchdog reporter rankings (IwataWeickgenannt and Geilhorn 2017, 5–6); and on censorship in the music industry (Manabe 2015). 34.  See chapter 4 for more on this new law. 35. See Hindmarsh for more on how the Monju accident led to a public distrust of the government over safety issues (Hindmarsh 2014, 65). 36.  Others who use the phrase include Shigematsu Kiyoshi, Ha­ya­shi Kyōko, Takahashi Gen’ichirō, and the poet Wagō Ryōichi. 37.  The term otaku refers to obsessive fans of popular culture, such as manga and animated films, as well as of computers and a range of other electronics and consumer items. 38.  Furukawa Hideo, personal communication February 20, 2017. 39.  Also see Nixon’s book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Nixon 2013). 40.  See Ghosh’s arguments in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. 41.  See, for example, the following stories in the Waseda Bungaku collection: Furukawa Hideo, “Pōla ga modoru”; Enjoe Toh, “Silverpoint”; Fukunaga Shin, “Kono yo no, hotondo subete no koto o”; Murata Sayaka, “Kaze no koibito”; and Aoki Jungo, “Nishi Ikebukuro no tokushū: kame ga fukuro o seotte” (Yoshikawa 2012). 42.  JAERI is a former semigovernmental organization that furthered the peaceful use of nuclear power in Japan. Created in 1956 by the Atomic Energy Basic Law, it merged with the Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute and became the Japan Atomic Energy Agency in 2005. 43.  Satō is quoted in Kimura (Kimura Saeko 2013, 56–58). His com-

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Notes to Pages 16–18

ments originally appeared in the April 2012 issue of the literary magazine Gunzō. 44.  See, for example, Mikuriya Takashi’s The End of the Postwar, The Beginning of Postdisaster (Sengo ga owari, saigo ga hajimaru, 2011). 45.  See Hopson for more on Ishihara’s inflammatory comments that the disaster was “divine retribution.” 46.  See Egawa for more on how recent announcements about radiation levels on the northeast coast have been made in an effort to get more residents to return (Egawa 2017). Japan has fifty-four reactors spread across sixteen plants. As of August 2017, five of the operable forty-two reactors had been restarted. For updates on restarts, see https://www.nei.org​/­News​ -Media/News/Japan-Nuclear-Update. 47.  See, for example, Shirai Satoshi’s On the Endless Defeat: The Core of Postwar Japan (Eizoku haisen ron: Sengo Nihon no kakushin, 2013). 48.  Also see Gaulène on the power of media communications group Dentsu to influence reporting on the Fukushima accident through their pronuclear advertising (Gaulène 2016). 49.  See Walsh for a summary of the WHO findings for Fukushima (Walsh 2013). See Petryna for a forceful rejection of these numbers regarding Chernobyl. Petryna criticizes the way in which such studies are conducted so as to leave out the majority of the victims who fail to meet the experimental controls. She discusses how further studies were denied funding because the uncertainties over the doses received by the exposed population potentially weakened the value of such studies (Petryna 2002, xx). The argument for denying funding is that such studies are unlikely to yield useful scientific information on radiation effects (Petryna 2002, xv). 50.  Despite the clear harm from accidents at NPPs, many environmentalists support nuclear power. Environmentalist James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis, was in favor of nuclear power as the only energy source that would not damage the earth (Cordle 2008, 113, 122n9). 51. Broderick and Jacobs discuss industry defenders who blame health effects on radiophobia rather than radiation (Broderick and Jacobs 2015, n. 4). For another example of this position, see George Johnson (Johnson 2015). The green-power argument is rehearsed in works like Biello’s article (Biello 2013). 52.  A full English translation of Azuma’s essay is provided in the back of this volume of Shisō chizu beta. See Azuma 2011c. 53.  As quoted in Hopson 2013. 54.  See the film Nuclear Nation for interviews with the former mayor of Futaba who comes to terms with this reality.

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Notes to Pages 19–27

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55.  Website maps show areas near the plant where there are currently no plans for repatriation, or “areas where it is anticipated that residents will face difficulties in returning for a long time.” http://josen.env​.go​.jp​/en​ /­decontamination/#special (accessed August 23, 2016). 56.  Cultural trauma theorists Alexander and Breese have reevaluated their original theories, shifting from the post–Cold War consensual narratives that offered social reconciliation to the polarizing narratives of twenty-first century strife that can exacerbate conflict (Alexander and Breese 2011, xxxii). Chapter 1: Voices from the Debris 1.  See Fujiwara Toshi’s documentary film No Man’s Zone (Mujin chitai, 2011) in which interviewees in Iitate talk about the invisibility of the radiation. 2. A number of scholars have written about these disasters (Bates 2015; Weisenfeld 2012; Clancey 2006; Smits 2014). Murakami Haruki’s After the Quake contains stories inspired by the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake in the Kobe area (Murakami Haruki 2003). Jinno Toshifumi also gives examples of scholars referencing prior earthquakes (Jinno 2011, 6). 3.  Jinno Toshifumi resists the idea of literature using any analogies for the nuclear disaster (Jinno 2011, 5). 4.  See Treat for more on atomic-bomb literature (Treat 1995). I discuss Fukushima fiction in relation to atomic-bomb fiction in chapter 3. 5.  See DiNitto for more on 3/11 film and voyeurism (DiNitto 2014). 6.  Despite this, the concentric-circles models continue to be used in the United States as well. 7.  For more on hot spots and radiation readings, see Safecast (“Safecast,” n.d.) and the Radiation Defense Project (“Radiation Defense Project,” n.d.). 8.  By comparison, in the Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe in 1995, approximately 6,500 people lost their lives. 9.  For 3/11 these slogans were supported by both the government and the mass media, as well as by individuals adding ‘badges’ to their personal profile images on social networks (Slater, Nishimura, and Kindstrand 2012; Hopson 2013; Samuels 2013, 39–41). The 3/11 disaster echoes 9/11, especially in its use of national slogans. For 9/11, however, the national was evoked through the local expression “We are all New Yorkers.” 10.  Poet Wagō Ryōichi criticized these campaigns because they suggested that residents were not already trying their best and that they failed to recognize the implications of this serious disaster (Iwata-­Weickgenannt 2015, 200).

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174

Notes to Pages 27–30

11.  For example, Itō Yōkadō, one of the major supermarket chains in Tokyo, had a promotion called “Gambarō Tohoku!” in April 2011. See Masami for more on food issues post-Fukushima (Masami 2014). See the following scholarship for more on the “Eat and Support” campaigns (tabete ōuen) and on contaminated food that was found at supermarkets across Japan (Iwata-Weickgenannt 2015, 190–191; Yagasaki 2016). Yagasaki compares the post-Fukushima food situation to Chernobyl. 12.  For a different opinion regarding the controlled nature of the Fukushima accident, see Komori for more on accidents at the plant during the cleanup (Komori 2014, 93–94). 13.  Abe’s speech was criticized by locals in the disaster area (“Local Leaders Criticize Abe for Saying Radioactive Water Leaks ‘under Control,’ ” 2013). See Hopson, Jinno, and my discussion in chapter 2 for more on Tohoku’s colonial status (Hopson 2013; Jinno 2011, 87–88). 14. The Asahi Shimbun ran a series of articles on the bullying of students from the affected area (Aoki 2016a, 2016b; Nagata 2016; Nagata, Ōmori, and Kimura 2016; Izawa 2017; Ōmori 2016a, 2016b; Ōmori and Kimura 2016; Ōmori and Ota 2017). 15.  Atomic-bomb victims were socially stigmatized and literarily marginalized. See Hindmarsh for more on the long-term effects of nuclear stigmatization (Hindmarsh 2014, 56–57). See Treat for more on atomic-bomb literature (Treat 1995). 16.  Three former TEPCO executives were indicted in 2016 for criminal negligence in their role in the meltdowns (Soble 2016). Also see the following articles about recent damages the courts have ordered TEPCO to pay to victims: “TEPCO Ordered to Pay $142,000 in Damages—News” 2018; “TEPCO Ordered to Pay 1.1 Billion Yen to Evacuees in Fukushima” 2018. 17. Writers Kawakami Hiromi and Nosaka Akiyuki have also questioned their own complacency (Hiromi Kawakami 2012a; Nosaka 2012). 18.  See Johnston for more on court injunctions to stop the restarts of nuclear power plants in Japan (Johnston 2016). There was a magnitude 6.2 earthquake on April 14, 2016, in Kyushu seventy-five miles northwest of the Sendai NPP, the only NPP in Japan that remained in operation after the mass shutdowns following the Fukushima accident. 19.  NEI: Japan Nuclear Update. “NRA Approves License Extensions for Takahama 1 and 2,” June 23, 2016, and “Four Reactors Move Closer to Restart,” June 16, 2016. http://www.nei.org/News-Media/News​ /­ Japan​ -Nuclear-Update. “NRA Gives Two-Decade Extension to 40-Year-Old Takahama Reactors; Residents’ Reactions Mixed” 2016. 20.  For survivor testimony, see works like Strong in the Rain (Birming-

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Notes to Pages 30–38

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ham and McNeill 2014). There has been some criticism on Japanese blog sites about nonvictims penning fictional narratives of the disaster, but these do not seem to have stopped nonvictims from writing. However, a recent scandal has brought more attention to the issue. After winning Gunzō’s New Writer Award, Hōjō Yūko’s Beautiful Face (Utsukushii kao, 2018) was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, the most prestigious award for serious fiction in Japan. In early July 2017, the media reported that she used a number of uncredited nonfictional texts and survivor accounts to write her novel about a high school girl affected by the tsunami. Hōjō had previously admitted she had never been to the disaster area, but these revelations of plagiarism have raised new questions about representations of the disaster by nonvictims. See her Japanese Wikipedia page for a summary of the scandal: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8C%97%E6%9D%A1​%E8​%A3​ %95%E5%AD%90_(%E5%B0%8F%E8%AA%AC%E5%AE%B6 (accessed July 15, 2018). 21. Atomic-bomb writers preface their works with information on where they were when the bombs were dropped, in effect identifying themselves in terms of their distance from ground zero (Treat 1995, ix–x). 22. Those who did not self-edit faced censure. Filmmaker Mori Ta­tsuya was heavily criticized by both locals and film critics for the intrusive camerawork in his documentary film 311 that attempted to capture the faces of the dead as body bags were opened for identification in the disaster area (Chris Fujiwara 2011; “Grief of Japan Quake Laid Bare in New Documentary” 2011). 23. See, for example, the scenes in Fujiwara Toshi’s film No Man’s Zone in which residents talk about hearing voices of those buried in the rubble, and one interviewee talks about the corpse of his cousin that had been left out in the open for seventy-five days because it was radioactive and he was not allowed to retrieve it ( Fujiwara Toshi 2011). 24.  Itō Seikō’s novel Imagination Radio (Sōzō rajio, 2013), although it does not show dead bodies, was controversial because it uses the voices of the dead. The main character is a deceased tsunami victim who deejays for a radio station whose listeners are dead disaster victims. 25.  The word for people (hito) is written in the katakana script used for emphasis or foreign-loan words. 26.  See DiNitto for a more detailed analysis of “Hiyoriyama” via other 3/11 works (DiNitto 2014). 27.  See films by Walker and Fujiwara. 28.  See my discussion about this in the introduction. 29.  In Okada Toshiki’s “Breakfast,” the wife of the narrator finds her-

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176

Notes to Pages 40–46

self unable to go on living in Tokyo after the Fukushima NPP meltdown, “as if nothing is wrong,” and ends up becoming permanently estranged from the city and from her husband (Okada 2014). 30.  Kuroko’s comments are directed mainly at the essays in the Japan Pen Club volume Ima koso watashi wa genpatsu ni hantai shimasu (Kuroko 2013, 11–17). The contributors to the Pen Club volume failed to mention the antinuclear movements in Japan and admit that they failed to speak out against nuclear power. 31.  This preface is in the English-language version of the report. 32.  See my analysis of Satō Yūya’s “Same as Always” in chapter 3 for a story that does insist on the perpetrator mentality. 33.  Kōji from Shigematsu’s novel, Map of Hope, is a middle-school social outcast who has been bullied and stopped going to school (Shigematsu 2012a). He starts the healing process after taking repeated trips to the disaster area with his father’s friend, Tamura, a journalist. The protagonist in Shigematsu’s “Pork Miso Soup” (Tonjiru) ends up working in a relief kitchen in the disaster area years after having lost his mother when he was a child (Shigematsu 2013d). But there are stories like “To the Next Spring” in which the protagonist-outsider deals with personal issues but never loses sight of the losses of the immediate victims. Hiroyuki has a malignant tumor removed from his lung, and his sickness is tied to his feelings of grief over his lost parents (Shigematsu 2013b, 215). But, in that story Shigematsu resists the hyperfocus on the outsider. 34.  See DiNitto for more analysis of this story (DiNitto 2017). 35.  A translation of this story and Isa’s Deluge by Doug Slaymaker is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in January 2019. 36.  Kimura describes the volunteers at the ranch and the victims of the disaster as abandoned (kimin), forgotten (wasurerareta), discarded (sute­ ra­reta), and used up (yōzumi); this last term is reminiscent of the term for spent nuclear fuel (shiyōzumi kakunenryō) ( Kimura Yūsuke 2014, 54, 86). 37.  See my discussion of “Guinea Pigs” in chapter 4 and DiNitto 2017 for more on social outcasts in 3/11-Fukushima fiction. 38.  See chapter 4 for a detailed analysis of this story. 39.  Gabriel Hecht argues that these “nuclear gypsies,” as the temporary workers who do the dirty work at NPPs are called, are the ultimate in expendability. They include vast numbers of unemployed and unskilled day laborers who are hired through subcontractors, including yakuza-­ affiliated organizations. This system of repeated subcontracting distances workers from plant management and from mechanisms that are supposed to ensure their safety (Hecht 2013).

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Notes to Pages 47–54

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40.  TEPCO is working on an ice wall—an underground wall of frozen dirt—to stop the leakage of contaminated water from the NPP (“Last Part of Fukushima Ice Wall Being Frozen” 2017; Fackler 2016). 41.  See Capodici and Burnie, and Field, for more on cut-off dates for compensation payments and forced relocation (Capodici and Burnie 2016; Field 2016). 42.  See Allison for more on the “crisis in reproduction” in contemporary Japan (Allison 2009). See Stallings for depopulation and ageing problems in Tohoku (Stallings n.d.). 43.  See Allison for more on the problematic nature of this critique and neoliberal policies that have rendered youth “socio-economically precarious” (Allison 2009, 90). 44. See the series of articles in Asahi Shimbun (Aoki 2016a, 2016b; Nagata 2016; Nagata, Ōmori, and Kimura 2016; Izawa 2017; Ōmori 2016a, 2016b; Ōmori and Kimura 2016; Ōmori and Ota 2017). 45.  See my discussion about 3/11 as rupture in the introduction. 46. See Rosenbaum for more on these precarious social positions (Rosenbaum 2015, 4). 47.  Shigematsu’s story originally appeared in Waseda bungaku 4 (2011) and was reprinted in the Waseda bungaku collection Shinsai to fikushon no ‘kyori’: Ruptured Fiction(s) of the Earthquake the following year with an English translation. It was later reprinted in Shigematsu’s short-story collection Mata tsugi no haru e with the new title of “Homecoming” (Kikyō). My references are to the Waseda bungaku collection unless otherwise noted (Shi­ge­matsu 2012d). 48.  See my discussion of Azuma and this rupture in the introduction. 49.  The novel was serialized in the journal Shinchō from January 2012 to 2013. 50. In his afterword to the Two-Headed Boat, Ohwada Toshiyuki explores the theme of return/repatriation (Ohwada 2013). 51.  The story was part of a collection of nine tales, The Restaurant of Many Orders (Chūmon no ōi ryōriten, 1924). For more on this, see Golley’s analysis (Golley 2008). 52.  This was made into a film titled Hontō no uta that has yet to be commercially distributed. The film stars Furukawa Hideo, Suga Keijirō, Kojima Keitani Love, and Shibata Motoyuki, and was directed by Kawai Hiroki. For more, see http://milkyway-railway.com/movie (accessed January 1, 20, 2018) 53.  For more on these films, see DiNitto 2014. 54.  The ship takes on a group of Peruvian/Peruvian-Japanese musicians, some of whom died in the 2007 earthquake in Peru (Ikezawa 2013, 210).

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178

Notes to Pages 55–61

55.  For more on the Soma Nomaoi festival see http://www.jnto​.­go​.jp​ /eng/spot/festival/somanomaoi.html (accessed August 4, 2016). Despite the disaster, crowds have been increasing for this event in the past few years. See http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/07/29/national​/43000​-flock​ -minamisoma-festivals-horseback-samurai-climax/#.V6OD2jXJLRx; http:// www.fukushimaminponews.com/news.html?id=382 (accessed August 4, 2016). The dream also has ties to Japanese literature. In opening with the line “I had a dream” (konna yume o mita), it references Natsume Sōseki’s (1867–1916) famous collection of stories titled “Ten Nights of Dreams” (Yume jūya, 1908), many of which were nightmares (Natsume 1974). Chapter 2: Tohoku on the Margins 1.  Furukawa Hideo is one of the most prolific and dynamic authors in Japan today. He writes in a dizzying range of styles and genres, averages around three novels a year, and has published over thirty books, including novels, essays, criticism, and illustrated texts, in addition to readings on CDs and DVDs and active collaborations with artists and musicians. The range of literary prizes Furukawa has won is a testament to his stylistic variety: the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Mystery Writers of Japan Award, the Japan SF Grand Prize, and the Mishima Yukio Award. 2. TEPCO admitted that for two months after the disaster they delayed using the word “meltdown” to describe the condition of the reactors at the plant, even though they had melted down. TEPCO claims it was because of pressure from the prime minister’s office (Associated Press 2016). In late March the nuclear disaster had been declared a level 6. The level 7 announcement came on April 12. Horses appeared in the July 2011 issue of the literary journal Shinchō. 3. See chapter 1 and articles by DiNitto for more on literary and filmic works about travels to the disaster area (DiNitto 2014, 2017). 4. The Warring States period was an era of political upheaval and almost constant internal battle. The Ashikaga shogun was losing control of the outerlying lords (daimyō). The farmers, weary of debt and taxes, were staging uprisings. The period ended in the unification of Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate. 5. See DiNitto for a more detailed analysis of this novel (DiNitto 2017). Also see my discussion of Kurokawa Sō’s short stories in chapter 4. 6.  Furukawa also plays with the name for Tohoku: “ ‘North’ plus ‘East’ adds up to Tohoku” (Furukawa 2016b, 3). 7.  Wolf’s work is also of interest because, like Furukawa’s, it was an early literary response to a disaster; the Chernobyl nuclear accident

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Notes to Pages 61–64

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occurred on April 26, 1986, and Wolf wrote her novel between June and September of the same year (Wolf 1989). The novel chronicles the narrator’s worries about her brother, who is undergoing brain surgery on the very day that news breaks about the Chernobyl accident. For more on Wolf and German disaster fiction, see Catastrophe and Catharsis (Gerstenberger and Nusser 2015). I thank Bruce Campbell for bringing this novel to my attention. 8.  Versluys and Keeble both discuss DeLillo’s novel (Versluys 2009; Keeble 2014). The novel was not uniformly well received. 9.  The quotation is a combination of Slaymaker’s translation and my own (Furukawa 2016b, 2–3; 2011, 4–5). 10. Anyone who has seen Furukawa do a reading of his work can appreciate the oral quality of his writing. See the following bilingual reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bcLDppk5gQ. 11.  Furukawa Hideo, personal communication, February 20, 2017. In Horses, the narrator says that he is from Nakadori, the middle section of the prefecture, but he left a long time ago (Furukawa 2016b, 27). In “Sixteen Years Later, In the Same Place,” the narrator tells a taxi driver in Fukushima that he is from Tokyo (Furukawa 2012, 136). 12.  Some works were criticized as disaster tourism, while others are very self-critical of such a position. See the documentary films No Man’s Zone (Mujin chitai, 2011) by Fujiwara Toshi and 311 (2013) by Mori Tatsuya (Toshi Fujiwara 2011; Mori et al. 2013). The 311 team—Mori Tatsuya, director; Watai Takeharu, journalist; Matsubayashi Yōju, director; Yasuoka Takaharu, producer—went to the disaster area two weeks after 3/11. See DiNitto for an analysis of No Man’s Zone (DiNitto 2014). Furukawa did not go to Fukushima intending to collect material for a new novel. He went to see it for himself and took notes and pictures. After returning, he decided to turn this material into a novel rather than into reportage, despite his earlier reservations. Horses was particularly challenging for Furukawa because he usually creates his stories from his imagination but in the case of 3/11 the material was all real. Furukawa Hideo, personal communication, February 20, 2017. 13.  See chapter 3 for more on the usage of this term. The word can be written in two different ways. Furukawa uses the Sino-Japanese characters for radiation exposure from something like an accident at an NPP, not the characters for exposure from an atomic bomb. 14.  See Yamauchi Akemi’s intentional use of hibakusha in “Tō­hoku” Saisei at an early point post-disaster (Akasaka, Oguma, and Yama­uchi 2011, 34).

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Notes to Pages 65–71

15.  The term “meganovel” is Furukawa’s (Furukawa 2016b, 7). “The Holy Family” is the name of Michelangelo’s famous panel painting of Mary, Jesus, and Joseph, completed before he began work on the Sistine Chapel (ca. 1506). Furukawa refers to the importance of the family in Christian art (Furukawa 2016b, 9). 16. Furukawa Hideo, personal communication, February 20, 2017. Many who experienced 9/11 also commented that it looked like a film. 17.  Jinno also discusses Kawakami Hiromi, who he says turned her novel into a non-novel. Jinno is talking about Kawakami’s “God Bless You 2011,” which is a rewrite of her earlier story “God Bless You.” See the discussion of Kawakami’s short story in chapter 3. 18.  This quotation is a combination of Slaymaker’s translation and my own (Furukawa 2016b, 66–67, 2011, 62). 19.  See DiNitto for more on Taguchi’s work (DiNitto 2017). 20.  The variety of rice had to be improved in order to grow in the Tohoku area, hence Tohoku’s association with rice is itself a product of modernity. 21.  The term “disposable people” is from human-rights activist Kevin Bales as quoted by Rob Nixon (Nixon 2011). For more on the concept of disposable people, see my discussion of Kimura Yūsuke in this chapter, and of the nuclear industry in chapter 4. See Hecht for more on nuclear gypsies (Hecht 2013). 22.  Okinawa represents 0.6 percent of Japan’s land but contributes 74.7 percent of its land to US military bases (Yoshida 2008). 23.  Mason and Helen Lee argue that the label of “internal colony” “obfuscates the violent enterprise of territorial appropriation, economic exploitation, and cultural repression that enabled the ‘Japanization’ ” of both Hokkaido and Okinawa (Mason and Lee 2012, 5). Hokkaido was the object of envy for Tohoku, as it was seen as developing faster (Hoyt Long 2011, 92–93). 24. Akasaka also makes the connection with Okinawa in “Tōhoku” Saisei (Akasaka, Oguma, and Yamauchi 2011, 16). 25.  I am grateful to Xiaoyu Wang for drawing my attention to this article. 26.  For more on Tawada’s story, see my analysis in chapter 4. 27.  Roman Rosenbaum argued that “the country’s national agenda has failed the rural reality of northeastern Japan” (Rosenbaum 2014, 110). 28.  The 1995 earthquake did contribute to a sense of national crisis when paired with the Aum Shinrikyō sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subways and “wildly fluctuating currency markets” that same year (McCor-

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Notes to Pages 71–77

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mack 1996, 3). This sense was less about the earthquake than about a crisis of identity following the collapse of the Japanese economy in the early 1990s. 29. The disaster heightened the perception of difference between these two regions of Japan, seen even in the size of firehoses. The difference in hydrants led to firefighters from Kantō not being able to hook up their hoses to local hydrants in Kansai to offer help. Although the 1995 earthquake was a regional disaster, Kobe’s ports and its proximity to Osaka, Japan’s second largest metropolitan area, give it a strategic importance that Tohoku lacks. 30.  Douglas Brinkley is cited in Holden 2006. For more on Katrina, see Brinkley’s book The Great Deluge Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Brinkley 2007). For more on internal colonialism in the United States with regard to the extraction, processing, and disposal of hazardous materials such as uranium, see Dorceta Taylor’s chapter 3. 31.  Brinkley as cited in Holden. 32.  Brinkley as cited in Holden. 33. For more on how environmental disasters affect the poor, see Nixon (2013). 34.  Hoyt Long discusses these issues via the theories of Foucault and Lefebvre (2011, 25–26). 35. The Asahi Shimbun ran a series of article on the bullying in schools of children from Fukushima (Aoki 2016a, 2016b; Nagata 2016; Nagata, Ōmori, and Kimura 2016; Izawa 2017; Ōmori 2016a, 2016b; Ōmori and Kimura 2016; Ōmori and Ota 2017). 36.  When at Nakoso, Furukawa mentions the poets Ki no Tsurayuki, Ono no Komachi, Izumi Shikibu, and Matsuo Bashō (Furukawa 2016b, 121). 37.  These gates date from the fifth century. 38.  The English translation adds the phrase “to our Kanto,” but that implication is clear in the sentences that surround Furukawa’s retranslation (Furukawa 2011, 114). 39.  Akasaka’s comments are from “Tōhoku” Saisei, which is a rec­ord of a conversation that took place on May 1, 2011. 40.  This is reminiscent of Nakagami Kenji’s character Fumihiko in A Thousand Years of Pleasure (Sennen no yuraku, 1982), who “treads the boundary between the human and the animal; he is covered with hair at birth and alone can see the mythical bird-monster, the tengu” (Zimmerman 2007, 147). 41.  There are many ijin in Tales of Tōno. 42. The two brothers in The Holy Family also mention the Emishi (Furukawa 2008, 1:603).

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182

Notes to Pages 77–83

43.  Saji’s comments do not make sense, because the Kumaso are from a completely different area of Japan than the original inhabitants of Tohoku. 44.  Furukawa Hideo, personal communication, February 20, 2017. 45.  Furukawa Hideo, personal communication, February 20, 2017. 46.  See my chapter 3 for more on nuclear victims. As I discuss there, the identification of 3/11 victims as nuclear victims (hibakusha) is controversial. 47.  See Yomota for more on the attraction of the South Seas as an “ambivalent space which possesses both utopian charm and sacred qualities” (Yomota 2007, 107). 48.  For more on Yasukuni Shrine, see Takenaka 2015. 49.  See panel 3: “Synopsis: In our last episode, as you might remember, time stood still.” The previous panel showed the towers coming down (Spiegelman 2004). 50.  Wagō posted poetry to his twitter feed in early August, and it was later published in Azuma Hiroki’s edited volume Shisō chizu beta, vol. 2: After the Disaster, with a translation by Jeffrey Angles. See, for example: “The clocks in eastern Japan are one minute behind. Digital clocks, analog clocks, hourglasses, water clocks, sundials, wind clocks, and even the clocks regulating our own stomachs. Could they all still be set to 2:47 p.m., March 11?” (Wagō 2011, 224). Also see the collection edited by Angles for more on 3/11 poetry (Angles 2016). 51.  This term became known in the West in connection with Miyazaki Hayao’s film Spirited Away. 52. See Lillie Chouliaraki’s chapter 7 for more on “ecstatic news” (Chouliaraki 2006). 53.  Anne McKnight talks about Nakagami Kenji’s story “Keshō” (Make-up, 1978), in which the protagonist is released from historical time to enter a space of folkloric figures in the Kumano region of Japan (­McKnight 2006, 156). Amitav Ghosh argues that such time lines exceed the limits of the modern novel, which has to have a “limited-time horizon” in order to be “narratable” (Ghosh 2016, 61). 54.  In the film, his goal is to “confront the Japanese with their complicity in the marginalization of the people of Fukushima, who themselves were victims of this tragedy and not its protagonists” (Broderick and Jacobs 2015, 226). 55.  This comment echoes Yanagita Kunio’s assertion in Tōno monotagari that he recorded everything as he heard it (ari no mama). See Ortabasi’s chapter 1 for more on this phrase and on Yanagita’s complex relationship with literary language (Ortabasi 2014).

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Notes to Pages 84–88

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56. The Tale of the Heike circulated orally for many years after the battles in the late 1100s and was written down in the early 1300s. Although it was originally read as history, scholars have discussed the various embellishments in the text, such as those used to aristocratize the Taira warriors (Varley 1997). Furukawa does not adhere to any one definition of the genre, nor to any representative example, be it Heike or Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, early 11th c.). 57.  For more on debates on the monogatari and Nakagami’s own conception, see Zimmerman 2007, 47–48; also see her chapter 4. 58.  The same can be said of Yanagita’s Tōno monogatari. I am grateful to Melek Ortabasi for pointing this out. 59. The final scene in The Cape (Misaki, 1976) of sex between the protagonist Akiyuki and his half-sister is a radical rewriting of the Kojiki’s origin story of Japan as one of incest. 60.  I am grateful to Jordan Smith for pointing out Furukawa’s work with the Heike. Furukawa talked about how he was chosen to write the language of the warriors in this tale because of his familiarity with the Tohoku dialect and sympathy with such characters (Furukawa Hideo, personal communication, February 20, 2017). 61.  The quotation and reference to Lippit’s work are from Zimmerman 2007, 127–128. 62.  Furukawa’s project of embracing locality as resistance echoes the work of other writers. Yanagita’s Tales of Tōno used local oral tales to reject the standardization of the modern novel, and novelist Nakagami Kenji created a mythical history for the outcast hisabetsu burakumin as a way of rejecting the canon of modern Japanese literature and the myth of the pure Japanese Imperial bloodline. For more on Yanagita and the modern novel, see Ortabasi, chap. 1. 63. Furukawa Hideo, personal communication, February 20, 2017. He may seem to be skirting the issue, but it is possible that his association with Fukushima prevents him from directly criticizing TEPCO, which provided jobs for many in the area. 64.  See, for example, the second poem in the Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, mid-late 8th c.) by Emperor Jomei. 65.  The Daiichi NPP is the plant that experienced meltdowns; the Daini NPP did not. This is my translation of the original passage in Horses (Furukawa 2011, 24). 66.  At one point the Furukawa narrator says he heard that Fukushima generates one-third of Tokyo’s electricity (Furukawa 2016b, 24).

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Notes to Pages 89–91

Chapter 3: Hiroshima Encore 1. An English translation of Hayashi’s essay came out after I had already written this chapter, hence my references are to the original essay. For the English translation, see “To Rui, Once Again” (Hayashi 2017). 2.  See Margherita Long’s article on Ōe and 3/11 (2017). Her article “Humanism and the Hikari-Event: Reading Ōe with Stengers in Catastrophic Times” is forthcoming in the journal positions: asia critique. 3.  See Kuroko’s books Bungakusha no “kaku, Fukushima ron”: Yoshimoto Takaaki, Ōe Kenzaburō, Murakami Haruki, and Hiroshima, Nagasaki kara Fukushima e: “Kaku” jidai o kangaeru. However, writer Shigematsu Kiyoshi, speaking through a fictional alter ego in his book Map of Hope: The Tale of 3/11 (Kibō no chizu: 3/11 kara hajimaru monogatari, 2012), argues that when Fukushima is written in katakana it becomes subsumed under the heading of “nuclear power” and the “atomic.” Despite his support for expanding the boundaries of the disaster beyond Japan, he fears that such action can turn into wordplay that allows for responsibility to be shirked. Additionally he argues that this large scale makes it harder to see the actual pain, anger, and sadness borne by the residents of Fukushima (Shigematsu 2012a, 124–125). 4.  Okinawa is also often written in katakana. See, for example, Eichi Shindō, Sengo no genzō: Hiroshima kara Okinawa e (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1999). I am grateful to Davinder Bhowmik for pointing this out. 5.  See Hayashi for more on the struggles of atomic-bomb victims and her hopes for the new nuclear victims of 3/11 (Hayashi 2013). Hayashi had not previously written about nuclear power plants. Many atomic-bomb victims have been denied government health care for their medical problems because of their inability to prove that the cause was radiation. Ishikida writes about this and postwar legislation guaranteeing health care and medical allowances for atomic-bomb victims (Ishikida 2005, 47–48). 6.  See, for example, the articles on the bullying of children from the disaster area (Aoki 2016a, 2016b; Nagata 2016; Nagata, Ōmori, and Kimura 2016; Izawa 2017; Ōmori 2016a, 2016b; Ōmori and Kimura 2016; Ōmori and Ota 2017). 7.  An older Japanese woman made this remark during the Q&A after a talk I gave at a Japanese university in 2017. I was asking the audience about their usage of hibakusha, and hers was clearly political. 8.  Ten percent of the DOE’s annual budget goes to Hanford (Lewis 2017). I am grateful to Luke Habberstad for this reference. 9.  A number of 9/11 novels and films have been criticized for pulling

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Notes to Pages 92–97

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the September 11 attacks “out of history,” such as DeLillo’s Falling Man and the film Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Shamsie 2012; Dargis 2011). 10.  A number of Japanese writers and critics wrote editorials in international newspapers after 3/11 (Saeki 2011; Azuma 2011a; Takahashi, Numano, and Ikeuchi 2011; Ryū Murakami 2011). 11.  See, for example, Ōe’s comments on post-3/11 antinuclear power movements in Sayonara genpatsu (Kamata 2011). 12. Murakami’s novels have all sold more than one million copies individually. His Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Shikisai o motanai Tazaki Tsukuru to, kare no junrei no toshi, 2013) sold more than a million in the first seven days of its release (Kyodo News 2013). 13.  See the official award website: http://pic.gencat.cat/en​ /­presentacio​_del_premi/ (accessed February 17, 2015). 14.  The translation of the cenotaph inscription is from Emanuel Pastreich’s translation of Murakami’s speech (Murakami Haruki 2011). However, the second line is often translated “The error shall not be repeated,” reflecting the ambiguity surrounding the grammatical subject in the original Japanese, which effectively removes or disperses agency and blame. 15.  See Pulvers for more on Murakami’s criticism of Israel (Pulvers 2011). Murakami wrote about World War II in his Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Nejimakidori kuronikuru, 1994–1995), and conducted interviews with the Aum adherents and their victims in Underground (1997–1998). Some have argued that the theme of Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru “overlaps with the sense of loss that permeated Japan in the wake” of 3/11 (Kyodo News 2013). But there are no direct references to the disaster itself. Murakami’s collection of short stories written after the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake, After the Quake, also references that disaster only tangentially (Haruki Mura­ kami 2003). 16.  For more on this, see Treat (Treat 1995). 17.  Aldrich discusses antinuclear opposition in Japan in his chapter 5 (Aldrich 2010). 18. “The no-nuclear principles, adopted as a parliamentary resolution in 1971, but never enshrined in law, forbid Japan from possessing or producing nuclear weapons or permitting them to be on its territory. The two main secret pacts in contravention of those principles are a 1960 one allowing nuclear-armed U.S. planes and ships to enter Japan, and one from 1969 regarding the reversion of Okinawa to Japan and the possible presence of such weapons there” (Pulvers 2011). Kan also discusses this (Kan 2011). 19.  For more on this statement of false assurance, see my introduction.

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Notes to Pages 97–105

20.  Azuma Hiroki talks about how the Japanese have had to struggle with the unfamiliar terminology of “sieverts, becquerels, half-life, and decontamination” (Azuma 2011b, 9). An English translation of Azuma’s essay is included in the back of the volume. 21.  I am thankful to Michele Mason for mentioning that the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organization (Nihon Hidan­ kyō) came out after 3/11 and argued that the Japanese government should issue health-care booklets to 3/11 victims to provide them with medical treatment and health-care allowances. See Ishikida for more on postwar compensation for atomic-bomb victims (Ishikida 2005, 47–48). Kate Brown interviewed a former chemist at the Hanford’s chemical processing plant who was ninety years old and notes that his “longevity defied the talk about Hanford’s radioactive legacy” (Brown 2013, 45). 22.  The Japanese government raised the acceptable level for annual individual radiation exposure from 1 mSv pre-3/11 to 20 mSv after the disaster (Phillips 2013). As of August 2014, the government raised the maximum ambient radiation level from an hourly 0.23 microsieverts to 0.3–0.6 microsieverts (Surjon 2014). In August 2012 the government brought the limits back down to the pre-accident levels (Hecht 2013). 23.  The Health and Labor Ministry raised the legal limit for radiation exposure twice for workers at the Fukushima NPP to a level equal to five times the maximum exposure for American nuclear workers (Petryna 2002, xxiii). 24.  See, for example, the families interviewed in A2-B-C (Ash 2013). 25.  See my analysis of the title story in chapter 4. 26.  Obon festivals are a common event in post-3/11 fiction. See the stories discussed in chapter 1. 27.  He is diagnosed a year after moving into temporary housing. The story does not indicate any causal relationship between the nuclear disaster and his cancer. 28.  Ian Thomas Ash, in his film A2-B-C, shows these workers decontaminating a house (Ash 2013). 29.  Woodblock artist Kazama Sachiko uses the term “throwaway people” (kimin; Knighton 2013, n. 30), and Takahashi Tetsuya talks about the “sacrificial system” of nuclear power (2014). The term “disposable people” is from human-rights activist Kevin Bales as quoted by Rob Nixon (Nixon 2011). For more on the concept of disposable people see my discussion of Kimura Yūsuke in chapter 2, and of the nuclear industry in chapter 4. 30. Nadesan quotes from Aileen Mioko Smith of Green Action (Nadesan 2013, 49). Yamashita was also interviewed in Der Spiegel. Noriko

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Notes to Pages 106–110

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Manabe has more on similar statements by Japanese officials and professors (Manabe 2015, 50). 31.  Hayashi is one of the few who did blame both the United States and Japan for the bombings and their aftermath. 32.  See Treat’s extended discussion of this (Treat 1995, 364–368). 33. Also see Treat’s essay “Lisbon to Sendai, New Haven to Fukushima” for more on the so-called accidental nature of the Fukushima meltdowns and its relation to questions of intentionality and negligence (Treat 2012). 34. The story was published in the February issue of the journal Shinchō. 35. See Höijer for more on media codes for victims (Höijer 2004, 521). I am grateful to Terry Jackson for pointing out the iconic nature of images of mothers nursing dead babies in atomic-bomb manga, and to Davinder Bhowmik for mentioning these images in the famous Hiroshima Panels (Genbaku no zu, 1950–1982) by Maruki Iri and Toshi. 36.  Critics and filmmakers have focused on mothers’ attempts to get care for their children (Ash 2013; Slater, Morioka, and Danzuka 2014). 37.  There are other instances in Japanese literature of mothers killing or hurting their children (or harboring such intentions), and it is possible that Sato is playing off these by presenting the new twist of radiation danger. See, for example, Ogawa Yōko’s “Pregnancy Diary” in The Diving Pool: Three Novellas (Ogawa 2008). 38.  Hayashi says hibakusha had to apply to the government, but were denied medical coverage because the government claimed there was no connection between internal radiation and either exposure to the atomic bomb or atomic-bomb disease. This explains why she was shocked when she heard a government official speak of internal exposure at a 3/11 press conference (Hayashi 2013, 13). 39. The Asahi Shimbun ran a series of articles about students from the affected areas having relocated to other areas of Japan only to be bullied in school (Aoki 2016a, 2016b; Nagata 2016; Nagata, Ōmori, and Kimura 2016; Izawa 2017; Ōmori 2016a, 2016b; Ōmori and Kimura 2016; Ōmori and Ota 2017). 40.  One mother in A2-B-C basically says that the authorities invite us back to the zone, but it is the same as saying “kill your children” (Ash 2013). 41.  A recurring theme for Satō is that the victim becomes the perpetrator, or was it all along. 42.  See the story in March Was Made of Yarn for the postscript in which Kawakami talks about her writing of the story and her reaction to the

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188

Notes to Pages 110–121

nuclear accident (Hiromi Kawakami 2012a, 44–48). The story came out in the June 2011 issue of the literary magazine Gunzō. 43.  For more on double victimization and the Aum victims, see the preface to Murakami Haruki’s Underground ( 2001). 44.  Smelser discusses the sense of pre- and post-disaster temporalities in his work on 9/11 (Smelser 2004, 265–266). 45. Her levels exceed the pre-3/11 limits but not the post-­disaster limit of twenty times the norm (Komori 2014, 88–89). 46.  This is also a common image in post-3/11 manga. 47.  See Kuroko Kazuo’s chapter on Yoshimoto Takaaki’s arguments emphasizing that scientific progress (nuclear research) cannot be halted lest we risk cultural degradation (Kuroko 2013, 27, 50–58). 48.  See Henmi for more on references to the war and to wartime-like fascism (Henmi 2012, 81, 85–86). 49.  Saitō, Henmi, and others also use this term. Both the English and Japanese titles are on the cover of Satō’s book. 50.  My translation is a combination of the New York Times editorial and the original Japanese as quoted in Komori (2014, 78). 51. The other characters are not solely the progeny of Japanese women and American GIs. One character traces her lineage back to a grandfather who served with the Dutch in Indonesia and impregnated a local woman (Tsushima 2013, 274). 52.  The references are to Nick Ut’s photograph of children running from a napalm attack in 1972 and Eddie Adams’ photograph of South Vietnamese police chief General Nguyen Ngoc Loan killing a Viet Cong suspect. 53.  The note is on an unnumbered page at the end of the novel. 54.  Murakami Ryū’s “Little Eucalyptus Leaves” compares 3/11 to the Holocaust (DiNitto 2014). Other works draw comparisons with 9/11, from Furukawa’s Horses to Takahashi Gen’ichirō’s A Nuclear Reactor in Love. Chapter 4: Chernobyl and Beyond 1.  See Hindmarsh for information on polls that show a major drop in public support for nuclear power post-3/11 (Hindmarsh 2014, 56). 2.  For more on Kluge’s nuclear disaster narratives, see Pflug­macher 2015. One of the writers I examine, Tawada Yōko, is a Japanese expatriate who has long lived in Germany and has written on the disaster in both Japanese and German. I treat only her Japanese-language works here. 3.  Treat argues that Oda’s novel signals “something quite new, a literature decisively ‘nuclear’ in the way the 1980s have seen that word become

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Notes to Pages 121–126

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one of global concern,” and that the novel “insists upon a new critical framework” that goes beyond atomic-bomb literature (Treat 1995, 383). 4.  See Treat for more on other works of atomic-bomb literature that explore the relationship between the United States and Japan (Treat 1995, 372–373). 5.  For more on this shift, see Broderick and Jacobs (2015, 218). Biello’s work is representative of this position (Biello 2013). 6.  Sinking of Japan is loosely based on Komatsu Sakyō’s 1973 novel Japan Sinks (Nihon chinbotsu) (Komatsu 1973). The novel was initially adapted for the cinema in 1973 and for TV in 1985. See Gardner for more on Komatsu’s novel in the context of 3/11 (Gardner 2014). Although the bombs in the 2006 Sinking of Japan produce unmistakable atomic mushroom clouds, they are referred to in the film as an explosive called “N2” and distinguished from nuclear bombs, apparently out of sensitivity for Japan’s history. This “nuclear” solution was not used in the 1973 film, but atomic bombs help make the earth safe for repopulation after a virus epidemic in Komatsu’s 1964 novel Virus (Fukkatsu no hi; Komatsu 1998). I am grateful to Will Gardner for pointing this out. 7.  See Sontag’s essay for more on these films (Sontag 1966). Godzilla is an ambivalent symbol with regard to the nuclear. Brought to life by nuclear testing, he is also killed by a weapon that is a metaphor for an atomic bomb. He uses his nuclear-enabled abilities to inflict damage on Japan but is himself a victim. 8. See Cordle for more on Cold War–era nuclear fiction (Cordle 2008). Also see my analysis of “Homecoming” in chapter 3. 9. This is the central argument in Hecht’s Being Nuclear (Hecht 2012). Also see her “Nuclear Ontologies” (Hecht 2006, 321–322). 10. For Hecht, “nuclearity” indicates how things get or do not get designated as nuclear, but it is an “unsettled classificatory scheme” and a “contested technopolitical category” (Hecht 2012, 14). 11. The short stories in this collection were originally published between October 2011 and March 2012 in the literary journal Shinchō. The references in this chapter are to the short-story collection. 12.  The term “documentary fiction” is taken from Shigematsu Kiyoshi’s Kibō no chizu, which has been described as a “documentary novel” (dokyumento noberu). 13.  In “Kamikaze” Kurokawa gives dates for the earthquake, tsunami, and the explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Kurokawa Sō 2012c, 210–211). 14.  Alexievich is a journalist, prose writer, and Nobel Prize winner

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Notes to Pages 127–132

known for her Voices from Chernobyl (1997), interviews with victims of the Chernobyl disaster (Alexievich 2008). 15.  I have been unable to determine if this is a real book. 16.  See Petryna for more on the history and application of radiophobia in areas affected by Chernobyl, and DiNitto for more on how this term is applied to women in post-Fukushima Japan (Petryna 2002, 160–177; DiNitto 2018). 17.  Ochiai and Brau discuss Oishinbo (Ochiai 2014; Brau 2017). 18.  The Japanese government delayed the release of this data to the public until March 23, although they gave it to the US military on March 14. Lacking this information, some residents unknowingly fled into zones of higher contamination (Phillips 2013). 19.  The project the character works on, Sakhalin 2, was a real project. 20.  See chapter 1 for more on Prime Minister Abe’s comments. 21.  For more on this phrase by Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio, see my introduction. 22.  See Paul Brians’ chapter 1 for more on works like H. G. Wells’ The World Set Free (1914), Robert Nichols and Maurice Browne’s Wings Over Europe: A Dramatic Extravaganza on a Pressing Theme (1929), and other works that explore this theme (Brians 1987). 23.  The quotes are from the advertisements themselves. See Zwi­gen­ berg on Atoms for Peace (Zwigenberg 2012). 24.  See Hayakawa for more on the utopian nuclear in Japan (Ha­ya­ kawa 2014). 25.  See Funahashi Atsushi’s Nuclear Nation about Futaba, a town that benefited from the nuclear subsidies (Funahashi 2012). In the film, the mayor talks nostalgically about the town’s many amenities that the subsidies funded. Also see Aldrich for more on how “the promise of new jobs, increased tax revenues, and improvement and maintenance of their roads seemed to overcome safety concerns” for locals living near NPPs from the late 1950s to the early 1970s (Aldrich 2010, 127). 26. See Juraku for more on the siting of multiple reactors at one plant, and Hindmarsh on communities that “welcomed” nuclear facilities (Juraku 2014; Hindmarsh 2014, 64). 27.  The story was originally published in the journal Ōru yomimono in 2013. The page number references in this chapter are to the short-story collection Zōn ni te. The two women in this story are like the resettlers or self-settlers (samosely) around Chernobyl. 28.  The Japanese government raised the acceptable level for annual individual radiation exposure from 1 mSv pre-3/11 to 20 mSv after the

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Notes to Pages 132–135

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disaster (Phillips 2013). As of August 2014, the government raised the maximum ambient radiation level from an hourly 0.23 mSv to 0.3–0.6 mSv (Surjon 2014). In August 2012, the government brought the limits back down to pre-disaster levels (Hecht 2013). 29.  NEET stands for young people “Not in Education, Employment, or Training” and freeter refers to those freelance workers in Japan—­ specifically, the younger generation who are unable to secure full-time, permanent jobs. See Rosenbaum for a history and overview of the precariat in contemporary Japan (Rosenbaum 2015). 30.  See chapter 2 for more on the concept of an “internal colony.” 31. The Fukushima city website has information on data collected from citizens who wore these dosimeters: http://www.city.fukushima​ .­ fukushima.jp/soshiki/71/hkenkou-kanri14022601.html (accessed September 5, 2016). 32.  See Hecht 2013 for more on the temporary workers at NPPs in Japan. 33.  The best example of this is the criticism of the documentary filmmakers in the film 311. See DiNitto for more on such disaster films (DiNitto 2014, 8, 19). 34.  Toki is the Japanese word for “time.” 35.  The Japanese prefectural and central governments gave residents of the evacuated zones until 2018 to return to decontaminated areas. Beyond that date, returnees would not receive aid (Capodici and Burnie 2016). 36.  The space is gendered female, as were the chemical processing plants at Hanford and other nuclear facilities (Brown 2013, 46). Taguchi’s narrator mentions that the local rumors labeled the place an ubasuteyama, a reference to the Japanese folklore of abandoning elderly parents in the mountains to die (Taguchi 2013a, 210). Satō Yūya has an all-female version of this in his novel Dendera (2009), where the elderly women who do not die live in secret communities (Satō 2015). 37.  This story was originally published in the journal Bungei shunjū in March 2012 and later included in a volume of short stories named after this piece. The references in this chapter are to the short-story collection. 38.  The narrator refers to the mountain as a kofun (Gen’yū 2013b, 163, 166). The kofun tombs were built between the early third and early seventh century CE. 39. The wreckage from the Fukushima meltdowns will have to be added to the existing “47 metric tons of plutonium and thousands of tons of uranium” accumulated at Japan’s nuclear plants. This latter material

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Notes to Pages 136–142

requires disposal in a highly secure permanent facility, the likes of which do not exist in Japan (Kirby 2016). 40.  See Kingston for more on NIMBY (ninbī) politics and nuclearwaste sites in Japan (Kingston 2013). 41.  Hideaki Fujiki points out that the ICRP has been suspected of conspiring with the nuclear industry (Fujiki 2017, 90). Also see Stephens for more on the relationship between the ICRP and the nuclear industry (Stephens 2002). 42.  See chapter 3 for more on Hayashi’s essay. 43.  Hirose Takashi has been critical of TEPCO’s defense and failure to plan, arguing that this accident was indeed foreseeable (Hirose 2012). 44.  Sawaragi Noi discusses the fictional depictions of Japan/Tokyo’s destruction (Sawaragi 2005). According to The New York Times, Aum also had connections to nuclear weapons. They reported on Aum’s sheep farm at Banjawarn, Australia: “Aum Shinrikyo, had tried to buy Russian nuclear warheads and had set up an advanced laboratory on a 500,000-acre ranch in Australia near the puzzling upheaval. At the ranch, investigators found that the sect had been mining uranium, a main material for making atomic bombs” (Broad 1997). 45.  Uno is cited in Kawamura (Kawamura 2013, 8). This end-of-theworld discourse is discussed by Satō and Miyadai (Satō 2013b, chap. 3; Shiokura and Miyadai 2011). 46.  As cited in Kawamura (2013, 8). 47. See Funahashi’s film Nuclear Nation (Funahashi 2012). See Aldrich for more on these subsidies (Aldrich 2010, 132, 135). 48. This statute was passed into law by the Diet on December 6, 2013. 49. See Repeta for more on the effect of the legislation on news reporting (Repeta 2014). 50.  Rebecca Suter quotes from an essay by Motoko Arai about this “alarm bell” (Suter 2013, 155). Arai’s essay is in 3/11 no mirai (Kasai et al. 2011). 51.  Hayashi Kyōko felt the need to explain this terminology for her readers (Hayashi 2013, 18–19). 52. References to “The Island of Eternal Life” are from the March Was Made of Yarn collection unless noted otherwise. 53.  This policy, instituted in the 1630s, was famously challenged by the arrival of American Commodore Perry and his Black Ships in 1853, which forced the opening of Japan to Western trade. For more on Perry, see John Dower’s interactive site on MIT’s Visualizing Cultures website (Dower n.d.).

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Notes to Pages 142–152

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54.  The story originally appeared in August 2014 in the literary journal Gunzō and was later collected in a volume titled Kentōshi. The page number references in this chapter are to the collection. After I finished writing this chapter an English-language translation of the novel was published under the title The Emissary. 55.  The term used for their temporary housing (kasetsu jutaku) is the same as that for evacuees from the 3/11 disaster. 56.  This is one of the two passages from this novel that Tawada read aloud in a public reading of the book (Tawada Yōko-shi ni yoru Kentōshi rōdoku 2014). The video is also available at http://book-sp.kodansha.co.jp​ /­topics​/kentoushi/ (accessed September 2, 2017). 57. See quotes from newspaper interviews of Yoshimoto after the Fukushima disaster where he continues to unapologetically support nuclear power (Kuroko 2013, 26–27). 58.  See Iwata-Weickgennant for more on this discrimination in post3/11 Japan (Iwata-Weickgenannt 2015, 201). The Asahi Shimbun ran a series of article on the bullying in schools of children from Fukushima (Aoki 2016a, 2016b; Nagata 2016; Nagata, Ōmori, and Kimura 2016; Izawa 2017; Ōmori 2016a, 2016b; Ōmori and Kimura 2016; Ōmori and Ota 2017). 59.  All three stories were published in a volume titled Bedside Murder Case (Beddosaido mādākēsu, 2013); however, the first two stories originally appeared in the literary journal Shinchō in April 2012 and August 2013, respectively (Satō 2013a). As Satō made revisions to the stories, my references here are to the originals in Shinchō. 60.  See my introductory chapter for more on Edano’s comments. 61.  See chapter 1 for more on the PM’s comments. 62.  Hayashi Kyōko expressed her shock at the post-3/11 government’s use of the term for “internal radiation exposure” (naibu hibaku) and her realization that, even though the government refused to provide medical services for health problems related to internal radiation from the atomic bombs, they knew about this problem all along (Hayashi 2013, 13). 63.  Fujiki notes that the standard for a “safe area” in post-3/11 Japan is one affected by less than 20 mSv of radiation, but the ICRP advises that such a high level is acceptable only in “exceptional cases”; 1 mSv is the normal standard (Fujiki 2017, 92). 64.  In the story it is written as “Makuramoto no monogatari” (The Bedside Tales) and glossed in the katakana script as “Beddosaido mādākēsu.” Here too, Satō is playing with genre, as the former recalls the tales of premodern Japan.

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194

Notes to Pages 152–155

65. The English-language version of The Official Report of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission characterized 3/11 as a man-made disaster with fundamental causes in the “ingrained conventions of Japanese culture” (Kiyoshi Kurokawa 2012, 9). Murakami Haruki, in his acceptance speech for the International Catalunya prize, also laid blame on the nation for having embraced nuclear power (Haruki Murakami 2011). See Kuroko 2013 for a critique of Murakami. Writers Kawakami Hiromi and Nosaka Akiyuki have also questioned their own complacency (Kawakami Hiromi 2012a; Nosaka 2012). 66.  The Lucky Dragon (Daigo Fukuryū Maru) was a Japanese tuna trawler that was exposed to and contaminated by nuclear fallout from the US thermonuclear weapon test at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954. The incident drew national and international attention to the plight of nuclear victims and incited protests over atmospheric nuclear testing. 67.  Yutaka means “prosperous.” The following slogans adorned arches over streets in nuclear towns: “Nuclear power: Creating prosperous towns and societies” (genshiryoku yutaka na shakai to machizukuri); “Correctly understanding nuclear power leads to prosperous lives” (genshiryoku tadashii rikai de yutaka na kurashi); “Nuclear power: Developing your hometown with a prosperous future” (genshiryoku kyōto no hatten yutaka na mirai). These images are easily found on the web with a google search for “yutaka na genshiryoku.” See, for example: http://kasakoblog.exblog.jp​ /18274974/ (accessed August 3, 2016). 68.  See my discussion of this story in chapter 3. 69.  The novel was originally published in the literary journal Bungakkai in January 2014. The references in this chapter are to the novel. 70.  See my discussion of the hometown in chapter 1. 71.  See Tossani for more on the Reconstruction Design Council and their recommendations (Tossani 2012). Also see the official Reconstruction Agency’s website: http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/english/ (accessed August, 23, 2016). 72.  See Tōgo for plans for revitalizing Tohoku. He also cites Koshizawa Akira and John Dower, who warn against grand plans for post-­disaster reconstruction (fukkō) that can take decades while the residents need more immediate restoration (fukkyū) of their daily lives (Tōgo 2012, 280–281). Maps on the official Reconstruction Agency’s website show areas near the plant where there are currently no plans for repatriation, or “areas where it is anticipated that residents will face difficulties in returning for a long time.” http://josen.env.go.jp/en/decontamination/#special (accessed Aug. 23, 2016). See Ash, A2-B-C for more on how the decontamination work is being

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Notes to Pages 156–165

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conducted (Ash 2013). Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt argues that Wagō Ryōichi’s poetry opposes the “centrally orchestrated reconstruction (fukkō) discourses” aimed at “nothing more than the restoration of the pre-disaster state” (Iwata-Weickgenannt 2015, 200). 73. See Slater, Nishmura, and Kindstrand for more on the social media “badges” of allegiance used post-3/11: “Pray for Japan” and “Stay Strong Japan” (Slater, Nishimura, and Kindstrand 2012, 105). Epilogue 1. Terebi Asahi Roppongi Hiruzu Summer Station http://www.tv​ -asahi​.co.jp/summerstation/genre/ (accessed July 20, 2017). 2.  Miyadai introduced this concept in 1995. See his book Owarinaki nichijō o ikiro (Miyadai 1998). 3.  The first quote is from the 2015 tour. United Arrows Ltd. Online Store. http://store.united-arrows.co.jp/shop/jc/blog/store/lrp​/20150720​ _56909.html (accessed July 20, 2017); Roppongi Hills Kids’ Workshop 2018. http://www.roppongihills.com/workshop/ (accessed July 20, 2017). See the main page for more images of the tour: Terebi Asahi Roppongi Hiruzu Summer Station. http://www.tv-asahi.co.jp/summerstation​ /genre/ (accessed July 20, 2017). 4.  See Mack 2010 for more on the Akutagawa prize. 5.  Other committee members on both the Bungakukai and Akutagawa Prize committees use the term “minority” to describe Numata’s story (Matsu­ura et al. 2017; Yamada et al. 2017). 6.  See chapter 4 for a discussion of this series by Satō. 7. Roppongi Hills Kids’ Workshop 2018. http://www​.­roppongihills​ .­com/workshop/ (accessed July 20, 2017).

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Index

9/11, 50, 117, 188n44; vs. 3/11, 5–6, 31, 86, 120, 168n10, 173n9, 188n54; critique of literature about, 91, 120, 184n9; Ground Zero, 61, 86; vs. Hurricane Katrina, 72; literature, 30–31, 59–61, 79–80, 86. See also DeLillo, Don; Shamsie, Kamila; Spiegelman, Art A2-B-C, 51, 169n22, 186n24, 186n28, 187n40, 194n72 Abe Katsushige: “Ride on Time,” 44 Abe Shinzō: on nuclear restarts, 160; speech to International Olympic Committee, 27, 58, 150 Akasaka Norio, 18, 72–73, 75, 78, 113 Akikawa Tetsuya: “Box Story” (Hako no hanashi), 44–48 Akutagawa Prize, 160, 162–164, 175n20, 195n4. See also Numata Shinsuke Aldrich, Daniel, 12, 69–70, 185n17, 190n25, 192n47 Alexander, Jeffrey, 25–28, 37, 173n56 Alexievich, Svetlana, 126, 169n22, 189n14 “Amenbo.” See Gen’yū Sōkyū Antinuclear movements, 29, 92, 94–96, 107, 115–116, 152, 154, 176n30, 185n17; activists, 29, 102; literary movements, 15; and nuclear power, 120, 185n11; suppression of, 12 15–16, 27, 140. See also Hirose Takashi; Manabe, Noriko anzen shinwa, 13, 29, 73, 102, 114, 150, 154–155, 158–159

Ash, Ian Thomas. See A2-B-C atomic bombs, 4, 89–92, 96, 116–118, 120, 125, 129, 150, 152; and Aum Shinrikyō, 192n44; comparison with Fukushima, 71, 90, 97, 99, 115–116, 118, 120; and film, 122, 189n6; loss of public memory of, 97, 154; memory of, 96–98, 117–118; and myth of safety, 13; and Native Americans, 125; and nuclear power, 9, 86, 94; right to speak of, 95; silencing of victims of, 98; and utopia, 129; victims of 4, 21, 23, 64, 89–90, 97–98, 112, 120. See also Hayashi Kyōko; hibakusha; Hiroshima, bombing of; internal exposure to radiation; Nagasaki, bombing of atomic-bomb fiction, 110, 121–122; and America, 106, 189n4; authors of, 3, 21, 23, 30, 89, 92, 94, 120, 175n21; and Fukushima fiction, 91–92, 99; marginalization of, 9, 168n13; vs. nuclear literature, 121, 188n3; and nuclear power, 90; and realism, 83. See also Hayashi Kyōko; Hiroshima, bombing of; Nagasaki, bombing of; Treat, John Aum Shinrikyō, 110, 132, 138, 168n12, 180n28, 185n15, 188n43, 192n44 Azuma Hiroki, 8, 185n10, 186n20; “The Disaster Broke Us Apart” (Shinsai de bokutachi wa barabara ni natte­shi­ matta), 18, 52, 55, 172n52; inter­view with Takahashi Gen’ichirō, 13

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222Index Beck, Ulrich, 171n30 Bedroom Murder series. See Satō Yūya Boltanski, Luc, 28, 49 Borādobyō. See Yoshimura Man’ichi boshi hinan, 102, 127 “Box Story.” See Akikawa Tetsuya Breese, Elizabeth Butler, 25–26, 173n56 Broderick, Mick, 11, 68, 122, 171n33, 172n51, 182n54, 189n5 Brown, Kate: on Hanford plant workers, 186n21, 191n36; on plutonium cities/plutopia, 123, 129–130, 133, 139, 145, 150–151; on radioactive fallout, 24. See also plutopia censorship, 12–13, 139, 144–145, 159, 171n33; of atomic-bomb fiction, 6; and community pressure, 100, 169n19; as information control, 139–140, 142–145; of music and manga, 14–15. See also damaging rumors, Henmi Yō; Manabe, Noriko; State Secrecy Law “The Charm.” See Shigematsu Kiyoshi “Cheehofu no gakkō.” See Kurokawa Sō Chernobyl: accident, 4, 6–7, 12, 24, 117–118, 122–124, 129, 161; clean-up workers, 99; and contaminated food, 126–127, 156, 174n11; definition of victims of, 28, 124, 126, 172n49; evacuation zone, 114, 131, 135, 190n27; as fluke, 17; literature of, 61–62, 178n7; and plutopia, 123, 130, 150–151; and radiation exposure limits, 131; and radiophobia, 190n16; sarcophagus 136, 141. See also Alexievich, Svetlana; Wolf, Christa concentric circles: as evacuation model, 5, 11, 57, 64, 128; as faulty, 5, 24, 56; as literary metaphor, 5, 30, 49–50, 87; and victim identification, 20, 22, 24, 56 contamination, radioactive, 4, 13, 64, 101–103, 105, 131, 138, 155, 158, 161; and Chernobyl, 28; and Cold

War fiction, 138; and dead bodies, 34; and evacuations, 18, 99, 156, 158; fear of, 141, 147; and food, 22, 107–108, 127, 142, 155–156, 174n11; at Hanford, 126; and nuclear waste site, 135; and Olympics, 149; of soil, 136; uneven dispersal of, 24; of water, 162, 177n40. See also exclusion zone; no immediate health risks Cordle, Daniel, 122, 126, 158, 147, 172n50, 189n8 damaging rumors (fūhyō higai), 7, 97, 101, 128, 169n19 dead bodies, 33–35, 37, 45, 104, 108, 175n22 decontamination, 51, 99, 103–104, 137, 149, 151, 158; and repatriation to former evacuation zones, 173n55, 194n72 DeLillo, Don: Falling Man, 30–31, 61, 179n8, 185n9 depleted uranium bombs, 123–124, 127–128, 150 disaster tourism. See voyeurism disposable people, 44, 70, 104, 176n36, 180n21, 186n29 dystopia, 21, 124, 133, 139, 154, 159 earthquakes: Great Hanshin, 6, 71, 168n11, 173n2, 173n8, 180n28, 181n29, 185n15; Great Kantō 5–6, 23, 168n11; and nuclear power plants 11, 17, 174n18 eat and support campaigns (tabete ōen), 27, 156, 174n11 Edano Yukio, 11–13, 108, 149, 170n27, 190n21, 193n60. See also no immediate health risks “Eiri.” See Numata Shinsuke Emishi, 77, 181n42 exclusion zone, 60, 136; characters living in, 10, 43, 100, 131; contamination outside of 11, 28; and corpses, 34; entry into, 41–42, 64, 66; evacuations from 34, 55; and

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Index223 hibakusha, 91. See also concentric circles; contamination, radioactive Field, Norma, 36, 177n41 Fight on slogans (Gambarō Nippon/ Fukushima/Tohoku), 18, 25, 27, 35, 58, 115, 157, 174n11 food: safety/contamination. See contamination, radioactive; eat and support campaigns fūhyō higai. See damaging rumors Fujiki, Hideaki, 151, 192n41, 193n63 Fujita Naoya, 13, 139, 169n21 Fujiwara Toshi: No Man’s Zone (Mujin chitai), 34, 54, 68, 173n1, 175n23, 175n27, 179n12 Fukushima, written in katakana, 7, 90, 169n18, 184n3 Funahashi Atsushi: Nuclear Nation (Futaba kara tōku hanarete), 169n22, 172n54, 190n25, 192n47; on Oishinbo controversy, 168n6 Furukawa Hideo, 142, 164; The Holy Family (Seikazoku), 57, 59, 62, 65–67, 74–79, 84–85, 180n15, 181n42; “Sixteen Years Later, in the Same Place” (Jyūrokunengo ni tomaru), 60–61, 179n11; taidan with Shigematsu Kiyoshi, 9, 63–64, 79; Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari), 85, 183n60. See also Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure furusato. See hometown “Futatabi Rui e.” See Hayashi Kyōko gambarō slogans. See Fight on slogans Gen’yū Sōkyū, 14, 56, 92, 99, 124, 130; “The Cricket” (Korogi), 31, 34–35; Mountain of Light (Hikari no yama), 100; “Mountain of Light” (Hikari no yama), 134–137, 191n38; “Praying Mantis” (Ogami mushi), 56, 103–105; “Water Strider” (Amenbo), 100–103 Ghosh, Amitav, 14, 167n5, 171n40, 182n53

“God Bless You.” See Kawakami Hiromi “God Bless You, 2011.” See Kawakami Hiromi “Grandma’s Bible.” See Ikezawa Natsuki Great Hanshin Earthquake. See under earthquakes Great Kantō Earthquake. See under earthquakes Hanford Nuclear Reservation, 12, 91, 124–126, 184n8, 186n21, 191n36; Richland as plutopia, 130, 139, 150–151 Hayashi Kyōko, 119–120, 187n31, 192n51; “Another Letter to Rui” (Futatabi Rui e), 96–98, 184n1; on Fukushima and atomic bombs, 90, 92, 137; on Fukushima nuclear accident, 21, 89, 170n24, 184n5; on internal exposure to radiation, 105, 187n38, 193n62. See also hibakusha; internal exposure to radiation Hecht, Gabrielle: on depleted uranium bombs, 127–128; on global warming, 17; on nuclear gypsies, 46, 176n39, 180n21, 191n32; on nuclearity, 21, 123, 189nn9–10; on permissible dose 103, 170n25, 186n22; on pronuclear advertising, 129 Henmi Yō, 8–9, 12–13, 114, 118n48. See also censorship hibakusha (atomic-bomb and nuclear victims): of atomic bombs, 23, 49, 89, 96–97, 105, 110, 113, 116, 137; controversy over Fukushima victims, 64, 90–91, 179n14, 184n7; discrimination against, 4, 27, 52, 54, 78, 110, 112–114, 146; of Fukushima accident, 5, 21, 23, 92, 105, 112–113; in Fukushima fiction, 98–99, 112–114, 119, 164; silenced after Fukushima, 97–98; spelling of, 90. See also atomic bombs; Hayashi Kyōko; internal exposure to radiation

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224Index Hikari no yama. See Gen’yū Sōkyū Hirose Takashi, 29, 117n30, 192n43 Hiroshima, bombing of, 3, 6, 7, 9, 23, 55, 71, 89, 90, 93, 96, 106; and antinuclear literary movements, 15; Dome, 6; in fiction, 91; Hiroshima Panels, 187n35; Memorial Cenotaph, 93, 185n14; as memory, 98–99, 152, 154; and utopia, 129; victims of, 78, 90, 93, 113, 116, 118, 150; written in katakana, 90. See also atomic bombs; Oda Makoto “Hiyoriyama.” See Saeki Kazumi Hokkaido, 33, 36, 70–71, 132, 162, 180n23 Holmberg, Ryan, 150 hometown (furusato), 38–39, 40, 52, 154, 156–157 Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (Umatachi yo sore de mo hikari wa muku de), 57–59; as alternate history, 73–79; and disaster time, 80–82; and literary form, 59–67; and narrative modes, 82–85; as political critique, 86–88. See also Furukawa Hideo Hurricane Katrina, 20, 59, 71–73, 78, 181n30 Ichikawa Makoto, 2, 10 Ikezawa Natsuki: on disaster corpses, 33–34; “Grandma’s Bible” (Utsukushii sobo no seisho), 37–40; The Two-Headed Boat (Sōtō no fune), 49, 52–56 Inoue Jun’ichi: Inherit the Earth (Daichi o uketsugu), 115 I-novel (shishōsetsu), 83–84 internal colony (naikokuteki shokuminchi), 27, 57, 68–73, 75, 81, 113, 132, 180n23, 181n30 internal exposure to radiation (naibu hibaku), 97, 101, 104–105, 108, 127, 150, 153, 156, 187n38, 193n62 Ishii Shinji: “Lulu,” 32, 36, 45, 55 “Island of Eternal Life.” See Tawada Yōko

Itsuka kono sekai de okotte ita koto. See Kurokawa Sō Iwata-Weickgenannt, Kristina, 2, 8, 27, 168n9, 173n10, 174n11, 193n58, 195n72 Jacobs, Robert, 11, 68, 122, 171n33, 172n51, 182n54, 189n5 Jinno Toshifumi, 9, 65–66, 69, 74–77, 82–83, 173n2–3, 174n13, 180n17 “Kamikaze.” See Kurokawa Sō Kan Takayuki, 94–96, 185n18 kasetsu jutaku. See temporary housing Kawakami Hiromi, 92, 95, 99, 174n17; “God Bless You” (Kamisama), 10, 111–112; “God Bless You, 2011” (Kamisama, 2011), 10, 58, 110– 113, 123, 188n42; and literary form 9, 180n17 Kawakami Mieko: “March Yarn” (Sangatsu no keito), 80 Kawamura Minato, 7, 9, 84, 114, 138; criticism of Furukawa Hideo, 63, 65, 87, 169n18; criticism of pronuclear writers, 15 Kentōshi. See Tawada Yōko Kimura Saeko, 110, 112, 168n10 Kimura Yūsuke: Sacred Cesium Ground (Seichi Cs), 41–44, 48, 176n36, 180n21 “Kinenbi.” See Shigematsu Kiyoshi Kingston, Jeff, 192n40 Kirby, Peter Wynn, 135–136, 192n39 Kirino Natsuo: Baraka, 164 Kluge, Alexander, 121, 188n2 Koisuru genpatsu. See Takahashi Gen’ichirō Kojiki, 73–74, 77, 85–87, 183n59 Komatsu Sakyō: Japan Sinks (Nihon chinbotsu), 122, 138, 189n6; Virus (Fukkatsu no hi), 189n6 Komori Yōichi, 174n12; on Kawakami Hiromi, 10, 11, 111, 188n45 “Korogi.” See Gen’yū Sōkyū Kurokawa Kiyoshi, 29, 40, 194n65. See also National Diet report

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Index225 Kurokawa Sō, 124; “Chekhov’s School” (Cheehofu no gakkō), 126–128; “The Crying Man” (Naku otoko), 125–126; “Kamikaze” 127–128, 189n13; Things That Once Happened in This World (Itsuka kono sekai de okotte ita koto), 124–125; “The Wave” (Nami), 98–99, 128–129 Kuroko Kazuo, 7, 15, 40, 90, 154, 169n16, 176n30, 184n3; critique of Murakami Haruki, 93–95, 120, 194n65; critique of Yoshimoto Takaaki, 145, 188n47, 193n57; interview with Hayashi Kyōko, 96–98 “Little Eucalyptus Leaves.” See Murakami Ryū Long, Hoyt, 68–69, 81, 180n23 Lucky Dragon Incident, 152, 194n66 “Lulu.” See Ishii Shinji Manabe, Noriko: on 9/11 and 3/11, 168n9; on antinuclear censorship, 12, 14–15, 27, 163, 171n33; on antinuclear demonstrations, 16, 102–103; on Fukushima 169nn16– 17; on health risks of radiation, 170n27, 187n30; on kaeuta 170n23; on musical response to Fukushima accident 167n3; on State Secrecy Law, 140 Map of Hope. See Shigematsu Kiyoshi “March Yarn.” See Kawakami Mieko Mason, Michele, 70, 180n23, 186n21 “Mata tsugi no haru e.” See Shigematsu Kiyoshi “Mata tsugi no haru e—urabon’e.” See Shigematsu Kiyoshi Matsuda Aoko: “Planting” (Māgaretto wa ueru), 44–45, 47–48 Matsuura Rieko, 163–164 Miyadai Shinji, 161, 192n45, 195n2 Miyazawa Kenji, 54 monogatari, 60, 64, 84–87, 183nn56–58, 193n64. See also Yanagita Kunio “Morumotto.” See Taguchi Randy mother and child images, 106–107

Murakami Haruki: After the Quake, 162n12, 173n2, 185n15; Catalunya Prize speech (“Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer”) 92–96, 98, 120, 194n65; and politics 94–95, 185n15; Underground, 185n15, 188n43 Murakami Ryū, 163; “Little Eucalyptus Leaves” (Yūkari no chisa na ha), 47, 114–115, 188n54 myth of safety (anzen shinwa), 13, 29, 73, 102, 114, 150, 154–155, 158–159 Nagasaki, bombing of, 92, 96–97, 125, 137. See also atomic bombs; Hiroshima, bombing of Nakagami Kenji, 59, 78, 84–85, 181n40, 182n53, 183n62 “Naku otoko.” See Kurokawa Sō “Nami.” See Kurokawa Sō National Diet report on the Fukushima accident, 29, 40, 194n65 Natsume Sōseki, 178n55 Nixon, Rob, 13–14, 171n39, 180n21, 181n33, 186n29. See also slow violence no immediate health risks (tadachi ni eikyō wa nai), 11–13, 96, 108, 112, 129, 149, 170n27. See also Edano Yukio No Man’s Zone. See Fujiwara Toshi Nosaka Akiyuki, 95, 174n17, 194n65 nuclearity 5, 21, 123–124, 128, 139, 149–150, 159, 188n10. See also Hecht, Gabrielle nuclear “company towns.” See plutopia nuclear gypsies, 46, 70, 103, 176n39, 180n21 Nuclear Nation. See Funahashi Atsushi nuclear victims. See hibakusha nuclear waste: 142, 145; disposal sites, 15, 73, 91, 105, 119, 123, 192n40; in fiction, 130, 134, 136–137 nuclear weapons: testing of, 19, 21, 24, 91, 118–119, 120, 189n7, 194n66. See also atomic bombs; Lucky Dragon Incident

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226Index Numata Shinsuke: “Behind the Shadow” (Eiri), 162–164, 195n5 Obon, 50–51, 54, 100–101, 186n26 Oda Makoto: Hiroshima, 121–122, 125, 126, 188n3 Ōe Kenzaburō, 90, 92, 106, 116, 184n2, 185n11 “Ogami mushi.” See Gen’yū Sōkyū Ogino Anna, 15 Oguma Eiji, 18, 69, 77, 90 Ohwada Toshiyuki, 177n50 Oishinbo: controversy over, 128, 168n6, 190n17 Okada Toshiki: “Breakfast,” 175n29 Okinawa, 70–71, 132, 163, 180nn22–24, 184n4, 185n18 Oliver-Smith, Anthony, 6 Olympics: 2020 Summer Games, 16, 21, 71, 165; and clean-up deadlines, 19, 36, 43; in fiction, 149–150; and Prime Minister Abe’s statement, 27, 58, 129, 150 Ozeki, Ruth, 121 Pebbles of Poetry. See Wagō Ryōichi Petryna, Adriana, 100; on Chernobyl, 123, 168n8; criticism of WHO report on Chernobyl, 17, 28, 172n49; on decontamination workers, 103; on “Fukushima 50,” 46; on permissible dose, 99, 186n23; on radiophobia, 190n16. Phillips, Sarah, 17, 24, 123–124, 170n25, 170nn28–29, 186n22, 190n18 “Planting.” See Matsuda Aoko plutopia, 129, 130, 133, 139, 145, 151, 154. See also Brown, Kate press freedom. See censorship pronuclear movements, 17, 122, 145, 149, 152, 172n48 Pulvers, Roger, 96, 185n15, 185n18 Ranch of Hope, 42 reconstruction, 19, 47, 55, 154–155, 157–158, 171n31, 194n71

Repeta, Lawrence, 140, 192n49 “Ride on Time.” See Abe Katsushige Rosenbaum, Roman, 167n4, 177n46, 180n27, 191n29 rupture: 3/11 as, 16–19, 36, 52, 55; spatial and temporal, 50, 52, 56, 80. See also Azuma Hiroki Saeki Kazumi: “Hiyoriyama,” 31–32, 35, 39, 54, 185n10 Saitō Tamaki, 144, 188n49 Samuels, Richard, 173n9 sakoku (closed-door policy), 142–144, 146 Satō Yūya, 92, 99, 124, 139, 158, 165, 187n41, 192n45; on 3/11 as war, 115–116; on 3/11 literature, 15–16; The Case of the Bedroom Community Murders (Beddotaun mādākēsu) 147–154; The Case of the Bedroom Murders (Beddorūmu mādākēsu), 147; The Case of the Bedside Murders (Beddosaido mādākēsu), 147–148, 152; Dendera, 191n36; on health effects of radiation, 13, 108; Lectures of Novels to Survive after a Thousand Years, 115; “Same as Always” (Ima made dōri), 106–110, 198n37 Sawaragi Noi, 192n44 Seichi Cs. See Kimura Yūsuke Seikazoku. See Furukawa Hideo self-censorship. See censorship Setouchi Jakuchō, 115 Shamsie, Kamila, 120, 185n9 Shigematsu Kiyoshi, 167n5; “The Anniversary” (Kinenbi), 80; “The Bookmark” (Shiori), 33; “The Charm” (Omajinai), 37–40, 45; Map of Hope (Kibō no chizu), 47, 60, 111, 176n33, 184n3, 189n12; “Pork Miso Soup” (Tonjiru), 176n33; taidan with Furukawa Hideo, 9, 63–64, 79; “To the Next Spring” (Mata tsugi no haru e), 33, 35, 38, 176n33; “To the Next Spring—Obon” (Mata tsugi no

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Index227 haru e—urabon’e), 49–55, 122–123, 177n47 “Shiori.” See Shigematsu Kiyoshi “Sixteen Years Later, in the Same Place.” See Furukawa Hideo Slater, David, 106, 156–157, 169n19, 171n33, 173n9, 187n36, 195n73 slow violence, 4, 14, 70, 165, 171n39 Smelser, Neil, 50, 188n44 social outcasts, 48, 53, 55–56, 117, 130, 132, 164, 176n33. See also Nakagami Kenji solidarity, 18–19, 26–28, 37, 40, 44, 48, 53, 55, 71, 156 Solnit, Rebecca, 109 Sontag, Susan, 122, 189n7 sōteigai, 11, 29, 96, 138, 150, 171n30. See also TEPCO Sōtō no fune. See Ikezawa Natsuki “Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer.” See Murakami Haruki SPEEDI (System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information), 11, 128 Spiegelman, Art: In the Shadow of No Towers, 79–80, 171n32, 182n49 Starrs, Roy, 167n3, 168n12 State Secrecy Law (Specially Designated Secrets Protection Law), 12, 139–140, 144–145 Stephens, Sharon, 131–132, 192n41 surveillance state, 147, 151, 154, 156. See also censorship tadachi ni eikyō wa nai. See no immediate health risks Taguchi Randy, 124, 130; “Guinea Pigs” (Morumotto), 130–134, 158, 191n36; “Into the Zone” (Zōn ni te I & II), 41–43, 68, 90–91, 111 Takahashi Gen’ichirō, 13, 185n10; on 3/11 and war memories, 116; on Kawakami Hiromi, 112; on literary charity projects, 167n4; A Nuclear Power Plant in Love (Koisuru genpatsu), 98, 168n10, 188n54 Takahashi Tetsuya, 29, 69–70, 186n29

Takashima Tetsuo: Disaster Caravan (Shinsai kyaraban), 15 Tawada Yōko, 9, 124, 139, 140–141, 188n2; “Island of Eternal Life” (Fushi no shima) 44, 141–143, 145–146; The Lantern Bearer (Kentōshi, aka The Emissary), 71, 142–147, 193n56 Taylor, Dorceta, 181n30 temporary housing (kasetsu jutaku), 8, 11, 51, 55–56, 70, 100, 103–105, 137–138, 143, 186n27, 193n55 TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company), 119, 154; and admission of meltdowns, 58, 60, 141, 178n2; and clean-up, 47, 161–162, 177n40; and compensation for victims, 22; criticism of, 183n63, 192n43; culpability of, 11, 29, 46, 86, 106, 115, 138, 141, 149–150, 152, 171n30, 174n16; on health risks, 96–97; and mismanagement, 11, 21, 124; and pronuclear advertising 17. See also sōteigai Tohoku: as internal colony, 68–73. See also internal colony Treat, John: on atomic-bomb literature, 3–4, 23, 83, 106, 110, 168n3, 175n21, 189n4; on concept of hibakusha, 91; on Fukushima, 108, 187n33; on Oda Makoto, 121–22, 125, 188n3 Tsushima Yūko: Mountain Cat Dome (Yama­neko dōmu), 92, 117–119, 188n51; on nuclear power, 118–119 utopia, 21, 124, 129–131, 133–134, 137, 139, 159, 182n47, 190n24. See also plutopia voyeurism, 20, 23, 36, 63–64, 133, 173n5, 179n12 Wagō Ryōichi, 23, 171n36, 173n10; critique of reconstruction campaigns, 195n72; Pebbles of Poetry (Shi no tsubute), 80, 182n50

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228Index Walker, Lucy, 54, 175n27 war, 19, 21, 84, 91, 138, 188n48; Cold War, 122, 126, 138–139, 147, 151, 173n56; Vietnam War, 117–118; World War I, 6. See also World War II Wolf, Christa: Accident: A Day’s News, 61–62, 178n7 World War II, 5, 21, 117, 120, 146, 155–156, 185n15; and antinuclear movements, 92; Japanese atrocities during, 26, 86; memories of, 114–116; and nuclear bombs,

124–125; repatriation after, 77, 117; responsibility for, 29 Yamaneko dōmu. See Tsushima Yūko Yanagita Kunio, 53, 76, 78, 182n55, 183n58, 183n62 Yoshimi Shun’ya, 16, 152 Yoshimura Man’ichi, 124, 139; Bollard Syndrome (Borādobyō), 154–158 Zimmerman, Eve, 85, 181n40, 183n57 “Zōn ni te” I & II. See Taguchi Randy

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About the Author

Rachel DiNitto, an associate professor of Japanese literature at the University of Oregon, has published on the literature, film, and manga of contemporary and pre–World War II–era Japan. This book is part of a larger project on the cultural responses to Japan’s triple disaster of 2011. In addition to her previous book, Uchida Hyakken: A Critique of Modernity and Militarism in Prewar Japan (2008), she has published translations of wartime and contemporary fiction, as well as articles on Kane­hara Hitomi, Suzuki Seijun, and Maruo ­Suehiro.

This content downloaded from 75.69.46.187 on Mon, 01 May 2023 02:36:05 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

This content downloaded from 75.69.46.187 on Mon, 01 May 2023 02:36:05 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms