When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan 9004268294, 9789004268296

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When the Tsunami Came to Shore

When the Tsunami Came to Shore Culture and Disaster in Japan Edited by

Roy Starrs

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: The Great Wave Off Fukushima by Roy Starrs, 2014. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data When the tsunami came to shore : culture and disaster in Japan / edited by Roy Starrs.   pages cm  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-90-04-26829-6 (hardback : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-26831-9 (e-book) 1. Disasters-Social aspects--Japan--History. 2. Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, Japan, 2011. 3. Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Japan, 2011. 4. Typhoons--Japan--History--21st century. 5. Floods--Japan--History--21st century. 6. Atomic bomb--Japan--History--20th century. 7. Kanto Earthquake, Japan, 1923. 8. Disasters--Japan-Religious aspects--History. 9. Disasters in literature. 10. Japanese literature--History and criticism. I. Starrs, Roy, 1946 DS806.5.W47 2014  363.34’940952090512--dc23

2014020424

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. isbn 978-90-04-26829-6 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-26831-9 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

津波来し時の岸辺は如何なりしと見下ろす海は青く静まる

What was it like then When the tsunami came to shore? I look down and wonder – Below me spreads the blue sea Quiet and perfectly still.

Emperor Akihito, New Year’s poem, 20121

∵

1 Translated by the Imperial Household Agency. Punctuation has been added.

Contents List of Illustrations ix Introduction Cultural Responses to Disaster in Japan 1 Roy Starrs

PART 1 Cultural Responses to the Triple Disaster of March 2011 1

Nature’s Blessing, Nature’s Wrath Shinto Responses to the Disasters of 2011 23 Aike P. Rots

2

Gods, Dragons, Catfish, and Godzilla Fragments for a History of Religious Views on Natural Disasters in Japan 50 Fabio Rambelli

3 Buddhism The Perfect Religion for Disasters? 70 Brian Victoria 4

Post-3/11 Literature in Japan 91 Roman Rosenbaum

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These Things Here and Now Poetry in the Wake of 3/11 113 Jeffrey Angles

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‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ Responses to 3/11 – Constructing Community Through Music and the Music Industry 139 Henry Johnson

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Learning that Emerges in Times of Trouble A Few Cases from Japan 166 Joy Hendry

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Contents 

Observations on Geomentality in Japan and New Zealand 179 Kenneth Henshall

Part 2 Towards a Wider Perspective – Japanese Cultural Responses to Earlier Disasters 9

‘All Shook Up’ Post-religious Responses to Disaster in Murakami Haruki’s after the quake 195 Jonathan Dil

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Disaster and National Identity The Textual Transformations of   Japan Sinks 214 Rebecca Suter

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Belated Arrival in Political Transition 1950s Films on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 231 Yuko Shibata

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Hiroshima Rages, Nagasaki Prays Nagai Takashi’s Catholic Response to the Atomic Bombing 249 Kevin M. Doak

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The Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923 and Poetry 272 Leith Morton

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Proletarian Writers and the Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923 299 Mats Karlsson

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The ‘Silenced Nexus’ Female Mediation in Modern Japanese Literature of Disaster 318 Janice Brown Index 345

List of Illustrations figure

caption

4.1 6.1 6.2 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6

Brother & Sister Nishioka, “The Crows and the Girl” 105 “Marching J” publicity logo 145 Album cover of Songs for Japan (2011) 158 Police Headquarters in Tokyo burning and the Asakusa Tower in ruins 274 Drawing by Takehisa Yumeji 279 Cover of Earthquake Poetry Collection 284 Poem by Paul Claudel 285 Aizu Yaichi on the 1923 earthquake 288 Akiko in 1926, three years after the quake 293

Introduction

Cultural Responses to Disaster in Japan Roy Starrs

University of Otago

日本を潰し日本に汚れ春の海

crushing Japan soiling Japan the spring sea seki etsushi

…

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age, that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. dylan thomas

∵ It may be said that the twenty-first century is the age not so much of the ‘revolt of the masses’ as of the ‘revolt of nature’. The spread of scientific-industrial civilization and consumer capitalism around the globe has created an immense ‘global middle class’ but it has also damaged our planet’s natural environment to such an extent that ‘natural disasters’, if not actually directly caused by human activity (as in global warming), are certainly made even more disastrous by those activities. The mega-disaster in northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011, is a prime example of this, with an (avoidable) nuclear accident following quickly in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami. The warning that Rousseau issued after the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755, just on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, that humans were unwise to live crowded together in large cities, alienated from nature, and thus suffered far more from nature’s wrath, has now, over two-and-a-half centuries later, become less easy to dismiss as the comical rant of a crackpot romantic ‘nature-lover’. (And, of course, the heirs of Rousseau are to be found all around us today, and, as we shall see,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004268319_002

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include some of the Japanese writers mentioned in this book.) Humanity today is suffering from its ‘alienation from nature’ or ‘abuse of nature’ in ways that even Rousseau could not envision. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that the study of disaster in all its multifarious aspects is an area of urgent and increasing interest for many of us as we await with trepidation what the future might bring. As an emerging academic field, ‘disaster studies’ incorporates both scientific and humanistic disciplines. The sub-field that investigates ‘cultural responses to disaster’ may not be quite as wide-ranging but, as I think this book amply demonstrates, still lends itself well to a multidisciplinary approach. The contributors to this volume include scholars of Japanese religion, anthropology, history, intellectual history, literature, music and popular culture. One of the things that interested me most as editor was to see how a number of common themes or leitmotifs emerged quite ‘naturally’ despite this diversity of disciplines and approaches and certainly without any prompting on my part. Perhaps the most striking of these was what Brian Victoria usefully calls the ‘shamanistic’ response to disaster and, more particularly, its associated idea of disaster as tenbatsu or ‘Heaven’s punishment’ (84). Other important leading themes  which emerged spontaneously in the same way include socialanthropological, political, cultural and even aesthetic issues, and I will touch upon some of the main ones in what follows. The four thematic or subject headings below fall roughly within four disciplinary areas – religion, anthropology/cultural studies, literature and art, and politics – but they are not meant to imply that the book is divided up along strict disciplinary lines into four discrete and unrelated segments. As even my discussion of these ‘four main disciplinary areas’ will reveal, the chapters ‘overlap’ with each other thematically in many interesting and thought-provoking ways, not all of which I will elaborate here. Here I am merely pointing to some of the most significant convergences, or some of the more suggestive ways the chapters may be seen to ‘mutually illuminate’ each other. 1

Religious/Theological Responses

Devastating disasters confront us, in the most immediate and violent way, with the precarious, arbitrary and contingent nature of our existence; they can induce a sense of existential crisis, shaking the foundations of our most cherished and fundamental beliefs, or of our very sense of reality and of moral law. Thus, when we address the question of the cultural impacts of disaster, it seems natural to begin on this most fundamental level, with its impacts on

Introduction

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religious faith and philosophical worldview. Most of the chapters herein touch upon these fundamental issues in one way or another, but our first three chapters deal directly with religious or theological responses to ‘3/11’ (as the March 2011 events are now conventionally designated – suggesting, of course, that they shook Japan as much as ‘9/11’ shook the us) as well as other disasters. Perhaps the most famous, or infamous, immediate ‘theological’ response to the March 2011 disaster came from the Tokyo governor, Ishihara Shintarō (a right-wing politician long notorious for his habit of making offensive remarks), who invoked the hoary old word tenbatsu to suggest that the ‘selfishness’ of present-day Japan had incurred ‘Heaven’s punishment’. Although Ishihara’s statement was deservedly condemned, the sentiment he expressed, albeit so maladroitly given his political position and the time and place, is by no means an uncommon one among the major world religions, as a number of our authors here point out. Indeed, whether we approve of it or not, this is, in fact, probably the most common and universal of all ‘religious’ responses to disaster, as Brian Victoria demonstrates in his chapter herein. Does the disaster mean that we are doing something wrong? Can we stop further disasters from happening by changing our behaviour in some way? Perhaps by propitiating the gods or angry ghosts? Such questions are as old as humanity itself and perhaps are, as some have suggested, the very origin of the ‘religious impulse’ from an evolutionary-psychological point of view. A number of our authors respond in their own way to Ishihara’s provocative and offensive statement, taking it as a starting point for deeper reflections (apparently) than the man himself is capable of. Like other of Ishihara’s critics, Fabio Rambelli points out that northeastern Japan can hardly be said to be the most sinful part of the country – echoing Voltaire’s famous response to the similarly ‘religious interpreters’ of the 1755 earthquake and tsunami that devastated Lisbon: ‘Aren’t Paris and London as sinful as Lisbon?’ Rambelli goes much deeper than this too, of course, placing the idea of disaster as tenbatsu or ‘Heaven’s punishment’ in a long and complex historical context. He shows that the term and idea has not only Shinto but also Confucian and Buddhist provenance and usage – indeed, it was originally a Confucian term related to the idea of the ‘mandate of Heaven’, and therefore not, strictly speaking, a ‘religious’ concept. At any rate, as Rambelli points out, the term is neither ‘homogeneous’ nor ‘uncontested’ (50). In his study of Shinto responses to the 2011 disaster, Aike Rots finds that it caused psychological or ideological damage to Shinto practitioners as well as physical damage to Shinto shrines: in particular, it challenged their belief in nature’s benevolence – a belief which itself perhaps shows the Western Romantic or Rousseauvian influences on modern Shinto, since nature, or the

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gods who represent natural forces, could be either benevolent or malevolent in traditional Shinto mythology (as Kenneth Henshall points out herein). Nonetheless, there are also Shintoists who explained the disaster in ‘heavenly punishment’ terms – and, like Ishihara, some have even seemed to welcome it as a chance for a necessary national ‘purification’ (harae). But, as Rambelli points out in his complex genealogy of the term tenbatsu, its use is not restricted to the most obviously shamanistic of Japanese religions, Shinto; surprisingly, the idea is also frequently invoked in the Buddhist tradition. On the face of it, Buddhism seems to be, in Brian Victoria’s words, the ‘perfect’ religion for disasters: one of its fundamental doctrines or ‘four noble truths’, that ‘life is suffering’, certainly would seem to encourage Buddhists to be stoical and compassionate. But, in popular Buddhism at least, there is also the doctrine of karma and, as Victoria shows, this can often boil down to another version of tenbatsu: blaming the victims of disaster for their own ‘bad karma’. Victoria also looks at other major world faiths and finds, in fact, that belief in tenbatsu is, in one form or another, present in all of them: for instance, the American Christian fundamentalists who claimed that God condemned the disaster-struck Haiti or New Orleans for its sinfulness predictably echoed Ishihara and others of his ilk. This leads Victoria to make the interesting suggestion that the universality of tenbatsu-type views derives from the shamanistic roots of all religion: religion began as an attempt to ‘propitiate the gods’ who were assumed to cause disasters of all kinds. But he also finds that some religions today are capable of a ‘critical response’ to their ‘shamanistic roots’ – even modern Shinto, which, as already pointed out, is the most obviously ‘­shamanistic’. He argues reasonably that the ‘legitimate role’ of religion should not be to blame the victims but to help them – and help prepare for disaster. Although eight of the chapters herein focus on literary responses to 3/11 and earlier Japanese disasters, it turns out that these too are by no means unrelated to religious or even theological issues. Jonathan Dil, for instance, finds that, despite the fact that Murakami Haruki’s short story collection, after the quake, deals with the responses of people to the Kobe quake of 1995 in a secular, ‘postreligious’ world, these responses have a marked ‘spiritual’ character, and this ‘spirituality’ often has much to do with the ‘ur-religious’ shamanistic response to disaster analysed in the three chapters that specifically focus on religion. The fact that these ‘shamanistic’ impulses or instincts appear even among the worldly denizens of a postmodern metropolis further confirms Victoria’s claim about their universality as perhaps something innate in human psychology and the ‘religious impulse’. Indeed, Dil invokes recent neuroscientific and ­psychological theories to explain this seemingly basic universal response to disaster as an instinctive search for meaning and agency in the natural world.

Introduction

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An  interesting example occurs in super-frog saves tokyo: nothing less than a shamanistic attempt to stop a natural disaster. As Dil writes: ‘The idea of a religious figure – a shaman or other such figure – who can do battle with evil on our behalf is also a common religious trope. While superfrog is not presented as a religious figure, he is a symbol of our desire for some kind of cosmic ­intervention’ (207). Secular echoes of the shamanistic worldview or of the shamanistic response to disaster may also be found in literary works written in response to 3/11 and to the greatest natural disaster (in terms of loss of life) in modern Japanese history, the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of the universality of the ‘heavenly punishment’ response is that it appeared, in one form or another, in both left- and right-wing responses to the 1923 disaster. Analysing the post-disaster work of the ‘proletarian’ writer Ogawa Mimei, Mats Karlsson finds the following view expressed by a character in his 1923 work, Fortuitous Things: People had become too self-complacent. They treated nature with too much contempt. They forgot to live in fear of Heaven. It’s a punishment, Heaven’s retribution. A fine lesson (308). Again, Ogawa himself expressed a similar tenbatsu-style view in secular form in an essay published shortly before. As Karlsson writes: Here we find a point that foreshadows a line of thought in Fortuitous Things; namely that the Japanese had ignored nature to a too great extent. Instead of learning from the experience of earlier disasters they had single-mindedly incorporated overseas civilization, incompatible to earthquake-prone Japan. Whether true or not, Ogawa claims that the new western architecture had been harder hit than dilapidated traditional buildings, leading him to the observation that imitation civilization had been uprooted and destroyed by the force of nature (310). One might describe this as a neo-Rousseauvian response to disaster with a modern cultural-nationalist twist! On the other hand, the increasingly right-wing government of the late 1920s and 1930s also developed its own version of a tenbatsu response to the megadisaster of 1923. Ishihara’s obnoxious comment, in fact, closely echoed the position of his rightist ancestors. As Karlsson notes, Charles Schencking, in his study of this historical phenomenon, includes the ‘divine punishment theory’ as one of the defining features in the ‘culture of catastrophe’ cultivated by the

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government after 1923 as a way of inculcating an anti-luxury campaign across the nation. This showed, according to Schencking, the ‘power and efficacy of using catastrophe for political and ideological ends…’ (308N4) A more purely Rousseauvian response to the 2011 disaster came from the poet Takahashi Mutsuo, who claimed that ‘the unparalleled disaster that brought about this wasteland, has as its epicentre the unbounded desire of each and every one of us in Japan’ (130). As Jeffrey Angles writes: ‘In some ways, this rhetoric might sound at first like the nationalistic “luxury is the enemy” kind of rhetoric used to justify the rationing system during World War ii, but in Takahashi’s case, the object of his criticism is a civilization that lives out of balance with nature, placing its own consumerist needs and short-lived comfort before the well-being of the environment and even the world in general… Ultimately, what Takahashi believes that the Japanese population needs is to recognize their own complicity in the consumerist, unnatural culture that they have created’ (131). Again, the old Rousseauvian theme of humanity’s alienation from nature seems altogether more compelling after incidents such as Fukushima. Needless to say, the careless exploitation of nuclear power is a far more convincing trope for ‘humanity’s abuse of nature’ or ‘living out of harmony with nature’ than ‘imitative Western-style’ architecture. One may thus find echoes of Rousseau in much of the literature written in response to disaster; but, of course, one may also find examples of more ‘orthodox’ religious responses, even in ‘non-scriptural’ or ‘secular’ literature, including responses of the tenbatsu variety. The locus classicus of this in Japanese literature is no doubt the Tale of the Heike. This great medieval ‘military chronicle’ is a reminder of the kind of ‘religious’ function literature could perform in an age that was far from secular – the Japanese middle ages. The Tale of Heike was recited or sung to console and propitiate the unhappy spirits of the defeated Heike forces, lest their anger give rise to even more disasters – which, again, points to the ancient roots of the ‘shamanistic’ view of disaster in Japan. In the medieval worldview, natural disaster was usually attributed to human misconduct of one kind or another, and certain disasters which followed the defeat of the Heike were explained in this way. Anyone who has seen the classic Japanese film Kwaidan will remember the moving scene in which the blind monk known as ‘earless Hōichi’ recites the tragic Tale to the ghosts of Heike warriors – at their request. Thus literature’s ‘therapeutic’ or spiritual role was recognized long before Matthew Arnold proposed that it might assume a ‘religious’ function in a secular age. A more recent literary work written in response to disaster that also has a strongly religious – one might even say ‘ultra-religious’ – message is Nagai Takashi’s novel, The Bells of Nagasaki, analysed here by Kevin M. Doak. But,

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however religious in tenor it may be, the novel’s ‘Catholic response to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki’ is specifically framed in opposition to any ­interpretation of the disaster as tenbatsu. On the contrary, it presents the ­striking – even shocking – view that the bombing was a blessing or grace from God (Nagai actually considered any suggestion that God allowed the bombing as a punishment for sin to be sacrilegious). If Nagai had not been a victim himself, and a dying one, this argument would be very hard to swallow or to stomach. It seems to belong to the shocking extreme of ‘justifying the ways of God to man’. But who could begrudge this consolation to a man who had suffered so much? Nonetheless, his position remains controversial, as Doak points out, even within the Japanese Catholic Church, although it is by no means without precedent in Catholic doctrine. As Doak also makes clear, to understand Nagai’s theological interpretation of the disaster, one must understand the subtleties of Catholic doctrine regarding the believer’s participation in Christ’s sacrifice and the idea of ‘redemptive suffering’ (261). Of course, somewhat comparable ideas of ‘purification through suffering’ may also be found in other religious and ideological traditions, including in Ishihara’s brand of Japanese right-wing discourse as mentioned above. In presenting Nagai’s ‘Catholic response’ as a significant part of post-war Japanese culture (not only in its original literary form but in later popular cinematic and musical adaptations), Doak argues for a wider, more diverse vision of ‘Japanese culture’ than has often been purveyed by Western Japanology – which tends, for instance, to regard Christianity as somehow ‘un-Japanese’. He advocates a ‘different cultural anthropology’ that would conceive Japanese culture as diverse, hybrid, historically evolving and interacting with cultural ‘others’ – against a narrow, essentialist, stereotypical view of ‘national culture’ as an unchanging monolith. This raises another key question touched upon by a number of chapters herein: do a people’s social and cultural responses to disaster reveal anything about their ‘national culture’ or even ‘national character’ or ‘national psychology’? Is there even such a thing as a ‘unique’ nationalcultural response to disaster? Or is there simply a range of basic psychological responses to disaster which are universally human – although, of course, they might assume different cultural forms? The universality of what we might call the ‘tenbatsu response’ would seem to support the latter proposition since, as we have seen, it appears, mutatis mutandis, in all the world’s major religions. In other words, are Japanese responses to disaster any different to those of other nations? One might point out, for instance, that, just a few weeks before 11 March 2011, the people of Christchurch, New Zealand, like their counterparts in Tōhoku, responded with admirable stoicism, fortitude and discipline to the devastation of their city by a major earthquake. Similarly, my

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parents’ generation of British were famous for maintaining a ‘stiff upper lip’ during the unending horrors of the Blitz. I would argue that human responses to disaster tend to be broadly similar in the first instance – that is, on the immediate, instinctive level where the primal will to survive operates – but that cultural differences come into play shortly afterwards, at the moment when the victims begin to interpret their experiences and develop psychological and ideological strategies for coping with them. What this means specifically in the Japanese context will of course be elucidated by virtually every chapter in this book, but especially by the chapters discussed in the following Section. 2

Disaster and ‘National Culture’

The anthropologist Joy Hendry happened to be in Japan when the 2011 disaster struck but, unlike many other foreigners, she did not opt to immediately depart, partly because she believes that ‘times of disaster are when much can be learned about a country’ (166). For instance, one of the things she learned at this particular ‘time of disaster’ was the ‘national mood of “selfrestraint” (jishyuku) in sympathy with those who had lost so much in the worst affected regions’ (167). As it happens, this was an aspect of Japanese culture she  was unfamiliar with, ‘despite 40 years of research in and about the ­country’ (167). And in her chapter here she gives a number of other examples of cultural insights gained during earlier disasters, moments of great stress on the families among whom she was conducting anthropological fieldwork. On the other hand: ‘Disaster brings out cultural reactions that can surprise longterm researchers who have never encountered such events, but other reactions reinforce prior findings’ (168). One of the benefits from her decades of research experience in Japan, Hendry finds, is that she was immune to claims that ‘Japan has changed forever’ after 3/11. In fact, she found that these rather inflated claims emanated more from abroad than from Japan itself. To the anthropologist herself disasters are very much part of Japanese ‘normalcy’ – although she allows that there was one novel aspect this time: ‘the speed of communication of the disaster and its consequences to television screens around the world’ (177). Another change, she suggests, may have been in the way Japan is perceived from the outside rather than from within the country itself. It is of course impossible to measure with any precision the extent to which a whole country or culture has changed after a major disaster, or the extent to which these changes will turn out to be either temporary or permanent – for instance, as shaping forces of ‘national culture’ or ‘national psychology’. One

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suspects that the long-term effects will not be as pronounced or as noticeable as the short-term ones, but that nonetheless the country or culture must somehow have been permanently changed by such an ‘earth-shattering’ experience. The natural impulse is to ‘return to normalcy’ but that is never entirely possible – least of all in the case of 3/11 because of the added still-ongoing nuclear disaster of Fukushima. The idea that the ‘Japanese national character’ is actually ‘defined by disaster’ appears in compelling form in perhaps the most famous science-fiction novel (and the most famous imaginary disaster) of twentieth-century Japan, Japan Sinks (Nihon chinbotsu, 1973), which is analysed here by Rebecca Suter. This brilliant disaster trope, imagined by one of the founding fathers of Japanese science fiction, Komatsu Sakyō, envisions the whole Japanese archipelago sinking beneath the waves and the consequent evacuation of the population to countries around the world. By showing how the Japanese people’s ‘true character’ emerges most clearly in times of disaster, in particular how they respond to this unprecedented catastrophe with exemplary virtue and intelligence, the novel reinforces all the familiar nihonjinron (theory of the Japanese national character) stereotypes. But Suter argues persuasively that it does considerably more than that: ‘While there is no denying that the novel contains a fair amount of nationalist rhetoric, it is my contention that its treatment of “Japaneseness” is more complex. Particularly interesting in this respect is the relationship between government, population, and territory and how these three elements affect the sense of national identity in the face of disaster’ (218). Ken Henshall, a historian and literary scholar who, as a resident of Christchurch, has experienced the effects of natural disaster in both New Zealand and Japan, continues the exploration of the question of whether disasters reveal much about national culture or character. Specifically, the coincidence of the two millennial disasters occurring in Japan and New Zealand just a few weeks apart leads him to explore the question of whether the frequency of disasters in these two Pacific island nations occupying two opposite sides of the ‘Ring of Fire’ has shaped their cultures in significant ways. To answer this question he looks primarily at the Japanese and Maori languages for clues. Perhaps surprisingly, he finds not much evidence of a significant impact from disaster even when he compares these two languages from ‘disaster-prone’ countries with English, which of course originates in a country where major natural disasters are relatively rare. This contradicts some of the  favorite nihonjinron ideas or stereotypes, as most famously represented by Watsuji Tetsurō. All three countries seem to have a relatively similar ‘geomentality’, at least judging by their languages. Nor, finds Henshall, is there any

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particular evidence to support the frequent claim that the Japanese have a ‘unique affinity’ with nature. Further evidence against any idea or model of a monolithic and specifically or uniquely ‘Japanese’ response to disaster is provided by Roman Rosenbaum who finds that, on the contrary, post-3/11 literature shows the multicultural diversity of early twenty-first century Japan, contradicting the ‘outdated paradigm’ of a holistic nation he finds expressed in the writings in response to the disaster of more established figures such as Ōe Kenzaburō and Murakami Haruki: Contemporary Japan is less holistic than both writers imagine and perhaps it is precisely because of the lack of ‘national consciousness’ and cultural unity that they fail to see the implicit diversity of a multiethnic and globalized culture under the umbra of a homogenous Japan. In this context the triple-headed monster of March 11 assumes a deeply historical and cultural significance, because the country’s national agenda has failed the rural reality of north-eastern Japan. It is the unification of the dissonant voices of a diverse Japan that can be glimpsed from the collective literary response that is a distinct aspect of post-3/11 literature (109–110). 3

Literary and Artistic Responses to Disaster

Both Roman Rosenbaum and Jeffrey Angles deal with the immediate literary response to the March 2011 disaster, and both find that it yielded an especially rich harvest of poetry. As Angles writes: ‘it is no exaggeration to say that in the midst of the crisis, it was the poetic world that asked some of the most incisive questions about the meaning of language, art, and truth – questions that continue to resonate even now’ (114). Why poetry, one might ask? A poet, of course, can respond more quickly to an event than can a novelist or even a short-story writer, genres that usually require some time to filter the experiences they deal with; poetry, after all, at least in its most common lyrical form, often involves the more or less spontaneous expression of an immediate personal response on the part of the poet – the fresher the better, one might say. In the case of 3/11 there was the added factor of new communications media, as noted by a number of writers here. For instance, one poet who came quickly to the fore was the Fukushima resident Wagō Ryōichi, who became an ‘overnight sensation’ by using Twitter, a ‘social medium’ that seems ideally suited for haiku-like poetic one-liners, to broadcast to the world his mini-poems and

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journal entries written in immediate response to his experiences as a resident  of one of the worst-affected areas. Since Wagō had been a relative unknown up to that point, his sudden prominence was a good example of what Jeffrey Angles notes: ‘At the same time that it shook poetry into the public eye, the earthquake levelled – at least temporarily – the hierarchical culture that had tended to keep established poets and relative newcomers apart’. This opening up, democratization, or mixing of the different Japanese poetic worlds in the wake of the disaster – as if the tsunami had washed away all barriers even in the literary world, for one historical moment at least – is one of the unique features of the post-3/11 literary flowering analysed by Angles and Rosenbaum. Disasters of such devastating, overwhelming magnitude as that of March 2011 compel writers and artists to ask fundamental questions about the value or appropriateness of their art in the face of such human suffering. They often tend, in the first instance, to be overcome by the debilitating sense that mere words or images ‘cannot do justice’ to the enormity and tragic meaning of the disaster, or even that the making of ‘artistic capital’ out of the disaster is a kind of ‘disaster exploitation’ on a par with the proverbial ‘ambulance-chasing’ of other professions. But such fainthearted hesitations or ambivalences also, almost inevitably, give rise to a creative counter-reaction and new forms of ‘apologia’ for the ultimate value of art; writers must write, even if almost in spite of themselves, and their words, once uttered, can possess a mysterious healing power of their own. In the wake of 3/11, for instance, Tanikawa Shuntarō, a senior figure in the Japanese poetic world, wrote a poem called ‘Words’ which, as Rosenbaum notes, poses ‘the question of how we can even write about things for which there are no words; yet “Words put forth buds/From the earth beneath the rubble”’ (106). In other words, ‘dealing with disaster’ becomes an artistic problem in itself: feelings of creative debility and disempowerment contend with an active creative struggle to find the right words or the right artistic style to do justice to the event – and its victims. This raises the interesting and perhaps unexpected question: is there actually an identifiable literary ‘style of disaster’? And the answer seems to be, somewhat surprisingly, yes – at least, in the short term. The general consensus among many writers, both in poetry and prose, seems to be that the appropriate way to write about disaster, at least in its immediate aftermath, is in a simple, straightforward, unadorned, realistic or objective, sketch-like, imagistic, restrained, ‘sincere’ ‘documentary’ style of writing – a kind of ‘Hemingway style’, a bare-bones minimalistic style which lets the experience speak for itself, without any unnecessary comment or elaboration from the writer. Indeed, Hemingway’s own style was created in the first instance as

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a literary response to the devastating mega-disaster of the First World War, as a way of writing about the unspeakable shock and trauma of that war, and in explicit reaction against the high-flown empty war-glorifying rhetoric of all those patriotic ‘war leaders’ who had led Hemingway’s ‘lost generation’ into that unprecedented and meaningless slaughter. (Something to think about as we commemorate the centenary of the ‘guns of August’, the opening salvo of the greatest disaster in European history – since the Second World War might now legitimately be regarded as only the delayed but inevitable second phase of that disaster.) Wagō Ryōichi, for instance, as Angles notes, believes that ‘the events surrounding 3/11 revealed how self-isolating and even obscurantist the Japanese poetry world had been’ and thus ‘his particular brand of down-to-earth language and powerful, relatively non-abstract expression represent one important direction that poetry seems to be taking in the post-3/11 poetic world’ (136). On the other hand: ‘Wagō wrote that other Japanese poets sometimes criticized his post-earthquake work for being too direct and not “poetic” enough’ (119). Indeed, these debates are universal: the widespread acceptance of a ‘simple, direct’ or ‘documentary’ style as the appropriate style for ‘disaster writing’ is inevitably short-term; the question soon arises: is such writing no more than a kind of ‘higher-level’ literary journalism or reportage? In particular, is poetry written in this style ‘poetic’ enough? No less a poet than W.B. Yeats became acrimoniously involved in just this debate when, as editor of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936, he chose to exclude all First World War combatant poets, explaining in his typically lofty, oracular way that: ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced. When man has withdrawn into the quicksilver at the back of the mirror no great event becomes luminous in his mind; it is no longer possible to write The Persians, Agincourt, Chevy Chase: some blunderer has driven his car on to the wrong side of the road – that is all’1. In short, what Yeats seems to be saying is that the war poets did not have sufficient aesthetic distance from the disaster they had experienced to be able to turn it into significant poetry; the disaster overwhelmed their poetic gift, robbing them of that joyful, playful spirit that is a necessary element of poetic creation. In his chapter on the poetry written in response to the Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923, Leith Morton analyses how some major poets of that day also struggled to transform ‘documentary realism into art’ through a ‘process of formalization’ (282). Comparing their efforts to the ‘documentary realism’ of some Holocaust poets, Morton writes of Mizutani Masaru’s and Kawaji Ryūkō’s work, for instance: 1 WB Yeats, Preface to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Oxford University Press, 1936, p. XV

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The objectivity of representation is an interesting notion when applied to poetry. The variety of lyric poetry that Mizutani employs, by virtue of its lyricism, acts to distance the reader from the horror of the devastation caused by the earthquake but, at the same time, it also memorializes it in a way that transcends mere documentary journalism. Mizutani does this by utilizing a traditional figure and device of poetic art: anthropomorphizing the autumn wind; and, in exactly the same way, Kawaji anthropomorphizes Nature (which is why I capitalize it in translation) in his first poem. The transformation of documentary realism into art is one of the defining characteristics of significant poetry. In this sense, the memorialization of trauma/tragedy is the product of a process of formalization. The use of formal categories of poetic expression such as the dirge or elegy or lament transcend the reality of the present and point to a future where only memory—the memory of tragedy formally rendered into art—remains (282). But there are also poets who, while making good use of elements of the formal aesthetic tradition, at the same time undermine the comfortably ‘aesthetic’ worldview implicit in that tradition as a way of expressing their outrage at the disaster that has befallen them. In other words, rather than by adopting the ‘simple documentary style’ of a Wagō, they challenge the literary tradition which now seems inadequate to deal with disaster by the kind of postmodern parody that, so to speak, turns the tradition back against itself. An excellent example is the haiku by Seki Etsushi quoted at the head of this chapter (as translated by Jeffrey Angles): ‘crushing Japan/soiling Japan/the spring sea’ – Nihon o tsubushi Nihon ni yogore haru no umi. Miniature though it is, this poem is brilliantly innovative in the way it uses the traditional haiku ma (a kind of suspenseful pause between images) to create a powerfully jolting tension between the traditionally lyrical poetic phrase ‘haru no umi’ and the two brutal verbal phrases. This is one beautiful ‘spring sea’ that has a very ugly impact: it demolishes and dirties Japan. In a few words, the poet has issued a devastating challenge to the thousand-year-plus tradition of Japanese nature lyricism. He calls for a radical reconfiguration of nature in the public imagination and challenges the ‘sanitized’, idealized or aestheticized vision of nature traditional in Japanese poetry. For the truth is that the mainstream Japanese poetic tradition of court poetry, especially after the Kokinshū (905), excluded much of ‘nature in the raw’ in the interests of an aristocratic aesthetic refinement – including, as Janice Brown shows in her chapter here, much of the reality of the female half of humanity. Thus modern Japanese poets, in rebelling against this ‘exclusivity’ or ‘hermeticism’, especially after the experience of major disasters, are

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intent on showing that nature is not all cherry blossoms, Mount Fuji, and frogs jumping into quiet old ponds – it is also earthquakes and tsunami and the holocaust of indiscriminate death and destruction they can cause. What this implies, of course, is also that, although the Japanese have lived with major natural disasters since time immemorial, their mainstream classical poetic tradition has largely tended to ignore this fact. (Rather like the modern Shinto nature-romantics mentioned earlier.) The traditional Japanese poetic vision of ‘nature’ is every bit as idealized, aestheticized, or romanticized as that of Wordsworth and the other English Romantics. Traditional Japanese poets, of course, had no inkling of the modern ideas of realism or naturalism, of ‘holding the mirror up to nature’; if anything, they wanted to ‘improve on nature’, in the same manner as, say, a gardener who turns ‘natural trees’ into bonsai by rigorous pruning. In a recent review of Haruo Shirane’s Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, which posits the existence of a ‘secondary nature’ in Japanese culture – that is, not ‘nature in the raw’ but the highly aesthetic, artificial construct of Heian poets – Richard Bowring ventures some interesting  speculations about the possible psychological origins of this cultural phenomenon: It emerged in the tenth century with an aristocracy coming to terms with having to live in one of the most violent and insecure environments on the planet. Hardly surprising that it sought to transform that environment into something it was not, to invent a ‘secondary’ nature that brought comfort and beauty. The myth of a harmonious society living in a benign world was in this sense a fiction necessary to survival. So, are those such as Watsuji Tetsuro who followed in the footsteps of Johann Gottfried von Herder and argued that climate informs national character correct? Well, yes, but not quite in the way intended.2 4

The Politics of Disaster

If, for both aesthetic and ethical reasons, writers and artists sometimes seem reluctant to ‘make cultural capital’ out of disaster, politicians rarely exhibit a similar reluctance to ‘make political capital’ out of it. Ex-Governor Ishihara’s notorious pronouncement was, of course, a prime example. His invocation of 2 Richard Bowring, review of Haruo Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts, in The Journal of Japanese Studies, Volume 39, Number 2, Summer 2013, pp. 427–430.

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the tenbatsu doctrine was, needless to say, more for political than for religious purposes: namely, as a way of convincing his fellow citizens that they should adopt his right-wing agenda in order to avoid future ‘punishment by Heaven’. As Fabio Rambelli shows, in the past the idea of heavenly punishment was used politically both by the established powers and by rebellious or critical groups within society who wanted to attack the government, at least indirectly. For instance, the giant catfish which was traditionally said to cause earthquakes featured in satirical cartoons, namazue or ‘catfish pictures’, meant to slyly criticize the late Tokugawa regime, suggesting that their weak-kneed policies, such as surrendering to the West’s demand for diplomatic and trade relations, had angered the ‘catfish’ and thus caused recent earthquakes. But perhaps the most powerful and potentially influential political response to disaster is that which construes it as a kind of call to arms, as an occasion for radical, revolutionary social-political change. We already detected a hint of this in Ishihara’s comment, with its nod towards a favorite trope of right-wing rhetoric: the need for a ‘national purification through suffering’. In his study of Shinto responses to 3/11, Aike Rots finds some disturbingly similar attempts to politicize the disaster: ‘Contemporary Japan, the argument goes, is a country with huge social problems; allegedly, it has become a muen shakai (society without social ties), where people no longer fulfil their obligations vis-à-vis their family members and ancestors. Hence, Japan is in need of a national harae (ritual purification) so that it can overcome its magagoto [“bad deeds”], and start “looking for an ideal image of a bright future Japan”’ (44). As Roger Griffin among others has shown, this variety of ‘palingenetic’ discourse has been a central element of fascism over the past century.2 Such a political ‘call to arms’ response to disaster can also come, of course, from the Left, as Mats Karlsson reminds us. After the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, the most deadly natural disaster in modern Japanese history, the Left hoped for a revolution to be precipitated by the social disorder that ensued. They were quick to point out that even the suffering caused by the disaster was distributed unequally among the classes, with the poor suffering far more than the rich, who lived in the spacious, hilly suburbs in homes far less prone to collapse, flood or fire. Although the expected revolution did not eventuate, the 1923 disaster became, notes Karlsson, a ‘foundational event’ for members of the proletarian literature movement; it ‘unequivocably exposed the fundamental contradictions of society and instilled them with a deep-rooted distrust in authorities’ (315). 2 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 2–8.

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Such major disasters, then, can expose not just geophysical but also sociocultural fault-lines. These can be the divisions and tensions resulting from the inequalities among social classes, but also, as Janice Brown shows, they can be similar divisions and inequalities between the genders in a particular society and culture. Comparing male and female writers’ treatments of the female victims of major man-made disasters such as the Hiroshima bombing and the Minamata pollution incident, Brown finds that the male writers’ attitudes are still shaped by traditional views of women as ‘closer to nature’ and therefore culturally inferior to men. Thus: ‘when viewed in terms of disaster, female embodiment tends to be presented in ways that enhance traditional associations with sexuality and reproduction, thereby reinforcing formulaic notions of man and woman, nature and culture. These attitudes have been bolstered in male-authored texts, from Hōjōki to works by modern writers, such as Ibuse Masuji and Ōe Kenzaburō, whereas in modern texts by female authors, such as Ōba Minako and Ishimure Michiko, these associations are presented in ways that question, critique, or attempt to rethink the underpinnings of the patriarchal status quo (342–343)’. The political repercussions of the March 2011 disaster ranged from the immediate – the downfall of a national government whose response seemed less than adequate – to the more long-term: a bitter debate about who was and still is to blame for the ongoing Fukushima fiasco. In Jeff Kingston’s devastating summation: ‘The fiercely partisan politics of the complex Tōhoku catastrophe has slowed action on recovery and discredited politicians of all political stripes. The public views Diet members with growing contempt because too many politicians seem to have prioritized petty party politics over reconstruction… In the court of public opinion, the verdict on national politicians is dereliction of duty’.3 Natural disasters in this way easily mutate into national disasters, with wide-ranging and long-lasting political impacts that can make the body politic tremble as violently as any building in an earthquake. But few among the Japanese public could have been surprised, since the Japanese government’s response to disasters or unexpected national emergencies has long been proverbially inept. Indeed, from our present point of view post-3/11, Komatsu Sakyō’s fictional depiction of the Japanese government’s callous and inept response to the imagined disaster of Japan Sinks in 1973 takes on a distinctly prophetic cast. Since the beginning of the present Heisei era in 1989, there have been a number of these disastrous events – the bursting of the 3 Jeff Kingston, ‘The Politics of Disaster, Nuclear Crisis and Recovery’, in Jeff Kingston, ed., Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan’s 3/11. Milton Park: Routledge, 2012, p. 188.

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financial bubble in 1990, the Kobe quake of 1995 and the Aum Shinrikyō terrorist attack of the same year, and now, of course, the unprecedented earthquake/ tsunami of 2011 – and in each case the response of the Japanese government and its elite bureaucracy has been lethargic and uninspired, to say the least. As of this writing, eighteen prime ministers have served the present emperor, Akihito, who is now in the 26th year of his reign – a form of political mujō or impermanence not likely to inspire the Japanese public with much confidence in their leaders. In The Enigma of Japanese Power (1989), the Dutch journalist Karel van Wolferen describes Japan as a ‘stateless nation’, controlled by a faceless, unaccountable, oligarchic elite from behind the scenes. This may be a slight exaggeration, but the fact is that, when a national emergency has called for strong, decisive leadership, the ship of state often seems cast adrift, without anyone competent at the helm. Two weeks after the catastrophe of 11 March, for instance, doctors in Miyagi Prefecture in northeastern Japan were complaining to the media that they and their patients were surviving on two riceballs per day. The press was full of stories of citizens who had loaded their cars with noodles, rice or even restaurant food and had driven hundreds of kilometres to distribute these to victims throughout the coastal areas. They were able to do so because the roads were not clogged, as one might have expected, with military convoys distributing food and medicine and evacuating the wounded. Where was the government? After all, the disaster had affected only a relatively small part of the country – surely a more efficient distribution of food from the unaffected parts could have been possible, given the immense resources at the Japanese government’s command? It was the same question that had been asked after the Kobe quake of 1995 – and that was not in isolated Tōhoku but in a major city of central Japan. Indeed, at that time Kobe’s famous yakuza (gangsters) gained considerable public esteem by distributing food to the needy and homeless far more efficiently than the government was willing or able to do. When Prime Minister Kan Naoto finally visited victims at an evacuee shelter three weeks after the disaster struck, one homeless seventy-two-year-old lady seemed underwhelmed: ‘Nothing will change with the prime minister’s visit to this shelter. I’ve expected nothing from the government from the very beginning’, she said.4 No doubt she spoke from experience. Kan came into office in June 2010 vowing to replace back-room rule by bureaucrats with a newly decisive politics. The March earthquake was his first great test, however, and one can hardly say that he passed with flying colors. As Kingston notes: ‘In many respects, Prime Minister Kan was an inept politician and his cabinet team 4 ‘Japan pm makes 1st visit to evacuee shelter’, in The DailyYomiuri, Sunday, 3 April 2011.

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lurched from gaffe to gaffe, provoking general dissatisfaction and a media feeding frenzy… Mostly, however, there was deep frustration about the slow pace of progress on mitigating the human misery unleashed by the tsunami and nuclear meltdown’.5 Kan survived a no-confidence vote on 2 June by promising to resign in the near future; by late June the opposition parties were demanding a firm date for his departure and, in protest at his tenure, delaying the implementation of a special budget for post-earthquake reconstruction. Victims expressed outrage that crucial work was delayed even further because of these familiar factional squabbles. Kan finally announced his resignation on 26 August, and was replaced by Noda Yoshihiko on 2 September. One might say, then, that there were certainly some serious political repercussions from the delays and ditherings and factional infighting of Diet members in dealing with the catastrophe as a whole. But the event that immediately politicized the March 2011 disaster in an urgent and disturbing way was the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. This was all the more true because this aspect of the catastrophe seemed to have been entirely avoidable if only certain simple ‘common-sense’ measures had been taken – such as locating the nuclear reactors further back from the shore. Furthermore, there seems to have been a concerted effort by the nuclear industry and/or the government to mislead the public by downplaying the seriousness of the accident. So who was to blame? This soon became a question with all-too-obvious political consequences for those who were targeted for blame. The relevant authorities, both political and commercial, had, in fact, been amply warned about the obvious dangers of locating the reactors so close to the shoreline in an area that had experienced major earthquakes and tsunami in the past. But the usual kind of cozy collusion between the government and the industrial sector, in this case the Tokyo Electric Power Company (tepco), seems to have prevailed. And so the continuing political fallout from the Fukushima debacle is almost as poisonous as the radioactive fallout. The disaster at Fukushima also inevitably called to mind Japan’s long and tragic relation with nuclear power of all kinds – beginning, of course, with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. And it raised the question, as writers such as Ōe Kenzaburō and Murakami Haruki pointed out: why did Japan of all countries not resist becoming dependent on nuclear energy? As Roman Rosenbaum notes, Murakami suggested that Japan’s unique nuclear history (as the only nation to have ever suffered atomic bombing) ‘should have made the development of non-nuclear power generation the cornerstone of our policy after World War II. This would have been the only way to assume our 5 Kingston 2012, p. 190.

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collective responsibility for the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, since we have failed once again to take responsibility, post-3/11 is doomed to continue the myth of the never-ending post-war stigma’ (100). Like Murakami, Ōe places some blame for Fukushima on what he sees as the political passivity of the Japanese population (‘reflexive obedience, reluctance to question authority, devotion to “sticking with the program,” groupism and insularity’, 96) – a view we might regard as a more negative and politicized take on what others regard as the admirable traits of stoicism, social discipline, etc., in the ‘Japanese national character’. As Rosenbaum writes: ‘Ōe laments that in the sixty years since the War the mentality of the Japanese people has changed very little. It is this mindset that needs to be redressed before real change post-3/11 can begin’ (96). A similar view was also expressed by the internationally-known musician, Sakamoto Ryūichi, who, as Henry Johnson notes, proclaimed that ‘keeping silent after Fukushima is barbaric’ (150–151). Sakamoto himself did not keep silent, organizing a number of high-profile anti-nuclear concerts. But he remains concerned that, once the immediate impact of the 2011 disaster starts to fade, the Japanese public might return to their traditional ‘silence’. As he remarked: ‘for so long in Japan it has been normal for people to not voice their opinions… The Fukushima crisis changed that, making dissent more acceptable, but I’m worried that this mood could fizzle out at any moment’ (151). A more specific explanation of the Japanese public’s ‘non-resistance’ to nuclear power, apart than their supposed general ‘political passivity’, is suggested by Yuko Shibata in her study of the complex politics surrounding the representation of the atomic bombings in post-war Japanese film. Especially in dealing with the politically sensitive issue of ‘responsibility’, filmmakers suffered from censorship not only by the victorious Americans, who of course had dropped the bombs, but also from the post-war Japanese government who neither wanted to cause offence to the Americans nor have any questions raised about their own complicity. And there was an even more sensitive kind of resistance working against them: the psychological resistance of the survivors themselves to any telling of the full truth about their experience (because of factors such as survivor’s guilt). Despite these various quite formidable barriers, there was also the problem already touched upon in regard to other major disasters: the sheer overwhelming nature of the experience itself, which seemed to make it impossible to represent artistically, even in film. Confronted by these manifold pressures and difficulties, a film such as The Bells of Nagasaki, Shibata finds, chose to evade the issue entirely: it cloaked itself in an ‘impressionist depiction and pietistic tone’ that ‘cleverly veiled the bomber’s identity’ (232). Many other films too, rather than tackle the

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troublesome political issue of responsibility, chose rather to focus on evoking sympathy for the victims, albeit in a kind of sentimental and culturally-nationalist sanitized form – for instance, without any mention of the many Korean victims. Thus was created ‘a cold space of national martyrdom, exclusive to the Japanese’ (240). The prolonged effect was the ‘formation of an introverted ­interior for the post-war Japanese psyche that wished to forget the imperial past’ (240-241). In a way this was quite natural or understandable: like people everywhere after a major disaster, the Japanese people after the Pacific War wanted above all to ‘return to normalcy’, as, Shibata tells us, the great director Kurosawa Akira pointed out. Thus developed a kind of ‘collective amnesia’ which suited everyone’s purpose, even that of the surviving victims. But the long-term problem, from the perspective of a number of more prescient observers, was that, having never been honestly confronted with the reality of their horrific experience of nuclear war, the Japanese public was able to complacently accept or at least turn a blind eye to the nuclear energy industry that ultimately produced Fukushima. And now, unfortunately, to the familiar slogan, ‘No more Hiroshimas’, another must be added: ‘No more Fukushimas’.

PART 1 Cultural Responses to the Triple Disaster of March 2011

∵

Chapter 1

Nature’s Blessing, Nature’s Wrath Shinto Responses to the Disasters of 2011 Aike P. Rots

University of Oslo

Introduction In 2011, Japan suffered from several disasters: the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit the Tōhoku region on 11 March, the subsequent nuclear crisis in Fukushima, and the typhoons and floods that caused serious damage and casualties in the southern Kansai region in September. These events posed some serious challenges to Shinto organizations. Not only did they cause significant material damage to shrines and shrine forests, they also led to the death, suffering and displacement of many shrine priests and practitioners, thus uprooting local communities. In addition, the disasters constituted challenges of a more theological and ideological nature. That is, they problematized the ideal typical notion of nature as essentially gentle and benign that underlies the popular myth of the harmonious Japanese co-existence with nature, which has strongly influenced recent reinterpretations of Shinto. Thus, the catastrophes of 2011 quite dramatically put the topic of theodicy onto the agenda of contemporary Shinto thought, leading authors and priests to consider ways to reconcile notions of nature as benevolent and animate with the widespread destruction and suffering brought about by the very forces of nature they had idealized. Meanwhile, however, the events also seem to have given new impetus to Shinto-related activism, and brought about new ideological vigour. Local shrine-based volunteer organizations, as well as other Shinto organizations, have employed a variety of activities to support affected shrines and communities. In fact, it has been suggested that the events have contributed to a new interest in the devotional aspects of supposedly secularized ritual events, such as matsuri 祭 (Porcu 2012: 102–103). In addition, there have been various ideological responses to the events, ranging from the rhetoric of ‘national resurrection’ – a concept that not only refers to the reconstruction of buildings and roads, but also to idealized notions of traditional culture, social harmony and morality – to the development of more radically environmentalist apocalyptic ideas of destruction and rebirth.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004268319_003

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In this chapter, I will discuss some of the ways in which Shinto organizations, as well as individual scholars and priests, have reacted to the disasters of 2011. Considering the ambiguity inherent in the category ‘Shinto’, as well as the institutional diversity of groups referring to themselves as such, such a discussion can never claim to be representative of Shinto as a whole. Nevertheless, I hope to point out at least some of the concerns of actors related to Shinto organizations, as well as some relevant institutional and ideological responses. The chapter consists of three parts. I will start with a discussion of the concept ‘Shinto’, in which I juxtapose competing historical interpretations, as well as the recent reinvention of Shinto as an ancient ecological tradition. In the light of this development, I will also discuss the topic of shrine forests, which have taken centre stage in environment-related discourse and practices, and the symbolic significance of these forests in the light of the recent events. Second, I will examine the suggestion, made by McLaughlin (2011a, 2011b) and Porcu (2012), that the events may have led to a revival in ‘religious’ activity. I will compare these to a recent book on shrine responses in Tōhoku (Kawamura 2012), as well as some of my own observations from Kumano – where the restoration of landscapes, shrine buildings and pilgrimage trails has been coupled with nationalist rhetoric, rather than explicitly ‘religious’ responses. Following this, I will question the applicability of ‘religion’ as an interpretative category, and argue for an alternative interpretation that sees a revival in nostalgic notions of ‘local communities’ and ‘traditional culture’ rather than religion per se. Third, I will discuss two recent books arguing for a prominent place for Shinto in the ‘rebuilding’ of postFukushima Japan, one written by the well-known Shinto scholar Kamata Tōji (Kamata 2011) and the other by the journalist Yamamura Akiyoshi (Yamamura 2011). Following this analysis, I will argue that, rather than being merely ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ reflections, these works are imbedded in popular romantic notions of decline, nostalgia, and national resurrection. Drawing on these books as well as ethnographic data, I will examine the question of theodicy, and explore how apocalyptic views of the destruction of the natural environment may relate to Shinto worldviews. I will suggest that, contrary to the view that interprets responses in the light of a binary religious-secular opposition, the disasters may have given rise to a new nationalist vigour that is embedded in millenarian beliefs of destruction and resurrection, as well as in local identity politics.

Shinto, Nature and Trees

The concept ‘Shinto’ is complicated. In the course of history, the term has carried a variety of meanings, and there is considerable scholarly debate as to the

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origins and essence of the tradition(s) to which the term supposedly refers. Arguably, the concept is an abstraction that ‘has had to be produced actively every time it has been used’ (Teeuwen 2002: 233). The historical pluriformity and adaptability of shrine-based worship and celebratory practices does not necessarily correspond to conceptualizations of ‘Shinto’ as a singular tradition intertwined with normative notions regarding national identity and imperial power. Consequently, it is virtually impossible to give an empirically adequate definition of Shinto, as the very notion of a singular tradition is an abstract ideal rather than a historical reality, and different origin narratives and categorizations correspond to competing ideological positions. Hence, as Michael Pye rightly remarked, ‘there is a political factor to be taken into account in any understanding of Shintō’ (1981: 61). As scholarly narratives are imbedded in and influenced by wider ideological and political developments, it comes as no surprise that there has been a considerable lack of agreement in academic discourse as to the concept’s meaning and genealogy. Essentialist notions of Shinto as the primordial spiritual tradition of the Japanese nation dominated scholarly discourse until fairly recently, and continue to be reproduced in popular introductions, Shinto institutional publications and some academic texts. According to this dominant historical narrative, since prehistoric times ‘Shinto’ has served as the ritual tradition that symbolically unified the Japanese people, ‘their’ land, rice cultivation and imperial power. Whereas recent historical scholarship has succeeded in demythologizing the primordialist narrative to a certain extent (e.g. Kuroda 1981; Breen & Teeuwen 2010), a significant proportion of the discourse in Shinto continues to adhere to essentialist paradigms, in Japan as well as abroad (cf. Thal 2006). As I argue in my PhD dissertation (Rots 2013: 126–155; cf. Rots 2011), in the modern and contemporary academic and popular discourses on ‘Shinto’ several essentialist paradigms can be distinguished. The primordialist notion of Shinto as a more or less singular tradition, the core essence of which predates the introduction of ‘foreign’ culture and religion, is generally shared; however, there are different responses to the question as to what this core essence consists of. In my research, I have distinguished five competing yet partly overlapping paradigms for the interpretation and conceptualization of Shinto: the non-religious or imperial paradigm, which states that fundamentally Shinto is not a religion, but a national cult surrounding the divine figure of the emperor; the ethnic paradigm, which does not deny the religious character of Shinto per se but considers it to be a unique and all-encompassing ethnic tradition that transcends ordinary categorization as well as historical change; the universal paradigm, which denies the former’s assumption that Shinto is uniquely Japanese, arguing that its basic essence can serve (or even, according to some

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interpretations, save) all of humankind; the local paradigm, which resists imperial centralization, and argues somewhat paradoxically that Shinto’s single essence is to be found in the diversity of rural traditions; and the spiritual paradigm, which denies any political aspect of Shinto, and argues that its true essence can only be grasped intuitively, through a direct experience of the divine. These paradigms are at times contradictory, but may at times complement each other; they have been developed at different moments in the course of Japan’s modern history, and are influenced by changing ideological, political and academic circumstances. Today, these different understandings of Shinto continue to coexist and be reproduced, corresponding to various positions within Shinto institutions, scholarship, and a variety of non-institutional and/ or non-mainstream texts and practices. In recent decades, a sixth paradigm has emerged, which draws on basic assumptions of the previous five, but leads to new combinations and interpretations. Following Pedersen’s notion of ‘the religious environmentalist paradigm’ (1995), I tentatively call this development the ‘Shinto environmentalist paradigm’. From the 1980s onwards, idealized notions of ‘ancient Shinto’ worldviews and practices have been reinterpreted as ‘animism’, and employed for the discursive differentiation between Japan and its main Other, the ‘monotheistic West’ (Umehara 1989; Yasuda 1990). The reappropriation of animism as the defining core characteristic of the Japanese nation is basically a recent reformulation of the widely accepted myth of the unique Japanese love of nature, which has been an essential part of the modern nation-building project from the Meiji period onwards.1 Combined with Shinto essentialism and contemporary environmentalist rhetoric, this has contributed to the discursive construction of Shinto as a tradition of nature-worship, fundamentally oriented towards ‘harmony with nature’ and environmental awareness (e.g. International Shinto Foundation 2000; Shaw 2009; Shintō Bunka Kai 2009–10). This recent reinterpretation of Shinto as an ancient tradition of nature worship that may provide solutions for present-day global environmental problems is well illustrated by the following statement of the journalist Yamamura Akiyoshi: ‘Environmental destruction continues worldwide. The Shinto notion of kami 神 residing in nature, and of “co-existence and co-prosperity” between humans and nature, is now beginning to be understood internationally. The clue to solving environmental problems lies in Japan’s sacred forests (chinju no mori 鎮守の森)’ (2011: 39; my translation).

1 On the topic of constructions of ‘nature’ in Japanese ideology, see Asquith & Kalland 1997; Morris-Suzuki 1998: 35–59; Thomas 2001.

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The sacred forests (chinju no mori) to which Yamamura refers have come to constitute one of the core concepts in discourse on Shinto and the environment in contemporary Japan. Not only have they taken centre stage in conservation practices, they also figure prominently in recent Shinto publications on education and national identity (e.g. Sonoda 2007a, 2007b; Ueda 2004; Yamaori 2001). Ideally, chinju no mori are old, ‘natural’ (that is, not planted) mixed forests, surrounding Shinto shrines, to which a particular sacred quality may be ascribed – as well as, significantly, ecological value. These forests are said to ‘have had a beneficial effect in preserving the urban environment’ and to embody ‘the source of all life, the awareness of which is the starting point for humankind’s environmental ethics’ (Sonoda 2007b: 13). Similarly, according to Motegi Sadasumi, chinju no mori are: …forests that have remained from the ancient age of myths until the present time. These are forests where old trees grow in abundance; where high trees, brushwood and plants growing under the trees are in balance. Many birds, insects and micro-organisms have the space to live here. These are forests with rich ecosystems. Inside, one can find ‘pure gardens’ [kiyorakana niwa 清らかな庭], where annual festivals [matsuri] are organized. These places remind one of distant, ancient times. This is where the voices of the gods [kamigami 神々] sound in your ears. This is where our ancestors lived, humbly and diligently, in harmony with nature. motegi 2010: 111; my translation

Thus, as this quotation illustrates, the significance of chinju no mori lies in their supposed biodiversity and ecological value as much as in the connection they represent with an idealized ancient past, characterized by purity, harmony and devotion. In recent decades, a sizeable movement has emerged that focuses on the conservation of chinju no mori, in particular in urban environments. Some of the main actors in the movement are ecologists, urban planners and environmental activists, such as Miyawaki Akira and Ueda Atsushi (Miyawaki 2000; Ueda 2003). Others are Shinto priests interested in the preservation of chinju no mori as valuable environmental and cultural resources; these include Sonoda Minoru and Ueda Masaaki, who co-founded the non-profit organization Shasō Gakkai 社叢学会 (Shrine Forest Society) in 2002 (see Ueda 2004). The latter organizes forestry courses for shrine priests, as well as academic conferences on the topic of ‘shrine forest studies’ (shasōgaku 社叢学): a newly developed multidisciplinary field of study, that combines biology and ecology with spatial planning, religious studies and history. Significantly, after the

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t­ sunami, Shasō Gakkai has been involved in monitoring the damage done to shrines and shrine forests in the Tōhoku region. Whereas several shrines located on high grounds escaped serious damage, others were severely affected. In some cases, shrine buildings were partly destroyed, and trees were uprooted. In November 2011, Shasō Gakkai organized a seminar on this topic, in which the results of their research were presented; in addition, they published a report containing details and pictures of affected shrines, as well as suggestions as to how they should be rebuilt.2 While the study offered a compelling overview of the condition of shrine buildings and their forests hit by the tsunami, the question as to how this rebuilding should be financed was not addressed. As Shasō Gakkai is an organization of modest financial means, it seems unlikely that they can do more than monitor developments and make suggestions concerning the replanting and design of (shrine) forests. When discussing the topic of chinju no mori, it is important to bear in mind that the symbolic significance of these forests extends far beyond their possible ecological significance. In Japan as well as elsewhere, the practice of (re)planting trees can carry profound social, moral and educational connotations, and may be seen as a way to cultivate personalities and contribute to community well-being. As such, reforestation practices may serve a variety of purposes, some of which are social and symbolic rather than environmental. This is illustrated by the social activism of Miyawaki Akira, who considers the planting of trees – indigenous trees, that is, for the reconstruction of the ‘forest of the ancestral village’ (furusato no mori ふるさとの森) – one of the crucial tasks of contemporary citizens. Not only does reforestation have positive environmental effects and, significantly, may help protect people from floods and other natural disasters (cf. Yamamura 2011: 48); according to Miyawaki, it also leads to the reestablishment of social cohesion and, ultimately, the recovery of the nation (Miyawaki 2000). In contemporary Japan, the forest is a powerful trope, employed in art and literature as well as ideology and commerce (Abe  Auestad 2014; cf. Kirby 2011: 33–34); this especially applies to the ‘sacred’  shrine forest, which has come to represent a symbolic connection between twenty-first century Japan and an imaginary ancestral age in which there was no place for environmental destruction, violence or selfishness (cf. Rots 2012a). In recent years, throughout Japan several non-profit organizations have been established that combine the conservation and management of chinju no mori with a variety of cultural and educational activities. In many 2 Symposium ‘Shasō ga tsumugu chiiki no kizuna: inochi to kokoro o mamoru chinju no mori’. Tokyo, 16 November 2011.

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cases, environmentalist education goes hand in hand with socialization in some sort of idealized, reified ‘traditional culture’ (dentō bunka 伝統文化), and the communication of essentialist narratives concerning ‘the Japanese love of nature’. While officially independent from shrines – which are religious organizations (shūkyō hōjin 宗教法人) according to Japanese law and therefore subject to a variety of limitations regarding their involvement in educational activities – in reality these organizations are usually connected to one particular shrine (forest) and (co-)founded by priests who sympathize with the chinju no mori movement. Examples of shrines that have such organizations are Kamigamo Jinja and Shimogamo Jinja in Kyoto, Tsurugaoka Hachimangū in Kamakura, and Meiji Jingū in Tokyo. At the last shrine, the Meiji emperor and empress are enshrined (i.e. after their death, they were deified and worshipped here); today, it is visited by millions of visitors annually, and it constitutes one of the most powerful shrines in the country, politically as well as economically. It is also well-known for its sizeable forest. Whereas opinions differ on whether the forest of Meiji Jingū may be considered a chinju no mori – it was not planted in the 1920s, when the shrine was founded, and it was constructed based on the latest European forestry theories (see Imaizumi 2007) – it is nevertheless one of Japan’s most impressive urban shrine forests. Here, several years ago a non-profit organization named npo Hibiki 響 was established. This organization, which is mainly run by volunteers, focuses on a number of activities: free guided tours in the shrine forest, for Tokyoites as well as foreign tourists; collecting acorns (donguri どんぐり) with volunteers, and planting them; forest tours for companies and other organizations; and rice planting (an activity that often seems to go together with other nature-related activities).3 In November 2011, I attended one of their activities: a guided tour in the shrine forest (including a visit to the shrine), during which basic information was given about the history of the shrine, its forest, and Shinto prayer etiquette (remarkably, the majority of the participants – mostly people from Tokyo in their early twenties – seemed unfamiliar with the simple ritual procedure of washing one’s hands before entering the shrine). After the tour, we went into the forest, where we collected 3 In interviews as well as shrine publications, rice cultivation is often mentioned as the primary example of the traditional ‘Shinto’ love of nature. In some cases, the discursively intertwined problems of moral deterioration, the loss of traditional culture, and environmental destruction are directly attributed to a decline in rice cultivation and consumption. Significantly, as Ohnuki-Tierney has convincingly demonstrated (1993), rice is a traditional symbol of imperial power, and has become an important marker of Japanese national identity.

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and selected acorns that could be used for planting trees. We also visited a small garden, where dozens of young trees were standing in pots. We were told that these would be sent to Tōhoku, where they would be used for replanting forests; the same was the case for the acorns we had collected. This way, we were told, we could help ‘rebuild’ the areas that had been hit by the disasters. Everybody did their best to collect as many good acorns as possible. Later, I  learned that these seedlings would be used for the ‘Great Forest Wall’ of Tōhoku. This is an ambitious project, set up by Miyawaki Akira and like-minded scientists, to build a ‘wall’ along the coast of Tōhoku, made of debris on which trees are planted. If their plans are successful, this wall of trees (mainly indigenous broad-leaved trees) will have a length of more than 300 kilometres and protect future generations from destructive tsunamis. Reportedly 90 million seedlings are needed for this wall – including those grown at Meiji Jingū. Thus, by collecting and planting acorns ‘for the people in Tōhoku’, participants may have felt a connection to the victims, and the affected areas in which they live. Thus, through this symbolic practice, they became part of a nation-wide movement, and shared in a newly imagined collective identity defined by the notions of ‘rebuilding’ and ‘reconstruction’. In sum, ‘planting a forest’ is about much more than the actual forest: it is about creating a symbolic space of social harmony, a connection with ancestral traditions, and co-existence with nature – if only in the imagination.

‘Religious’ Responses?

Soon after the events of 11 March, Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintarō – well-known for his nationalist populism, historical revisionism and xenophobic remarks – made international headlines with his statement that the earthquake and tsunami were the result of ‘heavenly punishment’ (tenbatsu 天罰) for the ‘greed’ and ‘selfishness’ of the Japanese people (Asahi Shimbun 2011).4 There were many angry reactions to this statement, and Ishihara later apologized. Apparently, however, his comments did not significantly affect his popularity – one month later, he was reelected as governor. Internationally, his statement was interpreted 4 In the international media, tenbatsu was usually translated as ‘divine punishment’. It may be argued, however, that ‘heavenly’ is a more accurate translation then ‘divine’. The character ten 天 means heaven, after all, and refers to an impersonal entity rather than a particular deity. The concept is of Confucian origin, and, as with other combinations with this character (e.g. tennen 天然, ‘nature’), it may be debated whether the term should be considered ‘religious’. That is, it does not refer to any particular divine actors (as for instance shinbatsu 神罰, punishment by a deity), nor is it historically associated with particular ritual practices or doctrinal texts.

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as a ‘religious’ comment, and compared with the views of Evangelicals in the us and elsewhere seeing various disasters as punishments or warnings by God (Dwyer 2011; Gilgoff 2011). By way of response, soon afterwards scholar of religion Levi McLaughlin published an online essay in which he argued that Ishihara’s comment is by no means representative of Japanese religious responses in general (McLaughlin 2011b). In this essay (a slightly revised version of which was later published as a journal article [McLaughlin 2011a]), he listed a number of activities undertaken by religious organizations in Japan to provide support for the victims of the disaster. These include temples, shrines and churches providing shelter to people who lost their homes; various religions organizing fundraising events and donating money as well as emergency supplies; Christian churches and Buddhist ‘new religions’ sending volunteers to the affected area; and so on. Thus McLaughlin corrected the negative impression of Japanese religion audiences outside Japan may have got based on Ishihara’s statement. However, he did not question the interpretation of Ishihara’s words as ‘religious’; on the contrary, he confirmed the association by juxtaposing them with positive contributions made by religious organizations. In his conclusion, he argues that, notwithstanding the low percentage of Japanese identifying themselves as such, recent events suggest that they are quite religious after all: The resources available within Japanese religious traditions inform Ishihara’s pronouncement of the tsunami as ‘divine punishment’, and they inspire thousands of clergy and lay adherents to devote themselves to the this-worldly and transcendent salvation of suffering people. More generally, the spirit of community, resilience, and an obstinate refusal to give up in the face of adversity speaks to the country’s legacy of selfcultivation, communitarianism, and self-sacrifice in the interest of social improvement — all qualities that can be characterized as ‘religious’. mclaughlin 2011b

McLaughlin’s article gives a useful overview of the various activities undertaken by religious groups in reponse to the natural disasters. His list is by no means exhaustive. For instance, a recent documentary portrays attempts by Buddhist priests to redefine their tradition in the light of the recent events, and provide care for victims (Graf & Montrasio 2012). The disaster has also served as an incentive for the development of new interreligious initiatives: in the city of Sendai, for example, a number of religious actors (including representatives of Buddhist, Shinto, Christian and ‘new religious’ organizations) have joined forces in setting up a ecumenical centre that provides pastoral care to tsunami survivors (Kamata 2011: 160–163). As for Shinto, as mentioned, shrine-related

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organizations such as Shasō Gakkai and npo Hibiki have been concerned with the state of uprooted (shrine) forests. Likewise, in the months following the disasters, Jinja Shinpō 神社新報 (the weekly newspaper published by the shrine umbrella organization Jinja Honchō 神社本庁) published several articles on the damage done to shrine buildings, and reported about the first reconstruction activities (e.g. Jinja Shinpō 2011d). The extent to which Jinja Honchō is financially involved with this reconstruction remains unclear, however. In recent years, the organization has been accused of spending too much money on the ritual rebuilding of Ise Jingū (shikinen sengū 式年遷宮) at the expense of smaller member shrines (Breen 2010), so it is not clear how and to what extent Jinja Honchō has been able to provide funding for the reconstruction of damaged shrines in Tōhoku. Regardless of the shrine establishment, however, individual shrines throughout the country have organized various fundraising events.5 They have also organized other social activities, such as a summer school for children from Fukushima (Jinja Shinpō 2011a), and a special market where farmers from the affected area could sell their products (Jinja Shinpō 2011b). In the affected area, too, shrine priests have undertaken a variety of activities, as reported in a recent book by Kawamura Kazuyo (2012). Examples mentioned in this book include shrine priests’ involvement in coordinating the work of volunteers coming to Tōhoku to assist in cleaning and reconstruction activities; the organization of a variety of special events and festivals, serving the dual purpose of providing some joy and distraction for people living in the affected areas, and raising funds for rebuilding activities; and even the construction of a temporary library for children on shrine precincts.6 Thus, as this book suggests, the dramatic events actually seem to have given rise to new creativity and social engagement, and to optimistic expressions of a desire to ‘rebuild’ and ‘resurrect’ communities and cultural expressions. In areas previously characterized by rural depopulation and a decline in facilities (including a lack of financial means to maintain local shrine buildings and perform ceremonies, and a dwindling 5 For instance, in October 2011, Afuhi Project 葵プロジェクト– a non-profit organization focusing on cultural and environmental education, as well as community-building, associated with Kamigamo shrine in Kyoto – organized a cultural day (ennichi 縁日), the proceeds of which were sent to tsunami victims in Tōhoku. Among other things, a choir consisting of local school children performed several songs as a means to express their sympathy with tsunami victims. 6 The non-profit organization ‘Ashita no hon’ あしたの本 (‘Tomorrow’s books’) has collected books for children living in areas affected by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. They have set up a temporary library, ‘Niji no raiburarii’ にじのライブラリー (‘Rainbow library’) at the precincts of Imaizumi Hachimangū shrine in the city of Rikuzentakata, in Iwate prefecture (Kawamura 2012: 39–46). See also their website, http://www.jbby.org/ae/ (last accessed: 9 October 2012).

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interest in matsuri),7 paradoxically the disasters may have given new impetus to shrine-related community activism and, possibly, brought about new interest in ‘traditional Japanese culture’, including Shinto. This impression is confirmed by my own observations in the area of Kumano. In early September 2011, the southern part of Japan was hit by Talas, one of the country’s most lethal typhoons in modern history. Causing heavy rainfall and floods, Talas caused the death of approximately one hundred people, and caused significant damage to roads, buildings and natural landscapes. A few weeks later, additional damage and deaths were caused by another typhoon, called Roke. The area most severely affected by Talas was the Kii peninsula in southern Wakayama prefecture. This area is famous for its impressive cliffs and forests, as well as for its shrines, temples and pilgrimage trails, which have been on the unesco World Heritage List since 2004. Historically, it was an important centre for shinbutsu shūgō 神仏習合 (the combined worship of kami and Buddhas), and one of medieval Japan’s major pilgrimage destinations (see Moerman 2005). Its three main shrines are called Kumano Hongū Taisha, Kumano Nachi Taisha and Kumano Hayatama Taisha; of these, the first in particular has suffered damage. When I visited the place two months after the typhoon, the effects of the devastating flood were still clearly visible: one of the lower shrine buildings had been destroyed, as well as the nearby visitors’ centre; many houses, restaurants and shops had been damaged (some had just reopened, others not yet); many trees in the area had been uprooted, leaving river banks empty; and so on. But reconstruction activities were going on everywhere. At Oyu-no-hara, Hongū Taisha’s historical location on the river bank famous for having the country’s largest torii 鳥居 gate,8 construction workers were busy returning the place to its former shape. A large banner had been put up, saying: From people to people Call out Let us connect our hearts [kokoro 心] Pray From Kumano for the rebirth of Japan!9 7 On the topic of rural depopulation, and related problems for shrines and shrine priests, see Fuyutsuki 2010; Yamamura 2009. 8 Until 1889, Kumano Hongū Taisha was located at Oyu-no-hara. In that year, the shrine was seriously damaged as a result of floods, upon which it was rebuilt at its present location, on top of a nearby hill. 9 The first three lines were written in small black letters. The character for ‘pray’ was written large, in red, next to the equally large last line, written in green. The original Japanese text was as follows: 「人から人へ　声を掛け　心を繋ごう　祈　熊野より日本の再生へ!」.

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Here, the connection was made between the rebuilding of Kumano, and the rebirth of Japan as a whole. Implicit reference was thus made to the destruction and suffering in Tōhoku, suggesting that the national reconstruction process would somehow originate in Kumano. Clearly, this notion of ‘rebirth’ is not limited to material reconstruction; on the contrary, it has significant moral, cultural and ideological connotations. After all, as one of the oldest pilgrimage sites in the country (linked to mythical events narrated in the Kojiki 古事記), there are strong symbolic connections between the sacred landscapes of Kumano, ancient ‘Shinto’ myths, and romantic nationalist notions linking a utopian future Japan to the mythical golden age of the Yamato dynasty. It came as no surprise, then, that two of the three head priests of the Kumano shrines to whom I talked during my visit expressed themselves in explicitly nationalistic terms. During these conversations, they combined pessimistic complaints about the alleged ignorance of contemporary Japanese youth with nostalgic glorifications of the supposedly unique Japanese capacities of gratitude and love of nature, as well as enthusiastic visions of a resurrected Japan that would be able to stand up for itself internationally. In this context, particular significance was attributed to the recent victory of the Japanese women’s football team in the World Cup. The symbol of the national team, the threelegged crow (yatagarasu 八咫烏), is a character from the Kojiki that is associated with Kumano;10 accordingly, a special connection has emerged between the national football teams and the shrines of Kumano. Football players (f/m) now visit these shrines before and after important tournaments, and some of the worship halls and shrine offices are full of signed footballs, shirts and similar paraphernalia. As the head priests suggested, the victory of the national team was a significant first step towards the resurrection of Japan, and they pointed to the central role that Kumano, as an important historical and cultural site, would play in this process.11 10

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According to the Kojiki, the crow was sent by the heavenly deities to guide the great-greatgrandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu-ō-mikami from Kumano to Yamato, where he would become Jimmu Tennō, the mythical first emperor of Japan (Kojiki volume 2: Section  46; online available at http://www.sacred-texts.com/shi/kj/index.htm [last accessed: 9 October 2012]; cf. Ashkenazi 2003: 117, 181–183). In fact, one of them even went so far as to suggest that the victory was the result of his personal prayers to Amaterasu. While this claim is far-reaching, and perhaps not very representative of Shinto priests in general, it does illustrate how devotional practices may be intertwined not only with ancient mythical symbols, but also with modern spectator sports and popular nationalism.

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Thus, at first sight, these empirical data do seem to confirm McLaughlin’s conclusion that the natural disasters have given rise to new religious vigour. Similarly, in a recent article, Elisabetta Porcu has suggested that in post-3/11 Japan, shrine festivals and other community events that were originally connected to particular shrines or temples but had become ‘secularized’ seem to be going through some sort of desecularization process, rediscovering their ‘original “religious” meaning’ (2012: 102). What she means by this is that in 2011 the devotional aspects of festivals, such as prayers, were given more emphasis than in previous years. While this is an interesting observation, one may question to what extent the choice to interpret the responses in the light of a religious-secular dichotomy adequately reflects the experience of the majority of the actors involved. A newly found interest in the devotional aspects of ceremonial events does not necessarily point to a revival in ‘religion’ – a category fraught with ambiguities and conflicting connotations, the analytical validity of which has been questioned in recent years (e.g. McCutcheon 1997; Fitzgerald 2000). As most people participating in matsuri would be hesitant to define their behaviour as ‘religious’, the choice to nevertheless interpret and frame their behaviour as such is by no means self-evident, and at least requires a clear working definition of the term. In fact, the opposite has also been argued: in a recent article (2012), Ian Reader stated that religion in Japan is in a state of decline, which he referred to as ‘secularization’ – a term he did not operationalize very well. However, just as an apparent increase in devotional activity does not automatically imply a revival of ‘religion’, so the commodification or ‘heritagization’ of certain ritual practices does not necessarily equal ‘secularization’ (cf. Rots 2012b). Arguably, then, many of the transformations going on in contemporary Japan (in pilgrimage and tourism, temple and shrine practices, life-cycle rituals and so on) cannot be adequately explained in the light of a binary opposition between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ – not only because of the problematic status of the category ‘religion’ within Japan, but also because there is a variety of concurring developments not easily identified as either. For instance, while temple Buddhism and other mainstream religious institutions seem to have difficulties attracting followers (Nelson 2012), recent years have seen an increasing appeal of particular ‘sacred places’ and media-popularized types of worship (e.g. the so-called ‘powerspot boom’ パワースポットブーム) that, depending on one’s use of the term, may be perceived as either evidence of ‘religious revival’ or as a symptom of ‘religious decline’. Thus, the categories ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ are not very helpful analytical tools for understanding contemporary developments, and scholars interpreting recent events in the light of these terms run the risk of overlooking other, more important variables.

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In post-2011 Japan, two parallel developments seem to be going on. On the one hand, new impetus was given to a trend that had already been going on for several years: a renewed interest in local culture and community-based activism (cf. Marmignon 2012). On the other, as the example of Kumano suggests, the 2011 disasters also seem to have given rise to new nationalist vigour, and to notions of national resurrection. So-called ‘religious’ organizations and ideas are part of both of these developments; however, as suggested, it is questionable whether ‘religion’ constitutes a relevant variable in this context. By most of the actors involved, it probably is not perceived as such. For instance, when I talked to a volunteer at a shrine-based cultural event in Kyoto (see footnote 5) and asked her whether she personally identified with Shinto, she looked at me in a surprised way, not understanding why I would ask such a question in the first place, before answering negatively. Like many young Japanese people these days (whether they are active in the reconstruction of supposedly traditional satoyama 里山 landscapes, in ‘development’ projects abroad, or in local ‘community-building’ [komyuniti-zukuri コミュニティづくり] activities), she worked as a volunteer in order to do something positive for her country, and contribute to local culture. This reaction was in accordance with other conversations I have had with young people in Japan, and confirmed by literature suggesting that, generally speaking, ‘religion’ and ‘belief’ are fairly irrelevant categories to a significant majority of them (e.g. Inoue 2003). This may well be different for volunteers belonging to membership-based religions such as Christian churches or Buddhist modern lay organizations such as Sōka Gakkai and Shinnyo-en; when it comes to shrine-related activism, however, I have the strong impression that most participants do not actively identify with ‘Shinto’, nor would they frame their actions as ‘religious’. The crux of the matter is that the category ‘religion’ often conceals more than it reveals. In scholarly discourse as well as general parlance, the term carries a variety of different meanings that are not usually reflected upon, and this often leads to conceptual fuzziness. In Japan, the term is useful insofar as it refers to a particular legally and societally differentiated type of organization; often, however, it is used as a generic catchword including those beliefs and practices the interpreter deems ‘religious’ (irrespective of people’s selfdefinition) while excluding others (notwithstanding possible similarities). McLaughlin’s statement that ‘self-cultivation, communitarianism, and selfsacrifice (…) can be characterized as “religious”’ (2011a) is a clear example of how easily the term can be stretched to include a variety of abstract values, almost to the point that the concept becomes a floating signifier. However, when it comes to social and discursive practices, ‘religion’ is not an independent variable, other than on the institutional and legal levels. This is especially

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the case in Japan, where the category is contested, and generally perceived negatively (cf. Bafelli & Reader 2012). In reality, so-called ‘religious’ practices overlap and are intertwined with heritage tourism, reinventions of ‘traditional culture’, volunteer work and activism, social customs, various ideologies (nationalist, universalist, pacifist, utopian), minority and local identity politics, and so on. Thus, in order to interpret contemporary Japanese developments, including developments in Shinto, we need to consider alternative conceptual frameworks that move beyond the categories of religious and secular, the analytical value of which is limited.

Theodicy and Apocalypse

Whether Ishihara’s comments should be considered ‘religious’ or not, they do address an important, universal question: why did this happen to us? If one adheres to a worldview that is neither nihilistic nor materialistic, but sees some sort of moral purpose to human existence, one has to find a way to account for, or at least accept, death, suffering and destruction. This is a classical philosophical problem that has occupied Christian and Muslim theologians for centuries: why would a God that is both omnipotent and absolutely good want His children to suffer? But the question is by no means limited to the so-called ‘Abrahamic religions’; the world over, people have come up with ways to make sense of suffering and disaster, and to prevent bad things from happening again. Asian traditions of worship may not have an ontological dichotomy between good and evil similar to that of, say, Christianity, and deities can be morally ambivalent, immanent and influenceable, rather than transcendent and omnipotent; but that does not mean that there is no need for theodicy (i.e. reflections upon and explanations for large-scale suffering). Japan is no exception. Due to its geographical location, throughout history the country has been hit repeatedly by natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons. It seems likely that early kami cults (not to be equated with the singular ‘Shinto’ as it was later conceptualized) were focused on maintaining a good relationship between human communities and deities residing in and/or being in control of certain aspects of the natural environment. These were not only deities taking care of a successful harvest, but also powerful, potentially destructive deities residing in mountains, the sea and the sky; recently, some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that ‘the essence of kami worship (…) can be sought in the avoidance of the kami’s violent apparitions (tatari 祟り). It was only later that kami came to be viewed as beings that had compassion on humans’ (Itō et al. 2002: 4; quoted in Havens

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2006: 19). Later, these cults were incorporated into so-called Buddhist and Shinto traditions. Thus the notion of divine wrath is by no means alien to Japanese worldviews, modern rhetoric of natural harmony and benevolence notwithstanding. In any case, as the discursive association between Shinto and nature is revitalized, and notions of sacred beings as corresponding to natural phenomena are emphasized, it should come as no surprise that the association between Shinto and natural disasters receives new attention as well. Indeed, in the course of 2011 and 2012, various academic symposia and seminars have been organized by Shinto institutions, inviting Shinto scholars and priests to reflect upon the topic of natural disasters. Examples include the shrine umbrella organization Jinja Honchō, and the International Shinto Foundation (Shintō Kokusai Gakkai 神道国際学会), a non-profit organization supporting the study of Shinto internationally.12 Accordingly, several traces of shrine worship historically focused on the prevention of disasters have been rediscovered. One shrine in particular that has received considerable media and scholarly attention is Kashima Jingū in Ibaraki prefecture, the deity of which, Kashima Daimyōjin, is traditionally believed to control a giant subterranean catfish (namazu 鯰) supposedly causing earthquakes; while the precise origins are unknown, the site and its deity became very popular during the premodern period (BernardiMorel 2012; Mitchell 2011; Smits 2012). The association of earthquakes with giant creatures living deep in the earth or sea goes back to medieval times, and seems to have been influenced by Chinese cosmology (Smits 2012); as such, it constitutes an interesting example of ‘transnational’ East Asian beliefs and ritual practices, which has received little scholarly attention so far.13 12

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For instance, on 13 June 2011, the weekly shrine newspaper Jinja Shinpō reported about two recent events organized by different committees within Jinja Honchō: a seminar on ‘natural disaster and revival’, where, among other topics, the notion of tenbatsu was discussed (31 May); and a research seminar on Shinto doctrine, where scholars reflected upon the relationship between the Tōhoku disasters and the ‘Japanese sense of nature’ (3 June) (Jinja Shinpō 2011c; 2011e). Shintō Kokusai Gakkai organized an international conference on the ‘the sacred and natural disasters’ on 3 November 2012. While Kashima Jingū has recently received much attention, one site historically connected with earthquakes in Japan has thus far been ignored by scholars of Japanese religion, probably because it is not located inside the country. In 1593, Japanese migrants in Vietnam built a temple-bridge (chùa cầu), possibly together with members of the nearby Chinese community, for the purpose of worshipping a pan-Asian namazu, a monstruous catfish causing earthquakes throughout the continent. The bridge was built in Hoi An, a historical port town in central Vietnam that was home to a sizeable Japanese merchant population until the mid-seventeenth century. Vietnamese sources suggest that one of

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The association between Shinto and natural disasters is not limited to worship practices, however. It also has significant ideological implications, and may affect ways in which Shinto is conceptualized in years to come. As noted, in times of crisis and suffering, the problem of theodicy inevitably resurfaces. Authors who have praised ‘Great Nature’ (daishizen 大自然) for its mysterious benevolence, and Shinto for its unique sense of harmony with and gratitude for nature, have to find ways to reconcile these idealized notions with the reality of earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons causing havoc. One of the scholars who have made an attempt to do so is Kamata Tōji. Kamata is a popular scholar of religion who has written several books on the topic of ‘Shinto spirituality’, and defined himself as a follower of Shinto as well as a researcher. Throughout his career, he has explored the boundaries of academic practice: in his work, which has strong autobiographical elements, he continuously makes reference to his own spiritual experiences; he has been active as a ‘Shinto songwriter’, idiosyncratically combining ancient myths with rock music; and currently he is the chair of Kyoto University’s transdisciplinary Kokoro no mirai こころの未来 (‘future of the heart’) research centre, which facilitates research on spiritual and supernatural topics, as well as Japanese ‘traditional culture’. Combining ethnographic, psychological and theological approaches, he is particularly interested in sacred places (seichi 聖地), shinbutsu shūgō, and so-called ‘folk’ traditions such as ‘shamanism’ and Shugendō 修験道 (mountain ascetism) (see Kamata 2008). In his work, Kamata laments the ‘erosion’ of ‘animism’, ‘shaminism’ and other so-called ‘folk’ traditions, and the artificial separation of Shinto and Buddhism; likewise, he argues for a revitalization of a ‘spiritual’ worldview, and the reconciliation of science and religion (Prohl 2000: 30–31). Last year, he published a new book, Gendai shintō ron: Reisei to seitaichi no tankyū 現代神道論―霊性と生態智の探求 (Contemporary theory of Shinto: A study of spirit and ecosophy) (Kamata 2011), in which he outlines his ideas concerning the role of Shinto in post-3/11 Japanese society. The book is basically a collection of personal notes and travel accounts, mixed with reflections on Shinto, nature and disaster. Kamata begins his book by arguing that we are currently living in a time that is characterized by a series of crises and disasters, in Japan as well as internationally, and that this has led to a decline in traditional values and community

the purposes of this bridge seems to have been the pacification of a gigantic subterranean monster, the body of which was believed to stretch all the way from India to Japan (e.g. Nguyễn not dated). In Vietnamese publications as well as tourist websites, the monster is reported to have been called mamazu; as there is no such word in Japanese, however, this is probably a mistaken rendering of namazu.

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spirit. As such, he suggests, the current situation is very similar to medieval Japanese society, which also suffered from a series of wars, disasters and political chaos – as narrated in the Hōjōki 方丈記 (1212) by Kamo no Chōmei (1155– 1216). However, as in medieval Japan the various crises gave way to the creation of new forms of religion (Zen, Pure Land and Nichiren Buddhism, as well as Yoshida Shinto), so today’s crisis should give birth to a New Age, in which a new Shinto leads the way (ibid.: 7–13, 61–73). According to Kamata, this new Shinto will be characterized by an intuitive appreciation of sacred places, a new communitarian spirit, and an overcoming of sectarian differences. Central to this new Shinto will be a new mode of relating between humans and their social and natural environments, which Kamata refers to by the term seitaichi 生態智. He defines this as follows: I understand this ‘seitaichi (ecosophia, ecological wisdom)’14 as ‘the techniques and wisdom of a sustainable and creative system of balance, rising from a deep and humble sense of awe/reverence towards nature, and refined through keen observations and experiences from daily life’. I believe these have been preserved in the sacred sites, holy places and healing spaces [iyashi kūkan 癒し空間] that are the source of today’s ‘powerspots’, as well as in the various traditional skills [waza ワザ] that have existed since ancient times as part of the culture of everyday life. Sacred places are ‘places that evoke numinous experiences,15 in which the sacred spirit [mono モノ] manifests itself’, and as in those places a power and wisdom dwells that can only be called seitaichi, for a long time prayers, matsuri, (…), initiation rituals and ascetic practices (…) have been conducted there. Ibid.: 205; my translation

Thus, rather than relating the notion of ‘ecological wisdom’ to practical knowledge of one’s natural environment, it is associated with so-called ‘sacred places’ and shrine worship. The performance of ‘traditional skills’, in particular those pertaining to devotional and ascetic practices (e.g. kagura 神楽 dance, nō 能 14

15

In the original quotation, the terms ‘ecosophia’ and ‘ecological wisdom’ are written in English. The term ecosophia seems to be derived from ecosophy, a concept coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss, founder of the Deep Ecology movement. Næss defined ecosophy as ‘a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium’ (1995: 8). Significantly, some important works on Deep Ecology have been translated into Japanese, and Næss’ ideas have received considerable attention in Japan. I.e., experiences of the divine. The terminology is derived from the works of Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade, by whom Kamata is strongly influenced.

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theatre, matsuri, mountain worship and so on), is seen as a manifestation of this ‘ecological wisdom’. ‘Nature’, on the other hand, remains the empty signifier it usually is in Japanese ideology: the possible relevance of knowledge of local ecosystems, non-human species, and environmental change is not seriously addressed. ‘Ecological wisdom’ thus becomes a rhetorical device for reasserting the importance of shrines and ritual practices for twenty-first century Japan, if not for the whole world, but has little concrete substance. According to Kamata, for the establishment of this new, universally oriented Shinto, supposedly founded on ancient ecological wisdom, three places in particular may serve as models. The first one is Tenkawa shrine, a famous contemporary pilgrimage site and spiritual ‘powerspot’ in Nara prefecture, that attracts a colourful variety of followers of New Age and ufo movements, as well as esoteric ‘ancient Shinto’ (koshintō 古神道) aficionados (ibid.: 110–116, 242; cf. Shimazono 1999: 122–124). The second one is Mount Miwa, a well-known sacred mountain (also in Nara prefecture), often referred to by representatives of the Shinto environmentalist paradigm as an ancient site of nature worship, as the shrine famously lacks a honden 本殿 (main hall) because the mountain itself is seen as the body of the deity (shintai 神体) (ibid.: 21–24). And the third one, significantly, is Kumano – not only because it is an ancient shinbutsu shūgō site, where the impressive natural landscape was sacralized and considered a mandala, but also because it was repeatedly visited by emperors during the medieval period, which supposedly contributed to the rebirth of Japan (ibid.: 7–12, 231–233). Considering the intimate connection between Kumano, Shinto spirituality, natural beauty and the mythical origins of the nation, it comes as no surprise that Kumano is seen as a utopian model for the resurrection of both Japan and Shinto. Throughout the centuries, as Max Moerman (2005) has demonstrated, the landscape of Kumano has lent itself to various utopian models; apparently, it still does. Arguably the most interesting and moving part of the book is Kamata’s account of a field research trip he made to the affected areas of Tōhoku, several months after the disasters there (ibid.: 153–218). As elsewhere, his writing is characterized by a confusing mixture of genres, blurring the boundaries between observation, scholarly reflection, autobiography and travelogue; nevertheless, as an impression of a visit to the tsunami-struck area, it is certainly relevant. While he does make reference to some positive developments (the aforementioned interreligious pastoral care initiative in Sendai; various types of community activism; performances of ‘traditional culture’, such as kagura and tiger dance; a post-disaster festival in Fukushima), he also shares his despair with his readers: not only does he repeatedly state that he lacks the words to describe the destruction and suffering he has witnessed, he also

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suggests that, for a while, he was confronted with the limitations of the notion of nature being great and benevolent, and could no longer wholeheartedly engage in his worship practices (ibid.: 236–237). In fact, it may be argued that the book as a whole has a strongly apocalyptic undertone. As said, Kamata believes we are living in an age that is characterized by crisis; he compares the contemporary condition to the ‘sea of decay’ as it was imagined in Miyazaki Hayao’s animated film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Kaze no tani no Naushika 風の谷のナウシカ, 1984), and states that we have reached the point where purification rituals such as misogi 禊 are no longer sufficient (Kamata 2011: 167). He makes the comparison with the Buddhist notion of mappō 末法 (ibid., 151), the period of the ‘End of the Law’ that is characterized by chaos, destruction and moral decay. In the end, however, Kamata does seem to overcome his desperation, and embraces an optimistic, even utopian vision of the future. As in most apocalyptic narratives, the period of destruction and suffering is followed by a time of peace and harmony, social as well as spiritual. Any death is followed by rebirth, after all: ‘while accepting nature’s actions as they are, I believe in the fundamental purifying power, the power of restoration, that emerges from within’ (ibid.: 239). Another popular recent book discussing the topic of Shinto in post-disaster Japan is called Shintō to Nihonjin: Tamashii to kokoro no minamoto o sagashite 神道と日本人―魂とこころの源を探して (‘Shinto and the Japanese: searching for the origins of the Japanese spirit and mind’). It appeared around the same time as Kamata’s Gendai shintō ron, and was written by the journalist Yamamura Akiyoshi (2011), who has previously published an article on the decline of Shinto in rural areas as a result of depopulation and financial deprivation (Yamamura 2009; cf. Breen 2010: 313). The book’s central message, like its title, is not particularly original: there is an intimate connection between Shinto and ‘the’ Japanese people, but the Japanese today are no longer aware of this connection, which has contributed to a range of problems that will be solved only if they ‘rediscover’ their roots. What is interesting about this book, however, is that, contrary to what the title suggests, it is not simply another nihonjinron 日本人論 treatise on the unique features of the Japanese nation. Rather, the book discusses several issues in contemporary Shinto based on interviews with a number of shrine priests, representing shrines in different parts of the country. As such, the book gives a useful indication of the issues concerning Shinto clergy today, as well as some of their commonly held ideas. Not all of these are directly related to natural disasters (in all likelihood, several of the interviews had already been conducted before the disasters took place); nevertheless, most of the topics discussed are related to contemporary institutional and ideological developments, and relevant to the question of what role Shinto

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might play in the ‘rebuilding’ of Japanese culture and society. Unfortunately, the book is not always reliable as a journalistic account, as Yamamura has his own personal agenda; it is not always clear whether he is paraphrasing an interviewee or offering his own opinion. Still, as an overview of contemporary issues, it is highly interesting. For instance, in his third chapter, Yamamura discusses the topic of chinju no mori, and gives accounts of an interview with a shrine priest who set up a local conservation initiative, as well as an interview with Sonoda Minoru, one of the leading representatives of the ‘Shinto environmentalist paradigm’ (Yamamura 2011: 39–68). He follows their interpretation of chinju no mori as places that are not merely of ecological interest, but also constitute invaluable remnants of ‘ancient Japan’, based on the lingering values of ‘animism’ and harmony among humans, nature, and deities. In addition, Yamamura asserts the value of chinju no mori when it comes to the prevention of disaster: for instance, in 1995, the chinju no mori of Ikuta Jinja in Kobe supposedly protected surrounding buildings from collapse (ibid.: 48).16 The latter topic, Shinto and disaster, is discussed in more detail in the fourth chapter of the book (ibid.: 101–136). Perhaps unsurprisingly considering its historical association with earthquakes, the author begins by discussing Kashima Jingū. He suggests that shrines have traditionally played an important part in helping people overcome their suffering: on the one hand, they serve a memorial function, as they may be built at places previously hit by disaster, and/or they may perform commemorative rituals; on the other, they may help people regain their courage, and endure difficulty (ibid.: 106–107). Yamamura then proceeds by raising the question as to how misfortune was perceived in ancient Japan, and makes the interesting comparison between powerful deities associated with fire and lightning in ancient times, and nuclear power today – both can be seen as energy-giving and beneficial, yet potentially destructive and wrathful (ibid.: 107–110). Central to an understanding of traditional perceptions of disaster, he argues, is the notion of magagoto 禍事 – the idea that, somehow, misfortune comes about as the consequence of ‘bad deeds’ (i.e. actions that disturb the ‘natural’ harmony). Contemporary Japan, the argument goes, is a country with huge social 16

A visit to the ‘forest’ of Ikuta Jinja does raise questions regarding the definition of chinju no mori, as it is so small that it can hardly be considered a ‘forest’ in the ordinary sense of the word. How many trees should a shrine have in order for them to be conceptualized as chinju no mori; i.e. as ‘forest’? Is there any substance to the term, other than the association of a shrine with a couple of trees? Ikuta Jinja’s ‘forest’ also raises questions regarding conservationist claims of chinju no mori as ecologically important areas of urban green, as it is dark, and seems to house little species diversity. See also Rots 2013: 243–273.

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­problems; allegedly, it has become a muen shakai 無縁社会 (society without social ties), where people no longer fulfil their obligations vis-à-vis their family members and ancestors. Hence, Japan is in need of a national harae 祓へ (ritual purification) so that it can overcome its magagoto, and start ‘looking for an ideal image of a bright future Japan’ (ibid.: 126–129). The implication is clear: there is a causal relationship between the alleged social and moral degradation of the Japanese nation (e.g. increasing numbers of people do not worship their ancestors), and the disasters of March 2011. Indeed, the suggestion is made that the tsunami may have served some divine purpose in ‘purifying’ Japan – an argument remarkably similar to Ishihara Shintarō’s infamous ‘tenbatsu’ statement discussed before. At this point, it is difficult to say how common these ideas actually are. Some of the shrine priests I interviewed made similar suggestions, albeit usually in more ­diplomatic terms – the tsunami being somehow related to a ‘balance being distorted’, which was somehow related to ‘social problems’ as well as environmental destruction. While terms such as magagoto and tatari (divine curse) were not immediately on their lips, the underlying principle of causality may be more common in Shinto circles than one would expect of the followers of a ‘peaceful nature religion’. That is, as suggested by Yamamura’s book as well as my interview data, there seems to be a fairly widespread assumption that a disturbance of relations between humans and nature, as well as between humans and divine (or ancestral) powers, can somehow lead to divine retribution. It may well be the case, then, that notions of natural disaster as some sort of divine counter-reaction, often combined with apocalyptic ideas of destruction and resurrection, are quite common among members of the Shinto priesthood and establishment. This is a hypothesis that requires further examination, however. Needless to say, fantasies of apocalyptic destruction are by no means alien to environmentally oriented movements (Lee 1997), and Japan is no exception. What is noteworthy about the narrative of Yamamura and others in Shinto circles is the intimate discursive association of environmental problems, moral decline, disaster and national resurrection. Environmental destruction and natural disasters here become part of an apocalyptic scheme, and play a part in the (‘re’)establishment of a harmonious, utopian Japanese society characterized by moral virtue, patriotism, humbleness and harmony with nature. Rather than as a revival of ‘religiosity’ in a supposedly secularized society, these narratives should be interpreted as, first and foremost, nationalistutopian constructions of an ideal future society, legitimized by an imaginary golden age located somewhere in the faraway past. While these ideas constitute a significant part of the worldviews advocated by some ‘religious’ actors in

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Japan (ranging from parts of the Shinto establishment [see Breen 2010] to socalled ‘new religions’ such as Seichō no Ie, Sūkyō Mahikari, Kōfuku no Kagaku and some Christian groups), they are by no means limited to the societally differentiated realm of ‘religion’. On the contrary, similar ideas are shared by ‘non-religious’ members of the political establishment, such as Ishihara, and expressed in a variety of pseudo-scientific nihonjinron texts that are not explicitly religious. The story of a perfect golden age that was lost – usually as a result of ‘foreign’ influences – and gave way to corruption, decay and (racial, linguistic, cultural or environmental) impurity, yet serves as a blueprint for a utopian future society, corresponds to a standard pattern in nationalist rhetoric (Levinger & Lytle 2000). In some cases, the transition from the current state of corruption and decay to the future state of purity and perfection is perceived as a ‘rupture’ – an apocalyptic moment, a catharsis, which inevitably leads to suffering and destruction. Needless to say, such narratives can have significant mobilizing potential, and even serve to justify the use of violence. While this is not the case in contemporary Japan, notions of destruction and rebirth do take centre stage in contemporary discursive practices; in the case of Shinto, they are often associated with idealized notions of nature worship and social harmony in ancient Japan. Thus, suffering ceases to be meaningless, for the ‘sacrifice’ of some becomes the first step towards purification and national resurrection. References Abe Auestad, Reiko. 2014. ‘Between History and Heritage: Forests and Mountains as a Figurative Space for Revitalizing the Past in the Works of Ōe Kenzaburō’. In Rethinking ‘Japanese Studies’ from Practices in the Nordic Region, edited by Liu Sanhui and Sano Mayuko, 75-88. Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies. Asahi Shimbun. 2011. ‘“Daijishin wa tenbatsu” “tsunami de gayoku araiotose” Ishihara tochiji’. 14 March. On http://www.asahi.com/special/10005/TKY201103140356.html (last accessed: 9 October 2012). Ashkenazi, Michael. 2003. Handbook of Japanese Mythology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Asquith, Pamela J. and Arne Kalland, edited by 1997. Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Bafelli, Erica, and Ian Reader. 2012. ‘Editors’ Introduction. Impact and Ramifications: The Aftermath of the Aum Affair in the Japanese Religious Context’. Japanese Journal for Religious Studies 39 (1), 1–28.

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Bernardi-Morel, Julien. 2012. ‘Cataclysme et pouvoir politique dans l’imaginaire au Japon: L’exemple des namazu-e du séisme de l’ère Ansei (1855)’. Ebisu 47, 255–266. Breen, John. 2010. ‘Resurrecting the Sacred Land of Japan: The State of Shinto in the Twenty-First Century’. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 37 (2), 295–315. Breen, John and Mark Teeuwen. 2010. A New History of Shinto. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Dwyer, Devin. 2011. ‘Divine Retribution? Japan Quake, Tsunami Resurface God Debate’. abc News, 18 March. On http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/japan-earthquake-tsunami-divine-retribution-natural-disaster-religious/story?id=13167670 (last accessed: 9 October 2012). Fitzgerald, Timothy. 2000. The Ideology of Religious Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fuyutsuki Ritsu. 2010. ‘Kasoka to jinja: Shōdoshima no jirei kara’. In Shinto wa doko e iku ka, edited by Ishii Kenji, 160–173. Tokyo: Perikansha. Gilgoff, Dan. 2011. ‘Tokyo governor apologizes for calling quake divine retribution’. cnn Belief Blog, 15 March. On http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/15/tokyo-governor -apologizes-for-calling-quake-divine-retribution/ (last accessed: 9 October 2012). Graf, Tim, and Jakob Montrasio. 2012. Souls of Zen: Ancestors and Agency in Contemporary Japanese Temple Buddhism. Documentary film. Havens, Norman. 2006. ‘Shinto’. In Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions, edited by Paul L. Swanson and Clark Chilson, 14–37. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Imaizumi, Yoshiko. 2007. Contested Space: A Genealogy of Meiji Shrine. PhD dissertation. soas, University of London. Inoue, Nobutaka. 2003. Japanese College Students’ Attitudes Towards Religion: An Analysis of Questionnaire Surveys from 1992 to 2001, Tokyo: Kokugakuin University. International Shinto Foundation, ed. 2000. The Kyoto Protocol, the Environment and Shinto. Tokyo: International Shinto Foundation. Itō, Satoshi et al. 2002. Nihonshi shōhyakka: Shintō. Tokyo: Tōkyōdō Shuppan. Jinja Shinpō. 2011a. ‘Chinju no mori to kodomotachi: heisei 23 nen seika’. 5 September. Jinja Shinpō. 2011b. ‘Fūhyō higai tonde ike: chinju no mori de aozora ichiba’. 23 May. Jinja Shinpō. 2011c. ‘Higashi Nihon daishinsai fumae shizenkan ya yakuwari o giron: Jinja honchō shintō kyōgaku kenkyū taikai’. 13 June. Jinja Shinpō. 2011d. ‘Higashi Nihon daishinsai hassei kara hantoshi: keikai kuiki no jinja wa –’. 19 September. Jinja Shinpō. 2011e. ‘Shizen saigai to fukkō: senjin no eichi ni manabu’. 13 June. Kamata, Tōji. 2008. Seichi kankaku. Tokyo: Kadokawa gakugei shuppan. Kamata, Tōji. 2011. Gendai shintō ron: Reisei to seitaichi no tankyū. Tokyo: Shunjusha. Kawamura, Kazuyo. 2012. Hikari ni mukatte: 3/11 de kanjita shintō no kokoro. Tokyo: Shobunsha.

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Kirby, Peter Wynn. 2011. Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Kuroda, Toshio. 1981. ‘Shinto in the History of Japanese Religion’. Journal of Japanese Studies 7 (1), 1–21. Lee, Martha F. 1997. ‘Environmental Apocalypse: The Millennial Ideology of “Earth First!”’. In Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements, edited by Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer, 119–138. London: Routledge. Levinger, Matthew, and Paula Franklin Lytle. 2001. ‘Myth and Mobilisation: The Triadic Structure of Nationalist Rhetoric’. Nations and Nationalism, 7 (2), 175–194. Marmignon, Patricia. 2012. ‘Communautés de quartier et associations: le retour du local après le 11 mars 2011’. Ebisu 47, 215–221. McCutcheon, Russell. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McLaughlin, Levi. 2011a. ‘In the Wake of the Tsunami: Religious Responses to the Great East Japan Earthquake’. Cross Currents 61 (3), 290–297. McLaughlin, Levi. 2011b. ‘Tokyo Governor Says Tsunami is Divine Punishment – Religious Groups Ignore Him’. Religion Dispatches, 17 March. On http://www.religiondispatches .org/archive/politics/4399/tokyo_governor_say_tsunami_is_divine_punishment %E2%80%94religious_groups_ignore_him (last accessed: 9 October 2012). Mitchell, Jon. 2011. ‘Kashima’s ancient rock of faith: The god of quake prevention offers some age-old comfort in these unsteady times’. The Japan Times, 8 May. Miyawaki, Akira. 2000. Chinju no mori. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Moerman, D. Max. 2005. Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 1998. Re-inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation. New York: M.E. Sharpe. Motegi, Sadasumi. 2010. ‘Chinju no mori’. In Voice style plus: Mori no baiburu, edited by Ōmori Kōji, 103–111. Tokyo: Voice. Næss, Arne. 1995. ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary’. In The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology, edited by Alan Drengson and Inoue Yūichi, 3–10. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Nelson, John. 2012. ‘Japanese Secularities and the Decline of Temple Buddhism’. Journal of Religion in Japan 1, 37–60. Nguyễn, Phước Tương. Not dated. ‘Đôi Điều về Chùa Cầu Hội An’. On http://chimviet .free.fr/dantochoc/giaoluu/glvietnhat/lvhs058b.htm (last accessed: 9 October 2012). Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. 1993. Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pedersen, Poul. 1995. ‘Nature, Religion and Cultural Identity: The Religious Environmentalist Paradigm’. In Asian Perceptions of Nature: A Critical Approach, edited by Ole Bruun and Arne Kalland, 258–276. London: Curzon Press.

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Porcu, Elisabetta. 2012. ‘Observations on the Blurring of the Religious and the Secular in a Japanese Urban Setting’. Journal of Religion in Japan 1, 83–106. Prohl, Inken. 2000. Die ‘spirituellen Intellektuellen’ und das New Age in Japan. Hamburg: Gesellschaft für Natur – und Völkerkunde Ostasiens. Pye, Michael. 1981. ‘Diversions in the Interpretation of Shintō’. Religion 11 (1), 61–74. Reader, Ian. 2012. ‘Secularisation, R.I.P.? Nonsense! The “Rush Hour Away from the Gods” and the Decline of Religion in Contemporary Japan’. Journal of Religion in Japan 1, 7–36. Rots, Aike P. 2011. ‘Staatscultus of natuurverering? “Shinto,” “religie” en politieke ideologie in de moderne Japanse geschiedenis’. Leidschrift 26 (2), 51–75. Rots, Aike P. 2012a. ‘The Discourse on Chinju no Mori: Redefining Shinto and Shinto Sanctuaries in Contemporary Japan’. In Toward a Deeper understanding of Shinto Culture. Essays on Shinto: Volume 6, edited by Shinto kokusai gakkai, 96–110. Tokyo: Shinto kokusai gakkai. Rots, Aike P. 2012b. ‘Transformation or secularisation?’ On PluRel – en blog om religion og samfunn. 22 February. On http://blogg.uio.no/prosjekter/plurel/content/ transformation-or-secularisation (last accessed: 9 October 2012). Rots, Aike P. 2013 Forests of the Gods: Shinto, Nature, and Sacred Space in Contemporary Japan. PhD dissertation. University of Oslo. Shaw, Daniel M.P. 2009. ‘The Way Forward? Shinto and a Twenty-First Century Japanese Ecological Attitude’. In Nature, Space and the Sacred: Transdisiplinary Perspectives, edited by S. Bergmann et al., 311–330. Farnham: Ashgate. Simazono, Susumu. 1999. ‘“New Age Movement” or “New Spirituality Movements and Culture?”’ Social Compass 46 (2), 121–133. Shintō Bunka, Kai. ed. 2009–2010. Shizen to shintō bunka. 3 volumes. Tokyo: Kōbundō. Smits, Gregory. 2012. ‘Conduits of Power: What the Origins of Japan’s Earthquake Catfish Reveal about Religious Geography’. Japan Review 24, 41–65. Sonoda, Minoru. 2007a [2005]. ‘Chinju no mori: sono genzai to igi o tou’. Essay enclosed with the dvd box Nihon wa mori no kuni. kuni director office, Nihon bunka eizō kenkyūjo. Previously published in Mizugaki 200. Sonoda, Minoru 2007b. ‘Japan, land of forests: The shrine grove and its meaning today’. English translation of Sonoda 2007a, enclosed with the former. Teeuwen, Mark. 2002. ‘From Jindō to Shinto: a Concept Takes Shape’. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 29 (3–4), 233–263. Thal, Sarah. 2006. ‘Shinto: Beyond “Japan’s Indigenous Religion.”’ Religious Studies Review 32 (3), 145–150. Thomas, Julia Adeney. 2001. Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ueda, Atsushi. 2003. Chinju no mori no monogatari: mō hitotsu no toshi no midori. Kyoto: Shibunkaku shuppan.

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Ueda, Masaaki, ed. 2004. Tankyū ‘chinju no mori’: shasōgaku e no shōtai. Tokyo: Heibonsha. Umehara, Takeshi. 1989. ‘Animizumu saikō’. Nihon kenkyū 1, 13–23. Yamamura, Akiyoshi. 2009. ‘Ima jinja shintō ga abunai’. Shokun 41 (3), 113–125. Yamamura, Akiyoshi. 2011. Shintō to Nihonjin: Tamashii to kokoro no minamoto o sagashite. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Yamaori, Tetsuo. 2001. Chinju no mori wa naite iru: Nihonjin no kokoro o ‘tsukiugokasu’ mono. Tokyo: php. Yasuda, Yoshinori. 1990. ‘Animism Renaissance’. Nichibunken Newsletter 5, 2–4.

Chapter 2

Gods, Dragons, Catfish, and Godzilla

Fragments for a History of Religious Views on Natural Disasters in Japan Fabio Rambelli

University of California, Santa Barbara

The triple disaster that affected large areas in northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011, has provoked, among other things, discussions on the role of religion, including its capacity to explain natural disasters. One of the topics that have been widely discussed is whether this disaster could be considered a form of ‘divine punishment’ for the directions taken by Japan, its government and its people, after modernization and especially in the post-war period. Former governor of Tokyo Ishikawa Shintarō was the first to open up discussion with a controversial statement. Professor Emeritus of Tokyo University Sueki Fumihiko has argued for the need of a ‘re-enchantment’ of the world, which would bring about a general reconfiguration of the ways in which human beings, and the Japanese in particular, envision and interact with nature. This chapter begins by looking at the arguments by Ishikawa and Sueki and continues with an exploration of premodern religious interpretations of natural disasters, especially earthquakes. We shall see that several competing discourses on the subject coexisted in Japan over many centuries, including Confucian perspectives, Buddhist doctrines, local legends, and more or less secular, scientific attitudes. Thus, the theme of divine punishment also was far from homogenous and uncontested; as we shall see, in some cases, it was invoked by authorities to emphasize their legitimacy and rule, but in other cases it was deployed by commoners to criticize the contemporary social order. The chapter concludes with some considerations on the possibility of reenchantment—or, rather, on the inescapable tendency towards increased desacralization as a paradoxical but powerful way to envision the sacred today.

The Tōhoku Disaster as Heavenly Punishment

On 14 March 2011, three days after the earthquake and tsunami, the Governor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintarō, said at a press conference: ‘It is necessary to wash away at once, by using the tsunami well, our selfishness—I mean, the dirt

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accumulated over many years in the heart of the Japanese. I believe that this was a heavenly punishment. I feel really sorry for the victims’. The reaction from the media and concerned citizens was immediate, and the next day, on 15 March, Ishihara issued a half-hearted apology and retracted his previous comment. At the time, Ishihara did not elaborate on the concept of ‘heavenly punishment’ (tenbatsu) nor on its alleged cause, selfishness (gayoku). A few months later, however, he published a book in which he described his own criticism of contemporary Japan based on his own definition of selfishness. In the book, Ishihara argues that post-war Japan has become subservient to the us and pursued a facile and passive politics of peace (fuji no heiwa) which has privileged the improvement of material conditions of life and has made the Japanese more concerned with their own personal well-being and less resilient and combative.1 Ishihara, by employing the idea of tenbatsu, seems to imply that Japan is an organic entity, and whatever faults it has, they are collective; according to this logic, heavenly punishment hits one part of Japan as an example for all. Of course, the notion of collective responsibility, implicit in this organicistic vision of the state, is essentially premodern and certainly undemocratic. One could argue further that the area most directly hit by the earthquake and tsunami, compounded by the nuclear accident, can hardly be singled out in Japan for its ‘selfishness’ and disrespect for traditional values: a fairly traditional and conservative region of small companies, emigration, and hard-working people, is hardly the ‘right’ place for ‘Heaven’ to mete out its punishment and avenge its divine anger… In any case, this was the first time that the concept of ‘heavenly punishment’ (tenbatsu) was brought in the public discourse by an influential figure in recent memory. It did not end there. Soon after Ishihara’s controversial statement, Sueki Fumihiko, professor emeritus of Tokyo University, a well-known and respected scholar of Japanese Buddhism, published an article in which he argued that the notion of heavenly punishment cannot be easily dismissed as irrelevant to the 3/11 triple disaster. Sueki’s article generated broad and heated discussions in the intellectual and religious worlds of Japan. Sueki made his controversial article available online in his blog and opened up a discussion with his readers; he further developed his argument and subsequently included the most important postings in a book.2 Sueki stressed that it was not the fault of the people living in the affected areas. Rather, Japan as a whole and even the entire world have taken a wrong direction, by privileging economic growth and scientific and technological development. This has resulted in environmental 1 Ishihara Shintarō, Shin darakuron: Gayoku to tenbatsu. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2011. 2 Sueki Fumihiko, Gendai bukkyōron. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2012.

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destruction and social distortions whose pernicious effects fall primarily upon the weakest, not the strongest, in Japan.3 Sueki also warns the readers to take seriously the prophecy by medieval Buddhist reformer Nichiren (1222–1282), according to whom, when a country is governed immorally, the buddhas and the kami abandon it, thus opening up the way for natural disasters to occur.4 Thus, ‘natural disasters are the products of great forces beyond the human realm; we should accept them as “heavenly punishments” and humbly reflect upon our mistakes (kenkyo ni hansei shinakereba ikenai)’. Japan as a whole should bear responsibility for what happened in Tōhoku. Sueki concludes his article by urging religious specialists and philosophers to actively participate in a public discussion about revising the entire model of development followed by Japan after the Meiji Restoration, a discussion that should include a historical perspective based on the entire Japanese tradition. Eventually Sueki separated himself from Ishihara’s view of heavenly punishment by stressing his own interest in a historically grounded intellectual understanding and the need for a ‘re-enchantment’ of nature; he even withdrew his approval of Ishihara’s very reference to heavenly punishment.5 Although Sueki raised the deeply political issue of how to govern Japanese society and which values to privilege, his argument is couched in intellectual and religious history as a discussion about the cultural meaning of natural disasters; indeed, Sueki makes a strong argument in favour of the need to learn from Japanese intellectual and religious history in order to find better ways to deal with nature. Now, whether those ways are new, as the result of philosophical and scientific innovation, or rather old, as based on premodern principles and attitudes, remains open in Sueki’s treatment. In fact, Sueki seems to show a preference for the latter, with his emphasis on the need for a ‘re-enchantment’ (saimajutsuka) of the world and nature in particular.6 With such a re-enchanted vision of the world, people will be made once more aware of the fact that nature is a radical Other for human beings, in which incomprehensible and ultimately unstoppable forces are at work. Indeed, Sueki introduces the idea of 3 Ibid., pp. 18–19. 4 To buttress his overall argument, Sueki refers repeatedly to Nichiren’s main work Risshō ankokuron, where Nichiren expounded his vision of a connection between bad governance (in his view, a monarch who did not acknowledge the supremacy of the Lotus Sutra and his followers) and natural disasters caused (or, at least, not prevented) by deities. Nichiren, Risshō ankokuron, in Takakusu Junjirō and Watanabe Kaigyoku, eds. Taishō shinshū daizōkyō. 85 vols. Tokyo: Issaikyō kankōkai, 1924–1932 (hereafter T), vol. 84, n. 2688. English transl. in Philip B. Yampolsky, ed., Selected Writings of Nichiren. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 11–49. 5 Sueki, Gendai bukkyōron, pp. 26–27 6 Ibid., pp. 62–67.

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a ‘heart’ (kokoro) of nature (shizen no ‘kokoro’; he also mentions the ‘“heart” of the sea and the mountains’: umi ya yama no ‘kokoro’).7 Sueki calls these forces kami, a term we could render as ‘gods’ or perhaps, in a broader and more abstract expression, ‘the divine’.8 In his view, specific kami, dragons, and other mythological beings of Japanese religion and folklore are potential agents of such reenchantment. More specifically, Sueki tries to reevaluate and re-actualize the medieval Buddhist understanding of the world, based on a distinction between a ‘visible’ (ken) and an ‘invisible’ (mei or myō) dimension. In this worldview, the invisible is the realm of buddhas, bodhisattvas, and various deities that ceaselessly intervene in our world, rewarding virtuous behaviors and punishing evil actions.9 Regardless of the specific content of Sueki’s arguments and the feasibility, if not even the desirability, of the form of re-enchantment he proposes, we should at least recognize in him the merit of having suggested the importance of rediscovering and reevaluating traditional Japanese understandings of natural disasters. In fact, before Sueki discussed some of the intellectual implications of ‘heavenly punishment’ following Ishihara’s statement, very few Japanese knew exactly what this notion referred to and where it came from.

The Sacred and Natural Disasters

At this point, an overview of the principal attitudes of premodern Japanese towards natural disasters, especially in their relations with the sacred, is in order. Despite the spiritual resonances of this term in its English rendering, Heavenly Punishment is originally not a religious concept, but pertains more properly to classical Chinese political thought, as it is closely related to the principle of Mandate from Heaven (Ch. tianming or tianqian, Jp. tenmei or tenkei). Mandate from Heaven, a notion first outlined by Confucius and subsequently systematized by Mencius, refers to the idea that the virtuous ruler is legitimized by Heaven (tian), the impersonal, cosmic principle of the Confucian universe, which is the source of order (natural, political, social and ethical). In other words, Tian would give the virtuous ruler a mandate to govern, provided that his government follows the Confucian principles, in themselves rooted in this cosmic ordering. However, when the ruler is not ethical and his government does not conform to these principles, this will result in social unrest, 7 Ibid., respectively, p. 26 and p. 25. 8 Ibid., p. 26. 9 Ibid., p. 66.

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political turmoil and anomalies in the natural order (negative astrological omens such as comets, irregular seasons and failing crops) culminating with natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes. Disorder in the various levels of reality, i.e. the manifestation of those anomalies and disasters, was understood as an indication not only that Heaven had withdrawn its mandate to rule, but was also actively punishing the ruler and his government to promote its quick demise and its replacement with another, more ethical ruler. These forms of punishment meted out by Heaven were known as Heavenly punishment (Ch. tianfa, Jp. tenbatsu). In Japan, the Confucian notion of Heavenly punishment, while present since a very early time, did not have a large impact on the general populace until the Tokugawa period, with the diffusion all over Japan of texts dealing with the so-called Heavenly Way (Tendō), which also mention ideas of punishment.10 These were popular Confucian tracts attributed to Fujiwara Seika (1561–1619), Hayashi Razan (1583–1657), and other figures of their tradition such as Honda Masanobu (1538–1616). For instance, the Kana rishō, attributed to Fujiwara Seika, states: if the ruler, ‘being father and mother of his country, makes his people suffer, he will certainly receive a punishment from Heaven (ten no batsu)’.11 If evil is obdurate, destruction occurs in one generation; if evil is moderate, destruction occurs at the time of one’s descendants.12 The same text lists, among the causes for tenbatsu, matters such as ‘not knowing the Way, being fearless of the Heavenly Way, making one’s subjects suffer, being proud of one’s own glory’.13 Concrete manifestations of tenbatsu are described in Honsaroku, a text attributed to Honda (Sado no kami) Masanobu, as: comets, great earthquakes, great fires, floods and famines; these are all signals that a country’s government is not ethical and hence the subjects are suffering, and the Heavenly Ways manifests its dissatisfaction in this way; if governance improves, calamities will cease without great damage.14 10

11 12 13 14

For an overview of Tendō, see Herman Ooms, Tokugawa Ideology: Early Constructs, 1570– 1680. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, esp. pp. 85–97; Wm. Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur E. Tiedermann, eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition (second edition), vol. 2, tome 1 (Abridged), pp. 62–74. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Kana rishō, in Ishida Ichirō and Kanaya Osamu, eds., Fujiwara Seika, Hayashi Razan (Nihon Shisō Taikei vol. 28), p. 245. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1975. Ibid., p. 245. Ibid., p. 246. The same points can be found in in Shingaku gorinsho, in Ishida Ichirō and Kanaya Osamu, eds., Fujiwara Seika, Hayashi Razan (Nihon Shisō Taikei vol. 28), p. 259. Honsaroku, in Ishida Ichirō and Kanaya Osamu, eds., Fujiwara Seika, Hayashi Razan (Nihon Shisō Taikei vol. 28), p. 281.

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Before the development and diffusion of Tendō during the early modern era, the Confucian notion of tenbatsu intersected in medieval Japan with two different discourses about divine punishment: one involving local gods or kami and known as divine punishment from the kami (shinbatsu); the other involving buddhas, bodhisattvas and other divinities of the Buddhist pantheon and known as punishment meted out by the buddhas (butsubachi). Both were ideas that emerged at some point in the late Heian period and were developed throughout the Edo period. The first, shinbatsu, refers to the idea that the kami punish, often in very unpredictable and arbitrary ways, people and communities that ignore or violate the kami’s own principles and expectations, most commonly by transgressing taboos and various kinds of prohibitions. This form of punishment is often referred to as ‘divine curse’ or tatari. As for butsubachi, this is obviously a non-canonical idea, as buddhas and bodhisattvas, because of their fundamental attitudes of nonviolence, compassion and benevolence, are originally incapable of causing suffering to beings, including the violators of Buddhist ethical precepts. Rather, Buddhist classical texts discuss karmic retribution (gōbatsu) in various forms including negative results caused by a person’s evil behaviour (acts, speeches and thoughts). However, some influential Buddhist scriptures dealing with political power and the duties of the Buddhist ruler indicate that, whenever the ruler does not respect the Buddhist principles and persecutes Buddhism, the deities will withdraw their protection and, as a consequence, all kinds of natural calamities and disasters will occur. This idea is expounded most clearly in scriptures such as the Golden Light Sutra and the Benevolent King Sutra (the latter being a Chinese apocryphon). For instance, in the Golden Light Sutra, the Four Great Kings, presiding over the four directions, tell the Buddha: If…there should be any king of men…[who] should not respect, reverence, honour those monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen who hold the excellent Suvarṇabhâsa [the Golden Light Sutra]…us, the four great kings, and the… Yakṣas…will neglect his region. When we…neglect the region, the groups of gods dwelling in all regions will neglect this region. When the gods…neglect the region, […] [t]here will be earthquakes. The wells…will dry up. Rough winds will blow… Fierce rains will arise.15 Analogously, the Benevolent King Sutra states: When the Correct Teaching decays and weakens, the people are bereft of proper conduct. Every evil will gradually increase and [the people’s] 15

R.E. Emmerick, transl., The Sūtra of Golden Light, London: Luzac & Co., 1970, pp. 37–38.

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fortunes will be diminished day by day… The heavenly dragons will not defend [them], and evil demons and evil dragons will become more injurious day by day. Calamities and monstrosities will intertwine, causing misfortunes to multiply.16 It should be noticed that in both cases, it is not the buddhas who actively punish the kings and their polities, but natural disasters are automatic karmic consequences of the Buddhist deities withdrawing their protection against negative forces that continuously threaten order. Now, in medieval Japan we also see a more active engagement of the buddhas and other agencies in the Buddhist pantheon in the preservation of the political order, as if buddhas took upon themselves functions normally associated with the protecting deities on the one hand and Confucian Heaven on the other; this resulted in the development of the concept of butsubachi. Despite its wide diffusion throughout premodern Japanese history, the idea of butsubachi is not scripturally grounded. The Japanese Buddhist encyclopedia Mochizuki bukkyō daijiten defines butsubachi as ‘punishment given by the Buddha’;17 unable to trace the canonical origin of this concept, the encyclopedia mostly refers to premodern Japanese texts such as the Nihon ryōiki, the Taiheiki, and the Heike monogatari. However, the expression butsubachi occurs most often in medieval documents such as oaths (kishōmon) and contracts. In general, this extra-canonical notion appears to be the combination of doctrinal notions of karmic action and folkloric beliefs about the nature and function of supernatural agencies, according to which deities actively manifest their wrath and punish those who make them angry (tatari or divine curse). In time, the idea developed that buddhas would also punish their enemies, and as a consequence Buddhist temples began to perform malediction rituals to invoke upon their enemies punishment from the buddhas.18 16

17

18

As translated by Charles D. Orzech as ‘The Transcendent Wisdom Scripture for Humane Kings Who Wish to Protect Their States (T 276)’. In Charles D. Orzech, Politics and Transcendent Wisdom: The Scripture for Humane Kings in the Creation of Chinese Buddhism. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998, pp. 272–273. Bukkyō daijiten. 10 vols. Edited by Mochizuki Shinkō, expanded and revised by Tsukamoto Zenryū and Sekai seiten kankō kyōkai. Tokyo: Sekai seiten kankō kyōkai, 1954–1971. The entry ‘Butsubachi’ is in vol. 10, pp. 911c–912a. For further details on the notion of butsubachi, see Fabio Rambelli, ‘Buddha’s Wrath: Esoteric Buddhism and the Discourse of Divine Punishment’, Japanese Religions 27, 1 (2002), pp. 41–68.

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In this way, the concept of heavenly punishment in Japan came gradually to assume religious overtones, as it shifted from Confucian political thought (rooted in cosmic principles) to Buddhist morality (based on a quasi-mechanistic and impersonal law of cause and effect, karma) and eventually to the active agency of divinities of various kinds. During the Tokugawa era, in particular, political crisis was combined with natural disaster and natural alteration as a sign of heavenly punishment.19

Earthquake Theories in Buddhism

If we shift our attention to earthquakes, the most studied instance of natural disaster,20 we see that, in premodern Japan, earthquakes were generally attributed to the movements of five divine agents: dragons (designated as ryū, ryūō or ryūjin, the Japanese equivalent of the nāga, Indian mythological serpents living at the bottom of the ocean), the fire god (Kajin, Japanese rendition of the Indian god Agni), the water god (Suijin, the god Varuna), Taishakuten (Indra), and a legendary bird (kinjichō, a different name for Garuda).21 Interestingly, all these deities are part of the Buddhist pantheon. The Buddhist encyclopedia entitled Jinten ainōshō (1532) also attributes earthquakes to movements by Agni, the nāgas, Indra and Garuda (the text does not mention the water god Varuna).22 It is worth mentioning that classical Buddhist texts offer several interpretations for the causes of earthquakes, including quasi-scientific, materialistic explanations that do not involve deities; for instance, the Great Parinirvana Sutra has, as the primary cause for earthquakes, the loss of balance among the five material elements that constitute the universe (earth, water, fire, air and space).23 19

For a few examples, dating from the 1770s and 1780s, see John Whitney Hall, Tanuma Okitsugu, 1719–1788: Forerunner of Modern Japan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955, pp. 119–122. 20 Natural disasters were not limited to earthquakes, but also included tidal waves (tsunami), extensive fires, and pestilences. There seems to be, both in primary sources and in the attention of scholars, an enhanced attention to earthquakes than to tsunami. 21 As based on Shinsai yobō chōsakai ed., Dainippon jishin shiryō, 1940; quoted in Kuroda Hideo, Ryū no sumu Nihon. Tokyo: Iwanami, 2003, p. 114. 22 See Jinten ainōshō, in Dainihon bukkyō zensho, ed. by Suzuki Gakujutsu Zaidan. Tokyo: Suzuki Gakujutsu Zaidan, vol. 93, 1972, p. 149. The text further distinguishes the agents responsible for earthquakes on the basis of the hour of the day in which earthquakes occur, perhaps an indication of influences from Onmyōdō divination. 23 Mahā pāri nirvāṇa sūtra, Jp. Daihatsu nehangyō (translated by Faxian [337-ca. 422 ce], in T. 1 n. 7, p. 191c). This sutra lists other causes as well, such as the supernatural powers

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In any case, the premodern Japanese understanding of earthquakes appears to have been based on the Daichidoron, a voluminous commentary to the Large Wisdom Sutra, attributed to Nāgārjuna, which contains, among others, a detailed Buddhist theory of earthquakes.24 The Daichidoron begins by stating that the Buddha himself generated six kinds of earthquakes (rokushu shindō) for various purposes, such as to reveal the boundless power of the Buddha to sentient beings as a way to induce them to believe in the Buddhist teachings; but also to show that everything in this world, including the earth, Mt Sumeru, and the ocean, is impermanent (mujō) and subject to the law of karma (innen). The Daichidoron further distinguishes between small, medium and large earthquakes, each further divided in several types for a total of twelve kinds of earthquakes. The text also proposes a correlation between the twenty-eight lunar mansions of Buddhist astronomy/astrology and the four divine agents of the earthquakes (Nāga dragons, Agni, Garuda and Indra);25 in other words, it is possible to determine the divine being at the origin of an earthquake on the basis of the lunar mansion of the day in which the earthquake occurred. Significantly, in the Buddhist view not all earthquakes are signs of divine wrath. Earthquakes caused by Indra, in particular, were believed to be auspicious, as indications of peace in the realm, regular weather and bountiful crops, and well-being and fortune for the king, his ministers and his subjects. In addition, small earthquakes were understood as omens that a virtuous person had been born or had died; larger earthquakes indicated the appearance or the extinction of a Buddha. Cultural historian Kuroda Hideo has listed the attribution of causes of medieval earthquakes as follows: Indra thirty-one earthquakes, dragons twentyeight, Garuda twenty-three, Agni and Varuna seventeen each.26 Another list of causes by the same Kuroda has shown a close causal relationship connecting earthquakes to dragons in Japan between the early eleventh and the early sixteenth centuries.27 As Kuroda explains, the medieval Japanese believed that, when the natural and/or social order was in a state of turmoil and disorder, the deities of heaven and earth (tenjin chigi) intervened to manifest their displeasure or anger, to punish the transgressors, or to restore order.28 Dragons, and to 24 25 26 27 28

acquired by ascetics, the movements of the deities, and the most important events in the life of the Buddha Śākyamuni. Daichidoron (Ch. Dazhidulun), T 25, n. 1509, p. 116c. Daichidoron, in Ibid., p. 117a. See Kuroda, Ryū no sumu Nihon, p. 122; his list is based on the material included in Monbushō shinsai yobō hyōgikai eds., Zōtei Dainippon jishin shiryō, 1941–43. Kuroda, Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 125.

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a minor extent, Indra, Agni, Varuna, and Garuda, were viewed as the most representative among the divine agencies causing earthquakes. A particular influential event that contributed to the formation and diffusion of the idea that earthquakes were forms of divine punishment (shinbatsu) was the end of the long struggle that had opposed the Minamoto and Taira clans at the end of the twelfth century. A strong earthquake shook Kyoto in 1185, a few months after the final defeat of the Taira clan by the Minamoto at the battle of Dan no Ura, in which also Emperor Antoku, a six-year-old child, died. The Gukanshō refers to the event as follows: ‘People said; “This too is due to unusual activity by the Dragon Kings.” And others claimed that Taira Kiyomori had become a dragon and was shaking’.29 As is well known, the Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari) contributed to spreading the idea that all Taira warriors, defeated in the final sea battle against the Minamoto at Dan no Ura in western Japan, had turned into dragons living on the bottom of the sea around Japan and kept causing earthquakes to show their enmity against the new government controlled by the Minamoto clan.30 As Mikael Adolphson has written, ‘It was not uncommon to explain disasters, both personal tragedies and human suffering caused by nature, as the native gods’ response to “political injustices”, such as the neglect of one of the elite temples’.31 However, premodern Japanese belief in supernatural intervention was not limited to a few major temples and their political interests; it was instead doctrinally based on particular interpretations of Buddhist cosmology, such as the structure of the world system of Mount Sumeru and its intrinsic instability, and the movements by various deities and divine agents, but also references to the cosmic struggle opposing the Buddha and Māra. In the latter, the supernatural enemies of Buddhism, led by Māra, were trying to destroy the very presence of Buddhism in Japan, while supernatural allies of Buddhism were using destruction to send signals and warnings to the faithful, urging 29

30

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Delmer M. Brown and Ichirō Ishida, The Future and the Past. A Translation and Study of the Gukanshō, an Interpretive History of Japan Written in 1229. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, p. 146. See the final chapter of Heike monogatari; English translation in Hiroshi Kitagawa and Bruce T. Tsuchida, trans., The Tale of the Heike. 2 vols. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1975, vol. 2, p. 778. The Heike monogatari also says that ‘intellectuals lamented that the earthquake had been caused by the evil spirits’ of the deceased emperor Antoku and the defeated Heike warriors: Ibid., p. 720. Mikael S. Adolphson, The Gates of Power: Monks, Courtiers, and Warriors in Premodern Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000, p. 267; see also Neil McMullin, ‘On Placating the Gods and Pacifying the Populace: The Case of the Gion Goryō Cult’, History of Religions 27/3 (February 1988), pp. 270–293, in particular p. 272.

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them to proliferate their acts of devotion. Indeed, the idea of the intervention of the invisible realm in this world’s occurrences is a topos running through premodern Buddhist literature. A text written in 1136 by the Shingon monk Kakuban (1095–1143) presents natural disasters such as earthquakes as echoes in this world of the cosmic struggle that takes place in the invisible realm between buddhas and Māra’s followers.32 From the Middle Ages onward, however, Buddhist institutions also developed a different interpretation. They tried to justify particularly serious and devastating occurrences as forms of voluntary self-sacrifice performed in accordance with the will of buddhas and kami, because violent means were necessary in order to save the Japanese. The Shasekishū, a collection of Buddhist tales written in the early fourteenth century by Mujū Ichien (1227– 1312), states this position in explicit terms: Ours is a country as remote from this centre [India] as the small, scattered millet seed, where rough, fierce creatures were unaware of moral causation. For those who did not believe in the Dharma, [the Buddha in its absolute and unconditioned form] employed that which was appropriate to the time and place. Manifesting the shapes of evil demons and wicked spirits and showing forth the forms of poisonous serpents and fierce beasts, it subdued this ferocious and evil lot and thereby brought people to the Way of the Buddha.33 Deities protecting Japan are thus described as ‘demons and dangerous animals’ or, more literally, ‘evil demons, malignant kami, poisonous snakes and violent beasts’; several Shinto texts belonging to the Buddhist tradition make clear that the true form of the kami is that of snakes. Thus, Japan was populated by dangerous gods engaged in a continuous struggle against evil demons; sometimes, it was not easy to determine whether disasters were the results of positive or negative messages from the deities. However, premodern sources also include skeptical and non-religious interpretations of occurrences of natural destruction—accounts that question, implicitly or explicitly, the actual role of divinities. For example, the great fire that burned large areas of Kyoto in 1177 was considered by the Tale of the Heike 32 33

Kakuban, ‘Hongan Shōnin gokajō chūmon’, in Miyasaka Yūshō, ed., Kōgyō Daishi senjutsushū. Revised edition. Tokyo: Sankibō busshorin, 1989, tome 2, p. 291. Robert E. Morrell, trans., Sand and Pebbles (Shasekishū): The Tales of Mujū Ichien, A Voice for Pluralism in Kamakura Buddhism. Albany, ny: State University of New York Press, 1985, p. 78.

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to be a punishment from Sannō, the god of Mt Hiei protecting the Tendai sect. But this was not the only interpretation at the time, as it was also explained as the unforeseeable result of a smaller fire that got out of control. For example, Hōjōki by Kamo no Chōmei (1155–1216), who witnessed the great fire in person, stresses the waste of resources and the ultimate pointlessness of ‘expending treasures and spirit to build houses in so dangerous a place as the capital’.34 Chōmei also used this natural disaster for political criticism.35 Thus, not all instances of destruction were always and necessarily manifestations of divine intervention. Often, Buddhist authors show a co-presence of a secular, empirical attitude with a cosmic, meta-historical vision involving the invisible world of the deities.36

Vernacularization: Japanese Transformations of Indic Theories and Imagery

The grand Buddhist cosmology of earthquakes, involving powerful deities, was localized and vernacularized in Japan by attributing similar powers to local deities. For example, the deity of Izuyama in the Izu peninsula southwest of Tokyo, called in medieval sources Sōtōsen, includes two dragons, one red and one white (i.e. one female and one male) living underneath the mountain Higanesan (present-day Jikkoku Pass), who are the source of the hot springs in the area, but also the cause of earthquakes because of their movements when they are particularly happy or angry. Significantly, medieval sources report that the ‘true name’ of Mt Higane is in fact Mt Kujira, thus establishing a connection between dragons and whales—both deep-sea creatures, but with the whale being much closer to local life and traditions.37 Another instance is the shrine-island of Chikubu (Chikubushima), in Lake Biwa. Chikubu shrine claimed that it was the Japanese manifestation/ 34 35 36

37

From Donald Keene, ed., Anthology of Japanese Literature from the Earliest Era to the Mid Nineteenth-Century. New York: Grove Press, 1981 (original edition 1955), p. 199. Michele Marra, The Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in Medieval Japanese Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1991, p. 84. For a general overview of premodern Japanese attitudes toward the intersections between religion and destruction, see Fabio Rambelli and Eric Reinders, Buddhism and Iconoclasm in East Asia: A History. London: Bloomsbury, 2012, and especially Fabio Rambelli, ‘Iconoclasm and Religious Violence in Japan: Practices and Rationalizations’, in Ibid., pp. 47–88. Sōtōzan engi (dating perhaps to the end of the Heian period), in Shintō taikei, Jinja-hen vol. 21 (Mishima, Hakone, Izuyama), pp. 349–370; citation on p. 364.

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localization­of Mt Sumeru, the centre of the human world system in Buddhist cosmography. At the same time, the island also functioned as a keystone (kanameishi) anchoring Japan and the surface of the entire earth to the metal mass (konrinzai) located underneath it; in this way, the shrine was able to prevent earthquakes caused by the movements of divine entities living at the bottom of the ocean (and of Lake Biwa).38 A similar set of associations, combining the Buddhist earthquake discourse outlined above with local myths, also took root at Kashima Shrine in Kantō. The main deity of this shrine, Kashima Daimyōjin, had the power, it was said, to prevent earthquakes by virtue of a sacred keystone (kanameishi), placed in the shrine precincts, which was stuck on the head of a great dragon surrounding Japan and the main cause of earthquakes. A stunning document that indicates the extent of this trend towards the vernacularization of Buddhist cosmology in Japan, especially in relation to earthquakes, is a map entitled Dainipponkoku jishin no zu (Map of the earthquakes in the great land of Japan), dated 1624 (first year of the Kan’ei era).39 This map is quite unique in that it brings together several elements: a map of Japan in the so-called Gyōki style,40 with a huge serpent/dragon located in the sea surrounding the country; the tail of the serpent, situated precisely in correspondence to its head—thus forming an ouroboros, a snake forming a circle with its body—is located in the Kashima area of Japan; a keystone (kanameishi) is stuck in the forehead of the dragon as a way to keep it from moving. The map also contains information about the population of Japan, neighbouring foreign countries, and types of earthquakes classified according to the month in which they occur. Here again we find four agents: Agni (the fire god), dragons, Indra, and Konjin. The latter, whose name means, literally, ‘gold god’, is the deity of the inauspicious northeastern direction; it would become the main god of Konkōkyō, a new religious cult that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.41 38

39 40

41

For an outline of the Buddhist cosmography as it was known in medieval and early modern Japan, see Sadaka Akira, Buddhist Cosmology: Philosophy and Origins. Tokyo: Kosei Publishing, 1997. On Chikubu shrine, see Andrew M. Watsky, Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. My treatment of this map is largely indebted to Kuroda Hideo, Ryū no sumu Nihon. Tokyo: Iwanami, 2003, especially pp. 174–197. On this type of medieval Japanese map, see Kuroda, Ryū no sumu Nihon, pp. 13–52; Lucia Dolce, ‘Mapping the ‘Divine Country’: Sacred Geography and International Concerns in Mediaeval Japan’, in Remco E. Breuker ed., Korea in the Middle, Leiden: cnws Publications, 2007, pp. 288–312. It is possible that Garuda, the mythical bird that is normally listed among the agents of earthquakes, known in Japanese as Kinjichō, a being that never played a major role in

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The map also tells us important information on the beast surrounding Japan, called uo or ‘fish’ in the text. On the top right corner of the map, it is written: ‘This fish is called daitōren, hōtōgyo, and also makasatsugyo’. This list of items is quite interesting, because in premodern Japan dragons were not normally considered fish, but rather as belonging to the category of insectsreptiles;42 indeed, similar maps of Japan to the one in discussion have, instead of a fish-dragon, a sort of centipede (mukade), called jishin mushi (earthquake insect).43 In that list, daitōren is the name of a famous sword; hōtōgyo, lit. ‘precious sword fish’, likely refers to the dragon itself (the dragon’s tail is a sword);44 and makasatsugyo seems to be a mistake for makatsugyo, a modified form of the Sino-Japanese transliteration of the Sanskrit term makara. Makara is a water being in Indian and Buddhist mythology, something between a dolphin (or a large fish) and a crocodile; in Japan, it was sometime associated with whales and any giant sea creature. The description of the serpent in this map records a set of associations between dragons/serpents, swords, and giant marine creatures. In this way, the nāgas of Indian mythology (which, as we have seen, were considered the primary cause of earthquakes in premodern Japan) came to be transformed into fishes through the mediation of the Indian makara. In this process, other mythical creatures living at the bottom of the earth, such as the turtle believed to support Mt Sumeru, may have also played a more or less indirect role. This transformation of dragons into fish further continued when, around the mid-nineteenth century, the earthquake-causing beast came to take the more familiar shape of the catfish (namazu),45 thus sanctioning the definitive vernacularization and localization of Buddhist imagery in a way that almost completely erased its Indic origin. This transformation 42

43

44 45

Japanese religion and mythology, came to be replaced by the god Konjin, more familiar and influential (and whose name begins with the same character, read kin or kon, ‘gold’.) We should note, however, that a medieval Buddhist encyclopedia, the Keiran shūyōshū, compiled by the Tendai priest Jiganbō Kōshū in 1318, in its discussion of the meaning of the term ryū (dragon, serpent or snake), includes ‘fish-dragons’; the author glosses thus: ‘I think that dragons in lakes and in the sea are perhaps called fish-dragons’; Keiran shūyōshū, in T. 76, n. 2410: p. 627a. I am grateful to Anna Andreeva for alerting me to the ‘earthquake insect’; on this elusive animal, see Cornelius Ouwehand, Namazu-e and Their Themes: An Interpretative Approach to Some Aspects of Japanese Folk Religion. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1964, pp. 37–39. See also Anna Andreeva, ‘The “Earthquake Insect”: Conceptualising Disasters in Pre-modern Japan’. In Monica Juneja and Gerrit Jasper Schenk, eds., Disaster as Image: Iconographies and Media Strategies across Europe and Asia, Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2014, pp. 81–90. Kuroda Hideo, Ryū no sumu Nihon, p. 175. On legends concerning the namazu catfish, see Ouwehand, Namazu-e, pp. 72–79.

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may not be unrelated to the strange behaviour of catfish observed by Japanese fishermen before the Ansei era earthquake (1855), which definitively sanctioned the imagery associating the catfish with earthquakes.46 It is worth noticing that Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716), in his account of Japan based on his visit in the late seventeenth century, mentions the belief that earthquakes are caused by a giant whale47—which, in contemporary iconography, was hardly distinguishable from giant catfish. In addition, we should note that the map also sanctions the connection between the earthquake-causing beast and Kashima Shrine, represented in visual form by the sword (in the tail of the beast) and the keystone, both powerful symbols associated with Kashima Daimyōjin. This association is further made explicit in textual form by the inclusion of the following poem:48 Yurugu to mo yomoya nukeji no kanameishi Kashima no kami no aran kagiri wa No matter how much it shakes this keystone will never come out As long as the god of Kashima is present Kuroda Hideo has shown that this poem is a variant of a magic song recorded in 1596 after an earthquake in Kyoto.49 Ouwehand also mentions a form of divination known as Kashima no kotobure (proclamations from the Kashima god) during the Kan’ei era (1622–44), when in the occurrence of earthquakes and epidemics, people associated with Kashima Shrine began to travel the country carrying a palanquin (mikoshi) of Kashima Daimyōjin to pacify the anger of the god.50 However, the connections between the god of Kashima and the magic keystone date back at least to the late thirteenth century. The Azuma kagami, a history narrative written after 1266, mentions Kashima Daimyōjin’s intervention in a battle between the Minamoto and the Taira, on the side of the former; the god is attributed with causing an earthquake that was felt simultaneously 46 47 48 49

50

Fishermen also observed this phenomenon prior to the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923; see Ouwehand, Namazu-e 1964, p. 56. Ibid., p. 109. As transcribed in Kuroda, Ryū no sumu Nihon, p. 174. The text of the 1596 version is slightly different: ‘Yurugu to mo yomoya nukeji to kanameishi no/ Kashima no kami no arankagiri wa’, but the English translation is essentially the same. It appears in a courtier’s diary entitled Tokitsune kyō ki, entry for Monroku 5 [1596] intercalary seventh month, 15th day; quoted in Kuroda, Ryū no sumu Nihon, p. 187. Ouwehand, Namazu-e, p. 77 n. 2.

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in Kyoto and Kamakura.51 This is one of the first indications that connect the god of Kashima with earthquakes, and in particular, its power to prevent and control them: even though in this passage the deity provokes an earthquake to signal its participation in battle, it was later associated with its power to subdue earthquake-causing dragons (in turn, related to the Taira warriors) located at the bottom of the ocean off the coasts of Japan. A commentary to the Man’yōshū written in 1366 by the monk Yūa 由阿 and entitled Shirin saiyōshō 詞林采葉抄 mentions a stone in Kashima Shrine, which is the abode of the god, that springs forth from the metal portion of our world system (konrinzai); by anchoring Japan to the solid metal mass located underground, the keystone prevents the country from moving during earthquakes.52 About a decade later, in 1377, the monk Shōgei mentions in his Kashima mondō the existence at Kashima Shrine of a ‘shaking pole’ (yurugu kui) that cannot be pulled out from the soil.53 Another text, probably composed a few decades earlier in the late Kamakura period (early fourteenth century), the Kashima gūsha reidenki 鹿島宮社例伝記, mentions a stone located at the far end of the Oku no In of Kashima Shrine, called by the people a ‘keystone’ (kanameishi), which is connected to the metal layer of the world (konrinzai); this is the abode of Kashima Daimyōjin when he descends to this world. The text suggests that this stone is similar to the agate (menō) throne of the Buddha under the bodhi tree where he attained enlightenment, to the agate stone placed under the statue of Kannon at Hasedera in Yamato, but also to the keystone at Chikubushima.54 The keystone at Kashima is a small circular stone, with a diameter of approximately 25 cm, protruding for 10–15 cm above the ground;55 similar stones also exist in other parts of Japan, where they are considered phallic symbols, foundation stones, or abodes of the kami.56 In any case, the attribution of earthquakes to the movements of a giant catfish, and the latter associations with Kashima Daimyōjin, are the results of a long and complex historical process, involving Indian Buddhist theories about 51

Azuma kagami, Juei 3 (1184) first month, 23rd day. Online text at: http://www5a.biglobe .ne.jp/~micro-8/toshio/azuma/118401.html (last checked on 25 May 2014). 52 Quoted in Kuroda, Ryū no sumu Nihon, p. 195. 53 Quoted in Kuroda, Ryū no sumu Nihon, pp. 195–196. Kashima mondō, by Shōgei, in Zoku Gunsho ruijū vol. 33, tome 2. Abridged version in Shintō taikei, Jinja-hen vol. 22 (Katori, Kashima), pp. 505–509. 54 Quoted in Kuroda, Ryū no sumu Nihon, p. 197. Kashima gūsha reidenki, in Zoku Gunsho ruijū vol. 3, tome 2. 55 Ouwehand, Namazue, p. 67; see also Kashima Shrine’s website at http://www.kashimajingu .jp/wp/keidai/keidai08 (last checked on 17 May 2013). 56 Ouwehand, Namazu-e, pp. 69–70.

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earthquakes, legends at Kashima associating the local god to fire, a divine sword, and a magic stone (and these legends may have been local appropriations of analogous symbols circulating at least since the eighth century in the NaraKyoto region). Cornelius Ouwehand, the author of what is still the most thorough study of the earthquake-causing catfish and its visual representations in the late Edo period (woodblock prints called namazue, ‘images of the catfish’), tried to disentangle the complex set of elements at play. Among them, we could mention that the origin of Kashima Daimyōjin is not clear; it could have been either a local god from the Hitachi area prior to the Yamato conquest and later assimilated within the Yamato pantheon, or a god brought to Hitachi by the Yamato conquerors and subsequently localized. Ouwehand suggests that a local Kashima god may have been nationalized by the Yamato invaders and later identified with one of the gods in their pantheon, the lightning god Takemikazuchi. Ancient myths report that Takemikazuchi once went to Izumo and planted his sword in the ground there as a sign of conquest. Now, Takemikazuchi is also associated with Kagutsuchi, the fire god who killed his mother Izanagi and was slain by his father Izanami. The god Takemikazuchi is also worshipped at another ancient sacred site, Isonokami shrine in Nara prefecture, where the worship of Takemikazuchi’s sword is associated with the cult of a divine stone (the term isonokami seems to be a variant of ishi no kami, ‘stone god’). The same symbolic complex, connecting lightning/ fire, a sword and a stone, can also be found at Kashima Shrine.57 And as we have already seen, this divine sword was in turn envisioned as an object protruding from the metal layer of the world (konrinzai), and thus functioning as an anchor for the surface of the world and for Japan in particular. Between the 23rd day of the twelfth month of 1854 (Ansei 1) and the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1855 (Ansei 2), three major earthquakes shook the central-eastern part of Japan (and especially the Kantō region), causing several thousands of victims and huge damages. Immediately afterwards, woodblock prints attributing the earthquake to a giant catfish that had set itself free from the sacred keystone of Kashima Shrine, thus eluding Kashima Daimyōjin’s surveillance, began to circulate in large numbers. These prints are known as namazue (pictures of the catfish) and constitute one of the most significant aspects of the visual culture towards the end of the Tokugawa period.58 The namazue develop the theme of the connection between earthquakes and the sacred in several different directions, including propitiation 57 See Ouwehand, Namazu-e, especially pp. 57–67. 58 On namazue, see also Gregory Smits, ‘Conduits of Power: What the Origins of Japan’s Earthquake Catfish Reveal about Religious Geography’, Japan Review 24 (2012), pp. 41–65.

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and transgression (bordering on blasphemy), all with a good dose of humour. Many prints describe the cause of the earthquake in the following way. The giant catfish is responsible for earthquakes, which occur when it moves in his location at the bottom of the sea in proximity with the coast of Japan. The god of Kashima immobilizes the catfish with the keystone (kanameishi). However, in the tenth month of every year the god is absent (during that month all the kami of Japan are believed to gather in Izumo), the catfish is able to move and shake the earth. The namazue also attempt to explain the reasons why the catfish decided to provoke such a terrible earthquake. Some associate it with the arrival of westerners to Japan. Commodore Perry had arrived in Edo in 1853 and had quickly become the catalyst of momentous changes that would ultimately result in the collapse of the Tokugawa regime and the Meiji Reformation. Popular rumours, echoed in the texts printed on some namazue, suggested that the catfish wanted to strike North America but instead hit Japan by mistake.59 Many more prints, however, propose a very different explanation. They suggest that the catfish provoked the earthquake to punish people, and explicitly the rich (kanemochi), for their excesses and sins. The authors of these prints and their texts were thus appropriating the popular Confucian rhetoric about Heavenly punishment being meted out upon bad government and bad individuals and directed it instead to class enemies (the rich), by mobilizing the folk theme of the catfish which, as we have seen, is the result and conglomeration of many religious and intellectual themes and images dating back to the middle ages if not before. The fear of the catfish prompted some authors to print namazue with a talismanic function showing the catfish being subjugated by the god of Kashima and promising to stay still; other prints show people paying obeisance to the keystone (and thus to the namazu). Yet, other images still choose irony to deal with the catfish. One such print shows the namazu as Fudō Myōō and calls it Kudō Myōō, with a pun on Fudō (the Unmovable one) turning into Kudō (the painfully moving one);60 another has the catfish in the guise of folk warrior hero Bankei, with his weapons transformed into the tools of carpenters, masons, firemen and other professionals.61 In the namazue, however, the catfish is not only a punisher and a destroyer, but also a benefactor. In Ouwehand’s words, it is the ‘avenger of social and economic abuses in the contemporary social order of the capital’;62 by 59 Ouwehand, Namazu-e, p. 20. 60 See for instance the print entitled ‘Shutsugen Kudō Myōō’, in Ibid., pp. 141–142. 61 See the print entitled ‘Namazu Bankei’, in Ibid., pp. 171–172. 62 Ibid., p. 80.

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destroying buildings, the catfish opens up new job opportunities for carpenters and other artisans. This role is particularly evident in the print of a catfish surrounded by gold coins and tools of carpenters and bricklayers. The catfish also plays a ‘preventive and protective function’63—or, to be more precise, it embodies a utopian vision, as is clear from its connection to the treasure ship (takarabune). Takarabune is a very popular and important theme of Edo period religiosity. This ship, sometimes carrying the seven gods of good fortune (shichifukujin),64 was believed to arrive to Japan on the new year from the other world (the realm known as Tokoyo) bringing wealth and fortune; it would then leave Japan loaded with the pollution and evil accumulated during the year that had just ended. It may not be irrelevant to note here that the Hitachi no kuni fudoki already identifies Hitachi province, and particularly the Kashima area, with Tokoyo.65 Furthermore, the takarabune image combines elements of premodern mythology and religion: the image of the outside as a distant land (Tokoyo), source of wealth and destination of pollution; the travelling god Sukunabikona, sometimes endowed with the features of a cultural hero; and the god of wealth and prosperity Ebisu (often associated with the whale),66 as a transformation of Hiruko (the leech child), which in turn might be one of the prototypes of the divinized catfish.67 We can see here a complex of themes, developing a popular utopia of wealth, prosperity and amusement as the result of a natural disaster triggering a radical transformation of society according to the image of yonaoshi (literally, a ‘rectification of society’) common to many religious movements and popular protests of the time. Coda In premodern Japan, natural disasters were not always seen as divine punishment; scientific explanations of various kinds were also available. Even divine punishment was not a single concept, but rather one component of a plurality of discourses, not always connected to authority and ruling elites but sometimes mobilized by individuals and social groups to express political 63 Ibid., pp. 81, 22, 23. 64 On shichifukujin, see Komatsu Kazuhiko, Fuku no kami to binbōgami. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1998. 65 See Michiko Y. Aoki, trans., Records of Wind and Earth. Ann Arbor, Mi.: Association for Asian Studies, 1997, p. 38. 66 On this association, see Nakazawa Shin’ichi, ‘Marveilleuse halieutique baleiniere japonaise d’antan!’ in Versus. Quaderni di studi semiotici 83/84, May-December 1999, pp. 145–164. 67 Ouwehand, Namazu-e, p. 83.

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discontent. Particularly in the case of the namazue, people appropriated the imagery of natural disaster and divine intervention and punishment to promote representations of a different, better society. Today, the very idea that natural disasters—no matter how significant their human component—are collective ‘punishments’ meted out by some deity upon harmless people smacks of obscurantism and is morally repugnant. It is certainly not a constructive way to promote a different society with better relations with nature. Besides, now it might be already too late to re-enchant nature and the world, especially if that involves reviving traditions that have been dead for centuries. In this sense, at least, it seems highly unrealistic to be able to re-envision mountain gods, sea serpents and the earthquake bug as objects of religious awe. Rearticulating the human relations with the environment requires certainly a new wisdom (some elements of which may be retrieved from old ideas and practices) but also new technologies—or, at least, a different attitude towards technology that is not merely negative and dismissive. A promising path could be opened up by a revision and re-actualization of the visions of some of the most original thinkers of the Tokugawa period, most notably Ninomiya Sontoku (1787–1856), Andō Shōeki (1703–1762) and Kaibara Ekken (1630–1714)—authors who showed a deep sense of respect for the workings of nature but did not succumb to the temptation to idolize it. They were not the only ones to display a secularized attitude. Already by the late Edo period the sacred—at least some forms of it—could be experienced only through its desacralization—to borrow Michael Taussig’s felicitous expression,68 as we have seen in the case of catfish challenging the god of Kashima in order to bring about a radical social transformation. This desacralizing movement still continues in Japan. Perhaps, a representative and influential instance of contemporary resurfacing of the sacred through desacralization can be found in the Godzilla movie series. While Godzilla may be related to very old stories about the ambivalent and unfathomable nature of deities and the dangerous power hidden in the invisible parts of the world (the bottom of the sea, beyond the mountains, under the earth, in the air…), the monster is the product of technology gone awry (nuclear energy) and keeps coming back, haunting Japan for generations. The message of the Godzilla movies, however, is not one of doom but of resilience, and Godzilla itself is a mere technological accident that needs to be contained and sent back to the depth and obscurity where it belongs—not a god or a demon who manifests itself on earth to forewarn and punish humans for their hubris. 68

See Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Chapter 3

Buddhism

The Perfect Religion for Disasters? Brian Victoria

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

Introduction In seeking to answer the question posed by the title of this chapter, the first thing that comes to mind is exactly what would constitute a ‘perfect religion’ for disasters? What would its tenets be? What would the standards be for it to be judged either ‘perfect’ or ‘imperfect’? Further, perfect or imperfect for whom, i.e. for those who were the victims of a disaster, or those who merely observed a disaster, or both? Needless to say, there are no easy answers to these questions. Yet, most observers would agree that, at the very least, any religion claiming to be ‘perfect’ for disasters of whatever type must address, in one way or another, the most salient characteristic of disasters, i.e. the immense suffering they cause their victims. It is in its ability to address this key component of disasters that Buddhism may be said to be the perfect religion for disasters. Why? Unlike other major world religions, Buddhism begins with the fundamental assertion that far from being an anomaly or aberration, ‘suffering’ in its many forms lies at the very heart of the human condition. This assertion is expressed in Buddhism’s basic teachings, i.e. the Four Noble Truths, as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Life means suffering. The origin of suffering is attachment. The cessation of suffering is attainable. The path to the cessation of suffering.

In Buddhism the cause of suffering is seen as stemming from attachment, i.e. attachment to transient things and the ignorance thereof. Transient things include not only the physical objects that surround us, but also ideas, and in a greater sense all objects of our perception. Ignorance is understood as the lack of understanding of how our mind is attached to impermanent things. The reasons for suffering are desire, passion, ardour, pursuit of wealth and prestige, striving for fame and popularity, or in short: craving and clinging. Because the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004268319_005

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objects of our attachment are transient, their loss is inevitable, thus suffering will necessarily follow. Objects of attachment also include what might be called the most delusional idea of all, i.e. that each one of us possesses something that can be called an enduring if not eternal ‘self’. Buddhism, on the contrary, claims there is no abiding self, for what we call ‘self’ is just an imagined entity. In reality, we are merely a very small part of the ceaseless becoming of the universe. Although these claims make Buddhism appear to be a very pessimistic, if not nihilistic, religion, such is not the case, for at the same time it offers a way, or path, to end suffering. Nevertheless Buddhism stresses that suffering, leading sooner or later to death, is an inevitable part of the human condition. Thus when disasters occur, they are not seen as something new, or even avoidable, but rather as further proof of the inevitability of suffering based on the fundamental Buddhist insight that all things, including the self, are destined to perish, i.e. they are impermanent. Yet, Buddhism has an additional mechanism to explain the suffering that typically accompanies disasters and misfortunes of all kinds. This mechanism is of great antiquity and claims, at least at the popular level, that it is due to the workings of karma (Pali, kamma) that we become victims of both natural and human-made disasters. That is to say, it is the victims’ own past misdeeds, not only during this life but also from previous lives, that bring misfortune on themselves. As ancient as this popular understanding may be, it is also readily invoked in the modern world. For example, at a press conference held in the immediate aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 11 March 2011, a reporter asked Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintarō how the Japanese people should view the quake? Ishihara replied: The identity of the Japanese people is greed. This tsunami represents a good opportunity to cleanse this greed (J. gayoku), and one we must avail ourselves of. Indeed, I think this is divine punishment (J. tenbatsu).… It may be harsh for the victims to hear, but I want you to take it down and report it.1 The underlying viewpoint expressed by Ishihara is similar to that expressed by Tomomatsu Entai (1895–1973), a noted Pure Land sect scholar-priest. Entai’s comments were contained in an eighty-two-page booklet published on 1 Asahi Shimbun, 14 March 2011.

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25 December 1941, only days after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Entitled A Reader for Bereaved Families (Izoku Tokuhon), the booklet portrays a soldier’s death on the battlefield during the Asia-Pacific War as what might be termed a somewhat ‘softer version’ of karmic recompense: There are those who say that it is no more than chance that someone dies on the battlefield, or becomes a widow early in life, or becomes an orphan without having seen their father’s face. However, there is not so much as a single bullet flying from the enemy that happens by chance. It is definitely the work of karma, for it is karma that makes it strike home.… Your husband died because of his karma.… It was the inevitability of karma that caused your husband’s death. In other words, your husband was only meant to live for as long as he did. In those bereaved that have recovered their composure, one sees the realization that their husband’s death was due to the consistent working of karma. No one was to blame [for his death] nor was anyone in the wrong. No one bears responsibility for what happened, for it was simply his karma to die.2 Here not only is the soldier victim held responsible for his own death, but all of the soldier’s superiors, whether military or civilian, who initiated the war in the first place are conveniently absolved from any culpability whatsoever. Even Japan’s eventual defeat was ascribed to karmic recompense due to the lack of true selfless dedication to the state on the part of Japan’s wartime leaders. Thus, one month after Japan’s surrender, on 15 September 1945, Sōtō Zen scholar-priest Masanaga Reihō wrote: The cause of Japan’s defeat…was that within our country there were not sufficient capable men who could direct the war by truly giving it their all…That is to say, we lacked individuals who, having transcended selfinterest, were able to employ the power of a life based on moral principles…It is religion and education that have the responsibility to develop such individuals.3 Yet, it is important to note that these modern usages of karmic recompense have deep roots in Japanese Buddhist history. For example, in 1260, when Japan faced a series of calamities at home and the threat of Mongol invasion 2 Quoted in Brian Victoria, Zen War Stories (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), p. 159. 3 Quoted in Brian Victoria, Zen at War, 2nd edition (Boulder, co: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), p. 160.

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from abroad, Nichiren (1222–1282), founder of the sect that bears his name, submitted his famous Risshō-ankoku-ron (Treatise on Pacifying the Country through the Establishment of True [Buddhism]) to Japan’s warrior rulers in Kamakura. The first dialogue in his treatise contained the following passage: The people of today all turn their backs upon what is right; they give their allegiance to evil. That is the reason why the benevolent deities have abandoned the nation, why sages leave and do not return, and in their stead come devils and demons, disasters and calamities that arise one after another.4 In short, what Ishihara, Tomomatsu and Nichiren were saying is that, with all the ills that befall human beings, it is their past misconduct that returns to them in the form of karmic retribution. In other words, they had it coming, for the doctrine of karma ensures that all are punished for their evil deeds just as they are rewarded for their acts of good. Thus, natural disasters are but one expression or manifestation of this moral accounting system. Should this seem to be a pessimistic or even fatalistic view, it is not, for like the leaders of many religions, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike, Nichiren also claimed to know the way that society as a whole could escape from the karmic recompense of its past wrongdoings, i.e. through the acceptance of his teachings. In Nichiren’s case this meant exclusive devotion to the Lotus Sutra as the means of attaining enlightenment. Concretely, this devotion meant the frequent and repetitive chanting of the mantra: Nam(u)-Myōhō-Renge-Kyō (I take refuge in the Wonderful Law of the Lotus Sutra). On the one hand it is not surprising that Nichiren selected the Lotus Sutra as the sole object of devotion inasmuch as it is arguably one of the most famous and influential scriptures in all of Mahāyāna Buddhism. At the same time, however, it strongly reinforces the belief in the horrific karmic consequences awaiting those who fail to heed its dictates. As such it has historically been used to justify discrimination directed at those suffering from both physical and mental impairments on the basis that their suffering is due to their past transgressions. Specifically, this sutra ends as follows: Whoever in future ages shall receive and keep, read and recite this sutra, such persons will no longer be greedily attached to clothes, bed things, 4 The entirety of the Risshō-ankoku-ron can be read online at: http://nichiren.info/gosho/ RisshoAnkokuRon.htm. Accessed on 21 June 2013.

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drink, food and things for the support of life; whatever they wish will never be in vain, and in the present life they will obtain their blessed reward. Suppose anyone slights and slanders them, saying ‘You are only madmen, pursuing this course in vain with never a thing to be gained.’ The doom for such a sin as this is blindness generation after generation.…if anyone sees those who receive and keep this sutra, and proclaims their errors and sins, whether true or false, such a one in the present life will be smitten with leprosy. If he ridicules them, generation after generation his teeth will be sparse and missing, his lips vile, his nose flat, his hands and feet contorted, his eyes squint, his body stinking and filthy with evil scabs and bloody pus, dropsical and short of breath, and [with] every evil disease.5 In addition, Nichiren took pains to demonstrate there were numerous Mahāyāna sutras that specifically viewed natural disasters as a form of karmic retribution. To prove his point, he quoted passages from four of them, i.e. 1) Konkomyo Sutra, 2) Yakushi Sutra, 3) Ninno Sutra and 4) Daijuku Sutra. For example, in what is clearly a reference to an earthquake, the Daijuku Sutra states: When the teachings of the Buddha truly become obscured and lost, then people will all let their beards, hair and fingernails grow long, and the laws of the world will be forgotten and ignored. At that time, loud noises will sound in the air and the earth will shake; everything in the world will begin to move as though it were a waterwheel. City walls will split and tumble, and all houses and dwellings will collapse.6 Nor should it be thought that the above interpretations represent some uniquely Mahāyāna (let alone Japanese) aberration or misunderstanding of karma that can safely be understood (or dismissed) as a relic of Buddhism’s feudal past. The author vividly recalls a conversation he had with a senior Thai monk during the 2001 conference of the International Association of Buddhist Studies in Bangkok. I asked the Venerable, ‘Why don’t Thai Buddhist leaders speak out against the rampant sexual slavery imposed on children in Bangkok and other Thai cities?’ He replied, ‘You must understand that these girls did something evil in their past lives, perhaps committing adultery. That is why 5 Bunno Kato. The Threefold Lotus Sutra (Tokyo: Kosei, 1989), p. 343. 6 Quoted in Risshō-ankoku-ron. Available online at: http://nichiren.info/gosho/ RisshoAnkokuRon.htm. Accessed on 21 June 2013.

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they ended up as prostitutes in this life. Of course, there is hope for them in their future lives’. As the preceding examples demonstrate, the popular Buddhist position, past and present, with regard to disasters, large and small, not to mention all kinds of misfortune, is that they are the result of karmic retribution for such things as human greed, heretical practices and beliefs, etc. Yet the question must be asked, in the contemporary era, in which the workings of plate tectonics are understood as the cause of earthquakes, and global warming is regarded as the cause of increasingly severe weather events, can this traditional Buddhist explanation of all kinds of disasters be considered the perfect religion for our age? In seeking to answer this question it may be helpful to examine how the world’s other major faiths address this same question. That is to say, how do they view the victims of natural disasters? Do they also seek to stigmatize the victims, i.e. place moral blame on the victims for their misfortune?

Christian Viewpoints

The basic problem facing Christians is how to make sense of natural disasters that happen on the watch of a God who is believed to be both beneficent (a God of love) and all-powerful. In addition, the Bible teaches that God can, if He so chooses, intervene directly into the physical world, e.g. parting the Red Sea, raising the dead, etc. In short, as Tom Krattenmaker recently noted in usa today, the basic problem Christians face is this: ‘God is all good. God is all-powerful. Evil and tragedy happen. Pick two, as the saying goes, but all three of those postulations can’t possibly be true’.7

Protestant Viewpoints

However, there is no religion that is built on purely logical propositions. Thus, both Protestant and Catholic religious leaders believe they know how to explain natural disasters. For example, Pastor John Hagee, an influential televangelist, claimed to know the cause of the devastating hurricane that struck New Orleans in late August 2005. ‘Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the 7 usa Today, 21 May 2013.

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judgment of God against…New Orleans’. The city, he continued, ‘had a level of sin that was offensive to God’ because ‘there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that Katrina came. What happened in New Orleans looked like the curse of God.… It was a city that was planning a sinful conduct’.8 Evangelical Christian leader Pat Robertson embraced a similar theological stance with regard to an earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010. Robertson, the host of the widely watched ‘700 Club’, claimed that the country had made a ‘pact to the devil’. He blamed the tragedy on something that ‘happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it’. The Haitians ‘were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon iii and whatever’, Robertson said. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ Native Haitians fought and defeated the French colonists in 1804, and declared independence. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other. Robertson has previously linked natural disasters and terrorist attacks to legalized abortion in the United States. Soon after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, killing more than 1800 and wreaking unprecedented devastation on New Orleans, Robertson weighed in with his own theory as to the cause. ‘We have killed over 40 million unborn babies in America’, Robertson said on his 12 September 2005 broadcast of the ‘700 Club’.9

A Roman Catholic Viewpoint

Roman Catholics are no more immune to ‘God as punisher’ than their Protestant counterparts. For example, Austrian priest Gerhard Wagner, fiftyfour, also claimed that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for the homosexual sins of New Orleans. Although Rev Wagner’s remarks would prove controversial he was nevertheless quoted in his local parish newsletter as saying that the death and destruction of Hurricane Katrina was ‘divine retribution’ for New Orleans’ tolerance of homosexuals and laid-back sexual attitudes.

8 Los Angeles Times, 26 April 2008. 9 cnn, 13 January 2010.

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Despite the controversy his remarks provoked, the Vatican subsequently decided to make Wagner a bishop.10 Inasmuch as Christianity is a religion active throughout the world, it is impossible to equate the few responses quoted above, either Protestant or Catholic, as adequately representing the wide spectrum of thinking in that faith about the relationship of God to natural disasters. Nevertheless, it is instructive to learn that in one of the world’s major Christian countries, i.e. the us, the belief that God is involved in natural disasters maintains a strong hold on the population. According to a 24 March 2011 poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with Religion News Service, a week after the 11 March 2011 disaster in Japan, nearly six in ten evangelicals (59%) believed that God could use natural disasters to send messages. Fully a third of mainline Protestants (34%) and nearly one third of Catholics (31%) agreed. Further, 53% of evangelicals believed that God punished nations for the sins of some citizens though only one in five Catholics and mainline Protestants agreed. Overall, a majority (56%) of Americans believed that God is in control of the world, with 38% subscribed to the idea that God employs Mother Nature to dispense judgment and 29% agreeing to the proposition that God punishes entire nations for the sins of a few. The poll also found that most racial and ethnic minority Christians (61%) in the us believed that natural disasters are God’s way of testing one’s faith – an idea that had particular resonance for African Americans given their history of surviving slavery and racial discrimination. More significantly, nearly half of all Americans (44%) said the increased severity of recent natural disasters is evidence that the biblical ‘end times’ is drawing near. This means that nearly half of all Americans actually welcome the increase in natural disasters as proof that the long-awaited second coming of Christ is near at hand. Thus, for them additional preventive measures to counter natural disasters are not only meaningless in the face of God’s plan, but actually hinder the redemption of the world, or at least its Christian inhabitants. Needless to say, this attitude also precludes taking effective measures to counter global warming as equally fruitless and running counter to God’s plan.

Jewish Viewpoints

Inasmuch as Judaism is the original Abrahamic faith, it should not be surprising to learn that in spite of the same logical dilemma faced by Christians, 10

Mail Online, 2 February 2009. Access available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/ sitemaparchive/index.html.

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Jewish adherents also embrace the idea that God can, if He chooses, intervene in the natural world. For example, in December of every year Jews typically recite the following prayer, entitled ‘Year of Prosperity’: ‘Bless on our behalf – O HASHEM, Our God – this year and all of its kinds of crops for the best, and give (dew and rain for) a blessing on the face of the earth, and satisfy us from Your bounty, and bless our year like the best years. Blessed are You, HASHEM, Who blesses the years’. Building on this understanding of a God who can intervene in nature, Shas spiritual leader and former Israeli Chief Sephardic Rabbi Ovadia Yosef stated: There was a tsunami and there are terrible natural disasters, because there isn’t enough Torah study.… Black people reside there [in New Orleans]. Blacks will study the Torah? [God said], Let’s bring a tsunami and drown them.… Hundreds of thousands remained homeless. Tens of thousands have been killed. All of this because they have no God.… Bush was behind the [expulsion of] Gush Katif, he encouraged Sharon to expel Gush Katif [from Gaza].… We had 15,000 people expelled here [in Israel], and there [in America] 150,000 [were expelled]. It was God’s retribution. God does not short-change anyone.11

A Muslim Viewpoint

Chronologically, Islam is the third of the great Abrahamic faiths. For all the many doctrinal differences among these faiths, the belief in an all-powerful God who can intervene in nature is universal to them all. Hence, Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi, a senior Iranian cleric, claimed that dolled-up women incite extramarital sex, causing more earthquakes in Iran. ‘Many women who dress inappropriately…cause youths to go astray, taint their chastity and incite extramarital sex in society which increases earthquakes. Calamities are the result of people’s deeds. We have no way but conform to Islam to ward off dangers’.12

Hindu Viewpoints

While clearly not an Abrahamic faith, Hinduism, too, shares the same general belief in a deity or deities who can intervene in the physical world both to punish­ 11 12

Ynetnews.com, 5 July 2009. The Australian, 17 April 2010.

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people for their lack of spiritual practice while, at the same time, leading them to proper faith. According to the website of the ‘Forum for Hindu Awakening’, there has been a tremendous decline in the spiritual practice of human beings in recent times, with the result that much of humankind is Raja-Tama predominant, (i.e. self-centred and ignorant). This has led to an increase in the spiritual pollution of the environment, also contributing to an increase in natural disasters. In addition, His Holiness Gurudev Dr Kateswamiji of India said: ‘Though externally it seems like a disaster, why can it not be God’s plan to accelerate the spread of Dharma-related activities!’13

Taoist Viewpoints

Taoism, one of the world’s oldest extant religions, emerged from a rich shamanic tradition that has existed in China since the Ice Age. Shamans were healers and diviners who, it was believed, could travel to the sky, converse with animals and had knowledge of the use of plants. Shamans also claimed to have power over the elements, One of these shamans, King Fu Hsi, who lived circa 2800 BCE, was the first to construct a system by which the underlying structure of the universe could be expressed and understood. This system was the forerunner to the tri-grams of the I Ching – the Classic of Change – and an enduring tool of divination. Fu Hsi was followed by Yu in 2070 BCE, another shaman who was charged by his king, Shun, with the responsibility of saving the people from rising floodwaters. Guided, it is said, by an immortal, Yu not only prayed but also designed a system of dikes and canals that both saved the kingdom from disaster and led to its future prosperity. While Fu Hsi had earlier discovered the underlying structure of the universe, Yu revealed its nature of continuous flux. Yu was so highly esteemed that he became king upon Shun’s death. King Wen, who lived from 1100 BCE, took these two systems of divination and produced the sixty-four hexagrams of the modern I Ching. In the coming centuries, the powerful cities led by feudal kings began to compete with each other, swallowing each other up and growing until Ch’in triumphed over its rivals to unite the warring states as China. The famous Tao Te Ching, written by Lao Tzu (approx. sixth century BCE), represents the first philosophical work of Taoism and is, today, the second most translated book after the Bible. Chuang Tzu (369–286 BCE?) is another 13 Available on the Web at: http://forumforhinduawakening.org/articles/id/awakening misconceptions/why-natural-disasters. Accessed on 1 June 2013.

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great father of Taoism whose work, entitled Chuang Tzu, is similar to the wisdom of Lao Tzu but differs in important ways. For instance, whereas Lao Tzu’s sage involves himself fully in the affairs of state, the sage in Chuang Tzu will have nothing to do with politics and refuses all requests to take part in worldly affairs. For Chuang Tzu, the maintenance of spiritual integrity required that the sage retreat from a corrupt and chaotic world. When peace eventually came to China, Taoism continued to thrive and expand into a number of different schools and traditions. Travelling Taoist sages became a social class of their own and imparted their knowledge of divination, healing and health to the masses. On the one hand, the upper classes, happy with their life and wanting to make it last as long as possible, made use of the sage’s knowledge to ensure their longevity, while the poor were more interested in the magic required for guaranteeing successful crops and avoiding such natural disasters as storms. Over the past 1000 years, while some Taoist sects have come and gone, others have endured to the present day. Inasmuch as there is no such thing as heresy in Taoism, a disagreement within a particular sect would often see one or more followers leaving to start sects of their own. On the one hand, external alchemy, which attempted to discover a mineral compound to achieve immortality, faded away because of continued failure, not to mention the numerous fatal poisonings that occurred. Internal alchemy, however, flourished and became woven together with Confucian ethics and Buddhist values to create a synthesis that survives to this day. It is the philosophical Taoism of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu that has captured the imagination of the Western world while internal alchemical practices such as Tai Chi and Ch’i Kung are also widely practised. Nevertheless, the I Ching remains a tool for the practice of divination and is famed the world over. Further, Taoist ritual attempts to guarantee successful crops and prevent natural disasters remain an important part of this faith in its homeland.

Confucian Viewpoints

In the sixth century BCE, Confucius wrote down, for the first time, fourteen lengthy oral legends. The thirteenth book, the ‘Spring and Autumn Annals’ revealed how in his lifetime one disaster followed another, leading both to death by warfare and death by ‘acts of God’ (as modern insurance agents say). These disasters occurred especially in the Yellow River region, China’s ancient homeland. Confucius put the blame on power-hungry warlords, each

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of whom insisted they alone had the ‘Mandate of Heaven’, or more correctly, ‘Heaven (God) commands’ (Ch., tianming). For example, warlords typically put their own aggrandizement first before securing the levees that were so vital to an overwhelmingly peasant society. In the second century BCE, China finally became a great, unified empire, enjoying peace and prosperity. Its leader Wu Di (Warrior Emperor) was sixteen when he ascended the throne and reigned for fifty-nine years. Wu Di’s equally formidable prime minister, the philosopher Dong Zhongshu, made Confucianism the state creed, something that would last to 1911. But Dong was worried about the empire’s future. In his official memoirs he dictated: ‘Our Han Dynasty has ruled for three generations, but what do we have to show for it? We have strange disasters that keep changing, and we don’t know where they come from’. Dong, however, had a remedy for these ‘strange disasters’. ‘God and humans must become comrades with each other’, he explained and added: ‘God can be happy or angry and can grieve or rejoice. God aids people and gives them direction. God and humans are one’. The core of Dong’s creed was that only the Emperor receives the ‘Mandate of Heaven’. If the emperor obeys God’s commands then he and his imperial domains will enjoy peace and prosperity. If not, the emperor himself is responsible for terrible disasters that befall the empire. Whether Confucianism is a religion is still being debated in Western academic circles. In fact, it is an extension of a debate that began some five centuries ago when Westerners first arrived in China in large numbers. In the beginning the debate centred on the question of whether the Chinese even had something that could be called ‘religion’. Eventually the word chosen as a compromise in the Chinese language for the Western word ‘religion’ was the tepid phrase, ‘teachings of ancestors’ (Ch. zongjiao). Be that as it may, the historical record reveals that around the beginning of the second millennium, Chinese philosophers had turned Confucianism into a purely secular creed. Dong Zhongshu’s views, especially that ‘God and humans are One’, were put on the back burner. Yet, Confucius himself had sustained his income as a traditional priest and his very first book was about liturgical music. Be that as it may, for Confucians the root causes of natural disasters are the faults of the nation and its leader(s). Therefore, in order to restore the original harmony between God/Heaven and humans, Heaven commands humans to behave morally and guides them in their lives. Therefore, it is critical that humans follow the universal principles, for to do otherwise is to invite ever more serious natural disasters.

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Shinto Viewpoints

Moving to Japan, as early as the Heian period (794–1192) natural disasters, as well as epidemics, were regarded as being caused by spirits seeking revenge for having been mistreated in life. Shinto shrines thus became places where rites for the spirits of the dead were held in order to placate them. For instance, the Kamigoryo shrine in Kyoto became famous as one such shrine where these ceremonies were conducted. It gained the support of not only ordinary people but the royal court as well. The Imperial Family worshipped at the shrine, regarding its kami (god) as the guardian deity of the Imperial Palace. In return, the Imperial Family expressed its gratitude by making offerings of such things as portable shrines and ox carts. In general it can be said that in Shinto nature is infinitely more powerful than human beings. Natural disasters such as tsunami are the work of kami inasmuch as these spirits inhabit every part of nature. In that sense humans are at the mercy of nature though humans are protected by nature as well. In short, kami (of which there are many) do not consider humans to be the most important thing, i.e. humans are not the centre of the story. Rather, kami themselves are the most important though they nevertheless have many human characteristics, including self-centredness and the capability of causing misfortune if not treated properly. In Shinto there is no philosophical problem of suffering, only the need for undergoing regular spiritual cleansing rituals in the course of becoming unavoidably polluted by the happenings of daily life. Failure to undergo these cleansing rituals, together with disrespect of the traditional spiritual forces, can combine to bring calamities down on humans and have traditionally been understood as events resulting from incurring the kamis’ wrath. This Shinto-based belief in pollution has been extended, at least at the popular level, to include the victims of disasters who are regarded as having been ‘polluted’ by their experience. This held true for the irradiated survivors (known as hibakusha) of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and, as revealed in the following passage of the 3 April 2011 edition of Newsweek, it continues to provide a powerful justification for social discrimination: People living near the damaged reactor [at Fukushima Daiichi] have already begun to face discrimination. They have been barred from staying in inns outside Fukushima prefecture. Angry motorists in Tokyo and other cities have complained that Fukushima-plate-bearing cars were ‘contaminated’. Some Minamisoma citizens have sought treatment at medical clinics in cities beyond the buffer zone, only to be turned away

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because they didn’t have ‘radiation-free’ certificates.…children evacuated from Fukushima prefecture — especially from the exclusion and buffer zones — and sent to centres in Tokyo and other cities were now being singled out for rough treatment in elementary schools. Their classmates were shunning them and taunting them as being ‘irradiated’.… As Japan reckons with its latest nuclear tragedy, the suffering endured by the hibakushas still weighs heavy on the land.

The Root of Religious Responses: Shamanism

After an all too brief review, what is perhaps most surprising about the preceding explanations from the world’s major faiths is how similar they are, on the whole, in identifying some kind of moral fault in the victims of disasters as a causal factor. In short, the victims had it coming. In Buddhism this is reflected in the popular understanding of karma. This raises the question of how to account for such a similar attitude across so many otherwise disparate faiths? As already noted in the preceding description of Taoism, the answer lies in the common and ancient origin of not just Taoism but all faiths, i.e. shamanism. It is the thesis of this chapter that the roots of religious responses to natural disasters are to be found in shamanism, for shamanism originally developed as an attempt by human beings to intervene in nature to ensure such things as a successful hunt and plentiful food. That is to say, for tens of thousands of years shamans throughout the world have utilized magico-religious practices in an attempt to control the natural and spirit world for the benefit of tribal members. With the advent of agriculture, shamans focused on acquiring the magic necessary for guaranteeing a bountiful harvest coupled with the avoidance of such natural disasters as storms, droughts, etc. Thus, it can be said that shamanism lies in the background, or forms the basis, of all spiritual traditions on the planet. Its relevant characteristics are: 1. 2. 3.

Unseen supernatural power(s) are ultimately in control of natural events. Supernatural power(s) use natural events to either reward or punish individuals or groups according to what we now identify as the moral content of their actions. Shamans have the power to intercede with supernatural power(s) on behalf of their respective groups and/or determine the (moral) causes of disasters of all kinds.

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4.

Shamans also claim to know the specific way, through ritual praxis, moral strictures, etc. to prevent the reoccurrence of such disasters.

If, as claimed, the shamanistic worldview underlies all of the spiritual traditions on this planet, it should come as no surprise that contemporary religious leaders (as the descendants of shamans) claim to be able to impact, or at least ‘divine’, the significance of natural disasters, imparting a moral significance to them in accordance with their interpretation of the doctrines of their respective faiths. While shamanism per se appears to have now disappeared from much of the world, its recognizable remnants are closer than many realize. For example, in July 2012 the Obama administration warned that food supplies were at risk from the worsening drought afflicting more than half of the country and called on Congress to revive lapsed disaster aid programmes. Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, added that he was praying for rain. ‘I get on my knees every day, and I’m saying an extra prayer now’, Mr Vilsack told reporters at the White House after his discussions with Mr Obama. ‘If I had a rain prayer or rain dance I could do, I would do it’.14 On the one hand, it is not surprising that the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack would tell reporters that he was praying to an undoubtedly all-powerful Christian God who could, if He chose, intervene in nature to make it rain. But Vilsack did not stop there, for he added that he would even engage in a ‘rain dance’ [of a Native American medicine man/shaman] if he thought it would help. While Vilsack’s words were no doubt said half in jest, they nevertheless reveal that shamanistic thinking is much closer than most of us imagine or perhaps are willing to admit. This is not to mention the shamanistic thinking that has been integrated into all of the world’s major religions as seen above.

Critical Responses to the Shamanistic Roots of the World’s Major Religions

Critical Responses in Buddhism Despite the popular understanding of karmic retribution in Buddhism, something surprising if not unprecedented occurred in the aftermath of Tokyo Governor Ishihara remarks introduced above. That is to say, Ishihara was subject to such severe criticism, especially by the governors of the disaster-struck 14

New York Times, 18 July 2012.

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prefectures, that he was forced to hold a news conference the following day where he retracted his earlier statement: ‘I will take back my remark and offer a deep apology’, Ishihara said. Commenting on Ishihara’s apology, John Nelson, chairman of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco, explained that while the Governor’s remarks about divine retribution stemmed from long-held Japanese Buddhist ideas, they have, nevertheless, become unpopular of late.15 Additionally, while the Japanese, like many Asian Buddhists, have long embraced an understanding of karma as exemplified by Ishihara’s remarks, a good argument can be made that such views do not in fact represent actual Buddhist doctrine. On the contrary, according to Buddhist doctrine, karma refers only to the first of five rules or processes that cause effects of various kinds. The five processes are: 1) The positive or negative moral consequences of one’s actions; 2) Laws of nature; 3) Seasonal changes and climate; 4) Genetic inheritance; and 5) Processes of consciousness. Thus, despite its long popularity in Japan and elsewhere, it is not Buddhist teaching, at least in theory, to claim that natural events like earthquakes, tsunami, etc. are the result of human moral failures, i.e. their just karmic recompense. Nevertheless, Japanese Buddhist leaders, acting closely with the state, have long embraced this mistaken understanding of karma as a method of placing blame on the victims of various misfortunes, including societal injustice. As noted above, in so doing they absolve themselves from any responsibility or blame for the human component of such disasters and social injustice. For an example of Buddhism’s orthodox teaching on karma, the Ven. Dhammika, a Theravadan monk, wrote the following in an article in 2008 entitled: ‘Kamma [Karma] and Natural Disasters’: How does Buddhism explain natural disasters like a tsunami?.… The universe does not conform to our desires and wishes. It takes no notice of us and our aspirations. The earth’s tectonic plates move and sometimes they move in ways that cause destruction. It rains and sometimes it rains too much or not enough and causes distress to humans. There are such things as bacteria. Sometimes they get established in our system and cause us disease. We live in a dynamic universe and sometimes events are to our benefit and at other times to our detriment. That’s the way the world is. Buddhism is not concerned with explaining why this is so, it simply makes the common sense assertion that the universe is dukkha [suffering] – sometimes at odds with our dreams, our wishes and our 15

Global News @Sizly.com.

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desires. What Buddhism is concerned with is teaching us to modify our desires so we are less likely to be in conflict with the way things are and how to remain calm and content when they do conflict with the way things are.16 To some, the Buddhist assertion: ‘That’s the way the world is’ may seem a cold, even cruel, response to natural disasters since it appears to lead to an easy acceptance of their occurrence. Yet a Buddhist might reply, is it cold or cruel for a child to learn in the course of growing up that Santa Claus doesn’t really exist (apart from their caregivers)? In other words, isn’t it sometimes necessary to accept that some things, including our inevitable deaths, are indeed the way things are, and move on from there? In fact, couldn’t this realization lead us to treasure just that much more each moment of life we do have? Further, isn’t this understanding of disasters in full accord with a scientific understanding of the world we live in? In modern Shinto, at least at the academic level, we also see a growing acceptance of the idea that natural disasters are not polluting events but occur as simple acts of nature rather than as retribution of the kami.

Critical Responses in Christianity



Significantly, Critical Voices are not Limited to Buddhism or Shinto alone, for Protestant Leaders, too, are Advocating Alternative Views For example, Tom Krattenmaker, the Portland-based religious writer mentioned above, addressed as follows the question of how a vicious tornado can kill children when God is good: There is, alas, no good answer. Unless, that is, believers can arrive at a deeper understanding of God’s omnipotence. They won’t have to look far for clues. No farther than [tornado-struck] Moore, Okla., in fact, where flawed but generally good-hearted people are going about the tasks that people always go about after tragedy: tending to the injured, consoling the grief-stricken, and beginning the long work of rebuilding their devastated community.

16

Ven. Dhammika, ‘Kamma and Natural Disasters’, The Buddhist Channel, 1 June 2008. Available on the Web at: http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=8,6572,0,0,1,0. Accessed 28 November 2012.

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Christians believe that the people of the church are the hands and feet of God. It’s in this way that God intervenes and comforts in the darkest times. It’s in this way hope and goodness endure, no matter what. And it’s in this way that God, or love, or the transcendent, or whatever word you want to use for the ultimate, prove to be all good and all powerful, even in the face of evil.17 Clearly, for Krattenmaker there is no room for a God who exacts vengeance on human kind for their perceived moral shortcomings. Instead we find a God who still intervenes in the world but does so in order to comfort and give hope to the afflicted in their time of need. As for Catholics, the Vatican’s appointment of Rev. Gerhard Wagner, introduced above, as a bishop was the subject of severe criticism by his fellow Austrian priests. For example, Father Franz Wild said: ‘I hope the church realizes that we live in the twenty-first century and that the church must live in that period, too’.18 It appears that the Vatican heard these criticisms, for after only two weeks the Vatican revoked Wagner’s bishop appointment. Ostensibly, this was done at Wagner’s request though it is widely believed that the real reason was the controversial nature of his remarks.

Critical Responses in Judaism

In Judaism, too, there are voices advocating the embrace of a modern or scientific viewpoint. For example, Knesset Member Eliezer Cohen (National Union) dismissed Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s comments, introduced above, in a talk with Ynet. ‘I know meteorology well enough not to believe such rubbish’, he said.19

Critical Responses in Islam

Critical voices are to be found among Muslims as well. ‘One thing is very clear from the teachings of the Holy Quran, the Traditions of the Holy Prophet of Islam, may peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, and from the writings of 17 18 19

Tom Krattenmaker, ‘Where is God when evil strikes?’ usatoday, 21 May 2013. Mail Online, 2 February 2009. Access available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/ sitemaparchive/index.html. Ynetnews.com, 5 July 2009.

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the Promised Messiah. It is that Islam does not claim anywhere that all natural disasters and calamities represent decrees of divine punishment’.20

The Importance of Critical Responses

The following points can be made about the importance of the preceding critical comments: 1.

Without critical responses, victims end up being held responsible for their own victimization, i.e. they had it coming! 2. The moral and political prejudices of the religious figures of the day are given prominence as divine explanations of natural disasters. 3. Most importantly, the need for adequate disaster preparation and response is greatly diminished, if not rendered totally unnecessary, for natural disasters are regarded as reflections of the supernatural power(s)’ decision to punish moral transgressions as identified by religious leaders (or even to bring about some kind of ideal world).

The Legitimate Role for Religion in Connection with Disasters

Is there a legitimate role for religion to play in a scientific age when it comes to natural disasters? That is to say, is there a role that does not rely on religious leaders acting as modern-day shamans? This chapter takes the position that there most definitely is. In fact, a role that is becoming ever more important in light of the increasing frequency of major disasters, due to global warming, etc., coupled with their ever greater destructive force. One example of such a possible role is connected with the little-known story of the seacoast village of Fudai in the Shimohei District of Iwate Prefecture in northeastern Japan. What is unusual about Fudai is that, unlike other villages up and down the eastern coast which experienced widespread devastation, Fudai emerged unscathed when the tsunami struck in March 2011. This was due to the existence of a huge sea wall and floodgates that had been built between 1972 and 1984 at a cost of ¥3.56 billion (approximately us$30 million in 2011) under the administration of Kotoku Wamura, the village mayor from 1947 to 1987. 20

According to the uk-based, reformist Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. Available on the Web at: http://www.alislam.org/library/links/00000032.html. Accessed on 28 June 2013.

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At the time of their construction Wamura was the subject of severe criticism for building facilities that were widely regarded as unnecessary and a waste of taxpayer money. Today, however, he is praised for his visionary stance and hailed as the saviour of the village. In fact, in the wake of the tsunami villagers lined up at Wamura’s grave to express their belated gratitude. The question is, don’t religious leaders also have a responsibility to support, or even initiate, efforts like these when it is a question of protecting the safety and well-being of not only their own believers but their fellow humans as well? Yet another potential role for religious leaders in what is now widely recognized as both a natural and human-made disaster, concerns the hundreds of thousands of children who were exposed to varying degrees of radiation contamination resulting from the meltdown/melt-through of three reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. Could these children possibly be held responsible for what happened to them? In addition to holding those legally responsible for the completely inadequate preparations made to protect the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant from tsunamis and major earthquakes, are there no related moral questions that religious leaders ought to address? For example, do adults have the right to put at risk the lives of future generations in order to enjoy the benefits of electricity produced at the cost of generating radioactive waste that will be lethal to humanity for thousands of years? If not, don’t religious leaders and their adherents bear a responsibility to actively oppose the continued reliance on this form of power generation? Conclusion In an era of plate tectonics, global warming, nuclear disasters, etc. the role of religious leaders as modern-day shamans ought to come to a rapid end though, as this article has shown, this is clearly easier said than done. Nevertheless, this shamanic role should end because disaster victims do not deserve to be victimized a second time by religious leaders who, by design or accident, remain ignorant of the physical causes of disasters, ascribing the occurrence of disasters to some kind of divine or moral punishment of humankind. The critical voices found in every faith demonstrate that it can be done. That said, this is also an era in which the financial ‘bottom line’ often determines the extent of disaster preparedness and response. Therefore, religious leaders ought to join in, if not lead, the movement to prevent unnecessary suffering based on the sanctity of life. These are deeply moral and religious issues that cry out for religious leaders to address.

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In the case of substantial disaster preparations like the huge and expensive construction of the sea wall and floodgates at Fudai, religious leaders should not only support these efforts but demand that those who refuse to address these issues be replaced by those who will. This requires addressing not only political leaders but rallying their constituents who must pay the associated costs. Similarly, religious leaders must constantly bring up the moral issues (and dangers) associated with such modern technologies as nuclear power generation, natural gas extraction methods like ‘fracking’, etc. Among other things, they must raise the question of whether those currently alive have the right to endanger the lives and well-being of future generations in an environmentally destructive quest to extract and consume ever more of the world’s limited resources, especially its fossil fuels. The dangers inherent in nuclear power generation, albeit extremely important, are nevertheless just one part of this larger question. Addressing these questions does not require the alleged magical powers of the shaman, let alone divination, but instead, the highest moral, compassionate and farsighted thinking and leadership of the world’s religious faiths and their adherents. Inasmuch as the future of the entire human species is now being questioned as never before, the responsibilities of religious leaders and their adherents have, in fact, never been more important. Returning to the question that marked the beginning of this article, is Buddhism the perfect religion for disasters? The answer should now be clear. Yes, it could be, but so to, could all of the world’s major religions. That is to say, they could be perfect to the extent that both their leaders and adherents embrace a world freed from placing a moral stigma on the victims of disasters but instead, work with all people of good will in both preparing for, and responding to, disasters to the very best of their ability. Will religious leaders and the faithful rise to the occasion? This is a challenge I leave with my readers.

Chapter 4

Post-3/11 Literature in Japan Roman Rosenbaum

University of Sydney

How long he went on dancing, Yoshiya could not tell. But it was long enough for him to perspire under the arms. And then it struck him what lay buried far down under the earth on which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform whole cities into mounds of rubble. murakami, After the Quake, 2002, p. 79

Some tried to write pieces that would bring solace to these survivors, while others composed requiems, just as Shoyo Tsubouchi, one of the founders of modern Japanese literature, did in 1923 following the Great Kanto Earthquake. It is often said that ‘authors always arrive last’. Some made the conscious decision not to write, choosing instead to write about these as history one day. There were those who questioned the value of writing fiction, while others did not hesitate to write when asked to do so. Some considered it their duty as a writer not to be moved by it all and chose to go on as always with daily life. Waseda Bungaku’s charity project: Japan Earthquake Charity Literature1 Just as Jean-Paul Sartre once famously asked what literature can do for starving children, so Makoto Ichikawa, the director of Waseda bungaku, asks whether it is ‘just’ in a time of disaster to simply write and whether Japanese writers could possibly achieve anything by it? The literary response to the Fukushima earthquake has been somewhat subdued because of the magnitude of the event. If as Adorno has memorably suggested there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, can there be literature after Fukushima? This conundrum is contextualized by local writers such as Hideo Furukawa who have dared to write about the event despite the paradox that once you do, it immediately becomes fiction. 1 Printed at the end of each short-story available for free download from Waseda Bungaku. Online at: . Accessed: 23 September 2012.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004268319_006

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This chapter investigates the literary response to the Fukushima earthquake and the likelihood of social repercussions of a discourse on disaster. Close attention is paid to the views of established literati, the responses of Ōe Kenzaburō (History Repeats) and Haruki Murakami (An Unrealistic Dreamer) investigated along with the marginalized counter-hegemonic voices of grassroots collaborative approaches in popular social media. Both Ōe and Murakami situate the nuclear catastrophe that followed the earthquake within the postHiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear rhetoric of victimization. Yet, while the unprecedented graphic representation of the disaster has been overwhelming in its variety, new forms of collaborative literature have filled the gap left by traditional forms unable to express the immediacy of victimization.

The Earthquake and Its Aftermath

The earthquake, tsunami and nuclear contamination of 11 March 2011 have been referred to in many ways. Next to the more empiric and mundane nomenclature of the ‘2011 Tōhoku earthquake’, we also talk of the ‘tripleheaded monster’ or more emblematically of ‘post-3/11’, a term reminiscent of 9/11 in the United States. In historical terms Japan also talks about saigo 災後 (a post-disaster worldview). There was in Japanese literature prior to the earthquake a steady trajectory towards what Yoshimoto Takaaki has called hinkon to shisō (ideology and poverty),2 which is comparable to the phenomenon popularized by Amamiya Karin3 of purekaria-to (precariat literature). This discourse of disenfranchisement and disempowerment followed several decades of neo-liberal policies that resulted in a highly stratified society where the divide between rich and poor grew rapidly. The disenfranchised community that large-scale unemployment created was given the dramatic tag the ‘ice-age generation’, signalling a change in the employment model from lifelong salarymen to freeters (the underemployed) and haken (dispatched temporary workers) as well as the emergence of hikikomori (social recluses). It was during this period, arguably the peak of Japan’s social crisis, that the triple catastrophe struck. When the German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno wrote in 1951 that ‘there can be no poetry after Auschwitz’ he was fleetingly right, but ultimately wrong.4 It turns out that, instead of silence, the spectacle of major 2 Yoshimoto Takaaki Hinkon no shisō, 2008, pp. 11–15. 3 Amamiya Karin ‘Nase ima puroretaria bungaku ka’, 2009, p. 13. 4 Cited in ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, reprinted as the first essay in Prisms, 1949, p. 34.

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disasters is very profitable in today’s globalized multimedia consumer society. And while there is a huge industry profiting from this gaudy spectacle of mass consumption, there are a few more serious publications that probe into disasters, seeking to benefit humanity in general. Situated somewhere in between those two methodologies of reportage, a third literary trend has emerged post-3/11. The devastation of 11 March demonstrates that perhaps our greatest human achievement is the ability to transcend catastrophes—man-made or natural—and find solace in the future. What has been labelled the world’s first ‘Earthquake–Tsunami–Nuclear Disaster’ is no exception and we observe that, after the initial shock has subsided, a rich literary response has emerged as people try to make sense of this calamity of overwhelming proportions. So far the pithiest literary response to the triple-headed catastrophe has come from a local Fukushima poet called Wagō Ryōichi 和合 亮一, who debuted in 1998 with the poetry collection After. When his family was directly affected by the earthquake Wagō was one of the first to utilize the social media Twitter to encapsulate the whole catastrophe in the microcosm of a one-line poem: Hōshanō ga futte imasu. Shizuka na yoru desu. (2011/3/16, 4:30)5 A quiet night — amidst the radioactive downpour. Though at first glance Wagō appears to diminish the enormity of the human suffering, the cathartic simplicity of his poem provided solace for people overwhelmed by an event beyond human comprehension. Perhaps it is the poem’s imaginative simplicity that downscales the event into lyric bits that we can digest more readily. While the uniqueness of this approach is its contemporaneity, traditional forms of literary imaginings are only gradually emerging. There have been several collaborative projects but most have not highlighted victimization, choosing instead to collate the voices of a distinctly Japanese seismic diaspora into the literary discourse. This trend has also been reflected in the more measured voices of Japan’s established literati. Yet, the sheer magnitude of the Tōhoku earthquake, with people struggling to simply survive, has delayed a literary response. Gradually we are beginning to see a rich tapestry of post-3/11 literature that addresses some of the metaphysical consequences posed by the earthquake. Though it may at first seem 5 Published on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/wago2828 Accessed 1 October 2012. For an in depth analysis see for example: Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt and Roman Rosenbaum, Imagining the Lost Generation: Representations of Precarity in Japanese Popular Culture (forthcoming).

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trivial to pursue the literary implications of a tragedy that is still affecting hundreds of thousands of people in a more immediate way, it is through the cathartic escapism of literature that we may obtain solace and glimpse a better future. The power of literature to heal has a long tradition in Japan and only the most courageous of writers have attempted to contextualize the country’s worst tragedies. For instance, well before Adorno spoke out in 1951 and shortly after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at a time when Tokyo was razed to the ground by some of the heaviest aerial bombardment the world had ever seen, Ishikawa Jun in his Yakeato no iesu (The Jesus of the Ruins, 1946) had already created an archetype for the recovery and renewal of Japan with a grotesque young boy rising above the yakeato nohara (burnt-out ruins) like a phoenix from the ashes.

The Views of Two Established Literati: Ōe Kenzaburō and Murakami Haruki

Thus, not surprisingly the Tōhoku earthquake is hardly the first time a major quake—daishinsai—has provided a catharsis in Japanese literature. For instance, in Kindai bungakushi hikkei 近代文学史必携 (Handbook of Modern Literary History) Shiraishi Yoshihiko 白石 喜彦 argues that a distinct genre of taishū bungaku (popular literature) appeared after the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, triggered by the large-scale production of the shōsetsu that targeted a broad readership.6 That is not to say that the earthquake was directly responsible for a new literary trend but it created the conditions for social change that led to the diversification of reading practices. A year after the earthquake Nagai Kafū 永井荷風 wrote a poem entitled Shinsai 震災 (Earthquake Disaster) expressing his dismay at the sociopolitical effects of the calamity: Aru toshi daishinsai ni yurameki 或年大地俄にゆらめき One year shaken by a great earthquake Hi wa toshi wo yakinu 火は都を焼きぬ Fires burned down the cities Yanagimura sensei sude ni naku 柳村先生既になく Master Yanagimura had already left us Ōgai gyoshi mo mata sugata wo kakushinu 鴎外漁史も亦姿をかくしぬ Ōgai was also no longer with us 6 Miyoshi Yukio (ed.) ‘Kindai bungaku-shi hikkei: bessatsu kokubungaku’, in Kokubungaku January 1987, p. 127.

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Edo bunka no nagori kemuri to narinu 江戸文化の名残煙りとなりぬ The afterglow of Edo culture turned to smoke Meiji bunka mata hai to narinu 明治文化また灰となりぬ Meiji culture turned to ashes.7 In this poem Kafū points to the Great Kantō earthquake as a rite of passage that marks both the slippage of culture and the passing of people who greatly influenced his literary career. Notwithstanding the scale of the disaster, out of those glorious ashes Tokyo was rebuilt into the capital of Japan. There are many other examples of Japanese revitalization after major disasters but suffice to say here that one significant fact to emerge after the triple-headed monster of 11 March is not only that literature is justifiable in the face of overwhelming calamity but, more importantly, that in our globalized consumer culture literary collaboration can aid the process of recovery. There are several outstanding examples in the Japanese literary canon, such as Oda Makoto’s Fukai Oto (Deep Sound, 2002), written several years after the Kobe earthquake as an integral part of the literary tradition.. Two dissident literary voices that have emerged from the blame game following the earthquake are those of Ōe Kenzaburō and Murakami Haruki. The international success of both writers makes them role models for the generation of Japanese who are seeking to re-establish themselves within post-disaster Japan and its relationship to the world at large.

Ōe Kenzaburō: Towards an Activism of Denuclearization

In The Art of Fiction8 Ōe revealed that the difference between himself and Murakami was the latter’s ability to secure a firm international readership. Even though literature is not a competition, Ōe acknowledges that Murakami is perhaps the first Japanese writer to be widely translated and read overseas. 7 Yanagimura refers to the poet and translator Ueda Bin 上田 敏, one of the great literary influences on Kafū. Originally published in Henkikan ginsō 偏奇館吟草 (Henkikan was the name of Kafū’s two-storey wooden residence in Tokyo’s Azabu district which burned to the ground in the fire-bombings of 1945), Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1948. Cited in Isoda Kouichi and Takahashi Hideo, (eds) Showa bungakushi-ron 昭和文学史論 (Theories of Showa literary history), 1990, p. 27. 8 Sarah Fay and Ōe Kenzaburo, ‘Interviews: The Art of Fiction’ in The Paris Review, Winter 2007. Online at: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5816/the-art-of-fiction-no-195-kenzaburo -oe. Accessed: 26 October 2012.

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Yet it was Ōe who contextualized many Western literary trends in his fiction, and his notion of denuclearization was influenced by Sartrean existentialism. With respect to Sartre’s rhetorical question cited above, a recent interview with Ōe Kenzaburō revealed idiosyncrasies in the founder of existentialism: The next year I interviewed Sartre. It was my first time in Paris. I took a small room in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and the first voices I heard were those of demonstrators outside shouting ‘Paix en Algérie!’ Sartre was a major figure in my life. Like Mao, he basically repeated things that he’d already published— in Existentialism Is Humanism and in Situations— so I stopped taking notes. I just wrote down the titles of the books. He also said that people should oppose nuclear war, but he supported China having nuclear weapons. I strongly opposed the possession of nuclear weapons by anyone, but I was unable to engage Sartre on this point. All he said was, ‘Next question.’9 Ōe not only expresses disappointment at Sartre’s contradictory remarks, he also explains that the issue of nuclear arms has remained for him a fundamental question in his literature. It is for this reason that despite Ōe’s famously secluded lifestyle he has been making more frequent public appearances recently championing one of the enduring legacies of his literature: the fight for a nuclear-free Japan. For instance, in a return to ‘post-war’ rhetoric, Ōe asserted during an appearance at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo that the Fukushima nuclear disaster marked a regression to post-war mentality because it was ‘made in Japan’.10 He went on to repeat the words of Kiyoshi Kurokawa, the chairman of the Diet investigative committee, and suggest that ‘reflexive obedience, reluctance to question authority, devotion to “sticking with the program”, groupism and insularity’ were the root causes of the accident at the Fukushima nuclear facility. Ōe laments that in the sixty years since the War the mentality of the Japanese people has changed very little. It is this mindset that needs to be redressed before real change post-3/11 can begin. As a response to the necessity for dramatic change, Ōe is this time championing the denuclearization cause through activism rather than literature. In light of the government’s attempt to restart nuclear power generation, 9 Ibid. 10 Matsubara Hiroshi, ‘Ōe: It’s time for Japanese to change their mentality’ The Asahi Shimbun, 12 July 2012. Online at: http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/ AJ201207120088. Accessed: 27 October 2012.

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thousands of people have joined his call to abolish nuclear power plants. The political movement to phase out nuclear energy by fiscal 2025 is only one of the campaigns this formerly reclusive Nobel laureate has spearheaded. It has been suggested that the decline in readership and popularity of Ōe’s complex fictional universe has prompted him to become the spokesperson for a nuclear-free Japan. Even in his early and very personal fiction the global threat of the nuclear and its proliferation in Japan represents itself as a barely discernible dark undertow. A news broadcast: the announcer was commenting on the repercussions of the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing. ōe, A Personal Matter, 1964: 149

The malignant undercurrent here is a thought too sinister to put into words, namely, the nuclear contamination of the Japanese archipelago and the continuing aftereffects such as the birth defects experienced by the narrator of the novel. The ruse of A Personal Matter lies in the polysemous nature of the ‘personal’, suggesting that everything, the entire history of Japan from its rise as a major world power to its colonial expansion in Asia and the consequent nuclear bombardment, is intimately related to the very personal choices individuals make daily. The implications here are dramatic: if everything comes down to the personal then each of us is responsible for the political, social and cultural decisions reached by the collective we live in, even if those decisions appear to be beyond our control. This is one of the most indirect and selfeffacing literary call-to-arms in post-war history. Ōe’s allusion to the intrinsic relationship between the personal and the public is a topic that recurs in post3/11 literature such as Hiromi Kawakami’s suggestion of a ‘karmic bond’11 in the relationship between nature and culture. Ōe is a member of the yakeato (burnt-out ruins) generation of children who were too young to be held accountable for the Asia Pacific War, and as such his literature is symbolic of the aftereffects of the War. His treatment of such controversial topics as Okinawa, Hiroshima and the emperor show a surprising disregard for personal safety and make him one of the post-war generation’s most fearless commentators. Ōe’s adoption of the denuclearization topos in his literature began with Hiroshima Notes (1965),12 a collection of essays he 11 12

Hiromi Kawakami ‘God Bless You’ in March Was Made of Yarn, 2012, p. 38. This work is not to be confused with the equally ambitious Hiroshima (translated by Hugh D. Whittaker as A Hiroshima Novel) by Oda Makoto, which won the Lotus Prize in 1981 of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association.

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wrote after several visits to Hiroshima in 1965 for the twentieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb. In this sense Ōe’s activism following the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe reverberates through Japanese history like the earthquake and tidal wave that caused it. In his oeuvre Ōe has often illustrated the irony of fate as history repeats itself in Japan. He has only recently—some thirty years after the publication of his Okinawa Notes (1970)—won a court case that conclusively rejected the defamation lawsuit against his dissident discourse that ‘Japanese soldiers had told Okinawans they would be raped, tortured and murdered by the advancing American troops and coerced them into killing themselves instead of surrendering’.13 Okinawa Notes is one of Ōe’s key non-fiction texts and its intertextuality reaches all the way to the Fukushima disaster. The issues it addresses include the contrary mindset of the post-war Zeitgeist, where personal responsibility is shifted onto an abstract notion of group-belonging, as well as the interconnected nature of nuclear bases and Japan’s direct democracy in relation to the literati’s responsibility for Okinawa.14 Ōe has been a leading anti-nuclear activist for close to half a century. He has steadfastly refused to accept that Okinawan nuclear bases are a deterrent in Southeast Asia, believing instead that establishing them was a fundamental  mistake since they did not stop either North Korea or China developing nuclear capabilities. He insists that Japan indirectly created the possibility of Fukushima through its proliferation of nuclear reactors. The issues raised in Okinawa Notes are directly linked to neo-liberal attempts to whitewash Japanese history and only the most dedicated Ōe followers will see the intrinsic irony in the publication a few days after the earthquake, in the morning edition of the Asahi shimbun, of an article Ōe had written the day before the earthquake about a fisherman who had been exposed to radiation in 1954, during the hydrogen-bomb testing at Bikini Atoll. It is clear, from this ominous coincidence of writing the day before the earthquake15 about the Daigo Fukuryu-Maru radiation incident,16 that the nuclear issue remains integral to Ôe’s literary life and his activist life. 13 14 15 16

Ōe Kenzaburō, Okinawa No-to, 1970, pp. 198–201. Ibid. See Kakukichi no chokusetsusei minshūu shugi (Nuclear Bases and Direct democracy, p. 258) and Bungakusha no Okinawa sekinin (Literati responsibility to Okinawa, p. 274). Ōe Kenzaburo, ‘History Repeats’ in The New Yorker, 28 March 2011. Online at: www .newyorker.com/talk/2011/03/28/110328ta_talk_oe. Accessed: 8 October 2012. This incident has now become folklore and is also well-established in popular culture with Kaneto Shindō’s 1959 movie entitled Daigo Fukuryu-Maru—Lucky Dragon No. 5, where an ageing fishing boat, Dai-go Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5), sets out from the port of Yaizu in Shizuoka Prefecture. It travels around the Pacific line-fishing. While

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Murakami Haruki’s Subterranean Worlds

Just as Ōe has continued to debate Japan’s nuclear legacy for over half a century, Murakami has focused on the synergy between Japan and earthquakes. In his acceptance speech, entitled As an Unrealistic Dreamer,17 on receiving the Catalunya International Prize in 2011 Murakami spoke at length about the impact the catastrophe had on his personal life. He emphasized that the Japanese mindset of mujo 無常, which he translates as ‘ephemerality’, is a vital part of the people’s ‘common ethnic consciousness’. He stressed that his literary focus is not the physical damage caused by earthquakes to things like buildings or roads, but rather the damage to ‘things which can’t be reconstructed easily, such as ethics and values’.18 And it is in the human failure of the nuclear leakage at Fukushima that Murakami locates ‘our’ (although he mentions the complicity of the power companies and the government, he surreptitiously includes the Japanese as a whole and by extension humanity at large) accountability for ‘having allowed these corrupt systems to exist until now’.19 This is where Murakami’s thinking converges with that of Ōe Kenzaburō, as he quotes from the cenotaph at Hiroshima: Yasuraka ni nemutte kudasai ayamachi ha kurikae shimasenu kara 安らかに眠って下さい 過ちは 繰返しませぬから

Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil. Murakami thus connects the disasters that befell Japan directly with Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a startling suggestion that in fact post-3/11 is nothing but a continuation of the post-war legacy. He even suggests that the perpetrator/ victim dichotomy, which made up most of the discourse up to the new the ship is near Bikini Atoll, the navigator sees a flash. All the crew come up to watch. They realize it is an atomic explosion, but take the time to clear their fishing gear. A short time later, grey ash starts to fall on the ship. When the ship returns to port the sailors have been burned brown. They unload the fish, which are then transported away. They visit the local doctor and then go to Tokyo for an examination. They are diagnosed with radiation sickness and are taken to hospitals in Tokyo, where the contaminated fish causes a panic. The radio operator, Kuboyama, later dies from the radiation. This incident has become folklore and contributed to the popular cultural Godzilla boom in Japan. 17 Murakami Haruki ‘As an Unrealistic Dreamer: Catalunya International Prize speech’ at Senri no michi. Online at: http://www.senrinomichi.com/?p=2541. Accessed: 21 October 2012. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.

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millennium, still applies today since ‘insofar as we are threatened by the force of nuclear power, we are all victims…[but] since we unleashed this power and were then unable to prevent ourselves from using it, we are also all perpetrators’.20 Murakami suggests that Japan’s nuclear disasters ‘should have made the development of non-nuclear power generation the cornerstone of our policy after World War ii’. This would have been the only way to assume our collective responsibility for the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, since we have failed once again to take responsibility, post-3/11 is doomed to continue the myth of the never-ending post-war stigma. Unlike Ōe, Murakami has not engaged with nuclear literature, but he has written what might unequivocally be called ‘earthquake literature’. He began well after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, when he published an eclectic short-story anthology that ‘indirectly’ focused on earthquakes in Japan, Kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru (The Children of God All Dance, 2000); this title has been translated somewhat nonchalantly as After the Quake (2002).21 I choose to write ‘indirectly’ because, despite the fact that the translator, Jay Rubin, has included ‘quake’ in the title, actual earthquakes are hardly mentioned at all and the ‘quake’ symbolizes Murakami’s exploration of Japan’s national consciousness. This quest also led him to discover Japan’s ‘historical karma’ in novels such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997), where the contemporary narrator boku 僕 (a colloquial version of the first-person pronoun) relates the experiences of a variety of secondary historical characters from Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and suggests that it feels like ‘being dragged into the middle of this kind of historical karma’.22 Murakami’s frequent use of boku—written with the kanji gō 業, the ideogram for karma, in combination with the ninben radical 亻(which stands for 人, people)—suggests the interrelatedness of human action and fate throughout history. It is this notion of a ‘historical karma’ that links Murakami’s fiction with that of Ōe, as well as with the

20 Ibid. 21 Beside the literary response to major earthquakes there is also a large corpus of popcultural media which engage the philosophical questions raised by major disasters. Although a detailed analysis of the implications is beyond the scope of this chapter, two examples shall suffice to illustrate this point. Shaking Tokyo, part of a trilogy directed by South Korean film director Bong Joon-ho, shows the positive repercussions of an earthquake which forces Tokyo’s large population of hikikomori or shut-ins out into the open to rediscover their introverted and isolated lives. In terms of graphic art Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime film Akira (1988), based on his manga (comic) series, portrays the apocalypse as the violent cleansing of a corrupt and decultured world. 22 Murakami Haruki, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1997, p. 275.

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post-3/11 narratives where the concept weighs heavily on the minds of a generation of young writers who are keenly aware of Japan’s lack of historical accountability and its consequences. The characters in each story in After the Quake are affected only peripherally by the earthquake disaster in Kobe, yet for each of them the earthquake becomes a metaphor for the necessity for change. For instance, Dr Satsuki, the protagonist in the short story titled ‘Thailand’, flies to that country to participate in the World Thyroid Conference. She is exhausted, needing a break from her hectic lifestyle and searching for new meaning beyond Japan. The static in the background is her lingering resentment from a vicious divorce. Nimit, her native chauffeur, doubles as a guide in Thailand and is also concerned for her well-being. Since both are fans of jazz they develop a mutual respect and when news of the Kobe quake is broadcast on the radio Satsuki tries to suppress the thought that her former husband might be in trouble, because when she does think of him she can only secretly wish that ‘he would be swallowed up by the liquefied earth’. In Satsuki we see a woman who is attempting to leave her past behind and reconnect with a better future. Nimit, who intuits this and takes her to see a shaman, suggests: Strange and mysterious things, though, aren’t they, earthquakes? We take it for granted that the earth beneath our feet is solid and stationary. We even talk about people being ‘down to earth’ or having their feet firmly planted on the ground. But suddenly one day we see that it isn’t true. The earth, the boulders, that are supposed to be so solid, all of a sudden turn as mushy as liquid.23 The peripheral nature of the earthquake in ‘Thailand’ is Murakami’s way to show how we react to events that do not directly affect us. Murakami wrote in his early work in the first person, whereas all the stories in After the Quake are narrated in the third person, enabling him to gingerly step outside his usual covertly fictional universe. This more overt subjective narration of his character’s feelings and thoughts is an analogy for ‘us’, the readers who are only peripherally affected by an earthquake that we read about in a ‘fictional’ context: In a sense, she told herself, I am the one who caused that earthquake. He turned my heart into a stone; he turned my body to stone. In the 23

Haruki Murakami, After the Quake (2002), p. 92.

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distant mountains, the gray monkeys were silently staring at her. Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.24 The character’s response becomes a dramatization and satirical reflection of how ‘we’ respond to an event that has little personal impact on us. Yet at the same time Murakami paints a disconcerting picture of the national psyche in February 1995, the month between the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo Tokyo subway gas attacks. Jay Rubin, who translated the collection, remarks that ‘the central characters in After the Quake live far from the physical devastation, which they witness only on tv or in the papers, but for each of them the massive destruction unleashed by the earth itself becomes a turning point in their lives’. While the stories are a metaphor for how little we care about a catastrophic event if it does not affect us directly, it is precisely this ethical and moral dimension that led to Murakami’s second non-fiction work, Underground (2000), a collection of essays about the Tokyo gas attacks and a series of interviews and oral records of the gas-attack survivors. It is also Murakami’s attempt to link to daily life on the surface the subconscious underground violence and the deep historical trauma that manifests as massive destruction. In an essay entitled ‘Blind Nightmare: Where Are We Japanese Going?’ also anthologized in Underground, Murakami suggests that: The Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo gas attack of January and March 1995 are two of the gravest tragedies in Japan’s post-war history. It is no exaggeration to say that there was a marked change in the Japanese consciousness ‘before’ and ‘after’ these events. These twin catastrophes will remain embedded in our psyche as two milestones in our life as a people.25 In this sense Murakami was perhaps one of the first writers to compare the subliminal human psychology with the subterranean world of earthquakes, so common in Japan. The linkage between the depth of human tragedy and natural disaster is foregrounded in his study of the Tokyo subway attacks, where the ‘underground’ in both the physical and the metaphysical sense become Murakami’s yardstick for an exploration of the Japanese mindscape. As Murakami puts it: ‘both [events] were nightmarish eruptions beneath our feet—from underground—that threw all the latent contradictions and weak points of our society into frighteningly high relief. Japanese society proved all

24 25

Ibid. Original italics. Haruki Murakami, Underground (2000), p. 135.

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too defenseless against these sudden onslaughts. We were unable to see them coming and failed to prepare’.26

Seismic Disenfranchisement: From Precariat Literature To Literary Palliative Care

Post-3/11 also saw a groundswell of grassroots literary works. The triple catastrophe created an emotional response overseas and the Kindle e-book anthology Shaken: Stories for Japan (2011), organized by the Japan Relief Fund in the United States under the pseudonym ‘Detectives beyond Borders’, was a collaborative effort of some twenty authors whose sole purpose was to raise funds for Japan, one of the first such collaborations. Most of the pieces in this collection are genre-specific and centre on crime fiction—an exception is Adrian McKinty’s reminiscences of Matsushima Bay before the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. Similar to the two other examples of relief literature discussed below, the marketing campaign for this collection of original stories promises that ‘one hundred percent’ of the royalties will go directly to the 2011 Japan Relief Fund administered by the Japan America Society of Southern California. Created on 11 March 2011 to aid victims of the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and tsunami, this fund has raised $750,000, which has been committed to nonprofit organizations on the front lines of relief and recovery work in northeastern Japan. This illustrates how literature, just like charity concerts,27 philanthropy and cross-border disaster relief, have become the raison d’être for literary collaborations in Japan. For instance, in a prelude to the Waseda bungaku’s charity project Japan Earthquake Charity Literature, the literary critic and director of Waseda bungaku Makoto Ichikawa remarked on how difficult it is to pursue the written word in response to tragedy on such a massive scale.28 But respond we 26 27

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Ibid. See also the discussion by Jonathan Boulter, ‘Writing Guilt: Haruki Murakami and the Archives of National Mourning’ in English Studies in Canada, 2006, pp. 125–130. Several disaster relief albums, like Songs For Japan (2011), a collaborative project between the music industry’s ‘big four’ record labels (emi, Sony, Universal and Warner), that waived all royalties to donate proceedings to the Japanese Red Cross Society. Similarly Jazz for Japan 2cd (2011) is a benefit album recorded in two days by twenty-five of the top jazz musicians in the world, benefiting the earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan. For details see Waseda Bungaku’s charity project: Japan Earthquake Charity Literature. Online at: http://www.bungaku.net/wasebun/info/charity_en.html. Accessed: 27 October 2012.

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must and Waseda bungaku led by example, providing a number of stories translated into English for free download on its website in order to assist with donations to the Red Cross in Japan. It was this project that eventually resulted in the publication of March Was Made of Yarn (2012), featuring such internationally renowned Japanese writers as Tawada Yōko, Ogawa Yōko and Murakami Ryū. The line-up of literary figures, who each contributed a short story free of charge, is impressive and includes literary newcomers as well as established canonical voices. Even more impressive are the translators, including Alfred Birnbaum, Stephen Snyder and Margaret Mitsutani, who contributed to the eclectic nature of the work. It features a mix of fiction and non-fiction, juxtaposing the futuristic premonitions of Yoko Tawada with the personal non-fiction recollections by Natsuki Ikezawa. There is also the transcultural poetry connection between Shuntaro Tanikawa and J.D. McClatchy. And, as if literature were not enough, the hauntingly grotesque manga by the Nishioka siblings completes this concoction of charity literature. In this sense, March Was Made of Yarn is not only a post-disaster literary anthology that offers a cathartic space for rewriting traumatic events, it is also a brave endeavour to offer all proceeds to ‘support charities that have been sparing no effort in helping to rebuild towns, homes, and individual lives in Tohoku’.29 The English translations of these short stories foreground the fragile existence of ‘hope’ despite all evidence to the contrary. In words taken from ‘Little Eucalyptus Leaves’, a short story by renowned literary activist Murakami Ryu, ‘Ten years ago I wrote a novel in which a middle school student […] declared: “You can find whatever you want here. The only thing you can’t find is hope.”’ Yet in the post-3/11 Zeitgeist of Japan he comments: ‘For all we’ve lost, there’s one thing we have regained. The great earthquake and tsunami have robbed us of resources, civic services, and many lives, but we who were so intoxicated with our own prosperity have once again planted the seed of hope’.30 One thing this literary collage does is counterpoise the postmodern hyperreality of the glossy magazines, with their graphic and gory depictions of the physical reality of the disaster, with the more abstract and subdued Murakamiesque depiction of the emotional and psychological trauma caused by the event. This is accomplished in surprising ways, for example, by Hiromi Kawakami who rewrote the prize-winning Kamisama (God Bless You, 1993) into a terrifying post-3/11 version. Whereas the original pantheistic allegory

29 30

From the ‘Introduction’ in March Was Made of Yarn, 2012, p. xxi. Ibid. p. 194.

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relates the story of a bear god going for a walk with the narrator ‘I’ in a picturesque Japanese landscape where a ‘karmic bond’ created a fairy-tale landscape, the rewritten post-disaster version is set in a landscape scarred by nuclear contamination. Kawakami’s suggestion is horrendous: by giving us two ‘almost’ identical versions of the same story—one prior to and another post-3/11—she suggests that even our traditional narratives have become distorted by the deep psychological scars of the disaster. In her new post-3/11 version, now suddenly the bear god ‘pulled a Geiger counter out of his bag’ (43) and suggests that not even bears are ‘resistant to strontium and plutonium’ (41). To go for a walk suddenly means ‘I took special care to avoid too much radiation for the first half of this year, so my total amount of accumulated radiation indicates I can still afford some exposure’ (39). Though the structure of the tale is little changed, the shock and awe comes from the additional subtext. While Kawakami’s attempt is subtle and couched in gentle language, it is sidelined by the brutal realism of the Nishioka siblings’ graphic poem (Figure 4.1). Each image appears with a short haiku-like Japanese text also rendered into English. Each panel, or rather the combined poetry and image, is masked by the images of crows disembowelling the body of a dead girl. The text lays blame hard and unforgiving, like the predatory beaks of the crows hacking away at the girl’s face. Several of the stories, like the title story ‘March Yarn’ by Kawakami

Figure 4.1 Brother & Sister Nishioka, ‘The Crows and the Girl’ in Luke Elmer and Karashima David, eds., March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown. New York: Vintage Books, 2012, p. 140.

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Mieko, deal with the strange ways people process memories and their understanding of their relationships. Still others, like Tanikawa Shuntarō’s poem ‘Words’, which opens the book, pose the question of how we can even write about things for which there are no words; yet ‘Words put forth buds / From the earth beneath the rubble’.31 The vignettes in March Was Made of Yarn all relate to the Tōhoku disasters but do so in a decidedly multi-generic way. It is precisely this that engenders a verisimilitude that suggests that every aspect of life has been deeply affected by the overwhelming scale of the disaster. At the time of writing, a Japanese version of the short stories, albeit with different contributors, entitled Shinsai to fikushon no kyori (The distance between fiction and earthquake disasters, 2012), has appeared, as well as several translations into Chinese and Korean that endeavour to turn literature into a transnational literary disaster-relief project. The eclectic pastiche of March Was Made of Yarn exemplifies a homegrown attempt to invoke the literary charity of Shaken: Stories for Japan. Several like-minded examples of disaster-relief literature have since appeared. Patrick Sherriff’s 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake (2011) is an anthology of impressions penned by both observers and survivors, providing an emotional eyewitness account of the disaster. Sherriff, a British resident in Japan, explains in the introduction that ‘the idea for this book came out of desperation; desperation to do something for a country on its knees’.32 This third example of a literary trend akin to disaster relief employs a similar marketing campaign that claims proudly that ‘less than 30 days after being backhanded by Mother Nature’ this book was available for purchase via Amazon as a Kindle edition to raise money for the Japanese Red Cross Society.33 The unpaid professionals and citizen journalists who collaborated to produce 2:46 Aftershocks met on Twitter. In addition to essays, artwork and photographs the scrapbooklike anthology features submissions from people around the world, including some who endured the disaster and journalists who covered it in the international media. It contains a bilingual piece by Yoko Ono entitled ‘Awakening’, in addition to work created specifically for the project by authors William Gibson, Barry Eisler and Jake Adelstein. The primary goal of this collection, according to Patrick Sherriff, ‘is to record the moment, and in doing so raise money for

31 32 33

Ibid. p. vii. Patrick Sherriff, 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake, 2011, p. 13. See review online at http://www.japantoday.com/category/arts-culture/view/246-after shocks-stories-from-the-japan-earthquake. Accessed 27 October 2012.

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the Japanese Red Cross Society to help the thousands of homeless, hungry and cold survivors of the earthquake and tsunami’.34 In an age of self-published instant media like Twitter, Facebook and blogs, these literary anthologies redefine literary discourse. Immediate literary production affords instant gratification and, in a globalized world, becomes shibbolethic by attesting that the author belongs to a particular diaspora of the traumatized. This is true for anyone who has ever experienced the terror of the earth shaking uncontrollably beneath their feet. Post-3/11 literature encapsulates this Zeitgeist and manifests a literary paradigm not ‘in’ but ‘of’ crisis. By exposing people’s deep trauma the primary function of post-3/11 literature in Japan has become palliative care. When we look at the overall literary response to the calamities in Japan we discover a range of reactions. Ōe Kenzaburō and Murakami Haruki exhibit some disillusionment at what their literature has been able to achieve in terms of social and cultural transformation. Arguably, this has led both writers to become more involved in activism and greater social engagement with denuclearization. On the other hand, a number of grassroots literary movements have emerged that have transcended the merely cathartic dimension of literature in an attempt to force literary production into becoming a more hands-on and socially engaging vehicle for disaster relief. Despite the first anniversary of this cataclysmic event having passed rather uneventfully, there are indications that post-3/11 may turn out to be somewhat different from its comparable historical precedents. George Clancey points out one conspicuous similarity in the varied response historically in Japan to earthquakes, and that is that daishinsai are insurmountable agents that trigger socio-cultural transformation.35 The working metaphor for this transformation the world over is the phoenix rising from the ashes of destruction to give birth to a new civilization. This myth can be traced back to Herodotus and Ovid in the West, and in China and Japan this bird-like mythical creature is known as fushichō 不死鳥(‘immortal bird’)36 whereas the native Japanese and Chinese variety is referred to as hō-ō 鳳凰. In this sense major earthquakes in Japan may also function as psychological change agents that usher in new paradigms independent of the cyclical reign of imperial dynasties.

34 35 36

Source: http://www.amazon.com/46-Aftershocks-Stories-Japan-Earthquake/dp/0956883621/ ref=pd_sim_b_1. Accessed: 27 October 2012. George Clancey, ‘Disasters as Change Agents: Three Earthquakes and Three Japans’, pp. 396–397. The Chinese equivalent for the former is businiao 不死鳥 (literally ‘immortal bird’), and fenghuang 鳳凰, for the latter with the same characters in use.

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The Tōhoku earthquake is also somewhat different from the major earthquakes that the Japanese archipelago has experienced in the past because it caused the Fukushima nuclear crisis and, at least metaphorically, combined a natural disaster with a major man-made disaster for the first time. In the Japanese psyche this collision between the natural and human domains marks a major point of departure for the advanced capitalist consumer cultural capital of the world, where the old has always coexisted with the new. The significant economic cost of the disaster is estimated by the World Bank to be us$235 billion, making it the most expensive natural disaster in world history. It has thus further widened the gap between rich and poor in a society that was already a kakusa shakai (deeply stratified society) and is closely connected with the rise of precarity in contemporary Japan. The three literary projects discussed in this article—2:46: Aftershocks (2011), March Was Made of Yarn (2012) and Shaken: Stories for Japan (2011)—have several things in common. They are real earthquake-relief endeavours aimed at helping not only by providing cathartic escapism but also by offering the monetary proceeds as an indirect donation. They are palliative literature or charity writing. Secondly, they are collaborative and often have been created very swiftly by incorporating modern mass-media like Twitter and Facebook into the production and dissemination process. Arguably, this makes them exceedingly effective since we do not need to go to a bookstore to buy them but can download a version onto our portable devices, knowing that our pleasurable purchase has simultaneously provided some disaster relief for the needy.

Towards a Long Conclusion

This chapter has positioned the post-3/11 literary response to the Tōhoku earthquake within the wider context of national calamities in Japan, ranging from the inevitable earthquakes to man-made nuclear contamination. These calamities have given birth to a literacy of disaster ranging from popular cultural icons like Godzilla to the mythos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet it was the allegorical triple-headed monster of the Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear meltdown that for the first time combined the natural seismicity of earthquakes with avoidable man-made nuclear disasters. The synergy of these events has profoundly ruptured the canonical discourse in Japanese literature. The texts discussed above demonstrate a recrudescence in Japan of the post-war-generation mindset whereby lack of accountability for the past is held at least partially responsible for the man-made catastrophe at Fukushima.

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Following in the metaphorical footsteps of a notoriously recalcitrant and drawn-out ‘post-war’ sociocultural paradigm, a new type of literature is emerging in post-3/11 Japan that is formulating its own vision of a post-apocalyptic future. What this literature presages for Japan is vital for the rest of the world. With global climate change worsening, population growth and our dependence on fossil fuels and energy accelerating, Japan is once again at the forefront in a volatile seismic and nuclear world. It seems that, one year after the earthquake, literary representations are still very much in flux. However, the immensity of the disaster has clearly caused a traumatic paradigm shift in the consciousness of the Japanese people. This is not without precedent in the Japanese archipelago and it is difficult to ignore a comparison with the psychological shift experienced at the end of the AsiaPacific War. Some historical parallels that warrant further discussion are the Zeitgeist of disillusionment with the established system and local authorities, a radical change in public discourse, and the inevitable attempt to reshape the status quo. It is because of this awkward realization that many commentators have begun to suggest that the publicly pronounced paradigm shift37 from sengo shakai (post-war society) to saigo shakai (post-disaster society) is merely wishful thinking. The stark reality appears to be that some six decades after the war and following another major earthquake not much has changed in the sociopolitical climate of Japan. In this sense the triple-headed monster becomes symbolic of the inability of Japanese society to radically reform and transform itself after 1945. This is the sombre message of the literary trends discussed above. To this end the literature of both Murakami and Ōe delve into the shortcomings of an abstract ‘national consciousness’ in relation to issues of accountability and victim/ perpetrator dichotomies. This literary ‘trend’ of introspection is another offshoot of Japan’s post-war legacy and its nation-building agenda following the ‘national’ catastrophe of the Asia-Pacific War. Yet, commendable as this endeavour might be, it is also mired in the outdated paradigm of nationalism infused with a neo-liberal agenda. Contemporary Japan is less holistic than both writers imagine and perhaps it is precisely because of the lack of ‘national consciousness’ and cultural unity that they fail to see the implicit diversity of a multi-ethnic and globalized culture under the umbra of a homogenous Japan. In this context the triple-headed monster of 11 March assumes a deeply historical and cultural significance, because the country’s national agenda has failed 37

See for example the commentary by the political scientist Mikurya Takashi, ‘Sengo ga owari, saigo ga hajimaru’ (End of the post-war period, beginning of the post-disaster) in Chūō kōron, 2011, pp. 24–31.

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the rural reality of northeastern Japan. It is the unification of the dissonant voices of a diverse Japan that can be glimpsed from the collective literary response that is a distinct aspect of post-3/11 literature. In this context of nation-building following 11 March Japan’s never-ending sengo (post-war period) has haunted the country for more than six decades after the fulminant end to the Asia Pacific War. Just as contemporary literature focuses on a somewhat esoteric notion of ‘historical karma’, the equally sudden and catastrophic magnitude of 11 March purportedly propelled Japan into a vague saigo (post-disaster period). Despite the misnomer—since Fukushima and the nuclear crisis are far from resolved—and despite the vestiges of a bygone era typified by territorial disputes with China, Korea and Russia, there are signs of hope that the earthquake’s traumatic erasure may also usher in the new, the good and the sustainable. Returning once more to Adorno, for whom the process of ruination is intrinsic to the dialectic whereby modernity underlines itself and lapses into mythology and self-destruction,38 we should see post-3/11 literature as reflecting a literary tradition that transgresses historical artefact. This tradition inoculates the survivors of major disasters against the depression and the inevitability of the carpe diem motif. In this sense we must acknowledge that in Japan daishinsai (major earthquakes) are as much about yonaoshi (rebirth and renewal) as they are about death and decay. The stark reminder of memento mori in post-3/11 literature amplifies the struggle of the human intellect against the power of nature. It suggests that eviscerating pain and suffering through the power of our (literary) imagination can help us transcend major catastrophes and find positive values in their wake. In this sense, palliative literature is precisely what Japan needs right now, to alleviate and soothe the pain and suffering while taking great care to preserve the memory in order to build a better society tomorrow. References Adorno, W. Theodore. Prisms. Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1981. Amamiya, Karin. ‘Naze ima puroretaria bungaku ka’, (Why proletarian literature now?) in Kokubungaku: Tokushu—Saidoku Puroretaria Bungaku (Special Edition— Rereading Proletarian Literature), January 2009, pp. 7–16. Blaxell, Vivian. ‘Sorrow, History and Catastrophe in Japan After the 3/11 Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Meltdown: A personal encounter’, The Asia-Pacific Journal 9,

38

Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, Ruins of Modernity (2010), p. 7.

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(36), (5 September 2011). Online at: http://www.japanfocus.org/-Vivian-Blaxell/3596. Accessed: 23 September 2012. Boulter, Jonathan. ‘Writing Guilt: Haruki Murakami and the Archives of National Mourning’, in English Studies in Canada 32, 1 (2006):125–145. Clancey, Gregory. ‘Disasters as Change Agents: Three Earthquakes and Three Japans’. In East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 5,3 (2011): 395–402. Fay Sarah and Ōe Kenzaburo ‘Interviews: The Art of Fiction’ in The Paris Review, Winter 2007. Online at: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5816/the-art-of-fiction -no-195-kenzaburo-oe. Accessed: 26 October 2012. Hell, Julia and Schönle Andreas (2010) Ruins of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. Isoda Kouichi (磯田光一) and Takahashi Hideo (高橋英夫eds) (1990) Shōwa bungakushi-ron (昭和文学史論; theories of Showa literary history). Tokyo: Shogakukan. Lindsey, Annison et al. (2011) 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake. London: The quakebook community. Luke Elmer and Karashima David (2012) March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown. New York: Vintage Books. Matsubara, Hiroshi, ‘Ōe: It’s time for Japanese to change their mentality’ The Asahi Shimbun, 12 July 2012. Online at: http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social _affairs/AJ201207120088. Accessed: 27 October 2012. Mikurya, Takashi (御厨貴) ‘Sengo ga owari, saigo ga hajimaru’ (End of the post-war period, beginning of the post disaster) in Chūō kōron, May (2011): 24–31. Miyoshi, Yukio (三好 行雄ed). Kindai bungaku-shi hikkei: bessatsu kokubungaku (近代 文学史必携:別冊国文学 Special edition of Kokubungaku—Handbook of Modern Literary History). Tokyo, Kokubungaku, January (1987). Murakami, Haruki. ‘As an Unrealistic Dreamer: Catalunya International Prize speech’, in Senri no michi, 2011. Online at: http://www.senrinomichi.com/?p=2541. Accessed: 21 October 2012. Murakami, Haruki (2002) After the Quake: Stories. London: Alfred A. Knopf. Murakami, Haruki (2000) Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. London: The Harvill Press. Murakami, Haruki (1999) The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (Nejimakidori kuronikuru, 1994– 1995, translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin). London: Harvill Press. Oda, Makoto (2002). Fukai Oto (Deep Sound). Tokyo: Shinchosha. Ōe, Kenzaburō and Sarah Fay. ‘Interviews: The Art of Fiction’, in The Paris Review, Winter 2007. Online at: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5816/the-art-of -fiction-no-195-kenzaburo-oe. Accessed: 26 October 2012.

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Ōe, Kenzaburō. ‘History Repeats’ in The New Yorker, 28 March 2011, Online at: http:// www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/03/28/110328ta_talk_oe. Accessed: 26 October 2012. Ōe, Kenzaburō (1995). Kojinteki na taiken (Translated by John Nathan as A Personal Matter). London: Picador. Ōe, Kenzaburō (1970). Okinawa No-to (Okinawa Notes). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Sano, Shinichi 佐野眞一, Wagō, Ryōichi和合亮一. (2012). Kotoba ni nani ga dekiru no ka: 3/11wo koete (言葉に何ができるのか: 3・11を越えて; Transcending 3/11: what can words achieve). Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten. Sherriff, Patrick (2011) 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake. London: Enhanced Editions. Kimoto, Takeshi. ‘Post-3/11 Literature: Two Writers from Fukushima’. In World Literature Today, 86, 1 (Jan/Feb 2012): 14–18. Waseda Bungaku. ‘Waseda Bungaku’s charity project: Japan Earthquake Charity Literature’. Online at: http://www.bungaku.net/wasebun/info/charity_en.html. Accessed: 27 October 2012. Yasuhisa Yoshikawa (芳川泰久, ed.) (2012) Waseda Bungaku kiroku zōkan: shinsai to fikushon no kyori = ruptured fiction(s) of the earthquake (早稲田文学記錄増刊: 震災 とフィクションの ‘距離’ = ruptured fiction(s) of the earthquake).早稲田文学会, Tōkyō: Waseda Bungakukai. Yoshimoto, Takaaki (2008) Hinkon no shisō (Thought and poverty). Tokyo: Seidosha.

Chapter 5

These Things Here and Now Poetry in the Wake of 3/11 Jeffrey Angles

Western Michigan University

Poetry addresses individuals in their most intimate, private, frightened and elated moments. People turn to poetry in times of crisis because it comes closer than any other art form to addressing what cannot be said. In expressing the inexpressible poetry remains close to the origins of language. w.s. merwin (The University of Arizona Poetry Center 2012)

Introduction1 As everyone knows by now, the 11 March 2011 earthquake that shook northeastern Japan also released a destructive tsunami that devastated the Tōhoku coast and precipitated the worst nuclear meltdown since Chernobyl. In a more figurative sense, that earthquake also reverberated throughout Japanese society, forcing it to rethink its usage of energy, its relationship to the natural environment, its relationship with the government, and its modes of organizing at the grass-roots level. At the same time, the quake also shook up the Japanese literary world. Almost immediately, Ōe Kenzaburō, Tsushima Yūko, Ishimure Michiko and other prominent novelists known for their involvement in social issues began to publish statements to the press and to use their influence to help shape reconstruction efforts. Just to give one example, it was not long before the novelist Shimada Masahiko founded ‘Fukkō Shoten’, an online bookstore that sold copies of books signed and donated by famous writers in order to raise money for relief efforts. Perhaps the segment of the Japanese literary world where the seismic forces of 3/11 were felt most strongly, however, was the poetic world. Many Japanese newspapers include regular columns that include free verse, tanka or haiku 1 The author would like to thank Davinder Bhowmik who kindly invited me to talk on this subject at the University of Washington, giving me the opportunity to develop ideas presented in this essay.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004268319_007

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poems, but in just the few days after 3/11, poetry began to emerge from those small columns and take a more prominent place in the news, eventually finding its way into a central position in the discourse that had started unfolding across the nation. At the same time that it shook poetry into the public eye, the earthquake levelled—at least temporarily—the hierarchical culture that had tended to keep established poets and relative newcomers apart. The collapse of the usual hierarchical distinctions, genre differences and personal rivalries resulted in an enormous burst of poetic output—special magazine issues, books, poetry readings, musical collaborations and translations. Meanwhile, as the Japanese population struggled to find a language that would allow them to express their grief, horror and anxiety, poets became leaders who used dramatic and powerful language to document the tragedy and probe its implications. Certain poets who had occupied relatively marginal positions in the Japanese poetic world until that point began to rise to the fore, and their work helped to reshape understandings of exactly who and what were important in the literary arts. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that in the midst of the crisis, it was the poetic world that asked some of the most incisive questions about the meaning of language, art and truth—questions that continue to resonate even now.

Pebbles of Poetry and the Shifting Poetic Landscape

In the first few days after 3/11, Tōhoku residents who were able to access the Internet immediately began using the web as a way to inform the outside world about the extent of the devastation. Conversely, people across Japan turned to the internet to find out what was happening. As the Fukushima meltdown proceeded and people found themselves less and less satisfied by the government and tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company)’s handling of information, people everywhere turned to the web to figure out what was going on, bypassing more traditional media such as newspapers and television. Social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook, which had played an enormous role in the Arab Spring uprisings only a year before, revealed their potential to allow communication while bypassing central authority. In other words, the earthquake shook the reins of control from the hands of the traditional media, allowing other modes of communication to come to the fore. The resulting explosion of Internet traffic contained both information and misinformation, but what is important to note is that, in the midst of this chaotic situation, there quickly emerged a number of new ‘authority’ figures who spoke about the disasters

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as they saw them. Most of these figures had been relatively known until the earthquake, but their disaster-related writing garnered them a significant audience. The poet Wagō Ryōichi (b. 1968) was one of these figures. Before the earthquake, he was a mid-career poet with a half-dozen books to his name and a few poetry prizes that made him moderately well known in the poetry world. In the aftermath of the earthquake, however, his writings on Twitter quickly catapulted him to a position as one of the most famous poets in the nation. Because Wagō is a Fukushima native and was working in a high school in the earthquake-ravaged city of Minami Sōma at the time of the disasters, in many ways he had the perfect pedigree to represent 3/11 to the world. Fortunately, the lives of Wagō’s wife and children were spared, and he was able to return home after three days in an evacuation camp. On 16 March, once back at home, he turned to Twitter and began writing a series of thousands of Tweets that poured out with tremendous speed. These Tweets began with relatively simple statements that he was safe, but quickly they turned to more probing observations and poetic evocations of the anxiety he and the people around him were experiencing. Throughout his Twitter feed, one senses Wagō’s confusion, despair, anger and hurt. Because his thoughts so carefully mirrored those of the nation as a whole, his Twitter feed quickly gathered over ten thousand followers, many of whom re-tweeted his observations and questions as a way of giving voice to their own sorrow, confusion and anger.2 This sudden attention catapulted Wagō into the spotlight. In short order, Gendai shi techō (Handbook of Contemporary Poetry), Japan’s foremost journal of modern, free-style poetry, put together a special issue dedicated to the earthquake, including a full reprint of the Twitter feed newly entitled ‘Shi no tsubute’ (Pebbles of Poetry), and containing all the Tweets posted between 16 March and 9 April, the date the journal went to press (Wagō 2011d: 37–80).3 At the same time, Wagō began making a large number of news, radio and speaking appearances—so many that the Tokyo publisher Tokuma Shoten re-published his Twitter feed from 16 March to 26 May in book form (Wagō 2011a). By the end of 2011, Wagō had appeared on every major television channel in Japan, often multiple times. As a result of this exposure, Shi no tsubute has become probably the most famous piece of literature in any genre to emerge from 3/11. In the aftermath of 2 As of January 2013, when this was article was written, Wagō’s feed (@wago2828) had just over 22,500 followers. 3 By the time of the earthquake, the April issue of Gendai shi techō had already gone to press, so the first of its earthquake special issues was published in May.

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the earthquake, vigils and poetry readings were held throughout the country, and Wagō’s poetic Twitter feed was among the most frequently read works. The composer Niimi Tokuhide (b. 1947) has set certain segments of the work to music, giving the songs the title ‘Tsubute songu’ (Pebble Songs). (These works have since been performed a number of times in various concerts in Tokyo.) The composer Itō Yasuhide also followed suit, publishing several pieces of music based on Wagō’s texts.4 Within months, two partial translations into English were published, and since then, there have been other partial translations into Finnish, Slovenian and other languages.5 Meanwhile, Wagō has continued to post his 3/11-related reflections on his Twitter feed and has produced two more books of writing, thus forming what is sometimes referred to as his ‘3/11 trilogy’ (2011b; 2011c). The following excerpt comes from the beginning of Shi no tsubute, the first and most widely read of his writings. These Tweets were originally posted 16 March, between 4:23 and 4:35 am. The earthquake hit. I spent some time in an emergency evacuation area, but things have calmed down, so I have returned to go to work. Thanks everyone for worrying about me. Your words of encouragement are greatly appreciated. Today is the sixth day since the disaster. My ways of looking at and thinking about things have changed. Everywhere I go, there is nothing but tears. I want to write about this with all the ferocity of an Asura. Radiation is falling. It is a quiet night. What meaning could there be in harming us to this extent? The meaning of all things is probably determined after the fact. If so, then what is the meaning of that period ‘after the fact’? Is there any meaning there at all? What could this earthquake be trying to teach us? If it’s not trying to teach us anything, then what can we possibly have left to believe? 4 Niimi has placed several of the songs on Youtube, as has Itō. See for instance, Niimi Tokuhide (2011) and Itō Yasuhide (2011). 5 At the request of the editors of Gendai shi techō, who were eager to see Wagō’s poetry reach the outside world, I translated one long segment, which was first published in Gendai shi techō’s blog, then slightly modified before being reprinted in the online journal Japan Focus. Soon, I received a request for another long segment in translation from the editors of a special issue of the intellectual journal Shisō chizu beta (Maps of Ideology Beta), dedicated to the earthquake (Wagō 2011e).

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Radiation is falling. It is a quiet, quiet night.6 2011a: 10–11; 2011f

Like all who lived through the disasters, he immediately begins asking the unanswerable question ‘why me?’ His sadness and rage is not limited to the forces that nature has unleashed. As the book proceeds, he also turns his ire to the institutions that have exacerbated the problems, such as the figures who created the Fukushima nuclear reactor, the government offices that failed to advise local citizens of the real risks, and the organizations that have failed to provide aid in a timely fashion to the people who need it. Even though his Tweets are strong and emphatic, they contain many elements that give them the feeling of poetry; for instance, the final Tweet quoted above recurs like a quiet cadence throughout the first part of the work. This use of rhythm and repetition invites the reader to consume the collection as a whole, rather than as a series of individual, unrelated observations. Even within single Tweets, he employs internal repetition; for example, one Tweet originally uploaded on 9 April 10:19 pm (and subsequently re-tweeted nearly 150 times) contains some of the most often quoted passages from Shi no tsubute. Give back our town, give back our village, give back our sea, give back the wind. The sound of chimes, the sound of mail arriving, the sound of something in the inbox. Give back waves, give back fish, give back love, give back the sun beating down. The sound of chimes, the sound of mail arriving, the sound of something in the inbox. Give back our joyful toasts, give back grandmothers, give back pride, give back Fukushima. The sound of chimes, the sound of mail arriving, the sound of something in the inbox. 2011a: 213

Here, his impossible yet insistent demand for a return to the pre-3/11 past overlaps with repeated flashes from his current reality, namely a small flood of e-mails and Twitter messages forcing their way into his consciousness, reminding him of his inescapable situation in the present. Psychologists and literary critics have often noted the consistent use of repetition in literature having to do with traumatic events. Early in the history of modern psychology, Pierre Janet recognized that helplessness constitutes the 6 All citations from poems are my own, either published or unpublished. In cases in which the translations have been published, I have provided citations in the bibliography.

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core insult of traumatic experience, and healing requires the victim to recover a sense of efficacy and power; repetition involves an attempt to come to mastery through language and relived experience (Herman 1997: 41). Similarly, as Cathy Caruth (1996: 11) noted in her influential rereading of Freud, one can think of trauma as a sort of wound that always comes too early to be understood; as a result, people who live through traumatic experiences relive their thoughts over and over in an attempt to make it comprehensible as a total experience. One sees the psychic echoes of trauma throughout Wagō’s work, especially in the use of repetitious images in those places where subjective description of events give way to more personal thoughts. For instance, on the evening of 1 April, he wrote the following. A cold sweat covers our minds. Drops fall onto our souls. Cold sweat. And still, all the clocks in eastern Japan remain one minute behind. 2011a: 171–172; 2011e: 224

Over and over, in the subsequent Tweets, Wagō uses the surreal phrase ‘a cold sweat runs over our spirits’ (watashi-tachi wa seishin ni, tsumetai ase o kaite iru) in describing the anxiety of the people around him. The reason that the sweat cannot end is that the anxiety is not over; the aftershocks keep coming one after another and the radiation continues, continuing to ruin homes and exhaust the already weary population even further. The psychological effect of this ongoing state is that the narrator ends up reliving the disaster over and over, unable to move forward in time and begin the process of gaining mastery over his environment. He states as much in this Tweet, posted just minutes later. 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 pm, March 11? 2011a: 174; 2011e: 224

To make matters worse, the images of the earthquake and tsunami kept replaying in the news, preventing the wounds from healing. The evening of the earthquake I set out to meet a friend in a particular big building. While I was waiting for him, I caught a glimpse of the tv in the

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security guard’s room. That was the moment—the moment the disaster really began for me. A black wave, swallowing everything, completely covering everything, the threat of the moment that is the present. Hundreds, no, thousands of times. The clips repeated over and over on the screen. The present baring its fangs. A black wave, swallowing everything, completely covering everything. Hundreds, no, thousands of times… The clips repeated over and over on the screen. My friend taps my shoulder. I quickly ask, ‘What… What is that?’ It is the true face of the disastrous quake that struck us. If so, then my clock and your clock are both one minute behind. The backs of our eyes are covered in a cold sweat. 2011a: 175; 2011e: 225

Although Wagō’s first Tweets were carefully worded and reserved, as they pick up speed, they seem to emerge like ‘automatic writing’ from some space inside his unconscious. In fact, in a book of recently published interviews, Wagō wrote that other Japanese poets sometimes criticized his post-earthquake work for being too direct and not ‘poetic’ enough. He counters by pointing out that he uses multiple perspectives in his Twitter work, sometimes writing from his own perspective, sometimes writing from a more universal perspective, sometimes even writing from the point of the view of the tsunami or quake itself (Sano and Wagō 2012: 41–42).7 Really, what most captured the imagination of the post-earthquake Japan, however, is the attitude behind the language—its intensely focused eagerness to communicate through the medium of poetry—and so it seems only appropriate that the first vehicle for this project was Twitter, a site designed for quick, direct communication. Writer Sano Shin’ichi comments that an enormous amount of the language before 3/11 seemed to be lacking in ‘power’; it suffered from an inability to convey dramatic emotion, but one of the effects of Wagō’s writing was to restore language’s expressive ability (Ibid.: 41). Elsewhere, Wagō has written that the fact that Twitter limits Tweets to 140 characters, meant that he was consistently paring his observations down, attempting to find suggestive nuggets of expressive truth in them.8 Ironically, it was those limits that 7 To differentiate between these perspectives, Wagō takes advantage of the fact that Japanese has multiple first-person pronouns. 8 Because the Japanese language is relatively compact and able to say a great deal in a short amount of space, 140 characters in Japanese allows one to say a lot more than 140 characters in English.

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turned his original impulse to document the events of 3/11 into something more focused and refined—something more like poetry (Ibid.: 248). Indeed, there are many passages in Shi no tsubute that suggest the need for a new form of powerful expression to give voice to Japan’s situation in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Wagō does not take to task other poets directly; however, his interviews suggest that before 3/11, he believes that the Japanese poetic world’s tendency to engage in closed linguistic experimentation, to focus on personal exchanges between poets, and to produce difficult, often inaccessible poems led the poetic world to grow anaemic and tired. The result was that poetry—and perhaps even language in general—was losing its ability to communicate and was instead devolving into an art form that was unappreciated and underutilized. Given this situation, 3/11 provided the shock required for language and poetry to become relevant to Japan once again. Language, he suggests, needs to be strong and powerful to deal with Japan’s current realities. One finds this at the beginning of Shi no tsubute when he writes, ‘Everywhere I go, there is nothing but tears. I want to write about this with all the ferocity of an Asura’—the powerful and demonic-looking demigods of Buddhist folklore (2011a: 10; 2011f). Later, he urges Japan’s other poets to join him in writing in powerful and dramatic ways of the many lives lost. The shadows of 11,438 people (You, poets in Japan! I call out to you! Now is the time to write poetry, to bet your life on the Japanese language. You, my poet friends who have worked so hard, I beg you for poetry, please write poetry, I ask you for the sake of those countless sad souls swallowed by the black wave at 2:46, my poetic friends, I beg you through tears) pass by the bus station. 2011a: 178; 2011e: 225



The Ghosts of Tōhoku

In the first few months after 3/11, a series of poetry vigils were held throughout the country, bringing together both new and established writers working in various genres. The result was the construction of a relatively democratic atmosphere in the poetic world in which people could share their new works inspired by the disasters. Among the participants in these readings were the poet and writer Suga Keijirō (b. 1958), who worked with the translator and essayist Nosaki Kan (b. 1959), to edit a collection of poems and prose reflections entitled Rōsoku no honō ga sasayaku kotoba (Words Whispered by

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Candle Flames), which they published in June 2011 and sold as a fundraiser for earthquake relief.9 The title of this collection comes from the fact that much of Tōhoku was without power for some time after 3/11. Meanwhile, as the Fukushima reactors began to melt down, tepco announced a series of rolling blackouts that would extend across Tokyo and central Japan in order to prevent larger scale outages. Not surprisingly darkness, blackness and power outages appear frequently as elements in many post-3/11 poems, including Tanikawa Shuntarō’s ‘Rōsoku ga tomosareta’ (The Candles were Lit) and my own ‘Teiden no mae no kansō’ (Reflections before a Blackout) (Tanikawa 2011; Angles 2011). One frequent participant in these readings was Arai Takako (b. 1966), a dynamic poet who, although still in her mid-career, has earned an international recognition. In Suga and Nozaki’s collection, she published the poem ‘Katahō no kutsu’ (Half a Pair of Shoes), inspired by a trip she had made in early May to a friend in Kesennuma, one of the coastal cities levelled by the tsunami. While there, Arai learned that shoes and clothing from the tsunami victims were still washing onto shore daily, and she decided to write about that in her work. The following is the poem in its entirety. the red poppy is in bloom a leather shoe, just half a pair, lies washed up on the seashore laces still tied as the poppy bends and drops dew from its petals the shoe sighs faintly the flower shakes itself off and the dirty shoe starts to open its eye most likely no landscapes are reflected in that eye, deep as an old well, memories 9 In Septmber 2011, Suga published his own book-length poem entitled Shima no mizu, shima no hi (Island Water, Island Fire), inspired by the disasters. This work deserves recognition as one of the significant pieces of 3/11 poetry, but because it is so long and complex, I hope to write about it elsewhere where I can do it justice.

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soak through the poppy can only caress she extends her leaves toward the chest-like instep — You cannot break me, the waves cannot wash away my worn-down heel and my folds they draw near the gaze of the shoeless boy going as far as the water’s edge if the poppy gazed in how clear that eye would be a fire, like a small fish’s fin at the bottom of an old well — The sea cannot extinguish the frank, pale flame at the depths of my existence for the sea too is an enormous eye what light must the wave have emitted in that moment as it watered and rushed surging in anger far from shore as the other shoe was swallowed — Did the school of sardines see the circle of blue flame drawn in my eyes? the poppy is trembling again no it is the wind the flower stands naked dropping its petals into the well

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it is an umbilical cord the tip of the shoelace falling into the depths of the eye where the boy tries to grab on down it crawls

arai 2011; 2012

In this somewhat surreal poem, Arai seems to be responding to the same impulse seen in Wagō’s call for poets to remember the missing and dead through their writing. The poppy, which serves as a symbol of the poet herself, leans toward the wet, memory-soaked shoe, and the shoe opens its ‘eyes’, which have born silent witness to the disaster. The eyes seem to morph into the eyes of the deceased child, and the poppy/poet imagines the visions reflected in his eyes in the final moments of his life. The poem’s abrupt ending, however, suggests the epistemological problems of such a project. The object, which seems so suggestive, seems to want to help the poet discover the story, dropping a shoelace deep inside, as if trying to provide a lifeline to the missing person and his memory. Still, it is clear that the missing child cannot return, and his story is only knowable through guesswork. The poppy/ poet cannot offer any meaningful salvation to the child, who is already gone. All it can do is drop its petals inside the shoe. In other words, the poet cannot really recover the lost lives; all the poet can do is invite the silent shoe to offer up its story. Elsewhere, in commenting on her own pre-3/11 work, Arai notes that one of the major projects of her poetry is to provide a space that would allow the ghosts of the past to haunt her and her readers. Ghosts and spirits have the power to teach us the past. There is a part of me that believes that. We tend to forget everything so quickly, don’t we? We humans go through life in such an irresponsible way. That’s especially true now, when our societies and economic systems speed forward at full tilt leaving us to chase after them. Our amnesia extends even to our worst tragedies. That’s why I want ghosts and spirits to remain close, so they can be our teachers. arai 2009

The poem ‘Katahō no kutsu’ is an attempt to do exactly what she has described here—to allow the ghosts of the recently deceased victims of the tsunami back onto the stage of history—even while remaining aware of the limitations of that sort of project.

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Poetry and the Documentary Drive

The same May special issue of Gendai shi techō that first put Wagō’s Tweets into printed form included a selection of poems from various poets living in the Tōhoku region. This selection included relatively minor poets alongside moderately well-known poets, such as the Chinese-born Tian Yuan, who had just won the H Prize (sometimes called the ‘Akutagawa Prize of the poetry  world’) the year before. In addition, the editors solicited essays from a large number of well-known non-Tōhoku poets, including Kitagawa Tōru, Fujii Sadakazu, Sasaki Mikirō, Yotsumoto Yasuhiro and Hirata Toshiko. This issue sold several thousand copies more than usual, and the editors followed up with a second special issue in June, this time containing poems from non-Tōhoku residents. Once again, the contributions came from a variety of poets, ranging from well-known poets—Shiraishi Kazuko, Takahashi Mutsuo, Nomura Kiwao and Kōra Rumiko—to several mid-career and younger poets, namely Takano Tamio, Miyata Kōsuke, Tanaka Yōsuke, Ohsaki Sayaka and myself. If one looks at the poems in these special issues, as well as many other poems published in the immediate aftermath of 3/11, one can see them as scattered points, individual stitches perhaps, in a much larger tapestry that together begins to trace the ways that the disasters impinged upon the individual and national psyche. Many of the results are intensely personal. For instance, in the poem ‘Sakebu imobatake’ (Screaming Potato Field), Tanaka Yōsuke (b. 1969) writes not about 3/11 as much as the ways that the disasters coincided with his own personal tragedy, namely the death of his mother in Tokyo and a major operation performed on his father. In the poem, Tanaka fights against his nervous exhaustion, imagining himself surrounded by clear spring water and a potato field, then planting seed potatoes and cultivating the field, which he hopes will bring him solace. Interestingly, in a statement that accompanied his poem in Gendai shi techō, Tanaka wrote: The thing that sustained my heart in the midst of all of the confusion after the earthquake was, much to my surprise, the piles of books of poetry that the earthquake had scattered all over my floor. Over the last couple of decades, Japanese society has been peaceful and quiet on the surface; meantime, poetry has grown difficult to understand and even obscurantist, and so society has grown away from it, treating it as something high-brow and unnecessary. Recent years, however, have seen terrorism, disasters, and now the nuclear meltdown. As it becomes clear to everyone how brutal the current situation really is, things that once were

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seen as unnecessary begin to become the things that comfort us the most—a kind of food for the spirit. Now is the time, in the middle of all these things showering down upon us, that we should be most grateful for the depths of culture. 2011; 2012

Like Wagō, Tanaka expresses discomfort with ‘difficult’ and thus self-isolating tendencies of contemporary poetry yet recognizes the role that poetry serves in providing comfort and healing. Most of the discussion in this article so far focuses on the genre of longer, free verse known as shi that developed in the nineteenth century as Japanese writers came in contact with longer, Western-style verse.10 Authors of traditional forms of poetry, such as haiku and tanka, also played an important role in documenting the events of 3/11 and their aftermath. One sees this in the year-long exhibition, ‘Mirai kara no koe ga kikoeru: 2011.3.11 to shiika’ (We Can Hear the Voices of the Future: 2011/3/11 and Poetry), held from March 2012 to March 2013 at the Museum of Contemporary Japanese Poetry, Tanka and Haiku in Kitakami City, Iwate Prefecture. This exhibition evoked such strong emotional responses from museum goers that the curators followed it with a second exhibition, ‘Ashita kara fuite kuru kaze: 2011.3.11 to shiika, sono go’ (The Wind That Blows from Tomorrow: 2011/3/11 and Poetry, Part ii), held from March 2013 until March 2014. This was then in turn followed by a third exhibition, ‘Mirai ni tsunagu omoi: 2011.3.11 to shiika, soshite…’ (Thoughts that Connect to Tomorrow: 2011/3/11, Poetry, and Then…’), held from March 2014 until March 2015. Each of these year-long exhibitions collected and placed on display the manuscripts of a number of original poems about the disasters by a number of prominent poets from around the country and abroad (Nihon Gendai Shiika Bungakukan 2012, 2013, 2014). This exhibition was unusual in that it collected haiku, tanka and free-style verse about the disasters in one place, even though these three genres have tended to exist independently in modern Japan, and poets working in the three genres often have relatively little interaction. In walking through this exhibition, one finds that even more than the tanka or free-verse poems, the haiku tend to have a strong documentary quality in that they focus on small observations, capturing small snippets of the poets’ experiences and preserving them in language. 10

In their anthology of modern Japanese literature, J. Thomas Rimer and Van Gessel have translated the word shi as ‘verse in the international style’, to distinguish it from haiku, tanka, renga and other forms of verse written in traditional Japanese meters and poetic styles (Rimer and Gessel 2005).

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In fact, one of the leading figures of the young generation of haiku poets, Seki Etsushi (b. 1969) commented in a public talk in Tokyo that haiku, which focuses on small moments of revelation and is often written extemporaneously, are perhaps the best methods of documenting the small details of large events, thus bringing colossal events like 3/11 down to a manageable human scale (Seki, Tanaka and Angles 2012). Seki’s own recently published collection contains a number of poems that describe his experiences in Tsuchiura City, Ibaragi Prefecture during the worst of 3/11. While the earthquakes did not produce many casualties in Ibaragi, the roof of Seki’s house did collapse—a fact mentioned in several of his poems. the places with lost roof tiles are black the spring moon gasotsu seshi tokoro ga kuroshi haru no tsuki one roof, another roof the soil feels pain — the spring moon yane yane ga tsuchi ga itagaru haru no tsuki the gravestones have twisted and fallen — the spring equinox bōseki-ra mawari taore ya haru higan in the blackout not even the well water comes out — the larks fly high teiden nareba idomizu mo denu agehibari 2011: 114–115

In other places, Seki’s attention turns to more general statements about the problems facing the nation as a whole. in the neighbouring prefecture the nuclear reactor bursts and blackens the eastern wind rinken ni genshiro ga haze kurozumu higashikaze

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crushing Japan soiling Japan the spring sea Nihon o tsubushi Nihon ni yogore haru no umi Ibid.: 115

In yet other poems, he comments on specific things happening elsewhere in the country. as the reactor burns Mr. Wagō’s poetry flows forth— a cold spell genpatsu moetsutsu Wagō-shi shi o nagashi iru shunkan the children of Fukushima practising their calligraphy writing ‘nuclear energy’ Fukushima no kodomo no shuji ‘genshiryoku’ Ibid.: 115

Both of these two poems contain a somewhat ironic note. In the first, Seki points out how Wagō’s Twitter poems seemed to pour forth in an unending stream even though Fukushima was experiencing so much destruction and such bitter cold that virtually everything else came to a halt. In the last haiku, Seki points out what a strange and sad fact it is that the children of Fukushima had in their school exercises written about and celebrated nuclear energy— the very same thing that would cause them so much trouble. The spectacular ability of traditional Japanese poetry to record and convey the human dimension of 3/11 is in powerful evidence in the ‘Voices from Japan’ project, an exhibition of tanka organized by Tsujimoto Isao of the Studio for Cultural Exchange in Tokyo. As mentioned in the introduction, Japanese newspapers published large numbers of poems about the disasters. Tsujimoto selected a large number of tanka, some by amateurs and some by more established poets, some by residents of the disaster zones and some from poets living elsewhere. Tsujimoto worked with three American scholars of Japanese literature, Laurel R. Rodd, Amy V. Heinrich and Joan Ericson, to translate them into English. As of the time of writing, the poems have been placed on exhibition three times in various locations in America and Japan, first in a cathedral in New York, then at Colorado College and at the American School in Japan.

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Because tanka are longer than haiku, tanka often have a stronger narrative feel than haiku, which often feel more like suggestively poetic fragments. For instance, one tanka of Kikuchi Yō, a resident of Kitakami in Iwate Prefecture, describes in straightforward terms the terrifying anxiety of not being able to get in contact with his elderly parents whom he was unable to contact after the earthquake. after seismic tremors greater than six at my parents’ place, I call my father and mother; it rings ten times…eleven times… terror at no response shindo 6-kyō no jika ni fubo wa iru yobidashion jū-kai jū-ikkai oenu kȳofu Voices from Japan, 2013: 16

Elsewhere in the exhibition, another poem written by the same poet a month later records the ways that recurring images of the tsunami haunt his dreams. a week, ten days passed by, and yet black surging waves— dreams of the tsunami stop my breath isshūkan tōka tatte mo kurododō tsunami ga yume de kokyū o tomeru Ibid.: 44

Once again, the medium of traditional Japanese verse, which seizes upon small moments and converts them into language, reveals its utility and versatility in capturing and recording the details of day-to-day life in the aftermath of such an enormous event. One of the tanka poets featured prominently in the various Voices from Japan exhibitions was Hangui Keiko, a resident of Tomioka, located within a ten-mile radius of the Fukushima nuclear power plants. After the reactor melted down, Hangui was, like all of her neighbours, forced to evacuate her home, and in the two years since, she has lived in Tokyo, only returning home for the briefest of visits. On one of those visits one year after the quake, she found a narcissus that she planted some years before blooming in her overgrown, ruined garden. in one glance— landscape reduced to a blotted wasteland,

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narcissus blooming heroically in a garden ichibō no arechi to bakashishi osen no chi no niwa ni kenageni suisen no saku Ibid.: 40

Hangui’s poems also provide a more general, overarching look at the painful emptiness that has filled her town in the absence of its residents. my home town has become a town without voices, without humans it is as distant as the end of the earth furusato wa buin bunin no machi ni nari chi no hate no gotoku tōku naritari Ibid.: 23

Hangui’s poem registers a small voice of protest against the cruel fate that had claimed her hometown, turning it into an abandoned wasteland. Although she does not overtly turn her anger against tepco or the designers who failed to protect the Fukushima nuclear power plant from the power of the neighbouring ocean, readers cannot help but realize that the emptiness Hangui is describing is a result of deeper forces at work.

Searching for New Directions from the Wasteland

Other poets, primarily ones working in the longer medium of free verse, immediately began probing the forces responsible for disasters. Soon after the earthquake, Takahashi Mutsuo (b. 1937), one of Japan’s most metaphysical and prolific poets, wrote the following in the June 2011 special issue of Gendai shi techō dedicated to 3/11. After Japan’s defeat in World War ii, there were a number of poets who drew upon T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, wanting to start again, using the wasteland as a point of departure. Now, if we are to draw upon their example, and start out again from the wastelands left by the disasters of 3/11, we must recognize that the wasteland is really within ourselves. In other words, it stems from the spiritual destruction of desire and idleness that has, at some point unbeknownst to us, started growing rampant

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within us. Even before we were victims, we were victimizers. As long as we fail to recognize this, our words will lose their weight and circulate emptily. 1996: 11

Takahashi repeats his message that the earthquake revealed the spiritual emptiness of Japanese culture in his far-reaching history of Japanese poetry Shishin ni-sen-nen: Susanoo kara 3.11 e (Two thousand years of the poetic spirit: From Susanoo to 3/11). Perhaps our own wastelands (which are not something we have borrowed) and, therefore, the true possibilities of Japanese-language poetry will take this great natural disaster as their starting point. The reason I say this is that the unparalleled disaster that brought about this wasteland, has as its epicentre the unbounded desire of each and every one of us in Japan. To go one step further, I suspect the roots that we need to come alive again from our contemporary wasteland can only come from a thorough awareness of the unrivalled poverty of our spirits as contemporary Japanese people. 2011a: 363

In some ways, this rhetoric might sound at first like the nationalistic ‘luxury is the enemy’ kind of rhetoric used to justify the rationing system during the Second World War, but in Takahashi’s case, the object of his criticism is a civilization that lives out of balance with nature, placing its own consumerist needs and short-lived comfort before the well-being of the environment and even the world in general. In his long poem, ‘Ima koko ni korera no koto o’ (These Things Here and Now) first published in Gendai shi techō in June 2011, he makes this clear in his descriptions of nuclear power not as a gift to humanity but mankind’s own blasphemous creation. There, he likens nuclear energy to a demon that mankind shuts in a cage, forces to work until exhausted, then buries alive. Is it any wonder, he wonders, that ‘the buried, anguished corpse has regained its breath/ And has returned, harbouring its anxiety and fear for revenge?’ (2011b: 72; 2012c) After living out of touch with nature for so long, mankind cannot help but feel like a victim when nature strikes back. We protest against the unfairness of providence and weep continuously When cries catch in the throat, they comfort the lamenter The flow of tears eventually purifies the one who weeps

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But we are not comforted, we are not purified The reason is that our grievances and protests Are finally against ourselves, our avarice, and our idleness 2011b: 73–74; 2012c

Ultimately, what Takahashi believes that the Japanese population needs is to recognize their own complicity in the consumerist, unnatural culture that they have created. Even those people who claim no involvement are, in his estimation, not entirely innocent, since through their inaction and failure to change, they have been complicit in allowing a consumerist, energy-hungry culture based on comfort, immediacy and even greed, to flourish; what Japan needs is a new ability to learn from the disaster and change its ways. We must turn our eyes to what has remained The mute words of the countless dead snatched by the waves The silence of the swelling numbers of displaced withstanding privation And the brilliance of the youth who have stood up from inaction 2011b: 74; 2012c

In the final stanza, Takahashi writes that he is writing his poem of protest not because of a sense that he, as an elderly poet, knows any better than others. It is simply because as he witnesses the destruction, he feels a need to point to its root causes, to the ‘truths’ that he finds in the wreckage of 3/11. In anticipation of the one year anniversary of the disasters, Kameoka Daisuke, one of the editors at Gendai shi techō, cooperated with Asahi shinbun to publish a series of poems about 3/11 by a variety of Japan’s most prominent poets—Tanikawa Shuntarō, Tsujii Takashi, Yoshimasu Gōzō, Takahashi Mutsuo, Ishimure Michiko, Sasaki Mikirō, Inaba Mayumi, Itō Hiromi, Koike Masayo, Wagō Ryōichi, Misumi Mizuki and Minashita Kiriu. Of these, all but Tanikawa and Ishimure’s poems were republished in the March 2012 issue of Gendai shi techō. Takahashi’s contribution to this project takes on the large and thorny subject of the relationship between language and disasters. His poem, entitled ‘Ima wa’ (As for this moment) begins with the following stanza. Words, they were the first to break The reason we did not realize was because The destruction came so slowly We realized only after the word was destroyed When we sought to suture the fissures

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And the cave-ins, words did not respond That was when we understood at last The world is made of words When our words slowly broke down Our world did too, invisible to the eye 2012b: 34

In the aftermath of the disasters, Takahashi says, language revealed its inability to deal with destruction on such a large scale, but this inability was symptomatic of a greater, deeper problem. Language, literature and poetry had already moved so far away from the ordinary lives of people that its attempts to deal with the disasters of 3/11 did not come across as sincere or meaningful, but as he suggests in the continuation of the poem, it is possible for this situation to change. Just as the big bang created the world in a stupendous act of destruction, the massive destruction of 3/11 should provide a creative burst of energy in which a new linguistic world could and should emerge. In an interview that accompanied this poem in the Asahi shinbun, Takahashi explains that the earthquake brought him to a realization about the dangerous relationship that mankind had developed with nature, and that the language he had been using in his pre-3/11 writings did not reflect the realities of mankind’s precarious position. The disasters wakened him to this fact, as well as to the fact that language needed to be sincere to make a difference. Rather than speaking irresponsibly and fill the world with empty words, it is best to think carefully and reflect before writing (Takahashi 2012a). Takahashi here seems to be criticizing other poets, such as Wagō Ryōichi whose writings in the aftermath of the disasters simply lament the destruction yet fail to dig deeper to the more profound problems that underlie them. More important than simply documenting the disasters, Takahashi believes, is getting at the deeper realities that have brought mankind to such a precarious situation. In the same Asahi shinbun special issue, the prominent feminist poet Itō Hiromi (b. 1955) also wrote about the poetic production that followed 3/11. Her long poem, entitled ‘Ryōri suru, shi o kaku’ (Cooking, Writing Poetry) begins by describing her admiration for her friend, the celebrity chef Edamoto Naoko (called by her nickname ‘Neko’ in the poem). Edamoto earned a great deal of press in Japan after 3/11 by starting a project to bring gourmet food to the disaster zones in Tōhoku, but then she expanded this into a programme that brought food made in Tōhoku to sell in Tokyo for earthquake relief. In the face of her friend’s dynamism, Itō writes that as a poet, she felt ‘powerless’ and ‘useless’. Other poets, however, seemed to have no trouble writing about the disasters.

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Poets wrote poetry The thoughts rained down continuously Drenching us to the bone So many poems were written […] Unsightly poems Boring poems But they were still read They say people read them and wept I heard lots of stories like that Don’t cry Don’t write Don’t miss out From that perspective They cannot say no The poets Who can do nothing but write Cannot say no to writing They cannot relate except Through writing They must not Say now They must not Fail to be read 2012b: 44–45; 2012a: 34–36

Clearly, Itō is critical of those poets who wrote poetry simply because they felt the need to respond to the ‘overdetermined mandate’ to write about the disaster (Fowler 2013). Still, as the poem continues, she states that she does harbour some small bit of admiration for those writers, especially considering that she personally had not known how to write about a subject so big and terrible. In Itō’s case, this problem was complicated by the fact that she spends her life alternating between homes in southern California and Kumamoto, far from the region where the disasters took place. As a result, the disasters felt distant, even though they had deeply affected the people around her. Rather than searching across space to come to grips with the tragedy, she turned across time, rereading the classic piece of literature Hōjōki (Account of My Ten-Foot Square Hut), in which the twefth-century author Kamo no Chōmei describes the earthquakes and disasters of his own age. In her poem, she provides an extended quotation from Hōjōki, rendering it into modern Japanese in the form of an extended quotation. She writes ‘And so, like this,/ the earthquakes,/ the

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tsunami,/ came (just a little) into my body’ (2012b: 47; 2012a: 38). In other words, Itō differs from her contemporaries who use original textual production as a way of grappling with the 3/11 disasters; instead, she reworks someone else’s words to relate to the experience and make it feel ‘real’. In doing so, she situates the 3/11 disasters as part of a longer historical continuum, thus drawing parallels across centuries and creating a dialogic relationship between past and present (Friederich 2013). Indeed, showing relationships and acting upon them, Itō suggests in the final stanzas, represent the key to dealing with the disaster. After her paraphrasing of Kamo no Chōmei, she writes how she turned to the Buddhist classics in search of solace. In the Nirvana Sutra, she encountered the words, ‘First you help people/ That is what it is to be a bodhisattva’. She concludes her poem with these words. …if I were to put into my own words And deliver a message to This wounded Damaged Frightened Trembling society That’s no doubt what it would be That would be best Or So I hope If not Then I would not even know Which direction to turn 2012a: 42; 2012b: 49

In contrast to Takahashi, who uses the events of 3/11 as a means to rethink humankind’s relationship to nature and spark a revitalization of language, Itō calls for a revival of humanism that puts Buddhist principles into work and urges people to help one another. In her estimation, the need for connection, selfless dedication, and action trumps other artistic concerns. If art and poetry are to have a place in the aftermath of the disasters, it is to further that humanistic mission. In commemoration of the first anniversary of 3/11, Elmer Luke and David Karashima edited a collection that was published simultaneously in Japan, North America and the United Kingdom. Although this collection consists mostly of prose, it begins with the powerful poem ‘Kotoba’ (Words) from Tanikawa Shuntarō, Japan’s best-known living poet. Like other poets, Tanikawa

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recognizes that the earthquake provoked a crisis not just on the ground, but also in artistic production. The following is a complete translation of the poem. Losing everything We even lost our words But words did not break Were not washed from the depths Of our individual hearts Words put forth buds From the earth beneath the rubble With accents like old times With cursive script With halting meanings Words grown old from overuse Come alive again with our pain Grow deep with our sadness As if backed by silence They grow toward new meanings 2012a; 2012b

Language, he notes, has changed since 3/11; however, unlike Takahashi who states writers must fundamentally rethink their modes of expression and artistic production or fail to be relevant in the contemporary world, Tanikawa seems to be of a more optimistic bent, believing that this process is already under way. The words that were washed away by the tsunami are returning, putting forth shoots in individual hearts, and those young plants are already growing in new directions. Conclusion As poets continue to write in the post-3/11 era, it will remain to be seen how contemporary Japanese poetry continues to develop. Already, it seems that the strong spirit of collaboration that gave birth to so many readings, collections and exhibitions between poets of different generations and genres has started to fade. Still, the poetic landscape has clearly shifted. Wagō Ryōichi, who rose to such prominence in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, continues to publish and appear in the media, and thus seems poised to retain his strong

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position in the world of Japanese letters, and his particular brand of downto-earth language and powerful, relatively non-abstract expression represent one important direction that poetry seems to be taking in the post-3/11 poetic world. As he and the other poets quoted above have implied, the events surrounding 3/11 revealed how self-isolating and even obscurantist the Japanese poetry world had been, and this realization compelled many Japanese poets to reconsider the ways they write, as well as their own individual relationship to language. Language, they discovered, has power and it is the responsibility of the poet to use that power well—whether it be to provide comfort, to question the world, or to help shape a better future. Bibliography Angles, Jeffrey. 2011. ‘Teiden no mae no kansō/ Jishingo no kikoku’. Gendai shi techō 54 (6) (June): 92–94. Arai, Takako. 2009. ‘Building the Space of Poetry: A Conversation with Arai Takako, Winner of the Oguma Hideo Prize for Poetry’. Full Tilt: A Journal of East-Asian Poetry, Translation, and the Arts. http://fulltilt.ncu.edu.tw/Content.asp?I_No=42& Period=4. ——. 2011. ‘Katahō no kutsu’. In Rōsoku no honō ga sasayaku kotoba, ed. Suga Keijirō and Nozaki Kan, 10–15. Tokyo: Keisō Shobō. ——. 2012. ‘Half a Pair of Shoes’. Trans. Jeffrey Angles. Poetry Kanto 28: 16–21. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Fowler, Edward. 2013. Unpublished comments on panel ‘Literary and Cultural Responses to 3.11’ at Association for Asian Studies annual meeting, San Diego. 24 March. Friederich, Lee. 2013. Unpublished paper ‘Faultlines: Strata of Texts and Media in the Poetry of Itō Hiromi and Wagō Ryōichi’ presented at Association for Asian Studies annual meeting, San Diego. 24 March. Herman, Judith. 1997. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. ny: Basic Books. Itō, Hiromi. 2012a. ‘Cooking, Writing Poetry’. Trans. Jeffrey Angles. Poetry Kanto 28: 30–42. ——. 2012b. ‘Ryōri suru, shi o kaku’. Gendai shi techō 55 (3) (March): 41–49. Itō, Yasuhide. 2011. ‘Wagō Ryōichi “shi no tsubute” kakyokushū “furusato” dai-go-kyoku “akenai yoru wa nai”’. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgojFQ99HEU. Nihon Gendai Shiika Bungakukan, ed. 2012. Mirai kara no koe ga kikoeru: 2011.3.11 to shiika. Kitakami-shi: Nihon Gendai Shiika Bungakukan. ——, ed. 2014. Mirai ni tsunagu omoi: 2011.3.11 to shiika, soshite…. Kitakami-shi: Nihon Gendai Shiika Bungakukan.

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——, ed. 2013. Ashita kara fuite kuru kaze: 2011.3.11 to shiika, sono go. Kitakami-shi: Nihon Gendai Shiika Bungakukan. Niimi, Tokuhide. 2011. ‘Tsubute song 1 “anata wa doko ni”’. YouTube. http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=ZWJ_wTIdPPI. Rimer, J. Thomas, and Van C. Gessel. 2005. The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, Vol. 1: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868–1945. ny: Columbia University Press. Sano, Shin’ichi and Wagō Ryōichi. 2012. Kotoba ni nani ga dekiru no ka: 3/11 o koete. Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten. Seki, Etsushi. 2011. Roku-jū-oku-hon no kaiten suru magatsuta bō. Tokyo: Yūshorin. Seki, Etsushi, Tanaka Yōsuke, and Jeffrey Angles. 2012. ‘Nanopoetorī to maikuropoetorī’. Talk on 10 November, Hazuki Hall House, Zenpukuji Park, Tokyo. Suga, Keijirō. 2011. Shima no mizu shima no hi: Agend’Ars 2. Tokyo: Sayūsha. Suga, Keijirō and Nozaki Kan, eds. 2011. Rosoku no honō ga sasayaku kotoba. Tokyo: Keisō Shobō. Takahashi, Mutsuo. 2011a. Shishin ni-sen-nen : Susanoo kara 3.11 e. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ——. 2011b. ‘Ima koko ni korera no koto o’. Gendai shi techō 54 (6) (June): 70–74. ——. 2012a. ‘Kotoba ga umu gaidoku, kotoba de tachimukau’. Asahi shinbun digital. http://digital.asahi.com/articles/TKY201202220616.html. ——. 2012b. ‘Ima wa’. Gendai shi techō 55 (3) (March): 34–35. ——. 2012c. ‘These Things Here and Now’. Trans. Jeffrey Angles. http://connotationpress .com/featured-guest-editor/1425-takahashi-mutsuo-translated-by-jeffrey-angles-poetry. Tanaka, Yōsuke. 2011. ‘Sakebu imobatake’. Gendai shi techō 54 (6) (June): 84–87. ——. 2012d. ‘Screaming Potato Field’. Trans. Jeffrey Angles. Connotations Press. http:// connotationpress.com/featured-guest-editor/1426-tanaka-yosuke-translated -by-jeffrey-angles-poetry. Tanikawa, Shuntarō. 2011. ‘Rōsoku ga tomosareta’. In Rōsoku no honō ga sasayaku kotoba, 2–6. Tokyo: Keisō Shobō. ——. 2012a. ‘Kotoba’. In Sore demo sangatsu wa, mata, ed. David Karashima and Elmer Luke. Tokyo: Kōbunsha. ——. 2012b. ‘Words’. In March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown, ed. David Luke and David Karashima, Trans. Jeffrey Angles, x. ny: Vintage International. The University of Arizona Poetry Center. 2012. ‘Poetry in Times of Tragedy’. http:// poetry.arizona.edu/content/poetry-times-tragedy. Voices from Japan. 2013. Catalog from exhibition at Colorado College, 25 March–6 April. Trans. Laurel R. Rodd, Amy V. Heinrich, Joan E. Ericson. Wagō, Ryōichi. 2011a. Shi No tsubute. Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten. ——. 2011b. Shi no mokurei. Tokyo: Shinchōsha.

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——. 2011c. Shi no kaikō. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun Shuppan. ——. 2011d. ‘Shi no tsubute’. Gendai shi techō 54 (5) (May): 37–80. ——. 2011e. ‘Pebbles of Poetry 10’. Trans. Jeffrey Angles. Shisō chizu beta 2 (August): 224–227. ——. 2011f. ‘Pebbles of Poetry: The Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami’. Trans. Jeffrey Angles. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. http://www.japanfocus.org/-Jeffrey -Angles/3568.

Chapter 6

‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’

Responses to 3/11 – Constructing Community through Music and the Music Industry Henry Johnson

University of Otago

Introduction This chapter offers insight into the construction of community through music and the music industry in response to Japan’s 3/11 (11 March 2011) triple disasters: earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident (see Kingston 2012). While located to the northeast of Japan’s largest island, Honshū, the enormity of the disasters had a massive effect on the entire nation in terms of not only the loss of lives and destruction of infrastructure in and around the immediately affected areas, but also in terms of how the nation responded, both from the top down (e.g. government and regional government), and from the bottom up (e.g. individuals, organizations and communities). Disasters have the power to capture the emotions of people in far-reaching ways. Such events as acts of war, terrorism, earthquakes, tsunamis or major accidents will unfailingly conjure up images of tragedy and devastation, and will have a lasting impact on those directly and indirectly affected by the event. One area of culture that is frequently used in diverse ways as a result of disaster is music. Does music help in the healing process? Can music bring people together? Does music have the ability to evoke transcultural solicitude? Take for instance the 9/11 terrorist acts in America in 2001 that changed international relations and national security at the start of the twenty-first century (see Fisher and Flota 2011; Ritter and Daughtry 2007); Hurricane Katrina, which reminded the world in 2005 of the power of the elements (e.g. McLeese 2008); the food disasters in Africa in the 1980s, which aroused the emotions of musicians from different continents to produce Band Aid in 1984 and then Live Aid in 1985; the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, which saw Grammy-winning rap singer Wyclef Jean so involved with and inspired by the events that he wanted to run for President; or the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami disasters of Japan, which devastated many villages and towns, brought the nation to the brink of nuclear catastrophe, and caused trauma for thousands. With such disasters and many others, musicians and the musical public are increasingly proactive and

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publicly visible in wanting to help: they may write songs or hold fund-raising events soon after the disaster, or they may create new music in commemoration (e.g. Robin Gibb’s The Titanic Requiem of 2012 commemorating 100 years since the vessel sank; cf. Cooper 2008; King et al. 2009). Musical responses to the 3/11 disasters were diverse, both within and outside Japan. In this political setting, it is important to consider the social and cultural place of music more broadly. That is, ‘musical sounds are a powerful human resource, often at the heart of our most profound social occasions and experiences’ (Turino 2008: 1). Music is a type of creativity through which people are able to express themselves, both through sound and through words, and one creative response to disaster is to channel feelings through an artistic work, for performers and listeners alike. In terms of music, fundraising and relief concerts for 3/11 have featured numerous performances all over Japan (and internationally), from professional musicians to amateur performers; proceeds from album sales, downloads and gigs have been contributed to the relief effort; and new music has been produced as a way of remembering the event. Building on recent research in the field of music and conflict (e.g. Dunn 2008; O’Connell and Castelo-Branco 2010; Robertson 2010), this chapter provides three contrasting case studies that explore the use of music in the music industry in the aftermath of 3/11 (both inside and outside Japan), and the chapter divides into three main parts accordingly. Following this brief introduction, the first of these parts focuses on the earthquake/tsunami response in terms of how one celebrated Japanese music agency and its artists responded by focussing on fund-raising for the relief effort by holding large-scale and high-profile concerts. The emphasis on this part of the discussion is how this influential company used its music industry networks to project itself in a benevolent way within the highly commercial world of Japanese popular music. The second part of the chapter looks at the Japanese response to the nuclear disaster in connection with how the anti-nuclear movement reacted through the intervention of established and influential musicians, as well as rising stars. The last main part of the chapter explores an international response through the music industry and collaboration between several major record labels. While musical responses to 3/11 have been diverse and far-reaching in their social and cultural reach, each of the three case studies in this chapter is discussed from the perspective of the music industry: a leading Japanese music agency, a famous musician and activist, and international record labels. As a way of showing such responses, the discussion places emphasis on how community has been constructed as a result of 3/11. I use the term community to express the diverse ways that people from inside and outside Japan have responded to 3/11, but have acted together in one way or another. The very fact

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that there have been collective responses signals that people come together, whether from near or far, to express solidarity at a time of crisis (see further Christensen and Levinson 2003; Delanty 2003). A ritualistic sense of community is expressed in some of the concerts that have been held in aid of 3/11 disaster relief. In terms of ritual, I have been influenced by Turner’s (1974; 1977; 1982; [1969] 1995; 1997) work in this field, especially his work on liminality, liminoid and communitas. I have also been influenced by Roemer’s (2007) work on Japanese festivals, ritual and community, although the intimate sense of community achieved by some local festivals is more of an imagined community when placed in popular music context (Anderson 1991). The concerts discussed in this chapter that were held as a result of 3/11 had a two-fold meaning: they were charity events that brought people together to share a sense of solidarity and emotional expression as a result of the disasters, yet they were also contexts for entertainment. This seemingly contradictory role of the concerts – a contradistinction of purpose – helps show how the notions of community and ritual can offer ways of comprehending such contact zones where music has the ability to affect human behaviour. Moreover, while such ritualistic settings are arguably part of Turner’s description of everyday life, they offer qualities of the notion of communitas in that they are part of a collective and emotional response that extends one type of ritual to another as a type of ‘transformative experience’ (Turner [1969] 1995: 138). As Turner notes, ‘communitas differs from the camaraderie found often in everyday life, which, though informal and egalitarian, still falls within the general domain of structure, which may include interaction rituals’ (Turner 1974: 274). Such events might be described as liminal, or ‘betwixt and between the categories of ordinary social life’ (Turner 1974: 53). The case studies offered in this chapter provide a perspective from popular music culture that helps show several musical responses and reactions to 3/11 from the perspective of influential companies and individuals in the music industry. Within each perspective, music is seen as a powerful medium that has significant agency for many affected by the disaster, and a study of this agency helps shed light on Japanese society and culture.

Earthquake/Tsunami Response

In the aftermath of 3/11, the Japanese nation, along with many other countries around the globe, responded by providing relief in various ways. Music played a large part in the relief effort by, for example, provoking memories of place, inspiring performers to create new music to express emotions, either through

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sound or song, or through direct donations, which included holding concerts and rallying fans behind the relief effort. Various historical disasters have been the source of the creation of much music in Japan. For example, the kudoki (semi-narrative song), ‘Goze kudoki: Jishin no mi no ue’ (‘Goze Kudoki: Experiences in the Earthquake’), written by Saitō Mayuki (1796–1859), describes the earthquake of 1828 in Sanjō (Niigata) (Groemer 1996: 12). Also, in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 that devastated Tōkyō, several songs were written about the event and became very popular at the time: ‘Daishinsai no uta’ (Songs of the Great Earthquake, 1924), ‘Shinsai aiwa’ (Sad Tale of the Earthquake, 1924) and ‘Fukko Kouta’ (Song of Recovery, 1924) all topped the charts. The title song in ‘Daishinsai no uta’, by Shibuya Hakurui, compared the earthquake to Buddhist hell as earthquake victims struggle to climb from the fires. The title song of ‘Shinsai Aiwa’ by Satsuki-sei eulogizes a cafe waitress trapped when the building collapses. The cover shows a man holding an infant in one arm as he bends over a woman, the silhouette of a burned-out building behind them. In ‘Fukko Kouta’, the title song by Beniya Shunsho, things are looking up. Vendors are selling dumpling soup, and the singer vows that while his house may be ash, ‘our Tokyo spirit did not die. Look at us!’ hughes 2005; see also smits 2006

While taking such creativity in the face of disaster into consideration, the focus of this part of the chapter is not on songs that have been written to describe events relating to disaster, but, rather, on several high-profile concerts that were produced as a way of showing a response from the popular music industry. Such events help monumentalize disasters so they become part of a collective conscience where memory, sound and place are inextricably linked (e.g. Stokes 1994). It’s very difficult to find a Japanese pop star who hasn’t been involved in the disaster relief effort in some capacity. There have been numerous charity performances, recordings and appearances all over the country. As well as some already existing songs gaining renewed popularity in terms of their meaning and resonance with 3/11, the disaster also inspired others to record new music. For example, The Beatles’ song ‘All You Need is Love’ was released as a single and video in 2012 by a specially formed thirty-piece group, Japan United with Music. The profits from the single were for the earthquake relief effort, especially for children. The project was conceived by musician Sakamoto Ryūichi (also discussed later in this chapter) who invited Kobayashi Takeshi to produce

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the recording. The line-up included the following well-known musicians, which shows the high recognition of the project from within the music industry (terms in parenthesis or square brackets show Japanese pronunciation or band affiliation): AI (Ai), Imai Miki, ATSUSHI (of the band EXILE [Eguzairu]), Takahiro (EXILE), Crystal Kay (Kurisutaru Kei), Kj (Keijei) (Dragon Ash [Doragon Asshu]), Koizumi Kyōko, Kobayashi Takeshi, Sakurai Kazutoshi (of the band Mr Children [Misutā Chirudoren]), Salyu (Saryu/Saryū), JUJU, SUGIZO (Sugizō), Superfly (Sūpāfurai), Tortoise Matsumoto (Tōtasu Matsumoto), GAMO (of the band Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra [Tōkyō Suka Paradaisu Ōkesutora]), Kitahara Masahiko (of the band Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra), NARGO (Nago) (of the band Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra), Yanaka Atsushi (Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra), Naoto Inti Raymi (Naoto Intiraimi), Nanba Akihiro, VERBAL (Vābaru) (m-flo [Emu Furō]), Hitoto Yō, Fujimaki Ryōta (of the band Remioromen), Hotei Tomoyasu, BONNIE PINK (Bonī Pinku), miwa, Gōta Yashiki, Sakamoto Ryūichi (Yellow Magic Orchestra [Ierō Majikku Ōkesutora]), Takahashi Yukihiro (Yellow Magic Orchestra), and Hosono Haruomi (Yellow Magic Orchestra). Japan has several large music agencies that focus on management, including Watanabe Productions (Watanabe Purodakushon; often shortened to Nabe-Puro), VISION Factory (Vijon Fakutorī), Stardust Promotion (Sutādasuto Puromōshon), Rainbow Entertainment (Reinbō Entateinmento), Ken-On Group (Ken’on Gurūpu), Horipro (Horipuro), and Johnny & Associates (Janīzu Jimusho; often shortened to Janīzu).1 Many of these agencies and their artists, along with various others in the music industry, have had a connection with the 3/11 relief effort in some capacity. For example, the extremely high profile Japanese girl group akb48 and its sister groups, including ske48, sdn48 and nmb48, were quick to be involved in raising funds through performances and promotions soon after the disaster. They also established a fund-raising project called ‘Dareka no Tame ni’ (‘What Can I Do For Someone’), which included charity events beginning as early as March 2011. Amongst various fund-raising activities, their effort included a single of the same name, which was released in April that year. As well as these responses to 3/11, the activities of Johnny & Associates (hereafter Johnny’s) and their artists have received widespread media coverage and popular appeal, and have been identified for further discussion in this part of the chapter. Indeed, the extent of the activities of Johnny’s and its 1 On these agencies see their official websites: http://www.watanabe-group.com; http://www .visionfactory.jp; http://www.stardust.co.jp; http://rainbow-e.co.jp; http://www.ken-on.co.jp; http://www.horipro.co.jp; and www.johnnys-net.jp (accessed 30 January 2013).

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performers showed that ‘idols and celebrity performers in Japan launched into charity activities that challenge the assumption that they are “simulacra of intertextual images devoid of political or moral meaning”’ (Galbraith and Karlin 2012: 25; quoting p. 18). The 3/11 series of disasters inspired large-scale concerts, and this part of the discussion explores the project, ‘Marching J’, which was announced on 18 March 2011 and included a major concert (Johnny’s Net 2012; Shiso 2011). While some of Johnny’s artists such as Arashi have held their own fund-raising performances and activities, and have themselves been identified as having more than a ten-fold upsurge in popularity in the disasterstricken areas (Momo Edgewood 2011),2 the term ‘Marching J’ refers to a joint project initiated by and involving artists belonging to Johnny’s. The focus of Johnny’s is male idols, who are themselves referred to as janīzu (Johnny’s). The company was established in 1962 by Kitagawa Hiromu (b. 1931), who was born in the us. ‘After serving in the us military in the Korean War in 1952, Kitagawa came to Japan, where he worked as an administrative staffer for the us Embassy in Tokyo’ (Fukue 2009; see further McClure 1996; Nagaike 2012). A formula behind Kitagawa’s success is noted as follows: Kitagawa recruits boys as young as 10 into a pool of talent known as Johnny’s Juniors. The Juniors debut as back-up dancers to established groups, thereby making fans familiar with their faces before they are launched as groups in their own right. Sequestered in a special school run by the talent agency, they undertake a rigorous programme of training in singing, dancing, acting and acrobatics. It has also been suggested that Kitagawa takes a keen personal interest in their tutelage. campion 2005

Numerous pop stars and groups have been the product of Johnny’s over the past six decades, including Johnnys (Janīzu), Four Leaves (Fō Rībusu), Ninja, Shibugakitai, Hikaru GENJI, Kimura Takuya, SMAP (Sumappu), Arashi, NYC (Enuwaishī), Sexy Zone (Sekushii Zōn), KAT-TUN (Katūn), Kondō Masahiko and Hey! Say! JUMP (Hei! Sei! Janpu). ‘Marching J’ has a double meaning: Marching Japan, and Marching Johnny’s. This is clearly shown in the logo that the company used for the events (Fig. 6.1). The central part of the rectangular logo has the English wording ‘Marching Japan’, and underneath the word Japan the Japanese katakana characters (usually used for foreign words) for Johnny’s is written. Further iconography in this 2 At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Arashi were the most popular Japanese male idol group (Nagaike 2012: 97).

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Figure 6.1  “Marching J” publicity logo

Courtesy of Marching J Incorporated Foundation.

logo adds to its various meanings. The main Japanese text is written around a circular yellow sun, perhaps visually standing for Japan in the same way that the sun is a major image in the Japanese flag (hinomaru: ‘circle of the sun’). This wording is written in kanji and hiragana, and reads ‘Ashita ni mukatte’ (‘Heading to tomorrow’), which offers a positive vision for looking forward. One of the most striking aspects of the English wording is that the first five letters of the word ‘Marching’ are written in red, which highlights the word ‘March’, the month of the earthquake and tsunami, and the beginning of a prolonged nuclear disaster. The term ‘Marching’ indicates moving ahead after the disasters, as well as joining together as a community in response to the events. While some Johnny’s artists collaborated as ‘J-Friends’ (i.e. Johnny’s Friends’) to help raise funds soon after the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995, the ‘Marching J’ project was a first for Johnny’s (Pang 2011). The ‘Marching J’ campaign has held several events since the disaster, as well as being actively involved in relief work. ‘We have received from the local government the permission to send to emergency areas concert staff along with 2 car power supply (300 kW), 5 trucks for transporting relief goods, 2000 liter of fuel (gasoline) as a means of concrete assistance’ (Johnny’s Family Club 2011). The company had already been affected by the disaster and had to cancel concerts in the disaster-struck region and reduce power for many of its other concerts (Tokyograph 2011). The first major event for ‘Marching J’ that was held soon after 3/11 was a fundraising concert from 1–3 April 2011 at the First Gymnasium (Dai Ichi Taiikukan) at the Yoyogi National Stadium (Kokuritsu Yoyogi Kyōgijō). ‘All talents under the Johnny’s label participated, drawing a crowd of over 389,000 people over the three days’ (Pang 2011). Another major event of the ‘Marching J’ charity project was a concert held at Tokyo Dome on 11 March 2012, which is an allweather multi-purpose stadium in the heart of Tōkyō, and held on the first anniversary of 3/11. The concert included ‘180 Johnny’s members including

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Kondo Masahiko, Higashiyama Noriyuki, Yamashita Tomohisa, Ikuta Toma, and boy groups smap, Tackey & Tsubasa, Hey! Say! Jump!, Sexy Zone and Johnny’s Jr’. (Lee 2012). The event was massive and an estimated 173,000 fans turned up to the 55,000 capacity venue, and the proceeds were 826,553,991 yen (Lee 2012). As part of Johnny’s campaign, from 15 September 2012 a special dvd purchase was made available for online download (Johnny’s Net 2012). Entitled ‘Marching J special movie’, the video download guaranteed 200 yen out of a purchase cost of 315 yen would go to the relief effort. Fans were able to download a short video of some of their favourite stars who had recorded a short (around five minutes) special movie specifically for the charity campaign. Events such as ‘Marching J’ help bring people together who share a common cause. In this case, management, artists and fans. A sense of community is constructed in several ways. Fans come together to support their favourite stars, and artists and fans come together with the aim of raising funds for the relief effort. The two meanings of such events are very different, but the ritualistic nature of these types of large-scale events helps add a level of communitas that allows music and community to come together in seemingly contrasting ways but with a common purpose. The purpose-in-life (ikigai) aspect of such events is emphasized within the spirit of people sharing a liminal experience, especially when social directions are changed. That is, the promoter becomes philanthropist, stars perform for charity, and fans maintain a practice of music consumption although for reasons that differ from their normal pop consumerism. Indeed, as argued by Matthews (1996; 2008), the notion of ikigai can be used across different cultures as an analytical tool (see also Takahashi and Wada 2001): Many entertainers, comedians, athletes, novelists, and others visited the disaster area in Japan and have taken part in various activities with victims, such as singing songs, talking, performing magic shows, playing baseball, reading picture books and cooking. These events can help people relax and feel less anxiety. Similarly, seeing members of Self-DefenceForces, police officers, fire fighters, other groups, and individuals from not only the damaged prefectures but also from other areas, as well as people from other countries, take part in recovery efforts and rescue and relief activities, also impacts people. In many cases, seeing people ‘give back’ to others can inspire them to give of themselves, which is an important factor in the establishment of pil [purpose in life]/ikigai. ishida 2011: 774–775

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Nuclear Response

The 3/11 events included the Fukushima nuclear crisis. The scale of the crisis was such that there were mass evacuations within a 20 km-radius due to the dangerous levels of radiation released into the air and sea (see Carpenter 2012). As the first nation in the world to have nuclear weapons used against it, first at Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and then at Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, the issue of nuclear power and nuclear weapons has always been controversial for Japan. In this historical context, the immediate destruction and subsequent suffering caused by decades of radiation have obviously impacted on Japan and influenced political and public opinion. Nevertheless, soon after the Second World War, the Japanese economy grew exponentially, along with its population, and so did the demand for electricity. It did not take long before the country opened its first nuclear powered reactor in 1966. The nation did, however, officially limit its use of nuclear energy and research to peaceful purposes with the Atomic Energy Basic Law of 1955 – although a controversial goal was added by legislators in 2012, which noted that atomic energy should contribute to national security (The Mainichi 2012). Currently, Japan has fifty main reactors (World Nuclear Association 2013).3 In the aftermath of the crisis, the Japanese government closed down all of its nuclear power stations, and discussed dismantling each of them by 2040. However, by the beginning of 2013, the demand for electricity meant that the government had to start using nuclear power again, a further cause of widespread public anger (Williamson 2013; World Nuclear Association 2013). In connection with nuclear power and weapons, the Japanese public has been especially vocal in its protests (see Hendry 2012: 17; Sasaki-Uemura 2001: 113–123). While there is often the belief that Japanese do not like to protest publically, as with other public expressions of emotion (e.g. Matsumoto 1996: 54), the country has witnessed, and continues to witness, many waves of public protest that are a response to nuclear weapons and nuclear power. The antiwar protests that were especially visible and vocal from the 1960s on, and the rise of the peace movement from the 1990s, were eras in Japanese history when the population demanded action from its government (see further Ogawa 2011). There has also been widespread dissatisfaction against the government’s response to 3/11, and this too has been expressed in music (Manabe 2013b; cf. Aldrich 2008; Hood 2011). Also, there are sometimes protest groups working 3 Japan had always had an ambivalent attitude towards nuclear weapons. During the American occupation of mainland Japan from 1945 to 1952 (some outer island groups including Tokara, Amami, Ogasawara and Okinawa were returned in 1952, 1953, 1968 and 1972 respectively), nuclear weapons were held on Japanese soil (Norris, Arkin and Burr 1999).

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within the ‘phenomenon of internationally linked Japanese nongovernmental advocacy networks, which since the 1990s have grown in the context of three conjunctural forces: neoliberalism, militarism, and nationalism’ (Chan 2008c: 20). What gives such public protest a distinct sense of community is that in these contexts Japanese are more able to express negative attitudes when they feel part of an in-group (uchi). The uchi (inside)/soto (outside) dichotomy is one that underpins much social discourse in Japan, and is present from one’s family to an array of social affiliations. In such antagonistic settings, there is also a sense of honne (true feelings) and tatemae (façade) (Hendry 2012: 219–220). With social protest and social movements (Chan 2008a; 2008b), there is perhaps a community of like-minded people in a group that are expressing their honne, yet at the same time there may be others that maintain social harmony (wa) within such a group and express themselves more as part of a collective tatemae. The crisis that resulted at Fukushima resulted in much public protest. Music was included as part of this in several ways, and this subsection looks at one large-scale concert that was held as a result of the intervention of the wellknown musician Sakamoto Ryūichi. While ‘there is nothing particularly new about establishing a link between music and politics’ (Garofalo 1992a: 2; see also Eyerman and Jamison 1998), some of the other musical responses to 3/11 were in the form of relief performances and donations to the relief effort, and as a result the Fukushima nuclear crisis mobilized many Japanese citizens in a slightly different way to some protest movements. That is, ‘as any social phenomenon attains national recognition, popular music can be used as an important socio-political indicator of that struggle’ (Garofalo 1992b: 231). The concerts that were staged as part of the anti-nuclear protests brought people together, much in the same way as the fund-raising concerts discussed above, but rather than grouping people with an idea of charity, compassion or benevolence at the core, with the anti-nuclear movement there was a communitas where social protest underpinned the event. That is, people gathered to collectively protest political policy. These events were anti-nuclear and antigovernment. Such collective protest demonstrates that social tensions and personal opinions can be expressed publically, and that some of the layers of the metaphorical and physical wrapping of Japanese society (Hendry 1993) can sometimes be shed at times of extreme public opinion. It is in such contexts, perhaps, that some individuals find their ikigai. In these types of settings, music is used in several main ways. While some protest events may include performances as a way of creating a visible and audible hub for supporters to meet and align themselves with likeminded people, where music may include an entertainment factor, some of the other ways music contributes to such events is through the political ideas of performers,

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and through song lyrics that may have explicit texts that express political or social views that usually rally people around a cry for protest or social action (Bourdaghs 2012; Mattern 1998; Phull 2008). Song lyrics are an important means of social commentary. In the Japanese context, the style of popular music called enka is often used to reference current affairs. In connection with lyricist and writer, Soeda Azenbō (1872–1944), for example, such a songwriting tradition in Japan is clearly seen: While enka singers, Azembō included, continued to write and sing songs with a political edge, they took on larger targets. From satires that lampooned party corruption, they moved to satirizing bureaucratic scandals and gave voice to the public’s complaints about poor sewers, lousy train service, high rice prices, and the government’s slow response to outbreaks of cholera. lewis 2009: xxiv

Songwriters may express their personal political ideas through song and these songs may gain currency in protest movements such as the anti-nuclear movement in Japan. Such songs may be overtly anti-nuclear (i.e. protest songs), or they may contain lyrics to which listeners are attracted and appropriate for their own purposes. Still, even though there may be mass support and mobilization around a particular social concern, ‘political action through music may or may not result in democratic change. The result depends in part on power’ (Mattern 1998: 7; see also Peddie 2006; Street 2006; 2012). In the Japanese context, music also offers protestors a distinct way of expressing personal feelings, especially since such outwardly visible expressions are often described as being difficult for Japanese people (see above). One large-scale Japanese concert setting that was overtly anti-nuclear (both power plants and weapons) was the two-day No Nukes 2012 event held in Chiba on 7–8 July 2012, with each concert bringing in over 8500 people and including various forms of video streaming and media coverage (Manabe 2013a).4 The income generated by the event was ‘donated to a citizens’ group called the 10 Million People’s Action to say Goodbye to Nuclear Power Plants’ (The Japan Times 2012). The two concerts, the first of which was held following a public protest and rally in central Tōkyō the day before, was organized by the Academy-award winning musician Sakamoto Ryūichi (b. 1952), member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra (from 1978): 4 See further the organization’s website for this event at http://nonukes2012.jp (accessed 7 February 2013).

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Profits from the concert were donated to Sayonara Genpatsu 1000 Man Nin Akushon (Citizens’ Committee for the 10 Million People’s Petition to say Goodbye to Nuclear Power Plants), an anti-nuclear group which Sakamoto has been backing, along with Nobel Prizewinning author Oe Kenzaburo and others. The concert featured performances by 18 groups, including pioneering electronic groups Kraftwerk [the only nonJapanese act] and ymo [Yellow Magic Orchestra] as well as rock bands Asian KungFu Generation, Acidman, and others. manabe 2013a; see also The Japan Times, 28 March 2012

The full lineup for the two-day event was as follows: Saturday 7 July: Asian Kung-Fu Generation (Ajian Kanfū Jenerēshon) Analogfish (Anarogufisshu) Soul Flower Union (Souru Furawā Yunion) Hajime Chitose Hifana (Haifana) Nanba Akihiro The Hiatus (Za Haieitasu) Yellow Magic Orchestra (Ierō Majikku Ōkesutora) with Oyamada Keigo, Takada Ren and Gondō Tomohiko Kraftwerk Sunday 8 July: Brahman (Burafuman) Yokoyama Ken 9mm Parabellum Bullet (Kyūmiri Paraberamu Baretto) Nanao Tabito, Ōtomo Yoshihide, Sakamoto Ryūichi and U-zhaan (Yuzān) Acidman (Ashiddoman) NoNukes 2012 Imawano Kiyoshirō Special Session. Nagaido Reichi Band with Tōtasu Matsumoto and Sakamoto Ryūichi Yamazaki Masayoshi Saitō Kazuyoshi Yellow Magic Orchestra (Ierō Majikku Ōkesutora) with Oyamada Keigo, Takada Ren and Gondō Tomohiko. Sakamoto’s part in this event helped add cultural currency in terms of his national and international profile as a professional musician often under the media gaze. As he noted in connection with 3/11, ‘keeping silent after Fukushima

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is barbaric’ (in Pulvers 2012). Also, in a political context of changing social awareness and media influence, ‘the fact that musicians can perform as politicians is also a product of the way in which politics has been transformed’ (Street 2006: 58). Manabe (2013a) has pointed out that many Japanese do not want to talk publically about political issues connected with the closure of nuclear plants, and, in a country where many under the media eye have been disadvantaged for aligning themselves with protest movements, events such as No Nukes 2012 help bring people together under a common cause—a community. As Sakamoto commented, ‘for so long in Japan it has been normal for people to not voice their opinions… The Fukushima crisis changed that, making dissent more acceptable, but I’m worried that this mood could fizzle out at any moment’ (in Corkill 2012). Also, there is a link between voicing public protest and youth, who are the main fans of the artists who appear at such large-scale popular music events. ‘The expansion of youth participation could be attributed to the overall visibility and social legitimacy of nonprofit and nongovernmental work after the 1995 Kobe earthquake’ (Chan 2008c: 229). In this context, and ‘as one of Japan’s most admired musicians, Sakamoto can be seen as using his social capital to set an example for both major artists and ordinary Japanese citizens’ (Manabe 2013a). Indeed, it is such social and cultural capital (see Bourdieu 1997) from Sakamoto that helped create a new community in response to the nuclear crisis and the underlying social tension regarding Japan’s nuclear future. Some of the performers already had links to the anti-nuclear movement, including Sakamoto and Soul Flower Union: During Japan’s last great period of social disquiet—the student movements against the revision of the us-Japan security treaty in 1970—the young Sakamoto is known for having been particularly militant. In a nowfamous episode, he even publicly denounced the celebrated 20th century composer Toru Takemitsu, who he saw as a symbol of the status quo. corkill 2012

Other artists, however, were aligning themselves more visibly for the first time. These included Asian Kung-Fu Generation, Yamazaki Masayoshi, Oyamada Keigo (aka Cornelius) and Hajime Chitose. The only non-Japanese act to perform was German band Kraftwerk, who are openly anti-nuclear and perform at various related events. As well as visual and spoken anti-nuclear messages that were included as part of the event, the lyrics of some songs performed included similar messages. ‘Asian Kung-Fu Generation played a new anti-nuclear song, while Soul Flower Union inserted anti-nuclear lyrics into their songs. Kraftwerk, the only

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foreign band that performed, refashioned “Radioactivity” for the current situation, memorably reciting in Japanese’ (Manabe 2013a). The band sang some lines of the song in Japanese, which added a distinct sense of locality and meaning: Cherunobuiri, Harisubāgu, Serafīrudo, Hiroshima, Cherunobuiri, Harisubāgu, Serafīrudo, Fukushima Ima demo hōshanō Kyō mo itsu made mo Fukushima hōshanō Kūki, sui subete Ima demo hōshanō Ima sugu yamero

Chernobyl, Harrisburg, Sellafield, Hiroshima Chernobyl, Harrisburg, Sellafield, Fukushima It’s still radioactive now Today and forever Fukushima radioactivity Air, water and everything It’s still radioactive now Stop it now

Opening of ‘Radioactivity’ (kraftwerk 2012; English translation by author)

Listing some of the world’s worst nuclear disasters, including one of the sites of the two nuclear bombings in Japan, the list closes by mentioning Fukushima, a point of reference specific for the event. A further version of ‘Radioactivitiy’ was performed at the event by the Yellow Magic Orchestra, in which Sakamoto is a member. This version of the song was in English: Radio-activity Is in the air for you and me Radio-activity Discovered by Madame Curie5 Radio-activity Tune in to the melody Radio-activity Is in the air for you and me Opening of ‘Radioactivity’.

yellow magic orchestra 2012

The same song, ‘Radioaktivität’, but in German, was the title track of Kraftwerk’s 1975 concept album Radio∙Activity (the two words being separated by an 5 The name Madame Curie refers to Marie Skłodowska-Curie (1867–1934), who was a Polish physicist and chemist, renowned in the field of radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.

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interpunct), where reference was more to ‘radio’ than to ‘radioactivity’. The English version of the song is ‘Radio∙Activity’. However, the lyrics were revised in 1991, with versions in German and English, and they now included a distinct anti-nuclear theme: Tschernobyl, Harrisburgh, Sellafield, Hiroshima Tschernobyl, Harrisburgh, Sellafield, Hiroshima Stop radioactivity Is in the air for you and me Stop radioactivity Discovered by Madame Curie Chain reaction and mutation Contaminated population Stop radioactivity Is in the air for you and me Opening of ‘Radioactivity’. kraftwerk 1991

Other songs performed at the event that also had an inherent anti-nuclear message included Saitō Kazuyoshi’s revised version of ‘Zutto Suki Datta’ (‘I Loved You All Along’), which he entitled ‘Zutto Uso Datta’ (‘It Was A Big Lie All Along’). The song was originally released in 2010, the opening few lines of which are as follows: Kono machi o arukeba yomigaeru jūroku sai Kyōkasho no rakugaki wa gitā no e to kimi no kao Ore tachi no madonna itazura de komaraseta Natsukashii sono koe kusuguttai aoi haru Zutto sukidattan daze aikawarazu kirei da na Honto sukidattan daze tsuini iidase nakattakedo Zutto sukidattan daze kimi wa ima mo kirei da Honto suki dattan daze kizuite tarō kono kimochi

When I walk in this town I feel 16 again The scribbles in my textbook were of my guitar and your face You were our Madonna, I teased you I miss that voice, it was such an awkward youth I’ve always loved you, you’re still beautiful I truly loved you, though I couldn’t say it in the end I’ve always loved you, even now you’re beautiful I truly loved you, I bet you knew I felt this way

Opening of anti-nuclear version of ‘Zutto Suki Datta’ (‘I Loved You All Along’). (saitō kazuyoshi 2010; English translation by author)

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The first few lines of the revised version of the song for this event, which has a clear anti-nuclear message, is shown below: Kono kuni o arukeba genbatsu ga If you walk around this country, there are 54 ki 54 nuclear plants Kyōkasho mo cm mo itte tayo anzen Schoolbooks and commercials [cm] told desu. us that nuclear plants were safe. Oretachi o damashite iiwake wa ‘sōtei-gai’ Natsukashii ano kusuguttai kuroi ame.

We trusted them, and their excuse was that the disaster was ‘unexpected’ I long for the sky, the black rain tickles me.

Zutto uso dattandaze Yappa darete shimatta na Honto uso dattandaze Genshi-ryoku wa anzen desu.

It’s all a lie The lie was exposed Really, it’s all a lie that Nuclear power is safe

Opening of anti-nuclear version of ‘Zutto Uso Datta’ (‘It Was A Big Lie All Along’). (saitō kazuyoshi 2011; English translation by author)

The theme of No Nukes 2012 was repeated for two days on 9–10 March in 2013, although this time in downtown Tōkyō at the Zepp DiverCity.6 One of the social functions of music in this type of protest context is to bind people who share a common cause, to bring them together as a community. Such large-scale events that have a political aim, such as the Nelson Mandela concerts from the 1980s or the ‘Rock Against Racism’ concerts from 1976, help show how music can bring people together through politics (Garofalo 1992c). There are numerous other examples, including freedom movements and the anti-apartheid and the civil rights movement, and many similar events emerged in the 1980s, which ‘were the most dramatic examples of the use of mass-mediated popular musics in consciousness raising and mobilizing masses of people’ (Garofalo 1992a: 7). In connection with No Nukes 2012 (and the follow-up event in 2013), the idea of creating a community is realized through music and protest. But the type of community at the event is one that shares common concerns, rather than knowing each other on a personal level, and music is the binding agent. In this sense, the event is a type of ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991), one that offers a ritualistic context in which a 6 See further the organization’s website for this event at http://nonukes2013.jp (accessed 7 February 2013).

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community is formed on different levels, gathers and celebrates music as a way of voicing a political message.

International Response

As with many large-scale disasters around the world, responses from near and distant cultures range from government assistance to individual and community aid in a variety of forms. In terms of collective music responses from professional performers, the last few decades have witnessed several large-scale events and albums. For example, the Band Aid and Nelson Mandela concerts (see above) helped show how large-scale live music events could raise global awareness firstly of famine in Africa, and secondly of race issues. Numerous other events followed this model, such as 12-12-12: The Concert for Sandy Relief, which included a live performance and follow-up album. There are various agencies around the world that focus on music and its place in providing disaster relief. For example, Music for Relief (2013) was established by the rock band Linkin Park. This organization established Download To Donate in response to several recent disasters, raising over $5M (us) in donations and helping survivors of: 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Hannah, Ike & Gustav Cyclones Nargis in Burma, Sidr, and Aila in Bangladesh Wildfires in Southern California & Victoria Australia Typhoons Ketsana, Parma, Morakot and Lupit in Southeast Asia Zimbabwe Cholera Outbreak Tornado in Mena, Arkansas China’s Wenchuan Earthquake 2009 Earthquakes in the Pacific Islands and Indonesia 2010 Haiti Earthquake Monsoon Flooding in Pakistan 2011 Japan Earthquake & tsunami Famine in Somalia. music for relief 2013

The 3/11 series of disasters inspired a range of other charitable events from outside Japan. For example, Lady Gaga went to Japan on a charity concert tour, the high-profile Yoko Ono and special guests played two charity concerts in New York soon after the disasters (Lewis 2011), and Hollywood actor Jackie

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Chan held a charity concert in Hong Kong that included many international stars. There are numerous other examples from international stars to local community performers, and covering a range of music styles (far too many to mention here). While there were many live events that brought people together to raise funds for Japan, there were also recordings. One high-profile recording that was sold specifically for 3/11 disaster relief was Songs for Japan (2011), which was initially an idea by Universal, but turned into a collaboration between the world’s four major multinational record labels: emi, Sony, Universal and Warner (Collett-White 2011). The digital album was released by Universal on iTunes on 25 March 2011, and a physical album followed by Sony on 4 April the same year. All royalties were waived and the profits were donated to the Japanese Red Cross. The thirty-seven tracks on the double album were of existing songs, something that has raised questions by music journalists (e.g. Fallon 2011), although some tracks had been re-mastered or remixed (e.g. ‘Born This Way’) (Table 6.1). Table 6.1

Track listing for Songs for Japan (2011)

No. Title

Artist(s)

Disc one 1. ‘Imagine’ 2. ‘Walk On’ 3. ‘Shelter from the Storm’ 4. ‘Around the World (Live)’ 5. ‘Born This Way (Starsmith Remix)’ 6. ‘Irreplaceable’ 7. ‘Talking to the Moon (Acoustic Piano Version)’ 8. ‘Firework’ 9. ‘Only Girl (In the World)’ 10. ‘Like I Love You’ 11. ‘Miles Away (Live)’ 12. ‘Love the Way You Lie’ 13. ‘Human Touch’ 14. ‘Awake (Live)’ 15. ‘Better Life’ 16. ‘One Tribe’ 17. ‘Sober’ 18. ‘It’s OK’

John Lennon U2 Bob Dylan Red Hot Chili Peppers Lady Gaga Beyoncé Bruno Mars Katy Perry Rihanna Justin Timberlake Madonna Eminem featuring Rihanna Bruce Springsteen Josh Groban Keith Urban The Black Eyed Peas P!nk Cee Lo Green

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No. Title

Disc two 1. ‘I Run to You’ 2. ‘What Do You Got?’ 3. ‘My Hero’ 4. ‘Man on the Moon (Live)’ 5. ‘Save Me’ 6. ‘By Your Side’ 7. ‘Hold On (Alt. Mix)’ 8. ‘Pray (Acoustic)’ 9. ‘Make You Feel My Love’ 10. ‘If I Could Be Where You Are’ 11. ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’ 12. ‘Waiting on the World to Change’ 13. ‘Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together)’ 14. ‘Use Somebody’ 15. ‘Fragile (Live)’ 16. 17. 18. 19.

‘Better in Time’ ‘One in a Million’ ‘Whenever, Wherever’ ‘Sunrise’

Artist(s)

Lady Antebellum Bon Jovi Foo Fighters R.E.M. Nicki Minaj Sade Michael Bublé Justin Bieber Adele Enya Elton John John Mayer Queen Kings of Leon Sting featuring The Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra Leona Lewis Ne-Yo Shakira Norah Jones

The iTunes version included one additional track to the double cd version: ‘When Love Takes Over’, by David Guetta featuring Kelly Rowland. The digital album entered the Billboard charts at number six having sold 68,000 albums on iTunes (Caulfield 2011) (the album is no longer available on iTunes). The album cover used for Songs for Japan was relatively simple, but very striking (Fig. 6.2). The text on the top was the album title, written in black except for the word Japan, which was a visual reference to a colour that is so often featured on many traditional Japanese objects, and also one found on the nation’s flag. Moreover, the artwork on the album consists of a plain white background with a red circle in the centre, which was a direct signifier of the Japanese flag. Songs for Japan is an example of community on several levels. From the top down, the record companies involved included Sony, a major Japanese and multinational company, and the collaboration between the four major labels was quite unusual considering the enormous rivalry within the music industry.

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Figure 6.2 Album cover of Songs for Japan (2011)

Source: Los Angeles Times, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/03/ john-lennon-justin-bieber-lady-gaga-katy-perry-josh-groban-hits-songs-for-japan -benefit.html (accessed 20 March 2014).

The release of the album was a signal of solidarity, not only between the labels and Japan as a whole, but also between the record labels and Sony. The album brought together diverse artists who might not otherwise be found on such compilation albums, and linked those artists and their record labels to humanitarianism. In terms of the media coverage of 3/11, such linkages help portray the artists as having a sense of social conscience, something that adds to their media image. Even though the album featured non-Japanese artists, in the Japanese context the artists that feature on the album are extremely popular and well known in a country that consumes western popular music as a large part of its broader music industry. The songs on the album are a mix from a variety of artistic and musical styles. They sometimes offer poignant lyrics at a time of disaster, although the album is primarily for the English-speaking consumer reflecting on the 3/11 events and wishing to contribute to the relief effort by purchasing the album. In this sense, the album offers a double

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purpose: as a product whose music might offer an emotional response to the events of 3/11, and as a product intended to act as a conduit for charitable donation across national borders. Conclusion This chapter has discussed three contrasting ways community has been constructed within the music industry as a result of the 3/11 triple disasters that struck Japan in 2011. There were numerous musical responses, and the ones covered here help show three spheres of action. The chapter focussed on largescale concerts and high-profile albums that were produced both in Japan and internationally. Each of the productions came about from a bottom-up perspective from influential individuals and companies in the music industry, and their influence helped mobilize other music industry professionals and fans alike to get together either to directly help raise funds or to voice public protest against government policy. The notion of community was explored in connection with three contrasting case studies: Johnny’s, No Nukes 2012 and Songs for Japan. In each of these examples people came together in ritualistic and liminal ways to form communities, whether transient for specific events or actions, or forging longerlasting relationships. At different stages in these real and sometimes imagined communities, the three main responses to 3/11 as discussed in this chapter showed a forging of intimacy at different levels of interaction whilst experiencing liminality as a community of one type or another. This sense of communitas was the result of disaster and a shared desire to come together to either express solidarity through public display, raise funds for the relief effort, or voice anger at government policy on nuclear power. In terms of the concerts and albums, there is a contradistinction of purpose in the product: on the one hand nurturing solidarity and creating community with charity and compassion in mind, yet on the other hand providing entertainment and business promotion as a part of this process. It is in such contact zones that music has the power to affect human behaviour and be part of a transformative experience between ritual and everyday social life. The three case studies have helped shed light on how people respond to disaster. From the perspective of influential companies and individuals in the Japanese and international music industry, music has been shown to have significant agency in helping to mobilize a benevolent social response to disaster. In the Japanese context, several social concepts were discussed, including insider (uchi), outsider (soto), true feeling (honne) and façade (tatemae), each of

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which helped to show how and why people may have responded and behaved in certain situations. The notion of purpose-in-life (ikigai) was introduced in connection with the change of direction by some professional musicians to more political rather than musical pathways, and offered one interpretation of some individual responses to 3/11. The examples discussed help show how music can be a part of a process of creating community in profound ways and diverse settings, yet each as a result of the 3/11 disasters. As a binding agent that helps bring people together to form communities, music is both a product and a conduit of cultural expression. The musical responses to 3/11 as discussed in this chapter, whether from the perspective of the producer or consumer, help show how music sound can often have a heartfelt effect on human behaviour, and how communities can be constructed on different levels as a result of that music. References Aldrich, Daniel P. 2008. Site fights: Divisive facilities and civil society in Japan and the West. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Bourdaghs, Michael K. 2012. Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A geopolitical prehistory of J-pop. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1997. The forms of capital. In Albert H. Halsey et al., eds, Education: Culture, economy, and society. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 46–58. Campion, Chris. 2005. J-Pop’s dream factory. Observer Music Monthly, 21 August, http:// www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/aug/21/popandrock3 (accessed 30 January 2013). Carpenter, Susan. 2012. Japan’s nuclear crisis: The routes to responsibility. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Caulfield, Keith. 2011. Chris Brown Nets First No. 1 Album on Billboard 200 Chart.  30 March, Billboard, http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/472291/chris-brown -nets-first-no-1-album-on-billboard-200-chart (accessed 3 February 2013). Chan, Jennifer, ed. 2008a. Another Japan is possible: New social movements and global citizenship education. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chan, Jennifer. 2008b. Conclusion: Social movements and global citizenship education. In Jennifer Chan, ed., Another Japan is possible: New social movements and global citizenship education. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 337–347. Chan, Jennifer. 2008c. Introduction: Global governance and Japanese nongovernmental advocacy networks. In Jennifer Chan, ed., Another Japan is possible: New social movements and global citizenship education. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 1–43.

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Christensen, Karen and David Levinson, eds. 2003. Encyclopedia of community: From the village to the virtual world. 4 vols. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Collett-White, Mike. 2011. Major record labels join for Japan relief album. Reuters Canada, 25 March, http://ca.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idCATRE72 O4U020110325?sp=true (accessed 3 February 2013). Cooper, B. Lee. 2008. Right place, wrong time: Discography of a disaster. Popular Music and Society 31(2): 263–268. Corkill, Edan. 2012. Sakamoto gently rallies the troops for No Nukes 2012. The Japan Times, 5 July, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2012/07/05/music/sakamoto-gently -rallies-the-troops-for-no-nukes-2012/#.UQcS_OjwPvg (accessed 29 January 2013). Delanty, Gerard. 2003. Community. New York: Routledge. Dunn, Barbara M. 2008. Transforming conflict through music. PhD dissertation, Union Institute and University. Eyerman, Ron and Andrew Jamison. 1998. Music and social movements: Mobilizing traditions in the twentieth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fallon, Kevin. 2011. ‘Songs for Japan’: Justin Bieber, Bob Dylan, and Beyonce Unite for Random Compilation of Unoriginal Music. The Atlantic, 25 March, http://www .theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/03/songs-for-japan-justin-bieber -bob-dylan-and-beyonce-unite-for-random-compilation-of-unoriginal-music/ 73049/ (accessed 3 February 2013). Fisher, Joseph P. and Brian Flota. 2011. The politics of post-9/11 music: Sound, trauma, and the music industry in the time of terror. Farnham: Ashgate. Fukue, Natsuko. 2009. So, you wanna be a Johnny? The Japan Times, 14 April, http:// www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2009/04/14/reference/so-you-wanna-be-a-johnny/# .UQlhGOjwMY0 (accessed 31 January 2013). Galbraith, Patrick W. and Jason G. Karlin. 2012. Introduction: The mirror of idols and celebrity. In Patrick W. Galbraith and Jason G. Karlin, eds., Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–32. Garofalo, Reebee. 1992a. Introduction. In Reebee Garofalo, ed., Rockin’ the boat: Mass music and mass movements. Cambridge, ma: South End Press, pp. 1–13. Garofalo, Reebee. 1992b. Popular music and the Civil Rights Movement. In Reebee Garofalo, ed., Rockin’ the boat: Mass music and mass movements. Cambridge, ma: South End Press, pp. 231–240. Garofalo, Reebee, ed. 1992c. Rockin’ the boat: Mass music and mass movements. Cambridge, ma: South End Press. Gibb, Robin and R.J. Gibb. 2012. The Titanic Requiem. Rhino 4661065. Groemer, Gerald. 1996. Edo’s ‘Tin Pan Alley’: Authors and publishers of Japanese popular song during the Tokugawa period. Asian Music 27(1): 1–36. Hendry, Joy. 1993. Wrapping culture: Politeness, presentation and power in Japan and other societies. Oxford: Clarendon.

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Hendry, Joy. 2012. Understanding Japanese society. 4th ed. New York: Routledge. Hood, Christopher P. 2011. Dealing with disaster in Japan: Responses to the Flight jl123 Crash. New York: Routledge. Hughes, Beth. 2005. taisho/Exhibition captures a period when Japan struggled to define its place in the world. San Francisco Chronicle, http://www.sfgate.com/living/ article/TAISHO-Exhibition-captures-a-period-when-Japan-2565583.php (accessed 6 February 2013). Ishida, Riichiro. 2011. Enormous earthquake in Japan: Coping with stress using purpose-in-life/ikigai. Psychology 2(8): 773–776. Johnny’s Family Club. 2011. What we can do now. Janīzu Jimusho, http://www.johnnys -net.jp/j/info_dekirukoto.html (accessed 31 January 2013). Johnny’s Net. 2012. Marching J. http://www.johnnys-net.jp/page?id=marchingJ (accessed 1 February 2013). King, Christopher C. et al. 2009. People take warning! Murder ballads & disaster songs (1913–1938). Journal of the Society for American Music 3(1): 123–125. Kingston, Jeff, ed. 2012. Natural disaster and nuclear crisis in Japan: Response and recovery after Japan’s 3/11/. New York: Routledge. Kraftwerk. 1991. Kraftwerk – Radioactivity (1991). YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NrhNICsdc_k (accessed 8 February 2013). Kraftwerk. 2012. Kraftwerk: Radioactivity (No Nukes 2012, Tokio, Japan). YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWsQgmq-fNs (accessed 8 February 2013). Lee, Casey. 2012. ‘Marching J’ leads 173,000 fans. Yahoo! Newsroom, 15 March, http://sg .entertainment.yahoo.com/news/marching-j-leads-173-000-fans-091900125.html (accessed 31 January 2013). Lewis, Michael, trans. 2009. A life adrift: Soeda Azembō, popular song, and modern mass culture in Japan. New York: Routledge. Lewis, Randy. 2011. John Lennon, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Josh Groban hits together on ‘Songs for Japan’ benefit album. Los Angeles Times, 25 March, http:// latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/03/john-lennon-justin-bieber-lady-gaga -katy-perry-josh-groban-hits-songs-for-japan-benefit.html (accessed 3 February 2013). Manabe, Noriko. 2013a. The No Nukes 2012 concert and the role of musicians in the antinuclear movement. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 16 July 2012, http://www.japanfocus .org/-Noriko-MANABE/3799 (accessed 28 January 2013). Manabe, Noriko. 2013b. Straight Outta Ichimiya: The appeal of a rural Japanese rapper. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 4 February 2013, http://www.japanfocus.org/-Noriko -MANABE/3889 (accessed 7 February 2013). Mathews, Gordon. 1996. What makes life worth living? How Japanese and Americans make sense of their worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mathews, Gordon. 2008. Finding and keeping a purpose in life: Well-being and ikigai in Japan and elsewhere. In Gordon Mathews and Carolina Izquierdo, eds, Pursuits

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of happiness: Well-being in anthropological perspective. New York: Berghahn, pp. 167–185. Matsumoto, David Ricky. 1996. Unmasking Japan: Myths and realities about the emotions of the Japanese. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Mattern, Mark. 1998. Acting in concert: Music, community, and political action. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. McClure, Steve. 1996. You look like a music star. Billboard 31 August: 76, 80. McLeese, Don. 2008. Seeds scattered by Katrina: The dynamic of disaster and inspiration. Popular Music and Society 31(2): 213–220. Momo, Edgewood. 2011. Arashi songs popular in disaster area. Blog, 25 March, http:// momoedgewood.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/arashi-songs-popular-in-disaster-area (accessed 4 February 2013). Music for Relief. 2013. http://www.musicforrelief.org (accessed 8 February 2013). Nagaike, Kazumi. 2012. Johnny’s idols as icons: Female desires to fantasize and consume male idol images. In Patrick W. Galbraith and Jason G. Karlin, eds, Idols and celebrity in Japanese media culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 97–112. Norris, Robert S., William M. Arkin and William Burr. 1999. Where they were. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 55(6): 26–35. O’Connell, John M. and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, eds. 2010. Music and conflict. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ogawa, Akihiro. 2011. The new prominence of the civil sector in Japan. In Theodore C. Bestor and Victoria Lyon Bestor, eds, The Routledge handbook of Japanese culture and society. New York: Routledge, pp. 186–197. Pang, Lauren. 2011. Johnny’s Entertainment fundraiser ‘Marching J’ attracts 389,000. Asia Pacific Arts, 4 May, http://asiapacificarts.usc.edu/article@apa?johnnys_entertainment _fundraiser_marching_j_attracts_389000_16606.aspx (accessed 31 January 2013). Peddie, Ian, ed. 2006. The resisting muse: Popular music and social protest. Aldershot: Ashgate. Phull, Hardeep. 2008. Story behind the protest song: A reference guide to the 50 songs that changed the 20th century. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. Pulvers, Roger. 2012. Ryuichi Sakamoto reminds Japanese what’s the score on nuclear blame. The Japan Times, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2012/07/01/commentary/ ryuichi-sakamoto-reminds-japanese-whats-the-score-on-nuclear-blame/# .URLbHujwPvg (accessed 7 February 2013). Ritter, Jonathan and J. Martin Daughtry, eds. 2007. Music in the post-9/11 world. New York: Routledge. Robertson, Craig. 2010. Music and conflict transformation in Bosnia: Constructing and reconstructing the normal. Music and Arts in Action 2(2): 38–55. Roemer, Michael K. 2007. Ritual participation and social support in a major Japanese festival. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 46(2): 185–200.

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Chapter 7

Learning that Emerges in Times of Trouble A Few Cases from Japan Joy Hendry

Professor Emerita, Oxford Brookes University

If it is a truism to say that Japan is a country prone to natural disaster, it rather naturally follows that researchers in Japan should be used to sharing disastrous experiences from time to time. In March 2011, when Japan was hit with the triple disaster that was graphically reported around the world’s media, and duly inspired books such as this one, this writer happened to be in the country, though thankfully at a safe distance from the worst effects. Unlike many of the other foreigners in the country at the time, however, I did not even consider leaving, for times of disaster are times when much can be learned about a culture—and in any case, how could I abandon the lot of my friends of forty years?! My agenda at the time was to gather material about change in order to update a textbook (Hendry 2013), and it so happened that my plans could be continued much as they had been laid out. I was in the Kansai when the disaster occurred, and trips to Hokkaido and Okinawa only took me further away, so they were not a problem. The next part—a return trip to Tokyo—filled me with some trepidation as the power was in short supply, and the aftershocks of the huge earthquake were still happening several times a day, but those who had invited me to visit were confidently awaiting my arrival and I did not feel I could let them down. I had also known them since I first visited Japan, we had shared ideas about other disasters, and they were keen to report on their experiences of this one. Tokyo was indeed disconcerting—the streets reminded me of my first visit in 1971, when foreigners were few and far-between, for many of them had lived up to the epithet they had been given: gaijin (foreigners) had become ‘fly-jin’. The rationale was apparently related to the level of radiation being emitted from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power-station, but an interesting article in one of the English-language newspapers in Japan suggested that one would need to be exposed for several months to receive the same quantity as a flight to New York would incur, and indeed, the British ambassador broadcast a similarly reassuring set of figures. My friend met me at the airport when I flew in from Okinawa, for another disconcerting aspect about life in Tokyo during that

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time was the unpredictability of the public transport that had depended on the power supplied from Fukushima. ‘So you are not leaving?’ he asked, smiling broadly. ‘No, we are fine’, I replied, miming extreme confidence, ‘the British Ambassador has been out measuring the radiation, and we can all relax throughout this particular bombardment!’ Another worry had been about the possible contamination of drinking water, and the bottled variety had been reported as disappearing rapidly from the supermarket shelves. This was clearly not a problem in the house of my friends, for as we arrived from the airport, a truck was delivering a boxful of bottled water sent by relatives in another part of the country—it seemed that it would take more than an earthquake, tsunami, and the destruction of a nuclear power station to put a stop to the wonderful system of takyūbin— which ensures door-to-door next-day delivery throughout Japan! Generally it was a joy to see my long-standing friends and their resilience in this time of national concern—the aftershocks did continue with alarming regularity, but when, on one occasion, I shot out an arm to protect their glassfronted cupboard and its contents of beautiful china crockery from falling over, they retorted, ‘don’t worry, we’ve pinned it to the wall, just sit back and enjoy it!’ We went out to dinner together to celebrate a birthday, their children visited, and I joined a pre-planned tour for the wife and a group of her colleagues to view some of Tokyo’s history which took place just as arranged, except for the closure of one or two buildings that had been deemed dangerous after the initial big earthquake. I was not really reassured by the bolts that had been fixed to the wall to hold up a heavy cupboard in the room where I was sleeping, however, and I laid my futon at the extreme end of the floor space, just in case it should be thrown free by a large shock. I was also nervous every time I took a bath, in case we should be summoned to get out into the street, and I can’t say that I felt entirely at ease in the parts of the underground train system that were working through the power shortage. I also discovered that my friend had cancelled a holiday to Greece, largely because she and her proposed travel companions had joined the national mood of ‘self-restraint’ (jishyuku) in sympathy with those who had lost so much in the worst affected regions. This notion of sympathetic self-restraint was one of the new things I learned about Japan during this time of disaster, despite forty years of research in and about the country. I was not surprised that people came out to protest at the Tokyo power station that had allowed the Fukushima nuclear plant to become so dangerous—my earlier experiences in Japan had been punctuated by antinuclear demonstrations, and it was more surprising to me that people seemed

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to have forgotten the terrible aftermath of the atomic bombs that ended the Second World War. Disaster brings out cultural reactions that can surprise long-term researchers who have never encountered such events, but other reactions reinforce prior findings. In this chapter I recount some of the details of a couple of momentous events that have occurred during my forty-odd years of research in Japan, and explain how much new learning was acquired at these times. The events were not disasters of the order of the March 2011 occasion, but they were certainly disastrous for some of the people I was working with, and threatening for others, and the reactions each time added new knowledge to my understanding of the country I had chosen for my research focus. I will then put these two cases in the context of more recent major disasters in Japan, and in an analysis at the end of the chapter I will draw on some of the value of long-term fieldwork in understanding shorter-term reactions. 1

The Death of a Young Man

My longest period of uninterrupted fieldwork in Japan was a year from 1975 to 1976 that I spent examining attitudes to marriage and the family, largely on the outskirts of a small town in Kyushu, but with an establishing period in Tokyo and other areas where I visited prior contacts. My collaborators in Kyushu became very well-known to me, for I decided to focus on one community of fifty-four houses for an in-depth view of neighbourly life, and I spent by far the greatest part of this research period with these people. My notebook recorded the names not only of all the living residents, but also of the ancestors they remembered at their Buddhist altars, and details of all their occupations and cooperative activities were carefully set down. I did ask about how all their marriages were formed, and indeed attended several weddings that took place while I was there, but my research was typical of anthropological fieldwork of the time and was a ‘holistic study’ that sought to place these details in a substantial social and economic context (see Hendry, 2010, or 1981, 1986 for versions of the book that recorded this study). At the time of my research, the majority of people in this community made their living through farming: many grew rice, but this was just the staple crop, and their income had been boosted in the years leading up to my visit by some quite experimental ventures. One was the cultivation of tea on a hillside formerly shared for the gathering of firewood, and other woodland provisions, now replaced by gas and retailed supplies. The other was the growing of chrysanthemums in greenhouses that were lit during the autumn months to delay

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the best crop of flowers until the New Year holiday when an optimum price could be achieved. Most of the families owned land that had been passed down through the generations, they lived together, and they shared out the economic and domestic activities of the household to cover as they were able. All the houses discharged obligations to ensure the smooth running of their neighbourhoods, and most individuals also belonged to groups of age-mates, who met regularly, largely for social events. One day, as I was cycling through the fields on my way to a house in the village, a group of women ran out to waylay me. ‘There’s been a death’, they reported. People do of course die from time to time in this community, as anywhere else, and the family erects large wreaths in front of the house as a method of general notification. This was an unusual case, however, for the man in question had been only thirty-seven years of age, and he simply dropped dead while working at his greenhouse. No one quite knew the cause of death yet; it was being investigated, but his was a family to whom I had become quite close, and I guessed that these women thought I needed some advance warning before I might myself face-to-face with other members of the household. I was indeed deeply shocked, I had visited his three young daughters and a cousin only a few days before, and I asked the advice of the women who had stopped me about how I should proceed. It was in the ensuing conversations, first with these women, and then gradually with neighbours and others members of the family that I began to learn things about the Japanese family system of which I had so far been rather blissfully unaware. My own first reaction had been to feel immense sympathy for the children I had visited, losing their father; for their mother, his wife, losing her husband; and indeed for his own mother and father with whom they shared their home. The reaction of my interlocutors was different. Their immediate concern was for the future of ‘the house’—Sadami (who had died) was the daikokubashira—‘the main post of the house construction’, the one who would inherit the house and land from his father, and there was now no one in this position. ‘What will happen to the house?’ they asked. ‘Who will now take over from the (still active) grandparents?’ This was clearly the disaster from their point-of-view. One man had died, but he represented the continuity of the whole family. Later I did express my condolences, in my own way, to each member of the family, and they did of course appreciate my concern. Sadami’s mother was the most interested in some (new) way to interpret the loss of her first-born, and she agreed wholeheartedly when I told her that my own grandfather had believed that only the good die young. Sadami’s father was quick to offer a solution to the problem he could probably see more clearly than anyone, and his idea was that

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a husband would have to be found for the eldest daughter as soon as she was sixteen, though she was then only about twelve, and the average age of marriage for girls at the time nearer to twenty-five. In fact, Sadami’s wife must have disagreed with this plan, for by the time I returned to the village, a few years later, she had taken her daughters and moved back to her own home in another, rather distant community, and I never saw her again. ‘The house’ was the concern of its neighbours, and a woman who fails to stick by her in-laws, even under these sad circumstances, incurred such general disapproval that no one was able, or willing to put me in touch, though I would like to have followed it up. Several other aspects of this story are interesting. First, the immediate reaction of Sadami’s age-mates was to step in and help out with getting in the harvest for that year so that the family would not be left in the lurch, without food, and without an income. This had seemed to be a social group, meeting regularly for drinks and fun, but the members were also there to help out in the case of such a ‘disaster’. Second, Sadami actually had two younger brothers, but they had left home and settled in nearby cities. They had their own jobs and their own families, and they were not trained to run a farming household. Later, when their parents became poorly, and died, they came back to organize their care and their funerals, but the physical house still stands in its place, sadly neglected, and no one seems quite sure what will become of it. A new village hall was built in 2010, however, and I noticed that at least one of these other two sons had made a donation to the construction costs. Another such disaster occurred after I had left the community on my first visit, and it was recounted to me when I returned as a more successful outcome. A man of a similar age had died on an outing, apparently an accident that involved excessive drinking, and he had also left a youngish wife and three children living with his parents. In this case, however, a new husband had been found through the bereaved wife’s own family, and he had agreed to move in and take over the farm and family, which he would eventually inherit. This had all taken place by the time I returned, and ‘the house’ continues to this day, a young son of the new husband working in the yard when I visited. These days it is not always possible to find a son to inherit, even if several are born to the family, so this house would seem to have done better than some that suffered no such disaster. Sadly, the same could not be said for Sadami’s one-time home. 2

The Eruption of Mount Mihara

The second event to be recounted here occurred during a period of fieldwork I carried out with my two school-age children, assisted by a former student, in

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a seaside town in the southern part of Chiba prefecture. One afternoon, when I was working in the house alone, there was an odd kind of shuddering in the shutters, and I went outside to take a look. A couple of my neighbours had come out as well, but nobody seemed to know what was happening. Then a third person ran out of her house with the news: ‘Mount Mihara is erupting’, she reported, ‘It is being shown on the television’. This turned out to be the mountain peak on an island a few miles off the shore on the other side of the peninsula where we were located, and several people jumped into their cars to go round and take a look across the water. As it had been forecast that the eruption might trigger earthquakes, or even a tsunami, I decided to round up the family, and I set off to collect my children, who were swimming at the nearby pool. Jenny, the student, soon came home as well, and brought news from the people she had been visiting. In fact the television was very informative, and during the evening we watched the evacuation of the families whose houses were most in danger of being affected by the rocks and lava that were being hurled from the volcano. First, they were moved to a school on the more distant side of the island, and then they were all shipped off to Tokyo for the duration. The mountain was still spewing out a colourful display of effluence throughout the evening, and it didn’t look like dying down in the near future. A broadcast in the streets even as far away as we were, across a considerable expanse of water, warned of the possibility of related earthquakes, and indeed, through the night our house did rock quite alarmingly. It was a well-constructed wooden house, though, and these are made to withstand earth movement in Japan so it was not harmed, and nothing much even fell down. In the morning, we woke to find the whole area covered in a layer of volcanic ash, which was quite impressive, but children set off for school as usual, and we began to go about our normal lives. Mine included a visit to the local photography shop to pick up some prints. I was chatting to other customers and admiring some of the colourful photographs captured by those who drove around the peninsula, when there was another large aftershock. The shop was full of glass cases, so the shuddering was quite alarming, but the photographer simply walked smartly into his inside room and brought out enough cushions for us all to hold over our heads while the earth continued to quake. No one was unduly bothered, though they did notice that this had been quite a big event, and some mentioned again that we should watch out for tsunami. Over at the school, most of the children had followed the usual routine, and donned the earthquake hoods they are all required to keep at hand, and got themselves underneath their desks. Not so the two untrained foreign children,

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however, for they had each in their separate classrooms been so alarmed by this big shock that they had shot out of the doors, down the stairs, and out into the playground. There they met each other, and waited for the movement to subside! Another difference between our collective behaviour and that of our neighbours related to the tsunami that was by now also being mentioned on the local loudspeakers. Although we lived rather close to the sea, and therefore felt quite threatened by these announcements, there was also a hill in the vicinity, and we decided to pack a bag of supplies in case we needed to run up to the top. Sweaters, bottles of water, and a few bars of chocolate were assembled, and we felt ready to go, if need be. In fact, the announcements eventually informed us that the tsunami was only 5 cm high, so we could relax, and write up the diaries we were all keeping about our Japanese experiences. I was impressed by how much the children had learned at school about the tectonic plates moving under the earth, but my own learning had been a little different. First, it turned out that we had been the only people in the vicinity who had been prepared to run up the hill. Clearly others would have done that if they had been called upon to flee, but for the most part, everyone relied on what they were being told by the television, or the local loud-speakers. Similarly, the families who had been evacuated in the island of the eruption had taken very little with them, though they were eventually away from home for a month. One tv presenter went around asking them what they had picked up when they were told to move, and they had mostly abandoned everything, although a couple of children had gathered up their homework, and a mother had remembered to grab a bag of nappies for her baby. This volcanic eruption had caused no loss of life, and it had not been reported beyond the Japanese media, so unlike events which do catch the international press, no one at home knew what had happened, and so no one worried about us. This was thankful in a way, but it was also a bit of a disappointment, when we felt we had been through such an exciting adventure, to find that no one at home seemed to care about it! This is a fairly obvious piece of learning, of course, but it is worth bearing in mind that ‘disasters’ occur all over the world all the time, but it is only those that attract the technology of the mobile media that make a big impact. I was once at an anthropological conference in Africa, when one of my colleagues proposed sending a letter from the conference to the London papers about a cruel incident that was taking place in Palestine at the time. We were somewhat shamefaced when the Africans present pointed out that cruel events of that ilk are taking place all the time in African countries, many of which were also founded by the British.

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The local reaction to the Japanese volcanic eruption was also interesting to us, for Japanese people are clearly used to these kinds of incidents, and panic was far from their minds. The calm way in which the photographer had simply produced cushions was one illustration, the organized reaction of the well-trained children another, and the general reliance on the powers that put out the broadcasts a third. In fact this event took place way back in 1986, long before the present level of worldwide communications, but also before the evidence of two much more destructive earthquakes began to undermine the confidence of Japanese people in the government that they had thought was taking care of them. The next example examines one of these. 3

The Kobe Earthquake of 1995

Much has been written about the unexpected huge earthquake that rocked the city of Kobe and its vicinity in January 1995, devastating many buildings, killing more than 6000 people, and injuring or displacing some 300,000. Portions of highway were dislodged and railway tracks were damaged, so that rescue vehicles had trouble getting out to the trapped and injured and it was reported that many who died in the fallen buildings might have been rescued had substantial help arrived sooner. The Japanese government of the time was heavily criticized for not reacting quickly enough and also for refusing the help of the American military. Many people who were involved talked positively of the way that unknown neighbours turned out to help each other, a situation reported as something of a surprise, and several scholars have talked of the Kobe earthquake having triggered a wave of ‘civil society’ in Japan (see, for example, Bestor 2002 and Nakano 2000). In fact, neighbourhoods all over Japan have voluntary fire-fighting groups that meet monthly to practise for just the kind of disaster that requires a more rapid reaction than professionals can provide, and the support of neighbours is an important part of traditional Japanese life. However, this situation in the heart of a dense urban complex seemed to break new ground, and a large number of npos, or ‘not-for-profit organizations’ were set up in subsequent years. I won’t dwell on these issues here, but simply point out that Kobe has been superbly reconstructed, and there is little else now to remind a visitor that anything untoward happened there. There are also some publications that explicitly link the ideas of civil society to former social arrangements in Japan, and more recently that question the idea that Japan’s case is truly comparable with ‘civil society’ elsewhere (see, for example, Ogawa 2009).

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The Great Tōhoku Disaster

I’d like to return now to consider some other things that I learned, rather coincidentally, at the time of the more recent disaster in Tōhoku. The first of these relates to another specific family, whom I had known for many years, but again I found I had new things to learn that added to my general understanding of Japanese society. In this case, the learning about the past of this family enables me to offer a potential view of the future, and to use this long-term knowledge to assess the novelty of the reactions to the disaster that the world press expected ‘to change Japan forever’. I will also recount a couple of examples of the reactions of the people of wider Japan to the disaster which didn’t affect them directly. On the day after the earthquake and tsunami, I happened to be arriving to stay with a daughter of this family, whom I had known since she was a schoolgirl, and with her husband and children, we watched on television the shocking news unfolding about the damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant. We had a more direct line of information about the medical consequences, however, because her younger brother is a doctor who specializes in the treatment of radiation sickness, and he had been called to Fukushima to set up an emergency unit. She was herself registered to turn out at times of great need in the case of human sickness caused by radiation. At this time, the immediate consequences for humans in the vicinity of the Fukushima power plant were quite minimal, however, and she was not called, nor was the emergency unit put into action. What I learned about the family at this time of disaster was the probable reason why her brother had chosen this speciality, and why she herself had signed up for the rapid response register, despite having two school-age children to care for. I had actually seen my friend a few weeks before at the funeral of her (step) grandmother in Kyushu, whom I had also known, but until the funeral had not realized came originally from Hiroshima. She had thus been in the area when the atomic bomb that ended the Second World War was released, though unharmed by the devastation, or indeed by the subsequent radiation. The possible long-term consequences of that radiation had been much feared, however, and children born around that time had found it very difficult to find marriage partners in other parts of Japan. My friend’s ‘mother’ was in fact her stepmother who had come to be the second wife of her father, widowed when she was still a child. Both she and her younger brother, who is the natural son of this woman, will have known about the problems of people growing up with the cloud of Hiroshima still metaphorically hanging over them, and they agreed that it had influenced their decisions.

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There were two school-aged children in the house where I was staying, as I explained, however, and life could not be put completely on hold for a disaster on the other side of the country, so we arranged to go out together and visit a local park. In fact we had a lot of fun, playing games, chatting and reminiscing, and in the case of the children, having a laugh at an amusing mistake I made in playing one of the games, which they expected surely everyone would know! As we laughed, we could not of course completely forget the people who had been washed away by the huge tidal wave, depicted so clearly on our tv screens, but there was little we could do, and life must go on… Life was going on everywhere else as well. My next planned port-of-call was a visit to another old friend, a professor of nursing, and we had planned to travel together to Hokkaido where she would attend a conference and I would visit an Ainu community where I had been before. We had already bought the tickets, and we continued on our way, as agreed. There was of course discussion everywhere about the disasters, and young people were collecting money at the stations and airport to send to those who needed help in Tōhoku. At Chubu airport we met a family of foreigners returning home to Norway—‘We don’t want to go’, they declared, ‘but our parents are very worried’. This airport was in the middle of Japan and a long way from the radiation, but such had been the reporting around the world that it seemed as if the whole of Japan might be disappearing into the sea. In Hokkaido, we found that many people had, like my friend in Tokyo, cancelled their planned holidays, however, and the hotels and restaurants were feeling the pinch. Local councils in Hokkaido had rallied round to offer housing to people who had been displaced, but so soon after the event, those suffering such loss had not yet started to consider serious long-term change. The nursing conference went ahead, and I met the Ainu villagers, though I almost got completely snowed in! Again, though this place was in better times a popular tourist attraction, today there was only one set of visitors, apart from me: a local man who with his girlfriend from elsewhere was showing around his prospective in-laws. One local member of the conference party also decided to forgo the pleasure of eating out with us in sympathy with those who had suffered in the earthquake/tsunami. My next port-of-call was Okinawa, and again I went ahead, as planned, though ensuring that my hotel was a good height above sea level! Here again I found that many people expected from the mainland had cancelled travel plans, though there were some families with children in my hotel, who had decided to get away from the area around the radiation emanating from the Fukushima plant. I visited an old student and his new baby, and again, life was going on, indeed with celebration of the new arrival, and much discussion

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about taking care of a first child. These things may seem mundane to recount now, but the press coverage of the triple disaster did frequently suggest that Japan would never be the same again. We’ll examine that idea in the concluding section of this chapter. 5

Some Concluding Remarks

In the next few months there were many academic discussions about the disasters, some on the internet in e-mail lists, others at Japanese Studies departments around the world. I happened to be present at a round-table discussion at the annual meeting of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia, where a group of us were invited to make ten-minute presentations, and a wider audience posed questions and added comments of their own. One of the issues raised was the extent to which Japan would be changed ‘for ever’ by this unprecedented set of disasters, and different views were put forward. The two of us who were most unenthusiastic about this idea were, not by chance I think, those who had worked in Japan for the longest, myself and Ross Mouer, who also happened to be chairing the session. Our arguments were not dissimilar, and mine was basically as follows: Japan is rather used to earthquakes, and expects that some of them will be quite devastating. For this reason people are from an early age trained to know how to react when an earthquake takes place, and the routine of the schoolchildren mentioned above is one example. There are also designated meeting places for those who get displaced, and various precautions are well-known among the general populations. Moreover, in the last century or so, building techniques have become rather sophisticated, so that skyscrapers are built to sway in the case of even a huge earthquake, and many of the buildings that collapsed in Kobe were said to have failed to meet the rather stringent rules about construction put out precisely to avoid such destruction. Actually, the next big earthquake had not been expected to be in Kobe, but in Tokyo, and the location of the 1995 disaster both took people by surprise, and demonstrated that prediction is still not an accurate science. In both Tokyo, where a huge earthquake took place in 1923, and in Kobe, the cities have been carefully rebuilt, and demonstrate the advantage that can be made of ‘natural’ forces of destruction. Tsunamis have also been experienced in Japan since time immemorial, and although the one that devastated much of the Tōhoku coast in 2011 was larger than anyone could remember, there were defences constructed. They just

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weren’t big enough, and again, people were taken by surprise. Since that has happened, many coastal areas have instituted more substantial defences, and have published escape routes that should be followed in case such an enormous tsunami should return. In a longer view back to Japan’s pre-history, the archipelago was actually attached to the mainland in various places, and the substantial incursions of water that brought about its complete separation apparently appeared in the space of one lifetime, so this kind of invasion from the sea is not unknown in Japan either, though it may be a long time in the past. The more unusual factor in this last series of disasters was the damage that was done to the nuclear power plant at Fukushima, and people quite justifiably felt that more should have been done to protect such sensitive buildings in a zone that is prone to instability. Major interference with the power supply to the city of Tokyo was of course a huge practical consequence of this aspect of the disaster, but the other problem that not only affected the Japanese public but shocked the world at large was the relatively unknown dangers of the associated radiation leaks. Here is a part of the disaster that may have seemed new to some of the younger witnesses, both in Japan and without, but older members of the Japanese public are well aware of the horror that followed the release of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and for many years afterwards people opposed the introduction of nuclear power stations in Japan, just as they are doing again now. In fact, the newest aspect of the whole 2011 situation was the speed of communication of the disaster and its consequences to television screens around the world. The way that it was presented was also very alarmist, and for a good twenty-four hours after the initial huge earthquake, people were afraid that the tsunami might reach islands as far away as Hawaii. Then there was the fear of the widespread release of radiation, which caused the evacuation of many of the foreigners living in Japan, as well as the removal of operations such as airlines—Qantas, for example, took its hub to Hong Kong for a fairly substantial period. In my view, the most unusual aspect of this set of disasters was the widespread fear that grew up about the worst case scenarios, and the reaction of the world. This probably brought a good deal of financial and practical help into Japan, and many volunteers turned up to help out with the incredibly unpleasant tasks of the clearing-up programme, but I am not sure that all this will change Japan forever. Japan is changing all the time, like anywhere else, and all these disastrous events are interpreted in new and different ways, but does this perhaps represent more of a change in the way Japan is seen from the outside than within Japan itself?

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Bibliography Bestor, Victoria Lyon, ‘Toward a Cultural Biography of Civil Society in Japan’, in Roger Goodman (ed.), Family and Social Policy in Japan: Anthropological Approaches, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. Hendry, Joy, Understanding Japanese Society (4th edition), Routledge, London and New York, 2013. ——, Marriage in Changing Japan: Community and Society, Routledge 2010, Croom Helm 1981 and Tuttle 1986. Nakano, Lynne Y., ‘Volunteering as a Lifestyle Choice: Negotiating Self-Identities in Japan’, Ethnology, 39, 2 (2000), pp. 93–107. Ogawa, Akihiro, The Failure of Civil Society?: The Third Sector and the State in Contem­ porary Japan. State University of New York Press, New York, 2009.

Chapter 8

Observations on Geomentality in Japan and New Zealand Kenneth Henshall

University of Canterbury



When Nature Goes Wild: A Personal Foreword

On 4 September 2010 Christchurch, New Zealand, experienced a 7.1 magnitude earthquake that caused very considerable damage, but which was largely confined to certain ill-fated suburbs. Fortunately this occurred in the early hours of the morning, meaning that the great majority of residents were at home in their typically single-storey houses that were damaged but did not necessarily collapse. Miraculously, no-one was killed. Several thousand [sic] relatively minor after-shocks later, on 22 February 2011, an earthquake of lesser magnitude, a ‘mere’ 6.3, occurred during the daytime, and proved to be far more destructive because it had greater impact on the centre of Christchurch and brought down multi-storey buildings, in some cases along with the people in them. There were ‘only’ 181 deaths. Since then there have been several thousand more shocks—well over 10,000 since 4 September 2010 (at the time of writing this chapter in October 2012). It is cold comfort to learn from the seismologists that the particular set of fault-lines responsible for the Christchurch earthquakes had been dormant for 16,000 years. One somehow feels victimized by Fate. Those of us who have experienced these traumatic events are now reasonably expert in the matter of earthquakes. Just about everyone in Christchurch knows now that it is not just a matter of magnitude. Influential factors include depth, duration, speed, motion (whether horizontal or vertical), and obviously location and the nature of the ground there. The February earthquake caused more damage in particular through its horizontality, meaning a very violent lateral shaking. At the time of the 22 February 2011 earthquake, my wife and I were at home some distance away from the epicentre, but our nineteen-year-old son was on the second storey of a large building in the city centre. He managed to run down the stairs and scramble out over piles of broken glass, and was able to text us to let us know he was safe (at least for the moment). It took us hours to © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004268319_010

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get into town owing to the traffic chaos, with the lights out of action, so we walked the final few kilometres to meet up with our son. It was certainly the most intense feeling of relief my wife and I have ever experienced when we finally met up with him. A squashed corpse we had walked past on the way in had obviously not been so lucky. A young British male tourist who was saying how great it was, because he’d wanted to experience an earthquake, could very easily have been lynched. So too could the looters who took advantage of the situation, and when some were eventually caught, they got away with light sentences that people of my generation could only shake our heads at. However, our experiences are as nothing compared to the calamitous 9.1 earthquake and enormous tsunami that Japan experienced less than a month later in its Tōhoku region, on 11 March, with its 20,000 deaths and massive destruction. In Christchurch we did not at any stage experience a tsunami of anything bigger than a few inches, and the scale of our destruction was lightweight compared to Japan. In particular, the devastating tsunami following the Tōhoku Earthquake is due to Japan being much closer to deep sea trenches than New Zealand is. And overall, whereas we suffered relocation on a limited scale, many hundreds of thousands were displaced in Japan. And of course, in Christchurch we did not have the threat of nuclear meltdown, though that introduces a threat that is not entirely attributable to nature. I will not attempt to go into specifics about the Japanese earthquake and its aftermath, for I leave that to Lucy Birmingham and David McNeill and their excellent 2012 book Strong in the Rain. Their book focuses on the human aspect of the disaster. It is after all humans that matter most, not inanimate buildings. Below, I look at perceptions of nature—particularly its potential for disaster— in (pre-Western) New Zealand and Japan, to see if there are any cultural commonalities.

Comparing Environments and Cultural Histories

Japan and New Zealand share many environmental similarities. They are both situated on the Circum-Pacific Orogenic Zone (popularly termed the ‘Ring of Fire’), with resultant common characteristics such as thermal activity, earthquakes, volcanoes and complex topography. Both lands are relatively mountainous, with few long rivers. They are similar in shape, approximate size (though Japan is about a third bigger), axial orientation (Northeast— Southwest), latitude (though in different hemispheres, Tōkyō being 36 degrees North and Auckland being 35 degrees South), and in being nations comprising

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several large islands lying east of a continental land mass. In addition, there are also similarities in their basic climatic characteristics and seasonal variations. And as an unfortunate commonality, both New Zealand and Japan suffered their greatest recorded earthquake damage within weeks of each other. One matter that is not similar, as already noted, is the proximity of deep sea trenches to Japan, which is not the case in New Zealand. That is, Japan is far more prone to tsunami, evidenced also by markers in many coastal towns indicating previous high water levels from tsunami stretching back centuries. Nonetheless, in view of the many similarities in environment and climate, it seems reasonable to expect that established cultures in the two lands might show some degree of similarity in their use of—and attitudes towards—their environment. That is, to use the term popularized by Yoon, they may have similar ‘geomentalities’, defined as ‘an established and lasting frame of mind regarding the environment’.1 A particularly high degree of commonality could be taken as supporting evidence for a theory of environmental determinism— or at least, of environment being a major factor in cultural beliefs and practices. This would accord with generalized deterministic beliefs propounded in nineteenth century Europe through Lamarck, Taine, Darwin, Zola, Spencer and others, and in the case of Japan Watsuji Tetsurō in the 1930s with his theories of culture determined by environment. A narrowed focus on human perceptions and responses with relation to specific key aspects of the environment, which would include geological, geographical, meteorological, and climatic factors as well as—though to a lesser extent—flora and fauna, should provide a more reliable understanding than broad sweeping theories of cultural determinism. However, any such evidence should ideally be ‘controlled’ by comparison with geomentalities evolving in very different geo-environments such as Britain and Australia. One major factor that needs to be taken into account—let us call it the geocultural factor—is the length of human occupation of the land, which should surely affect the degree of adaptation to the environment. With regard to New Zealand, the Maori (and Moriori) of New Zealand have had a relatively short occupation of their land, from around a thousand years ago. By contrast, habitation in Japan is much more complicated, for there is widespread agreement that Japan was probably occupied about 200,000 years ago. In terms of the earliest identifiable culture, it appears to be that of the Jōmon people, almost certainly antecedents of the present-day Ainu, some 15,000 years ago. However, from around 500 bc to ad 250 there were waves of immigrants from China and Korea, known as the Yayoi or Yamato, who established themselves as the major 1 Yoon, p. 8.

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culture. Moreover, from around the fifth century ad, the (Yamato) Japanese deliberately adopted Sino-Korean practices, especially Chinese. Thus ‘Japanese culture’ is more complex to define and assess. And of course, when it came to the forceful advent of Westerners in the nineteenth century surge of neo-imperialism, both New Zealand and Japan inevitably faced massive cultural changes. Both Japanese and Maori faced the prospect of occupation and colonization by Western powers keen to build empires. New Zealand did become a British colony with numerous British settlers, who brought their own values with them. Japan escaped colonization, but hastily and intensely embarked on a policy of Westernization—including matters cultural—to strengthen itself. In both cases the Western factors are cultural ‘overlays’ and I will not attempt any systematic assessment of their impact on any existing geo-cultural values. I am more concerned with indigenous cultural perceptions of the environment, prior to the advent of Westerners.

Metaphors as Values

In going back in history one important matter is that of language usage. Japan has written records going back as far as fifteen hundred years, including poems about nature and so forth, whereas unfortunately Maori had no writing system and so had to rely on oral tradition, which is prone to change over the centuries. Nonetheless, let us examine language, particularly metaphor, for metaphor is a classic embodiment of values. It might be expected that a comparison of Japanese, Maori and English (the last of these as a control, and as spoken in Britain) in terms of metaphoric reference to the geo-environment would reveal significant differences of perception of the environment—that is, different geomentalities. In particular, given the environments associated with each language, potential natural hazards such as volcanoes and earthquakes might reasonably be expected to feature very much more in Japanese and Maori than in English, moreover with connotations of fear, awe, danger, or similar. In fact, rather surprisingly, preliminary research to date has shown no significant differences between the three languages. I list metaphors below by category of potential natural disaster. Volcanoes Regarding volcanoes, although Japan has one tenth of the world’s active volcanoes, there appear to be no metaphoric references to them—or indeed any type of volcano—in everyday Japanese language. This dearth is very surprising. In fact, a number of native speakers interviewed had mistakenly

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assumed there would be a number of such references, even though they themselves did not know any. Similarly, although the central North Island of New Zealand is one of the world’s most active volcanic zones—the latest eruption happening this year 2012 (Mount Tongariro)—there appear to be very few metaphoric references to volcanoes in Maori, at least in terms of their eruptions. The god of volcanoes, Ruaumoko, is also the god of earthquakes, and in references to him— such as two sayings that indicate being on the verge of anger—the degree of distinction between volcanic activity and seismic activity is not clear, but is presumably linked. There is a more clearly volcanic expression, similarly indicating the verge of anger, that refers to Ngatoroirangi, a legendary tohunga (magician/shaman) who summoned fire to the mountains. There is also a reference to the summit of Mt Tongariro—as indicated above, a particularly active volcano—being so difficult of access that anyone taking refuge there would be safe from their enemies. Tongariro and other volcanoes are used, along with other natural features, to identify people associated with a particular locality. Also, the term ‘puia’, which can mean either ‘volcano’ or ‘steaming water’, is used mostly in association with comfort or nostalgia, not with danger. The association between nostalgia and volcanoes may be seen as an extended reference to a particularized locality, such as one’s birthplace, but the association with comfort is surely an indication that Maori have come to terms with volcanoes. In English one finds expressions such as ‘hellfire and brimstone’ and ‘to blow your top’, though the latter is of obscure origin and may relate to the power of steam rather than volcanoes. ‘Hellfire and brimstone’ is of course a religious metaphor for the awfulness of hell, and the use of terms such as ‘hellfire’ and ‘brimstone’ could have their basis in images of European volcanoes, such as Mt Etna. Vulcan, the Roman god of fire from which the term ‘volcano’ derives, appears in modern times to be associated with fireworks, heaters, matches, and a method of repairing tyres using sulphur, and is not seen as a symbol of rage or power, but of religious fear. Earthquakes Regarding earthquakes, Japanese has only one metaphor, relating to four items to be feared, namely earthquakes, thunder, conflagration and fathers, in that order—though it is rather puzzling that thunder is seemingly feared more than conflagration. Nowadays the saying is used overwhelmingly in a tonguein-cheek manner, functioning as a mildly humorous reference to the role of the father in a family, which in bygone years was autocratic.

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Maori appears to have only one specific reference, in which the god of earthquakes, Ruaumoko (also the god of volcanoes as mentioned above), causes the season to change by shaking the earth—plus the two references of Ruaumoko mentioned above as being on the verge of anger. English has two terms: ‘to be on shaky ground’ and ‘earthshaking(ly)’. Neither is used in any context of real danger, the first usually meaning a less than fully convincing argument, the second meaning something substantial with potential to cause change. Thermal Activity Regarding thermal activity Japanese seems to contain no specific metaphoric reference to thermal pools, geysers, or similar. The general word for ‘hot pool’ (‘onsen’) is synonymous with ‘spa’ and has associations of relaxation and therapy. Maori is very similar, with no obvious references to geysers and with the term ‘puia’ mentioned above (meaning both ‘volcano’ and ‘steaming water’, and by extension ‘hot pool’), associating hot pools with comfort and nostalgia rather than danger. English seems to have no references to hot pools, and has only one rarely used ‘surrogate’ reference to a geyser, located not in Britain but in North America, ‘Old Faithful’ (in Yellowstone Park), that suggests the very opposite of unpredictable threat, as if it were an old and trusted friend. However, it is worthy of note that many of the fearsome names given to thermal areas in New Zealand, such as Hell’s Gate and Devil’s Cauldron, were given by British settlers, and are by no means translations of Maori names. Hell’s Gate, for example, is Tikitere in Maori, meaning simply ‘floating amulet’ (a neutral reference to the clothing of a drowned person). This British tendency to dramatize may reflect a similar attitude to that underlying the term ‘hellfire and brimstone’: that is, it very likely reflects a certain Christian notion, particularly widely held at the time of the British encounter with New Zealand, one which associates thermal activity with hell. Tsunami Regarding tsunami (literally ‘harbour wave’) there appears to be only one figurative reference to tsunami or tidal waves in Japanese, and that is the term ‘yama-tsunami’ (‘mountain tsunami’), which indicates a landslide and metaphorically a debacle. Given that the Japanese language gave the term ‘tsunami’ to the world, its dearth of related terminology is rather surprising. Maori does not appear to have a term for tsunami, no doubt for the simple reason that they are not particularly common in New Zealand and even when they do occur they are rarely significant.

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In recent years ‘tsunami’ has occasionally featured metaphorically in English as an indicator of something massive and overwhelming, along with ‘avalanche’ and ‘landslide’ (see also below). Avalanches and Landslides With regard to avalanches and landslides, in Japanese and English their use as metaphors is confined to expressions of great volume, and typically overwhelming. However, neither term is necessarily negative in either language, for there are expressions such as a ‘landslide victory’ and an ‘avalanche of fan-mail’. In Maori the equivalent terminology can have similar connotations of volume, and is also used—in a matter-of-fact rather than menacing fashion—to refer to the physical destruction of a fortress. Floods Regarding floods, as with avalanches and landslides, in both Japanese and English flooding is normally associated metaphorically with volume, and can be used in a positive sense. In Maori there is a negative reference to the aftermath of a great flood causing disruption and turbulence. It is also used sometimes to describe a variety of emotions such as grief and infatuation. Other Natural Threats Regarding other natural threats, this time broadening the range to other types of natural hazard including climatic and meteorological events, such as whirlwind, storm and maelstrom, there is surprisingly little variance between the three languages. ‘Whirlwind’ and ‘maelstrom’ do not seem to feature distinctly in Maori, and in both Japanese and English the terms are used to indicate intense and often uncoordinated activity rather than danger. Various terms for ‘storm(y)’ in all three languages can refer to intensity, usually with unpleasant and sometimes frightening connotations, but are by no means necessarily lifethreatening (unless in a particular context, such as a small boat at sea). The thunder and lightning associated with storms are used in English and Japanese to indicate volume and speed respectively, as well as being common dramatic symbols of frightening (often supernatural) elements and unfavourable portents. In Japanese thunder is also given as one of the four items to be feared, as discussed earlier. In Maori the term for ‘thunder’ can have the same usage as in Japanese and English, to indicate volume, but to a greater degree than in English and Japanese both thunder and lightning tend to be associated with death (especially of a prominent person such as a chief).

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It is perhaps surprising that there is no apparent metaphor in Japanese involving typhoons, especially in view of the unfortunate coincidence of the typhoon season with the rice harvest and the not infrequent crop damage that is caused. One might expect a natural and recurring phenomenon that is destructive of food to occur with some prominence in common thought and language. References to natural features that are not in themselves spontaneously hazardous but are sometimes associated with danger to humans, such as mountains, deserts and rivers, similarly fail to indicate any major linguocultural differences. Mountains, for example, in all three countries/languages are generally associated with size, solidity and by extension dignity, but rarely with serious threat. In fact, having read more than a hundred works by Tayama Katai (1872–1930), the leading Japanese naturalist writer, I can think of only one work—the little-known short story ‘Akai Katakake’ (The Red Shawl) of 1913—in which he expresses any fear towards physical nature, and that was in the midst of towering mountains with his wife and young daughter. Flora and Fauna Regarding flora and fauna, both Japanese and pre-European Maori had little to fear. Comparing the two, Japan seems to have had a greater variety in both categories, and to be the more bountiful. In terms of pre-European flora, New Zealand had few native flowering plants whereas Japan had many, especially the cherry blossom which became a symbol of Japan. One could readily describe Japanese flora as beautiful, but one would hesitate to apply that term to pre-European flora in New Zealand. In terms of fauna, Japan has numerous mammals including the bear (almost all now found only in Hokkaidō) and the kamoshika (a deerlike creature) and foxes and tanuki (a raccoon-like creature), as well as a great variety of birds, and fish (freshwater and saltwater), and so forth. The bear is potentially dangerous, though attacks are rare. By contrast early New Zealand had no native land mammals—though seals were hunted—but rather flightless birds. Variety in native freshwater fish species in New Zealand has been limited, though saltwater fish (including shellfish) were plentiful and varied. In sum, neither Japanese nor Maori had to fear any flora or fauna. In summary of this linguistic analysis of metaphor related to potential natural disaster and fear of the environment, it can be said that in Japanese, Maori and English all reveal a generally similar geomentality and do not seem to indicate in any case a distinct perception of the geo-environment as particularly threatening, despite the demonstrable fact that the environments of Japanese and Maori are in actuality more threatening than that of English. This was an unexpected finding.

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Are the Japanese Closer to Nature than the Rest of Us? Again We Use Metaphors

Staying with flora and fauna, it is well-known that scholars such as Umesao Tadao, Yasuda Yoshinori, Watsuji Tetsurō, Imanishi Kinji, Kawai Tatsuo and Tsunoda Tadanobu are just a few among many who have claimed that the Japanese are closer to nature and have some sort of nexus with the animal/ natural world that (virtually) no other people have. Ignoring the unfortunately ambiguous statement of Umesao that the Japanese are closer to the apes than are other human beings,2 I take up Tsunoda’s controversial claim that the Japanese are closer to nature than any other people because the Japanese brain processes the sounds of animals—including insects such as the cricket (‘semi’)—with the part that processes human speech.3 This claim was extended even to the sounds of a river, etc. He made one exception for the rest of the human race, and that was—by remarkable coincidence—the Maori, though how exactly he arrived at this conclusion is not particularly clear. Latching on to the mention of Maori, being based in New Zealand I decided to test Tsunoda’s claims, with colleagues Ray Harlow (Maori language specialist), Wharehuia Milroy (native Maori speaker), the renowned biologist Benno Meyer-Rochow, and Japan’s ‘David Attenborough’, namely Okui Kazumitsu (a friend and colleague of Meyer-Rochow).4 We asked highly educated native speakers of each of the languages, Japanese, Maori and English, to identify metaphoric usages of insects, and to categorize these as positive, neutral and negative. They had to produce the usages actively, with no prompts, and were given an hour or so. We broadened the strict definition of ‘insect’ to include spiders and worms and so forth, so really we were asking not only for true insects but what one might generalize as ‘creepy-crawlies’ or ‘bugs’ in the English, and ‘mushi’ in Japanese. If Tsunoda was correct then the Japanese and Maori responses should be far more positive than in the case of English. In fact, there was little difference between the Japanese and English. With remarkable consistency native speakers of Japanese and English each knew about fifty metaphoric usages. The ratio of positive-negative-neutral in the case of English was 1 to 6 to 4, while in Japanese it was 1 to 4 to 7. The Japanese came slightly ahead in terms of the neutral category as opposed to the negative, but this was largely attributable to the greater use of the generalized term ‘mushi’, which was far more common in 2 See for example Dale, p. 193. 3 Dale, p. 190. 4 See Henshall (1992) pp. 31–37.

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sayings than ‘bug’ or similar. The results for Maori were quite remarkable. There were fewer than a dozen references, and each of them was negative. Following this up, we did subsequently find three more references which were classed as neutral. Clearly, the results showed that—at least in terms of use of metaphor—the Japanese do not have any basis for claiming a unique affinity with nature. Moreover, there are numerous personifications in English for inanimate or semi-animate objects in nature relating to sound, such as ‘babbling brook’ or ‘whispering wind’, etc. It would seem that it was just another groundless Nihonjinron claim.

Belief Systems

Japanese and Maori mythologies have much in common. Both have unpretentious and undramatic explanations for the origin of their land. In the case of Japan, the islands were formed from the droplets from a god’s spear when he raised it after dipping it into a primordial sea (many interpret this as ejaculation of semen). In the case of New Zealand, the North Island was formed from a fish brought to the surface by a god (or god-like being) while the South Island was formed from the petrification of a canoe and its divine occupants. Both mythologies make no absolute distinction between gods and humans either ontologically or behaviourally, with a consequent tendency to judge human behaviour in relative and particular rather than absolute terms, as in the Christian world. Both attribute human qualities to natural features. For example, Maori mythology has male mountains such as Tongariro and Taranaki vying for the affections of a female mountain, Pihanga.5 In Japan the eighth century Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan) states that ‘trees and herbs could all speak’,6 and later sources include stories such as the contest between Mount Fuji and Mount Yatsugatake to see who/which was taller.7 In fact, strictly speaking, because no real distinction was made between gods and humans, it could be said that in both mythologies natural features were not just personified, they were deified. Certainly Mt Fuji was already deemed divine through the Ainu, for it was a sacred mountain for them dedicated to Fuchi the god of fire. Indeed, in both Japanese and Maori mythologies gods were associated with—and were effectively synonymous with—natural phenomena, such as 5 McCraw, p. 46. 6 Pelzel, p. 12. 7 Dorson, p. 227.

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Amaterasu, representing the sun for the Japanese and Papa representing the very earth itself for the Maori. In short, both cosmologies indicate a merging of gods and humans and natural phenomena. Polytheistic animism is by no means confined to Japanese or Maori. In fact, the majority of cultures of the world have at some stage developed an essentially similar cosmology to explain the world around them—in Europe alone, for example, such cultures would include the ancient Celts (Druids), the Norse, and the Greeks and Romans—but what is unusual about the case of the Japanese and to a lesser extent the Maori (who have been more receptive of Christianity than have the Japanese) is that it still persists quite noticeably, despite the influx of exogenous monotheism. Japan is the only major nation to still practise an animistic religion, Shintō. As with most polytheistic cultures, especially those whose gods are humanlike in their emotions and behaviours, both Maori and Japanese traditionally see the spirit of the land—or of the gods or demigods associated with a particular aspect of the land—as ambivalent, benign at some times, hostile at others. Accordingly, Maori culture generally sets great value on propitiation, such as for example of Tane the god of the forest when cutting down a tree, and usually achieves this through ritual chants and symbolic offerings. If proprieties are not observed, calamity will probably follow. And where calamity occurs without obvious cause, it is often attributed to a punishment from the gods for failing to observe due proprieties. The 1886 eruption of Mt Tarawera, which killed over 150 people, was blamed by local Maori on the errant ways of a certain tohunga, or shaman. In more recent times the 1987 eruption of the volcanic Mt Putauaki (Edgecumbe) was apparently attributed by many Maori people to the fact that Ruaumoko, god of volcanoes, had been angered. Hence the importance of taboos and rituals to minimize the risk of causing offence to the gods. Similarly, in Japan, the scholar Nakanishi Susumu observes in his work Nihon Shinwa no Sekai (The World of Japanese Myth) that: ‘In general, that which was worshipped as sacred was at the same time also feared as calamitous’.8 Such a potential for calamity is seen in the Nihongi statement that in early times: ‘The very rocks, trees and herbs were all given to violence’.9 While it is true that they were ‘reduced to submission’10 by Ō-kuninushi, greatnephew of the sun goddess Amaterasu, suggesting in this particular case an aggressive defiance of nature rather than the propitiation generally (but not 8 9 10

Nakanishi, p. 13. Nihongi 1.60. Nihongi 1.60.

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always) characterizing the Maori approach, nevertheless the general importance of observing ritual and proprieties is clear throughout the myths. It is well-known, for example, that the first child of the gods Izanagi and Izanami was born deformed due to the fact that their behaviour preceding sexual congress had not followed proper etiquette. And in general women were associated with ‘kegare’, which now means impurity but was originally very similar to the idea of tapu/taboo—that is, something to be treated with awe and respect and caution. In Japan’s case, one notes that as late as 1945, until the Occupation began, women were banned from climbing Mt Fuji for fear of upsetting the gods by the ‘kegare’ associated with them. That is, in both Maori and Japanese beliefs, the god-like elements of nature must be kept favourably disposed towards humans by the avoidance of causing offence, and hence the continued use of particularized ritual, taboo, geomancy and associated propitiation and blessing of land. It must be stressed though that these practices are characteristic of polytheistic religions in general, not just of Maori and Japanese. And there are, of course, also related practices in monotheistic religions. In Christianity it is not uncommon to seek blessing for a location or building (as in hallowed ground and the saying ‘Bless this house’), and to use prayer as a general propitiation, both to God and to semi-divine patron saints. There are rituals (in the form of ceremonies and set procedures, especially in the Catholic Church), and there are taboos (such as the prohibitions in the Ten Commandments). Divine anger is also feared, especially in the Old Testament, and is indeed blamed for many disasters (such as the Great Flood, the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, etc.). Many cultures, especially in recent times of international environmental and ethnic sensitivity, claim to live in harmony with nature and to have strong spiritual harmony with their land. Maori and Japanese voices have not been silent on this matter, for they often see Christian Western cultures as exploitative. One can understand this—though the Japanese are far from innocent themselves when it comes to tropical hardwood deforestation in South East Asia—for the Christian Bible itself appears to encourage this. Genesis, for example, contains divine commands to humans such as ‘…Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground’,11 and ‘Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything’ (9:3).12 By contrast, for Maori, there is the less anthropocentrically assertive concept of ‘turangawaewae’, which is a sense of belonging to a place 11 12

Genesis 1:28. Genesis 9:3.

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as well as to a tribe, embodied in the identification with features of the land. It has also been common traditional practice to bury the placenta at the place where one was born, to enforce the tie with that place. The English word ‘land’ is usually used to translate the Maori term ‘whenua’, but in fact this is often considered by Maori to render the term inadequately, for ‘whenua’ also has a spiritual as well as physical dimension. For Japanese, notwithstanding the subduing of the land by Ōkuninushi, their view of harmony with nature has been embodied in the philosophy of ‘musubi’, meaning bonding between humans and nature—though it does not seem as strong a connection as with the Maori. Another commonality between Maori and Japanese with regard to ‘anger of the gods’/earthquakes is that traditionally they both built in wood, rather than stone or brick. Harada Kenichi, a geologist, terms this ‘kumiawase’ (‘put together’), as opposed to ‘tsumikasane’ (‘piled up’). Continental land masses are generally more stable than islands, with the ground typically comprising a high proportion of old hard rock such as granite and basalt, and they experience fewer earthquakes. It is obviously much safer to build tall edifices on continents than on islands. Ironically, in this regard, after firearms were introduced by early European visitors to Japan in the sixteenth century, the Japanese built massive stone castles known as shirasagijō (white heron castles, for their winglike shape), but they were careful to build them on a floating base, typically of logs, to absorb seismic movement. This floating base under brick or stone was something never attempted by the Maori, whose fortresses were all of wood. All things considered, the Japanese and the Maori seem to have adjusted to their respective environments, as one would expect, for it was more or less a case of having to. There is little evidence of widespread fear regarding potential natural disasters, certainly in their languages, though one does note propitiation and taboo and an animistic religion. Japan would seem more prone to disaster than New Zealand, as a result of the frequency of serious tsunami— though this threat too is not reflected in the language. I will end with reference to Watsuji Tetsurō, who believed that every individual was determined by his or her nation, which was in turn determined by geo-climatic factors. The Japanese nation, for its part, was long subjected to typhoons and other natural catastrophes, which moulded the national character. To quote Kurt Singer, who lived in Japan during the 1930s and was heavily influenced by Watsuji: Everywhere [in Japan] the capricious and incalculable appear to rule, aggravated by sudden excesses of floods and storms, earthquakes and tidal waves. It is as if nature had intended to teach man to be always on the alert and thus able to deal with catastrophe as a matter of routine.

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Therefore the Japanese, according to Watsuji, has become ‘monsoon [sic] -minded’…. He oscillates between extreme states, never resting in stable equilibrium, but opposing to violent and uncontrollable forces the virtues of silent suffering and stoic obedience. Thus the Japanese is lured into passivity and encouraged to wait with patience….13 It will indeed take considerable patience before the consequences of the Tōhoku Earthquake become things of the past, and one wishes Japan the very best of fortune in its endeavours to return to some degree of normalcy. References Birmingham, Lucy and McNeill, David: Strong in the Rain, 2012, Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Dale, P: The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness, 1986, St Martin’s Press/ Croom Helm, New York. Dorson, R: Folk Legends of Japan, 1962, Tuttle, Tōkyō. Harada, K: Chikyū ni Tsuite (About the Earth), 1990, Kokusai Shoin, Tōkyō. Henshall, K: ‘On Japanese Perceptions of their Relationship with Nature, with Special Regard to Entomological and Geological Factors’, in K. Henshall and D. Bing (eds), Japanese Perceptions of Nature and Natural Order, 1992, Centre for Asian Studies, University of Waikato, for the New Zealand Asian Studies Society, pp. 25–44. McCraw, J: ‘Maori Legends as an Aid in Teaching Earth Sciences’, New Zealand Science Teacher, No. 65, 1990. Nakanishi, S: Nihon Shinwa no Sekai (The World of Japanese Myths), 1991, Heibonsha, Tōkyō. Nihongi—Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times, translated by W. Aston, 1972, Tuttle, Tōkyō. Pelzel J: ‘Human Nature in the Japanese Myths’, in T. Lebra et al. (eds), Japanese Culture and Behavior, pp. 7–28, 1974, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. Singer, K: Mirror, Sword and Jewel, 1973 (written c. 1947), Croom Helm, London. Yoon, H-K: ‘A Preliminary Enquiry into Different Geomentalities as Reflected in French Renaissance Gardens and Japanese Hill Gardens’, in K. Henshall and D. Bing (eds), Japanese Perceptions of Nature and Natural Order, 1992, Centre for Asian Studies, University of Waikato, for the New Zealand Asian Studies Society, pp. 1–12.

13

Singer, p. 30.

PART 2 Towards a Wider Perspective – Japanese Cultural Responses to Earlier Disasters

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Chapter 9

‘All Shook Up’

Post-religious Responses to Disaster in Murakami Haruki’s after the Quake Jonathan Dil

Keio University

While religious beliefs and practices continue to play an important role in the lives of some people in Japan, the sociological data paints a picture of declining religious influence. Ian Reader, for example, offers a careful analysis of the data, making the strong case that the ‘rush hour away from the Gods’ remains a defining feature of post-war Japanese society.1 One role religion can play in a society, of course, is to provide reassurance and comfort in the face of disasters and other existential threats. It can provide community and spaces for people to put themselves back together again after they have been ‘all shook up’. So what, if anything, is taking religion’s place in contemporary Japanese society? What resources—cultural, psychological, or even spiritual—remain for secularized individuals in the face of massive natural (and human-made) disasters and threats? This question could be approached from a variety of perspectives: sociological, political, cultural and otherwise. The focus of this chapter will be literary, looking specifically at the way Murakami Haruki’s 1999 short story collection after the quake2 (originally published as a book in Japan as Kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru (all god’s children can dance) deals with the theme of postreligious responses to disaster. While Murakami is an on-the-record atheist, one does not necessarily get this from reading his fiction alone. after the quake deals, in subtle ways, with the psychological after-effects of the Kobe earthquake of January 1995 (and less directly with the Aum sarin gas attack of March of the same year), and shows the complex ways people deal with trauma, and not necessarily in ways that can be easily categorized as either religious or secular. Several of the stories in this collection make use of psychological moves 1 Ian Reader, ‘Secularization, R.I.P.? Nonsense! The ‘Rush Hour Away from the Gods’ and the Decline of Religion in Contemporary Japan’. Journal of Religion in Japan, Volume One, Number One, 2012, pp. 7–36. 2 Haruki Murakami, after the quake. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. This chapter will follow the convention of the English translation (apparently insisted on by Murakami) of not capitalizing the first letter of words in the title of the book or in the individual titles of stories.

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that are basic to the human ability to make and maintain religious belief, but in ways that are void of, or even antagonistic to, any specific religious content. What these stories demonstrate are some of the ways Murakami has been searching for post-religious (though not necessarily post-spiritual) responses to disaster and anxiety in contemporary Japanese society and elsewhere.

Background and Reception

In early 1995, Japan was shaken by two major events: The Great Hanshin (Kobe) earthquake in January and the Aum Shrinkyō cult sarin gas attack of the Tokyo subway system in March. Both events deeply affected the popular Japanese author Murakami Haruki (1949-), who shortly thereafter returned to Japan from a period living abroad in the United States to begin work on two non-fictional books: Andāguraundo (Underground, 1997) and Yakusoku sareta basho de (The Place that was Promised, 1998). The first book was a collection of interviews with survivors of the Aum attack, while the second book recorded interviews with members and former members of Aum. Murakami then returned to his fictional writing in 1999, publishing five consecutive short stories, one a month starting in August, in the magazine Shinchō, under the collective title jishin no ato de (after the quake). A sixth story was then added to the collection the following year when it was published as a short story collection entitled kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru (all god’s children can dance). This collection was translated into English in 2002, reverting back to the original title of after the quake (which I will use to identity the book in the remainder of this chapter). The critical reaction to after the quake was mixed. For one group of critics, the collection was a missed opportunity that exploited the earthquake for Murakami’s own selfish purposes. Kuroko Kazuo, for example, was troubled that the stories did not deal with characters who experienced the earthquake firsthand, but rather focused on the psychological trauma of those on the periphery.3 Horie Toshiyuki was likewise disappointed that the true misery of the earthquake was not portrayed in any direct sense, a sentiment he shared with Yoshida Haruo who saw the earthquake merely as a prop perhaps unnecessary for the stories at all.4,5 The Great Hanshin earthquake, these critics 3 Kazuo Kuroko. Murakami Haruki: Sōshitsu no monogatari kara tenkan no monogatari e. Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2007, p. 232. 4 Toshiyuki Horie, ‘Mō kamisama ni denwa dekinai’, in Yuriika, Murakami Haruki o yomu. Special Edition, March 2000, p. 212. 5 Haruo Yoshida, Murakami Haruki to Amerika: Bōryoku to yurai. Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2001, p. 215.

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collectively implied, was a deeply traumatic event in need of a skilled storyteller—one who could record, share, and help readers to process the physical and emotional pain caused by this massive natural disaster. Instead what they saw was a writer for whom the earthquake was little more than a plot device used to write the kinds of stories he was going to write anyway. Other critics praised after the quake for its freshness and for what it revealed about Murakami’s growing commitment as a writer. Katō Norihiro, for example, saw one of the most significant developments in the collection as Murakami’s use of third-person narration. Murakami’s early reputation had rested on firstperson narratives, so this expansion of perspective, for Katō at least, was a significant sign of Murakami’s broadening worldview and growing search for commitment as a writer.6 For Jay Rubin (who also translated the collection into English), the earthquake was more than an empty prop; rather, it provided an important focal point through which individual characters are forced to face a deep sense of emptiness within themselves, the discovery of which leads to an important turning point in their lives.7 The critic who saw the most significance in the collection, however, was Philip Gabriel, who in his excellent study examining religious themes in contemporary Japanese literature, Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature, makes the case that all god’s children can dance is the story that perhaps comes closest to representing contemporary Japanese attitudes towards the spiritual today.8 This chapter sides with Gabriel and sees after the quake as a significant collection that powerfully chronicles contemporary attitudes in Japan towards spirituality, arguing, along with Gabriel, that all god’s children can dance is the story that most explicitly captures Murakami’s position. As Rubin suggests, the earthquake is important in the collection for the sense of existential crisis it brings to the lives of individual characters and for the way this forces them to reassess and reformulate life narratives. All of the action in the six stories is set after the earthquake but before the Aum attack. While it is thus the earthquake that provides the obvious link between the individual stories, the Aum attack is arguably just as important for understanding the book’s themes. As Murakami makes clear in his epilogue to Underground, responding to those whom, like the members and former members of Aum, are sensitive to the spiritual anxieties of the age has always been an important part of his fiction: 6 Norihiro Katō, Ierōpēji: Murakami Haruki Part 2. Tokyo: Arachi Shuppansha, 2004, p. 104. 7 Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. London: Harvill Press, 2002, pp. 255–264. 8 Philip Gabriel, Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature. Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2006, p. 175.

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But were we able to offer ‘them’ [the members and former members of Aum] a more viable narrative? Did we have a narrative potent enough to chase away [cult leader] Asahara’s ‘utter nonsense’…It’s something I’m going to have to deal with more seriously from here on…but the real surprise is that it’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do as a writer all along!9 after the quake should be read as part of Murakami’s ongoing attempt to answer his own rhetorical question—what can he, and more broadly an increasingly secular Japan, offer to those who are searching for something more? It is a quest that started for Murakami long before the events of 1995, but that has since grown in focus and intensity. In focusing on the way the stories found in after the quake deal with themes of secularism, religion and coping, I will place different weight on each story. The first two stories I discuss, ufo in kushiro and landscape with flatiron, deal with some of the anxieties of living in modern societies and the potential dangers that can emerge from the human need to belong. While not explicitly referenced in the stories themselves, I wish to follow up on Katō Norihiro’s interesting suggestion that these stories offer explorations of cult recruiting dynamics.10 The next two stories I discuss, thailand and super-frog saves tokyo, include themes of uncanny cosmic causes and the desire to engage in supernatural interventions. While religious and nonreligious people alike realize that there are physical causes behind natural events, it is not uncommon for people to look for deeper meanings that can explain the cosmic question of why. What we want to know is not only why this happened, but why it happened to me, and what, if anything, I can do to stop it from ever happening again. thailand and super-frog saves tokyo show characters wrestling with just these kinds of questions and finding their own strange answers. The next section of the chapter considers the most important story of the collection, all god’s children can dance. This story describes a young man who abandons the God of his mother’s religion, but who is nevertheless open to the unseen presence of an unknown person or power as he dances on the pitcher’s mound of a baseball diamond late at night. The ambiguous ending of the story highlights the uncertain search for spirituality and meaning in contemporary Japanese society. Perhaps one of the most fundamental of all religious beliefs is the belief that there is someone or something out there watching me, and 9 10

Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. London: The Harvill Press, 2000, pp. 202–203. Norihiro Katō, Iero-pe-ji: Murakami Haruki Part 2. Tokyo: Arachi Shuppansha, 2004, p. 112.

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this story highlights this widely shared experience, while simultaneously refusing to attach any specific content to it, religious or otherwise. I only touch briefly on the remaining story of the collection, honey pie, in my conclusion, as it goes beyond the immediate interests of this chapter. This story explores the evolving commitments of a writer who finds in the aftermath of the earthquake a reason to commit to others and to form a new family unit. This new family might be constrasted with the other types of belonging portrayed in the first two stories discussed, offering a more positive model of family and a new sense of hope and belonging grounded in the power of storytelling. Collectively, these stories offer one of the best literary portrayals available of the ambigious role religion and spirituality continue to play in the aftermath of disaster, even in an increasingly secularized society like Japan. While the influence of religion might be in decline in Japan and other developed nations, religious habits of mind continue to resurface in surprising ways in the face of disaster. after the quake provides a particularly striking example of how this works.

Who am I, What am I, and Where do I Belong?

Disasters can shake people up and bring questions to the surface that have long been lying dormant. The first two stories in after the quake, ufo in kushiro and landscape with flatiron, deal with characters facing such existential crises who are then offered compensation through companionship, though not in ways that are completely satisfactory or even safe. At first glance, these two stories may seem to have nothing to do with Aum and everything to do with the Kobe earthquake, but Katō Norihiro’s intriguing suggestion that these stories highlight the psychological dynamics of cult recruiting invites us to dig a little deeper. Characters who have been shaken out of their everyday routines and sense of security are approached by individuals who promise companionship and a sense of belonging, but the potential for violence or even death remains just below the surface. As I will argue in more detail below, a close reading of these two stories offers some support to Katō’s thesis, though not in a conclusive way. Yet by widening our gaze to Murakami’s non-fiction writing, particularly The Place that was Promised, it is possible to see the ways in which the concerns of these protagonists mirror the concerns of many of the members and former members of Aum Shinrikyō interviewed by Murakami, particularly before they joined the cult. This approach allows us to see the validity of Katō’s reading, despite the natural resistance one might feel from just reading the stories alone.

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In the first story, ufo in kushiro, the main protagonist, Komura, is suddenly abandoned by his wife who has spent five days in front of the television watching footage of the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake. The parting letter Komura’s wife leaves him states that she is never coming back, and even more cuttingly, that living with him was ‘like living with a chunk of air’ (6). Komura, unsure of what to do next, takes a week of paid leave, and at the request of a friend from the office named Sasaki, agrees to take a small package to Hokkaido to deliver to this colleague’s younger sister. The package weighs virtually nothing, and Komura is reassured that there is nothing dangerous inside it. Komura accepts the offer and makes his way to Hokkaido where he is greeted by two women: his colleague’s sister, Keiko, and her friend, Shimao. The mystery of the package’s contents provides a key point of interest in the story, and Komura eventually has to face the question of what it is he has brought with him to Hokkaido. The emotional (anti)climax of the story comes when Komura is unable to perform sexually at a love hotel with Shimao. Lying in bed following this dissapointing encounter, Komura finds his thoughts returning to his wife’s departing note. His attention then turns again to the box. Joking about its contents, Shimao suggests that it might be ‘the something that was inside you’ (27). Suddenly and inexplicably, Komura finds himself filled with rage and ‘on the verge of committing an act of overwhelming violence’ (28). Sensing the inherent danger in the situation, Shimao quickly assures him that she is only joking and did not mean to hurt his feelings. Komura then forces himself to calm down and the story ends with Shimao suggesting that, while he may feel like he has come a long way, he is only at the beginning of his journey. Before this final scene, the two women tell Komura stories that highlight an important sub-theme of the work. One of these stories, told by Keiko, mirrors Komura’s own, and involves a disappearing wife: a woman living in Kushiro had seen a ufo and then one week later had left her husband and children without a note or explanation. The second story is told by Shimao, and involves a comical anecdote about sex in the woods. The comedy comes from the bell Shimao and her boyfriend carried with them to alert bears of their presence, and which they took turns shaking during intercourse lest a bear stumble upon them in their compromised position. As Shimao is clear to explain, her story has a message: ‘Tomorrow there could be an earthquake; you could be kidnapped by aliens; you could be eaten by a bear. Nobody knows what’s going to happen’ (25). The message here is clear. Life is fragile and could end at any moment; events which remind us of this reality have the power to shake us to our very core and to bring about dramatic changes in our lives. Those who critique the collection for failing to focus on the specificity of the Kobe earthquake thus

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have a point. While all of the stories in the collection have some connection to the earthquake, as this first story exemplifies, it really could have been any event that fufilled this role, provided it could catalyse the same sense of existential crisis. In other words, it is not the particularity of the earthquake that matters, but the opportunity it provides for protagonists to face fundamental questions about identity and self. A bear attack or an encounter with visitors from another planet would have served just as well. In Komura’s case, it is not so much the earthquake that brings the crisis, but the disappearance of his wife and her parting note. His anxiety, in other words, is more connected to deep existential and ontological questions related to the most important relationship in his life, which the earthquake only brings to the surface indirectly. What would he find if he looked in the box? Is it some missing part of himself, or is it perhaps nothing at all? While the text never provides definitive answers to these questions, these concerns nevertheless provide useful context for readers trying to make sense of Komura’s behaviour and the way he accepts influence from others. Katō, of course, in suggesting that this story is an exploration of cult recruiting dynamics, is reading more into the story than is explicitly there. Neither Keiko nor Shimao ever invites Komura to join a cult, nor anything else for that matter, and they never even bring up the topic of religion. Indeed, the two girls come across more as carefree hedonists than religious zealots. At first glance then, it might seem that Katō is simply reading too much into all this. Yet his hypothesis does open up an interesting perspective on the psychological dynamics inherent in the text. Why is it that when Komura is at his lowest, his friend from the office makes his strange request? And why is it that the girls seemed determined to generate feelings of uncertainty in Komura by telling him stories and by suggesting the possibly that the empty container he has brought with him to Hokkaido contains his self? Of course, if this is really about cults, as Katō suggests, we might reasonably ask why the final sales pitch never comes, or indeed, why it is never even hinted at. And yet, despite these serious limitations, there is a sense in which Katō’s reading still makes sense. The three characters in question—Sasaki, his sister Keiko, and Shimao—seem to be covertly working on Komura for some strange purpose. The text leaves open the question of what this final purpose might be, yet the subtly manipulative psychological dynamics are apparent. Reading Murakami’s interviews with members and former members of Aum, one of the recurring themes is the feeling that, like Komura in ufo in kushiro, people felt something was missing in their lives, or even that they were empty inside, before they joined Aum. Mitsuharu Inaba, for example, expresses the sentiment like this: ‘When I became a member I didn’t have any personal

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problems or anything. It was just that, no matter where I found myself, I felt like there was a hole inside me, with the wind rushing through. I never felt satisfied’.11 Similarly, Hajime Masutani describes his life before Aum in these terms: ‘I never felt any major frustration or difficulties in my life, really. It was more like something was missing’.12 It is interesting to note the way Komura’s experience overlaps with these interviews. ufo in kushiro is not an account of cult recruiting dynamics in any explicit sense, but implicitly it is dealing with the same kinds of vulnerabilities. While a solution to Komura’s existential and ontological dread is never offered in the story, it does offer a diagnosis of his problem that has real world parallels. If we read this first story as a response to Aum, what we have is not a solution to their dilemma, but rather a diagnosis of their problem. Such is also the case in the next story. landscape with flatiron continues in a similar vein to ufo in kushiro, examining the way feelings of emptiness and lack can translate into dangerous new alliances. The story features three main protagonists living near the coast in Ibaraki Prefecture: Junko, a runaway who has come to Ibaraki by chance to start a new life; her boyfriend Keisuke, a young man focused on sex who is happy to drift along surfing and playing in his rock band; and Miyake, the middle-aged artist the young couple befriend who builds bonfires on the beach and who speaks with a Kansai dialect. The main action of the story involves a meeting of the young couple with Miyake who has built yet another bonfire on the beach and invites them to join him. Keisuke soon starts complaining of a stomachache and leaves Junko and Miyake in front of the fire where Junko begins to share her deepest anxieties. Similar to Komura’s concern in the previous story, Junko describes herself as ‘completely empty’, a sentiment with which Miyake sympathizes (52). Then Miyake makes the shocking suggestion that they could die together. The bonfire in the story works like a Rorschach test. Those looking at it see whatever is in them to see. Miyake explains: ‘[A] fire can be any shape it wants to be. It’s free. So it can look like anything at all depending on what’s inside the person looking at it’ (43). For Junko and Miyake it reflects back their own sense of emptiness and isolation. Miyake later reveals that he left a wife and children in Kobe, and though he suspects that they are okay, he has not contacted them since the earthquake to make sure. Like Junko, he has cut himself off from his biological family but has found a surrogate family in Junko and Keisuke. Before they kill themselves, Miyake suggests that they should first let the fire burn out: 11 12

Ibid. p. 241. Ibid. p. 251.

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‘We built it, so we ought to keep it company to the end’ (53). Junko goes to sleep, but asks to be woken when the fire goes out. Miyake assures her that he will not have to; the cold will do that for him. Here again we have a story where feelings of emptiness lead to new attachments but also new dangers. Junko has found a surrogate family in Keisuke and Miyake, a replacement for the biological family that failed her. Yet the loneliness she shares with Miyake finally only binds them in a death pact that she may or may not be willing to go through with. Again, her concerns overlap with those of some of the interviewees featured in Murakami’s The Place that was Promised. One of the most common complaints Murakami heard from those who joined Aum was a feeling of being out of sync with the world around them—a notion that they were constant outsiders unable to belong. As Akio Namimura says in her interview: ‘When I graduated from high school I felt like I would either renounce the world, or die—one of the two’.13 In Aum, these individuals found others who shared a similar experience of the world, yet together, these social outcasts found a place they felt they could belong. As with Junko in Landscape with Flatiron, however, this sense of solidarity came at a price—in the most extreme cases, it was something close to a death pact. In summary, while Komura in the first story and Junko in the second both find surrogate forms of belonging, in both cases this belonging comes at a price. Both start with a deep void which makes them vulnerable to the approaches of those around them who reach out and listen. Yet buried in these connections are dangerous drives for violence and death. While religion is never overtly mentioned in either story, Katō Norihiro’s suggestion that these works are explorations of the psychological dynamics of cult recruiting has a certain credibility when viewed in the light of Murakami’s broader interests post-1995. Yet in none of these early stories does Murakami answer the rhetorical question he posed in Underground: What could he offer these people in return? To see how Murakami tries to start addressing this question we have to turn to the next stories in the collection.

Why did this Happen to Me and How Can I Stop it from Ever Happening Again?

The human ability (or folly) to see divine vengeance in natural disasters is well documented. In 2006, for example, the American Pastor John Hagee made 13

Ibid. p. 229.

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headlines when he declared that Hurricane Katrina was a divine punishment from God, a just reward for the city’s plan to hold a homosexual rally.14 Similarly, Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintarō, in the aftermath of the Great East Japan earthquake, controversially declared that it was ‘divine punishment’ for the ‘egoism’ of the Japanese people.15 These might seem like extreme examples, stemming from particular religious or political ideologies, but they also highlight habits of the mind that have a broad range of expression. What is it that allows many people to see in natural disasters not just random events but divine warnings or even punishments for moral failings? In the language of cognitive psychology, it all starts with theory of mind. Theory of mind, put simply, describes the human ability to see other people not as random objects—hunks of flesh wondering about with no particular rhyme or reason—but as subjects, people with their own beliefs, thoughts and desires. This ability, stated in this way, may seem entirely unremarkable, grounded as it is in our common sense experience of the world. Yet from the perspective of human evolution or artificial intelligence, or thinking about cases where it seems less developed (such as with some cases of autism), theory of mind proves to be a remarkable design feature that allows us to navigate the social intricacies of daily life. Where this gets interesting in terms of religious belief is in the way theory of mind fires (or misfires) in the face of, at best, partial information. In the next section of this chapter, I will look at how theory of mind, together with what what some cognitive scientists label ‘hyperactive agency detection’—put simply, our constant vigilance for other minds—primes our ability to see others ‘out there’, to always wonder who—whether visibile or invisible—is watching us and why.16 In this section, however, I would like to focus on how this leads to a sense of moral cause and effect in the universe. The by-product theory of religious belief proposes a model whereby concepts of unseen agents interested in the social, and more importantly, moral details of our lives, and who are waiting to reward or punish us based on this information, are not particularly difficult concepts to grasp or process. Sometimes this might be personified through some kind of vengeful god, and 14

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Matt Corley, ‘Hagee Says Hurricane Katrina Struck New Orleans Because It Was ‘Planning a Sinful’ ‘Homosexual Rally.” Think Progress. 23 April 2008. Cited at thinkprogress.org/ politics/2008/04/23/22152/hagee-katrina-mccain/?mobile=nc. Dan Gilgoff, ‘Tokyo governor apologizes for calling quake divine retribution’. cnn.com, 15 March 2011. Cited at http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/15/tokyo-governor-apologizes -for-calling-quake-divine-retribution/. See Justin L. Barret, Why Would Anyone Believe in God. United Kingdom: Altamira Press, 2004.

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other times it might be more loosely defined as a kind of cosmic reckoning— karma perhaps.17 Examples of such moral accounting systems are found in the next two stories. thailand tells the story of Satsuki, an expert on the thyroidal immune system, who is in Thailand to attend an academic conference. Following the conference, she organizes some time off, and at the recommendation of a friend, hires a driver who knows the area well and who can attend to her every need. The way the earthquake first appears in the story is through Satsuki’s fantasies of revenge against her ex-husband, an alcoholic who cheated on her with someone Satsuki knew, and who now lives in Kobe. When Satsuki’s driver asks her if she knows anyone in Kobe, however, she denies it, perhaps not wanting to admit to the driver, or perhaps even to herself, that she really hopes the worst for her ex-husband. Of course, from a secular perspective, there is no need to worry that thoughts of jealousy or ill will could have any real effects, provided, of course, one doesn’t act on these feelings in the real world. And yet, we are well accustomed to worlds, both religious and fictional, where this is not the case. In traditional Japanese works of literature such as Genji Monogatari, for example, jealousy can have very real consequences in the world, such as when Lady Rokujō’s wandering spirit kills her romantic rival Yugao. Similar psychological/metaphysical dynamics are played out for dramatic effect in one of Murakami’s later novels: Umibe no Kafuka (Kafka on the Shore). And in thailand, while it may not seem entirely rational, Satsuki also seems to harbour feelings that her animosity towards her ex-husband may have had some kind of strange cause and effect relationship on the earthquake. Eventually, Satsuki’s driver takes her to see a Thai spiritualist who explains to Satsuki that she has a stone inside her: ‘A hard white stone. About the size of a child’s fist’ (103). There is some kind of writing on the stone, but the spiritualist cannot read it because it is in Japanese. Satsuki is told that she must get rid of the stone or she will die. She will have a dream about a snake that will be her cue that the time has come to make a spiritual transition in her life and to remove the stone buried within her. The story finishes with Satsuki wishing for the dream to come, but not yet having experienced it. The stone, of course, might easily be read as a psychological metaphor. Satsuki’s ‘hard’ feelings about her ex-husband and the ‘hard’ words she has engraved in her heart are weighing her down and this is having an effect on her psychological and physical well-being. She must forgive him for what he did 17

See Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Human Instincts that Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors. Great Britain: Vintage, 2002.

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and for the children he never gave her so that she can find peace and a way to move on. And yet there is also an unspoken fear that her feelings may somehow have spilled over into the real world, a subtle subtext of karma and moral judgment that exists in the text, even if Satsuki is not entirely willing to own it. At one point in the story, for example, Satsuki’s thoughts about her exhusband and the earthquake are expressed in this way: ‘I hope he was crushed to death by something big and heavy. Or swallowed up by the liquefied earth. It’s everything I’ve always wanted for him’ (92). The fact that Satsuki has always wanted this for her ex-husband and the fact that he may have actually got it, of course, might be considered as two completely different things: a lucky coincidence. With the introduction of the spiritualist and the stone, however, the possibility is at least left open that there has been some kind of moral reckoning. The boundary between her internal world and the external one of the earthquake is left ambigious. This, of course, is not expressed in the story in the overt terms of Hagee or Ishihara mentioned earlier. Yet in its own subtle ways, Satsuki’s story exemplifies the way even secular individuals can wrestle with questions of cosmic cause and meaning. Despite herself, she finds it difficult not to believe that her ex-husband somehow got what he deserved, though the story is ultimately more about her own attempts at forgiveness. The next story in the collection takes this kind of cause and effect relationship in a different direction, asking what can be done to stop disaster from happening, though in a way that is notably more fantastic than religious. In super-frog saves tokyo, the main protagonist, Katagiri, returns home to find a giant frog waiting for him. The frog claims that he and Katagiri must work together to stop an earthquake from occuring in Tokyo on February 18th, at 8:30am. Their adversary is a giant worm whose body has swollen to gigantic proportions and who causes earthquakes when he gets angry. There is a moral dimension to the worm as well. He is able to absorb hatred from the world, as if, in some biblical sense, Tokyo has been ripening for its own destruction. Katagiri, a debt-collector, is shot before he is able to join the frog on the appointed day of their battle. Here the line between fantasy and reality becomes even more unclear. When Katagiri awakes in hospital and asks about the shooting, for example, his nurse mysteriously tells him that he wasn’t shot and that the earthquake the frog had predicted never came. He wonders if he was dreaming, but the frog later appears to inform him that he was there with him as they fought the worm, and that they achieved a temporary victory. The frog also explains that it was less a real battle than one that took place in his dreams. The frog later dies before his eyes (though the nurse can’t see this either). The story ends with the earthquake having been avoided but a very large question mark hanging over the reality of the frog.

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Again, there is nothing overtly religious about this story, but the psychological dynamics have potential overlaps with the way religious people can seek to manage anxieties and prevent disasters. In short, people don’t just want to know the cosmic causes for why bad things happen; they want to know what they can do to stop them from happening again. People offer gifts, perform rituals, and offer other types of religious devotions to protect themselves from potential evil and harm. The idea of a religious figure—a shaman or other such figure—who can do battle with evil on our behalf is also a common religious trope. While superfrog is not presented as a religious figure, he is a symbol of our desire for some kind of cosmic intervention. The story thus avoids overt religious themes, but uses fantasy to deal with similair anxieties and desires that have traditionally been worked out in religious contexts. In summary, the two stories discussed in this section show characters dealing with questions of cosmic cause and effect, but not in ways that are overtly religious. The first story offers a subtle subtext about karma and spirituality that might say something about strange cosmic forces, but that also might just be a psychological metaphor. Interestingly, it is the setting of the story, Thailand rather than Tokyo, that perhaps allows the spiritual aspects of the story to be taken more seriously. The second story offers a theme about cosmic interventions, but in a way that is so fantastic it requires us to entirely suspend disbelief. Both stories thus allow readers to explore ideas of cosmic cause and effect in playful ways removed from the specificity of any particular religion or belief system. It is in the next story that this search for spirituality outside of any particular religious prepackaging becomes most explicit.

Watch Me If You Like, I Don’t Care

Oedipal tensions are on display in the next story, all god’s children can dance, from the very beginning. The main protagonist, Yoshiya, is a twenty-five-yearold male who still lives with his solo mother. The narrator early on informs the reader that Yoshiya’s mother is a person lacking in maternal affection and a sexual temptation to her son. She is attractive, looks younger than she really is, keeps herself in good physical condition, and continues to walk around their small apartment wearing nothing but skimpy underwear or sometimes nothing at all. When she feels lonely at night, she often climbs into Yoshiya’s bed leaving him to ‘twist himself into incredible positions to keep his mother unaware of his erections’ (58). As the narrator clearly informs us, Yoshiya was ‘[t]errified of stumbling into a fatal relationship with his own mother’(59).

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Though Yoshiya realizes that he should leave home and go out on his own, the narrator tells us that he was ‘unable to tear himself away’ (59). From a psychological perspective, his problem is clearly related to the absence of a strong father figure in his life. Though his religious mother tries to persuade him that he is a special child of God, he has already abandoned the faith, his fundamental reason being ‘the unending coldness of the One who was his father: His dark, heavy, silent heart of stone’ (69). Yoshiya later learns a little more about his supposed biological father. His mother, as a young woman, became pregnant and went to a doctor for an abortion. When she later returned to this same doctor a second time, he was angry and lectured her sternly about the need to be more careful. She eventually slept with this doctor, and though he was careful to use contraception, she became pregnant again. The doctor was convinced the child was not his; Yoshiya’s mother became distraught and was ready to commit suicide. As she was making her way to the boat she planned to jump from, however, she was approached on the street by Mr Tabata, a member of a religious cult, who convinced her that her child was a gift from God. While the idea brought her a sense of salvation, her son, as he grows up, is not convinced. The only thing he ever asked for from this ‘father’ was to be able to catch fly balls in baseball. His failure to get any kind of response eventually causes him to abandon his faith at age thirteen. The only other clue Yoshiya has about his biological father’s identity, besides that he is a doctor, is the fact that he is missing his right earlobe. Thus, when Yoshiya one day notices a professional looking man on a train with a missing right earlobe, he begins to follow him. Eventually, he finds himself tailing him down a narrow alley. The imagery evoked is reminiscent of a kind of rebirth: High walls pressed in on either side of the straight passageway. There was barely enough room in here for two people to pass each other, and it was as dark as the bottom of the night time sea. Yoshiya had only the sound of the man’s shoes to go by. The leather slaps continued on ahead of him at the same unbroken pace. All but clinging to the sound, Yoshiya moved forward through this world devoid of light. And then there was no sound at all. 73

Pressing forward, Yoshiya finds that the alley has come to a dead end, closed off by a sheet-metal fence. Finding a gap, he makes his way through to a baseball diamond.

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It is here on this diamond late at night that Yoshiya finally confronts what it is he has been chasing. The man has disappeared, and he is all alone. Making his way towards home base, he finds that meaning itself is breaking down inside him. Finally, he comes to the following realization: What was I hoping to gain from this?…Was I trying to confirm the ties that make it possible for me to exist here and now? Was I hoping to be woven into some new plot, to be given some new and better-defined role to play? No, he thought, that’s not it. What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me. I just happened to catch sight of it, and followed it, and clung to it, and in the end let it fly into still deeper darkness. I’m sure I’ll never see it again. 75–76

This discovery brings intense joy to Yoshiya and he begins to dance. He feels a natural rhythm well up inside him, and also feels as if he is in perfect unison with the world. He has learnt how to live with an absent father. What he discovers next, however, is that something soon comes to compensate for this absence. He begins to feel that he is being watched. Before long, he began to feel that someone, somewhere, was watching him. His whole body—his skin, his bones—told him with absolute certainty that he was in someone’s field of vision. So what? he thought. Let them look if they want to, whoever they are. All God’s children can dance. 78–79

Yoshiya loses all inhibitions or sense of self-consciousness. He has been reborn. The question that remains is who or what is watching him? The search for the father is naturally related to a search for origins. Yoshiya wants to know where he has come from. What he eventually discovers is that he is only chasing a trail of darkness within himself. He has not found some larger narrative to place himself within; he has simply found the freedom to live without answers. Coming through the dark alley into the open baseball field, he is re-enacting his own birth. Because he cannot witness this event directly, however, he requires a third party presence. As Slavoj Žižek explains: [T]he most elementary fantasmatic scene is not that of a fascinating scene to be looked at, but the notion that ‘there is someone out there

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looking at us’; it is not a dream, but the notion that ‘we are the objects in someone else’s dream’.18 This act of detecting agency beyond our field of vision is also one with deep evolutionary origins. Some evolutionary psychologists, in fact, see it as one of the key cognitive building blocks upon which human religions and supernatural concepts are founded. In this view, human gods are born out of earlier cognitive structures that were used for detecting agency: predators, prey and other external agents essential to human survival. Because agency detection is such an important survival tool, we have a tendency to over-detect it, to sometimes see what is not there. This is sometimes referred to in the literature as hyperactive agency detection. Scott Atran explains the general approach: Natural selection designed the agency-detector system to deal rapidly and economically with stimulus situations involving people and animals as predators, protectors and prey. This resulted in the system’s being trip-wired to respond to fragmentary information under conditions of uncertainty…This hair-triggering of the agency-detection mechanism readily lends itself to supernatural interpretation of uncertain or anxietyprovoking events.19 While this is only one small piece of the puzzle some evolutionary psychologists and cultural anthropologists offer to try and understand the origins of human religions, it is interesting to apply this idea of hyperactive agency detection to Yoshiya’s situation. Though he has finally come to abandon the search for his biological father, he also comes to sense that he is the object in someone else’s gaze. It is interesting to note in this context the way animal motifs work their way into the text. As Yoshiya dances for those who are supposedly watching him, the narrator explains the inner struggle he faces: Animals lurked in the forest like trompe l’oeil figures, some of them horrific beasts he had never seen before. He would eventually have to pass through the forest, but he felt no fear. Of course—the forest was inside 18 19

Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacque Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 2001 p. 202. Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002 p. 78.

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him, he knew, and it made him who he was. The beasts were ones that he himself possessed. 79

Though Yoshiya is celebrating, it seems clear that he still has many battles left to face. He has wild beasts within that threaten to destroy him. The most dangerous internal beast of all, it would seem, is the attraction he feels towards his own mother. Though Yoshiya’s mother is away in Kobe with her religious group helping victims of the earthquake, as he dances in the dark, his thoughts soon return to her: What would happen, he wondered, if he could remain his present self and yet turn time backward so as to meet his mother in her youth when her soul was in its deepest state of darkness? No doubt they would plunge as one into the muck of bedlam and devour each other in acts for which they would be dealt the harshest punishments. 80

These are themes picked up again in Murakami’s tenth novel, Kafka on the Shore, where a young boy makes a journey through a forest, past the eyes of the beasts that are watching him, and encounters his ‘mother’ in her youth. In Yoshiya’s case, however, the narrative ends before we find out how he is going to handle this next challenge. What this story offers then is perhaps Murakami’s most explicit take on themes of spirituality in contemporary Japan (at least previous to his recent three-part novel series 1Q84). Yoshiya has explicitly rejected the religion of his mother, but he is still open to his mysterious experience dancing up on the pitcher’s mound. He senses someone is out there watching him, but he refuses to interpret who or what this something is. He simply accepts the experience, while simultaneously refusing to force it into any kind of preconceived framework, religious or otherwise.

Writing and Commitment

A Brief Look at honey pie and a Conclusion The final story in the collection, honey pie, is less directly connected to the immediate focus of this chapter. I thus wish to only make a few brief remarks about it. The story is structured around a love triangle involving two male

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friends, Junpei and Takatsuki, and their female friend and love interest, Sayoko. The three friends meet at university and soon become inseparable, but it is Takatsuki who makes the first move, and he and Sayoko eventually marry. Junpei goes on to become a short story writer, and while he and Sayoko clearly connect on a deeper emotional level, he is forced to watch as she and Takatsuki build a life together. Later, Takatsuki and Sayoko have a child, Sala, and the four of them (Uncle Junpei included) continue to build a life together. Eventually, Takatsuki and Sayoko divorce after it is revealed that Takatsuki has been having an affair, and the opportunity opens up for Junpei to make his move. For some reason, though, there is still something holding him back. The earthquake provides the catalyst for change in Junpei’s life. Sayoko’s daughter, Sala, starts having nightmares about the Earthquake Man, a figure who tries to put people into boxes that are too small for them to fit. Uncle Junpei sometimes comes over late at night to tell her stories and to help her get back to sleep. Through this experience, Junpei comes to learn the true power of storytelling and the ability it has to strengthen and support the next generation. This leads him to an epiphany—he does in fact have something to offer Sayako and Sala. Though Junpei’s life has been marked by inaction and regret, he finally knows what he wants to do. Junpei explains: I want to write stories that are different from the ones I’ve written so far…I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love. But right now I have to stay here and keep watch over this woman and this girl. I will never let anyone—not anyone—try to put them into that crazy box—not even if the sky should fall or the earth crack open with a roar. 181

These thoughts, of course, are Junpei’s, and may or may not reflect Murakami’s own. It is hard not to see in the story, however, a statement of Murakami’s own desire for commitment, a sentiment specifically directed at supporting younger generations. While not necessarily linked to the post-religious themes of the other stories in the collection, honey pie offers readers a tangible sense of Murakami’s newfound desire for commitment. At the heart of all these stories is the fear of death and the power and danger of storytelling as a means of confronting existential anxieties. Disasters, natural and otherwise, have the power to lift the lid on these anxieties and to unleash their energies in unexpected ways. Murakami’s quest as a writer has been to find ways to deal with these anxieties that are more constructive than the dangerous narratives offered by Aum and others. The fiction Murakami has

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written post-1995 is antagonistic to organized religion, at least as it appears in its fundamentalist varieties, but it is not closed off to spirituality. It is a position that coincides nicely with certain currents within the contemporary zeitgeist. As after the quake shows, the ‘rush hour away from the gods’ that Reader and others describe does not necessarily mean that people’s strategies for dealing with disasters and threats are entirely secularized. The human mind is more complex and disjointed (modular in the language of neuroscience) than linear narratives of secularization often allow for, and competing intuitions, narratives, and modes of being can all work side by side with only minimal dissonance. The fiction of Murakami Haruki, and particularly his collection after the quake, showcases in an exemplary way exactly how this can work. Like Yoshiya standing on his pitcher’s mound, the invitation is to celebrate the mystical and the spiritual without attaching any overt religious meaning to it. This might be described as a postmodern response to religion, and it is one with resonances not only in Japan but in many other developed nations. Narratives about secularization have some role to play in understanding Murakami’s post-religious response to disaster. Yet ultimately binaries of the religious and the secular cannot do justice to his narratives. These are not stories about the rejection of religion and the embrace of secularism. Rather, they are stories about the desire to separate the spiritual from the religious, to let the former thrive and the latter wither. But can literature really do a better job than religion of helping people put themselves together again after they have been ‘all shook up’? It is a question hanging over much of Murakami’s recent fiction.

Chapter 10

Disaster and National Identity

The Textual Transformations of Japan Sinks Rebecca Suter

University of Sydney

1

Introduction: Japanese Science Fiction and Natural Disaster

In the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear incident that affected Japan on 11 March 2011, a number of authors of fiction commented on the power of literature as a medium to reflect on national tragedy and cope with trauma. Some of the most interesting reflections emerged from the fields of fantasy and science fiction. Arguably the most influential of these were collected in a volume entitled 3.11 no mirai: Nihon—SF—sōzōryoku (The Future of 3.11: Japan, Science Fiction, and Imagination), edited by Tatsumi Takayuki and Kasai Kiyoshi and published in September 2011. The preface to the volume was written by one of the founding fathers of Japanese science fiction, Komatsu Sakyō, who unfortunately passed away in July 2011, but was able to write, a few weeks before his death, a short essay on 3/11 and its relationship with speculative fiction. The essay begins by discussing the Kantō earthquake of September 1923, noting that it was perceived on the national level as the first time in history in which Japan reacted to natural disaster as a modern nation, taking full advantage of innovative science and technology to protect its recently conquered ‘modern life’ from the forces of nature. By contrast, in Komatsu’s opinion, the March 1995 Kōbe-Ōsaka earthquake, while having a major impact on the cities involved, did not have lasting consequences on the country’s sense of national identity. Building on these observations, Komatsu reflects on the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and argues that the disaster had an unprecedented impact on the international image of Japan. This for Komatsu had to do both with the natural disaster’s sheer scale, and with the fact that it was broadcast in real time to a degree never seen before. On the national level, on the other hand, the Fukushima nuclear plant incident that followed the tsunami prompted Japanese citizens to question science’s ability to protect and improve human life. Komatsu concludes the essay by stating that at such a time, the genre of science fiction, with its long tradition of speculative storytelling, can

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004268319_012

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play a crucial role by offering critical reflections on the interrelation of nature, science and politics through an entertaining medium that can reach a wide audience. (Kasai and Tatsumi: 1–2) In the same volume, three renowned scholars of science fiction, Tani Kōshū, Kotani Mari and Ishiwa Yoshiyuki, comment on how prophetic Komatsu’s own works have been in envisaging the Japanese government’s and the Japanese people’s reactions to a major natural disaster of a similar nature to that of 3/11. (Kasai and Tatsumi: 147–193) Indeed, Komatsu’s fiction often dealt with natural disaster and climate change, imagining the possible consequences of unusually powerful earthquakes and tsunami, as well as the future effects of humanmade phenomena such as pollution and global warming. The most influential example is undoubtedly his novel Nihon chinbotsu (Japan Sinks, 1973). The text, highly popular among readers, was adapted into a movie by Moritani Shirō a few months after its publication, while another renowned science fiction author, Tsutsui Yasutaka, wrote a parody, entitled Nihon igai zenbu chinbotsu (Everything but Japan sinks), also in the same year. Interestingly, in 2006 there appeared, almost simultaneously, three different sequels and remakes of Nihon chinbotsu. The first was a new movie adaptation of Komatsu’s novel by director Higuchi Shinji, starring two celebrities of pop music, Kusanagi Tsuyoshi from the band smap and singer/actress Shibasaki Kō. A few months later, Kawasaki Minoru directed a movie adaptation of Tsutsui’s Everything But Japan Sinks, featuring a number of so-called gaijin tarento, or foreign tv personalities. Finally, also in 2006, Komatsu himself published a sequel to his novel, entitled Nihon chinbotsu dainibu (Japan sinks ii), imagining the survival of the Japanese nation twenty-five years after the archipelago sunk into the ocean. In different ways, all these works reflected on the impact that a natural disaster of unprecedented proportions could have on the national and international perception of Japanese identity. In this chapter, I will analyse the textual transformations of Nihon chinbotsu with specific focus on the interrelation of disaster and national identity in the Japanese collective imaginary. 2

Natural Disaster and ‘Japanese Spirit’: The Original Nihon Chinbotsu

Komatsu started writing Nihon chinbotsu in 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics, and originally intended the novel to be a commentary on the fragility of the state of complacency the Japanese people had reached as a result of the economic boom of the 1960s. The novel took nine years to complete, and was finally

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published in 1973, the year of the oil crisis and the so-called ‘Nixon shocks’. The text thus was also read as a reflection on the fragility of Japan’s international position, as well as a warning against the instability of the country’s alliance with the United States. (Yamamoto: 191–192; Kasai and Tatsumi: 160–161) The story, told in the third person, begins by describing unusual seismic activity around the Japan Trench (Nihon kaikō), the sea floor depression that runs along the eastern side of the island of Honshū. A team of oceanographers and seismologists, led by an eccentric scholar named Tadokoro, investigates the phenomenon with the aid of a young and capable deep-sea submarine researcher named Onodera. Tadokoro is presented as a paradigmatic example of Japan’s inability to take full advantage of its own intellectual resources. Eccentric and individualistic, Tadokoro is a brilliant scholar who is renowned abroad, but disliked in Japan. Unable to get government funding for his studies, the professor is sponsored by a new religion called the sekai kaiyō kyōdan (the Church of the World Oceans), a global organization that has its headquarters in Greece (Vol. 1: 166–167). Interestingly, once he realizes that Japan is in real danger, Tadokoro decides to cease all interaction with foreign financiers, because the investigation is ‘intimately tied with issues of national security’ (Vol. 1: 163). When national security is threatened, patriotism overrides intellectual pursuit, thus revealing that the professor’s ultimate loyalty is to his country, not to the international community of scientists. As Tadokoro’s investigation progresses, a string of powerful earthquakes and volcanic eruptions affects various areas on the island of Honshū. The first large earthquake occurs in the Kyōto area, something that takes all scientists by surprise, since the region was generally perceived as less seismically active than other parts of Japan. The second major trembling, a few weeks later, strikes Tokyo, and is even more destructive.1 After the first series of earthquakes, the local population immediately start working at reconstruction, a testament to the characteristic ‘Japanese spirit of resiliency’ (Vol. 1: 95). Politicians, on the other hand, are reluctant to act, as they feel that ‘their task is not to do, but to let become’ (Vol. 1: 107). After much wavering, the government commissions Professor Tadokoro to implement ‘Plan D,’ a thorough study of the unusual seismic activity aimed at 1 The choice to set the first two major disasters in Kyoto/Ōsaka and Tokyo respectively is a compelling one, as it speaks to the collective fear that an earthquake might strike the largest and most densely populated areas of Japan. At the same time, the choice of locations for the first two earthquakes and their order is also eerily prescient of the actual disasters that happened in 1995 and 2011.

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individuating its causes. The plan is funded by a private investor, a mysterious old man named Watari. Tadokoro recruits Onodera as his chief assistant, and begins submarine investigations. After gathering a large amount of data, often putting his own and Onodera’s life in danger, the scientist reaches the conclusion that the earthquakes are due to a large scale, unstoppable acceleration of the movement of the earth mantle, that will ultimately result in the sinking of the entire Japanese archipelago. While initially the government is reluctant to believe Tadokoro’s dire prediction, as the frequency and intensity of earthquakes, eruptions and tsunami increases, politicians and bureaucrats come to accept the validity of the seismologist’s theory and put him in charge of plan D-2, the evacuation of one hundred and ten million Japanese citizens. Diplomatic efforts begin to procure a home for millions of environmental refugees in a very short time. The first foreign government Japanese envoys visit is that of Australia, which has just abandoned its White Australia Policy and is ostensibly willing to engage Asia more actively. A Japanese delegate asks the Prime Minister to accept five million Japanese refugees within the next year. The Prime Minister is taken aback, and points out that the entire Australian population stands at twelve million, which means that the refugees would increase it by almost fifty percent. In response, the Japanese government offers to provide engineers and equipment to develop areas such as the Northern Territory by building infrastructure, particularly train lines. The Japanese envoy then uncovers a precious gift, a statue of the Buddha from the twelfth century, which the Prime Minister recognizes instantly, acknowledging the absolute value of ancient Japanese art. The novel thus not so subtly portrays Japan as the harbinger of both technological and artistic achievement to underpopulated, underdeveloped Australia, yet does so through the point of view of the Australian character, thus validating the objectivity of Japanese cultural superiority. The scene is filtered from the perspective of the Australian Prime Minister, who expresses stereotypical views of the Japanese character, commenting on the envoy’s dignity and his admirable emotional restraint. (Vol. 2: 77–86). Lured by the gift, the Prime Minister accepts the Japanese proposal and commits to hosting the refugees. The negotiation with Australia is the only one described in such detail; the scene is followed by indirect reports of similar negotiations with other countries, as the Japanese government gradually secures a destination for large portions of its soon-to-be exiled population. In the meantime, the government informs of the imminent disaster the ceos of major corporations, but not the population at large, prioritizing the needs of the economic elite over those of the common people. However,

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the Japanese people have faith in their government, and are confident that they will be provided for, even when it becomes apparent that a privileged few are being evacuated and the rest of the population is, at least in an initial phase, left behind to endure the ongoing multiple earthquakes and tsunami. When the government finally begins to organize mass evacuation, individual citizens participate actively and with amazing efficiency and staunchness in rescue operations. This gives the text another occasion to display a plethora of stereotypes about ‘the Japanese spirit,’ which, interestingly, are presented through the filter of the foreign press. These skilfully combine the catchphrases of the contemporaneous nationalist discourse that goes under the name of Nihonjinron, and Western stereotypes about Japan, describing the Japanese’s rescue efforts as a ‘Japanese miracle’, and attributing it to the people’s ‘kamikaze instinct.’ (Vol. 2: 179) The miraculous nature of national resiliency and efficiency is reinforced by the plot development, as the Japanese are able to evacuate seventy million citizens in three months. Of the remaining thirty million, most commit suicide in order to leave room for their younger compatriots. Such spirit of sacrifice, too, is portrayed as quintessentially Japanese. (Vol. 2: 181) Tadokoro for his part decides to die together with Japan, an act that he describes as a shinjū, or ‘love suicide’, based on the conviction that the meaning of ‘being Japanese’ lies in the land itself, and there can be no more true ‘Japaneseness’ after Japan sinks (Vol. 2: 185–186). Watari expresses a different opinion: he believes that Japanese identity transcends the territory, and that it will survive diaspora (Vol. 2: 187). Science fiction author and critic Yamada Masaki interprets the novel as an example of how Komatsu, unlike authors such as Shiba Ryōtarō who concentrate on the actions of a few individual heroes, reveals the heroic nature of the nameless millions of Japanese citizens that are able to endure difficulty and survive disaster (Yamada: 82), while Yamamoto Akira sees it as a romanticization of Japanese national identity (Yamamoto 193–196). Other critics are less kind, and describe it as a ‘Nihonjinron in the form of a novel’ (shōsetsu to shite kakareta Nihonjinron [Azuma and Miyazaki: 21]). While there is no denying that the novel contains a fair amount of nationalist rhetoric, it is my contention that its treatment of ‘Japaneseness’ is more complex. Particularly interesting in this respect is the relationship between government, population and territory and how these three elements affect the sense of national identity in the face of disaster. The text is highly critical of the Japanese government, which is portrayed as decadent, corrupt, and failing at its main task, namely protecting the territory and guaranteeing the security of the population. In the first Cabinet meeting called after the Izu earthquake of 27 July, politicians and bureaucrats appear as

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entirely callous, more preoccupied with the budget for disaster relief than with the safety of citizens. (Vol. 1: 151–157) The story’s ultimate message is that the occurrence of natural disaster allows the true ‘Japanese spirit’ to emerge among the common people precisely because their government fails them, forcing them to rely on each other. This lays the groundwork for a broader reflection on issues of national security and international relations, and to the idea that Japanese national identity is ultimately predicated upon the idea of a uniquely Japanese sense of fragility of territorial integrity. The relationship between the notions of minzoku (people, nation) and kokudo (national territory) is thus complex in the story. Significantly, the novel ends with the question of what can a nation be without a land. The issue is explored with even greater sophistication in the 2006 sequel, as I will discuss in the final section. Before I examine Sakyō’s portrayal of post-disaster national identity, I will now outline the transformations of the theme of disappearance of national territory in the adaptations and parodies of Nihon chinbotsu. 3

Media and Nationalism: The Filmic Adaptations of Nihon Chinbotsu

Moritani Shirō’s filmic adaptation of Komatsu’s novel is very close to the original both on the level of plot and in its treatment of cultural stereotypes and political issues. The movie begins with a series of black and white images of the evolution of the earth over billions of years, which conveys the impression that the Japanese archipelago is both relatively recent and very unstable. This is followed by a montage of scenes from Japanese life, including traditional and modern symbols such as Mount Fuji and the shinkansen bullet train, and scenes that underscore the size of the Japanese population. We see shots of a crowded matsuri, a mass of spectators at a horse race, a baseball stadium filled with people, crowds at an amusement park, cars parked in a port, a beach bursting with people, high rise buildings, streams of small identical houses in the suburbs, a jam-packed subway, masses of commuters walking, and a congested swimming pool complex. Finally, the characters for ‘Japan Sinks,’ in bold red, are overlaid on the images. The opening thus presents this as a movie about territory, population, and national identity, and the danger posed to them by natural disaster. The plot follows that of the novel rather faithfully, showing Onodera and Tadokoro’s investigations, their attempts to convince politicians of the gravity of the impending disaster, a series of earthquakes and tsunami, and the subsequent

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development of Plan D and Plan D-2. The film features a more sustained focus on Tokyo as a site of disaster. The first major earthquake happens in the capital, and a significant proportion of the film is taken up by scenes of buildings crumbling, including landmarks such as the Tokyo Tower as well as generic skyscrapers and suburban houses; explosions, fires, and crowds running around in terror, being injured, and dying. A tsunami completes the destruction, sweeping away buildings, vehicles, and human beings with its immense mass of water. Another addition to the movie is its increased emphasis on the foreign perspective on Japan. For example, during the visit to the Australian Prime Minister in Canberra, the dialogues are in English, with Japanese subtitles. This narrative device has a similar yet reversed effect to the representation of the ‘Japanese spirit’ from the point of view of the Australian Prime Minister in the novel. If in the novel the foreign point of view validated the impression that Japanese people are uniquely resilient and courageous in the face of disaster, the film emphasizes the Japanese delegate’s position as a helpless victim, as he implores, in English: ‘Japan is prostrating itself and begging every nation in the world. Please help save the lives and the future of the people of Japan.’ On the other hand, similar to the novel, it is from the perspective of the Australian Prime Minister that we see the story of Onodera, who chooses to remain in Japan ‘until he can save the last citizen from the disaster’. As he reads an article, in English, about this man, the Australian wonders aloud: ‘Is he like a kamikaze?’2 As Tadokoro decides to die with Japan, describing his gesture as a love suicide, he encourages the others to leave and preserve the Japanese spirit along with its people, saying: ‘I loved the Japanese. I want to believe in them.’ The Japanese archipelago finally sinks, in a series of visually stunning scenes, mostly filmed from an aerial perspective. While this validates Susan Napier’s interpretation of the film as ‘essentially an elegy to a lost Japan,’ (Napier: 335) I propose to read the movie also as a critique of the Japanese government. Like the novel, the film version from 1973 is critical of the Japanese political class as self-interested and insensitive to the needs of the people, and promotes a vision of the Japanese people as uniquely capable of enduring hardship and of helping each other in the face of a shared tragedy. This is also true 2 The film also highlights the role of the media, particularly television, in framing the event, something that was not as prominent in the novel. After we see the earthquake happening in the movie, the same scenes reappear on television screens in people’s houses, with a commentary by journalists. Similarly, later on, as bureaucrats discuss how to handle the emergency, they follow the destruction on several television screens, which multiply the visual impact of the destruction and at the same time accentuate its mediated nature.

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of the 2006 movie version, directed by Higuchi Shinji. The film begins with Professor Tadokoro warning the government that the Japanese archipelago will sink entirely within forty years, and meeting a cold disbelief in response. Shortly afterwards, a series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions force Tadokoro to reconsider his forecast, and he declares that the country will disappear in less than one year. This time, given the ongoing disasters, politicians believe him, and decide to take action. However, the government officially announces to the population that the country will sink within five years, not one, and promises that they will relocate the entire population overseas during that time span. Their cynical plan is to wait until the ongoing string of earthquakes curbs down the refugee population to a manageable number, especially since the international community refuses to take in refugees. In the end, however, science triumphs as Tadokoro devises a plan to save Japan by generating a series of underwater explosions that arrest the movement of the earth mantle and halt its westward movement. The 2006 film is thus more optimistic, featuring a classic Hollywood disaster movie structure, with an individual hero saving the world from destruction with the help of science, in contrast with the dark ending of Komatsu’s original novel and the first movie adaptation. At the same time, the 2006 version is more critical of politicians, who are presented as unequivocally evil, albeit in a rather naïve way, with a black-and-white contrast between positive and negative characters that erases the nuances of Komatsu’s original. If the filmic adaptations of Japan Sinks are completely tragic and lack in irony, the opposite can be said of its parodies. These are the object of the next Section. 4

Between Xenophilia and Xenophobia: Everything but Japan Sinks

In 1973, renowned science fiction author Tsutsui Yasutaka wrote a parody of Komatsu’s novel, entitled Nihon igai zenbu chinbotsu (Everything but Japan sinks), in which earthquakes destroy the whole world except the Japanese archipelago, which is invaded by millions of environmental refugees. The story is satirical more than science-fictional; the landslides are described in passing at the beginning, and the novel concentrates instead on issues of insularity and xenophobia through a series of comical dialogues. The text foregrounds the nationalism and exceptionalism that underlay Komatsu’s text; it takes Japan’s inferiority complex and turns it upside down, speculating on the evolution of the Japanese sense of national identity when the country finds itself in a position of superiority.

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The story is set in a Japanese bar, whose main clientele is constituted by ‘celebrity refugees’ from all over the world, including heads of state but also famous actors, writers, singers and media personalities. The narrator is a journalist, and most of the events are presented through his dialogues with two fellow journalists, named Kōga and Gotō. They occasionally interact with foreign politicians and media personalities; a few dialogues between the foreigners, supposedly conducted in foreign languages and ‘translated’ into Japanese by the narrator, are also represented. This multiplicity of voices allows the text to play with language in interesting ways. The dialogue lines of Westerners are written katakana, the syllabary used to transcribe foreign words, conveying the impression that their Japanese is stilted. Chinese and Korean characters’ dialogue lines, on the other hand, are in a combination of kanji and katakana, replete with grammatical errors. If the use of English in the 1973 filmic version of Nihon chinbotsu emphasized the essentialist vision of national character, the use of katakana and translationese in the parody serves to highlight the relativity of culture and language, and the constructed nature of identity. In the first pages, the background of the story is introduced, as the narrator and his colleague discuss the sinking of the world and the flood of refugees into Japan. Their conversation focuses on a recent law that imposes the expulsion of foreigners who have not become accustomed to the ‘Japanese ways’ within three years. The journalists humorously wonder how this cultural adaptation could be tested: make the foreigners eat cold tofu (hiyayakko) with chopsticks without crumbling it? Defecating in a Japanese-style toilet? Tying the strings of a pair of traditional pants (hakama) while reciting a Japanese tongue-twister? (6)3 As the narrator chats with Kōga, another colleague, named Gotō, comes in, and tells his friends that he was just accosted in the street by Elizabeth Taylor, who is now working as a street hooker. Kōga wants to rush out and hire her for her services, and asks Gotō how much she charges, to which Gotō replies that Kōga can surely do better than such a fat old hag (11). Further conversation reveals that numerous foreign celebrities are working as prostitutes in Tokyo; Gotō relates that the previous evening he attended a party where all the most beautiful Western actresses, including Audrey Hepburn, Claudia Cardinale, 3 Negative stereotypes about foreigners are also displayed, such as white American characters’ racism, when they joke about the positive developments of the natural disaster, such as the fact that they were able to keep all black people off the refugee boats (p. 8). The Norwegians, Swedes and Danes are engaged in naval battles with each other, and the narrator and his friends comment that it must be a result of their Viking warrior spirit (pp. 8–9).

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Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve and Romy Schneider, were working as hostesses, and he had sex with several of them (11). The transformation of foreign celebrities into cheap labour and sexual objects does not apply to women alone: we later discover that Alain Delon works as a ‘boy’ in a strip club in Kōenji, while Charles Bronson has found employment as a handyman, carrying daikon radishes to the markets (17). Many also work in the porn industry, either as actors, like John Connolly, or as writers, like Arthur Miller and Simone de Beauvoir, both of whom are regularly publishing pornographic stories for cheap Japanese magazines (18–19). Another result of the global disaster and the flood of refugees into Japan is galloping inflation on Japanese products: a dish of zarusoba cold noodles costs 30,000 yen, while a bowl of curry rice is around 50,000.4 Foreign goods, on the other hand, are incredibly cheap: the narrator shows his friends a three-carat diamond ring that he bought from Onassis for 7800 yen (17). Whether it is food or jewellery, Japanese goods are valuable and hard to find, and foreign things cheap and available, an unequivocal parody of 1970s Japan and its craze for foreign brands and products. Despite their common plight, the refugees are deeply divided, and the conflicts that nations had with each other before the disaster continue in the immigrant community. Thus we see Nixon and Kosygin argue about their respective nations’ failed attempt to send refugees into space, while Kissinger and Breznev join the fight (20). Zalman Shazar, president of Israel, gets into a fight with the leaders of Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, and the debate becomes so violent that they begin to hit each other (23). At the time of the narration, Japan has accepted five hundred million refugees, which is already more than it can handle, and the pressure on its borders is only increasing. And the problem is not limited to humans: animals are swimming to its coasts from the sunken continents, too. The overpopulation has already caused a severe depletion of resources and a dramatic increase of pollution (22). In the finale, professor Tadokoro, drunk, arrives on the scene, and predicts that Japan, too, will sink like the rest of the world. The story closes on a scene of panic in the bar, as water begins to flood the building (26–27). While foregrounding the chauvinistic dimension of Komatsu’s novel, Tsutsui also comments more broadly on Japanese society of the 1970s and its peculiar combination of xenophilia and xenophobia. More than a commentary on governmental and popular responses to natural disaster, the story is thus a critique of Japanese nationalism and Japanese attitudes towards 4 About three hundred and five hundred dollars, respectively.

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foreigners. The same is true of its film version, directed by Kawasaki Minoru and released in 2006. The movie is set in 2014, three years after the sinking of the whole world except Japan, which happened in 2011 (another eerily prophetic feature). It opens with two Japanese journalists sitting at a bar, commenting on the bad enka singing of a white American actor. The former us president, named Pepitone,5 reprimands them for being harsh on the poor refugee, who is trying his best. This is followed by a flashback describing the sinking of the world, which is much more developed than in the original text. Furthermore, the movie adaptation expands its setting beyond the closed space of the bar, and shows in greater detail the effects of the refugee invasion. These range from humorous developments such as the fact that whale meat becomes very inexpensive because there are no more foreign environmentalists to oppose its hunting, or the fact that all the ekimae eikaiwa gakkō, the English conversation schools in front of train stations that were highly popular in the 1990s, reconvert en masse into Japanese language schools for foreigners, to directly xenophobic responses. As the streets fill with homeless foreigners and crime rates increase dramatically, tv newscasts create a gaijin yohō, foreigner forecast section, which shows on a map of the country how many foreigners there will be in each area and the associated crime forecast. To solve the problem of immigrant unemployment, Second World War veteran associations hire Americans to play the part of soldiers, and allow former Japanese prisoners of war to insult them and ride them as horses, as a way of recovering from the psychological wounds of the war. In a more repressive vein, the Japanese police create a special agency, called gat, or Gaijin Attack Team, to arrest any foreigner who engages in unJapanese behavior. The movie also introduces a larger number of characters and plotlines. One subplot involves a couple of award-winning actors, Elizabeth and Jerry Cruising, who come to Japan to work in the local film industry. Initially welcomed as great artists, with the inflation of foreign artists they fall out of favour, and Jerry is reduced to act as an extra in scenes of mass destruction in monster movies, while Elizabeth starts working as a prostitute. Jerry finally gets arrested 5 Interestingly, all characters of politicians have imaginary names, like Russian president Sveshnikov, and the Chinese leader Chang, while in Tsutsui’s novel they were all real famous politicians and media personalities. The American president’s name is particularly intriguing as it is reminiscent of Joe Pepitone, an American baseball player who played for the Yakult Atoms, who was famous for spending all his time hanging out in discos in the Roppongi area of Tokyo, so much so that the name acquired a derogatory meaning in Japanese slang.

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for shoptlifting an umaibō (a cylindrical puffed corn snack), which used to be a very cheap snack but has by now become an incredibly expensive item, valued at 100,000 yen.6 In the final scene, the owner of the bar kidnaps the customers, threatening them with guns, while he reveals himself to be the North Korean leader. As North Korean soldiers attack the headquarters of the gat, the head of gat blows himself up with dynamite, next to a Japanese flag, after a nationalist speech. In the meantime, Tadokoro arrives at the bar and informs all present that Japan is about to sink too. A major earthquake ensues; the foreigners panic and start hitting each other. Japan sinks in a series of spectacular explosions and fires, and no more land is left on earth. The film is mainly a combination of surrealistic humor and slapstick comedy, reminiscent of Kawasaki Minoru’s other films such as The Calamari Wrestler (2004) and Executive Koala (2005). At the same time, it expands on Tsutsui’s original satire of Japanese nationalism and the country’s peculiar combination of extreme xenophilia and xenophobia, inviting us to reflect on the impact that severe natural disasters can have on such mechanisms. Similar dynamics, although in a different perspective, appear in my last example, Sakyō’s sequel to Nihon chinbotsu, also published in 2006. 5

Diaspora, Neo-Nationalism, and Neo-Cosmopolitanism: Nihon Chinbotsu II

Japan Sinks II portrays Japan twenty-five years after the country sunk into the ocean, and describes the consequences of the imagined global diaspora of the Japanese people. The novel is written from the perspective of five different narrators, most of whom have connections with the original 1973 novel.7 This multiple narrative structure is skilfully employed to convey an impression of objectivity, as the text balances differing views on the events. At the same time, all narrators share some fundamental views, particularly the sense that the Japanese are innocent victims of foreign hatred, and a concern for the impending loss of Japanese traditional values among the new generation, born after 6 About $1000. 7 The first two narrators, Watari Moshe Jun’i and Watari Sakura, are the grandchildren of Watari, while another narrator, Abe Reiko, high commissioner for the United Nations refugee agency in Geneva, is Onodera’s former fiancée. Another character, Onoda, the leader of a Japanese refugee community in Kazakhstan, is towards the end revealed to be none other than Onodera himself, who had lost his memory as a result of trauma.

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the sinking of the country. The fact that all narrators concur on these two issues leaves the reader with the impression that these concerns are objectively valid, rather than a matter of personal conviction. The novel is set in various parts of the world where the Japanese have been relocated, including Papua New Guinea, the Amazon Basin, Central Asia and Australia. In each of these locations, as promised in the 1973 volume, the Japanese refugees have contributed to the development of infrastructure and therefore of the economy, both through their hard-working attitude and their technical skills, and through direct financial aid from the Japanese government. Rather than being grateful for the improvement the arrival of the Japanese has brought to their nations, however, local residents are distressed by the economic gap between the Japanese settlers, who have rapidly become the richest sector of the population, and the majority of the locals, who have remained poor. (Vol. 1: 74) In Papua New Guinea, for example, initially the Japanese attempted to train local personnel to participate in the development projects, but they eventually gave up teaching the local ‘useless trainees’ (tsukaenai kenshūin, Vol. 1: 133), and conducted all work by themselves, telling the locals to just ‘let them work without disturbing them’. This angered the local workers, who resented the refugees’ patronizing attitude (Vol. 1: 135). In Kazhakstan and China, too, the Japanese are a target of racist violence because of their wealth, while in the Amazon region they are accused of contributing to the destruction of the tropical forest. A notable exception is Australia, where the Japanese have successfully developed the Northern Territory without any apparent conflict with the local population.8 The novel thus simultaneously critiques Japanese cultural imperialism in underdeveloped countries and supports a neo-Orientalist view that Japan’s mission civilisatrice has ultimately benefited the target countries. Furthermore, by presenting the Japanese presence in these countries not as a result of military conquest or economic aggression, but as the consequence of the Japanese diaspora resulting from a major natural disaster, it presents the locals’ resentment as unwarranted and a sign of ungratefulness, and portrays the Japanese as innocent victims of world racism. (Vol. 1: 57–67, 313–315) This view is reinforced by numerous scenes where the Japanese characters are shocked and saddened by the realization of their new status on the world scene, particularly when they have to go through passport control at international airports. Whereas before the disaster a Japanese passport was a ‘free 8 Conveniently, no mention is made of Australian aborigines or non-Japanese immigrants and refugees.

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pass’ to the world, and citizens were rarely, if ever, subject to security checks, now, because of their newly acquired global refugee status, they are subjected to repeated security checks and extensive questioning about their residence status and purpose for travel (Vol. 1: 195–196, 337; Vol. 2: 44–45). The main plot revolves around the development by a team of Japanese scientists of a device called Earth Simulator (chikyū shimurētā), a machine that can predict climate change. According to Prime Minister Nakata, the aim of the project is to restore the ‘Japanese spirit’ by stimulating scientific research and technological development, which was a pillar of Japanese identity before the disaster, thus ‘reviving Japan’ (Nihon saisei). A second, covert goal of the project is to investigate the possibility of building an artificial island, called Megafloat, on the site where Japan used to be, and relocate at least part of the Japanese population there, thus ‘rebuilding Japan’ (Nihon saiken) (Vol. 2: 59–61). Japanese plans however do not go very smoothly. First, China invades both North Korea and the Takeshima/Dokdo islands, with the ostensible aim of bringing humanitarian relief to the area, but with the secret goal of securing domination of the Sea of Japan.9 Once they have conquered the coast, the Chinese obstruct underwater explorations by Japanese scientists, hindering the reconstruction plan. In the meantime, the Earth Simulator predicts a cold wave that will lower global temperatures in the course of the following twenty years, bringing about a new glacial era. The sinking of Japan twenty-five years before was only the beginning of a global-scale disaster that will affect the entire world population. To avoid panic, the Japanese government decides to keep the information secret for the moment. The news, however, is leaked to the press, which further damages Japan’s international reputation as the media spreads the rumour that they were deliberately keeping the information secret to take advantage of it. The Japanese are the ideal scapegoat for the global panic, as there is a long tradition of seeing them as unfathomable and therefore unsettling, the kind of people about whom it is often said: ‘you never know what they are thinking’ (moto moto nani o kangaeteiru ka wakaranai minzoku, Vol. 2: 277). This in turn reinforces in the Japanese the conviction that they can rely only on each other, and strengthens their belief in the uniqueness and the power of the ‘Japanese spirit’. Like the first novel, the sequel focuses on the development of Japanese collective spirit, described as kizuna (bond), rentaikan (collectivism) and kyōdōkan (spirit of collaboration), in the face of adversity. The novel 9 After Japan lost interest in the territorial dispute over the Takeshima/Dokdo islands, so did South Korea, and the islands have remained uninhabited ever since.

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thus appears to prove Watari’s point at the end of Japan Sinks: the spirit of Japan lies in the population, not in the territory. As one of the characters, Shinohara, notes at the beginning of the story, ‘Even if they had lost their territory, the Japanese were still Japanese. They considered it shameful to be late for an appointment, or to inconvenience other people’10 (Vol. 1: 76). At the same time, the novel also proposes a different view of the relationship between disaster and individual identity. This emerges most clearly in a debate between Prime Minister Nakata and Foreign Minister Torigai. Nakata believes that Japan needs some form of territory to survive as a nation, and desperately wants to build Megafloat, even if it means asking the support of the United States, which wants to use it as an outpost for us military forces in East Asia. Torigai on the contrary is convinced that territory is not essential to the preservation of Japanese identity. He thinks that what holds the Japanese together is not their land, but a sort of cultural autism, an inability to fit into other cultures that has helped them preserve cultural values such as hard work and politeness during the diaspora: ‘The Japanese are simply too different, and can never blend in with other people’ (Vol. 2: 246).11 However, Torigai also believes that this insular attitude is not sustainable in the face of global diaspora, and he argues that the Japanese should try to become more cosmopolitan, that is to say, divert their sense of collective belonging to a larger community that transcends national borders. Nakata, a staunch nationalist, refutes his argument, dismisses him from office, and proceeds with his bilateral agreements with the United States. If China initially appeared as the villain of the story, hindering Japanese research, harassing Japanese residents, and slandering the Japanese government, the us emerge as the ultimate traitor in the last section. After retrieving information about climate change from the Earth Simulator, the Americans take over the project, publicly blaming Japan for keeping it secret. At the same time, they release false information about the development of global cooling, downplaying the dangers and hiding data, not in order to avoid global panic, but to one-sidedly procure supplies for their own country in view of the disaster, keeping the rest of the world in the dark. Things finally take a positive turn when Prime Minister Nakata resigns and is replaced by Torigai, who promotes policies of internationalization (Nihon no kokusaika) and localization (Nihonjin no genchika, p. 340), restoring the public image of Japan. When a global committee is formed to tackle the impending 10 ‘Tatoe kokudo wa ushinawarete mo, Nihonjin wa Nihonjin no mama datta. Yakusoku no jikan ni okuretari, tanin ni meiwaku o kakeru koto o haji to kangaeteiru.’ 11 ‘Tan ni Nihonjin ga tokui sugite, hoka no minzoku to tokeawanai kamo shirenai.’

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environmental crisis triggered by global cooling, Japan, thanks to its unique status as a country without territory (yūitsu no kokudo o motanai kuni, p. 380), is elected chair of the committee. In the end, Megafloat is built on the equator as a global refuge for all of humanity, regardless of nationality. 6

Conclusion: Learning from (Fictional) Disaster

Science-fiction critic Fujita Naoya noted that, in Sakyō’s fiction, an ability to endure disaster and recover from it seems to lie at the very core of Japanese identity (Fujita: 115).12 This is certainly true of Japan Sinks and its adaptations and parodies. In different ways, all the texts I examine here use disaster as a hermeneutic tool to uncover the dynamics of national and international politics. The trope of ‘sinking Japan’ is a particularly compelling one not only because it speaks to a collective fear that natural disaster may destroy the very foundations of the Japanese nation, its territory and its population, but also because it allows authors and readers to speculate about issues of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and national identity. Indeed, as Komatsu argued just before his death, disaster fiction is a powerful means to foster critical thinking through an entertaining medium: if we cannot protect ourselves from natural disaster, we can reflect on it to better understand the world and ourselves. References Azuma Hiroki and Miyazaki Tetsuya. ‘Jidai wa Komatsu Sakyō o hitsuyō to shiteiru.’ Komatsu Sakyō: Nihon, mirai, bungaku, soshite sf. Kawade yume mukku bungei essatsu Special Issue, November 2011, pp. 19–23. Fujita Naoya. ‘Komatsu Sakyō o yomitoku kīwādo 10 + alpha.’ Komatsu Sakyō: Nihon, mirai, bungaku, soshite sf. Kawade yume mukku bungei bessatsu Special Issue, November 2011, pp. 114–120. Higuchi Shinji, dir. Nihon chinbotsu. Tokyo: Toho film production, 2006. Kasai Kiyoshi and Tatsumi Takayuki, eds. 3.11 no mirai: Nihon, sf, sōzōryoku, Tokyo, Sakuhinsha, 2011. Kawasaki Minoru, dir. Nihon igai zenbu chinbotsu. Tokyo: KJadokawa entertainment, 2006. 12 ‘Saigai to soko kara no fukkatsu to iu koto o, ‘Nihon’ no bunkateki/shukyōteki aidentiti no kiso toshite Komatsu wa kōzō shite iru.’

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Komatsu Sakyō. Nihon chinbotsu. Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 2006 (1973). ——. Nihon chinbotsu dainibu. Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 2011 (2006). Moritani Shirō, dir. Nihon chinbotsu. Tokyo: Toho film production, 1973. Napier, Susan. ‘Panic Sites: The Japanese Imagination of Disaster From Godzilla To Akira.’ The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 19 No. 2 (1993), pp. 327–351. Tsutsui Yasutaka. Nihon igai zenbu chinbotsu. Tokyo: Kadokawa bunko, 2006 (1973). Yamada Masaki. ‘Nihon Chinbotsu.’ Komatsu Sakyō Magajin Vol. 42, uly 2011, pp. 82–83. Yamamoto Akira. ‘Nihon chinbotsu no imi.’ Kokubungaku: kaishaku to kanshō. Vol. 20 (1975), pp. 191–196.

Chapter 11

Belated Arrival in Political Transition 1950s Films on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Yuko Shibata

University of Otago

Not many Japanese films have taken up Hiroshima and Nagasaki as their main themes. Nor have they included criticism of the us, with a handful of exceptions. This scarcity ostensibly informs a marked contrast to other visual culture genres such as kaijū eiga (monster films), tv dramas, manga and anime, in which ruined sites in a nuclear apocalypse often compose the vivid imagery of their battle scenes. But the deluge of nuclear catastrophic images in these genres also constitute the reverse side of the coin, as discernible in their reliance on abstract and unspecified nuclear wars in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only remotely evoked.1 In the midst of the Cold War, Derrida contended that nuclear war was a fable, and that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were merely the end of the spectrum of conventional warfare.2 A large part of Japanese visual culture, at least on the surface, shares this rhetorical separation between unlocalizable nuclear wars and the American atomic bombings. To consider how this trend has been engendered and in what contexts, this chapter traces the genealogy of the Japanese cinema on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a focus on Japanese fictional and documentary films created in the 1950s, at the time of freedom from censorship under the us Occupation.

Treatment of the Atomic Bombing during and after the Occupation

The cinematographic representation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as of the hibakusha arrived belatedly, compared to the literary representation, 1 Nakazawa Kenji’s Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no gen) is an exception. For Japanese cinema on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in general, see Mick Broderick ed., Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film (London: Kegan Paul International, 1996), Satō Tadao, Nihon eiga shisōshi (History of Japanese Film Thought) (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1970), Satō Tadao, ‘Gensuibaku to eiga’ (The Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs and Film), Bungaku (Literature), vol. 28 (August 1960): 28–34, and David Desser, ‘Japan: An Ambivalent Nation, and Ambivalent Cinema’, Swords and Ploughshares, vol. ix, no. 3 & 4 (Spring-Summer 1995): 15–19. 2 Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, Diacritics, vol. 14, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 23. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004268319_013

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because of the much tighter restrictions imposed on visual media under the Occupation.3 Therefore, during the initial seven years after the end of the war, no documentaries or realist reconstructions were available to the public, except for a few fiction movies released in the early 1950s. But these movies referred to the events only as a backdrop to the melodramatic scenes, with no actual depiction of the atomic bombing. One early example, The Bells of Nagasaki (Nagasaki no kane; Ōba Hideo, 1950), was a dramatization of the bestselling memoir written by the radiologist Nagai Takashi, a victim of the bombing of Nagasaki. Nagai was known as a devout Catholic who claimed that the bombing was a test given by God. The movie portrayed him like a hero quietly embracing his approaching death (although in reality, his days had already been numbered before the bombing, as a result of his excessive exposure to radiation in his profession).4 The atomic explosion was viewed in the middle of the film through its mushroom clouds at a distance beyond the mountains. This impressionist depiction and pietistic tone cleverly veiled the bomber’s identity. Another fiction film produced under the Occupation, I’ll Not Forget the Song of Nagasaki (Nagasaki no uta wa wasureji; Tasaka Tomotaka, 1952), was in line with a melodramatic colonial cliché also found in Japanese wartime propaganda films that justified a military expansion in Asia.5 Released just a month 3 For the censorship of cinema, see Kyōko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema under the American Occupation, 1945–1952 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), Tanikawa Takeshi, America eiga to senryō seisaku, (American Films and the Occupation Policies) (Kyoto: Kyoto daigaku gakujutsu shuppankai), and Hiroshi Kitamura, Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). For censorship practice at large, see, for instance, Horiba Kiyoko, Kinjirareta genbaku taiken (The Suppressed Experiences of the Atomic Bombing Victimization) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995). One of the most famous censorship practices on the visual representation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki under the us Occupation was the confiscation of The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Hiroshima Nagasaki ni okeru genbaku no kōka) by the us Forces. The crew of the Nippon Eigasha started to shoot the ruined sites of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including injured hibakusha, in September 1945, but they were caught in October. They negotiated about continuing to shoot under close guard. Upon completion in April 1946, the entire film was confiscated. But some of the footage was secretly copied and hidden by the crew, and used in Kamei’s Still It’s Good to Live and others after the end of the Occupation. 4 For an analysis of Nagai Takashi’s The Bells of Nagasaki, see Yuko Shibata, ‘Dissociative Entanglement: us-Japan Atomic Bomb Discourses by John Hersey and Nagai Takashi’, InterAsia Cultural Studies, vol. 13, no. 1 (March 2012): 122–137. 5 Films that romanticized the love relationship between a Japanese man and a Chinese woman, such as Song of White Orchid (Byakuran no uta, Watanabe Kunio, 1939), China Night (Shina no yoru, Fushimi Osamu, 1940), and An Oath of Hot Sand (Nessa no chikai, Watanabe Kunio, 1940), all of which starred Ri Kōran, are well-known in this genre.

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before the end of the Occupation, its narrative revolved around a vaguely sexual relationship between a warm-hearted American male visitor and a blind hibakusha widow. Appreciating his sincerity for coming a long way to complete an unfinished song for her late husband whom he met at a us pow camp, the widow changed her stone-faced attitude and came to accept the consequence of the bombing. The film critic Satō Tadao argued that the widow allegorized the Japanese government’s attitude, insomuch as she insinuated Japan in requesting the us to love her more, in exchange for relinquishing her grudge against the bombing.6 The film also contained lines that equated the Pearl Harbor attack with the atomic bombing, as well as American military casualties with Japanese civilian ones. Tasaka was a hibakusha, but also had a career in the production of war propaganda.7 To a degree he may exemplify the transformation of ex-militarist regime followers into the Occupation conformists that were commonly seen at that time.8 Yet putting this reality aside, Satō also maintained that the lack of criticism of the us in Japanese cinema during this period was not necessarily attributable to the censorship practice. In his observation, there existed an atmosphere not in favour of critiquing the us, due to the awareness that their nation carried war responsibility and had committed war atrocities, as well as the perception that warfare was intrinsically cruel.9 The criticism of the us atomic bombing became more apparent after the Occupation, when directors could posit the atomic calamity as the central theme. The first example came in a fiction movie entitled Children of the Atomic Bombing (Genbaku no ko; Shindō Kaneto, 1952). Raised in a town nearby Hiroshima, Shindō long planned to make a film on Hiroshima as soon as the Occupation came to a close, and managed to release it in time for the seventh anniversary of the bombing. His movie was a development of the well-known book of the same title published as a collection of children’s testimonies on their experiences of Hiroshima. The film delineated in detail the tragic outcome of the bombing over seven years, such as impoverished survivors unable to even build graves for their killed family members, senior citizens with keloid injuries living as beggars, orphaned children dying of radiation sickness, and young women no longer able to reproduce. To present these realities in itself 6 Satō, Nihon eiga shisōshi, 340, and Satō Tadao, ‘Gensuibaku to eiga’, 31. 7 See Satō, Nihon eiga shisōshi, 339–340, and ‘Gensuibaku to eiga’, 31. 8 Nagai was also a loyal worshipper of Emperor Hirohito. See Kondō Hiroki, ‘Nagai Takashi: Mō hitotsu no genbakushō’ (‘Nagai Takashi: Another Illness Caused by Atomic Bomb Radiation’, Osaka ika daigaku kiyō jinbun kenkyū (Journal of Osaka Medical College, Studies in the Humanities), vol. 37: 82–83. 9 Satō, Nihon eiga shisōshi, 328–329.

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constituted a strong protest against the bombing, if not against the bomber. But its effusive portrayal of the hibakusha’s suffering coupled with the sketchy images of the atomic explosion—in scenes like a screaming baby clinging to a dead mother and a caged bird burned to death—invited the Japan Teachers Union which commissioned the film to critique it as lacking sufficient power to convey the brutality of the atomic bomb.10 The Union also thought that Shindō’s film inadequately tackled the political climate of the early 1950s, in which there was a fair possibility for the us to undertake an atomic bomb attack again in the throes of the Korean War. Propelled by a sense of emergency, the Union moved forward to create another film based on the same original. In the wake of these variances, Hiroshima (Sekikawa Hideo, 1953) came into being, with the hope of devising a preemptive measure against nuclear war. It turned out to be a shocking graphic reconstruction of the disaster in which masses of people were suddenly thrown into a hellish calamity and losing their lives one after another. It was perhaps this Sekikawa film that Marguerite Duras made a caustic comment on in her synopsis of the French film, Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959), as ‘the description of horror by horror’.11 Indeed, the sanguinary spectacle provided in Sekikawa’s film would be seen not only as violent but also sensational, and even scandalous. But it would also be ethically questionable, if it is the case that a film on Hiroshima and Nagasaki exercises a numbing effect on audiences about the pain the victims experienced. The other characteristic of Sekikawa’s movie was its vocal denunciation of the us atomic bombing through the quotation of the famous phrase from Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947): ‘One murder makes a villain, millions a hero’. This quote paid homage to Chaplin who was exiled to Europe in 1952 under attack from McCarthyism. Yet the production of these films did not promote an immediate increase in public awareness of the devastating victimization in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.12 10

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See Donald Richie, ‘“Mono no aware”: Hiroshima in Film’, in Hibakusha Cinema, 23. According to Shindō, the Japan Teachers Union pressured him to stop shooting his film. See Shindō Kaneto, Shindō Kaneto: Genbaku o toru (Shindō Kaneto: Shooting the Atomic Bombing) (Tokyo: Shin’nihon shuppansha, 2005), 14–15. Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 9. Immediately after the end of the Occupation, a few attempts to publicly share the visual representation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were made. One of them was a short documentary released in August 1952. It utilized footage in The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the movie staff had secretly copied before it was confiscated by the us Forces. The photo magazine Asahi Graph also featured the same footage in its issue of 6 August 1952, the seventh anniversary day of Hiroshima. Using the same

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Instead, what captured national attention was the Lucky Dragon Incident which took place in March 1954. The crew of a tuna fishing boat called the Lucky Dragon Five (Dai go fukuryū-maru) was accidentally exposed to nuclear fallout from the us testing of a hydrogen bomb on the Bikini atoll. Since the boat belonged to the Yaizu fishing port in Shizuoka Prefecture, a provider of seafood to Tokyo, Osaka and other urban populations, this incident not only stirred up nationwide apprehension about food security vis-à-vis nuclear contamination, but also led to anti-nuclear movements initiated by homemakers in Suginami Ward in Tokyo. It was only after this anti-nuclear outcry that the victimization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gradually came to the fore. This retroactive acknowledgement of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also demonstrates how the process of knowledge production in the general public could be developed in Japan; an event remains esoteric if not caught on the radar of the media network with a major stake in metropolitan Tokyo, the seat of political and administrative decision-making power. In being located in the western periphery of the Japanese archipelago, Hiroshima and Nagasaki could not easily surface into most people’s consciousness, even though the events themselves became acknowledged. In brief, the knowledge of Hiroshima and Nagasaki inside Japan only manifested itself belatedly, since it was first suppressed by Occupation censorship, and secondly neglected due to geopolitical insignificance.

Kamei’s Compromise and the Martyrdom Discourse

In representing the hibakusha, what followed these two antipodal films built on the same literary source was the documentary, Still It’s Good to Live (Ikiteite yokkata, director: Kamei Fumio, 1956); it provided the now-precious-record of an intimate portrayal of the hibakusha’s realities ten years after the bombings. However, in spite of the fact that it was released after Sekikawa’s film, and that both Sekikawa and Kamei were leftists, Kamei’s film did not carry the censorious tenor that Sekikawa’s had. Rather, it followed Shindō’s approach for attracting sympathy for the hibakusha. This striking difference between Kamei’s direction and Sekikawa’s is somewhat surprising, given the former’s uncompromising attitude in his checkered life as a director. Kamei was an anomalous documentary director whose works were suppressed in both wartime and post-war, as in his two banned films, Fighting Soldiers (Tatakau heitai, 1939) footage, a short film entitled Genbaku no Nagasaki (Nagasaki of the Atomic Bomb) was also produced.

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and A Japanese Tragedy (Nihon no higeki, 1946).13 The production of the former, which resisted the promotion of fighting spirit, led to his imprisonment and the loss of his director’s licence. But the latter film, which prosecuted the Japanese military and the emperor for their war responsibility, was initially developed with the encouragement of the chief officer at the Civil Information and Education Section (ci & e) of the Occupation government, David Conde. ci & e was one of the twin censorship organizations specifically designed for the re-education of the Japanese. After this film passed ci & e’s examination and became available to the public, the other censorship institution, the Civil Censorship Detachment (ccd), re-censored it, and decided not only to ban it, but also to confiscate all the footage in it.14 After this incident, which in retrospect informed the start of the ‘reverse course’ in the film policy of the Occupation regime, Conde resigned from ci & e, and Kamei left the Nippon Eigasha (the Japan Film Company), where he had made A Japanese Tragedy. Then he returned to Tōhō, where he had previously directed Fighting Soldiers. In Tōhō, Kamei produced the fiction movie War and Peace (Sensō to heiwa, 1947) as a joint project with the director Yamamoto Satsuo. But there again they received an order from the Occupation government to eliminate many parts of the film.15 Then Kamei soon came to participate in a labour dispute that took place at the Kinuta Tōhō studio in 1948. The dispute developed into a forceful confrontation between the union members and the company across the barricades, and ultimately the us Army intervened and besieged the union members with tanks, armoured vehicles and air planes. Although this incident was completely censored in the news media, the satirical comment made by 13

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Fighting Soldiers had a premiere screening, but was not allowed to be released to the public. A Japanese Tragedy was once on screen and mobilized a record-breaking size of audience. But it was suspended a week after the release and confiscated. See Kamei Fumio, Tatakau eiga: dokyumentarisuto no shōwashi (Fighting Cinema: A History of Shōwa for a Documentarian) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1989), 53–54 and 116–117. Kamei produced A Japanese Tragedy by using the pre-war war propaganda footage for a completely opposite objective—to pursue the war responsibilities of politicians, Zaibatsu companies, intellectuals and Emperor Hirohito. It is said that Kamei’s montage scene in which Hirohito changes his clothing from a military uniform to a businessman-like frock coat especially infuriated Japanese Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru at that time. See Iwasaki Akira, Senryō sareta sukuri’in: waga sengoshi (The Occupied Screen: My Post-war History) (Tokyo: Shin’nihon shuppansha, 1975), 79. The Occupation government ordered, for instance, the deletion of a scene in which yakuza members forcibly intervene in a strike at the factory. Kamei said that the Yakuza’s intervention in strikes, in fact, became normalized soon after this event. See Kamei, Tatakau eiga, 123.

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Kamei about the us military mobilization—‘the only weapon not deployed was a battleship’ (Konakatta no wa gunkan dake)—was broadly circulated.16 Viewed as an instigator of the union activities, Kamei had to depart Tōhō again. After that, he founded an independent production company in which he worked in a team to make feature films, but failed after all, due to the difficulty in distributing their works in competition with major film production companies. In 1953, he returned to the documentary field, since this allowed him to work on a lean budget but on his own. Between 1953 and 1956, he made a few documentaries on the opposition campaign against the expansion of the us bases in Sunagawa, in the suburbs of Tokyo. Clearly Kamei’s background history was at odds with his lack of reference to the us involvement in Still It’s Good to Live. As a matter of fact, his initial plan for this film drastically differed from the final version.17 He intended to begin with an ironic opening scene in which a teenage boy with a big keloid scar on his head was shooting down doves with an air gun at the Atomic Bomb Dome just for fun. The crew accidentally encountered this astonishing scene. These doves were supposed to be a new symbol of peace, released into the sky during the anniversary ceremonies. Additionally a robbery that took place on the new Peace Memorial Bridge took him by surprise. This bridge was constructed with the elegant design of the internationally-acclaimed artist Isamu Noguchi, again as a symbol of a newly rehabilitated Hiroshima. But a trusted senior janitor, with the reputation of forty years of diligent service to a local bank, unexpectedly ambushed a transport car from his bank on this bridge. Kamei felt that this bridge’s beautiful whiteness like bleached bones held a sinister power to precipitate a crime in this man’s mind, in the very place where numerous human bones were still found no matter where digging happened. Kamei’s overall impression of Hiroshima was dry, callous and bleak. In spite of this impression, he ended up removing the entirety of these episodes. Instead, he filled the film with a number of stories of hibakusha’s struggles and courage. The change in the film’s focus derived from the intention of the Gensuikyō (the Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs) which had commissioned him to make this film. Its main purpose was not to accurately portray the current Hiroshima, but primarily to commemorate the Council’s first international assembly held in Hiroshima in 1955. As Michiba Chikanobu maintains, the overriding concern of the anti-nuclear movements 16 Kamei, Tatakau eiga, 129–131. 17 Kamei Fumio et al., ‘Kiroku eiga “Ikiteite yokatta” no itoshita mono’ (What the Documentary Still It’s Good to Live Intended), Bijutsu Hihyō (Art Criticism) (August 1956): 76–78.

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was not necessarily the hibakusha who were still suffering from aftereffects of the bomb, but rather the prevention of their own victimization in the future.18 Except for Shindō, who had a strong personal attachment to Hiroshima, we may say that both Sekikawa and Kamei basically made their films to enlighten the society in line with the objective of anti-nuclear movements. Without doubt, these anti-nuclear movements empowered the marginalized hibakusha who had no forum to publicly speak out about their experiences for a long time. However, when depicted in these films, their appearance was contoured to make it relevant to the overarching directions of these anti-nuclear movements. In Kamei’s case, he was also emphatically supportive of the Gensuikyō, which was striving to inaugurate the first organized international anti-nuclear convention. He remembered its small and untidy office at the nascent stage of development, as well as its struggle to wage signature-collecting campaigns even in Hiroshima, in order to sensitize the uninterested general public. These circumstances probably led him to opt for a conventional humanism through the preclusion of the heterogeneity of the hibakusha psyche. Kamei also articulated that the ‘limitation of the times’ underlaid his decision.19 The year of 1956 in which Still It’s Good to Live was released was also when the Japanese government declared in its annual economic white paper that ‘it was no longer post-war’. By that time, the Japanese economy had recovered to its pre-war levels, leaving behind the chaotic and devastated state after the defeat. This recovery was facilitated not only by us aid that aimed to prevent Japan’s communization in the Cold War, but also by an economic boom triggered by the Korean War between 1950 and 1953. The mid-1950s constituted the start of Japan’s rapid economic growth period in which the development of industries and international trade moved in tandem until its end with the 1973 oil crisis. The mid-1950s was also a time of political shake-up in which the internal coalitions within both the conservative and leftist groups together formulated the so-called 1955 system.20 In retrospect, the 1955 system functioned 18

See Michiba Chikanobu, ‘“Kaku jidai” no hansen heiwa: taiwa to kōryū no tameno nōto 2’ (Antiwar and Peace in the ‘Nuclear Era’: Notes 2 for Dialogue Exchanges), Gendai shisō (Modern Thought), vol. 31–10 (August 2003): 158–165. 19 Kamei, Tatakau eiga, 153. 20 For the 1955 system, see Masumi Jun’nosuke, Gendai seiji: 1955 nen igo (Modern Politics: In and After 1955) (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1985). An English version is Masumi Jun’nosuke, Contemporary Politics in Japan, trans. Lonny E. Carlile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). For a change in Japanese society propelled by economic development and political turbulence in the 1950s and 1960s, see Yoshikuni Igarashi, ‘From the Anti-Security Treaty Movement to the Tokyo Olympics: Transforming the Body, the

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as a political device to promote economic growth by tying Japan to the Western block. Japan’s membership both in the imf from 1952 and the gatt from 1955, after the conclusion of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, paved the way for the development of its export-oriented economy. In this milieu, the balance of power within the 1955 system also absorbed domestic conflicts well. Reflecting the Cold War regime, the 1955 system was structured through a confrontation between the conservative (the Liberal Democratic Party) and the liberals (the Socialist Party). Yet their balance of two to one in the House of Representatives mostly stayed the same until it was upset in the mid-1990s, in the wake of the collapse of the ussr. The 1955 system was the apparatus that allowed criticism and dissent from the opposition parties, but that ultimately settled with these objections within the regime led by the ldp. In this political environment, the hibakusha faced hardship in making their voices heard. First of all, a substantial gap in psychological and economic conditions between them and others had already developed. While Japan as a whole was in transition towards a new political and economic stage in the 1950s, the hibakusha had been abandoned with little official support for welfare and medical treatment during the Occupation, partly because of the censorship that prohibited a wide sharing of the reality of their difficulties (even from a medical perspective), and partly because of the self-restriction of the national and local governments in the presence of the us Forces. As a result, the hibakusha also suffered prejudice and discrimination stemming from ignorance and misunderstanding of their health conditions among the general public. Only after the Lucky Dragon Incident gripped the whole nation, did the retroactive awareness of the hibakusha’s predicament grow. Considering these circumstances, for anti-nuclear movements to mobilize national sympathy with the hibakusha matched well with their political needs. And on the conservative’s side, these movements were tolerated to the extent that they would not destroy a path to economic prosperity and the alliance with the us. Also for the Gensuikyō, there might have been concerns about intervening in Soviet nuclear policies in the midst of the nuclear armaments race. Actually, Metropolis, and Memory’, in Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 131–163. For the development of Japanese nationalism either as an anti-American or pro-American movement, see Takabatake Michitoshi, ‘“Rokujū-nen anpo” no seishinshi’ (An Ideological History of the 1960 Anti-Security Treaty Movement), and Sugiyama Mitsunobu, ‘Sengo nashonarizumu-ron no ichisokumen’ (An Aspect of a Discussion of Post-war Nationalism), both in Sengo nihon no seishinshi (A History of the Post-war Japanese Mentality), eds., Tetsuo Najita et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1988).

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controversies over the inclusion of ussr nuclear testing in their protest later led to the establishment of a new institution, the Gensuikin (Japan Congress against A- & H-Bombs) which eventually split from the Gensuikyō. In short, we can say that Kamei’s Still It’s Good to Live was born out of such a strategic choice about where to position anti-nuclear movements in this political climate—a strategic choice to streamline the film narrative in order not to trigger serious domestic and international disputes. However, including no reference to the us as in Shindō’s and Kamei’s films also contributed to a lack of reference to events preceding the atomic bombings. This not only rendered the hibakusha almost indistinguishable from victims of natural disasters, but also precluded mention of Japanese military expansion in the Asian and Pacific regions that finally led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.21 This lack of reference also downplayed the pre-war prosperity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which went hand in hand with their development as military cities. Although the us target of the atomic bombing was clearly civilian residential areas, as such, these cities had absorbed many colonial subjects in the downtown areas. In Hiroshima, some estimated that Koreans may have made up at least ten percent of the hibakusha if not more.22 However, they did not appear in Kamei’s documentary, or in his retrospection in which he said that he had interviewed totally three hundred hibakushas.23 Together with this lack of colonial reference, the whole narrative created a closed space of national martyrdom, exclusive to the Japanese. The construction of this space encouraged the formation of an introverted interior for the 21

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For a debate over American and Japanese military violence and nationalisms, see Laura Hein and Mark Selden, ed., Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), and Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Henry Holt, 1996). For Korean bomb victims in Hiroshima, see Pak Subok et al. eds., Hibaku kankokujin (Koreans Victimized by the Atomic Bombing) (Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha, 1975), Hiroshima, Nagasaki shōgen no kai, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, sanjūnen no shōgen (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Thirty-years Testimonies) (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1975), 251–294, Mōhitotsu no Hiroshima (Another Hiroshima), dir. Pak Sunam, 58  min., 1987, Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 151–186, and Ōta Yasuo, Umino mukō no hiroshima, nagasaki: kankoku hibakusha tachino saigetsu (Hiroshima, Nagasaki across the Sea: Years of Korean Bomb Victims) (Tokyo: Bakushūsha, 2005). Alain Resnais and Kamei Fumio, ‘Watashi wa naze kiroku eiga o tsukuruka: yoru to kiri kara pikadon e’ (Why Do I Make Documentaries?: From Night and Fog to Pikadon), Geijutsu shinchō (Art Shinchō) (December 1958): 259.

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post-war Japanese psyche that wished to forget the imperial past. In this closed space of martyrdom, the hibakusha was transformed into an epic character in Bakhtin’s sense. The epic character is founded upon the person’s circumstances or fate, not upon their existence which is more than destiny. He or she is regulated by a sole, prescribed and incontestable worldview, unlike the novelistic character whose personhood never fits the complete incarnation of preexisting social categories. In addition, the epic character represents ‘the exclusive beauty, wholeness, crystal clarity and artistic completedness of this image of man’,24 and resides in the absolute past or a space isolated from contemporaneity. In this sense, both Shindō’s and Kamei’s films, and to some degree even Sekikawa’s confined the hibakusha to the space of martyrdom, whether they appeared in fiction or documentary form. Moreover, they also made them good-willed humanists that the compassionate audience could easily sympathize with, without the slightest fear of their realities being threatened.25 The dove and robbery episodes that Kamei relinquished would have destabilized the valorized martyrdom narrative, just as Bakhtin celebrated the allegorical roles of the villain, clown or fool that parodied the epic authority.26 But a political end overpowered Kamei’s original intention. After Still It’s Good to Live, however, he promptly produced another film, The World Is Terrified (Sekai wa kyōfu suru, 1957) that cautioned about the danger of radiation damage on the future environment. Although the scientific accuracy of some of its claims was questioned by the physicist Taketani Mitsuo, it forcefully conveyed serious concerns about radioactive contamination with an overwhelming amount of footage and scientific data, without any sentimentality attached.27 Besides these movies, Imai Tadashi also produced two films on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 1950s: The Hiroshima Panels (Genbaku no zu, 1952) and A Story of Pure Love (Jun’ai monogatari, 1957). The former was a short documentary film highlighting the famous panels of the hibakusha’s experiences drawn by the painter couple, Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi. The latter was a feature film of a tragic love relationship of a rebellious young couple; the heroine endured radiation sickness and finally lost her life. Utilizing the martyrdom 24

M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 35. 25 Satō pointed out this aspect in ‘Gensuibaku to eiga’, 31–32. 26 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 158–167. 27 Taketani Mitsuo, ‘“Sekai wa kyōfu suru” o mite’ (Watching The World Is Terrified), Eiga hyōron (Film Criticism) (December 1957): 73–75. For instance, Taketani pointed out that the film did not clearly differentiate the radiation damage caused by extensive irradiation from the kind affected by low level contamination.

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narrative in conjunction with a tragic heroine figure, Imai’s film set a precedent for the ensuing prominence of ill-fated and ephemeral female protagonists who often contracted diseases suggestive of radiation effects in 1970s and 1980s popular tv dramas, such as Yamaguchi Momoe’s Red Series and Yumechiyo Nikki (Diary of Yumechiyo). In contrast to his predecessors such as Shindō, Sekikawa and Kamei, who created their works with independent production companies, Imai was known as a skilled box-office hit moviemaker, and could release his A Story of Pure Love from Tōei, one of the major Japanese film companies. In this film Imai problematized social conflicts within the society by shedding light on the disadvantageous status of adult war orphans as well as the hibakusha. The film’s success paved the way for the hibakusha story to enter the mainstream in the entertainment industry. We may say that these earlier films held an important position insofar as they established a sense of the plausibility of atomic bomb victimhood. Christian Metz maintains that the establishment of plausibility constitutes a problematic mode of ideological censorship. For Metz, there are two types of censorship: one based on political and the other on commercial incentives— for instance, political regulations, moral standards and commercial requirements, all of which he recapitulates as institutional censorship. Kamei’s banned films, Fighting Soldiers and A Japanese Tragedy, instantiate the institutionalized political censorship conducted by the government. Extending the range of this censorship, Still It’s Good to Live may also fall into this censorship category, even though the film producer is not as forceful as the governmental power. However, Metz adds another kind: the censorship of the plausible that dictates a genre: The arts of representation — and the cinema is one of them, which, whether ‘realistic’ or ‘fantastic’, is always figurative and almost always fictional — do not represent all that is possible — all the possibles — but only the plausible possibles….from its inception, the Plausible is a reduction of the possible; it is an arbitrary and cultural restriction of real possible; it is, in fact, censorship: Among all the possibilities of figurative fiction, only those authorized by previous discourse will be ‘chosen’ (emphasis in the original).28 In other words, the plausible is established in such a way that initially dispersed discourses cluster together, organize a sequence and comprise a corpus 28

Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 238–239.

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of common opinions that start to repeat themselves. To take the atomic bomb victimhood discourse, there was a considerable difference in the representation of the hibakusha between Shindō’s Children of Atomic Bombing and Sekikawa’s Hiroshima. Whereas the ideology of martyrdom penetrated Shindō’s narrative, this was less so in Sekikawa’s, which was primarily produced as a critique of Shindō’s. Sekikawa’s film encompassed twisted figures, such as orphaned boys defacing a burial site and selling the skulls of bomb victims to American tourists. The works of Kamei and Imai released after these contrasting films then ‘chose’ to primarily follow Shindō’s approach. These subsequent movies thus ‘authorized’ the pattern of martyrdom, and contributed to the formation of a new film genre. Accordingly, movies like Sekikawa’s with polyphonous hibakusha voices became less plausible. The consequence of this censorship was that the narrative of martyrdom allowed the audience to believe that the atomic bombing could damage human nature no more than a scratch, no matter how brutally it could change an individual’s fate.29 This belief promoted not only a utilitarian view of the support that the audience should provide, but also a sense of assurance that the victim’s hardship was solvable with this kind of support.

Kurosawa’s Two Trials and the Institution of Family

These movies on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, seldom received attention from outside Japan, aside from occasional appreciation in small art and intellectual circles where they gained awards.30 Among them, Kurosawa Akira’s Rhapsody in August (Hachigatsu no kyōshikyoku, 1991) was exceptional, because it was a globally influential Kurosawa work, and also because the film’s reference to the American bombing of Nagasaki caused rampant reactions in the us. Kurosawa possessed a persistent interest in nuclear issues throughout his career. He made Record of A Living Being (Ikimono no kiroku, 1955) that portrayed the fear of nuclear wars bringing an ordinary man called Nakajima to the verge of insanity, and isolating him from his bewildered family. Yume (Dreams, 1990) released one year before Rhapsody in August also devoted one of the omnibus episodes to a monstrously transformed human existence after 29 Satō made this point in ‘Gensuibaku to eiga’, 33. 30 Shindō’s Children of the Atomic Bombing received awards at the Melbourne International Film Festival, the Karlovy International Film Festival, the British Academy Film Awards, the Edinburgh International Film Festival and a few others in Poland and France. Sekikawa’s Hiroshima was also awarded at the Berlin International Film Festival.

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a nuclear plant meltdown. But the direct reference to the us bombing was made for the first time in Rhapsody in August, seemingly in response to the negative responses that Record of A Living Being had previously received in Japan. According to Donald Richie, the film’s claim that the nuclear crisis was common property to be shared worldwide infuriated Japanese critics, since it also indirectly exempted the us from any blame.31 Indeed, the story of Record of A Living Being could be staged anywhere in the world, not necessarily in Japan. In this sense, this film offered a stark contrast to the works of Shindō, Sekikawa and Kamei released in the same period, which addressed issues specifically relevant to the Japanese contexts after the imposed silence of censorship. Although the point of Record of A Living Being lay in its self-referential structure, as in Rashōmon, that destabilized the positionality of the viewer who would not question the world being jeopardized under nuclear threat, the flip side was again the film’s circumvention of problematizing the agents responsible for creating this threat. The same kind of indifference to specifying the parties directly involved in the nuclear confrontation was also found in On the Beach (director: Stanley Kramer, 1959). But probably Kurosawa’s spatial and temporal grasp of nuclear issues had been developed with a different interest. As Satō argued, in Record of A Living Being Kurosawa radically questioned the family and the nation, as the two very institutions that usurp our freedom and that thrust us into launching wars.32 Rhapsody in August was a twisted extension of this familial and national saga. It sparked criticism in the us due to its scene in which the American Clark, played by Richard Gere, apologized to his Japanese grandmother Kane for his lack of knowledge about the cause of her husband’s death: the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. As many critics pointed out, this scene was misunderstood as Clark apologizing for the us atomic bombing.33 For instance, Vincent Canby, a reviewer of The New York Times, promptly fired back; ‘If Clark can apologize for bombing Nagasaki, why can’t Granny apologize for the raid on Pearl Harbor?…I suspect that he [Kurosawa] would admit that he doesn’t know how Americans feel about the war’.34 A number of scholars also complained 31 Donald Richie, ‘“Mono no aware”: Hiroshima in Film’, in Hibakusha Cinema, 33. 32 Satō, Nihon eiga shisōshi, 323. 33 See Matthew Bernstein and Mark Ravina, ‘Rhapsody in August by Hisao Kurosawa; Akira Kurosawa’, The American Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 4 (October 1993): 1162. For a detailed explanation of criticisms, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 364–371. 34 Vincent Canby, ‘Kurosawa, Small in Scale and Blunt’, New York Times, 20 December 1991, 22. See also, Satō Tadao, ‘The Spirit of Compassion’, trans. Linda Ehrlich, Cineaste, vol. 19,

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that Kurosawa’s film promoted a sense of Japanese victimization, but did not mention Japan’s wartime aggressions.35 In point of fact, in so far as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were inseparable from the war mobilization of the Japanese people, and locatable within a chain of atrocities in the Second World War that the Japanese also perpetrated, this historical context would perpetually haunt the claim of Japanese victimization. Yet in Canby’s contention, there was a recycling of ‘the rhetoric of apologists for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’ as well, as Akira Lippit insinuated.36 Furthermore, Canby’s rhetoric prompted a call for the formation of the monolithic American subject together with a seamless national narrative, which made it possible to conveniently disregard the ruptures not easily bridgeable in American history. The formation of this national subject and narrative precisely demonstrates how important a role Hiroshima and Nagasaki have played in establishing a post-war American national identity. To place the relationship between Clark and Kane within the simple dichotomy between Americans and Japanese may miss historical complexities embedded in the characters in Rhapsody in August. Clark was from a JapaneseAmerican family in Hawaii. This already suggests his entangled positionality vis-à-vis the two countries. Hawaii was colonized by the us at the end of the nineteenth century, and attacked by Japan decades later as the first target in the Pacific War. At that time Japanese-Americans already comprised too big an immigrant population to be incarcerated in the internment camps, unlike their kin on the mainland. But both groups became battered figures who had little choice but to ‘go for broke’ within the American military in order to demonstrate their loyalty to the us. To unhesitatingly include Clark under the rubric of ‘we Americans’ neglected this historical dissonance between the mainland and Hawaii, and between mainstream white Americans and nonwhite immigrants.37 The subjugation of Clark as the victimizer may not work,

35

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issue 1 (1992): 48–49, and Linda Ehrlich, ‘The Extremes of Innocence: Kurosawa’s Dreams and Rhapsodies’, in Hibakusha Cinema, 160, 171. Jeffrey Ruoff and Kenneth Ruoff, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On: Yukiyukite shingun (Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 1998), 43. For similar criticism, Winston Davis, review of In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: A Portrait of Japan at Century’s End, by Norma Field, Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 19, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 147–151. Akira Lippit, review of The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On: Yukiyukite shingun, by Jeffrey Ruoff and Kenneth Ruoff, Film Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 3 (Spring 2000), 58. See, for instance, Takashi Fujitani, ‘Go for Broke, the Movie: Japanese American Soldiers in u.s. National, Military, and Racial Discourses’, in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), ed. Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 239–266, ‘Senka no jinshushugi: dai’niji taisenki no ‘chōsen

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nor may his words constitute an apology by the victimizer to the victimized. Their conversations first and foremost took place among family members, not between the representatives of the two nations. From this position, an entirely new form of relationship between them could emerge: a trans-Pacific familial relationship that did not necessarily require mediation by national narratives. Kurosawa designed this innovative family form that had the capacity to embrace pain, trauma and conflicts, as a solution to the prison house of the family and the nation that he problematized in Record of A Living Being. This new trans-Pacific relationship was also where family members could acquire a different type of knowledge, as seen in the figure of the active and future-oriented Clark, the new generation that had no direct traumatic experience. Kurosawa also assigned an important position to Kane’s house as a site of travel for all the protagonists. For Clark, her house represented one important origin of his immigrant family. For her grandchildren, it was the theme-parklike countryside filled with fearful folklore tales, and for their parents, an indispensable link to financial benefits from successful relatives overseas. The rural village in Nagasaki was directly connected to the profitable farm across the Pacific, as if the local were always already an effect of the global, but not vice versa. Her house intersected such transnational dynamism, including her ultimate ‘migration’ to past memories. Everyone had to travel to her house to share a coeval relationship with each other, while Kane, soon after their arrival, left for a place unreachable to any of them. Thus the spatial arrangement in this film was also fundamentally confused and disrupted, and this confusion of spatiality was a radical inquiry into what the local/global/transnational could mean. As James Clifford put it, ‘“local” in whose terms? How is significant difference politically articulated, and challenged? Who determines where

shusshin nihon kokumin’ to ‘nikkei amerikajin’ (Racism under Fire: ‘Korean Japanese’ and ‘Japanese Americans’ in wwii), in Kanjō, kioku, sensō: iwanami kōza—kindai nihon no bunkashi vol. 8 (Sentiment, Memory, War: Iwanami Lectures—The Cultural History of Modern Japan), ed. Komori Yōichi et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002), 235–280, and ‘The Reischauer Memo: Mr Moto, Hirohito, and Japanese American Soldiers’, Critical Asian Studies, vol. 33, no. 3 (September 2001): 379–402. Also, Naoki Sakai, ‘Two Negations: Fear of Being Excluded and the Logic of Self-Esteem’, Novel, vol. 37, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 229– 257, and ‘Henzai suru kokka: futatsu no hitei—No-No Boy o yomu’, (The Ubiquity of the Nation State: Two Negativities—A Reading of No-No Boy), in Shizan sareru nihongo, nihonjin: ‘nihon’ no rekishi—chiseiteki haichi (The Stillborn of the Japanese as Language and as Ethnos: ‘Japanese’ History—Geopolitical Configuration) (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 1996), 99–126.

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(and when) a community draws its lines, names its insiders and outsiders?’38 In contrast to a conventional idea of the East-West binaries, Rhapsody in August did not present Clark’s visit like an ethnographic field trip. Rather, it emphasized a sense of foreignness shared by her grandchildren visiting Kane’s from urban areas during their summer vacation.39 While underscoring a generation gap and a temporal difference more than the national, regional, racial or cultural differences, the film situated the memory of the atomic bombing at the core of their cross-referenced meeting place. There, as seen in the final scene, the memory of the bomb ultimately arose as a black hole or absence that everyone had to seek while wandering in a rainstorm where no sense of time existed any more. This rainstorm space was also the space reined in by insanity, and therefore was the space where a frenzied Kane and demented Nakajima from Record of A Living Being would finally meet. Kurosawa’s repeated attempts to represent nuclear issues should also be understood in conjunction with a history of fostering an amnesia about the atomic bombing in the wake of the complicity between the American and Japanese authorities. Kurosawa once stated: The people who survived Nagasaki don’t want to remember their experience because the majority of them, in order to survive, had to abandon their parents, their children, their brothers and sisters. They still can’t stop feeling guilty. Afterwards, the us forces that occupied the country for six years influenced by various means the acceleration of forgetfulness, and the Japanese government collaborated with them.40 Thus the lack of Japanese films on Hiroshima and Nagasaki should also be considered in this vein. In the early 1960s, Richie provided his observations about why there were not many films on this topic: Though there have been some unequivocally non-political films on the A-bomb…there have been such a number of politically oriented pictures, 38 39

40

James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 19. The film’s English version omitted many episodes in the Japanese original, such as the depiction of the perplexed feelings among the grandchildren living in the archaic grandmother’s house. As a result, the English version accentuated the episodes directly related to the atomic bombing only, losing the feel of the Akutagawa-Prize-winning novel Nabe no naka (Inside a Pot, Murata Kiyoko) that Kurosawa incorporated into the film. James Goodwin, ‘Akira Kurosawa and the Atomic Age’, in Hibakusha Cinema, 197.

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that the result has been a disinclination on the part of many filmmakers to deal with the theme because to do so involves committing themselves to the political left, at least in the eyes of their audiences…. And, though leftist views are still fashionable, the governmental attitude is such that Communist directors find it difficult to distribute their films. Governmental authorities ‘talk’ to the big distributing companies and the film is either not released at all or else (and this was the case of the apolitical Hiroshima Mon Amour) is released in such a manner — shown in suburban theaters, shown without publicity — that few people see it.41 In sum, directors who produced films on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the early phase faced a variety of issues; the seven-year silence under the us Occupation created an insurmountable gap in economic, psychological and health conditions between the hibakusha and others; this also resulted in a widespread ignorance of the hibakusha’s dilemmas among the general public; film directors’ objectives often had to come to terms with the goals of the anti-nuclear movements; the habitual disturbance of distributing films on the atomic bombing was undertaken by the Japanese authorities to suit the convenience of the us; and there was a fundamental difficulty in representing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the cinema—no matter how hard these directors tried, their works inevitably ended up containing an incompatibility with the magnitude of the events. While films on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have continuously been created in Japan, as Richie wrote a half century ago, ‘the thing [the atomic bomb] itself has become the very epitome of chaos unleashed’.42 The Fukushima nuclear plant disaster took place on top of this chaotic and political history of representation. 41 42

Donald Richie, ‘“Mono no aware”: Hiroshima in Film’, 28. Ibid., 37.

Chapter 12

Hiroshima Rages, Nagasaki Prays

Nagai Takashi’s Catholic Response to the Atomic Bombing Kevin M. Doak

Georgetown University

In their 2009 study on natural disasters and cultural responses, Mauch and Pfister introduced an innovative approach to understanding natural disasters, one that gives more attention to the interplay between natural and cultural elements in how we try to come to terms with catastrophes. Although the twelve case studies that inform their volume do not include Japan, there is much we can learn from their methodology in trying to make sense of culture and disaster in Japan. First, as Mauch reminds us in the volume’s introduction, ‘scholars have increasingly come to accept that natural catastrophes are never “natural” in the true sense of the word; instead they should be understood as both physical events and social and cultural occurrences’.1 Second, Mauch invokes Richard Stuart Olson and Vincent T. Gawronski’s idea of ‘societies as weaving daily tapestries’ to inform what he calls ‘cultures of coping’, particular instances of ‘how a society repairs/reweaves itself and moves on. In many cases, the tapestry takes off in a dramatically different direction, with new colors and designs’.2 However, inherent in this ‘cultures of coping’ approach is a contradictory impulse towards cultural reductionism that is not easily reconciled with Olson and Gawronski’s notion of societies as open tapestries that accept new weavings and new directions. For example, Mauelshagen presents a sensitive reading of how Christian values shaped the history of German responses to disasters, but restricts the impact of Christian values to how they have ‘shaped “Western cultures”’.3 Mauelshagen’s reduction of Christianity to Western cultural tapestries is echoed in the chapter by Andrea Janku on disasters in late imperial China. Janku reduces Christianity to an expression of 1 Christof Mauch, ‘Introduction’, in Mauch and Pfister, eds., Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses, p. 4. 2 Quoted material appears to be from Richard Stuart Olson and Vincent T. Gawronski, ‘Mexico as a Living Tapestry: the 1985 Disaster in Retrospect’, Natural Hazards Observer 30, no. 1 (September 2005); quoted without page citation in Mauch, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 3 Franz Mauelshagen, ‘Disaster and Political Culture in Germany Since 1500’, in Mauch and Pfister, eds., Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses, p. 61.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004268319_014

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Western material interests and concludes that Chinese national survival was predicated on resisting the efforts of Christian missionaries like Timothy Richard.4 In essence, the cultural approach to disaster taken by Mauch and Pfister’s volume has not completely escaped the pull of a structural anthropology that locates trauma and recovery within an idealized notion of gestalt culture that reinforces timeless cultural norms in the face of unpredictable historical change and even rupture. A different cultural anthropology, one more helpful in establishing the cultural significance of Nagai Takashi’s response to the catastrophe of Nagasaki, was outlined by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in Truth and Tolerance, his 2003 study on Christian belief and world religions. Criticizing anthropologies that are not sufficiently historical, Ratzinger emphasizes the dynamic openness of all cultures that is an effect of the historicity of Man who informs them: Society progresses through time, and culture therefore has to do with history. Culture develops along the way, through the encounter with new realities and the assimilation of new perceptions. It is not closed up in itself but is affected by the impetus of time’s onward flow, in which the confluence of different currents, the processes of union are important. The historical character of culture signifies its capacity for progress, and that implies its capacity to be open, to accept its being transformed by an encounter.5 Based on this historical, dynamic understanding of cultures, Ratzinger develops a new approach to cultural relations. He suggests we cease talking about ‘inculturation’ where the relationship between culture and religion is governed by an assumption of static culture and malleable religion but instead think in terms of ‘interculturality’, a meeting of cultures in which ‘two agents that were hitherto alien to each other meet and now engage in a synthesis together’.6 Ratzinger’s historically informed ‘interculturality’, when wedded to Mauch and Pfister’s model of disasters as cultural/natural events, lays the groundwork for appreciating Nagai’s Catholic response to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki as a legitimate part of an historically informed Japanese culture. But before considering Nagai’s Catholic voice, there remains one further obstacle to understanding this historical Japanese culture: we need to recognize how the English language field of Japanese Studies has often presumed a particular idealized 4 Andrea Janku, ‘“Heaven-Sent Disasters” in Late Imperial China’, in Mauch and Pfister, eds., Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses, pp. 253–254. 5 [Emeritus Pope Benedict xvi] Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, p. 62. 6 [Emeritus Pope Benedict xvi] Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, p. 64.

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form of Japanese culture that is put forth in an effort to avoid taking Japanese Christian views seriously. The views of Japanese Catholics, particularly Nagasaki Catholics, are often discounted through a process of cultural double-marginalization: first, quantitatively, through reference to their small percentage of the Japanese population, and second, qualitatively, through insinuations that Catholicism is a Western religion and therefore that their own Catholic values and experiences are not authentically part of ‘Japanese culture’. The first argument is undeniable as a measure of quantity. But the second argument, which seeks to extend quantity into a qualitative argument about identity involves a host of problematic assumptions. First, the argument that Catholicism is a Western religion flies in the face of historical fact: the Catholic Church originated in Asia (‘the Levant’), as Pope John Paul ii reminded the world in his 1999 apostolic exhortation, Ecclesia in Asia.7 Second, it is worth noting that the Catholic Church has been in Japan since 1549, sixteen years longer than in the United States, a nation that is constantly referred to as being exceptionally Christian.8 And Catholicism has remained continuously in Japan ever since, including the period of underground Catholicism from the early seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century when over 50,000 kakure Catholics lived in Japan. Certainly, what is and is not an authentic part of any culture is a deeply politicized question, no less so with regard to how ‘Japanese’ Catholicism is than with any other religion or culture. If it is not at all self-evident that Catholicism is alien to Japanese culture, we need a better understanding of the historical process through which it became ‘common sense’ that Catholicism, and more generally Christianity, is alien to Japanese culture and thus authentically Japanese responses to disaster exclude Catholic ones.

7 Pope John Paul ii wrote, ‘The Church in Asia sings the praises of the “God of salvation” (Ps 68:20) for choosing to initiate his saving plan on Asian soil, through men and women of that continent. It was in fact in Asia that God revealed and fulfilled his saving purpose from the beginning. He guided the patriarchs (cf. Gen 12) and called Moses to lead his people to freedom (cf. Ex 3:10). He spoke to his chosen people through many prophets, judges, kings and valiant women of faith. In “the fullness of time” (Gal 4:4), he sent his only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ the Saviour, who took flesh as an Asian!’ Ecclesia in Asia, §1; cf. http://www.vatican.va/ holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_06111999_ecclesia-in -asia_en.html. 8 The first Catholic Mass in what would become the United States was celebrated in St. Augustine, Florida in 1565 by Fr. Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales; the first Catholic Mass in Japan was celebrated in 1549, probably on 15 August when St. Francis Xavier, sj landed in Kagoshima on the Feast of the Assumption.

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A large part of the answer has to do with the personal biases of the nineteenth century Western men who shaped many of the assumptions that still inform the field of Japanese Studies, especially as conceived and practised in the West. Chief among them was Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, who wrote incessantly about Japanese culture after his arrival in Japan in 1890, the year the new Meiji Constitution went into effect that guaranteed freedom of religion to all (particularly to the historically discriminated Catholic Japanese), until his death in 1904. Soon after arrival and taking up a teaching position in the provincial town of Matsue, Hearn married a local woman, Koizumi Setsu and, taking her family name, naturalized as a Japanese national under the name Koizumi Yakumo. Although he moved to Tokyo in 1896 and remained there the rest of his life, his initial experience in Matsue was formative in shaping his idealized vision of Japanese culture as pristinely archaic and free from contaminations from the West, particularly from Christianity. This vision of Japanese culture came in spite of (or surely precisely because of) the fact that Hearn had been educated in Catholic schools in France and Ireland.9 Early on, he had developed a strong antipathy towards Christianity that lasted throughout his adult life. His obituary in a Tokyo newspaper noted that Hearn hated Christianity so much that ‘when in his walks he came upon a church, he would not pass before it, but would turn about and go another way’.10 Hearn’s anti-Catholic bias led him to make outrageously reductive claims about Japanese culture, such as the following statement from a letter he wrote to Basil Hall Chamberlain in October 1894: ‘What a book I could now write about a Roman Catholic country, like Mexico, after having lived in Japan. In order to write well about Catholicism, one must have studied paganism outside of it’.11 Having convinced himself that Japanese culture was free of Catholicism, Hearn went on to draw happy conclusions from this assumption, including the idea that the Japanese handle disasters with a degree of equanimity unmatched by any of the Christian countries. In Japan, he maintained: …under all circumstances a certain outward cheerfulness never fails: no matter what troubles may come—storm or fire, flood or earthquake— the laughter of greeting voices, the bright smile and graceful bow, the 9 Coll, Wandering Ghost, pp. 25–30. Note that Coll, an admirer of Hearn, titles this chapter on Hearn’s Catholic schooling, ‘Shades of Prison-House’. 10 Hearn’s 1 June 1905 obituary in The Sun Trade Journal (Tokyo), as summarized by Otis Cary, p. 148; on Hearn’s education at Catholic schools in France and Ireland, see Coll, pp. 25–30. 11 Hearn, October 1894 letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, reprinted in Coll, p. 384.

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kindly inquiry and wish to please, continue to make existence beautiful. Religion brings no gloom into this sunshine.12 The gloomy ‘religion’ that could not invade Japan’s sunshine was of course Christianity, specifically Catholicism. Hearn’s view of Japanese culture was not a secular one, as was that of his friend Chamberlain. Hearn celebrated Japan as a pagan culture, subtitling his book with large characters for the Japanese word shinkoku, or the ‘land of the gods’, and he took every opportunity to thoroughly invest his explanations of Japanese culture with Shinto cultural determinism. Shintoism was the reason the Japanese people were unperturbed by disasters of all sorts—it served as a neat prophylactic against the pollution of Catholic insemination. Except that it didn’t. In 1890s Japan, Hearn did not live ‘outside of’ Catholicism. In Tokyo, where Hearn had moved in 1896, there were half a dozen Catholic churches and approximately 3000 Catholic Japanese in central Tokyo alone.13 These must have kept him quite busy sidewalk hopping on his walks around town. Protestant Christian Japanese were even more salient, particularly in the university and intellectual circles Hearn traversed, and he surely couldn’t ignore the landmark Nikolai Orthodox Cathedral built in 1891 near Waseda and Tokyo Imperial universities where he worked. Hearn would have been acutely aware of this new church as he himself had been baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church. One might assume that it was aggravation at discovering the prevalence of Christianity in Tokyo that led Hearn to build a cultural view of pristine, non-Christian Japan from his experience in Matsue. But it would be more accurate to conclude that Hearn had been running from the Catholic Japan that he first had encountered in Matsue. In 1890, the same year that Hearn arrived in Matsue, a Japanese Catholic woman named Otani came to Matsue from Kobe, sent by Fr. Henry Perrin, M.E.P. to convert as many Japanese there to Catholicism as possible. She was followed in 1897 by Fr. JohnBaptist Angles, M.E.P. who set up a church in the home of Mishima Kinnosuke and began to evangelize in the region, including Izumo, Hearn’s favourite local 12 Hearn,  Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, p. 16. As evidence of the durability of this religious cultural stereotype, consider how Western media emphasized similar notions of docility, order and cheerfulness as essential Japanese cultural attributes in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami. 13 Catholic Churches in central Tokyo by 1890 included those in Kanda, Azabu, Sekiguchi, Asakusa, Tsukiji and Honjo. This doesn’t include those in outlying areas of Tokyo, Chiba and Yokohama. Yokohama had about another 2300 Catholics. Numbers of Catholics come from Van Hecken, The Catholic Church in Japan Since 1859, p. 31.

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spot where he dreamed his best of a Catholic-free pagan world centred on the Great Shinto Shrine there. Two years after Hearn’s death, there was a growing community of fifty Catholics even in small-town Matsue.14 In short, both Japan’s city and countryside already were far more multicultural places than Hearn wanted to admit, and his conceit of a Japan liberated from Christianity was more a projection of his Orientalist effort to escape from his own religious past than an accurate depiction of the forms and functions of moral life in the ordinary, everyday Japanese culture that surrounded him.

Reclaiming Catholic Perspectives on Disaster as Japanese Culture

In 1908, four years after Hearn had died in Tokyo, back in his idyllic town of Matsue, a baby boy was born to Noburu and Tsune Nagai.15 This was Nagai Takashi, who would later write one of modern Japan’s best-known cultural responses to disaster, The Bells of Nagasaki. Takashi was born into a medical family, but they were not Christian. Takashi’s own personal conversion to Catholicism is an important part of his appeal to Japanese readers, as he was not from one of the historical Nagasaki Catholic kakure families: his is a story that reinforces the individual choice in matters of faith that modern society made possible for Japanese, and it brought together for him religion and science in a way that is often overlooked or misunderstood by those who fail to grasp the compatibility of faith and reason. Nagai’s conversion, like all conversions, was a complex matter with many factors involved: the death of his mother in 1930, and questions about the limits of materialism and the existence of the soul that nagged him while studying medicine at Nagasaki Medical University (1928–1932) are part of the story. But by Nagai’s own testimony, his reading of Pascal made a deep, definitive impression on his move towards Catholicism. He has offered the following reflection 14

15

As of 1996, there were 400 registered Catholics in Matsue and another 236 Catholics in Izumo. The Catholic Church in Japan: Present Structure and Activities (Tokyo: Catholic Bishops Conference of Japan, 1996), pp. 80–81. They are a part of the Hiroshima Diocese of 20,784 Catholics. Nagai Takashi was almost aborted. When his mother experienced difficulties with his birth, the doctor insisted on using a machine to cut the baby out of her womb in order to save her life. Tsune rejected his advice, the doctor walked out on her, and she waited either for the baby to be born or her husband, who was an obstetric physician, to return and help with the birth. Takashi was born naturally, just as Noburu entered the home. Kataoka Yakichi, Nagai Takashi no shōgai, pp. 10–11.

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on his discovery that the life of a scientist was not incompatible with the life of a man of faith: The soul, eternity, God—what a shock, that our predecessor, the great physicist Pascal had truly believed in such things! That this intellectual without peer past or present had faith! What was this Catholic faith that Pascal could believe in without any contradiction to his science?—my interest was naturally drawn towards the Catholic Church.16 In 1933, Nagai was mobilized as a medical corpsman to Manchuria, returning the following year to his work at University of Nagasaki Medical School, before being sent back to the front in 1937 until 1940.17 While back home in Nagasaki, he was baptized into the Catholic Church in June 1934, taking Paul as his baptismal name. Two months later, he married Midori Moriyama, who was a descendent of Nagasaki’s historical Catholic community, and he joined the St. Vincent de Paul Society. What stands out during this time is Nagai’s ardent and active Catholic faith. Like many converts, he did not regard Catholicism passively as merely a cultural inheritance from his family, a matter of rules and regulations passed down from one’s ancestors, but rather as a core part of his everyday life, a Weltanschauung that animated his very being. Once we understand the depth of Nagai’s personal conversion and his ardent faith in Catholicism as the Truth he as a scientist had long sought, it is not surprising, and should not be dismissed as merely a cultural inheritance of the Nagasaki kakure community, that his understanding of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki would also be framed within the same religious perspective. What is surprising is how positively many Japanese responded to his message, even if they did not share his Catholic faith. Nagai Takashi’s Bells of Nagasaki was first published in January 1949. It was an unprecedented best seller. Surely much of its success was due to its sensational reporting on Nagai’s personal experience of suffering the atomic bombing and surviving to tell of it. Nagai was at work in the University of Nagasaki Medical School when the plutonium bomb exploded a few hundred metres 16 Nagai, Rozario no kusa, p. 18; cited and translated by Kevin Hanlon, in Popular Catholicism in Japan, p. 94. I have revised Hanlon’s translation slightly. 17 Nishimura Akira argues that Nagai’s personal experience in seventy battles while in military service had a profound impact on his worldview and later on his understanding of the value of life that he emphasized in his writings about the bombing of Nagasaki. Cf. Nishimura Akira, ‘Nagai Takashi ni okeru genbaku saika’, 182–187. At the same time, it is important to note that Nishimura does not deny the role of Nagai’s Catholic faith in shaping his response to the issue of life and death.

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away and, although seriously injured, he miraculously survived. Equally sensational was the coincidence that Nagai was both a victim and a physician who immediately was inundated with appeals for emergency medical aid from other victims. Many of the most emotionally disturbing scenes in his account involve seriously injured people coming to his hospital for help, and Nagai and his colleagues having little or nothing to offer them, as their medical supplies had been practically wiped out by the massive force of the bomb. There are many aspects to The Bells of Nagasaki that contribute to its status as a canonical text on disaster in Japanese cultural history, not the least of which is the irony of a radiologist suffering from the effects of a bomb devised with the same atomic technology that he had been using to heal his patients—even though he was already dying from leukemia contracted from his radiological work. Surely, everyone who reads The Bells of Nagasaki is struck by the uncanny scene on 10 August when Nagai and his colleagues, having picked up a handbill dropped by the Americans, discover they are victims of a new weapon, an atomic bomb. Rather than responding to this news merely with raging anger as we might expect, their discussion is tingled paradoxically with a palpable sense of joy: Choro and his companions had gathered around Dr Seiki and were engaged in heated discussion. ‘Who on earth really perfected this work? Was it Compton? Or was it Lawrence?’ ‘You can be sure that Einstein played an important role. And then Bohr and Fermi and other scientists who were exiled from Europe to the United States’. ‘Then the British scientist Chadwick who discovered the neutron— and the French, the Joliot-Curies’. … ‘Ah! I’ve got it! yes, that’s it! Fission!’ ‘Yes, yes! Fission! The phenomenon discovered by Madame Meitner… Her research has some connection with the work of Professor Fermi of Italy. She found out that if you make a slow-moving neutron hit a uranium nucleus, the latter breaks in two…if the slow-moving neutron creeps into the atomic nucleus and stays there for a while, the nucleus suddenly breaks in two and separates. Then the great atomic energy latent in the nucleus is released and bursts out’. ‘Wow! That’s brilliant! It can be done with the neutron alone’. …

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‘I think they used uranium. Or perhaps they used artificial atoms. It seems that Dr Fermi of Rome, the highest authority in this field, went to the United States’. ‘Well, we can’t deny that it is a tremendous scientific achievement, this atomic bomb!’18 In recounting this remarkable moment from the wastelands of the atomic bombing, Nagai recognizes the surreal quality of this discussion, and he adds an optimistic, progressive viewpoint: ‘We nevertheless felt rising within us a new drive and a new motivation in our search for truth. In this devastated atomic desert, fresh and vigorous scientific life began to flourish’.19 While on a personal level, Nagai is undoubtedly thinking of the future in terms of his two children, his readers also found meaning in this positive vision of a future life in a radically new, post-catastrophic Japan. And this positive view did not, as Hearn opined, come from a non-Christian, Shintoist perspective.

Nagai Takashi’s Catholic Understanding of Catastrophe

Had Nagai’s response to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki been limited to these paradoxes—a radiologist bombed by an atomic weapon, a doctor seeking to treat those injured by the bomb (among whom he himself was numbered), and a terminal leukemia victim near ground zero who survives the atomic bombing—The Bells of Nagasaki would certainly have garnered national attention as a compelling story about survival of a major catastrophe. But Nagai offers more. And it is what he adds—a shocking interpretation of the bombing of his city grounded in his Catholic faith—that offers a profound meaning to the event, a means of carrying on with a sense of purpose, not an empty nihilism—that elevates The Bells of Nagasaki to a classic and ensures that it is widely read down to the present. The key passage is when Nagai is visited by Yamada Ichitarō, a demobilized Catholic soldier who survived the war only to return home to Nagasaki to find his wife and five children reduced to ashes.20 Yet, what torments Yamada even 18 Nagai, The Bells of Nagasaki, 56–60. 19 Nagai, The Bells of Nagasaki, 60. 20 It is not clear whether this Yamada Ichitarō is a real person or a fictionalized version of Yoshimochi Tōgo, a fellow member of Nagai’s Catholic St. Vincent Society whose catastrophic losses in the bombing were identical to those attributed to Yamada in The Bells of Nagasaki. Takahashi Shinji believes Yamada was a real person; Nishimura Akira raises

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more than their loss is his belief that their deaths were punishment from God, proof—he thinks—that God considered his loved ones ‘evil people’.21 Nagai tells Yamada that he is mistaken, that the bombing of their town was not a manifestation of divine punishment at all. ‘In fact, I have the opposite view. The atomic bomb falling on Urakami was a great act of Divine Providence. It was a grace from God. Urakami must give thanks to God’.22 This one statement comes like a thunderbolt, a scandal to Yamada (and perhaps to most of Nagai’s readers). But it is merely an expression of the Catholic understanding of catastrophe: that all things that happen to us are the result of the providence of a God who is all good. Even ‘bad’ things that happen to us can be the seeds of a good that we do not immediately recognize.23 Nagai’s response is a direct contradiction of Hearn’s argument that it is Shinto that provides the Japanese with their optimistic attitude to catastrophe. Nagai’s optimism comes from that ‘gloomy religion’ that Hearn most detested: Catholicism. As difficult as it was for the grieving Yamada to understand what Nagai was telling him, even contemporary readers of The Bells of Nagasaki grapple with Nagai’s way of finding meaning and hope in the catastrophe of the atomic bombing. Those who reject Christianity will have even greater difficulty, since Nagai is assuming a particular Catholic view of history, one that is not much in favour among academic historians today. James Hitchcock is a rare exception—an academic historian who also understands the Catholic view of history that Nagai assumed and tried to communicate to Yamada and to his readers. As Hitchcock explains, this Catholic understanding of history is one that: …is intimately bound up with one of the most perplexing of all doctrines—divine providence. Blessed John Henry Newman said that human experience seems to force the conclusion that mankind was doubts on the basis of the writings of Kataoka Yakichi, Nagai’s close friend and a leading scholar of Nagai’s life and works. See Nishimura, ‘Nagai Takashi ni okeru genbaku saika’, 193–194, and 200 n. 40. 21 Nagai, The Bells of Nagasaki, 106. 22 Nagai, The Bells of Nagasaki. I have revised slightly William Johnston’s translation here: in particular, I have restored Nagai’s original reference to Urakami, the Catholic neighborhood of Nagasaki that lay at ground zero. Johnston made an inexplicable decision to substitute the name of the entire city of Nagasaki for Nagai’s reference to Urakami. 23 This idea of good coming from bad (what St. Augustine called the felix culpa) is a major theme in the fiction of the Japanese Catholic novelist Endō Shūsaku who generally approaches it in terms of sin and how good can come from sin through grace of an omnipotent God. Whether Endō was influenced by Nagai on this point is an open question.

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implicated in some ‘primordial catastrophe’. History offers believers no knowledge of the exact nature of that catastrophe, but faith informs them that it occurred. Even on a purely human level, history cannot be understood apart from the reality of sin, especially of universal selfishness. Rooted in universal human nature, sin is a constant in man’s affairs, although its character and intensity vary with time and place. Those who deny that a tendency toward evil is basic to human nature cannot make sense of history, which becomes merely endless, incomprehensible tragedy… [In contrast] Christianity gave history an eschaton, a goal toward which it relentlessly moves and which for the first time allowed that movement to have meaning. But one of the great temptations for Christians is to deduce the specific manifestations in history from a general belief in divine providence… Edifying stories of devout people saved from danger by divine intervention…leave unanswered the question why countless other people, even more pious and innocent, have been allowed to perish. Christians can readily understand this on the individual level—suffering is redemptive, and God takes His servants when He wants them. But it is far more difficult to explain the fate of whole societies.24 Indeed. And that is the task confronting Nagai as so many bereaved victims of the catastrophes that arose from the war, like Yamada, tried to make sense of their suffering. But how to understand the destruction of the entire city, particularly the Urakami neighbourhood, the most Catholic part of this Catholic Japanese city? Nagai realizes Yamada’s loss and pain have not been fully alleviated by his meager words, so he offers him (and his readers) a speech he has written for a requiem Mass at Urakami Cathedral for the victims of the bombing. As Yamada reads it, he begins to weep. Here is the crux of Nagai’s speech: On August 15, the Imperial Rescript that ended the war was formally promulgated and, while the whole world considered it a day of peace, that day also happened to fall on the major feast day of the Assumption of the 24 Hitchcock, History of the Catholic Church, pp. 15–16. But Hitchcock also adds that ‘the Christian approach to history is also not completely linear; it revolves around a particular moment—the coming of Christ—from which time is reckoned both forward and backward’. This view offers insight into the significance of the widespread simultaneous use of Japanese reign era designations (e.g. Heisei 25) and the Christian calendar (e.g. 2013 ad, ‘the twenty-first century’) in modern Japan.

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Blessed Virgin Mary. This reminds us that the Urakami Cathedral was formally dedicated to Mary. And we must ask if this striking convergence of events—the ending of the war on her feast day and the Urakami Cathedral being the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of Mary— was merely a coincidence or if it was due to the working of divine providence. I have heard that the second atomic bomb, calculated to deal a deadly blow to the war potential of Japan, was originally destined for another city. But since the sky over that city was covered with clouds, the American pilots found it impossible to aim at their target. Consequently, they suddenly changed their plans and decided to drop the bomb on Nagasaki, the secondary target. However, yet another hitch occurred. As the bomb fell, cloud and wind carried it slightly north of the munitions factories that were targeted and it exploded instead above the cathedral. This is what I was told. If it is true, the American pilots did not aim at Urakami, and we have to consider the possibility that it was God’s providence that guided the bomb to its destination [Urakami]. Is there not a deep connection between the annihilation of Urakami and the end of the war? Was not Urakami—the most sacred place in all Japan— chosen as a victim, a pure lamb, that had to be slaughtered and burned on the altar of sacrifice to expiate this sin of humanity, the World War? … Before this moment there were many opportunities to end the war. Not a few cities were totally destroyed. But these were not suitable sacrifices; nor did God accept them. Only when Urakami was destroyed did God accept the sacrifice. Hearing the cry of the human family, He inspired the emperor to issue the sacred decree by which the war was brought to an end. Our church in Urakami kept the faith… Was it not, then, the one unblemished lamb that had to be offered on the altar of God? Thanks to the sacrifice of this lamb many millions who would otherwise have fallen victim to the ravages of war have been saved.25 As a convert to Catholicism, Nagai had a particularly keen sense of the providential view of history. Whether his departure from Matsue in his youth, 25

Again I have made some revisions to Johnston’s translation, again restoring Nagai’s term ‘Urakami’ instead of Johnston’s ‘Nagasaki’. Cf. Nagai, Nagasaki no kane, http://www .aozora.gr.jp/cards/000924/files/50659_42787.html and Nagai, Bells of Nagasaki, (Johnston, trans.) pp. 107–108.

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converting to Catholicism, marrying Midori, surviving his experience at the front, then surviving the Nagasaki bombing but losing Midori in the same atomic catastrophe—all these moments in his life testified to the force of divine providence. Nagai’s message about this catastrophe, indeed all catastrophes, was deeply rooted in his religious faith and encapsulated in the closing lines of his funeral speech: ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord’.26 However, there is much more to Nagai’s Catholic understanding of catastrophe than what one finds in these lines from the Book of Job, the classic Biblical source of consolation. In his searching, sensitive reading of Nagai’s text, John Treat agrees that there is more to Nagai’s theological response to the atomic bombing than Job’s cri de coeur to an unfathomable God. As a Christian for whom the New Testament does not negate the Old but builds on it, Nagai does suggest on one level something akin to what Treat describes as ‘Urakami as Calvary, the site of a divine, compensatory violence not inspired by men but rather by their sins…an Old Testament story of a wrathful God combined with a New Testament promise of deliverance by that same God’.27 Nagai would certainly not think of this as ‘divine, compensatory violence’ but rather as the sacrifice (gisei; ikenie) of the Son who thereby redeemed us from the clutches of sin and death. In this regard, Yuki Miyamoto is quite right that Nagai’s interpretation of the catastrophe in terms of ‘sacrificial lambs’ must be put in context of the Catholic teaching on redemptive suffering.28 But this redemptive suffering should not be understood merely as a social or political movement: rather, Nagai’s Catholic understanding of redemptive suffering is thoroughly theological. It grows out of and points to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass (which he had attended that fateful morning), in which the sacrifice of the unblemished Lamb (Jesus Christ), which happened once for all, is re-presented every day all around the world. One must first understand Nagai’s assumption that Catholics in a state of grace who participate in the sacrifice of the Lamb at the Mass are, in a sense, ‘co-redeemers’ of a fallen world. As Miyamoto puts it, ‘the meaning of suffering is only intelligible insofar as one participates in Jesus’s suffering’.29 Only then can one begin to appreciate Nagai’s suggestion that the Urakami Catholics who died in the bombing participated in Christ’s Passion 26 Nagai, Nagasaki no kane, http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000924/files/50659_42787.html. Nagai is of course quoting Job 1:21. 27 Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 313. Treat touches on the perspective of Job in Elie Wiesel’s interpretation on p. xvii. 28 Yuki Miyamoto, Beyond the Mushroom Cloud, pp. 130–141. 29 Miyamoto, Beyond the Mushroom Cloud, p. 138.

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and thus are joined to the Pascal Lamb who is sacrificed on the altar of the Mass. Their deaths were not meaningless nor merely the effects of ‘violence’. Nagai is speaking not of violence, but of sanctification and the liberation from the clutches of death that the Lamb’s sacrifice made possible. This is surely why Yamada is moved to tears as he reads the speech, and it is also a part of the poetic power of Nagai’s voice, even for those Japanese who are not Catholic but who have some appreciation of the need for, and power of, purification. Nagai introduced a transformative understanding of human failure (sin) that resonated widely throughout early post-war Japanese society, regardless of particular religious beliefs and affiliations.

The Bells of Nagasaki in Japanese Popular Culture

Nagai’s Catholic response to the catastrophe of Nagasaki was not limited to this book (or the other books he wrote before his death in 1951); indeed, his influence extended well beyond the confines of academic literature. On 1 July 1949, only six months after Nagai’s book was published, Columbia Records released a song ‘The Bells of Nagasaki’, performed by the popular singer Fujiyama Ichirō, with lyrics written by Satō Hachirō and melody by Koseki Yūji. Columbia had wanted Ike Mariko, Japan’s ‘Queen of Swing’, to sing it, but when she saw the lyrics, she realized it should be sung by a man, since it expressed Nagai’s own state of mind after the loss of his wife. She convinced the record company to get Fujiyama to sing it instead.30 It was an immediate hit. Here is an English translation of Satō’s lyrics to ‘The Bells of Nagasaki’: This pain of seeing such a beautiful blue sky sadly you wildflowers living vainly amidst the undulating waves of Mankind Ah, the bells of Nagasaki, those consoling, encouraging bells of Nagasaki. It was Your will to take my wife to Heaven leaving me to sojourn alone with her rosary beads she left behind glistening from my tears Ah, the bells of Nagasaki, those consoling, encouraging bells of Nagasaki. 30

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ikemariko. Fujiyama performed the song again in 1990. For a recording of the 1990 performance, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZqJL9TtSF4.

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Confess one’s deepest sins as the night deepens the moonlight reveals even in the poorest houses Mary standing tall and bright. Ah, the bells of Nagasaki, those consoling, encouraging bells of Nagasaki. One commentator has suggested that the reason for the song’s popularity is that Satō’s poetic words reached out beyond the Catholics in Nagasaki to serve as ‘a requiem for all those who suffered from the catastrophe of the war. The words implored those broken in spirit to rise up again… And Fujiyama Ichirō sang it with his superior musical talent in a particularly dignified manner’.31 It is impossible to capture the emotional impact of this song through reading the lyrics—especially in translation; one should hear a recording of the song, which is widely available even today. While the song doesn’t try to convey the theological nuances of Nagai’s point about the sacrifice of the unblemished Lamb, there is no denying the obvious Catholic references (‘Heaven’, ‘rosary beads’, ‘Mary’ and, of course the church ‘bells of Nagasaki’, calling the faithful to pray the Angelus). Even the fact that this song, with its explicit references to Nagai’s book and his Catholic faith, became a hit tune suggests something of the receptivity to the Catholic response to loss in the Japanese culture of the early post-war years. It also is a powerful exposé of the limits of Hearn’s reductive theory of a Japanese culture ostensibly sealed off from the influences of Catholicism. But this song, although a powerful influence, was not the only instance of Japanese cultural receptivity to Nagai’s Catholic understanding of catastrophe. Two months later, another song named ‘The Bells of Nagasaki’ was released, this one recorded by the noted opera star Fujiwara Yoshie with words and melody written by Uemoto Kazuo. Uemoto had connections to the Nagai family and had graduated from the famous Catholic Morning Star High School. Here is an English translation of the lyrics to Uemoto’s ‘The Bells of Nagasaki’: I hear the bells of Nagasaki. I think it is my father asking ‘Give the rabbits something to eat’. No, I’m wrong, I’m wrong. It is the voice of God saying, ‘The rabbits are sleeping peacefully’. 31

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/nagasakinokane, accessed 2 January 2013. The author of the article is not identified.

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I hear the bells of Nagasaki. I think it is my mother saying ‘Let me wash your back for you’. No, I’m wrong, I’m wrong. It is the voice of God saying, ‘You have to wash your own back’. I hear the bells of Nagasaki. ‘Is the same night falling as it did then?’ the insects in the fields are asking. No, I’m wrong, I’m wrong. It is the voice of God saying, ‘You can see it reflected on the cross’. Uemoto’s lyrics are quite different from those of Satō’s version, perhaps less consoling. But there are still references to Christianity (‘God’, ‘the cross’), and the final line in particular is a poetic sign of the redemptive suffering that Nagai had outlined more explicitly in his book. In the end, the important point is not the differences in nuance between the two versions but rather the fact that two popular songs were released immediately after the publication of Nagai’s Bells of Nagasaki, thus reinforcing the impact Nagai’s Catholic response to the catastrophe of war and atomic bombing had on Japanese culture in the early post-war years. Cultural receptivity to Nagai’s Catholic response to the catastrophe of the atomic bombing was not limited to literature or popular music. Shōchiku Ōfune Studios put out a movie version, The Bells of Nagasaki, on 23 September 1950. Directed by Ōba Hideo, it starred Wakahara Masao as Nagai, Tsukioka Yumeji as his wife Midori, Tsujima Keiko (a Nagasaki native) as Yamada Sachiko, Takizawa Osamu as Professor Asakura, and Mitsui Kōji as Yamashita. The movie took a broader framing than the book that had focused on the bombing and its aftermath. It emphasized the life course of Dr Nagai, including scenes from his ordinary Catholic family life in Nagasaki before the bombing. From all accounts, it was a commercial success, even if the critics were not unstinting in their praise for it. The net effect, however, was an even more Catholic contribution to popular Japanese culture, as images of Japanese priests, nuns in habit, children at Mass, rosary and other prayers, etc. filled the screen. The movie was a particularly effective medium for depicting the loss of Midori to Nagai and his children, which it clearly linked to the consolations of the Catholic faith. Visual representations of Catholic faith in the movie were particularly powerful and achieved an articulation of the naturalness of Catholicism in Japanese culture that Nagai’s book, as a verbal text, simply could not do as effectively.

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A similar point can be made about the 1959 play, ‘The Head of Mary’, by Tanaka Chikao. Tanaka was a native of Nagasaki and considered himself a Christian (although it appears he was never baptized). Married to the Catholic writer Tanaka Sumie, he had his family baptized in the Catholic Church and is considered a Catholic playwright. In his introduction to ‘The Head of Mary’, David Goodman describes the play as an elaboration of the themes laid out in Nagai’s The Bells of Nagasaki.32 Certainly, Tanaka shares with Nagai a critical view of those who would politicize catastrophe for their own self-aggrandizements. This critical view of political determinism is portrayed best when Yabari, a young student activist, pesters the bed-ridden Momozono to declare himself an atomic bomb victim and sign his petition—even though Momozono tells him he is not a victim of the bombing and was nowhere near Nagasaki when the bomb went off. Finally, he reluctantly signs the petition anyway just to be rid of Yabari. Of course there are striking parallels between Momozono and Nagai who was a bomb victim but who was already dying of leukemia (contracted from his radiological work in the hospital) before 9 August. But there are clear differences also between Nagai’s book and Tanaka’s play, which was put on nearly fifteen years after the Nagasaki bombing. For Tanaka, the intervening years meant it was time to focus on rebuilding the community, and in fact the action of the play revolves around the efforts of a motley crew of locals to salvage the head of the statue of Mary from the bombed Urakami Cathedral before local politicians remove the ruins. For them, this utilitarian modern political act threatens their culture and their shared memories of what they had endured together. Tanaka’s play illustrates quite effectively what Miyamoto has described as the ‘Catholic teaching [that] demonstrates the possibility of an inclusive community embodying the ethics of “not retaliation, but reconciliation”’.33 But even more it offers another example of the realistic, even cheerful response to catastrophe that finds grounds for its optimism about the future in the values of that ‘gloomy religion’—Catholicism.

Nagai’s Legacy: Post-war Aberration or Part of Japanese Culture?

With the passing of years, Nagai’s call for an atonement of sin and especially his location of redemption in the sacrifice of the unblemished Lamb has lost some of its luster among members of more jaded, recent generations. Most 32

David G. Goodman, ‘Introduction—The Head of Mary: Nagasaki as Theophany’, After Apocalypse, 108. 33 Miyamoto, Beyond the Mushroom Cloud, p. 134.

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representative of this new generation is Hayashida Yasumasa who, writing in the midst of the affluent 1980s, sought to deflect attention from atomic bomb literature on Nagasaki (‘Nagasaki prays’) toward the experience in Hiroshima (‘Hiroshima rages’) through a string of what Treat has described as ‘cryptic references to Nagasaki’s ‘social environment’, ‘negativity’ and ‘clannishness’ in contrast to the more cosmopolitan character of other Japanese cities’34 (Hiroshima?). As Treat has pointed out, Hayashida’s arguments against Nagasaki’s importance ‘reveal nothing so much as the deeply held prejudices both against Nagasaki…and against any broad interpretation of what manifestations an “appropriate” atomic-bomb literature might assume’.35 Nonetheless, Treat concludes that ‘the writer now most closely identified with the bombing of Nagasaki is not Nagai Takashi but Hayashi Kyōko’.36 That may be true among specialists in university literature departments, but Hayashi does not have anything like the canonical status of Nagai in broader Japanese literary and cultural history. Her work is not included in the one thousand works of Japanese literature electronically reproduced in the Nihon bungaku 1000 sakuhin database (The Bells of Nagasaki is), nor is she listed in the Encyclopedia Dictionary Maipedia or Kōjien (Nagai Takashi is) that are all built into the ex-word electronic dictionary that is now ubiquitous in Japan. While undoubtedly secular progressive scholars in Japan and elsewhere are more comfortable with the atomic bomb literature of writers like Ōta Yōko, Gotō Minako and Sata Ineko whose gloomy works offer little in the way of optimism or hope, such personal preferences do not mean that Nagai’s views are less reflective of Japanese culture or of Japanese attitudes towards catastrophe in particular. Nagai’s Catholic views may be disdained among some professors of Japanese literature, just as the Catholic literature of Flannery O’Conner, Walker Percy or Graham Greene has become marginal in the literature departments of elite universities in the United States and Europe today.37 But there is evidence that Nagai is not as marginal among literary scholars at Japanese universities.38 In any event, it is also true that academic literary scholars no longer speak for the entirety, or even the best, of culture—whether in Japan or in other countries. 34 Treat, Writing Ground Zero, p. 303. 35 Treat, Writing Ground Zero, p. 303. 36 Treat, Writing Ground Zero, p. 315. 37 See Garfitt, ‘What Happened to the Catholic Novel?’, esp. pp. 228–230. 38 Nishimura’s article on Nagai, cited herein, originated in his research for his 2004 PhD dissertation at the University of Tokyo and was published, in part, as ‘Inori no Nagasaki: Nagai Takashi to genbaku shisha’ (2002). Professor Asami Masakazu of Keio University’s Department of Japanese History informed me that there is a ‘Christian boom’ taking place in Japan today (personal correspondence, 27 March 2013).

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If we take a broader perspective on Japanese culture, we find the enduring appeal of Nagai’s interpretation of the Nagasaki bombing in a variety of ways. The 1950 movie ‘The Bells of Nagasaki’ was released in vhs format in 1992. Koseki Yūji’s song, ‘The Bells of Nagasaki’, was re-recorded by Aikawa Yumi in 1996. In 2004, Columbia Music Entertainment released a collection of Fujiyama Ichirō songs on cd that prominently features his singing of Koseki’s version of ‘The Bells of Nagasaki’. And Nagai’s text, Nagasaki no kane, remains widely and easily available, in a cheap bunkobon edition published by San Paulo in 1995, in editions published more recently by Beisei Publishing in 2009 and Nihon Book Ace in 2010, and the ultimate sign of success—in a free Kindle version available to users in Japan since 2012 and, of course, it is available worldwide free on the internet through the Aozora Bunko website. There are even plans to make a new movie of The Bells of Nagasaki.39 Perhaps the most bizarre tribute to Nagai’s cultural impact is Yoshimura Tatsuya’s 1997 detective novel, Nagasaki no kane satsujin jiken, which does much more than borrow the name of Nagai’s book. The longest of this popular detective novelist’s many works, it goes deeply into the history of the Japanese Catholic community and specifically into the substance of Nagai’s book. Clearly, Nagai and his Catholic perspective on the atomic bombing of Nagasaki have achieved canonical status in Japanese culture, contributing greatly to the undermining of Hearn’s Orientalist ideal of a ‘Catholic-free’ Japan. But the widespread reception of The Bells of Nagasaki does not mean that Nagai’s specific theological interpretation of the bombing as a holy sacrifice (hansaisetsu) has been accepted as widely as his narrative. Indeed, it is not even embraced by all Catholics in Japan. At the centre of Nagai’s interpretation of the meaning of the bombing was an understanding of the Mass as a living sacrifice, a gisei or ikenie. But this orthodox understanding of the Mass and the centrality in it of Jesus’ final redemptive act has been rejected by some Catholic theologians and clerics in Japan and elsewhere. In fact, resistance to the idea of redemptive sacrifice was so strong among some Japanese bishops that translation of the universal Catechism of the Catholic Church into Japanese was held up for a decade. As Francis Mutsuo Fukushima summarized the dispute, when Father Peter Takehiko Ano was ordered to rewrite Sister Therese Takako Kikuchi’s initial translation of the Catechism, ‘some bishops demanded that 39

On 19 November 2012, a meeting was held with Nagasaki Governor Nakamura Hōdō, playwright Okabe Kōdai, former Tōhō producer Morioka Michio, Dietmember Kitamura Seigo and others to explore the possibility of producing a movie based on Nagai’s Bells of Nagasaki. See http://www.pref.nagasaki.jp/koho/hodo/upfile/20121116133204.pdf. Accessed 31 January 2013.

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the word [sacrifice] be translated as hōken (offering), while others asked him to translate it as ikenie (sacrifice/victim), the traditional Japanese rendering of “sacrifice”’.40 When the Japanese Catechism was finally published in 2002, Father Ano’s translation, with its orthodox emphasis on the Mass as a sacrifice (ikenie) appeared as the authorized translation.41 But the dispute had exposed influential voices in the Catholic Church in Japan who did not accept the idea of the Mass as a redemptive sacrifice, the key concept in Nagai’s understanding of the meaning of the Nagasaki bombing. Even Catholic laymen like Dr Akizuki Tatsuichirō earlier had expressed reservations about Nagai’s theory of redemptive suffering.42 Given opposition even within the Catholic Church to this idea of sacrifice, we cannot conclude that Nagai’s interpretation is marginal to Japanese culture because it comes from his Catholic faith. It is likely that his view would be just as marginal in other non-Japanese cultures, even those where the Catholic Church has a greater number of adherents than it does in Japan. But these reservations on certain theological aspects of The Bells of Nagasaki do not mean that Nagai’s approach to catastrophe is losing its relevance in Japan today. Sister Suzukawa Yoshi recently recounted how a chance encounter with Nagai’s book changed her life and led her to take vows as a Catholic woman religious.43 In 2005, Sister Kataoka Chizuko reiterated her long-standing defence of Nagai’s claim that the atomic bombing was an act of God’s providence. Sister Kataoka notes that criticism of Nagai’s view of the atomic bombing has focused on three points: (1) not expressing enough political resistance to the bombing itself; (2) underemphasizing the peace movement in Nagasaki in comparison with Hiroshima; and (3) providing justification for America’s use of the bomb. Kataoka notes that these criticisms fail to put Nagai’s comments in their proper context. Nagai’s intent was to reject the view that God allowed the bombing as punishment for sin, a view that encouraged despair in the immediate aftermath of the bombing when many who had lost their families and homes were demoralized by false rumours in addition to the catastrophic impact of the bombing itself. Nagai, she notes, could empathize with their temptation to despair, but he strongly rejected the idea that the bombing was an act of divine punishment as contrary to the Catholic understanding of life and death and the significance of human suffering. His point was that such 40 Francis Mutsuo Fukushima, ‘Why There is no Catechism in Japan’. 41 Cf. Nihon Katorikku Shikyō Kyōgikai, ed., Katorikku kyōkai no katekizumu, §1366, p. 415. 42 Miyamoto, Beyond the Mushroom Cloud, p. 134. 43 Joshua J. McElwee, ‘Japanese Sisters Recount the Road to Conversion’, National Catholic Reporter (30 September 2011), p. 5a.

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a view of the dead as victims of God’s vengeance was nothing less than a kind of sacrilege against the dead.44 Undoubtedly, there are countless others, Catholic and non-Catholic, whose lives were transformed by Nagai’s The Bells of Nagasaki. The value of The Bells of Nagasaki as a Japanese cultural response to catastrophe is best understood in light of Mauch’s concept of ‘cultures of coping’ that result from ‘the daily tapestries’ that all societies weave, and reweave. Certainly, Nagai’s work is one important example, among many Japanese tapestries of coping with disaster. One clear example of Nagai’s continuing relevance is Nishimura Akira’s confession that he found consolation in listening to Koseki’s version of the song ‘The Bells of Nagasaki’ in the immediate aftermath of the 11 March catastrophe.45 What better evidence could there be that these ‘cultures of coping’ are not frozen in time, not hermetically sealed off from various influences, and that the cultures of coping in Japan include expressions that stem from minority religions like Catholicism? As Emeritus Pope Benedict xvi noted in his magisterial study of world cultures and religion cited above, ‘the historical character of culture signifies its capacity for progress, and that implies its capacity to be open, to accept its being transformed by an encounter’.46 If there is any enduring lesson in Nagai Takashi’s The Bells of Nagasaki, surely it is as testimony of the power that can transform one for the better through an encounter with something one never had imagined—or perhaps had never even desired. Bibliography [Emeritus Pope Benedict xvi] Ratzinger, Joseph. Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, translated by Henry Taylor. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004. Blaney, Retta. ‘Noh Play Follows Japanese Doctor Who Witnessed Atomic Blast’. National Catholic Reporter (29 July 2005), p. 18. Cary, Otis.  A History of Christianity in Japan, volume ii: Protestant Missions, 1909; reprint, Curzon Press, 1993. The Catholic Church in Japan: Present Structure and Activities. Tokyo: Catholic Bishops Conference of Japan, 1996. 44 45

46

Kataoka Chizuko, ‘Nagai Takashi-hakase to hibakuchi urakami no saiken’, p. 1. Nishimura, ‘Nagai Takashi ni okeru genbaku saika’, 180. Nishimura adds in a note that ‘The Bells of Nagasaki’ was the most requested song on the radio ‘that touched your heart’ for 2011. Nishimura, p. 197, n. 3. [Emeritus Pope Benedict xvi], Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, p. 62.

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Coll, Jonathan. Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Fukushima, Francis Mutsuo. ‘Why There is No Catechism in Japanese’. Adoremus Bulletin, vol. vii, no. 2 (April 2001). On-line edition. http://www.adoremus .org/0401Fukushima.html. Garfitt, Toby. ‘What Happened to the Catholic Novel?’ French Studies: A Quarterly Review, vol. 66, no. 2 (2012): 222–230. Glynn, Paul. A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai. Eerdmans, 1990; reprint, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009. Goodman, David G., ed. and trans. After Apocalypse: Four Japanese Plays of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Hanlon, Kevin J.M.M., Popular Catholicism in Japan: Their Own Voices, Their Spiritual Writers, and Their Devotional Art. Tokyo: Enderle Book Co., Ltd, 2004. Hearn, Lafcadio. Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1904. Hitchcock, James. History of the Catholic Church: From the Apostolic Age to the Third Millennium. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012. Kataoka, Chizuko. ‘Nagai Takashi-hakase to hibakuchi Urakami no saiken: Nagai hatsugen ‘genbaku wa kami no setsuri’ no imi suru mono’. Koto no ha, no. 20 (August, 2005): p. 1. Kataoka, Yakichi. Nagai Takashi no shōgai. Tokyo: San Paolo, 1961. Mauch, Christof and Christian Pfister, eds. Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies toward a Global Environmental History. Lanham, md: Lexington Books, 2009. McElwee, Joshua J. ‘Japanese Sisters Recount the Road of Conversion’. National Catholic Reporter (30 September 2011): 5a, 6b. Miyamoto, Yuki. Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Nagai, Takashi. The Bells of Nagasaki. Trans. William Johnston. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1984. ——. Leaving My Beloved Children Behind. Trans. Maurice M. Tatsuoka and Tsuneyoshi Takai. Strathfield, Australia: St. Pauls Publications, 2008. ——. Nyokodō zuihitsu. Tokyo: San Paolo, 1996. ——. Rozario no kusa. Tokyo: San Paolo, 1995. Nihon Katorikku Shikyō Kyōgikai, ed. Katorikku kyōkai no katekizumu. Tokyo: Katorikku Chūō Kyōgikai, 2002. Nishimura, Akira. ‘Inori no Nagasaki: Nagai Takashi to genbaku shisha’. Tokyo Daigaku Shūkyōgaku Nenpō xix (2002). ——. ‘Nagai Takashi ni okeru genbaku saika: jūgun taiken to shokugyō hibaku ni chūmoku shite’, Shūkyō Kenkyū, vol. 86, no. 2 (2012): 179–201 (369–391).

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Shibata, Yuko. ‘Dissociative Entanglement: us-Japan Atomic Bomb Discourses by John Hersey and Nagai Takashi’. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 13, no. 1 (2012): 122–137. Tanaka, Chikao. ‘The Head of Mary: A Nagasaki Fantasia’. In trans. and edited by David G. Goodman, After Apocalypse: Four Japanese Plays of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Treat, John. n. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Van Hecken, Joseph L. Trans and revised by John Van Hoydonck. The Catholic Church in Japan Since 1859. Tokyo: Herder Agency, Enderle Bookstore, 1963. Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr. ‘The Cross and the Bomb: Two Catholic Dramas in Response to Nagasaki’. The Journal of Religion and Theatre, vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 2002). http://www .rtjournal.org.

Chapter 13

The Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923 and Poetry Leith Morton

Tokyo Institute of Technology

The massive earthquake that struck the Tokyo-Yokohama area and surrounding regions on 1 September 1923 was the deadliest natural disaster ever recorded in Japanese history, with well over 100,000 documented deaths. The devastation this calamity wrought on Tokyo alone was without precedent. Following in the wake of the earthquake, much of the city—and its environs—were engulfed by an intense firestorm that lasted two days and destroyed large sections of the metropolis. Over half a million dwellings were totally destroyed by fire.1 Out of a total population of just over two million in the capital, nearly one and half million people were made homeless.2 In various genres of literature, writers recorded their reactions to the event, and documented the tragedy, with both modern and traditional forms of poetry being prominent: primarily shi, tanka and haiku. In this study, I intend to focus firstly on the reactions of free-verse (shi) poets as documented in a number of collections of free-verse poetry published within two months after the earthquake. The free-verse poets examined here include the famous Kawaji Ryūko (1885–1959) and Satō Sōnōsuke (1890–1942), among others that I will translate. Free-verse poets were much affected by the tragedy; for example, the distinguished poet Nishiwaki Junzaburō (1894–1982) composed a number of poems on the earthquake in his celebrated 1933 poetry collection Ambarvalia.3 In addition, I will also translate a prose poem by the French author Paul Claudel (1868–1955), who was residing in Tokyo at this time, in order to obtain a sense of the international reaction to this event. I will 1 Figures cited in Wada Hirofumi, ‘Kantō daishinsai to modan toshi’, p. 609 in Kantō daishinsai [Modan toshi bunka 26] Ed. Wada Hirofumi, (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2007). See also Gregory Clancey, Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity 1868–1930 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2006). 2 Joseph Hammer, Yokohama Burning (New York, London, Sydney, Toronto: Free Press, 2006) p. 244. 3 On the poetry of Nishiwaki, see Hosea Hirata, The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburō: Modernism in Translation (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1993) and Nishiwaki Junzaburō, Gen’ei: Selected Poems of Nishiwaki Junzaburō Trans. Yasuko Claremont. (Sydney: Wild Peony, 1991).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004268319_015

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also examine and translate a few haiku that will serve to represent a much larger body of verse composed on the earthquake. Also, I will briefly scrutinize one of the many literary debates born out of the earthquake and its impact on literature. Next I will investigate a different genre of verse—the traditional genre of tanka (the oldest Japanese verse genre)—by translating and analysing poetry composed in reaction to the event by a number of famous tanka poets: Aizu Yaichi (1881–1956), Kubota Utsubo (1877–1967), Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) and Wakayama Bokusui (1885–1928). Much of this verse will be taken from selected journals, books and magazines published at the time that capture the mood of crisis that engulfed the nation. The poetry produced in the wake of the 1923 earthquake made an enormous contribution to the literature of disaster by showing how culture could serve as a memorial to disaster and also act as a means by which those who lived through it could cope with the event. Trauma memorialized in literature not only functions as a reminder to future generations of the tragedies of the past but also creates a literary precedent or model for the witnessing and recording of similar events in the future. This is clear from literary reactions to the 11 March 2011 East Japan Earthquake, and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown and tsunami that followed it. Award-winning tanka and free-verse collections written about this event have already appeared; many such reach back to the September 1923 earthquake and the verse produced at the time. However, the emphasis in this study will be on the earlier disaster, the literary impact of which (especially in respect of poetry) has still yet to be investigated in any detail in English.

The Event

The above photographs show first, the Police Headquarters in Tokyo burning as a result of the earthquake; the second photo shows the famous Asakusa tower in ruins after the fires (Figure  13.1). The devastation wrought by the earthquake is clearly visible in these photographs.4 The means of production utilized by the mass media in Tokyo were nearly all destroyed by the earthquake and fires, thus the production of newspapers and the like reporting on events was quickly relocated to western Japan.5 The famous novelist Tanizaki 4 Photograph taken from Kantō daishinsai [Modan toshi bunka 26] Ed. Wada Hirofumi (original source: the Ōsaka Mainichi newspaper). 5 Ibid. pp. 609–612.

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Police headquarters in Tokyo burning (above) and the Asakusa tower in ruins (below). Photograph taken from Kantō daishinsai [Modan toshi bunka 26] ed. Wada Hirofumi (original source: the Ōsaka Mainichi newspaper).

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Jun’ichirō (1886–1965) who moved immediately to Ōsaka following the earthquake was interviewed by the Ōsaka Mainichi weekly news magazine eight days after the event and remarked, ‘Except for the businesses that survived the earthquake, publication has been shifted to Ōsaka and Kyoto and publishers are now all based in western Japan’.6 The earthquake and ensuing fires and tsunami were quickly the subject of media representation. Gennifer Weisenfeld notes that, ‘The print media had demonstrated its miraculous recovery by producing over seventy special earthquake issues in the month of October alone’.7 A number of special issues of literary and art journals appeared almost immediately. The celebrated tanka journal Araragi (Yew tree) brought out an issue on 1 October, but it was only eight pages in length. The November and December issues were also special earthquake editions; the November issue came to 125 pages.8 The tanka poet Takada Namikichi (1898–1962), whose poetry volume on the earthquake Kawanami (River ripples, 1929) was praised by many, composed the following tanka for the February 1924 issue of Araragi: Hahaue yo Hinaka ni arite Yameru ko wo Itawari kanete Tomo ni shinikemu

Mother! And my sick sister Surrounded by fire Unable to care for her Both perished9

Although the family home was burnt to the ground, Takada’s brother survived the earthquake and fire but his three sisters and mother who were at home died in the firestorm.10 In the special earthquake issue of the magazine Fujin Kurabu (Ladies’ Club) published in October 1923, the well-known free-verse poet Shiratori Shōgo (1890–1973) penned the following short free-verse poem entitled ‘Ryōgoku no hotori’ (Near Ryōgoku): Standing near the Ryōgoku bridge Between the wooden debris and boats 6 Cited ibid. p. 612. 7 Weisenfeld, Imagining Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (Los Angeles, Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 2012), p. 69. 8 Kantō daijishinsai [Modan toshi bunka 26] Ed. Wada Hirofumi, p. 613. 9 Cited ibid. p. 614. 10 Ibid.

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I saw countless bodies floating in the water. Pursued by the flames drowned in the water I saw countless bodies: old young men women What remains with me is A dead mother clutching her baby A woman floating together with her just-born fetus.11 Haiku poets also responded to the tragedy with many fine haiku composed in the aftermath of the earthquake. Here I will translate only a tiny selection but these poems can stand for the response of the larger community of haiku poets to the events of 1 September. First, three haiku from the brush of one of the greatest haiku poets of the modern era: Kawahigashi Hekigotō (1873–1937) who advocated haiku written in a modern free meter format. Hekigotō composed a group of 18 free meter haiku under the title of ‘Shinsai zatsuei’ (Miscellaneous Verse on the Earthquake) that were published in the magazine Midori (Green) in October/November 1923, and the following selection is taken from this sequence. Yoru no Takidashi no Sukima o moru hi

Night: A makeshift kitchen: Flames Flickering between the queue12

Yane goshi no Hi no te ni Kao sarasu yoru

Over the night roofs Flames leaping Exposed faces13

Yakeato o yuku Hirugaeru Hoshi mono no hakufu

Making my way through the ruins White washing Flapping14

Another haiku poet who composed moving poetry in response to the tragedy was Hasegawa Reisho (1886–1928), the husband of the equally famous haiku poet Hasegawa Kanajo (1887–1969). Reisho composed the following haiku that was published in his collection Zassō (Weeds, 1923). The poem has the 11 12

Cited ibid. p. 615. Hennentai: Taishō bungaku zenshū Vol. 12 [1923] ed. Sone, Hiroyoshi (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2002), p. 614. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid.

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head-note, ‘At the back of Hakone, at the time of the earthquake, a rock cliff split in two, falling onto the ground’. Akikusa ni Daibanjaku no Hakanasa yo

Onto the autumn grasses A huge rock fell Nothing lasts15

As is well known, a large number of Korean residents of Tokyo were massacred in the aftermath to the earthquake, the murders ostensibly triggered by rumours of Korean ‘spies’ starting the fires. Estimates of Koreans slaughtered by mobs range from two thousand to eight thousand.16 The free-verse poet Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942), undoubtedly the most acclaimed poet of prewar Japan, wrote the following short free-verse poem entitled ‘Kinjitsu shokan’ (My Impressions of Recent Events) about this event, which was published in the magazine Gendai (The Present) in March 1924: Masses of Koreans were killed Their blood extends over a hundred leagues Enraged, I witnessed this: what barbarity!17 Various debates by writers were carried out after the earthquake as to its significance for literature and art. One of the most explosive was the novelist Kikuchi Kan’s (1888–1948) essay Saigo zakkan (Stray Thoughts After the Quake), published in the leading journal Chūō kōron (Central Review) in October 1923. Kikuchi begins with the following provocative statements: The earthquake was, in the final analysis, a social revolution. Property, position and tradition have been made into an absurdity, society is now based on merit. It is a society for those who can truly work hard. This may be a temporary phenomenon or only partly so but as a result of this horrifying earthquake one good thing has emerged… If politicians and the people alike do not forget the lessons we have learnt, I believe they may be able to avoid the havoc of the social revolution looming up before us…. In any event, I now understand that you make only what you eat yourself; 15 Ibid. 16 Hammer, Yokohama Burning, pp. 167. Gennifer Weisenfeld cites a figure of over 6,000 deaths, Imagining Disaster, p. 66. 17 Hennentai: Taishō bungaku zenshū Vol. 13 [1924] ed. Kamei, Hideo (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2003), p. 550.

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this is the most important job of all. I believe the strongest among us make what they eat themselves. In that sense, the greatest and most powerful jobs are held by farmers… As a result of the earthquake, there is no doubt that art and literature will deteriorate. The fact that we have lost faith in literature and art may be one of the reasons for this. Moreover, the need for literature and art will decline dramatically.18 Kikuchi’s attack on literature, his bold predictions of its irrelevance and inevitable demise in the face of the tragedy caused by the earthquake—which might seem a paradoxical and somewhat self-defeating position for a professional writer to adopt—was quickly rebutted the following month by another well-known novelist, Hirotsu Kazuo (1891–1968), who wrote a reply to Kikuchi in the Jiji shinpō (Current Affairs) newspaper entitled ‘Hinan to bengo (Kikuchi Kan ni taisuru)’ (Criticism and Justification: Against Kikuchi Kan): I know that when we are confronted by earthquakes and fires and wars— events of extraordinary destructive power—then literary works will cease to exist but if we proceed along this path logically, then we can anticipate there will come a time when the earth itself will be destroyed. Thus it is foolish as a general rule for human beings to utter the word eternal. And if we take this to its logical conclusion, then debates will cease, words themselves will disappear… If we contemplate a far distant future when this occurs or rather if we take this to be our basic presupposition, then human life, learning, even art and literature, everything will end up as nothing—however, living and breathing human beings all eject this pessimistic view of life from their thinking. Human beings recoil from this cosmic pessimism or nihilism to return to optimism, to the activism of human life. Thereupon, using human standards, humans create various words…and thus the word eternal lives as a human construction. And so the words eternal art are alive.19 I have quoted at length from these two writers to give a sense of the vitality and urgency of debates conducted by Japanese authors over matters as fundamental as the prospects for literature and art after the earthquake. As a matter of course, many significant works of fiction were also produced on the theme of the earthquake but an analysis of these works lies outside the scope of this study.20 18 Hennentai: Taishō bungaku zenshū Vol. 12 [1923] pp. 554–555. 19 Ibid. pp. 558–559. 20 See Hennentai: Taishō bungaku zenshū Vol. 13, pp. 11–272 for a selection of such works.

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Ah Tokyo

The drawing below is by the celebrated artist and poet Takehisa Yumeji (1884– 1934) (Figure 13.2), and appeared in the special volume entitled Shishū sanbun: Ā Tōkyō (Poetry Prose: Ah Tokyo), published in November 1923.21 This 200 page book was produced by the Kōransha company, well known for publishing poets

Figure 13.2

Drawing by Takehisa Yumeji. Taken from Kantō daishinsai [Modan toshi bunka 26] Ed. Wada Hirofumi (original source: Shishū sanbun: Ā Tōkyō).

21

Reproduced in Kantō daishinsai [Modan toshi bunka 26], p. 5. Weisenfeld reproduces various examples of Takehisa Yumeji’s art and drawings, as well as citing translations of his prose on the tragedy in Imagining Disaster, esp. pp. 129–132, 170–171.

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and poetry, and included works by a representative list of its authors (who acted as the editors), among whom were the free-verse poets Saijō Yaso (1892– 1970), Noguchi Ujō (1882–1945), Ikuta Shungetsu (1892–1930), Takehisa Yumeji, Kawaji Ryūkō, Mizutani Masaru (1894–1950) and Hitomi Tōmei (1883–1974). In the preface, the editors noted that, ‘A hundred nights would not suffice to express the pain and sadness of residents of Tokyo at the loss of so many thousands of lives and millions of yen…We at Kōransha are at one with the feelings of the victims and will memorialize for the future this unparalleled and appalling tragedy; moreover we pray that this calamity will never again befall the imperial capital that now will have to be rebuilt from the ground up’.22 I will examine representative poems from this volume (although there were some prose pieces, most of the items in the volume are poems), and here I should note that verse collected in the book is almost all free verse (jiyūshi)— some written in colloquial diction, others using classical diction; in that sense, the volume confirms the triumph of this mode of verse com­position which was introduced to Japan a mere two decades earlier. The poet generally seen as responsible for the popularity of this new verse genre was Kawaji Ryūkō, and so the first two poems I translate from this book will come from his pen.

Destruction (Hakai) Revolution wrought by Nature is Far more ingenious than The scheming of mankind, Reducing the battered metropolis To ash, In just three minutes Bringing destruction That is not possible without sweat and toil. Like an infant Smashing up a paper doll for no reason whatever.23



Aftershocks (Yoshin) ‘You won’t be wrong to think of this as war!’ ‘But, it’s a war with your life on the line.

22 23

Kantō daijishinsai [Modan toshi bunka 26], p. 10. Ibid. p. 103.

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Every time the earth shakes with a thud Running outside embracing weeping children Makes this a war marked by the depth of human compassion; Looking back at the wailing women and children before my eyes Who will continue the struggle against inexorable Nature tonight All through the sleepless night’.24 The style of poetry in Ah Tokyo closely approaches what James E. Young in his study of Holocaust literature, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (1990), has described as ‘documentary realism’. He comments: ‘“documentary realism” has become the style by which to persuade readers of a work’s testamentary character. For the survivor’s witness to be credible, it must seem natural and unconstructed’.25 Kawaji’s use of the present tense reinforces the sense of immediacy that the poetry projects. His second poem in particular reads as a conversation, an autobiographical or documentary narrative. Another poem from the same volume is the following verse by Mizutani Masaru, which is interwoven into a prose description of the destruction wrought by the earthquake. Unlike Kawaji Ryūkō’s verse, Mizutani’s poem is composed in classical Japanese: There was once a city here — As if fumbling The autumn winds blow over the burnt ground Death slumbers in the unending darkness So silent so black that Memories dissipate in the autumn winds Grief and sadness Scatter into the night air. Ah, a city in ruins! A city inhabited by autumn winds!26 This verse is followed by a prose passage where Mizutani makes more explicit what is powerfully expressed in the poem: ‘The night is no more than a city filled with the black ash of death. The light that flickered brightly in the sky is now a mere memory, like a dream extinguished’.27 The poem is a dirge, or 24 25

Ibid. pp. 104–105. Young, James E. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990) p. 90. 26 Kantō daishinsai [Modan toshi bunka 26], p. 95. 27 Ibid.

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perhaps an elegy to those who perished in the fires that ravaged Tokyo, leaving only ash and desolation. Susan Gubar writing of poetry written on and by the survivors of the Holocaust notes that: At its least mediated, documentary poetry aspires to the condition of journalistic or legal reportage, reiterating the words of survivors to contest incredulity; however, since even representations that claim to imitate the world also construct versions of it, various aesthetic maneuvers inevitably intervene to complicate the reportorial model. North American and British poets have edited legal depositions; transcribed oral histories; described their reactions to circumstantial evidence and trials; used passages in books about the Holocaust as footnotes, titles, epigraphs, and occasions for ethical speculations; and recorded their reactions to conversations with survivors. To the extent that the most literal, legalistic journalism crops testimony as rigorously as a camera frames experience, documentary poets question the objectivity of representation, just as they emphasize the artifice of presumably factual accounts, the blurring of the line between fiction and fact,…28 The objectivity of representation is an interesting notion when applied to poetry. The variety of lyric poetry that Mizutani employs, by virtue of its lyricism, acts to distance the reader from the horror of the devastation caused by the earthquake but, at the same time, it also memorializes it in a way that transcends mere documentary journalism. Mizutani does this by utilizing a traditional figure and device of poetic art: anthropomorphizing the autumn wind; and, in exactly the same way, Kawaji anthropomorphizes Nature (which is why I capitalize it in translation) in his first poem. The transformation of documentary realism into art is one of the defining characteristics of significant poetry. In this sense, the memorialization of trauma/tragedy is the product of a process of formalization. The use of formal categories of poetic expression such as the dirge or elegy or lament transcend the reality of the present and point to a future where only memory—the memory of tragedy formally rendered into art—remains. In essence this is the purpose and function of Ah Tokyo. Yumeji Takehisa’s long, formal lament for those who perished in the fires illustrates this perfectly. I translate only the first stanza of this seven stanza poem: 28

Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 150.

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A Lament for the Dead City (Shito Aishō) 1 Those who survived They can be forgotten These must never be forgotten They and these Were divided and placed into Two boxes One was burnt One survived. The one that was burnt Contained what must never be forgotten.29

Yumeji’s verse has an angular, formal concision that marks it as distinctly modern poetry, although the hand of the draftsman sketching an outline can also be discerned in the work. The abstract, minimalist nature of the poem emphasizes by contrast the immensity of the tragedy.

Earthquake Poetry Collection

Another collection produced on the earthquake that is representative of the outpouring of free verse written in the aftermath of the tragedy is the book entitled Shinsai shishū: Saika no ue ni (Earthquake Poetry Collection: On the Disaster) published in November 1923 by the Shinchōsha company (Figure 13.3). This 240-page volume was edited by a poets’ association called the ‘Shiwakai’ (Poetry Discussion Group), which included such well-known poets as Kitahara Hakushū (1885–1942), Saijō Yaso, Hinatsu Kōnosuke (1890–1971) and Horiguchi Daigaku (1892–1981). Poetry by forty-nine poets was included in this volume but I will translate a sample of just three works. The first is by the famous French poet Paul Claudel (1868–1955), who was the French ambassador to Japan, based in Tokyo from 1921 to 1927. In his 1926 volume L’Oiseau Noir Dans le Soleil Levant (Black Bird Against the Rising Sun), Claudel wrote of the

29

Kantō daishinsai [Modan toshi bunka 26], p. 65.

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Figure 13.3

Cover of  Earthquake Poetry Collection. Taken from Kantō daishinsai [Modan toshi bunka 26] Ed. Wada Hirofumi (original source: Shinsai shishū: Saika no ue ni).

earthquake in a reportage style. He submitted the text below to the editors of the Earthquake Poetry Collection, and this prose poem is apparently a true record (poetically expressed) of his journey to Yokohama searching for his daughter (Figure 13.4).30 30

Ibid. p. 221. For details of Claudel’s movements, and the frantic efforts of Western diplomats to seek out their loved ones, see Hammer, Yokohama Burning, pp. 176–177.

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Figure 13.4

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Poem by Paul Claudel. Taken from Kantō daishinsai [Modan toshi bunka 26] Ed. Wada Hirofumi (original source: Shinsai shishū: Saika no ue ni).

The text is composed in an imitation of the 7/5 meter of traditional Japanese verse, and, literally translated, reads: ‘To my right and my left there is a town burning but the moon between the clouds is the same as seven white women. Head on the rail body tangled together with the trembling body of the earth I listen to the last cicada. On the sea seven syllables of light a single drop of milk’. Claudel is known for his Catholic mysticism, and this mysterious verse expressing the poet’s exhaustion and terror, but also a perverse sense of beauty, captures this incongruous mixture of themes perfectly. In the same collection are poems by Satō Sōnōsuke (1890–1942), a famous modern poet who was interested in faraway places like France and also Okinawa. His verse in this volume is both realistic and fantastic as we see from the following poem written about refugees huddling in a customs warehouse to escape the fires.

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A Heavenly Hell (Tengoku meita jigoku) The customs warehouse filled with ash-grey citizens Goods scattered everywhere, everyone wants something A drink! a drink, the barrels spout a fountain of wine Outside the windows, fire maidens from the harbor Dance in giddying circles: the dance of vultures A poor man’s heaven is wreathed in flame Eyes are keys; hands are pickaxes Scorched to their eyebrows, children lap at milk Their parents have belly-sacs filled with Rhinewine Strolling through a miraculous bazaar.31

This poem presents the truly bizarre spectacle of refugees availing themselves of the luxury goods in the customs warehouse, while fleeing the flames outside which are personified as fire-maidens. Satō’s imagery is strained somewhat in an attempt to capture the Dante-like features of a building that seems like heaven but could soon turn into a hell as it is devoured by the flames. Other poems by him are brutally realistic, but documentary realism has its limits and poets sought escape from the constraints of such narrative devices by recourse to extravagant poetic figures and tropes, as illustrated in this poem. The final free-verse poem from Earthquake Poetry Collection that I translate is the following verse by another famous poet Senge Motomaro (1888–1948).

Death Train (Shi no densha) A burnt train, nothing but bones left, Passengers and the driver alike are nothing but bones On a journey to the land of death How hideous the postures of the dead!32

This rather ugly poem (like much of the poetry in this volume) sums up effectively the grisly horror of the aftermath to the firestorm that engulfed Tokyo.

31 32

Kantō daishinsai [Modan toshi bunka 26], pp. 299–300. Ibid. p. 325.

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Aizu Yaichi’s Aftershocks (Shinyo, 1923)

Aizu Yaichi was born in Niigata on the Japan Sea coast and was educated in his home province as well as at Waseda University in Tokyo, whence he graduated in 1906 with a degree in English literature. From an early age, he displayed a love of poetry and the fine arts and by 1925 was lecturing on Japanese art in Waseda University. His first book of tanka poetry was Nara New Songs (Nankyō Shinshō, 1924), which revealed his admiration for the art and architecture of the Nara region. In this maiden volume of verse, Aizu included eight tanka on the 1923 earthquake under the title Aftershocks (Shinyo, 1923). In 1953, Aizu published a poetry volume entitled Self-Annotated Howling Stag Collection (Jichū Rokumeishū), which included the poet’s own comments on all his verse (which was reproduced in the volume), including Aftershocks, and the following translation of Aizu’s reaction to the earthquake and the tanka he composed recording this event is taken from this book. An image of the text is reproduced below (Figure 13.5). ‘On the first of September [1923] I was eating lunch when suddenly everything began to shake violently, I ran out into my garden but the shocks became increasingly ferocious, and I could no longer stand up. I remained on all fours, looking all round me, the water from the water-lily basins leapt into the air, falling with mud everywhere, half the roof tiles fell down. The aftershocks occurred frequently, my bookcases all collapsed and fell onto the straw mats one on top of the other. As it wasn’t safe to go inside the house, I took the storm shutters from their compartments and choosing a flat place amid the Japanese cedars put the shutters down as a floor. Stripping the carpet from my parlour, I made it into a shelter over my head and spent many days there…’33 The following five tanka are taken from Aftershocks but it should be noted that the remaining untranslated three poems in the sequence for the most part echo the grisly verse that is demonstrated by the fourth poem I translate here. Ōtono mo Nobe no kusane mo Oshinabete Nai uchifuru ka Kami no manimani

The fields the grasses The Emperor’s palace Will you shake them all With your earthquake? O god of creation34

33 Aizu Yaichi Zenshū (Tokyo: Chūōkōronsha, 1968) Vol. 5, p. 158. 34 Ibid.

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Aizu Yaichi on the 1923 earthquake. Taken from the Aizu Yaichi Zenshū (Tokyo: Chūōkōronsha, 1968) Vol. 5, p. 158.

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The above poem is written in Aizu’s famous neo-classical style where the poet uses recondite vocabulary drawn from ancient literature, and like all of his verse, is composed in the hiragana script (minus any Chinese characters), another gesture to the Japanese past. The use of such diction and vocabulary adds a certain austere, almost classical quality to the poem, and this in turn acts to his theme of the unbridled power of nature. Uchihisasu Miyakōji mo Watatsumi no Nami no uneri to Nai furiyamazu

On the sunlit Avenues of the capital Like the rolling Waves over the waters The earthquake does not end35

This next poem is similar to the preceding verse in both diction and theme. Atarashiki Machi no chimata no Noki no ha ni Kagayou haru o Itsu to ka matamu

I can hardly wait For spring to dance Onto the eaves of rooftops On the streets Of our town reborn36

This much praised verse looks to the future, to next spring when all will be reborn in a cataclysm of new growth. Aki no hi wa Tsugite terasedo Kokobaku no Hito no abura wa Tsuchi ni kawakazu

The autumn sunlight Continues to shine But the grease From countless corpses Lies wet on the earth37

This tanka is of a piece with much of the documentary style of literature produced in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, and is unsparing in its description of the loss of life. Waga yado no Perū no tsubo mo 35 36 37

Ibid. p. 159. Ibid. p. 159. Ibid. p. 161.

The vase from Peru In my home was

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Kudaketari Na ga Panseon Tsutsu ga arazu ya

Completely shattered Your Pantheon Is it still safe?38

This last verse that I translate from Aftershocks is a slightly humorous poem (as stated by the author in his notes to the verse), where the narrator wonders if the earthquake has even shaken the mighty Pantheon in Greece, given that it has shattered his precious Peruvian vase.

Kubota Utsubo’s Shiny Leaves (Kagamiba, 1926)

In 1926 the famous poet Kubota Utsubo’s tanka collection Kagamiba (Shiny Leaves) was published, and included in the collection are twenty-four tanka on the earthquake. I have selected five poems from this selection for translation. Kubota begins his poetry with the following note: ‘Fortunately my house was spared the damage caused by the great earthquake of September 1st. There were many people I was worried about but there was no way I could visit them. On the 2nd, hoping for the aftershocks to subside, I went to see the remains of my nephew’s house in Sarugaku-chō, Kanda’.39 This note is followed by the first poem in the sequence, which chronicles the poet’s increasingly desperate search for his nephew: Moenokoru Honoo no hara o Yukimodori Miredomo wakazu Oi ga ie Atari

Walking back through The smoldering Paddocks Not comprehending what I saw Near my nephew’s home40

Chi wa subete Akaki oki nari Kono shita ni Oi no ari tomo Waga ika ni semu

The earth was completely covered In red embers Underneath My nephew may be buried What can I do?41

38 Ibid. p. 163. 39 Kubota Utsubo, Kashū Kagamiba (Tokyo: Tanka shinbunsha bunko, 1992). p. 77. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid.

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Yakenokori Akaki hi moyuru Jinbochō Misakichō yukedo Hito hitori mizu

Still burning The red fires burning I ventured through Misakichō and Jinbochō Saw not a single soul42

Tobotobo to Noronoro to furafura to Kuru hitora Hitomi suwarite Tada ni kewashiki

Trudging Creeping along reeling People Eyes fixed Just grim43

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The above verse is noticeable for the heavy use of onomatopoeia and alliteration, as well as the ji-amari (extra syllables), common features of modern tanka poetry. The last poem is about his friend, the tanka poet Nishikawa Tomoyoshi, who Kubota heard had died at Hifukushō in eastern Tokyo. Kegashitaru Chichi o seoite Hi no chimata Hashireru Nishikawa o Hito no mata mizu

Carrying on his back His injured father Running through The streets of fire Nishikawa was never seen again44

Yosano Akiko’s Poetry on the Earthquake

Yosano Akiko and Wakayama Bokusui were associates as well as two of the greatest poets of twentieth century Japan; both poets were leaders of the school of tanka that was greatly influenced by the naturalist movement, especially after 1910.45 I will discuss Bokusui’s verse later but will first investigate Akiko’s poetry on the earthquake. Akiko is without any doubt the most celebrated female poet of her time.46 Despite the fact that her Tokyo residence did 42 Ibid. p. 78. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. p. 79. 45 For details on naturalism and tanka, see Leith Morton The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), pp. 92–96. 46 For details of Akiko’s life, see Janine Beichmann Embracing The Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,

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not suffer any damage during the earthquake, Akiko was deeply affected by this event because the manuscript of her translation or commentary on the Tale of Genji (the second version of the work that Akiko finished), which she had placed for the safekeeping in the school that she ran, was completely  destroyed in the ensuing fires. This was a great loss to Akiko and to scholarship on Genji (other manuscripts by Akiko were also destroyed in the fires).47 Subsequently Akiko wrote a large number of tanka about the earthquake, which were later collected and published in her 20th collection of poetry Rurikō (Lapis Lazuli Light, 1925).48 The collection contained 529 tanka plus a free-verse poem. The number of tanka written on the theme of the earthquake come to fifty-four in total, from which I have selected ten poems for translation, the order of the verses (as in the original) making a narrative documenting the events of that terrible day and following night (Figure 13.6). Daichi o ba Aisuru mono no Kanashimi o Azameru kugatsu Tsuitachi no sora

The sky of The first of September Mocks our grief We who love Mother earth!49

Yasuminaku Nai shite aki no Getsumei ni Aware moyuru ka Tōkyō no machi

Unrelenting The earthquake In the autumn moonlight Will it all burn down? How pitiful The city of Tokyo50

2002). For translations from her most famous book of poetry, see Leith Morton, Yosano Akiko no ‘Midaregami’ wo Eigo de Ajiwau. [Enjoying Yosano Akiko’s ‘Tangled Hair’ in English] (Tokyo: Chukei shuppan, 2007). 47 The first colloquial version of Genji produced by Akiko was published in 1912–13, and, according to Gay Rowley, the work that was destroyed in the fires was to be a detailed commentary on or annotated version of the text. Her third version was published in 1938–39. See G.G. Rowley, Yosano Akiko and The Tale of Genji for details (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2000), pp. 135–139. 48 Hirako Kyōko (ed.) [Nenpyō: Sakka Tokuhon] Yosano Akiko. (Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 1995), p. 116–121. 49 Yosano Akiko, Tekkan Akiko zenshū. Vol. 22. Ed. Itsumi Kumi, (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2007). p. 242. 50 Ibid.

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Figure 13.6 Akiko in 1926, three years after the quake. Taken from Hirako Kyōko (ed.) [Nenpyō: Sakka Tokuhon] Yosano Akiko.

Kōmyō o Suteshi miyako ga Mizukara o Yaku honoo age Akaku suredomo

The capital abandoning Hope and Buddha’s grace equally Burning itself to death Flames rising All is red51

Waga miyako Hi no umi to nari Yamanote ni Nokorunakaba wa Shōmō wo matsu

Our capital Has become a sea of flame Uptown The remaining half of the city is Awaiting total destruction52

51 Ibid. 52 Ibid.

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‘Uptown’ (Yamanote) was the area where the wealthy citizens of Tokyo dwelled; fortunately few people died there. This stood in stark contrast to the unfortunate ‘downtown’ (shitamachi) where the poor resided, and was the scene of many deaths. Nai no yo no Kusamakura o ba Fuku mono wa Daichi ga morasu Zetsubō no iki

The night of the earthquake Outdoors sleeping rough The breeze is The earth’s Exhalations of despair53

Ōtsuka Torahiko notes that when the earthquake occurred, Akiko fled with her family to the riverbank where they spent two nights together with other evacuees.54 As stated above, Akiko’s house was uptown in Kōjimachi, and so escaped destruction.

53 54

Tenchi kuyu Inochi wo oshimu Kokoro dani Ima shibashi nite Wasure hatsu beki

Heaven and earth break The thought of Cherishing life Now will be forgotten For a brief instant55

Kono yowa ni Ikinokoritaru Kazu saguru Ayashiki kaze no Ningen wo fuku

In the middle of the night Counting Survivors A sinister wind Blows over humanity56

Dare mite mo Oya harakara no Kokochi sure Nai osamarite Asa ni itareba

No matter who you see You feel the same as Parents brothers and sisters The earthquake has subsided Morning has come57

Ibid. p. 243. Ōtsuka Torahiko ed., Uta no imi ga sugu wakaru—Meika sokuyaku Yosano Akiko (Tokyo: Pia, 2004), p. 227. 55 Yosano Akiko, Tekkan Akiko zenshū. Vol. 22., p. 243. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. p. 244.

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Sora ni nomi Kiritsu nokorite Hi no shizumi Haikyo no ue ni Tsuki nobori kinu

Only in the heavens Does order remain The sun sinks Over the ruins The moon has risen58

Hito amata Shinuru hi ni shite Ikitaru wa Shi yori hakanaki Kokochi koso sure

On a day when Countless people have perished Life is More fleeting than death This is what I felt59

Wakayama Bokusui’s Miscellaneous Poems on the Aftershocks

Wakayama Bokusui was renowned as the poet of journeying and saké, about which he composed much verse. He also wrote eight tanka on the earthquake in his 15th collection of tanka Black Pines (Kuromatsu, 1938). The volume was put together ten years after the poet’s death, in one sense as a memorial to Bokusui’s work.60 The book contained poetry written between 1923 and 1928, including what the distinguished tanka critic Shinma Shin’ichi calls ‘a linked sequence of poems’ (rensaku), that is, the eight poems titled ‘Yoshin zatsuei’ (Miscellaneous Poems on the Aftershocks). Shinma remarks that the sequence was begun on 1 September 1923, namely, the day the earthquake occurred.61 Bokusui also kept a diary record of the earthquake in a single volume of recollections entitled Tree and Leaves (Jūmoku to sono ha, 1925). My translation of the sequence follows: Yo ni hiru ni Nai yuritsuzuku Konogoro no Kokoro susabi no Sube nakarikeri

Day and night The earthquakes continue At a time such as this Hearts cannot help But harden62

58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. p. 245. 60 Shinma Shin’ichi annot., Nihon no shiika: Yosano Tekkan Yosano Akiko Wakayama Bokusui Yoshii Isamu (Tokyo: Chūkō bunko, 1975), p. 284. 61 Ibid. 62 Wakayama Bokusui zenkashū (Tokyo: Tanka shinbunsha, 1975), ed. Daigō, Toshio, p. 457.

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Tsuki koete Nao yuritsuzuku Ōnai no Koyoi mo yuru yo Kono shizuka yo o

A month later Still going on The enormous earthquake Tonight too rocking This tranquil night63

Me no mae no Dentō no hi o Yurisutete Nai sugiyukinu Kono shizuka yo o

Before my very eyes Jolting the Glow of the electric light The earthquake rolls uncaring Over this tranquil night64

Niwa ki kusa Susamite zo miyu Yoru hiru naku Nai yuritsuzuki Hareshi hi goro o

Look how the trees and grasses In the garden have gone to seed Day and night The earthquake still going on This fine day65

Waga kokoro Ikidooroshi mo Yoru hiru naku Yuritsuzuku nai o Uchimamorite

The rage In my heart Day and night Staring at The never-ending earthquake66

Waga musume Muttsu ni nareru ga Itaitashi Nai ni obiete Yase no mietaru

My daughter Has turned six How bitter to see Her thin frame Terrified from the earthquake67

Asa yoi ni Aimiru tsuma o Kodomora o

The sadness of keeping The wife I see morning and evening

63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid.

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Mamoritsutsu kanashi Nai no shigeki ni

My children From the shock of the quake68

Nagori naru Kabe no yabure no Fuyu wa nao Me ni tsuku mono o Nao yururu nai

Aftereffects: The winter With broken walls Everywhere I look The quake is never-ending69

Wakayama wrote these poems near the end of his life, and it can be said that his style had reached a literary peak with these verses. The connections between the poems in terms of shared and repeated motifs, by the stress placed upon mention of the continuing tremors and their continuing effects upon people, are carefully mapped out through the device of Bokusui’s steady rhythm. I have not dwelt on the stylistics or techniques of the powerful examples of poetry scrutinized hitherto, but that the verses investigated above are the product of a group of poets exceedingly skilled at their art even when dealing with an event of such unprecedented tragedy as the 1923 earthquake cannot be denied. Their poetry still has the power to move readers, and this fact alone is testimony to their continuing significance as literary creations. These verses memorialize a hideous tragedy, and thus have created a remarkable precedent for poets chronicling such events in the future, as can be seen in the outpouring of poetry produced on the subject of the 11 March 2011 earthquake, where, once again, documentary description mingles with considered reflection to produce undeniably important art.

Brief Concluding Note

In her fine, detailed study of the visual culture created by the 1923 earthquake, Gennifer Weisenfeld writes, ‘Memorial spaces not only serve as spiritual sanctuaries but also provide, in Timothy Brown’s words, a kind of “pedagogy of trauma” that goes beyond mere description and narration of the event. In such venues, salvaged artifacts and exhibit spaces are mobilized to bear witness to the event in a visceral and palpable manner that cannot be represented solely by photographs and other documentary materials’.70 Literature also provides a 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Imagining Disaster, p. 285.

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pedagogy of trauma in that it acts to both capture for history the facts of the tragedy itself and fashion a cathartic release from the trauma caused by the earthquake. In the poetry studied above, we have seen not merely documentary description but also attempts at catharsis. The incongruous humour of Aizu Yaichi’s Peruvian vase, as well as Yosano Akiko’s invocations of the Buddha, where the tragedy is given a cosmic dimension, are useful examples of cathartic verse, although they are but a tiny sampling of a much larger body of work written with similar aims. As Weisenfeld and other chroniclers of the event point out, there was also an element of concealment in these memorials (whether architectural or literary) as the authorities sought to suppress information on the slaughter of Koreans. The personal touches so evident in the individual narratives and verses of poets also reshape the tragedy in such a way as to make it comprehensible for future generations. Such an immense tragedy on the massive scale of the 1923 earthquake cannot be reproduced in any real way in poetic art, or art in general, but by carefully reshaping and selecting incidents for emphasis, an apprehension of the event is created, one that bears witness to the irreducible dimension of individual experience. This not only reminds future generations of the event but also creates a literary precedent or model for the witnessing and recording of similar events, as we have seen in the recent outpouring of verse of all types and varieties on the 11 March 2011 East Japan Earthquake, and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. This study has only documented a fraction of the verse produced in the aftermath to the 1923 earthquake but the range and quality of poetry seen here has many lessons to teach us, not only about the history of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, but also about the value of art and the possibilities that poetry can create.

Chapter 14

Proletarian Writers and the Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923 Mats Karlsson

University of Sydney

Prologue On 9 April 2000 the writer turned hawkish politician and mayor of Tokyo Ishihara Shintarō was invited to address the Self-Defence Forces at a commemorative ceremony held at their Nerima base in Tokyo. In his speech he referred to the duties of the forces in terms that aroused fierce opposition from various directions: When we look at Tokyo today, we see that illegally entered third country nationals, foreigners, are repeatedly committing extremely heinous crimes. Crime in Tokyo has already changed shape compared to the past. Considering this situation, in the event of a natural disaster incidents of great, great civil disorder are even to be expected. In order to deal with something like that there are limits to the power of the police. In that case, we expect you to report to duty, and not only to provide disaster first aid, but we also expect you to accomplish the important aim of maintaining public order. These comments were made in connection with a large-scale military manoeuvre, which was planned for the following September, to practise natural disaster prevention and to deliver first aid. The main reason that Ishihara’s speech created such controversy was a word he used. The word sangokujin, or third country nationals, carries two meanings, one of which is taboo in today’s language usage. Before and during the Second World War it was a derogatory term used to denote nationals from countries under Japan’s colonial rule living in Japan. Responding to the critique, Ishihara however claimed that he had used the word in its other sense of ‘nationals other than from the country concerned’, which carries more neutral connotations. What added explosive force to the utterance, though, was the mental leap he made from natural disaster to rioting foreigners, to many an eerie reminder © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004268319_016

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of the massacre of thousands of innocent Koreans, in the immediate aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake that struck Tokyo on 1 September 1923. Groundless rumours, to the effect that Koreans and also socialists were rioting and poisoning wells and deliberately starting fires, had spread like an epidemic and initiated an unprecedented persecution. Even though Ishihara tried to exculpate himself by claiming that he had intended no scapegoating of Koreans – he had only meant to say that there is no telling what illegally entered criminal foreigners may do in the event of disaster – the damage had already been done. (Sankei shinbun 13 April 2000, Osaka morning edition: 29) Although media seemed to focus on semantics, this incident is indicative of how Japan’s problematic colonial past and treatment of colonial subjects remain a sensitive and contested issue even today. Introduction The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 has been identified as a defining cultural moment and turning point in Japan’s social as well as literary history. Writing at the time, the well-known writer Kikuchi Kan’s (1888–1948) defeatist declaration of the powerlessness of literature became a famous, if contested, reference point of post-disaster sentiment among intellectuals. Kikuchi did think the earthquake would have a single beneficial effect: by setting in motion a social revolution, it would level the playing field and bring the principle of ‘precedence of merit’ (jitsuryoku hon’i) to the fore. If only statesmen and the masses alike would learn this one lesson, the ravages of the social revolution that was bound to come sooner or later anyway might be evaded, he thought. As for literature, though, the disaster only spelt gloom. Kikuchi surmised that literary men must now have learnt the vivid lesson that, on the borderline between life and death, literature turns into a useless luxury item, the realization of which unpleasant truth had made them lose faith in their work. As a result literature was bound to weaken, while the demand for it would go into a sharp decline (Kikuchi Kan 1923: 116–117). Nakajima Kenzō, to take a retrospective example, understands the disaster, occurring at the height of the supposedly milder climate of the so-called ‘Taishō Democracy’, as a ‘repugnant prologue’ (imawashī jokyoku) to Shōwa history: Even on the paper scroll of Japan’s cruel history from Taishō to Shōwa, the tragedy of the Great Kanto Earthquake stands out conspicuously. Here I perceive the starting point of an even greater tragedy [the war to come]. The reason is that I think that the modern state of affairs, with atrocities

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in disregard of law and order carried out openly, and with no one held to account except for one person, Amakasu Masahiko [the military-police captain who was court-martialled for killing the anarchist Ōsugi Sakae on 16 September and sentenced to ten years], started with the great earthquake. nakajima kenzō 1957: 21

Nakajima thought that the scale of the natural disaster was great in itself, but what turned it into an even greater catastrophe was the fact that the ensuing cruelty could be carried out openly without anyone protesting, and the question of responsibility was never pursued: ‘Despite the fact that people ranging from those connected to state power to ordinary citizens trampled on law and order and committed murder, the question of the locus of responsibility ended in almost complete noncommittal ambiguity’ (Nakajima Kenzō: 25). Imai Sei’ichi reads the disaster as the site where two simultaneous but contradictory developments were set in motion: the unfolding of modernity during the reconstruction and the increased repressiveness of state policy. In this sense, the earthquake can be seen to have triggered a ‘sudden rise in mass culture’ (taishū bunka no bokkō), while at the same time it occasioned a backlash that led to a ‘democracy in agony’ (demokurashī no kumon), as illustrated by the chapter titles of Imai’s book and as reflected in the lineage stretching from the martial law of 1923 to the introduction of the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 (Imai Sei’ichi 2008). The distinguished literary critic Odagiri Susumu continues this line of thought: ‘The series of policies – foremost among them the barbaric legislation of the Peace Preservation Law, unprecedented in the world – implemented on the pretext of maintaining peace and order, engraved anxiety and fear in intellectuals more than the natural disaster had done’ (Odagiri Susumu 1967: 68). The law allowed for depriving citizens of the freedoms of speech, expression, assembly and association at any time. Another point that reappears in commentaries is the reflection that the earthquake set a series of events in motion that ultimately led to the rise of fascism during the 1930s.1 Against this general background, this chapter is an attempt to delineate the typical leftist and socialist approaches to the disaster, focusing mainly on contemporary testimony of writers and intellectuals who were more or less 1 Tsuda Takashi et al., for instance, argue that the kind of animosity against socialism which makes up the foundation of fascism was formed in the circumstances of collective madness that followed the earthquake (Tsuda Takashi et al. 1989: 270).

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involved in the rising Proletarian Literary Movement.2 When we consider these approaches, we find that the focus tends to be on the ensuing persecution rather than on the natural disaster as such.

The Critical Stance

Aono Suekichi (1890–1961), a leading critic and theoretician of the early movement, for instance, in a newspaper article series advocated for distinguishing between natural causes and man-made, artificial causes of the disaster. What caused the disaster to become a disaster in the true sense of the word was, according to Aono, the eruption of violence that took place in the commotion directly after the quake had struck. Even though the chain of events had been set off by groundless rumours, he asks where the initiative lay to spread the rumours as though they were true. Furthermore, since everything in the world happens according to logic, Aono poses the question of what social reasons caused groups and individuals to commit murder on their own authority. In Marxist jargon he claims that the violence exposed the deadlock that the relationship between the subjugators and the subjugated, as well as between the exploiters and the exploited, had fallen into due to the conflicts and contradictions inherent in social life. Aono exhorts all ‘true’ writers to refrain from shutting their eyes in awe before the horrors of the disaster and instead to grasp what is significant by looking squarely at reality (Aono Suekichi 1923a). When a month later Aono looked back at the literary output of the year he found, however, only inertia from the established writers. Although he admits that they firmed up somewhat after the earthquake, the dominant mode had soon reverted to deal with trivial private matters in line with the tradition of the Japanese literary circles (bundan). He wonders how writers expect to be able to get in tune with the masses when they persist in keeping aloof from the social reality facing them. Despite his pessimism, though, he senses a distinctive mood of instability within literary circles, caused by the friction between the inertia of the surface and an undercurrent that is gaining momentum. Thanks to this undercurrent – by which, one surmises, he means proletarian literature – Japanese literature has entered a period of transition (Aono Suekichi 1923b: 8). 2 Works of note that are not dealt with in this article include two short stories by renegade soldiers turned socialists who provide testimony from the military point of view (Ecchūya Riichi, ‘Kaigenrei to heisotsu’, Senki 1928.9: 83–86; Fujimori Seikichi, ‘Kusama chūi’, Senki 1928.10: 8–12), and Akita Ujaku’s play dealing with the slaughter of Koreans, Gaikotsu no buchō (Engeki shinchō, 1924: 4: 28–49).

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Another prominent aspect of leftist reactions to the disaster was the reflection that it was the lower classes that had been hit hardest. In opposition to the renowned author Tsubouchi Shōyō’s remarks that the quake had made no distinction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie since it had left everyone stripped to the skin (Tsubouchi Shōyō 1923: 3), Aono retorted that, although earthquakes and fires may not differentiate among classes, there is a class distinction in the misfortune among people at the receiving end. He goes on to repeat his above claim that the man-made disasters that added to the natural disaster were a product of class factors and would not have occurred in a society devoid of class discrimination. Aono also refutes the widespread claim that proletarian literature would be wiped out by the earthquake: since the existence of classes and class conflict is not a superficial phenomenon, a movement firmly rooted in class will not be dispelled by an earthquake any more than will be society as a whole (Aono Suekichi 1924: 44–46). Considering the surge of proletarian literature during the next ten years or so, we may conclude that Aono was right on this last point. The journal Tanemaku hito (The Sower), the harbinger of the proletarian literary movement, published one extra edition dated 17 September before ceasing due to the destruction caused by the earthquake. Here the editors go further than Aono in blaming nature for being unfair: ‘In capitalist society not even nature can be said to be completely impartial; it was the disadvantaged areas of Honjo and Fukagawa, where many poor live, that met with the most gruesome destruction’. Defeatism, though, is not something that they would revert to: ‘Everything has been reduced to ashes. But our spirit keeps shining. What ought we to do? The same as ever, from beginning to end. In our soul there is not a trace of a tremble or despair. The bright future of the coming life shines radiantly in front of us’. As a practical problem to tackle they demanded an egalitarian new city plan to be drawn up on class principles. The journal also highlights the Korean problem. Even though the government had acknowledged the rumours to be groundless and repealed its accusation that Koreans lay behind the civil unrest, which had occasioned the government to proclaim martial law on 2 September, the atrocious behaviour that the Koreans had become victims of needed to be recognized as an indisputable reality and dealt with accordingly. The editors especially indict youth associations (seinendan) for having carried out the persecution. (Tanemaku hito ‘Teito shinsai gōgai’, October 1923: unpaginated) In addition to the massacre of Koreans, another incident on a smaller scale occurring on 4 September has come to be inscribed in the historiography of Japanese socialism. This was the so-called Kameido Incident in which the police and military took advantage of the confusion caused by the earthquake

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to clamp down on a stronghold of labour union activism, leaving nine union members dead, as well as the playwright and anarcho-syndicalist labour union member Hirasawa Keishichi, along with four other supporters involved in an on-going labour dispute. Tanemaku hito devoted a last issue published in January 1924 to this incident (Tanemaki zakki ‘Kameido no jun’nansha o aitō suru tame ni’), including testimony by friends and relatives of the last known activities of the victims, testifying to their peaceful behaviour to counter the official version that they had been involved in illegal acts of social unrest. This last issue opens with an appeal signed by the ‘The Executive Committee of the Communist Youth International’ (Kyōsanshugi seinen intānashonaru shikkō i’inkai). The fact that members of the Japan Communist Youth League made up the core of the union in question, Nankatsu Rōdō Kumiai, and that a first Young Communist International Day in Japan had been planned for 2 September, indicates that one of the motivations behind the police involvement had been to target this communist affiliation (see Tsuda Takashi et al., 1989: 267). At the same time the incident amply illustrates how authorities exploited the chaos that ensued in the wake of the earthquake as a tool for their own political agenda. As noted, not only Koreans but also socialists became targets of the groundless rumours. Hosoda Tamiki (1892–1972) – a writer who had created a stir with novels criticizing the military based on his three years as a conscripted soldier and who later moved towards the proletarian literary movement – at an early stage refuted the rumours by pointing to the absurdity of the claims: Regarding the causes of the great fires it seems socialists have also been falsely charged. In the history of the development of socialism there is probably no record of successfully having been able to take advantage of a natural disaster. Ideologues [shugisha] are surely aware of this. Furthermore, as a socialist strategy, it is not likely that they would make such a blunder as to worsen the calamity of a natural disaster, thereby to risk losing the sympathy of the masses and instead incur their hatred […] Rather than the existence or nonexistence of the truth of arson by ideologues, the fact that such rumours could rise like a flood tide tells quite eloquently of the trends of the contemporary public mindset. hosoda tamiki 1923: 82

The crucial point here seems to be what to make of the phrase ‘trends of the public mindset’ (jinshin keikō). Is this meant to signify that people were searching for scapegoats and willing to pounce on any candidate they came up with? Or does it mean that the repressive stance of the authorities had had its effect

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and created an anti-socialist mind-set in mainstream society? Unfortunately, the text does not give clear evidence on this point.3

The Literary Evidence

In Tsuboi Shigeji’s (1897–1975) recollections five years later, though, we find useful commentary that elaborates on the zeitgeist at the time of the earthquake. Tsuboi, who started out as an anarchist poet before turning socialist, was elected a member of the central committee of the Japan Proletarian Writers’ League (Nihon Puroretaria Sakka Dōmei) at its inaugural meeting in 1928 and immersed himself in the publication of the League’s flagship journal Battle Flag (Senki). In a contribution to the journal with the title of ‘Fifteen yen fifty sen’ (‘Jūgo en gojissen’) he outlines his observations on the overcrowded train on which he escaped from Tokyo on 5 September: [The passengers] talked about the various terrifying incidents that they had seen and heard and met with from the time when that great earthquake struck at noon on 1 September up until now. And then, with exaggerated gestures and manner of talking, they related the groundless rumours as though they were the truth itself. Among them there was a chivalrous man who even rattled on proudly, without a trace of hesitation, 3 Yoshimura Akira provides a useful explanatory model of the phenomenon of guilt by association whereby socialists became fellow scapegoats alongside Koreans. He recounts the events leading up to a socialist tie-up in the formation of the Confederation of Korean Workers (Chōsenjin rōdōsha dōmeikai) in late 1922. According to him, this alliance of socialists and Korean workers came as a great shock to the ruling classes. Japan’s annexation of Korea had stirred violent animosity towards Japan in Korea. Consequently, there was great apprehension that this situation would escalate into social disturbances involving Korean workers in Japan spurred on by the involvement of socialists. Furthermore, he points out that there was a strong inclination among the common people to shun activists due to governmental propaganda to the effect that they embraced the fearsome intent of overthrowing state order. Public sentiment towards Koreans, however, was different to this. In Japan there was a tendency to sympathize with the docile Korean workers, while overlooking their plight as the fate of an oppressed race, something that amounted to a sort of guilt consciousness. Socialists, on the other hand, actively supported Korean workers and stressed their allegiance to them. Against this background, Yoshimura somewhat controversially claims that the groundless rumours arose and spread naturally: socialists who habitually advocated revolution might take the opportunity to commence active measures, while Koreans, deprived of their homeland and forced to harsh labour conditions, might take advantage of the chaos to vent their pent-up hatred against the Japanese (Yoshimura Akira 1973: 23, 111–112).

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about slaying a Korean on a whim with one single stroke of the sword, while he showed off an arm with uncanny tattoos on it. Also among them were people who took it as a foregone conclusion that the reason Tokyo had become so engulfed in great fires was that socialists had thrown bombs all over the place. Surveying the inside of the car, one fellow shouted, ‘After all, socialists might have sneaked their way in here as well’ […] Each time I heard people one after the other yell out words of hatred for Koreans and socialists, I felt the utmost hatred towards that hatred itself. Being alone, though, I could do nothing but to consume my hatred within myself. tsuboi shigeji 1928: 80

Every time the train stopped at a station the carriages were inspected by soldiers with bayonetted rifles, attesting to the fact that the security line put in place when Tokyo was placed under martial law stretched far into the countryside. At a station three Korean workers hiding under a carriage were discovered and handed over to the young people’s association (seinendan) of the town, who were urged on by the passengers to kill them off. One fellow decided that the Koreans’ intention in hiding on the train had been to overturn it, whereupon an old lady stroked her chest in relief over having escaped the peril so narrowly. ‘Carrying these groundless rumours together with the illusions and hallucinations of the ignorant “masses”’, relates Tsuboi, ‘the train advanced on and on through the dark’ (Tsuboi Shigeji 1928: 81). In a scene on the following morning we learn the significance of the title of the story. At a station a soldier with a bayonetted rifle pokes his head in through a window and orders a surprised passenger to say the words ‘fifteen yen fifty sen’ (jūgo en gojissen) in order to determine whether he is a Korean, as they often have difficulties with pronouncing voiced consonants. For Tsuboi the mere memory of the great earthquake fills him with violent anger against the authorities: ‘In the confusion of the moment of that great earthquake the then reactionary government, which was a tool of the capitalist and landowning classes, mobilized all institutions they could use to carry out a systematic [two characters self-censored, possibly the word gyakusatsu] massacre of countless Koreans, workers and the militant proletariat. The Ōsugi Incident and the Kameido Incident were mere examples appearing on society’s surface’ (Tsuboi Shigeji 1928: 82). Interestingly, encounters with Koreans, or purported Koreans, on trains with evacuees out of Tokyo, become a recurring theme in several literary pieces. Proletarian writer forerunner Miyajima Sukeo’s True or false (Shingi), for instance, relates how a group of probable Koreans tend to an ailing old passenger in need of help on the train and who suddenly become tense and

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expressionless when another passenger brings up the topic of the commotion involving Koreans. The short story ends with the protagonist’s observations of the look in their eyes: ‘In the chilly, indifferent and uncanny light in their eyes, flowing from the depths inside them, of endured resignation and concealed feelings in their hearts, he felt a fearsome force hidden’ (Miyajima Sukeo 1923: 19). The fellow leftist forerunner critic and writer Eguchi Kan (1887–1975) published a short piece in Asahi shinbun with the title of ‘An incident on the train’ (‘Shachū no dekigoto’). The train out of Tokyo on 8 September is packed to the limit with refugees, spilling on to the car roofs like ‘ants gathering on a caterpillar’ and brimming with rumours about the disaster and about Koreans and socialists. When the train crosses over Arakawa River the passengers lay their eyes on people throwing stones at a corpse floating on the surface, a sight which invites even more excited gossip over Koreans and socialists. After a while there is a commotion among the passengers created by a quarrel between a reservist in khaki uniform and a merchant-looking man. The man in khakis rises to his feet and declares the other man to be Korean and all of a sudden gives him a kick in the head. There is great pushing and shoving as the passengers pounce on the poor man. At the next station he is shoved out headlong through a window onto the platform where blows rain down on him from the groups of waiting people belonging to the fire brigade, the young people’s association and to the reservists. The narrator and a few other passengers try to put an end to the assault by insisting that the man is Japanese, but to no avail. The man, now bleeding from the head, is brusquely dragged away from the station. For the narrator, the ugly sight of group terror, of the man being dragged along by the avalanche of people and disappearing beyond the ticket gate, becomes imprinted on his mind, ‘From my heart I could not help feeling contempt and hatred toward the courageous and devoted “Japanese spirit” [Yamatodamashi] involved in the triumphant slaughter of a defenceless minority by the armed power of the majority’ (Eguchi Kan 1923: 8). One noteworthy literary piece that treats the catastrophe in almost realtime is Ogawa Mimei’s (1882–1961) short story Fortuitous Things (Hakarazaru koto) published in the November 1923 issue of Kaizō. Ogawa is known to posterity as a writer of children’s stories; from around 1915, though, he was active as a pioneering socialist writer who involved himself in workers’ literature and leftist literary circles. Fortuitous Things is a low-keyed meditation on human nature devoid of the kind of Marxist rhetoric that otherwise tends to pop up in progressive writings of the time. It starts off with a reflection of life and death reminiscent of Shiga Naoya’s famous 1917 At Kinosaki (Kinosaki nite). Upon killing insect pests that cling to plants in his garden, the protagonist, K, muses to himself, ‘On what criteria do we call them insect pests? They are all trying to

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live. And they possess the freedom to do so, don’t they?’ Yet he decides that harmful things must be eliminated. He cuts a caterpillar feeding off a gardenia in two and notices how the two halves quiver although the insect’s life has been extinguished: When doing so he was overcome with a deep melancholy. ‘Do human beings, who don’t possess the power to create any life, have the right to destroy that life?’ Even if it did not constitute a crime amongst mankind, it even felt as though he had committed a crime against nature not easily perpetrated. Through feeling so he was assailed with an invisible fear. But who could criticize him for that now? When that thought occurred to him he went on killing the caterpillars, sparing no one. ogawa mimei 1923b: 4

This opening scene, recurring to the protagonist’s mind as a leitmotif, sets the tone and atmosphere of the story to unfold. In the next scene he becomes unsettled to see children killing ants who are straining to carry eggs in their mouths, innumerable ants losing their lives in just a tread of a child’s foot. Next day the earthquake strikes. A few days later K finds himself facing an unknown man at the rural outskirts of the city to where he has evacuated. Says the man: ‘People had become too self-complacent. They treated nature with too much contempt. They forgot to live in fear of Heaven. It’s a punishment, Heaven’s retribution. A fine lesson’ (Ogawa Mimei 1923b: 9).4 The man’s words induce K to recall the pitiful sight he had witnessed when cutting the insects in half: ‘Although no one would blame him for his deed, he thought he had acted too arrogantly. Can you say it is not a cruel deed just because no one is blaming you for it? When he realized it had been a massacre of something with one and the same life as his, he felt an inexpressible fear. In this case, nature, which possesses a power superior to mankind, had massacred humans’ (Ogawa Mimei 1923b: 11). 4 Charles Schencking sees the widespread ‘divine punishment theory’ as one of the defining features in what he calls a ‘culture of catastrophe’. This theory enabled authorities to utilize the earthquake as an awakening call for all Japanese: ‘As no other single event had done, the 1923 disaster amplified, unified, and helped enable Japan’s leaders to proselytize an anticonsumption, anti-luxury, and anti-extravagance discourse across the nation. It remained ever-present throughout the interwar and wartime periods in Japan. The power and efficacy of using catastrophe for political and ideological ends was clear’ (Charles Schencking 2008: 328). Suzuki Akira describes various ‘irresponsible’ divine punishment theories on behalf of the literati at the time of the disaster to draw a comparison with the modern version of the theory that Ishihara Shintarō launched in response to the triple catastrophe that hit NorthEastern Japan in 2011. See: Suzuki Akira 2012: 2–4.

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Y, with whom K is lodging, tells of how he had been derided for writing about the mystery of maternal love in the past. His slanderers had criticized him for sentimentalizing a feeling that in the final analysis was something utilitarian and material. Now though, scenes of mothers trying to protect their babies to the end even as they themselves were engulfed in flames had convinced him that maternal love is indeed a self-sacrificing, mysterious emotion. Next, however, Y relates the hearsay of plots to burn down their village. K marvels that the usually composed Y, who spends his time writing poems and doing translating work, would believe in the rumours to the point of losing his composure over them. At night they stand vigil on the outskirts of town. In the peace and quiet of the night K doubts that there is any need for them to keep watch but Y insists that, since a suspicious-looking fellow had been caught walking along the tracks last night carrying a liquid and a dagger, they cannot afford to let their guard down. K wonders why anyone would want to burn down the village, and what the object of ideologues to do so would be, to which Y retorts that they would want to unsettle people’s minds and try to achieve something. K rejoins that not even thieves would want to take advantage of a situation like this. He finds himself amazed at the fact that incidents that would usually be utterly inconceivable to persons of reason could appear plausible for a time in a situation like this. In relation to the person who had suggested that the quake was Heaven’s retribution, an artist who had not acted his usual self lately, Y asserts that you cannot understand humans only by observing them under normal conditions. K yet fears the extent to which Y himself had turned reactionary and ponders whether the violent instinct that flows through the veins of humankind can at all be controlled by reason. To Y he utters: ‘In times like this, people change […] After all, people are made to fight each other’ (Ogawa Mimei 1923b: 14). Suddenly there is the sound of a whistle and commotion as villagers have picked up a trail of a man looking like a construction labourer. To shouts of ‘stab him’ and ‘beat the life out of him’ they surround a shed, which turns out to be empty. Disappointed at having let the man escape through the net, the artist unsheathes his sword and cuts it through empty space repeatedly, ‘At any cost, I have to decapitate at least one head…’ K reflects, ‘Amongst artists as well, it is conceivable for any type of person to appear. If it is up to the liberty of each and everyone to embrace whatever ideology they want, then it is also up to the liberty of them to be engaged in arts for whatever purpose. But with regard to human conduct, at least, it is possible to declare what is permissible and what is not permissible (Ogawa Mimei 1923b: 18). Towards the end of the short story K reflects on the situation: ‘Vaguely, he thought that this earthquake had wrecked people’s established rules. It even felt as though, more than ever before, spiritually as

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well as instinctly, all were blindly reckless transient beings’ (Ogawa Mimei 1923b: 25). In assessing the Great Kanto Earthquake literature, Inagaki Tatsurō concludes that the genre did not yield any result worthy of the epithet of classic. In the field of reportage, though, he admits to some works of merit from established writers, Kawabata Yasunari’s Taika kenbutsu in particular (Inagaki Tatsurō 1964: 47). In light of this estimate Ogawa’s Fortuitous Things appears a quite rare work. It is obviously meant to provide some kind of explication of the situation immediately after the disaster, but not through realistic depiction of gruesome events or indignant indictment of acts of persecution. It gives a more subdued and indirect reflection on the unfathomable, irrational sides of human conduct, whereas the explanatory model provided by more hard-line socialists, needless to say, focused on social injustices based on a class analysis. The piece is presented in the journal as fiction (sōsaku), but given the fact that it is written in real-time and given the contemporary predominant mode of semiautobiographical writing (shishōsetsu), it is tempting to read it as an account of the author’s lived experiences of the earthquake. This mode of reading, however, is complicated by the fact that the opening sequence appears as an obvious allusion to Shiga’s pivotal short story At Kinosaki. Remember that Shiga’s short story also provides a scene with children’s cruel play with a deadly wounded rat that is doing its utmost to go on living. In the October earthquake special issue of Kaizō, Ogawa Mimei had already published a short essay, ‘The destruction of imitative culture’ (‘Mogiteki bunmei no hakai’), where he lamented that the Tokyo that they used to know no longer existed. Here we find a point that foreshadows a line of thought in Fortuitous Things; namely that the Japanese had ignored nature to a too great extent. Instead of learning from the experience of earlier disasters they had single-mindedly incorporated overseas civilization, incompatible to earthquake-prone Japan. Whether true or not, Ogawa claims that the new Western architecture had been harder hit than dilapidated traditional buildings, leading him to the observation that imitation civilization had been uprooted and destroyed by the force of nature. Here he gets tangled up in a somewhat unconvincing argument that the Japanese had traded their idealistic and imaginative characteristics, unique to the East, for a this-worldly, practical worldview. At the end of the essay we get a glimpse of Ogawa Mimei, the socialist. He suggests making a clean sweep of the bourgeois mentality in order to rebuild a new city grounded in austere and sturdy principles of equality: ‘The matter requiring immediate attention is to save Tokyo from capitalist addiction and put an end to its dependence on imitation culture’ (Ogawa Mimei 1923a: 222).

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The probably first book-length coverage of the earthquake is Ema Shū’s (1889–1975) When Sheep Get Angry (Hitsuji ga okoru toki), written between October 1924 and March 1925 and first serialized in the newspaper Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, before appearing in book format in October 1925. In the preface Ema defines his work as a novel – in fact though, it reads like a halfway house between a novel and reportage. The protagonist moves through Tokyo during the first three days to observe the situation. The observations are vividly captured in the book with camera-eye precision and he reconstructs the atmosphere of mass psychology run amok. He listens to rumours and reads bills5 pasted to utility poles: ‘Three hundred Koreans are hiding in this neighbourhood. Everyone should exercise vigilance on their own’ (Ema Shū 1989: 154). On the evening of day three he joins a crowd making the rounds on night watch. What shocks him the most is that all of them are convinced that it is publicly permitted to cut down any Korean that they happen to lay their eyes on. At first he thinks that they must be under a delusion and that the police would not allow it, but he falters when they insist. He inquires at a nearby police box where an officer informs him that not even the police have the right to carry lethal weapons at the moment. Back at the crowd he spreads the information that there cannot exist any public permission to attack freely, since not even the police have the right to harm Koreans. He is now warned about the possible personal consequences of siding with the Koreans, a warning he takes seriously as Japanese are known to have been killed for defending Koreans. When Sheep Get Angry is interesting in that it revisits the atmosphere at the time where trustworthy information is scarce and no one really knows what is going on. The protagonist tries to put himself in the place of the masses and imagine whether there might be any truth to the rumours: In the places I went to see today, general animosity and hatred towards Koreans were seething to the limit […] Therefore, on top of fear, the Koreans no doubt feel the same or even worse animosity and hatred towards the Japanese. In this situation of worry and want for provisions even for us, for Koreans, surely, there is nothing edible to be had, not to mention rice. So, what is left for them is hopelessness and desperation. Whether [rumours about] last night’s riot were true or false is another 5 Nakajima Kenzō, a witness to the enfolding chaos after the disaster, is particular to note as an historical fact that, on the afternoon of 2 September 1923, there was a notice pasted to the wall of Kagurazaka Police Station stating in its name, that there was at present a faction of insubordinate Koreans taking advantage of the chaos by rioting all over Tokyo and that inhabitants therefore should observe strict precautions (Nakajima Kenzō 1957: 15–16).

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question. Still, in these circumstances I think there is enough possibility that they will raise a riot tonight, this time for sure.6 ema shū 1989: 162–163

In the preface to the book, Ema interestingly explains that he had considered himself an internationalist before and up to the time he was writing the book. After finishing the book, however, he had undergone an ideological reorientation to become a Marxist. He surmises that readers will understand the reason for his transformation through reading the book. In other words, for Ema, who was later to become a central committee member of the Japan Proletarian Writers’ League, the earthquake was a defining moment that radicalized him. Conclusion In Hayashi Fusao’s 1955 Literary Reminiscences (Bungakuteki kaisō) we find one of the more unusual reflections on the great earthquake from a leftist perspective. Hayashi, who would go on to become one of the most prominent proletarian writers and activists, had enrolled at the Tokyo Imperial University in April 1923, or rather, as he explains, he had enrolled in New Man Society (Shinjinkai). Students at the university had formed the society in 1918, originally to promote democratic thought, but by 1923, it had turned into a congregation of students with a communist political leaning that even included communist party cells within it. During the summer break of 1923 Hayashi had returned to his hometown of Oita on Kyushu to sow the seeds of communism and to involve youth organizations in the budding university enlightenment movement. It is against this background that the following incident occurs:

6 Maeda Kakuzō does an especially good job at accounting for the social factors that influenced people in general to become willing accomplices in what he calls the earthquake terror (shinsai teroru), highlighting the fact that the Japanese were an oppressing race (yokuatsu minzoku) with regards to Koreans. Therefore, the necessary conditions for the terror to unfold were already in place, inasmuch as there was a widespread fear that Koreans would resort to retaliative measures. In addition, Maeda maintains that socialists and proletarian writers alike shared the pitfall of grasping the actions of the Japanese as solely manifestations of ignorance. Accordingly, they lacked a self-critical perspective, since they did not perform the self-analysis necessary for discerning the contradictory dualism of being both victims of class hierarchies and oppressors at the same time, the analysis of which would follow from the self-awareness of being an oppressing race (Maeda Kakuzō, 1979: 75–76, 91).

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It seemed the comrades who had returned to other regions were steadily achieving results. In contrast, I was only doing things like forming useless ‘cultural circles’ comprising returnee students that had no effect whatsoever on workers or the youth in rural communities. While I was agonizing all on my own and feeling frustrated over letting other comrades down, the summer holidays ended. Then came September 1, the day of the Great Kanto Earthquake. All page space of the regional newspapers was occupied with preposterous articles that would surely make the readers flabbergasted rather than surprised, had these newspapers still existed today. ‘The Imperial Capital reduced to a field of burned-out ruins in an instant’. ‘Mount Fuji caves in’. ‘A large troop of Koreans lead by Socialists clashes with the military’. ‘Street fighting in Kōtō, no prospect of subjugation say the authorities’. ‘His Imperial Highness the Crown Prince missing’. What startled me was neither the annihilation of the capital of Japan nor the cave-in of Mount Fuji. It was the street fighting in Tokyo; in other words, the fact that the revolution had occurred. The comrades had taken to arms; built barricades, raised the Red Flag and were fighting the imperialists’ army. Surely, it cannot be the Koreans only. All workers and oppressed masses of Tokyo are bound to have joined the revolutionary army. A part of the revolutionary army has in all probability brushed off the resistance of the military and the police to make an advance on the Imperial Palace. As a consequence, no doubt, the Crown Prince has gone missing. I’m too late, I thought. I’m left behind all alone, I thought. While I had been putting useless effort into a tedious enlightenment movement in a provincial town, the revolution had broken out. Had I only advanced the date for returning to Tokyo slightly, I would have been in time. With a time difference of only a day or two I had become a dropout from the revolution, a class traitor. I walked about the hills aimlessly and came out onto the seashore. Waiting for the nightfall I drank alcohol, which I could not yet take at the time. I pilfered a small fishing boat and rowed out to sea. I wished for a storm to occur and the boat to capsize. Revolution dropouts ought to sink into the sea and die! But no storm occurred and the moon arose in the clear sky. I was amazed and seized with fear at the size of the surging of the waves and the darkness of the sea. Crestfallen I rowed the boat back to shore. Bungakuteki kaisō: 6–7

In the history of the Proletarian Literary Movement Hayashi Fusao is infamous for having dealt the movement its first blow from an insider position, when he announced his political conversion (tenkō) in 1936. In Hayashi’s reminiscences

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the above anecdote is featured to illustrate how his communism had been built on fanaticism and on an illusion and that the proletarian literary movement itself becomes inexplicable if we bracket this naïve and primitive fanaticism for revolution. Although Hayashi Fusao obviously has a valid point here, for present purposes this anecdote also amply illustrates the deep imprint that the disaster made on contemporary socialist intellectuals. For devoted believers the coming of the revolution was a question of when, not if, and it is easy to imagine how they would have expected the panic situation after the quake to provide the opportunity for revolution to break out. In fact, in the leftist writings discussed in this essay one can detect a slight opportune trace of trying to utilize the violations perpetrated against Koreans for a political purpose. The fact that the revolution eventually did not break out, though, proves that the movement overestimated the grassroots fervour for its coming and underestimated the power of authorities to restore public order. In assessing the various reactions to the shock of the disaster among literary circles, Lee Jee-Hyung argues that even though there were voices (exemplified with Mushanokōji Saneatsu) that predicted the arrival of a serious type of literature, such as religious or proletarian literature, he concludes that the consensus (exemplified with Tokuda Shūsei) predicted a strong trend of entertainment reading that would help to heal the spiritual desolation and feelings of emptiness brought on by the material destruction of the disaster. By forming this consensus, writers reversed the commonsensical prediction among other intellectuals that the catastrophe would lead to an ideological reorganization away from amusement culture and materialism toward spiritualism (Lee, Jee-Hyung 2003: 95–96). Another writer to predict a surge in popular literature was Kikuchi Kan in his previously mentioned defeatist proclamation. For him, the prediction that literature would turn more serious as the subjectivity of authors deepened was a belief centring on the sentiment of the authors themselves. Authors might have thought that they could no longer go on writing irresponsible things in the aftermath of the disaster. Reading demand, oppositely, would be for popular literature; conventional readings for pleasure in order to escape the seriousness of reality. Kikuchi understood this to be another aspect of the coming degeneration of literature (Kikuchi Kan 1923: 117). The proletarian prediction, on the other hand, was for another type of literature. The critic and proletarian literature theorist Katagami Noburu (1884–1928) also foresaw an increasing demand for exciting literature, regardless of literary value or quality, at least for a while. But this stimulusseeking trend, heightened by the experiences of the natural disaster, would next manifest itself in an earnest desire for a fundamental change, more

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genuinely in direct connection with life. As a result, literature would, ‘move toward a trend more consistent with an ideology of realism. To connect more boldly with real life! This mind-set will probably emerge all the more strongly. In other words, the total permeation of realism in literature’. Katagami predicted that the earthquake would induce an impulse for change in the collective psyche, not only in social life but also in literature. In contrast to Kickuchi Kan, who thought that the social revolution brought about by the disaster would render void the predicted socialist revolution, Katagami conversely predicted that the earthquake would speed up the pace of the trend towards antagonism in society and deepen and intensify its tendency (Katagami Noburu 1997 [1923]: 86–87). To assess the accuracy of these predictions is somewhat beyond the scope of this chapter.7 Suffice to say, though, that it was not until 1926 that the proletarian literary movement would start to yield noteworthy works of fiction, despite the fact that the proletarian literary journal The Literary Front (Bungei sensen) appeared for a first stint in June 1924. By this time, though, the great earthquake only rarely features as a subject matter for literary exploration.8 It is perhaps better to say that the Great Kanto Earthquake, along with the High Treason Incident of 1910–11 and the enactment of the Peace Preservation Law, belongs among the foundational events for members of the proletarian literary movement. If the earthquake is inscribed in collective memory for its unprecedented destructive power, then for socialists it became a milestone that unequivocally exposed the fundamental contradictions of society and instilled them with a deep-rooted distrust in authorities. 7 In 1925 the word ‘popular literature’ (taishū bungaku) first appears in Japan in review titles. December 1926 saw the birth of the enbon-phenomenon, collected works of popular literature selling at the price of 1 yen per book. In 1927 the publisher Heibonsha followed with its enbon-series Collected Works of Contemporary Popular Literature (Gendai taishū bungaku zenshū). High demand soon led to the so-called enbon-battle (enbon gassen) between around one hundred different series of books. 8 Ōta Tsutomu argues that five years of earthquake fiction (shinsai mono) had resulted in advancement for the proletarian literary movement with regards to both subject matter and method, in contrast to established writers who were never able to critically capture the reality of events with literary means, even though they acknowledged the Korean problem. Taking into consideration also pieces that closed in on the essence of the Imperial Army, which suppressed the very people they were supposed to protect, proletarian literature progressed greatly in terms of subject matter according to him. Furthermore, this subject matter was not treated in an impressionistic mood, but depended on a pursuit of realistic objectivity in line with Aono Suekichi’s theory of realism as laid forth in his famous article, ‘Art that Has Investigated’ (‘Shirabeta’ geijutsu’, 1925). See Ōta Tsutomu 2011: 155.

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Epilogue In the wake of the triple disaster that struck Japan’s Northeast region on 11 March 2011, ‘bonds’ (kizuna) quickly became a widely used term to stress the importance of familial bonds and bonds between people in local communities for overcoming hardships together. It also became a catchphrase in media to promote regional solidarity with the hardest hit areas of Japan, illustrated with voluntary help from people from all over Japan. In December of the same year the character for the word was chosen as the kanji-character of the year by the Japanese Kanji Proficiency Society at its yearly ceremony at Kiyomizu temple in Kyoto. When we look back at testimony regarding the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 by socialists and members of the Proletarian Literary Movement, we find that the disaster for them spelt broken bonds between different peoples and classes and a fundamental breach of bonds of trust in authorities. Tsuchida Mitsufumi, who went through the accounts in various special issues of journals that were published immediately after the quake, has made the following poignant remark: Since no measures whatsoever had been taken, despite the warnings from seismologists, the Great Kanto Earthquake triggered unprecedented panic conditions. All the more so because of the sudden and unforeseen extreme situation, both the positive and the negative sides to what should be called the true feelings [honne] of the Japanese – which under normal circumstances do not come into the open – were exposed. tsuchida mitsufumi 1992: 3

What a comparison of the 2011 with the 1923 earthquake experience ultimately shows is natural disaster’s capacity to appeal both to people’s conscience and to their darker sides – the realization of which lends an even more uncanny ring to the comments by Ishihara Shintarō with which this essay began. Bibliography Aono, Suekichi (1923a). ‘Shinsai to shisō, geijutsu’ Hōchi shinbun 8–11 November 1923. Aono, Suekichi (1923b). ‘Sōsakukai no ichinen’ Asahi shinbun 8 December 1923: 8. Aono, Suekichi (1924). ‘Shakai no genjitsu to shisō to’ Shinkō 1924.2: 44–48. Eguchi, Kan (1923). ‘Shachū no dekigoto’ Asahi shinbun 11, 12 December 1923. Ema, Shū (1989 [1925]). Hitsuji no okoru toki, Kageshobō. Hayashi, Fusao (1955). Bungakuteki kaisō, Shinchōsha.

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Hosoda, Tamiki (1923). ‘Unmei no minikusa’ Bunshō kurabu 1923.10: 80–83. Imai, Sei’ichi (2008). Nihon no hyakunen 6: shinsai ni yuragu, Chikuma shobō. Inagaki, Tatsurō (1964). ‘Kantō daishinkasai to bundan’, Kokubungaku: kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū 1964.10: 42–47. Katagami, Noburu (1997 [1923]). ‘Shinsaikasai to bungaku’, Katagami Noburu zenshū 3: 162–187. Nihon tosho sentā. Kikuchi, Kan (1923). ‘Saigo zakkan’, Chūō kōron 1923.10: 116–119. Lee, Jee-Hyung [Ri, Shikei] (2003). ‘Kantō daishinsai to ‘shinsai shōsetsu”, Bungaku kenkyū ronshū 20: 93–110. Maeda, Kakuzō (1979). ‘Kantō daishinkasai to bungaku: shinsai teroru to puroretaria bungaku’, Nihon bungaku 1979.6: 75–96. Miyajima, Sukeo (1923). ‘Shingi’ Kaizō 1923.12: 2–19. Nakajima, Kenzō (1957). Shōwa jidai, Iwanami shoten. Odagiri, Susumu (1967). ‘Kantō daishinkasai to bungaku’, Kokubungaku: kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū 1967.9: 66–70. Ogawa, Mimei (1923a). ‘Mogiteki bunmei no hakai’, Kaizō 1923.10: 220–222. Ogawa, Mimei (1923b). ‘Hakarazaru koto’, Kaizō 1923.11: 2–26. Ōta, Tsutomu (2011). ‘Kantō daishinsai to puroretaria bungaku undō’, Minshu bungaku 2011.9: 150–156. Schencking, Charles J. (2008). ‘The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Culture of Catastrophe and Reconstruction in 1920s Japan’, Journal of Japanese Studies 34(2): 295–331. Suzuki, Akira (2012). ‘Kantō daishinsai to bungaku: hyōgen no dainamizumu e’, Sekai bungaku 2012.7: 1–10. Tsuboi, Shigeji (1928). ‘Jūgo en gojissen’, Senki 1928.9: 78–82. Tsubouchi Shōyō (1923). ‘Daishinsai shokan’ Asahi shinbun 28 September 1923: 3. Tsuchida, Mitsufumi (1992). ‘Bungakusha no mita Kantō daishinsai’ Nihon kosho tsūshin 1992.8: 2–5. Tsuda, Takashi et al. (1989). ‘Puroretaria bungaku no jidai (3): Kantō daishinsai zengo (zadankai)’, Bunkahyōron 1989.3: 261–274. Yoshimura, Akira (1973). Kantō daishinsai. Bungei shunjū.

Chapter 15

The ‘Silenced Nexus’

Female Mediation in Modern Japanese Literature of Disaster Janice Brown

University of Colorado, Boulder

Sherry B. Ortner’s influential 1974 essay ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ opened new perspectives on a widely recognized social issue that continues to plague global societies today, that is, ‘the secondary status of women in society’, which Ortner sees as a ‘pan-cultural fact’.1 For Ortner, the lesser status of women is linked to the construction of culturally defined value systems in which the human need to manage and control the environment in order to produce and maintain culture becomes an exercise in the relegation of the natural world to a lesser status. In this view, all cultures at some level see themselves as not only ‘distinct from but superior to nature’, a view that allows human societies to socialize or ‘culturalize’ nature.2 The fact that women rather than men have become associated with the ‘lesser’ status of nature, Ortner argues, lies in the greater physiological involvement of the female body with the processes of reproduction, and therefore with the processes of ‘nature’. This long-standing cliché is further responsible for woman’s placement in subordinate social roles and her subjection to demeaning social attitudes. For Ortner, the lesser positioning of women despite their social and cultural significance leads to the view that women occupy a position somewhere below culture but above nature, and thus are always somewhere between.3 As a result, women acquire various mediating functions and/or ambiguous meanings within and along the nature-culture trajectory. More recently, Ortner’s views have become influential in the development of ecofeminism, which sees the current ecological crisis as ‘the inevitable effect of a Eurocentric capitalist patriarchal culture built on the domination of nature, and the domination of ‘Woman’ as nature.’4 In company with Ortner, ecofeminist and 1 Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’, in Woman, culture, and society, eds. M.Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (Stanford ca: Stanford University Press, 1974), 67. 2 Ortner, 73. 3 Ortner, 84. 4 Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics: nature, Marx, and the postmodern (London & New York, Zed books, 1997), 12–13.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004268319_017

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other environmentalist critics have called for new modes of thinking about the relationship of human beings and nature and, similar to other post-modern discourses, question such received notions as Woman, Man, Culture and Nature. Ariel Salleh, in particular, has called for new analyses of ‘the psychosexual edge where women “mediate” nature’, an area that she views as a ‘silenced nexus’.5 While Ortner’s prime purpose was to consider how concepts of nature and culture have interpellated women in human societies, and the focus of ecofemnism has been on the political dimensions of such interactions, both approaches suggest the need for further analysis of specific cultural artifacts in which women and nature are given a prominent role, as for example, in the arts, and more specifically I might add, in literature, and for the purposes of this chapter, in the literature of disaster, where women and women’s bodies are aligned not only with nature but specifically with extremes of nature. When we relate Ortner’s interpretation of women and nature to Japan, the ‘pancultural fact’ of women’s inferiority is not exceptional and in fact offers fertile ground for examination of the treatment of women within the nature/culture dichotomy. This essay will consider literary treatments of disaster by selected writers of the modern and contemporary periods and will examine some of the ways in which the contrast between the workings of nature and the conditions and requirements of culture are of paramount concern. It will demonstrate that in some contexts depictions of female embodiment may reinforce iterations of the status quo, as described by Ortner, while in other contexts, possibilities for change and new modes of thinking are suggested.

Nature as Elite Discourse: Re-viewing Nature and Woman in Japanese Literary Culture

Rather than seeing human beings as ‘distinct from but superior to nature’, Japan, similar to other Asian cultures, has tended to embrace ideas that emphasize the relatedness of the human and the natural, and not their distinctiveness or separation. The idea of relatedness is so prevalent that in the case of Japan one scholar has observed that ‘nature has been the matrix for the making of civilized society’.6 While such sentiments might suggest Japan’s circumvention of Ortner’s dichotomizing dictum, other scholars have pointed out 5 Salleh, 164. 6 Shogo Ikuta, ‘Modern Japanese Nature Writing: An Overview’, in Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook, ed. Patrick D. Murphy (Chicago, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998), 277

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that in Japan the relatedness of nature to the human is in fact only one view among many regarding the natural realm. In Re-Inventing Japan: Time Space Nation, for example, Tessa Morris-Suzuki delves into a variety of ideas and practices involving the world of nature, and identifies a range of viewpoints, from animistic beliefs to Taoist-influenced notions to Confucian and/or neoConfucian exhortations to develop nature for the sake of the human realm (kaibutsu). In all cases, however, human beings are seen as closely involved with the world of nature and are expected to ‘care…for and nurture…all creatures under heaven’.7 Against this shifting spectrum of opinion, further complicating factors stand out, such as the views of Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), who promoted the notion of a unique spontaneous empathy between human beings and the natural environment (mono no aware). Alongside his attempt to connect humanity to the world of nature, Motoori also believed that in comparison to nature, men were ‘born as especially superior beings’.8 Motoori took his ideas about human superiority even further, advocating the positioning of Japan over China and other foreign countries based on what he saw as the supremacy of Japanese Shintō traditions. Thus, while it seems difficult to make a case for the idea that human beings are considered distinct from nature in Japan, it is entirely possible to find examples wherein humans believe themselves to be in a managerial role, or what some scholars have called a position of ‘taming’.9 Given such inconsistencies and contradictions in the historical record, it would appear that the Japanese view of the relatedness of nature requires examination and contextualization just as does Ortner’s idea of a universal nature/culture split. Nonetheless, due to the grounding of ‘relatedness’ in Japanese culture, we can expect that notions about nature and/or culture will be formulated somewhat differently and will exhibit nuances not found in societies in which the dichotomy between nature and culture is less relational. The position of women in Japan with regards to nature and culture is undeniably one of relatedness, yet the connection clearly underlines and reinforces the inferiority of women, as per Ortner’s assertion. As Ortner points out: …every culture asserts that proper relations between human existence and natural forces depend upon culture’s employing its special powers to 7 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, N.Y., London, England: M.E. Sharpe,1998), 42. 8 Morris-Suzuki, 8. 9 Kalland, Arne, ‘Culture in Japanese Nature’, in Asian Perspectives of Nature: A Critical Approach (Richmond, Surrey, uk, 1995), 249.

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regulate the overall processes of the world and life. One realm of cultural thought in which these points are often articulated is that of concepts of purity and pollution.10 When we examine notions of purity/pollution in Japan, these are centred on taboos against death, disease, blood, childbirth and menstruation, the latter three items having particularly negative consequences for women. Reinforced by the teachings of Buddhism and Confucianism, particularly neoConfucianism, as well as by Shintō belief and practice, these taboos are the basis of gender inequality in Japanese culture and society. According to sociolinguist Naoko Takemaru, the ‘association of women and blood impurity caused the exclusion of women from various spheres of life, and created the tradition of ‘no females allowed (nyonin kinsei)’.11 Despite attempts to abolish nyonin kinsei from the Meiji period onwards, to date, women are still not allowed to step into the sumo ring, to climb certain sacred mountains, to enter construction sites and certain Shintō shrines, or to take part in certain festivals.12 While the notion that human beings are closely related to nature may contribute to attitudes and feelings that promote harmonious interactions with and sympathetic representations of the natural sphere, there is also the danger that the tendency to view woman as ‘closer to nature’ locks her into the negative proscriptions evoked by blood impurity or blood defilement (kegare). Since this designation of the female is seen as allied to the harmonious workings of the nature/culture paradigm, change becomes more difficult to pursue. The mediating between function described by Ortner (which implies a distinct division of nature and culture) becomes less significant in Japan (where divisions may be less clearly demarcated), and thus the status of women with regard to movement along a nature-culture trajectory may be more ambiguous.13 Accordingly, in Japan, representations of women who attempt to overcome their inferior status by moving away from nature towards culture are in general unsuccessful as women. For example, according to many Buddhist sutras and Buddhist-inspired texts, a woman who desires to achieve 10 11 12 13

Ortner, 72. Naoko Takemaru, Women in the Language and Society of Japan: The Linguistic Roots of Bias (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Co., 2010), 14. Takemaru, 15–18. That is, in Japan, while the male/female dichotomy is enforced, this does not necessarily lead to the clear demarcation of a nature/culture binarism, since the symbolic order is not predicated upon exclusive binarisms.

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enlightenment must first become male.14 In other representations, women forego their humanity entirely and merge with the natural world, metamorphosing into plants or flowers.15 Others, like the yamamba, end up living alone in the mountains, cannibalizing human passers-by. In some stories, women attempt to conceal their connection to nature from their spouses. Once the spouse sees his wife’s ‘natural’ shape, usually that of an animal, typically a crane, fox or snake, the wife vanishes into the world of nature, never to return.16 Some non-human wives may also represent natural destructive forces, such as the yuki onna, or snow woman, whose breath freezes men to death. Not only are women portrayed negatively with regard to the natural realm, they are also unable to ‘beat the system’, that is, they remain unable to escape the negativity that binds them to lesser status. As pointed out above, one reason for this is the pervasive notion of relatedness between the human and natural realms and the concomitant proscription against blood defilement. Another explanation may also lie in the way nature has come to be represented over the course of centuries, first by the court elite, and later by literati from other social classes and occupations. Despite claims put forward for the classical female literary tradition, the dominant gender in this extended project of aestheticization and creation of Japanese literary culture has been primarily male.17 Since earliest times, the integration of human subjective experience with the myriad landscapes, entities and objects of nature has been a major factor in the development of a literary aesthetic that takes as its underlying principle the sense of relatedness and connection to the natural world. At the same time, the aestheticization of nature has undergone a highly selective process, exclusive rather than inclusive, leading over time to the formulation of complex 14

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Toshie Kurihara, ‘History of Women in Japanese Buddhism: Nichiren’s Perspectives on the Enlightenment of Women’, trans. Maiko Imai, Journal of Oriental Studies 13 (October 2003): 96–98. Also, see Etsuko Terasaki, Figures of Desire: Wordplay, Spirit Possession, Fantasy, Madness, and Mourning in Japanese Noh Plays (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, 2002), especially Chapter 6, for a detailed study of the noh, Eguchi, in which the female protagonist achieves enlightenment only after being transformed into a male deity. Examples of such female transformations are often found in Noh plays, such as Bashō, Kakitsubata, Kochō. See Hayao Kawai, The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairytales of Japan (Woodstock, Connecticut: Spring Publications, 1996) for a discussion of non-human wives. For an informed and concise discussion of this point, see Gustav Heldt, The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan (Ithaca, New York: East Asian Program Cornell University, 2008), 221–224.

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structures and systems of imagery and meaning centred on selected elements of the natural world. With the appearance of the Kokinwakashū imperial anthology of poetry (c. 905), this process reached a culminating point. Today the anthology is credited as the primary source for, among other things, the establishment of acceptable standards for the discursive representation of nature. Favouring the elegant and evocative, the Kokinshū carefully avoids mention of corporeal defilement or pollution. Even when death is suggested, and this occurs rarely, the topic is couched in highly figurative language, as in the following: the spirit now soars above – why would we ever hear of its return – for the body it once knew has been turned to flying sparks18 Similarly, the majority of the contributions of women poets to the Kokinshū were virtually erased, their texts consigned to the category of Anonymous. As Gustav Heldt notes: Although the Kokinshū includes poems by [some] named female authors, the prefaces portray them as singers rather than writers. Ultimately, it is the male editors who guarantee authorship in the anthology, and who are responsible for (re)composing yamato uta as they transcribe, amend, and rewrite both songs and written poems.19 This elite aesthetic has proven over time to be not only durable but also remarkably resilient in the expansion and modification of its literary boundaries. For example, in the seventeenth century, when haikai poetry shifted attention to the quotidian world and its less than classically elegant natural images, the expressive range of Japanese poetry was increased rather than diminished. Some two hundred years later, however, the importation of Euroamerican literary conceptions and writings brought major change to the literary repertoire, resulting in the extinction of traditional genres, the concomitant creation of new ones, and a further shift in the representation of nature, as non-Asian perceptions were grafted onto the literary body. Nonetheless, the ancient elite discourse has continued to survive and today remains more or less intact, as 18 19

Kokinshū: A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern, trans. Laurel Rasplica Rodd and Mary Catherine Henkenius (Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 1996), 375. Heldt, 224.

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does the traditional view of women in culture. One cannot help but ask how we are to understand this aesthetic and its related misogynistic worldview within modern and contemporary contexts, particularly in face of the tremendous social upheaval and environmental destruction that has taken place in Japan over the past century and a half? An examination of literary treatments of disaster will aid in this consideration by focusing not only on ways in which Japanese writers treat female figures when writing about calamity but also by attending to how representations of disaster acquire a ‘psychosexual edge’ when evolved within the convoluted nexus of nature, woman, and culture.

Nature and Disaster: Aestheticizing the Borderspace

The collapse of pre-modern Japanese society amidst the shock of modernization was followed by a long series of repeated assaults on both culture and nature as Japan moved through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Including such catastrophes as a devastating world war; two atomic bombings and the fire bombing of Tokyo and other cities; major earthquakes in important urban areas; numerous environmental disasters; terrorist attacks both at home and abroad; and of course the most recent 3/11 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown, the havoc wreaked upon Japanese society has been considerable. Although other regions of the globe also experience severe natural disasters and undergo war and other human-induced ravages, it could be argued that Japan, given its geographical position, is subject to a wider variety of natural disasters than many places. Volcano, typhoon, tornado, flood, earthquake, landslide and tsunami are all common occurrences in the Japanese archipelago. Wars, too, have raged periodically over the Japanese landscape. Yet despite the prevalence of such upheavals, relatively few literary works of the pre-modern period focused on such topics, perhaps due in part to the taboo against blood pollution. Nonetheless, some tales of violence did flourish, particularly the military tales (gunkimono) of the Kamakura and Muromachi periods, which detailed the end of the Heian court and the rise of the warrior classes. In these war tales, the spilling of blood on the battlefield seems to have caused little ritual concern. Perhaps, unlike the blood impurity associated with childbirth, menstruation and illness, warfare encouraged such patriarchal/ masculine values as ‘loyalty, steadfastness in adversity, and pride of family honor’,20 and thus the gunki texts successfully bypassed the issue of blood 20

Carl Steenstrup, Notes on the Gunki or Military Tales: Contributions to the Study of the Impact of War on Folk Literature in Premodern Japan (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: iscsc, 1980), 11.

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defilement.21 Another well-known work of this era that treats disaster and violence is Hōjōki (1212),22 an essay in which the author recounts a series of horrific natural disasters that provoke him into leaving his home in the capital for a mountain hut. Whether war or disaster, however, events in these texts are treated primarily in terms of the Buddhistic notion of impermanence (mujōkan), a gloss that succeeds in elevating the often gratuitous violence of the war tales and the random calamities observed by the would-be Hōjōki recluse into an aesthetic of the perishability of human (read male) endeavor. In Hōjōki, the author-protagonist, Kamo no Chōmei, copes with disaster not only by engaging the perishability of phenomena, he also confronts the Buddhistic notion of attachment. Unsettled by the myriad natural disasters as well as deeply disgruntled at the way he has been treated by his fellow men, Chōmei decides to escape both the horror of natural calamity as well as his less-than-successful life in the capital and retire to the mountains, where he builds a hut. Despite the austerity of his life and his Buddhist practice, he finds he cannot rid himself of attachment. The text ends with Chōmei questioning his motivations as well as his sanity, and then fading into silence. As Haruo Shirane notes: ‘Chōmei finds himself in the paradoxical position of advocating detachment and rebirth in the Pure Land while at the same time becoming attached to the beauties of nature and the four seasons and the aesthetic life of his ten-foot-square hut at Hino.’23 In this respect, it might also be suggested that the ‘paradoxical position’ described by Shirane is the result not only of personal conundrum but also a reflection of the shifting contexts of the nature/culture connection in which Chōmei finds himself. As we have seen, the notion of the interconnectedness of the human and the natural in the Japanese worldview prevents a clear demarcation between these two arenas, often resulting in negative positionings that are inescapable for those who are deemed ‘closer to nature’. Although 21

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As G. Cameron Hurst notes, the medieval Japanese warrior reserved bloodletting for war, and did not shed blood ‘for sport or for ceremonial purposes’. See G. Cameron Hurst, Armed Martial Arts of Japan: Swordsmanship and Archery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 20–22, for a discussion of blood pollution with regard to bushi practices. See Takeda Kō, ed., Hōjōki zenshaku (Tokyo: Kasama shoin, 1995) for full text and commentary on Hōjōki by Kamo no Chōmei (1153–1216). Among several translations into English two of the most recent are Hōjōki: Visions of a Torn World, trans. Yasuhiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 1996), and ‘An Account of a Ten-Foot-Square Hut’ in Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600, ed. Haruo Shirane, and trans. Anthony H. Chambers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 624–635. Shirane, 624.

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this negative positioning is seen most commonly in the case of women and their connection to blood pollution,24 it can be argued that Chōmei, too, has placed himself in a zone of potential ‘contamination’. As Chōmei distances himself from society and moves into the mountain wilderness, his connection to both nature and culture undergoes a contextual shift. No longer an observer and chronicler of nature’s upheavals, he now imagines he is aligning himself with its patterns and forces; his plan is to transcend nature’s attractions as well as the pull of the capital through Buddhist meditation. Yet he is unsuccessful. Hampered by attachment to the ten-foot-square hut as well as by his pleasure in living close to nature, Chōmei begins to doubt his resolve; his plans seem on the verge of collapse. By seeking to live outside accepted cultural bounds, Chōmei has entered a liminal space wherein boundaries are fluid and the possibility of further breakdown always a possibility. Viewed through the lens of cultural anthropology, such ‘in-between’ positions as inhabited by Chōmei are associated with impurity, including illness and other unsettled and unsettling conditions and events.25 Thus, not only is Chōmei anxious about his mental state (‘has your discerning mind just served to drive you mad?’),26 he also harbours the uneasy thought that his attachment to the hut has defiled the memory of the sage Vimalakirti (in Japanese, Jōmyōkoji), whose example he attempted to emulate (lit. ‘your dwelling has disgraced/defiled the memory/achievements of Vimalakirti’).27 The concern with insanity and defilement that marks Chōmei’s experience in the ten-footsquare hut underlines the recluse’s precarious position as he attempts to come closer to nature and/or be absorbed into its immanence. A similar anxiety may also be noted in Chōmei’s initial reaction to abuse by the androcentric power structures he sees as prevailing in the distant capital. Unable to win power and acceptance, he worries at being disgraced or thought mad. The concern with contamination or defilement as well as the construction of an aestheticized space within or through the natural realm as a means of overcoming the exigencies brought about by both natural and personal catastrophe are strategies that may be traced to the representation of disaster and its effect on human culture in modern Japanese literature. 24

In the case of Hōjōki, the only female figure that appears in Chōmei’s description of disasters is that of a dead woman with a baby suckling at her breast. 25 Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, The Monkey as Mirror: Symbolic Transformations in Japanese History and Ritual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 143. 26 Moriguchi and Jenkins, trans., 78. ‘Hatamata, mōshin no itarite, kyōseru ka’, Takeda, 381. 27 ‘Sumika wa, sunawachi, Jōmyōkoji no ato wo kegaseri to iedomo…’ Takeda, 381. Above translation mine.

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Nature and the A-Bomb: Reconsidering Gender, Women, and Violence

Among the modern period’s preeminent disasters, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand out as prime examples of unmitigated, all-out assault on both nature and culture by human beings. Arguably, one of the more disturbing factors connected with atomic attack are the almost invisible long-term effects that devastate the underlying genetic structures of the human and natural realms. Thus, beyond the impact of immediate destruction and death lies another unknown but anticipated level of horror that affects the ability of the species to reproduce. As a result, radioactive contamination or the threat of such is often treated in terms of representation of the female or female experience, portrayed as defiled or made impure by atomic assault. A brief examination of works by two writers who have written extensively on the atomic bombings, Ibuse Masuji (1898–1993) and Ōba Minako (1933–2007), will demonstrate how disaster, particularly atomic disaster, may involve a reinscription of gender norms (Ibuse) or a re-situation of gender in terms of dread and horror (Ōba). The works of Ibuse Masuji are well known for their portrayals of disaster, ranging from tales of historical calamities to narratives of war, including the Second World War and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.28 Ibuse’s practice of attending carefully to the detail of natural and unnatural upheaval, particularly as viewed from the perspective of daily life and its interconnection with the natural world, is a hallmark of his work and one that has received much critical attention. Although Ibuse’s perspective on disaster tends to the historical rather than the philosophical, it is nonetheless significant that both Ibuse and Chōmei share certain aspects of presentation in their approach to the theme of disaster. For example, similar to Kamo no Chōmei, Ibuse situates the horror and violence of disaster within cultural space, and seeks significance in his protagonists’ responses. Also like Chōmei, Ibuse writes from an androcentric position, constructing aestheticized arenas in and through which nature and culture interact and in which boundaries shift across contexts, in particular pure/impure. As well, although Chōmei’s text depicts a female figure in only one instance (see footnote 24), and Ibuse supplies a variety of representations of women, both writers present female figures in ways that offer further possibilities for consideration of the misogyny that underlies the treatment of nature and culture in Japan. 28

The best known of these is Ibuse Masuji, Black Rain, trans. John Bester (Tokyo, New York, and San Francisco, 1969), originally published as Kuroi ame (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1965).

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Keeping in mind these points, the short story, ‘Kakitsubata’ (1951, trans. ‘The Crazy Iris’, 1985), with its focus on the atomic bombing, offers a cogent example of Ibuse’s approach to the writing of disaster. The story opens (and closes) with the description of a somewhat deformed kakitsubata, or wild iris, growing unseasonably in a pond visible from where the narrator is staying in a town near Hiroshima; this is the ‘crazy iris’ of the English translation. Although never stated specifically, the narrator informs the reader that it is the middle of August ‘after the Imperial Rescript of Surrender’29 (i.e. some time after 15 August 1945), and so, along with the fact that the kakitsubata also serves as a trigger for the narrator’s memories of the bombing of Hiroshima, we assume the out-of-season blooms are likely the result of the effects of atomic radiation. The story centres on the daily activities recalled by the narrator on the day of the bombing and its immediate aftermath, when survivors, having escaped the city, began to make their way into the town with their reports of the new weapon. Despite the fact that the kakitsubata is also a kind of survivor, representing to some extent the regenerative capacity of the natural world, the conventional associations of strength, valour and purity30 can no longer be applied, or if so, applied only in ironic terms. While the events of the story centre around the narrator’s numerous recollections, including the destruction of a beautiful Imbe water jar, the deaths of several villagers, the destruction of the Fukuyama castle in an air raid, and the distribution of former Army supplies to the local villages, the most poignant memory, and the one which the narrator seems to find most shocking, is the suicide of a young girl whose body he finds floating in the pond. This event is reported by the narrator at the end of the story yet, despite his earlier accounts of numerous deaths and horrors, such as the terrifying air raid over Fukuyama not to mention the descriptions of the dreadfully wounded Hiroshima victims, once the narrator catches sight of the body of the drowned girl, he is unable to gaze further upon it. Both he and his friend shut themselves indoors and wait until the police have removed the corpse before they can again turn their eyes to the pond and its uncanny iris. Apparently the girl threw herself into the pond in terror after experiencing the bombing of Hiroshima and the Fukuyama raid. As the story comes to a close, almost as an aside, the narrator hints at a possible significance for his 29 30

Ibuse, 17, translation by Ivan Morris of ‘Kakitsubata’ in Ibuse Masuji zenshū, Vol. 15 (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1996). There are several varieties of iris in Japan, including shōbu, kakitsubata and ayame. Shōbu representing purity and strength are associated with Kodomo no hi (Children’s Festival) on 5 May originally Tango-no–sekku, or Boys’ Festival. Kakitsubata tend to be found near ponds and in wetlands, and ayame in drier areas.

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squeamishness – the drowned girl brings back memories of another girl who drowned in a pond of iris long ago, due to an unwanted pregnancy. The narrator is inordinately vague about the origin of this memory: ‘It may have been something I once heard, or perhaps part of a story I had read.’31 Yet he is able to describe the event in some detail, effectively suggesting that he himself must have been somehow involved. Learning of this second drowned girl, the friend lambastes the narrator in a diatribe that brings the story to an end: There’s all the difference in the world, you know, between the iris in your story and the flower down there in the pond. They belong to completely different periods. The iris blooming in this pond is crazy and belongs to a crazy age!32 According to this logic, it would seem that it is perfectly acceptable for pregnant girls to commit suicide by jumping into a pond. The fact that the friend might find such an event of less import in other circumstances (that is, where there is no atomic-blooming iris) testifies to the extraordinary, if seldom recognized, misogyny underlining this tale. This problematic conclusion can be further elucidated in terms of other events in the story, for example, the humorous episode of the beautiful water jar. The narrator admires the water jar for its beauty and desires it for his own. When the landlady refuses to sell, the narrator’s desire increases. He confides: ‘There was something very attractive about this jar, but it wasn’t until the landlady’s refusal that I realized how much I had always wanted it.’33 However, we never learn exactly what it is about the jar that he finds so attractive. Although the narrator composes several letters to the landlady asking her for the jar, he hesitates to send them lest he incur her displeasure. Eventually, to his dismay, the narrator observes the gradual destruction and disintegration of the jar. He has pursued the jar as if it were a woman (certainly the vessel-like quality of the piece strengthens this connotation in very obvious fashion). The jar is objectified, desired, aestheticized, idealized, the narrator ‘courts’ the jar, asking that it be given to him to cherish; he even offers to buy it. On the other hand, the landlady’s refusals sound very much like the lame excuses a parent might contrive to deflect would-be suitors. Unlucky in ‘love’, the narrator ends up watching over the jar’s destruction. 31 32 33

Ibuse Masuji, ‘The Crazy Iris’, trans. Ivan Morris in The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 34. Ibuse, 35. Ibuse, 19.

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The humour of this episode reveals several things about the narrating figure – his aesthetic sensibility, his nervousness with women, and his concomitant desire to maintain an ironic distance from anything potentially ugly, shocking, abject or otherwise unsettling. This can also be seen in the Fukuyama air raid. The only way he can watch the air raid over Fukuyama is by not looking at it directly.34 Thus, in his description, he stands at an angle, focusing on the shapes and sizes of moving flames and lights. Here, aesthetic concerns hold in abeyance the ghastliness of the scene. Likewise, when faced with the corpse of the girl in the pond, he retreats, superimposing another memory of another drowned girl over that of the terrified air raid victim. Certainly, the ‘craziness’ of the mutant iris, like the ‘craziness’ of the drowned girl, is disturbing for the narrator, yet what is equally unsettling is the presentation of the female and female body as sites in which such ‘craziness’ may be situated and enacted. In Ibuse’s text, it is thus possible to read in the depiction of the gendered female something of the fear, profound distress, and horror that is in turn associated with that ultimately incomprehensible Other, the atomic bomb. In addition, the reference to the drowned girls as ‘flowers’ or ‘iris’ further undercuts their humanity, linking them to earlier cultural notions of women who may be transformed or become metamorphosed into flora or fauna. The title ‘Kakitsubata’, written in hiragana, is a rendering that alludes to a passage in the Ise monogatari upon which the Noh Kakitsubata is based. In the Ise tales, male courtiers break their journey near an iris pond where they compose an anagram-poem, beginning each line of the poem with a syllable from ka-ki-tsuba-ta. The poem recalls the love of a wife for her absent husband. In the Noh, a village girl appears, recounts the Ise episode, and then reveals herself to be the spirit of the iris flower. As she disappears into the Western Paradise, the play concludes, ‘Even the spirits of flowers can attain Buddhahood.’35 Indeed, but one wonders, what about Buddhahood possibilities for female human beings? Similarly, in the conclusion of his story, Ibuse’s dead girl becomes a ‘flower’, the conflation of iris and girl producing a traditional poetic image that allows the male narrator not only to distance himself from the realities of war and disaster but also to re-establish familiar parameters that persist in shoring up a severely distressed social order in which actual women are and will continue to be erased and/or excluded, or, at the very best, relegated to the realm of metaphor. The transformation of female figures into non-human forms as a means of achieving apotheosis or transcendence of nature/culture contexts is a 34 35

Ibuse, 23. Arthur Waley, The Nō Plays of Japan (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 262.

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commonplace in Japanese literary and theatrical texts of the pre-modern era, and as we have seen in the case of Ibuse, may be found in writings by modern male authors as well. Modern and contemporary women writers also make use of human/nonhuman metamorphoses, but this is not limited to a particular gender, as either male or female figures may be involved and, perhaps more significantly, the purposes of such transformations are seldom if ever aesthetic or transcendental. Instead, such alterations often take an ironic, absurd or fantastic turn that invariably involves a form of implied or actual social critique. Writers like Tawada Yōko (b. 1960), Shōno Yoriko (b. 1956) and Ōba Minako (1933–2007), to mention a few, employ magic-realist techniques and/or motifs through which the nonhuman and human may interface, as for example, Tawada’s dog bridegroom, and squid husband, or Shōno’s tuna and Ōba’s fox lovers.36 Ōba’s poetry provides further instances, such as ‘Musashino haru no hana’ and ‘Musashino aki no hana’, where lists of plants and flowers are placed in apposition to descriptions of the personalities and behaviours of both men and women.37 In her re-written fairytales, Ōba frequently focuses on transformations of humans into animals, plants, fruit, grasses and the like.38 In addition, a variety of women writers, including Ōba, make use of folk/fairytale elements, such as animals that speak, in order to bring forward critical perspectives. As such, strategies involving metamorphosis or anthropomorphic representation in female-authored texts do not erase or exclude women but instead introduce positions that serve to defamiliarize or subvert the status quo. Ōba’s use of folk or fairytale motifs in her writings on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima offers further example. Present in Hiroshima during the aftermath of the bombing, Ōba based one of her major works on the event, Urashimasō (1977, trans. 1995), using the motif of Urashima Tarō, a Japanese folktale. However, Ōba’s first attempts to comment on atomic disaster can be found in her early poetry, ‘Akumu’ (1954, trans. ‘Bad Dream’) and ‘Bikini kara yatte kita tsubame’ (1954, trans. ‘The Swallow from Bikini’).39 The latter is a narrative 36

37 38 39

See Tawada Yōko, ‘The Bridegroom Was a Dog’ and ‘Missing Heels’ in The Bridegroom Was a Dog, trans. Margaret Mitsutani (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1998); Shōno Yoriko, ‘Taimu surippu kombinaato: Timewarp Complex’, trans. Adam Fulford, Takahashi Yuriko, and Itō Nobuji, Japanese Literature Today, 20 (1995); and Ōba Minako, ‘The Pale Fox’, trans. Stephen W. Kohl, in The Shōwa Anthology: Modern Japanese Short Stories, eds. Van C. Gessel and Tomone Matsumoto (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1985). See Ōba Minako, Shishū sabita kotoba (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1971), 64–67. See Ōba Minako, Shinshū otogisōshi (Tokyo: Kawade shobō, 1990). See Janice Brown, trans. Tarnished Words: The Poetry of Ōba Minako. Norwalk, Connecticut: EastBridge, 2006.

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poem that takes as its topic not the A-bomb but the dropping of the H-bomb on the Bikini Atoll. The principal speaker, a talking swallow that alights outside the window of the poet-narrator’s bedroom, engages the poet-narrator in conversation and describes in grotesque detail the effect of the H-bomb as it turns an idyllic South Seas island into a screaming hell of agony and gore. The swallow’s motivation in recounting its horrific tale is ostensibly a warning, not only against nuclear weapons but also against the poet-narrator’s use of cosmetics, which are tainted by radioactivity from the Bikini fallout. The poem turns on several themes. By juxtaposing concerns about the environment, domestic order, beauty, sexuality and reproductive capacity with nuclear disaster, the nature/culture relationship is shown to be both threatened and undermined by the interjection of the polluting contexts of illness, death and decay carried by the atomic testing. For example, rather than bringing good luck and protection to the poet-narrator’s household as custom dictates, the swallow brings death and pollution. Not only is the beauty of the poet-narrator threatened by the radioactivity present in cosmetic products, the comparison of the poet-narrator to a ‘fallen gravestone’40 hints at approaching death. In addition, the eventual death of the swallow as well as the image of the empty swallow’s nest overrun by bats provides a conclusion that effectively precludes the possibility of new birth and future generations. More obliquely, given the gendered context of the poem, the term ‘Bikini’ also connotes the bikini swimsuit, named for the Pacific atoll where H-bomb tests were conducted from 1946 to 1958.41 The bikini and its association with the objectification of the female body are thus linked to images of destruction and death. In the poem, Ōba develops this connection further, creating a mock fairytale scenario that invokes a brand of gender horror that, viewed from the female perspective, clearly denotes how closely entwined the uninformed pursuit of erotic capital and the irresponsible testing of nuclear weapons are in their lifedestroying violence.

Nature and the Politics of Disaster: (Mis)recognizing the Other

While male-authored disaster narratives, such as those of Ibuse Masuji, aestheticize or subordinate female experience to maintain control or ‘distance’ from what are perceived as potentially impure or polluting elements, other 40 Ōba, Shishū sabita kotoba, 42. 41 The bikini swimsuit was created and named by French auto engineer, Louis Réard, in 1946.

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male writers treat disaster from political and/or theoretical positions, such as Ōe Kenzaburō (b. 1935), whose non-fiction Hiroshima nōto (1965, trans. Hiroshima Notes, 1995) attempts to explain rather than fictionalize female experience in the wake of the atomic catastrophe. Written to address the impact of Hiroshima on his own life, Ōe based Hiroshima Notes on various journeys he took to Hiroshima in the 1960s to attend conferences on nuclear disarmament and to interview survivors of the bombing. The principal focus of the text is on what Ōe calls ‘a new humanism’,42 which he sees arising from the experiences of the people of Hiroshima. However, nowhere in the text does Ōe define precisely what he means by ‘humanism’ or its corollary, the so-called ‘new humanism’. As a result, a clear and unified argument does not emerge from Hiroshima Notes. Nonetheless, since the volume is entitled ‘notes’, we perhaps may forgive the lack of meticulous attention needed for a more focused presentation. At the same time, given its shaky underpinnings, the text has come under rigorous scrutiny from other scholars and critics, such as John Treat, who devotes a full chapter to a discussion of Hiroshima nōto in his volume on atomic bomb literature, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. Treat takes Ōe to task for, among other things, his failure to adequately account for his personal motivations in writing about Hiroshima. In short, Treat sees Ōe as ‘exploiting the aftermath of an atrocity in which tens of thousands died in order to reassert his identity as a kind of privileged and individualized being’,43 and as a result, ‘reduc[ing] the lives of the hibakusha to passive… objects of a famous writer’s notes’.44 Treat goes on to discuss Ōe’s ‘humanism’ in terms of the existentialist ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre who influenced Ōe, and to discover that Ōe’s treatment of existentialist concepts, such as the Other, are not thoroughly interrogated. That is, according to Treat, Ōe’s attempt to apply the idea of the Other to the hibakusha is flawed in that Ōe chooses to understand the hibakusha socio-politically as heroes rather than ontologically, as a feared and desired part of himself.45 Treat’s observation is cogent and points to Ōe’s further misrecognition of the Other when attempting to explicate the female experience of the atomic bombing. In one instance, Ōe comments on the story of a young mother whose child was stillborn as the result of radiation poisoning, and the body of the dead 42 43 44 45

Ōe Kenzaburō, Hiroshima Notes, trans. David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa (New York, London: Marion Boyars, 1995), 83. John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 231. Treat, 256. Treat, 253.

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baby was removed before she had a chance to see it. The woman commented, ‘If only I could see my baby, I would have courage.’46 Ōe takes this to mean ‘she is attempting to live at the minimum limit under which human beings can remain human. This may be interpreted as a valiant expression of humanism beyond popular humanism – a new humanism sprouting from the misery of Hiroshima.’47 As per Treat’s earlier observations, it seems clear that what Ōe wishes to find in the young mother is a ‘valiant’ and ‘humanist’ ‘hero’. Dissatisfied with Ōe’s assessment, Treat attempts a further stab at interpretation, noting that what is revealed in the mother’s statement is an expression of a desire to ‘realize her own self’ and thereby gain ‘the courage to be whatever she willed within that self’.48 This may be so. But the overstated concerns of Ōe with being ‘human’ and Treat with realizing the ‘self’ seem to offer very limited insights into the mother’s statement and her situation. Both commentators focus only on the mother as someone facing an existentialist dilemma, and on hospital policy. Ōe comments ‘The hospital policy of not showing deformed stillborn babies to their mothers is certainly humane’49 and Treat, less concerned with the humaneness of the policy, weighs in with ‘a hibakusha, who has already lived through the most inhuman of experiences, may be inured to things we are not’.50 These comments are focused primarily on the justification of (male) authority and as such, offer little insight into the meaning of the mother’s remark. In order to fully comprehend the mother’s statement, it seems necessary to examine the relationship of the mother with the true Other in this account, that is, the figure of the dead child. While neither Ōe nor Treat engages with the figure of the dead baby, it is important to note that during the time of writing Hiroshima Notes, Ōe was coping with the aftermath of the birth of his own developmentally disabled child in June 1963. In fact, in the Prologue to Hiroshima Notes, Ōe mentions ‘there was no hope of recovery for my first son, who was on the verge of death and lying in an incubator’, a fact which made his first visit to Hiroshima ‘exhausting, depressing and suffocating’.51 This observation contrasts sharply with his later reading of the mother and stillborn child, since Ōe does not seem to discover humanism, or courage in his own (or his wife’s) situation. Of course, as is well known, Ōe’s son did not die, and in fact became the subject of Ōe’s novel, 46 47 48 49 50 51

Ōe, trans. Swain and Yonezawa, 83. Ōe, trans. Swain and Yonezawa, 83. Treat, 246. Ōe, trans. Swain and Yonezawa, 83. Treat, 246. Ōe, trans. Swain and Yonezawa, 17.

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Kojinteki na taiken (1964, trans. A Personal Matter) and the inspiration for other works as well. The stillborn baby of Hiroshima Notes, however, does not live, and appears in the text only insofar as it is reported, as a corpse. Associated with defilement, the corpse is identified by Julia Kristeva as ‘the most sickening of wastes….the utmost of abjection’, an object that represents ‘a world that has erased its borders’.52 This idea, however, is not and has not been entertained across all cultures. Arguing that this view of the dead body is specific to patriarchal cultures, ecofeminist Ariel Salleh notes that where there is dissociation from either the beginnings or endings of life, ‘the corpse is absolute horror…[and] death is as problematic as birth’.53 In its association with nuclear contamination as well as with the defilements of childbirth and death, the stillborn baby can thus be seen as an abjected, monstrous Other whose existence is immediately expunged by the distanciating patriarchal authority even as the mother desires to see the child. Yet, the mother does not wish to abject, or cast off, the child. First she declares her resolve (kesshin shite ita) to see the child, and when that is denied, she laments (nageita) the fact that she was not allowed to see it, saying, literally, ‘My courage would have sprung forth, I tell you!’ (‘yūki ga waita no ni!’)54 a statement that I would argue supports a quite different reading than that of Ōe or Treat. In this case, it seems necessary to consider a feminine dimension of subjectivity rather than the masculinist perspective advocated by Kristeva in which reaction to the breakdown of boundaries, that is, the loss of distinction between subject and object, self and other, such as occurs in death, is viewed as invoking horror and abjection. In a feminine-directed model, standard Euroamerican psychoanalytic notions regarding the formation of boundaries in psychosexual development, such as the exclusion of and separation from the mother, must also be re-read. Bracha L. Ettinger’s work on psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity and sexuality provides another way of exploring the connection between mother and child, even the stillborn child, as per the passage from Hiroshima nōto cited above. In contrast to Freudian and Lacanian theory in which the subject comes into being ‘only through separations from the…unities of the maternal body and the imaginary mother-child dyad’,55 Ettinger proposes a model that takes into consideration pregnancy and intrauterine experience as ‘an encounter of 52 53 54 55

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 3–4. Salleh, 42. Ōe Kenzaburō, Hiroshima nōto (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965), 74. Griselda Pollock, introduction to The Matrixial Borderspace, by Bracha L. Ettinger (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 2.

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the co-emergence of several subjective/subjectivizing elements’56 in the coming-to-life process. Naming this site of encounter the matrixial borderspace, Ettinger suggests a ‘prenatal severality’ composed of ‘I and non-I’57 that is originary and thus ‘feminine’, and that precedes ‘later Oedipal gendering as boy or girl’.58 Within this borderspace, the mother and about-to-be-born child experience an intrasubjective and transsubjective connection that informs all future psychic space. In the case of the mother and the stillborn baby, these connections have been severed by death, but the mother still seeks resolution, hence her wish to ‘see’ the body of the child. In the matrixial sphere as conceived by Ettinger, unlike the scopic drive of Freud or the absent gaze of Lacan, the matrixial gaze is modelled on a desire to link with the Other. As Ettinger comments ‘In this borderlinking of I and non-I…I am not only concerned with my own traumas; the encounter with the Other is traumatic to me, but I am also concerned with the trauma of the Other.’59 Thus, it would seem that what the hibakusha mother wished to resolve but was unable to do so was not the question of her own ‘courage’, or ‘selfhood’, or lack thereof, but the affirmation of relatedness and connection to her baby in the trauma of loss. The sight of the stillborn child would have confirmed as well as affirmed this connection.60 56 57 58 59 60

Pollock, 3. Pollock, 8. Pollock, 14. Ettinger, 125. With regard to the above reading, it should be noted that the position of the hibakusha as Other might also benefit from an assessment based on the psychosexual. Both Ōe and Treat follow parameters of Sartrean discourse on self and Other and thus elide important aspects of the hibakusha experience, most notably those of the body, gender and the m/ Other. Despite the mention of numerous instances of female hibakusha experience, such as the mother and the stillborn baby, Ōe and Treat strive to produce a universal (male) hibakusha (nb. Ōe’s ‘Hiroshima-teki na ningen’ which Treat renders as ‘Hiroshima Man’, Treat, p. 34). The attempt to maintain the dichotomy of the androcentric self/other results not only in the erasure of the experience of Hiroshima, which is defined in terms of nonHiroshima, but also in the exclusion of women, who are defined in terms of men. Any possibility for understanding the trauma of the atomic bombing must take into consideration that which accounts for the singularity of this event as well as the female experience of it, that is, the ionizing radiation produced by the bomb. Since this radiation disrupts the natural processes of human development, reproduction fails or is replaced by nuclear mutation that cannot reproduce. Without mother/child, there can be no pre-oedipal or oedipal stages, and hence no Lacanian/Freaudian model of human psychosexual development. As well, the generation of binarisms such as self/other, nature/culture is no longer possible. In this situation, one may only speculate as to the positioning of that which may be called the Other, that is, any possible categorization of the Other is undecidable.

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Although less well known outside Japan than Ōe’s Hiroshima nōto, Kugai jōdo: waga Minamata-byō (1972, trans. Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, 1990) by Ishimure Michiko is arguably one of the most important works of modern Japanese literature to treat disaster from a political position. Taking up what has become known as the Minamata Disaster and Minamata Disease, Ishimure has been compared to Rachel Carson, author of The Silent Spring (1962), for her impact on environmental and conservationist movements in Japan as well as for the garnering of national support for the victims of Minamata.61 Translator, Livia Monnet, notes: The book’s impact was enormous; noted writers and critics referred to it as the most important literary event since the end of World War ii; many readers gave up their studies or professions and went to Minamata to help the patients in their struggle for survival…[it] is now part of the literature curriculum in senior high schools.62 In addition to its message, Kugai jōdo was also acclaimed for its innovative literary approach. Ishimure, herself victim of one of the lesser forms of Minamata disease, presents a multi-faceted and multi-vocal account of the deadly effects of mercury poisoning on the inhabitants of Minamata Bay in Kyushu during the 1950s and 1960s. Ostensibly a nonfictional account, Ishimure’s text resists clear definition. As the translator has commented elsewhere, ‘part imaginative biography, part mystical confession, part investigative journalism, and part historical document, Kugai jōdo transcends established literary genres to create a new form’.63 As a result, Ishimure’s work offers an astonishingly broad perspective of the disaster, encompassing personal accounts, prose poems, hospital reports, newspaper articles, minutes from citizens’ associations and other documentary evidence as well as various presentations of the recollections and musings of the author. Ishimure’s consummate interweaving of the numerous and varied texts results in a structure that emphasizes not only the many aspects of the disaster but also underlines the complex interrelatedness of human beings and the natural environment. 61

62 63

Patrick D. Murphy, ‘Ishimure Michiko: The Price of Pollution and the Presence of the Past’, in Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature (Charlottesville and London, University Press of Virginia, 2000), 146. Livia Monet, trans., Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, by Ishimure Michiko (Kyoto: Yamaguchi Publishing House, 1990), iv. Murphy, 147.

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Given the almost complete decimation of the natural realm in the Minamata catastrophe as well as the horrific deaths and injuries sustained by those affected, similar to Ōe and his view of the atomic bombing, the Minamata victims also occupy a space of monstrosity and abjection. However, while the details of the disaster are brought forward in ways that underline the dreadfulness of the suffering and devastation, Ishimure does not attempt, as does Ōe, to re-invent, re-configure or exploit the testimony of the victims. Neither does the space of abjection serve to support the status quo, in which patriarchal authority passes unquestioned or is tacitly accepted, as in the case of Ōe. Instead, the attempted cover-up of the disaster by the polluting Chisso Corporation as well as the callous treatment by hospital authorities of the bodies of the dead are presented in ways that challenge and/or undermine patriarchal authority. In attendance at one of the autopsies of the Minamata victims, Ishimure writes: A dead body is not the body of a dead person. A person ceases to be a ‘person’ by which I mean an individual with a unique, well-defined personality, when he or she dies… There is nothing more natural and more desirable than the process of decomposition of a dead body. Is not the re-absorption by an indifferent, ever-changing cosmos the dearest wish of the dead? Autopsy is objectionable insofar as it interferes with this natural process by violently tearing apart the equanimity of the dead and by forcing on them an unwanted activity – that of introspection. To me, the autopsy I attended took on the characteristics of a sacred ritual enabling me to engage in a secret conversation with the dead victims of Minamata Disease, and to enter their realm.64 Instead of Kristevan disgust and horror directed towards the corpse, Ishimure contemplates re-absorption into the cosmos, a thought process more in keeping with what Salleh regards as ‘reproductive consciousness’.65 Less troubled by the erasure of boundaries the corpse represents, Ishimure finds that such dissolution is both natural and desirable. Even the autopsy (which can be regarded as an intrusion into this natural process) Ishimure views as an opportunity for communion with the dead. Her sense of boundaries remains open and fluid, and thus the dead body of a fellow Minamata-byō victim fosters feelings of connectedness and relatedness rather than revulsion. Ishimure continues: 64 65

Ishimure, 170. Salleh, 38.

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‘Look, this is the heart’, Prof. Takeuchi said, peering into my face. He seemed to be shouting at me from the bottom of an immeasurably deep, heavy ocean. I struggled to keep my balance in that still, blue abyss. I felt strangely composed and prepared.66 Here, Ishimure invokes the ocean, despite its destruction and pollution by the selfish actions of a powerful corporation. Juxtaposed against the condescending and trivializing attitude of the male doctor, the oceanic image provides not only support but also strength for the protagonist in her stand against patriarchal malfeasance. As we might expect, Ishimure’s empathy is not limited to the Minamata victims, but is a significant factor throughout the text. As Kurahashi Yuko notes, ‘Ishimure…refuse[s] to be a traditional “observer.” She infuses herself into every part of the narrative’.67 Reminiscent of Ettinger’s concept of the borderlinking I/non-I matrixial space, Ishimure’s structuring of the narrative and the roles of the human actors within it do not create an us-them situation, as in the case of Hiroshima nōto, where the atomic bomb victims Ōe encounters remain firmly and clearly rooted in alterity. In Kugai jōdo, the text assumes the position of Other, and speaks from and through that perspective. The subtitle of Kugai jōdo, ‘waga Minamata-byō’ (lit. ‘our Minamata disease’), for example, announces this stance, granting a sense of possession and guardianship to the disease by those who have suffered from its ravages. Even the officials of the renegade Chisso Corporation and the unregulated capitalist practices they represent are subsumed within this sphere. Criticized but not demonized, the officials are drawn into the web of horror they have created, forced to make rounds of apology, to hear the recriminations of the victims, and to offer incense at the altars of the dead. The sense of relatedness that circulates among the victims both living and dead, the natural environment, the animal world, local cultural practice, the company officials and their cover up, medical practitioners, various civic and governmental authorities, and the figure of the author herself as she attempts to document the experience of the disease present a powerful indictment of the Minamata Disaster. One of the more harrowing passages in Kugai jōdo, a victim’s search for her aborted baby, provides an example of the way in which this sense of relatedness and shared trauma is brought forward within the text. Having just experienced an abortion due to her contamination with methyl mercury 66 67

Ishimure, 171. Kurahashi Yuko, ‘Creating a Tapestry of Voice and Silence in Michiko Ishimure’s Kugai jōdo (Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow)’, Journal of Narrative Theory 33, no. 3 (2003): 324.

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poisoning, Minamata victim, Sakagami Yuki, suffers an hallucination as the result of her illness: That day we had fish for supper. The fish on the tray immediately attracted my attention. As I stared at it vacantly, I suddenly saw it turn into a child. I gasped with horror, convinced that the fish on the tray was the baby the doctors had pulled out of my womb a few hours before.68 Attempting to grasp the fish proves too difficult given Yuki’s degenerating motor skills, and the fish is knocked to the floor and under the bed where Yuki finally manages to grip it. Yuki speaks: ‘I called to the fish in as sweet a voice as possible: “Come here, darling. Don’t run away from your own mama…”’ “Now, don’t you try to escape. I’ll put you out of your misery once and for all.” Catching the fish as tight as I could, I gulped it down fast, smearing it all over my mouth. The fish was sticky and tasted awful. Minamata Disease patients can’t taste anything, but they have a sharp nose. As I ate the fish, I kept thinking I was devouring my own child’.69 Similar to the young mother in Hiroshima nōto who desires to see her stillborn child, Yuki also seeks to re-capture her link with the dead foetus, in this case, to literally set her hands on it. However, debilitated and deranged by illness, she has difficulty accomplishing the task. As the images of child and fish interchange and overlap, Yuki joins the two perceptions in necrophagic fantasy by eating the fish/foetus. This scene of quasi-cannibalistic consumption calls up the archetypal devouring mother, or in Japan, the yamamba, a demonic female figure associated with the non-human natural world and, similar to Yuki, inhabiting marginal areas associated with anthropophagy, death and defilement. The image of the devouring mother also offers insight into the further complexity of affect that shapes Yuki’s action. Kurahashi, for example, views Yuki’s encounter with the fish as an illustration of the ‘internalization of sorrow and self-blame for having to abort her child as well as for failing to be a mother. She thinks that her baby, disguised as the fish on the dinner tray, comes back to blame her’.70 While this interpretation puts forward a convincing

68 69 70

Ishimure, 148. Ishimure, 149. Kurahashi, 329.

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explanation of Yuki’s mental state, it does not directly address the devouring of the fish/fetus. In her study of necrophagia and corpse abuse, cultural anthropologist Michele Stephen has pointed out that such aggressive acts often are related to the mourning process, and ‘involve a complex interaction between unconscious guilt and the need to make reparation’.71 In several instances, Stephen delineates how the actual corpse may not be consumed, but other meat substituted for the body of the deceased (391). As such, Yuki’s eating of the fish/foetus may be viewed as a symbolic act that represents not only the ‘internalization of sorrow and self-blame’ but also acts as an expression of mourning that acknowledges the death of the child and her need to atone for such loss. As well, the fish/foetus has further implications in the wider view of the Minamata Disaster taken by Kugai jōdo, that is, as a locus in and through which the human and natural realms may both encompass and attempt to reach beyond established boundaries. Kurahashi notes: …the dead child, the sea, and fish are all symbiotically linked with [Yuki’s] body and the corporation that usurped her power and life… The fish’s merciless gaze symbolizes the dynamics between the corporation, those who collude, and Yuki’s own sense of self-accusation for events that she could not control.72 (329) Similar to the young mother in Hiroshima nôto, Yuki occupies a space of abjection in the loss of her body and her child through human-induced disaster. Yet, unlike the situation of the young mother described by Ōe, Yuki’s trauma is shown to have larger implications. Not only does her testimony embrace the natural world and excoriate the contamination and destruction brought about by the vicious actions, practices and beliefs of patriarchal authority, it also calls upon the human community for redress. Yuki’s final words demand the involvement of every person: Look at me! All of you, look well And REMEMBER!73

71 72 73

Michele Stephen, ‘Devouring the Mother: A Kleinian Perspective on Necrophagia and Corpse Abuse in Mortuary Ritual’, Ethos 26, no. 4 (1998): 387. Kurahashi, 329. Ishimure, 319.

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In response to Yuki’s plea, Ishimure re-doubles her attempts to secure recognition, relief and compensation for the Minamata sufferers. Nonetheless, at the end of Kugai jōdo, she finds that the abuse has developed a new form – discrimination against Minamata victims by inhabitants of the local villages. She writes: I could see layers upon layers of hatred, indifference, malice, and contempt crystallizing into a taboo even more formidable than that which had enveloped Minamata Disease until now. But, I pursued my line of thought, even taboos undergo transformations. They may even become their very opposite, that is, a means to lay bare and demolish ignorance and prejudice.74 Ishimure’s insight is not only a clear call for restorative justice but also for a deeper understanding of the mechanisms and systems that underlie the (re)production of woman and man, nature and human in Japanese society and culture, particularly with regard to the harmful constructs of defilement and pollution associated with human-induced disaster. Conclusion Writings about disaster in Japan bring forward intense and violent scenarios in which the status quo is challenged, threatened and/or decimated through extraordinary and unexpected circumstances. In such instances, the impact is portrayed in ways that highlight the alteration or destruction of the natural realm, an area that traditionally has been viewed in terms of its ‘relatedness’ to human culture, and also, as an aestheticized and aestheticizing space. Such space tends to be formulated in terms of androcentric desire, with women occupying a lesser status, based primarily on taboos regarding blood impurity: menstruation, childbirth and pregnancy. The variability of such positioning means that women are often assigned or assume ambiguous or mediating positions within the nature/culture construct. Similarly, when viewed in terms of disaster, female embodiment tends to be presented in ways that enhance traditional associations with sexuality and reproduction, thereby reinforcing formulaic notions of man and woman, nature and culture. These attitudes have been bolstered in male-authored texts, from Hōjōki to works by modern writers, such as Ibuse Masuji and Ōe Kenzaburō whereas in modern texts by female-authors, 74

Ishimure, 348.

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such as Ōba Minako and Ishimure Michiko, these associations are presented in ways that question, critique, or attempt to re-think the underpinnings of the patriarchal status quo. With its focus on the extremes that transgress and problematize established boundaries, disaster writing offers a useful ground for the interrogation of the ‘silenced nexus’ that surrounds the issue of female embodiment and its relation to socio-cultural notions of nature and culture in Japan. Bibliography Brown, Janice, trans. Tarnished Words: The Poetry of Ōba Minako. Norwalk, Connecticut: EastBridge, 2006. Hayao, Kawai. The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairytales of Japan. Translated by Hayao Kawai and Sachiko Reece. Woodstock, Connecticut: Spring Publications, 1996. Heldt, Gustav. The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan. Ithaca, New York: East Asian Program Cornell University, 2008. Hurst, G. Cameron. Armed Martial Arts of Japan: Swordsmanship and Archery. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Ibuse, Masuji. ‘The Crazy Iris,’ trans. Ivan Morris in The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath. New York: Grove Press, 1985. ——. ‘Kakitsubata.’ In Ibuse Masuji zenshū, Vol. 15. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1996. Ishimure, Michiko, Kugai jōdo: waga Minamata byō. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2004. Kalland, Arne. ‘Culture in Japanese Nature’, in Asian Perspectives of Nature: A Critical Approach. Richmond, Surrey, uk, 1995, 243–257. Kamo no Chōmei. Hōjōki: Visions of a Torn World. Translated by Yasuhiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 1996. ——. ‘An Account of a Ten-Foot-Square Hut.’ In Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600. Edited by Haruo Shirane. Translated by Anthony H. Chambers. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, 624–635. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Kurahashi, Yuko. ‘Creating a Tapestry of Voice and Silence in Michiko Ishimure’s Kugai jōdo (Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow).’ Journal of Narrative Theory 33, no. 3 (2003): 315–334. Monet, Livia trans., Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, by Ishimure Michiko. Kyoto: Yamaguchi Publishing House, 1990. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation. Armonk, N.Y., London, England: M.E. Sharpe, 1998. Murphy, Patrick D. ‘Ishimure Michiko: The Price of Pollution and the Presence of the Past.’ In Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000, 146–158.

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Ōba Minako. Shishū sabita kotoba. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1971. ——. Shinshū otogisōshi. Tokyo: Kawade shobō, 1990. Ōe Kenzaburō, Hiroshima Notes. Translated by David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa. New York, London: Marion Boyars, 1995. ——. Hiroshima nōto. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965. Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. The Monkey as Mirror: Symbolic Transformations in Japanese History and Ritual. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Ortner, Sherry B. ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ In Woman, Culture, and Society. Edited by M.Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere. Stanford ca: Stanford University Press, 1974, 68–87. Pollock, Griselda. Introduction to The Matrixial Borderspace, by Bracha L. Ettinger. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Rodd, Laurel Rasplica and Mary Catherine Henkenius, trans., Kokinshū: A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern. Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 1996. Salleh, Ariel. Ecofeminism as Politics: nature, Marx, and the postmodern. London & New York: Zed Books Ltd, 1997. Shogo, Ikuta, ‘Modern Japanese Nature Writing: An Overview.’ In Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook. Edited by Patrick D. Murphy. Chicago, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998, 277–280. Steenstrup, Carl. Notes on the Gunki or Military Tales: Contributions to the Study of the Impact of War on Folk Literature in Premodern Japan. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: iscsc, 1980. Stephen, Michele. ‘Devouring the Mother: A Kleinian Perspective on Necrophagia and Corpse Abuse in Mortuary Ritual.’ Ethos 26, no. 4 (1998): 387–409. Takeda, Kō, ed., Hōjōki zenshaku. Tokyo: Kasama shoin, 1995. Takemaru, Naoko. Women in the Language and Society of Japan: The Linguistic Roots of Bias. Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Co., 2010. Terasaki, Etsuko. Figures of Desire: Wordplay, Spirit Possession, Fantasy, Madness, and Mourning in Japanese Noh Plays. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, 2002. Toshie, Kurihara. ‘History of Women in Japanese Buddhism: Nichiren’s Perspectives on the Enlightenment of Women.’ Translated by Maiko Imai. Journal of Oriental Studies 13 (2003): 94–118. Treat, John Whittier. Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Waley, Arthur. The Nō Plays of Japan. New York: Grove Press, 1957.

Index 11 March 2011 disaster, see Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami 1755 Lisbon earthquake and tsunami  3 1923 earthquake, see Great Kantō (Tokyo) Earthquake 1955 system  238–239 2011 disaster, see Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami 3/11, see Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami 700 Club  76 9mm Parabellum Bullet  150 A Personal Matter  97, 112, 335 a post-disaster worldview  92 abuse of nature  2, 6 academic discussions about the disasters  176 Account of My Ten-Foot Square Hut, see Hōjōki Acidman  150 Adolphson, Mikael  59 aesthetics  2, 12–14, 282, 322–325, 330–331 after the quake  4, 91, 100–102, 111, 128, 195–213, 277, 293, 302, 314, 316 aftershocks  106–108, 111–112, 118, 166–167, 171, 280, 287, 290, 295 African American(s)  77 age-mates  169–170 ai  143, 241 Aikawa Yumi  267 airlines  177 Aizu Yaichi (1881–1956)  273, 287–290, 298 akb  48, 143 Akihito, Emperor  17 Akizuki, Dr. Tatsuichirō  268 ‘Akumu’ (tr., Bad Dream)  331 album cover  157, 158 alchemy  80 alienation from nature  2 all god’s children can dance  197–199, 207–211 Amakasu Masahiko  301 Amaterasu-ō-mikami  34 American military, help of the  173 Analogfish  150

Andō Shōeki  69 Angles, Jeffrey  121, 124 Angles, Fr. John-Baptist, M.E.P.  253 animism  26, 39, 43, 49, 189 Ano, Fr. Peter Takehiko  267–268 Ansei era earthquake (1855)  63–64, 66–67 anthropological fieldwork  8, 168 anthropologist  8, 341 anti-nuclear movement  19, 98, 140, 148–151, 153–154, 164, 235, 237–240, 248 anti-nuclear concerts  19 antiwar  147, 238 Aono Suekichi  302–303, 315 apocalypticism  23, 24, 42, 44, 45 Arai Takako  121–123, 136 Araragi (Yew tree)  275 Arashi  144, 163 architecture  5–6, 287, 310 aristocratic aesthetic refinement  13 Asahi shinbun  131–132, 137–138, 307, 316–317 Asia-Pacific War  72, 109, 245 Asian Kung-Fu Generation  150–151 atomic bomb  98, 168, 174, 177, 232–235, 237, 242–243, 248, 256–258, 260, 265–266, 271, 330, 333, 339, 344 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki  18, 82, 245, 327 Atran, Scott  210 ATSUSHI  27, 48, 143 Aum Shinrikyō  195–199, 201, 203 Australia  155, 176, 181, 217, 220, 226, 270 autobiographical narrative  284–5, 290–1, 295–8 avalanche  185, 307 Azuma kagami (after 1266)  64 Bakhtin, Mikhail  241 Bangkok  74 Battle Flag (Senki)  305 Beatles  142 Bells of Nagasaki, see Nagasaki no kane Benedict XVI, Emeritus Pope, see Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal

346 Benevolent King Sutra  55–56 Bible  75, 79, 190 ‘Bikini kara yatte kita tsubame’ (tr., The Swallow from Bikini)  331–332 Black Pines (Kuromatsu, 1938)  295 blackouts  121 Bodies  275–276, 283, 286 bombing of Nagasaki  7, 232, 243–244, 250, 255, 257, 266–267 BONNIE PINK  143 borderspace  324, 335–336, 344 Bowring, Richard  14 Brahman  150 Buddhism  3–4, 31, 35, 36, 38–40, 42, 46–47, 50, 51, 53, 55–63, 65, 71–75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 83–87, 89–90, 120, 134, 142, 168, 321–322, 325–326, 344 Buddhism, earthquake theories of  57–61 calamity  93–95, 189, 233–234, 272, 280, 304, 324–325 Carson, Rachel  337 Caruth, Cathy  118, 136 catastrophe  5–6, 9, 16–18, 92–93, 98–99, 103, 108–110, 139, 191, 250, 257–259, 261–266, 268–269, 301, 307–308, 314, 317, 326, 333, 338 catfish (namazu)  63–64, 66–68 catharsis  45, 94, 298 Catholic response to the atomic bomb  7, 249–250 Catholicism  75–77, 87, 190, 232, 249–255, 257–271, 285 Catholicism, in Japan  249–271 Ch’i Kung  80 Chamberlain, Basil Hall  252–253 Chan, Jackie  155–56 Chikubushima  61–62, 65 Children of the Atomic Bombing (Genbaku no ko)  233–234, 243 China  79–81, 96, 98, 107, 110, 155, 167, 181, 226–228, 232, 249–250, 320 chinju no mori  26–29, 43, 46–49 Chisso Corporation  338–339 Christchurch  7, 9, 179–180 Christian(s)  4, 31, 36–37, 45, 75–77, 84, 86–87, 184, 188, 190, 242, 249–254, 257, 259, 261, 265–266, 269–270 Christian fundamentalists  4

Index Christianity  7, 37, 77, 86, 189–190, 249, 251–254, 258–259, 264, 269 Christianity as somehow ‘un-Japanese’  7 Chuang Tzu  79–80 Chuang Tzu (book)  79–80 Chūō kōron (Central Review)  277–8 Circum-Pacific Orogenic Zone  180 civil society  160, 173, 178 claim that the Japanese have a ‘unique affinity’ with nature  10 Claudel, Paul (1868–1955)  272, 283–285 Clifford, James  246–247 cloud of Hiroshima  174 co-emergence  336 coast  67, 76, 88, 113, 176, 202, 227, 287 Cohen, Eliezer  87 coincidence of the two millennial disasters occurring in Japan and New Zealand  9 Cold War  231, 238–239 collecting money at stations  175 collective amnesia  20 collusion between the government and the industrial sector  18 communitas  141, 146, 148, 159 community  28, 31–33, 35–36, 38–39, 41, 86, 88, 111, 139–141, 145–146, 148, 151, 154–157, 159–161, 163, 168–170, 175, 178, 195, 216, 221, 223, 225, 228, 247, 254–255, 265, 267, 276, 341 community-building/community activism  23, 29, 32, 33, 36, 41 confidence of Japanese people in the government  173 Confucianism  3, 30, 50, 53–54, 56–57, 67, 80–81, 320–321 Confucius  53, 80–81 contamination of drinking water  167 continuity  169 cosmopolitanism  225, 228–229 Crystal Kay  143 cultural anthropology  7, 250, 326 cultural differences  8, 186, 247 cultural responses to disaster  1–2, 7, 254 culture of catastrophe  5, 308, 317 cultures of coping  249, 269 Daichidoron  58 Daigo Fukuryu-Maru radiation incident  98

Index Daijuku Sutra  74 daikokubashira  169 Dainipponkoku jishin no zu (Map of the earthquakes in the great land of Japan)  62–64 Daishizen (‘Great Nature’)  39 dangers of radiation leaks  177 death  272–298 passim Deep Ecology  40, 47 Derrida, Jacques  231 Devil’s Cauldron  184 Dhammika  85–86 n16 diaries  172 Diet members  16, 18 difficulty in finding marriage partners  174 Dirge  13, 281–282 disaster  1–21, 31–32, 37–39, 41–44, 46, 50–51, 57, 61, 68–70, 77, 79–80, 84, 88–96, 98, 101–111, 115–116, 118–120, 123, 127, 130–135, 139–143, 145–146, 154–156, 158–159, 161–163, 166–170, 173–177, 180, 182, 186, 191, 195–197, 199, 206, 213–215, 217–223, 225–230, 234, 248–251, 254, 256, 269, 272–273, 275, 277, 279, 283, 297, 299–304, 307–308, 310–311, 314–316, 318–319, 324–328, 330–333, 337–339, 341–343 disaster and national culture  8 disaster as an artistic problem  11 Disaster Studies  2 disasters as part of Japanese normalcy  8 diversity of early twenty-first century Japan  10 divine punishment theory  5, 308; see also tenbatsu documentary poets  280–282, 297–298 documentary realism  12–13, 281–282, 286 documentary style of writing  11 Dong Zhongshu  81 dragons (as causes of earthquakes)  57–59, 63 dreams  85, 128, 206, 243, 245 earthquake  1, 3, 5, 7, 11–13, 15–18, 23, 30, 32, 46–48, 50–51, 57–59, 62–67, 69, 71, 74, 76, 91–95, 98, 100–116, 118–119, 121, 124, 128–130, 132, 135, 137–142, 145, 151, 155, 162, 164, 166–167, 171, 173–177, 179–181, 190, 192,

347 195–197, 199–202, 204–206, 211–212, 214, 216, 218, 220, 225, 252–253, 272–273, 275–279, 281–313, 315–317, 324 earthquake hoods  171 Earthquake of 1923  5, 12, 15, 64, 94, 142, 272–273, 275, 277, 279, 281, 283, 285, 287, 289, 291, 293, 295, 297, 299–300, 316; see also Great Kantō (Tokyo) Earthquake Earthquake Poetry Collection  283–284, 286 earthquakes as mechanisms for social reform (yonaoshi)  67–68 Ecclesia in Asia  251 ecosophy, ecological wisdom (seitaichi)  39–41 Edamoto Naoko  132 Eguchi Kan  307 Elegy  13, 220, 282 Eliot, T.S.  129 Ema Shū  311–312 emergency unit  174 English Romantic view of nature  14 enka  149, 224 environment  1, 6, 14, 24, 27, 37, 40, 46, 69, 79, 113, 118, 130, 181–182, 186, 239, 241, 266, 318, 320, 332, 337, 339 Ericson, Joan  127 Ettinger, Bracha L.  335–336, 339, 344 evacuation of foreigners after 3/11  177 Everything but Japan Sinks  215, 221–25, exceptionalism  218, 221 EXILE  143 Facebook  107–108, 114 fascism  15, 301 Firestorm  272–276, 280–2, 286, 290–5 First World War  12 flood  15, 33, 117, 185, 190, 222–223, 252, 304, 324 fly-jin  166 football  34 formalization  12–13, 282 formulaic notions of man and woman, nature and culture  16, 342 ‘Fortuitous Things’  5, 307, 310 Forum for Hindu Awakening  79 Four Leaves  144 Four Noble Truths  4, 70 Fowler, Edward  133, 136 French  76, 192, 234, 256, 270, 272, 283, 332

348 Freud, Sigmund  118, 336 Friederich, Lee  134, 136 Fu Hsi (King)  79 Fudai  88, 90 Fujii Sadakazu  124 Fujimaki Ryōta  143 Fujin Kurabu (Ladies’ Club)  275–276 Fujiwara Seika (1561–1619)  54 Fujiwara Yoshie  263 Fujiyama Ichirō  262, 263, 267 Fukkō Shoten  113 Fukushima nuclear accident  6, 9–10, 16, 18–20, 23–24, 32, 41, 82–83, 89, 91–93, 96, 98–99, 108, 110, 112, 114–115, 117, 121, 127–129, 147–148, 150–152, 166–167, 174–175, 177, 214, 248, 267–268, 270, 298 Fukushima Daiichi  82, 89 Fukushima Francis Mutsuo  267–268 Fukushima nuclear power plant  129, 166, 174 Fukushima Prefecture  82–83 Fukushima residents  10 Fukuyama  328, 330 fundraisers  113, 121, 163 furusato no mori  28 Gabriel, Philip  197 Gaijin  166, 215, 224 GAMO  143 Gendai shi techō (Handbook of Contemporary Poetry, journal)  115, 124, 130, 131 Gensuikyō & Gensuikin  237–240 geomentality  9, 179, 181, 183, 185–187, 189, 191 Gessel, Van  125, 137, 331 geyser  184 gisei (sacrifice)  261, 267 god(s)  4, 7, 31, 37, 46–47, 57, 61–69, 75–82, 84, 86–87, 97, 100, 104–105, 183–184, 188–190, 195–198, 204, 207–209, 232, 251, 255, 258–261, 263–264, 268–269, 287 Godzilla  50–51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 99, 108, 230 Golden Light Sutra  55 Gondō Tomohiko  150 Goodman, David  265, 270–271 Gōta Yashiki  143 Gotō Minako  266

Index Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami  1, 3–5, 6, 7, 8–12, 15–16, 18–19, 35, 39, 46, 50–51, 71, 77, 91–93, 95–97, 99–101, 103–105, 107–117, 119–121, 123–127, 129–132, 134–137, 139–145, 147–148, 150, 155–156, 158–160, 162, 214–215, 273, 297–298, 316, 324 Great Forest Wall  30 Great Hanshin (Kobe) earthquake  145, 196 Great Kantō (Tokyo) Earthquake  12, 142, 272–273, 275, 277, 279, 281, 283, 285, 287–289, 291, 293, 295, 297–299, 301, 303, 305, 307, 309, 311, 313, 315–317 Great Nature  39 Great Parinirvana Sutra  57 Greece  12, 167, 216, 290 Griffin, Roger  15 Gukanshō  59 gunkimono  324 Hagee, John  75, 203–204, 206 Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942)  277 haikai  323 haiku  10, 13, 105, 113, 125–127, 272–273, 276 haiku ma  13 Haiti  4, 76, 139, 155 Hajime Chitose  150–151 Han Dynasty  81 Handbook of Contemporary Poetry  115 Hangui Keiko  128–129 harae  4, 15, 44 Hasegawa Kanajo (1887–1969)  276–7 Hasegawa Reisho (1886–1928)  276–7 Hayashi Fusao  312–314 Hayashi Kyōko  266 Hayashi Razan (1583–1657)  54 Hayashida Yasumasa  266 “Head of Mary, The” (play by Tanaka Chikao)  265, 271 Hearn, Patrick Lafcadio (Koizumi Yakumo)  252–254, 257–258, 263, 267, 270 Heaven’s punishment (tenbatsu)  2–5, 15, 30, 50–69; see also tenbatsu, Mandate from Heaven, karmic punishment, punishment by the Buddha Heavenly Way (tendō)  54–55 Heian period  55, 61, 82

349

Index Heian poets  14 Heike monogatari  6, 56, 59, 60–61 Heinrich, Amy V.  127, 137 Hell’s Gate  184 hellfire  183–184 Hemingway style (and disaster)  11–12 Herder, Johann Gottfried von  14 hermeticism  13 Hey! Say! JUMP  144, 146 hibakusha (A-bomb survivors)  82–83, 231–245, 247–248, 333–334, 336 hidden Catholics  251, 254, 255 Hifana  150 Higashiyama Noriyuki  146 High Treason Incident  315 Hikaru GENJI  144 Hinduism  78–79 hinomaru  145 Hirasawa Keishichi  304 Hirata Toshiko  124 Hiromi  97, 104, 131–132, 136 Hiroshima  16, 18–19, 82, 94, 97–100, 108, 147, 152–153, 174, 177, 231–235, 237–238, 240–241, 243–245, 247–249, 251, 253–255, 257, 259, 261, 263, 265–271, 327–328, 331, 333–337, 339–341, 344 Hiroshima  234–235, 241–244 Hiroshima bombing  16 Hiroshima nōto (tr., Hiroshima Notes)  97, 333–335, 339, 340, 341, 344 Hirotsu Kazuo (1891–1968)  278 Hitchcock, James  258–259, 270 Hitoto Yō  143 Hoi An  38 Hōjōki (Account of My Ten-Foot Square Hut)  40, 61, 133, 325, 342 hōken (offering)  268 holistic study  168 Holocaust  12, 14, 281–282 Holocaust poets  12 homogeneity of Japan  10, 109 Honda Masanobu (1538–1616)  54 honey pie  199, 211–212 honne  148, 159, 316 Horie Toshiyuki  196 Horipro  143 Hosoda Tamiki  304 Hosono Haruomi  143 Hotei Tomoyasu  143

human responses to disaster  8 humanism  96, 134, 238, 333–334 Hurricane Katrina  75–76, 139, 204 I Ching  79–80 Ibuse Masuji  16, 327, 329, 332, 342–343 idea of a uniquely ‘Japanese’ response to disaster  10 Ike Mariko  262 ikenie (sacrifice)  261, 267–268 ikigai  146, 148, 160 Ikimono no kiroku  243 Ikiteite yokatta  237 Ikuta Jinja (shrine)  43 Ikuta Toma  146 imaginary disaster  9 Imai Miki  143 Imaizumi Hachimangū (shrine)  32 Inaba Mayumi  131 inculturation  250 Industrial Revolution  1 interculturality  250 International Association of Buddhist Studies  74 international press  172 International Shinto Foundation  26, 38, 46 Internet  114–115, 176, 267 Ise Jingū (shrine)  32 Ise monogatari  330 Ishihara Shintarō (former Tokyo Governor)  3–5, 7, 14–15, 30–31, 37, 44–45, 50–53, 71, 73, 84–85, 204, 206, 299–300, 308, 316 Ishikawa Jun  94 Ishimure Michiko  16, 113, 131, 337–339, 342, 343 Islam  78, 87–88 Itō Hiromi  131, 132–34 Itō Yasuhide  116 Iwate Prefecture  32, 88, 125, 127 Izoku Tokuhon  72 Janet, Pierre  117 Japan as a ‘stateless nation’  17 of all countries should resist becoming dependent on nuclear energy  18 the idea that 3/11 will change it ­forever  174, 177

350 Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons  14 Japan Proletarian Writers’ League (Nihon Puroretaria Sakka Dōmei)  305, 312 Japan Sinks  9, 16, 214–219, 221, 225, 228–229 Japans Sinks II  225–29 Japan United with Music  142 Japanese family system  169 Japanese flag  145, 157, 225 Japanese government  16–17, 19, 147, 173, 215, 217–218, 220, 226–228, 233, 238, 247 Japanese immigrants  226, 245–247 Japanese media  161, 163, 172 Japanese national character  9, 19 Japanese nature lyricism  13 Japanese public  16–17, 19–20, 147, 177 Japanese Studies Association of Australia  176 Japanese temple bridge (chùa cầu), Hoi An, Vietnam  38, 39 Japaneseness  9, 218 Jewish viewpoints on disaster  77–78 Jiji shinpō (Current Affairs)  278 Jinja Honchō  32, 38 Jinten ainōshō (1532)  57 jishin mushi (earthquake insect)  63 jishyuku  8, 167 Johnny & Associates  143, 164 Johnny’s  143–146, 159, 162–164 Johnny’s Jr.  146 Jōmyōkoji  326 journalism  12–13, 282, 337 Judaism  77, 87 JUJU  143 Jūmoku to sono ha (Tree and Leaves)  295–296 Kaempfer, Engelbert (1651–1716)  64 Kafka on the Shore  205, 211 Kagamiba (Shiny Leaves, 1926)  290–1 Kaibara Ekken  69 Kaibutsu  320 Kaizō  310 kakitsubata (flower)  328, 330 Kakitsubata (Noh)  330 ‘Kakitsubata’ (story by Ibuse Masuji, tr. ‘The Crazy Iris’)  328–330 Kakuban (1095–1143)  60

Index kakure (hidden Catholics)  251, 254, 255 kakusa shakai  108 Kamata Tōji  24, 39, 40, 41, 42 Kamei Fumio  232 n3, 235–244 Still It’s Good to Live (Ikiteite yokatta)  232n3, 235, 237–243 Kameido Incident  303–304, 306 Kameoka Daisuke  131 kami (god)  26, 33, 37, 52–55, 60, 64–68, 82, 86, 100, 196, 270, 287 kami worship, kami cults  33, 37 Kamigamo Jinja (shrine)  29, 32 Kamigoryo (shrine)  82 Kamo no Chōmei (1155–1216)  40, 61, 133, 134, 325–326, 327 Kanda  253, 290 Karashima, David  105, 111, 134, 137 karma (Pali, kamma)  4, 57–58, 71, 72, 74, 83, 85, 100, 110, 205–207 karmic punishment (gōbatsu)  55 Kasai Kiyoshi  214, 229 Kashima deity (Daimyōjin)  62, 64–68 Kashima Jingū (shrine)  38, 43 Kashima mondō (1377)  65 Kashima Shrine  62, 64–68 KAT-TUN  144 Kataoka Yakichi  254, 258 Kataoka, Sr. Chizuko  268–270 Kateswamiji, Gurudev  79 Katō Norihiro  197–199, 201, 203 Kawabata Yasunari  310 Kawahigashi Hekigotō (1873–1937)  276 Kawaji Ryūko (1885–1959)  12–13, 272, 280–282 Kawanami (River Ripples  1929)  275 kegare  190, 321 Ken-On Group  143 Kesennuma  121 Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948)  277–278, 300, 314–315 Kikuchi, Sister Therese Takako  267–268 Kikuchi Yō  128 Kimura Takuya  144 Kingston, Jeff  16–18, 139, 162 Kinjitsu shokan (My Impressions of Recent Events)  277 Kitagawa Hiromu  144 Kitagawa Tōru  124 Kitahara Masahiko  143

Index Kitakami City  125, 128 Kiyoshi Kurokawa  96 kizuna (bonds)  28, 227, 316 Kj (Keijei)  143 Kobayashi Takeshi  142–143 Kobe (Great Hanshin) earthquake of 1995  4, 17, 43, 95, 100–102, 151, 173, 176, 195–197, 199–200, 202, 205, 211, 253 Koike Masayo  131 Koizumi Kyōko  143 Koizumi Setsu  252 Koizumi Yakumo. See Hearn, Patrick Lafcadio  252 Kojiki  34 Kojinteka na taiken (tr., A Personal Matter)  335 Kokinshū  323 Kokinwakashū  323 Kokoro no mirai research centre  39 Komatsu Sakyō  9, 16, 68, 214–215, 218–219, 221, 223, 229–230 Kondō Masahiko  144, 146 Konkomyo Sutra  74 Kōra Rumiko  124 Koseki Yūji  262, 267, 269 Koshintō (‘ancient Shinto’)  41 Kotani Mari  215 Kraftwerk  150–153, 162 Krattenmaker, Tom  75, 86–87n17 Kristeva, Julia  335, 343 Kubota Utsubo (1877–1967)  273, 290–291 kudoki  142 Kugai jōdo  337, 339, 341, 342 Kugai jōdo: waga Minamata-byō (tr., Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow)  337, 339 Kumano shrines  24, 33, 34, 36, 41 Kurahashi Yuko  339, 340, 341 Kuroda Hideo  58–59, 64, and passim Kuroko, Kazuo  196–197 Kuromatsu (Black Pines, 1938)  295 Kurosawa Akira  20, 243–247 Films: Rhapsody in August (Hachigatsu no kyōshikyoku)  243–247 Record of A Living Being (Ikimono no kiroku)  243–244, 246–247 Yume (Dreams)  243–244 Kwaidan  6

351 Kyoto  29, 32, 36, 39, 46, 48, 59–60, 65, 82, 216, 275, 316, 337, 343 Kyushu  168, 174, 312, 337 Lacan, Jacques  210, 336 Ladies’ Club  275 Lady Gaga  155–57 Lament  282–283 landscape with flatiron  198–199, 202–203 landslide  184–185, 324 Lao Tzu  79–80 liminality  141, 159, 164–165 Linkin Park  155 Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755  1 literary ‘style of disaster’  11 literary and artistic responses to disaster  10 Literary Front (Bungei sensen)  315 logo  144–145 long-term consequences of radiation  174 long-term fieldwork  168 Lotus Sutra  52, 73–74n5 loud-speakers  172 love of nature/harmony with nature  26, 27, 29, 34, 38, 39, 43, 44 Luke, Elmer  134, 137 lyric poetry  13, 282 lyrics  149, 151, 153, 158, 262–264 magagoto  15, 43–44 makara fish  63 Mandate of Heaven (tenmei)  3, 53–55, 81 Maori language and culture (and disaster)  9, 181–192 mappō  42 Māra  59–60 ‘Marching J’  144–146, 162–164 Masanaga Reihō  72 matrixial borderspace  335–336, 339, 344 matsuri  23, 27, 33, 35, 40–41, 219 Mauch, Christof  249–250, 269–270 ‘cultures of coping’  249, 269 Meiji Jingū (shrine)  29, 30 memorial  273, 280, 282, 295, 297–8 Merwin, W.S.  113 metaphor  101–102, 107, 182–183, 186, 188, 205, 207, 330 Metz, Christian  242–243 Minamata Bay  337

352 Minamata Disaster  16, 337, 339, 341 Minamata Disease (Minamata-byō)  337, 338, 342 Minami Sōma City  82, 115 Minashita Kiriu  131 minimalistic style  11 Mishima Kinnosuke  253 Misumi Mizuki  131 Mitsui Kōji  264 miwa  143 Miwa, Mount  41 Miyagi Prefecture  17 Miyajima Sukeo  306 Miyamoto, Yuki  261, 265, 268, 270 Miyata Kōsuke  124 Miyawaki Akira  27–28 Mizutani Masaru (1894–1950)  12–13, 280–281 Monnet, Livia  337 mono no aware  234, 244, 248, 320 Mouer, Ross  176 Moriori  181 Moritani Shirō  215, 219 Moriyama Midori (Mrs. Nagai Takashi)  255 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa  26, 47, 320, 343 Motoori Norinaga  320 Mount Higane (Higanesan)  61 Mount Mihara (eruption of)  170–171 Mount Miwa  41 Mount Sumeru  59 Mount Tarawera  189 muen shakai  15, 44 mujō-kan  325 Mujū Ichien (1227–1312)  60 multiculturalism  10, 254 Murakami Haruki  4, 10, 18–19, 45, 91–92, 94–95, 99–104, 107, 109, 111, 195–199, 201, 203, 205, 211–213 Works of: after the quake  195–213; all god’s children can dance  197–199, 207–211; honey pie  211–212; Kafka on the Shore  205, 211; landscape with flatiron  202–203; The Place that was Promised  196–198, 201–203; super-frog saves tokyo  206–207; thailand  205– 206; ufo in Kushiro  200–202; Underground  196–198

Index murders of Koreans  277, 298 Museum of Contemporary Japanese Poetry, Tanka, and Haiku (Nihon Gendai Shiika Bungakukan)  125 Mushanokōji Saneatsu  314 Music For Relief  155, 163 musician  19, 140, 142, 148–150 musubi  191 My Impressions of Recent Events  277 Nagai Noburu  254 Nagai Takashi  6, 232–233n8, 249–250, 254–255, 257–258, 266, 269–271 Mrs. Nagai Takashi  262, 264 Nagai Tsune  254 Nagaido Reichi Band  150 Nagasaki  6–7, 18–19, 82, 92, 94, 99–100, 108, 147, 177, 231–232, 234–235, 240–241, 243–251, 253–271, 327 Nagasaki no kane (book by Nagai Takashi)  232, 260–265, 267 Nagasaki no kane satsujin jiken (book by Yoshimura Tatsuya)  267 Nakajima Kenzō  300, 311 namazu, see catfish namazue or ‘catfish pictures’  15, 38–39, 45, 63, 67 Nam(u)-Myōhō-Renge-Kyō (I take refuge in the Wonderful Law of the Lotus Sutra)  73 Nanao Tabito  150 Nanba Akihiro  143, 150 Naoko Takemaru  321 Naoto Inti Raymi  143 Napoleon III  76 NARGO  143 national culture  7–8 national identity  9, 25, 27, 29, 214–215, 217–219, 221, 223, 225, 227, 229, 245 national psychology  7–8 national resurrection  23–24, 36, 44–45 nationalism  34, 47, 109, 148, 160, 219, 221, 223–225, 229, 239 Native Americans  84 natural disasters becoming national disasters  16 naturalism  14, 291 nature  1–3, 5–6, 10, 13–14, 16, 19, 179–180, 182, 186–192

Index nature, sacredness of  52–53 nature’s benevolence  3 Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind  42 neighbours  169–173 Nelson, John  85 neo-Rousseauvianism  5 New Age  40, 41 New Orleans  4, 75–76, 78, 204 new religious movements  31, 36, 45 New Zealand  7, 9, 179–189, 191–192 Newman, John Henry (Cardinal)  258 Newsweek  82 Nichiren (1222–1282)  40, 52, 73–74, 322, 344 Nihon chinbotsu  9, 215, 219, 222, 225, 229–230 Nihon chinbotsu II  225–29 Nihon Gendai Shiika Bungakukan  125, 136–137 Nihon igai zenbu chinbotsu  215, 221–25, nihonjinron  9, 42, 45, 188, 218 Niimi Tokuhide  116 Ninja  144 Ninno Sutra  74 Ninomiya Sontoku  69 Nishimura Akira  255, 257, 269 Nishiwaki Junzaburō (1894–1982)  272 No Nukes 2012  149–151, 154, 159, 161–162, 165 Noda Yoshihiko  18 Noh theatre  269, 322, 330, 344 Nomura Kiwao  124 Norihiro  197–199, 203 northeastern Japan  1, 3, 17, 50, 88, 103, 110, 113, 308 Nosaki Kan  120 npo Hibiki  29, 30, 32 npos  173 nuclear power  1, 6, 9, 16, 18–20, 23, 32, 43, 51, 69, 83, 89–90, 92–93, 96–100, 105, 108–111, 113, 117, 124, 126–130, 137, 139–140, 145, 147–154, 159–160, 162–167, 174, 177, 180, 214, 231, 234–235, 237–240, 243–244, 247–248, 273, 298, 324, 332–333, 335–336 nuclear accident  1, 139; see also Fukushima nuclear energy industry  20 nuclear power plant at Fukushima  177 nyc  144 nyonin kinsei  321

353 Ōba Hideo  232, 264 Ōba Minako  327, 331, 343 Obama, Barack  84 objectivity of representation in poetry  13, 282 Oda Makoto  95, 97 Odagiri Susumu  301 Ōe Kenzaburō  10, 16, 18, 45, 92, 94–99, 107, 111, 112, 113, 150, 333–335, 338, 339, 341, 342 Oedipus complex  207–208 offering  43, 108, 199, 215, 268 Ogawa Mimei  5, 307–310 Ohsaki Sayaka  124 Okinawa Notes  98, 112 Ortner, Sherry B.  318 Ōsugi Sakae  301, 306 Ōta Yōko  266 Other  333–336, 339 Ōtomo Yoshihide  150 Ouwehand, Cornelius  66–68 Ovadia Yosef  78, 87 Oxford Book of Modern Verse  12 Oyamada Keigo  150–151 Oyu-no-hara  33 Pacific War  20, 72, 97, 109–110, 245 palingenetic discourse  15 palliative literature  108, 110 Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow  337, 339, 343 parody  13, 215, 221–223 party politics  16 Pascal, Blaise  254–255 pastoral care  31, 41 patriarchy  16, 318, 324, 335, 338–339, 341, 343 Peace Preservation Law  301, 315 Pearl Harbor  72, 233, 244 pedagogy of trauma  297–298 Perrin, Fr. Henry, M.E.P.,  253 Pfister, Christian  270 photography  171 Pierre Janet  117 playfulness (as a necessary element of poetic creation)  12 poetic diction  289, 291, 297 poetry  10–13, 91–93, 104–105, 113–117, 119–121, 123–125, 127, 130, 132–138, 272–298 passim  322–323, 331, 343; see separate entries for tanka, haiku, and shi

354

Index

questions about the value of art in the face of human suffering  11 Quran  87

Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI)  250, 267 theory of interculturality vs. inculturation  250 Reader, Ian  35, 45, 195 Reader for Bereaved Families (Izoku Tokuhon)  72 realism  12–14, 105, 281–282, 286, 315 Record of A Living Being (Ikimono no kiroku)  243–244, 246–247 redemptive suffering  7, 261, 264, 268 re-enchantment of the world  52–53, 69 Religion News Service  77 religion and secularity  35 religion (category)  24, 31, 35, 36, 37 religious organisations (shūkyō hōjin)  29, 31, 36 reportage  12, 93, 272, 281–282, 284, 310–311 representation, crisis of  114, 120, 131–32, 135 Rhapsody in August (Hachigatsu no kyōshikyoku)  243–245, 247 rice cultivation  29 Richie, Donald  234 n10, 244, 247–248 Rimer, J. Thomas  125 Ring of Fire  9, 180 Risshō-ankoku-ron (Treatise on Pacifying the Country through the Establishment of True [Buddhism])  73–74n6 ritual purification  15, 44 Robertson, Pat  76 Rodd, Laurel R.  127, 137 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  1–2, 6 Rousseauvian influences  3 Ruaumoko (Maori god of earthquakes and volcanoes)  183–184, 189 Rubin, Jay  100, 102, 111, 197 rules about construction  176 rural depopulation  32–33, 42 Rurikō, (Lapis Lazuli Light  1925)  292 Ryōgoku Bridge  275

radiation  83, 89, 98–99, 105, 116–118, 147, 166–167, 174–175, 177, 232–233, 241–242, 328, 333, 336 radiation incident  98 Rainbow Entertainment  143 rapid response register  174

sacred keystone (kanameishi)  62 sacred places (seichi)  35, 39, 40 sacrifice  7, 260–263, 265, 267–268 Saigo zakkan (Stray Thoughts After the Quake)  277, 317 Saitō Kazuyoshi  150, 153–54

Police Headquarters in Tokyo  273–274 political ‘call to arms’ response to disaster  15 political fallout from the Fukushima  18 political impacts of disaster  16 political passivity (alleged) of the Japanese population  19 political response to disaster as a call to arms  15 politically sensitive issue of A-bomb responsibility  19 politics of disaster  14–16, 332 Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI  250, 269 Pope John Paul II  251 Ecclesia in Asia  251 population  216–219, 221, 226–229 post-3/11 literature  10–11, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109–112 postmodernity  4, 13, 104, 213, 318, 344 power shortage  167 power supply to the city of Tokyo  177 ‘powerspots’  35, 40, 41 precariat literature  92, 103 prediction  176 Prime Minister Kan Naoto  17 proletarian(s)  5, 15, 110, 299, 301–307, 309, 311–317 proletarian literature movement  15, 302, 313–314, 315, 316 propitiation  66, 189–191 protest  18, 129–131, 147–149, 151, 154, 159, 163–165, 167, 234, 240 Protestantism  75–77, 86, 253, 269 Public Religion Research Institute  77 punishment by the Buddha (butsubachi)  55–57 purification (misogi, harae)  4, 42, 44 purification through suffering  7, 15

Index Saitō Mayuki  142 Sakamoto Ryūichi  19, 142–143, 148–152, 161, 163–164 Sakurai Kazutoshi  143 Salleh, Ariel  319, 335, 338 Salyu (Saryu/Saryū)  143 sangokujin (third country national)  299 Sanjō (Niigata) earthquake of  1828, 142 Sano Shin’ichi  119 Santa Claus  86 Sartre, Jean-Paul  91, 96, 333 Sasaki Mikirō  124, 131 Sata Ineko  266 Satō Hachirō  262 Satō Sōnōsuke (1890–1942)  285–6 Satō Tadao  231 n1, 233, 241n25, 243n29, 244 satoyama  36 Schencking, Charles  5–6, 308, 316–317 science fiction  9, 214–215, 218, 221, 229 Second World War  12, 130, 147, 168, 174, 224, 245, 299, 327 ‘secondary nature’  14 secularisation  48, 195–196, 199, 213 Sedighi, Ayatollah Kazem  78 seinendan (young people’s association)  303, 306, 307 seismic activity  93, 103, 109, 113, 128, 183, 191, 216 Seki Etsushi  1, 13, 125–127 Sekikawa, Hideo  234–235, 238, 241–244 Hiroshima  234–235, 241–244 self-restraint  8, 167 Senge Motomaru (1888–1948)  286 sengo shakai  109 Sexy Zone  144, 146 shamans  5, 79, 84, 90, 101, 183, 189, 207 shamanism  2, 4–6, 39, 79, 83–84, 88–90 Shasekishū  60 Shasō Gakkai  27, 28, 32 shasōgaku (‘sacred forest studies’)  27 shi (free-verse poetry)  113–125, 129–136, 272–273, 275–7, 279–281, 283–286 Shibugakitai  144 Shiga Naoya  307, 310 Shimada Masahiko  113 shinbutsu shūgō  33, 39, 41 Shindō, Kaneto  233–235, 238, 240–244 Children of the Atomic Bombing (Genbaku no ko)  233–234, 243

355 Shinjinkai (New Man Society)  312 Shinsai shishū: Saika no ue ni (Earthquake Poetry Collection: On the Disaster)  283–285 Shinto  3–4, 14–15, 23, 24, 29, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 60, 82, 86, 253–254, 258, 320–321 ‘Shinto’ (concept)  24, 25, 36, 37 Shinto environmentalist paradigm  26, 27, 41, 43 Shinto nature-romantics  14 Shiraishi Kazuko  124 Shiraishi Yoshihiko  94 Shirane, Haruo  14, 325, 343 Shiratori Shōgo (1890–1973)  275–276 Shirin saiyōshō (1366)  65 Shishū sanbun: Ā Tōkyō (Poetry Prose: Ah Tokyo)  279–282 Shōchiku Ōfune Studios  264 Shōno Yoriko  331 shrine forests (chinju no mori)  24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 43 shrine priests  23, 27, 29, 32, 34, 42, 43, 44 shrines  3, 24, 27, 28, 29, 32, 36, 42, 43, 82, 321 Shugendō  39 shūkyō hōjin  29 Shun (King)  79 skyscrapers and earthquakes  176 SMAP  144, 146, 215 social discipline  19 social media  10 Soeda Azenbō  149 Songs for Japan  103, 156–159, 161–162, 164 Sonoda Minoru  27, 43 soto  148, 159 Soul Flower Union  150–151 speed of communication of the 3/11 disaster  8, 177 Spring and Autumn Annals  80 Stephen, Michele  341 stereotypes  9, 218–219, 222 Still It’s Good to Live (Ikiteite yokatta)  232n3, 235, 237–243 stoicism  7, 19 storms  156, 185, 252, 287, 313 Stray Thoughts After the Quake  277 Studio for Cultural Exchange  127 Sueki Fumihiko  51–53

356 Suga Keijirō  120, 121 SUGIZO  143 super-frog saves tokyo  5, 206–207 Superfly  143 support of neighbours  173 Suzukawa, Sr. Yoshi  268 taboo  190–191, 299, 324, 342 Tackey & Tsubasa  146 Tai Chi  80 Taishō Democracy  300 taishū bungaku  315 Takada Namikichi (1898–1962)  275 Takada Ren  150 Takahashi Mutsuo  6, 124, 129–32, 134, 135 Takahashi Yukihiro  143 Takahiro  143 Takano Tamio  124 Takarabune (treasure ship)  68 Takashi Nagai  270 Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934)  279, 282–283 Takizawa Osamu  264 Tale of Genji  205, 292 Tale of the Heike  6, 59–60, 61 Tanaka Chikao  265 Tanaka Sumie  265 Tanaka Yōsuke  124–25 Tanemaku hito (The Sower)  303–304 Tanikawa Shuntarō  11, 121, 131, 135 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965)  273–275 tanka  113, 125, 127–129, 272–273, 275, 287–98 Tao Te Ching  79 Taoism  79–80, 83, 320 tatari  37, 44, 55–56 tatemae  148, 159 Tatsumi Takayuki  214, 229 Tawada Yōko  331 Tayama Katai  186 technology of the mobile media  172 tectonic plates  85, 172 television  8, 114–115, 171–172, 174, 177, 200, 220 tenbatsu (heavenly punishment)  2–7, 15, 30, 31, 38, 44, 45, 51, 54, 71 tenbatsu response  5, 7 Tenkawa Jinja (shrine)  41 tenkō  313

Index tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company)  18, 114, 121, 129 territory  218–219, 228–229 terrorist attack  17 testament  272–298 passim thailand  205–206 The 1955 system  238–239 The Beatles  142 The Bells of Nagasaki  6, 19, 232, 254, 256–258, 262–270 The Bells of Nagasaki (book by Nagai Takashi), see Nagasaki no kane) “The Bells of Nagasaki” (song written by Satō Hachirō and Koseki Yūji)  262–263 “The Bells of Nagasaki” (song written by Uemoto Kazuo)  263–264 “The Bells of Nagasaki” (1950 movie produced by Shōchiku Ōfune Studios)  232, 264 The Cold War  231, 238–239 The Crazy Iris  328–329, 343 The Enigma of Japanese Power  17 The Hiatus  150 The Lucky Dragon Five (Dai go fukuryū maru)  235, 239 The Place that was Promised  196–198, 201–203 The Silent Spring  337 ‘The Swallow from Bikini’, 331 theodicy  23, 24, 37, 42, 44, 45 theological interpretation of disaster  7 theory of mind  204, 210 Thomas, Dylan  1 thunder  183, 185 Tian Yuan  124 Tōhoku  23, 24, 30, 32, 38, 41 Tōhoku Earthquake, see Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Tokuda Shūsei  314 Tokugawa era  15, 54, 57, 66–67, 69, 161 Tokyo Electric Power Company, see tepco Tokyo power station  167 Tokyo-Yokohama  272–275, 283–6, 290–5 Tomioka City  128 Tomomatsu Entai  71, 73 tornado  86, 155, 324 Tortoise Matsumoto  143 ‘traditional culture’ (dentō bunka)  24, 29, 37

357

Index traditional skills (waza)  40, 41 tragedy  272–298 passim trauma  114, 117–18 Treat, John  257, 261, 266, 271, 324, 333–337, 344 treatment of radiation sickness  174 Tree and Leaves (Jūmoku to sono ha, 1925)  295–296 tree-planting  28, 29, 30 Truth and Tolerance (book by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger)  250, 269 Tsuboi Shigeji  305–306 Tsubouchi Shōyō  303 Tsuchiura City  126 Tsujii Takashi  131 Tsujima Keiko  264 Tsujimoto Isao  127 Tsukioka Yumeji  264 tsunami  1, 3, 11, 14, 17–18, 23, 28, 30, 31, 32, 37, 39, 41, 44, 47, 50–51, 57, 71, 78, 82, 85, 88–89, 92–93, 103–105, 107–108, 110–111, 113, 118–119, 121, 123, 128, 134–135, 137–141, 145, 155, 167, 171–172, 174–175, 176, 177, 180–181, 184–185, 191, 214–215, 217–220, 253, 273, 275, 324 Tsunoda Tadanobu  187 Tsushima Yūko  113 Tsutsui Yasutaka  215, 221, 223–225, 230 Twitter  10, 93, 106–108, 114–117, 119, 127 typhoons  23, 33, 37, 39, 155, 186, 191, 324 U-zhaan  150 uchi  148, 159 Uemoto Kazuo  263 ufo in kushiro  198–202 Umesao Tadao  187 Underground  196–198 University of San Francisco  85 Urashimasō, 331 us censorship  231–237, 242 us Occupation  231–237, 239, 247–248 usa today  75 Vatican  77, 87, 251 VERBAL  143 Verse composition  273, 280–3, 286, 289, 291, 297 Vietnam  38 Vilsack, Tom  84 Vimalakirti  326

VISION Factory  143 Voices from Japan project  127 volcanic ash  171 volcanic eruption  172–173 volcano  171, 182–184, 324 Voltaire  3 voluntary fire-fighting groups  173 volunteers  29, 31–32, 36, 177 Vulcan  183 wa  148 Wagner, Gerhard  76–77, 87 Wagō Ryōichi  10–11, 12, 13, 93, 112, 114–20, 125, 127, 131, 132, 135 Wakahara Masao  264 Wakayama Bokusui (1885–1928)  295–7 Wamura Kotoku  88–89 Watanabe Productions  143 Watsuji Tetsuro  14 Weisenfeld, Gennifer  275, 277, 279, 297–298 whales  61, 64, 68 whirlwinds  185 Wild, Franz  87, 179, 211, 272, 328 Wolferen, Karel van  17 Wordsworth, William  14 World War II  6, 18, 100, 129, 337 Wu Di (Emperor)  81 xenophilia  221, 223, 225 xenophobia  221, 223, 225 yakeato (burnt-out ruins) generation  94, 97 Yakushi Sutra  74 yakuza (gangsters)  17 Yamada Ichitarō  257, 258, 259, 262 yamamba  322, 340 Yamamura Akiyoshi  24, 26, 42, 43, 44 Yamashita Tomohisa  146 Yamazaki Masayoshi  150–151 Yanaka Atsushi  143 yatagarasu  34 Yeats, W.B.  12 Yellow Magic Orchestra  143, 149–150, 152, 165 Yellow River  80 Ynet  78n11, 87n19 Yoko Ono  106, 155

358 Yokoyama Ken  150 Yosano Akiko (1878–1942)  291–5 Yoshida Haruo  196 Yoshimasu Gōzō  131 Yoshimoto Takaaki  92 Yoshimura Tatsuya  267

Index Yotsumoto Yasuhiro  124 Yu (King)  79 yuki onna  322 Yume (Dreams)  243–244 Žižek, Slavoj  209–210