Note: The following text was written in January, 2013. Grammatical errors and awkward phrases abound, but the substance of the argument is not totally rubbish.
Art in the Wake of the Quake
“If
there
is a future in every past that is present
Quis
est qui non novit quinnigan and
Qui
quae quot at Quinnigan's Quake!”
—Finnegans
Wake,
496-7
“The
river is more a picture
of real life [des
wirklichen Lebens]:
it
draws our imagination along with it into unrestricted bounds,
as
into a distant future.”
—Clara,
Or Nature's Connection to the Spirit World,
67
Introduction
The
Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 triggered a widespread skepticism
concerning the benevolence of God. A certain naïve interpretation of
the texts written by Malebranche, Leibniz, and others during the 17th
century had to be revised. It is well-known that Kant, prior to the
composition of his first
Critique,
had to experience the limits of mysticism and esoterica preached by
Swedenborg, a man who claimed to have “foreseen” the disaster.
Together with the writings of Hume, Kant had to undergo a radical
transformation concerning his own understanding of major intellectual
topics such as science, ethics, morality, freedom, beauty, theology,
theodicy, and politics. The result was the birth of modern thought.
Japan's
experience of the Great Tohoku Earthquake is of analogous magnitude,
and it calls into question many of the background assumptions upon
which Japanese culture has been operating for many decades. The
tsunami itself is nothing new – such disasters have been hitting
the nation since time immemorial. What is truly unique about the
present case is rather the nuclear accident. It is not simply a
“failure of technology” or the “end of the safety myth.” Much
more profoundly, this event opens up a certain void between what we
think we think, and what we actually have been thinking. There are
many such previously invisible gaps which are increasingly becoming
vivid.
I
A
news headline reads: “Quake toll now worst disaster in
postwar Japan” (Asahi Shimbun,
March 16 2011). Would the conclusion then be this: disasters are
terrible because they devastate a large number of people?
If
it were as simple as this... but it is not the numbers themselves
that matter. Rather, it is the possibility that somebody is left
helpless that stirs our emotions. This is why the claim “every
three seconds, a child is dying” is much less likely to motivate us
to act compared to the familiar advertisement that features a
close-up photograph of a lonely starving child. The fact that tens of
thousands of people were displaced is not that bad if this news were
to be followed up by the claim: millions of people showed their
support in the disaster relief efforts. As long as there are enough
people and resources to address all the survivors' needs, the scale
of the disaster is not the deciding factor of how terrible it was.
This
shows that scale is a measure of terror only because it gives rise to
an image of helpless masses of people whose needs are left
unattended. In other words, the core of our feeling of terror towards
“large-scale” disasters is our psychic assimilation to one or two
concrete individuals who are left all on their own to pull out of the
mess. Without this image, any number of casualties would fail to
produce an emotional response within us. Thus, in order to grasp the
true consequences of the Great Tohoku Earthquake, we must not rest
content with discovering statistical facts. Rather, we must enter the
much more murky realm of subjective qualities of feeling and
experience and sift through the array of reactions and responses one
after the other.
A
Rude Awakening
Initial
reactions to the Great Tohoku Eathquake are not natural but
manufactured. They are conditioned by what we learn through various
telecommunications, and the material for the latter is chosen by
human beings, most notably journalists, who have at least some
freedom albeit being situational.
What
choices were journalists making?
When
I visited an evacuation centre in Minami-Sanriku city as a volunteer
worker – this was in the beginning of May 2011, only two months
after the day of disaster – I witnessed reporters and journalists
from various newspapers and television channels coming and going
quite ceaselessly. Every two or three days, I would see a team of two
or three, often equipped with a voice recorder or a video camera,
prowling around the school gymnasium – the temporary “bedroom”
for dozens of survivors – and approaching the local people. The
media's goal was simple: extract stories from the survivors, so that
the rest of the nation can learn the real damage of the disaster. On
first sight, it seems that the cause of these journalists were
anything but sensationalism.
The
results of their work were sensational. Newspapers and television
news shows were filled with stories of “outraged citizens” and
“shocking aftermaths.” There were images of people crying, of
houses being torn down, and, sometimes, even of bodies floating on
the surface of a blood-stained water puddle.
If
journalists were genuinely committed to uncovering the truth, and if
the result of such a commitment produced sensational images and
stories, then did this mean that the truth of the disaster has been
revealed by these media representations? If so, are we not entitled
to understand the reality of the disaster as “outrageous” and
“shocking?”
The
answer is no. Reporters and writers were in a way bound to be
sensationalists, not because they actively pursued these lines, but
because of the constraints within which they had to work. For one
thing, there was an extremely high demand for coverage which needed
to be met in such a short period of time. People wanted to know the
next update on pretty much everything that was going on in the Red
Zone – the situation with the nuclear power plant, the nature of
the devastations experienced by the local people, the local
government's plans for recovery. Forced to work in this rushed
environment, journalists failed to take the time to slowly melt into
the community which they were approaching for stories. Instead, they
simply walked into the evacuation centres, expecting to hear
authentic testimonies out of the blue. By doing so, they failed to
notice how the survivors themselves were not yet ready to express
their damage in a language fitting to the intensity of the
experience. Journalists also failed to see how, even if survivors
were ready to calmly reflect of their own situation and experience,
it would be difficult for them to tell their stories to outsiders who
have barely introduced themselves to the local community. As a
result, survivors, when being pointed at with a voice recorder or a
video camera, were often reduced to tears, and even when they were
able to say something, their voices contained not a detailed account
of what happened to them from an objective point of view, but rather
a purely emotional cry.
Another
constraint which journalists had to work under were the demand for
brevity and news-value. Anyone with a voice recorder can report on
what the local people had to tell the nation. Journalists actively
sought to capture rare stories and images, even from the earliest
stage of the post-disaster response. An ex-Asahi Shinbun journalist,
who is now working for a volunteer organization for post-3.11
recovery, gave me an insider account of how journalists competed with
each other to deliver the shortest yet most “valuable” pieces of
information. Immediately after the tsunami hit, journalists instantly
mapped out key locations where “news-worthy” photos and stories
might be collected. They then re-located to these “hot-spots,”
often times occupying entire buildings which could have otherwise
been used as evacuation centres for the needy survivors. They
constantly exchanged rumours about a “body floating on water” or
a “mutilated body” or a “grotesquely disfigured house” –
anything which may represent the “intensity” of the trauma. These
rumours spread quickly via cell phones, and as a result journalists
from a wide variety of different news sources were all pumping out
sensational stories and images at a rapid pace.
What
we see behind these choices made by journalists is nothing less than
the complex psychology of news media competition. Each medium tries
to uncover the “truth” of the disaster, yet it also tries to
differentiate itself from others in terms of the content which it can
present to the public. The result is an unintended sensationalism.
It
is no wonder then that both the Japanese and non-Japanese public has
been conditioned accordingly to experience intense emotional
reactions to the aftermath of the Great Tohoku Earthquake. This is
not exactly a problem, except for the fact that, due to the above
sketched state of journalism, what the public ended up getting was an
over-stimulation of emotion and a paralysis of our more rational
faculties. It is true that there were also many objective, neutral
information in the news – most notably the updates concerning
radiation. But when it came to the task of interpreting this
information so as to make them relevant for our daily lives, the news
offered very little beyond immediate emotional messages like:
“ganbaro
(let's do our best)!” and “save yourself!”
Sympathy
in the Beginning
When
we are bombarded with words, images, and sounds that depict a
disaster, a hitherto dormant emotion seems to get stirred within us:
sympathy. Sympathy further translates, at a remarkable pace and
intensity, into the command which we give to ourselves: do something!
And
we do something. This is our first selfish reaction to a disaster,
selfish precisely because it is based on our impulses rather than on
careful thought and discipline.
In
our day-to-day lives, the “good” things which we do seem minute
in comparison to massive social problems that we confront as a global
society. Contemporary first-world politics and its hollowness makes
us feel that nothing good can take place on a large scale. Sensible
writers and critics repeatedly remind us that instead of despairing,
we must engage in piece-meal changes – driving less, not buying
that next cup of coffee, or refraining from flying to Hawaii for the
nth
time. One might see here how deeply our moral self-esteem has become
wounded.
Therefore,
when disaster hits, we try to heal this wound. Politicians make
speeches; corporations make massive donations; individuals sign up
for one-week volunteer programs, run fund-raising events, or send
whatever they can afford to send to the disaster-torn people.
What
matters here is not
whether
these activities actually
lead
to real recovery. The stakes are, in this sense, extremely low. These
actions ultimately aim to satisfy the call: do something! By “doing
something,” we regain our moral self-esteem. Disaster becomes
another convenient tool for boosting our ego. NPOs
and local organizations have complained, from April 2011 onwards,
that, while they appreciate the “good will” of outsiders who send
various supplies, outsiders also tend to skip the step of actually
researching real local needs. Thus, massive quantities of goods which
were of no need were frequently brought into evacuation centres,
while essential needs for warm food, clean water, sanitation, and
other tools for re-building the cities were left unmet. Again, here
we see that the act of charity by the outside observers were
motivated by selfish principles. This truth behind the initial active
reaction to the disaster is further suggested in the decline of the
number of volunteers (Appendix I). Here we see that by January 2012,
the number of volunteers have fallen to less than 10% of either
April, May, or June of 2011. The numbers never take a dramatic
increase again despite the fact that the need for basic human labor
remained much the same.
Dread
in the Middle
Once
sympathy wears off, or once we are satisfied with what we managed
to “accomplish,” the
next phase is dread. We now reflect on what has taken place with a
calm state of mind, and see all the risks which we were not able to
see during our first fervent reactions.
A
particularly noteworthy risk
is radioactive contamination. As outside observers became
self-conscious of their own situation, many investigative accounts
concerning the true extent of radioactive contamination has been
released through various media. These accounts deal with food, water,
lumber, and other supplies from Tohoku and its surrounding
prefectures. One article even relates a case where an overdose of
radioactive substance has been found from tealeaves, produced in
Shizuoka, at the French borders. In addition, general geographical
information concerning the contamination of soil and water also were
released in newspapers, academic journals, and online studies and
analyses. Comparisons between Chernobyl were made frequently, and
speculations on the actual health effects of various levels of
radiation were rampant. Cultural figures and intellectuals cautioned
the public to stay calm and refer to “real science,” while
politicians repeated the mantra: “please respond calmly [reisei
na taiou wo shitekudasai].”
The
effects of this collective dread were expressed most vividly in the
decline of agriculture and forestry in and around Tohoku. Farmers who
lost their customers now sought desperately for new buyers. As a
result, brokers were able to buy up the crops at an inhumanely low
price, hurting not only the bank accounts but also the dignity and
pride of those farmers. Lumberjacks faced similar situations, where
buyers, out of fear and suspicion concerning the levels of
radioactivity contained in wood products, decided to withdraw.
Suspicion against wood products produced in North-Eastern Japan was
expressed symbolically during the preparations for the
“dai-mon-ji-yaki”
festival in Kyoto. In this traditional festival, tons of firewood get
assembles into Chinese characters on top of mountains, and are
ignited on the night of the festival. For the summer of 2011, the
festival management decided to refuse all firewood which came from
North-Eastern Japan. This measure was taken purely on psychological
grounds, where the management explains how the “voices of dread”
were a major factor that pressured them to make this decision.
Indifference
in the End
While
in a state of dread, at least we try to think for ourselves, even if
our thinking is directed by selfish material interests. However, it
is very difficult for the average person to understand the entire
post-Tohoku situation. Especially the risk of radioactivity is a
topic which goes beyond the scientific literacy of most people.
The
result is a regression to a state of indifference. Instead of
ourselves, we lay our trust in an institution or an “expert” out
there: the IAEA, the Prime Minister, the Yomiuri Shinbun. But by
letting go of our capacity to think, we also outsource our capacity
to act.
We do not know, therefore we cannot act. Any act contains an unknown
risk, and it is better to take anything in comparison to this
something which lurks in the deep darkness of our imagination.
In
this state of disavowal, we nonetheless retain a number of new
general rules for our everyday decisions. They are often internalized
as habit, and we habitually follow these rules. Avoiding food
produced in certain prefectures, even if crops are proven to be safe.
Not drinking green tea. Not eating seaweed. Collecting information
about the ongoing recovery process and gossiping about it either in
everyday social interactions or in the virtual space of the world
wide web. Signing that next petition, going to that next
demonstration.
All
of these actions are carried out not because of concrete goals that
we try to achieve through them. We no longer relate spontaneously to
the Great Tohoku Earthquake. The disaster has, in our minds,
transformed from being a problem that needs to be solved to a
“reality” that can be diluted and externalized.
As
we will see in the following sections, one of the aims of art is to
help us break out from our habitual, routinized relation to a
physical event. Art thus tries to re-awaken our capacity to freely
think and act in response to concrete phases in the process of
recovery. But before discussing the nature and role of art in
relation to the Great Tohoku Earthquake, first we need to consider
the other side of the story: the survivors.
So
far we have considered the Great Tohoku Earthquake from the point of
view of the average outsider. I have spelled out a general tendency
which starts from sympathy, leads into dread, and finally concludes
with indifference. But what of the emotional struggles on the side of
the survivors?
Selflessness
in the Beginning
Right
after the cessation of the tsunami, survivors, who were isolated in
buildings located in higher altitudes, had to face two issues. The
first was how to keep warm, and the second was how to keep hydrated.
Many of those survivors were elderly people who lacked the ability to
improvise survival strategies. They relied on the support of their
children and grandchildren. And these latter people stood up
admirably to the rescue.
In
Minami-Sanriku city, it snowed profusely for two days right after the
tsunami. In the absence of electricity, firewood was essential for
keeping everybody warm. However, this was running out rapidly. Facing
this situation, the youth – and here I include those who were still
in their early teens
– decided to tear off the floorboards of the school building. This
they did despite their fatigue. They moreover decided to burn the
sculptures produced in art classes by elementary school students.
These measures were taken solely in order to ensure that the elderly
people were kept warm.
The
profound altruism of the survivors was demonstrated most forcibly
when it came to the acquisition and distribution of food and water. I
have met numerous teenagers who chose to give all of their share of
food and water to the more needy elders for the first week following
the tsunami. And as if one week of starvation in this post-disaster
situation was not enough, these same teenagers collaborated with
adults in one important task. Since the breakdown of the water
system, the supply of drinkable water quickly became a serious issue.
Survivors noticed that, amidst the debris, vending machines were
drifting on the surface of the seawater which devoured their city. It
was snowing, and the water was icy cold. The current, the debris, and
potential toxins all posed unknown risks. Yet, survivors decided to
tie themselves to a rope, let their friends hold the rope at bay, and
dived into the water to retrieve those vending machines. Teenagers
took part in these
salvaging sessions. Once retrieved, those machines were then
destroyed by axes and the contents were distributed to the needy.
These
behaviors following the disaster shows that, while survivors were
willing to endure anything to increase their chances of survival,
their primary concern was not individual survival, but rather the
continuation of the community as a whole. Selflessness was the key
emotional factor which motivated their choices to take these risks
for the sake of their community members. William James, in June 1906,
already testifies to our tendency to become altruistic in the wake of
a disaster. In “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake” –
referring to the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906 – James relates
the following: “In California every one, to some degree, was
suffering, and one's private miseries were merged in the vast general
sum of privation and in the all-absorbing practical problem of
general recuperation. The cheerfulness, or, at any rate, the
steadfastness of tone, was universal. Not a single whine or plaintive
word did I hear from the hundred [survivors]
whom I spoke to. Instead of that there was a temper of helpfulness
beyond the counting” (225). More than a century later, in a culture
very different from early 20th
century San Francisco, we see an almost identical phenomenon of
selflessness expressed amongst the survivors of the Great Tohoku
Earthquake.
Despair
in the Middle
Once
the post-survival euphoria subsides, such altruism – “universal
equanimity,” in James' terms – comes to an end. Securing a
certain degree of stable material supplies, and learning to habituate
oneself to the new post-disaster way of life, survivors become
self-reflective. They reflect on their own future prospects as well
as on the magnitude of their loss. The result is despair.
Despair
was expressed in selfish or indifferent acts. Many survivors took to
drinking or smoking heavily. Others simply stayed in their
partitioned “private space” within evacuation centres. Still
others stole goods from storage. Based on my personal observations as
well as on testimonies given by local survivors and volunteer
workers, it is clear that, generally speaking, the less one was
involved in labor, the more likely it became for such a person to
fall into despair. With an excess of freedom within a situation where
prospects cannot be imagined, it was only natural for the already
exhausted survivors to end up in this state.
An
article titled “Japanese Politely Giving Up Their Lives,”
published online at Fukushima
Diary,
aptly articulates the characteristic features of this despair. The
article features a snapshot from a new video clip, where a group of
Japanese men smile at a Geiger-Muller counter which shows that the
radiation level in the air is 1.4 times that of the immediate
peripheries of reactor 4 at Chernobyl. As the writer of this article
points out, this picture brings out the core elements which make
Japanese despair unique. Ignorance concerning the implications of
measurements. The tendency to keep up an appearance of contentment –
a smile, a calm posture, or a neat self-organization of bodies. A
passive submission to existing circumstances, extinguishing the
desire to survive. Lack of self-will, political mobilization, and
radical resistance.
Of
course, not all survivors within a given community despair at once.
Reflecting on their despairing selves, or observing the behaviour of
despairing others, survivors come to learn how to take a distance
from these unhealthy, unhappy states. Nonetheless, it is also true
that the need to survive, as well as the unreliability of large-scale
decision makers in the arena of politics and economics, continue to
ground their grim predicament. When the present is dominated by
endless labor for overcoming hunger, thirst, cold, and filth, and
when the future seems to offer no clear prospect of recovery,
survivors turn to their past as the only place where they can feel at
home.
Nostalgia
in the End
In
The Shock Doctrine Naomi
Klein describes a conflict in Africa between a fishing village and a
global tourist corporation. Here, Klein is correct to point out the
violence inflicted upon the villagers by the combination of natural
disasters and global corporatist projects. After all, the
construction of a mega-tourist retreat had a purely destructive
effect upon their ways of life. On the other hand, Klein remains
one-sided in her account when she rhetorically describes the village
as a passive, tranquil, self-contained and content culture. After
all, tsunamis are a real threat to every seaside habitation.
Therefore the fragile huts and fishing equipment of the villagers
also are required to change. A more holistic approach to this
incident would have been to recognize that the true problem lay in
something that was shared by both the villagers and the neoliberal
institutions: a stubborn mind-set that clings onto practices which
they already know. The reason why the villagers would rather have
their village re-constructed after the tsunami is not because such a
re-construction would somehow allow them to better withstand another
tsunami. Instead of such a habitual re-construction, the real aim for
the villagers ought to have been to find a third way – neither a
simple re-construction nor a total submission to an external
authority – which would allow them to make progress in becoming
more resistant towards another tsunami in the future.
A
similar apathy towards change has often been portrayed as desperate
heroism in the literature concerning the Great Tohoku Earthquake. For
example, consider the portrayal of the “last man in the Forbidden
Zone” from Reconstructing
3/11: Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown:
Naoto
Matsumura in Tomioka City, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan – the last
man standing in Fukushima’s Forbidden Zone. He will not leave; he
risks an early death because his defiance of Tokyo Electric Power
Company and the government is his life now. He is not crazy, but he
is not going. He remains there to remind people of the human costs of
nuclear accidents. He is the King of The Forbidden Zone, its
protector. He is the caretaker of empty houses, a point of contact
for those citizens who can’t return. He takes care of the animals,
“the sentient beings” that remain behind, because no one else
will. He is the Buddha of the forbidden zone.
The
voice of Mr. Matsumura himself concludes this “story” – a voice
which confirms that his portrait in the above cited text is indeed an
appropriate one:
“My
father is 80 years old, my grandmother lived until she was a hundred
years old, so I had the hope to live at least until I get to my 80s.
With the radioactivity, I think I will live until my 60s, at best.
Tomioka, for me, is the most beautiful place in the world. There is
the ocean, the mountains and the forest. My family has been living
here for five generations. Nothing will make me leave this soil.”
Here
it is clear that, both through concrete actions (taking care of empty
houses, keeping the animals, etc.) and inner conviction (“nothing
will make me leave my soil” etc.), Mr. Matsumoto refuses to imagine
a third way which is neither corporatism nor a simple return.
Instead, Mr. Matsumoto's motivations for remaining in the “Forbidden
Zone” clearly shows that he opts for the latter, nostalgic option,
where his dream to “see Tomioka returned to normality before his
death” (location 509) appears as a justification for his
self-sacrifice.
There
is no doubt about the importance to “remind people of the human
costs of nuclear accidents.” However, while the presence of a man
such as Mr. Matsumoto may continue to fuel our critical attitude
toward certain social decisions which prepared the grounds for the
accident, it also sustains our nostalgic attitudes toward things
which have been lost. There are many problems with building and
running a nuclear power plant in a country like Japan, where
earthquakes and tsunamis are practical affairs of the day. It is
however equally problematic for survivors to believe that a simple
return to their old ways of life, of living in relatively fragile
houses by the seashores, is the only option for recovery. Instead of
seeing tradition as an absolutely sacrosanct substance which needs to
be defended at all costs, survivors will benefit by relating to their
past as a fluid idea which can be changed according to the needs of
their own historical situation. Exactly how to proceed with this
third way will be one of the implicit topics of the next part.
II
What
the above contrast between the mind-set of the outside observers and
that of the involved survivors shows is this: while the observers
change their mind-set in relation to things outside
themselves,
the survivors tend to change in relation to things that take place
within themselves.
The difference here is in the category
of
objects that trigger the emotional reactions of each side. For the
outside observers, important things include the bodies and villages
of the victims and survivors, food and water, wood, minerals, and
other material for producing goods, and the various statements made
by various people and institutions – words which are presented as
something independent of the speaker's immediate private interests.
For the inside survivors, on the other hand, the things which they
care are the memories of their dead relatives, the traces of their
own lives before the disaster, their own plans for further action,
and their own everyday attitude towards people who live both inside
and outside the Red Zone. Here we see the fundamental barrier for
mutual understanding. Just as it is difficult for outsiders to
imagine the felt intensity of post-disaster internal struggles, so it
is the case when survivors try to understand how their own outward
appearances might be perceived objectively.
The
first task of art is to provide a tangible medium through which these
two side are given a better chance of understanding the predicament
of one another. Not only is art the direct material preserver of the
experiences of sympathy, dread, indifference, selflessness, despair,
and nostalgia. Art also is a representation of a possible relation
between
these aspects in one consciousness. In this manner, art tries to
overcome the limitation of each consciousness – that of the
observer and that of the survivor – and thus, as a side-effect,
also awaken both consciousnesses from their skepticism, despair, and
apathy.
This
leads into the second task of art, which is to serve as a condensed
object which teaches and reminds us of what the effects of the
disaster have been for our consciousness. In other words, art is a
memory-object, a relic of the disaster. In being such an object, a
work of art further
define for
the observers and survivors alike what the motivating
factor behind
their post-disaster life is. Here, it is not difficult to imagine how
such a memory-object would have deep political implications. For
example, after Fukushima, the Japanese people – observers and
survivors alike – have been continuously mobilized to perform
mass-demonstrations against the government's pro-nuclear policies and
apathy. However, when considered abstractly, the reason
behind
such a demonstration may appear to be arbitrary, and the mob might be
symbolized – unfairly of course – in the figure of a baby who is
screaming because her mother's breasts one day produced ink instead
of milk. One could even adopt a pseudo-Buddhist attitude, claiming
that if we let go of our desires to re-produce, as well as of living
for a long time, then it is relatively easy to accept the prospect of
a nuclear annihilation of the human species. These abstract
considerations miss the point of the demonstrations completely, since
they have not been able to take into account the real
motivating
factors behind the movement. Art brings forth a concrete, condensed
representation of the reality
that
drives mothers to migrate all the way from Fukushima to camp in front
of the parliamentary building for weeks on end.
How
Art Communicates
At
this point we must leave the terrain of political psychology and
enter into the deeper considerations of philosophy. Before examining
the particular works of art which deal with the Great Tohoku
Earthquake, it is important to clarify what we can demand for art in
general. By clarifying our demands, we can then justify our choice
when it comes to selecting the works for deeper consideration. The
last thing we want is to spend page after page on a relatively
mediocre work which is just not capable of satisfying our desire to
understand the disaster.
As
a memory-object, art is a representation of ourselves.
Whatever enters our past memories, current thoughts, and future
prospects, art must exhibit it in material form. As long as this
exhibition remains ambiguous or incomplete, a work of art falls short
of our demand to see ourselves
in
that very work. For example, after the disaster, many schools –
both in and outside Japan – encouraged students to send paintings
to the disaster-torn areas. I have personally delivered such works –
produced by U.S. elementary school students – to an evacuation
centre which I visited in Minami-Sanriku. These paintings comprise a
typical example of a work of art which falls short of our inner
demands. One painting depicted a clumsily drawn tree and a big wave
attacking it; another had a man weeping and a girl smiling
encouragingly at him. These images are far from capable of allowing
their viewers to feel that everything
related
to the disaster and its effects on humanity is there. On the
contrary, to claim that these paintings represent all the emotional
turmoil of the observers and survivors would be an insult.
Now
perhaps the actual survivors who received these paintings as a gift
would have felt that the children actually did do a good job at
imagining the post-disaster situation. But in this case, the
survivors are simply being charitable to the painters out of
sympathy. Moreover, if the paintings, by chance, trigger a series of
thoughts in the survivor's mind which eventually leads to
satisfaction, then this satisfaction is again not so much due to the
talent of the artist but rather caused by the strength of the
viewer's mind to supplement the feeble artwork with his or her own
creative thought-process.
A
truly satisfying work of art must not rely on the ability of its
viewers for the presentation of their content. Rather, art must be a
guide to
those who are having difficulty coming to terms with their own
experience. In this sense, we can demand art to produce an artwork
which, just by virtue of its material organization, illuminates
before our senses a complete
worldview
which follows convincingly from the day when the earthquake and
tsunami hit.
An
idea dawns upon us. It is the truth, but it is as fleeting as
anything could ever be. Was it real? We feel the need to stage a
temporal unfolding of everything that was contained in that moment.
This will relieve our doubts concerning the reality of the initial
moment, a moment too important for the person to forgo. But this will
also allow us to dilute and dissect the idea in the hope of digesting
it piece-by-piece. This temporal object, an object which carefully
and patiently re-traces the contours of an initial, traumatic,
excessive, and intense moment, this is the ideal
which
is also called the work
of art.
However,
this does not mean that the simple act of recording
and
preserving
everything
is the ultimate task of the artist. On the contrary, the most
important task of the artist is to choose what to not
include
in the work. Here, in order to economically continue with this
analysis, I would like to introduce two philosophical terms. A
complete worldview, which is capable of being understood by all
humans, and in which all the parts are intelligible only in virtue of
their connection as a whole, is what we call an “idea.” The
material counterpart of the idea, in which the worldview in our heads
unfolds before us concretely, is what we call an “ideal.” For
example, the idea of a student – which involves a series of images
and thoughts such as desks, pens, professors, libraries, etc. and
which allows each part to find its meaning only in relation to the
whole worldview of a student – finds its ideal in a classroom, a
library, a study at home, or in certain types of social interactions.
Here, the arrangement of objects in the material world, i.e. the
ideal, mirrors the arrangement of thoughts and images in the
student's mind, i.e. the idea. Notice that neither the idea nor the
ideal contains everything
which
a human being, sees, hears, feels, smells, and tastes. Rather, the
idea allows a human being to become
a
student by removing
a
whole array of material things as well as thoughts and images from
that person's consciousness. This function of removing
allows
this person to focus
on
what is important for him or her if he or she is to be a student. It
is in this sense that a work of art also is to be considered as an
ideal. That is to say, a work of art also removes
a
great many things from our mind in order to guide our attention to
certain essential thoughts, images, and material objects which, when
arranged in a certain way via the idea, allows its viewers to share
that
which motivates certain people to live with an inseparable connection
to the experience of the Great Tohoku Earthquake.
From
Architecture to Music
In
the beginning, art tries to present the disaster “as it is.” The
direct preservation of the site of the aftermath – this is the
dream of an artist whose first priority is to keep the purity of his
object. The Isozaki
Project is
precisely such a dream.
Much
like the Hiroshima
Atom Bomb Dome,
architect Arata Isozaki's idea is to encase a portion of the debris
in order to preserve it for generations. A gigantic, transparent box
will thus be installed around the debris, and visitors in the future
will have access to the most “direct” evidence of the scale of
this disaster.
If
art is the act of excluding irrelevant details from the world, then
the Isozaki
Project can
be seen as the exclusion
of this exclusion.
The encasement expresses a wish that nothing be excluded from the
initial aftermath, and nothing added, either. In doing so, however,
the work achieves the opposite of what it aims explicitly. In being
encased in this manner, the debris is detached from the perpetual
evolution of our emotions. The artwork itself, in its repose, is thus
no longer in active relation to its perceivers. Just as it is
impossible for an adult to divine his past emotions by gazing into a
picture of himself taken during his childhood, so it is the case with
the Project.
Instead of being a pure memory-object, therefore, the Isozaki
Project would
have come to function as a pure projectile of the most diverse
fantasies. Visitors are not told
how
to relate to this object. They are not given a clue. Referring to the
Hiroshima Atom
Bomb Dome,
a foreigner in Hiroshima
mon amour repeats
“I have seen everything in Hiroshima,” while a Japanese repeats
“you have seen nothing in Hiroshima.” Because everybody knows
that the object is the pure preservation of an aftermath, perceivers
feel like
they “have seen everything,” that they are in the full presence
of the experience of the original catastrophe. But the reality is the
opposite, for the object is silent, and there is nothing in its which
triggers a determinate emotion or thought in the viewer.
The
lesson to be learned from the Isozaki
Project is
that an immediate preservation of an “objective” scene of an
aftermath is not a viable option for art. Art must
exclude
or mutate certain details of its target object. An artist must thus
have an idea of
what his or her artwork will allow the perceivers to experience, and
in striving towards the realization of this idea in an ideal
object,
the artist must step in and take risks, be active.
The
emphasis now shifts from pure representation to the satisfaction
of the perceiver.
An art-work must not only preserve the memory of the disaster in
itself, but also has to direct the perceiver's attention in certain
specific ways that will allow the latter to participate in its
original traumatic experience. The work itself must be the vehicle of
this experience. It must be dynamic, and it must also address the
fundamental concerns of humanity.
Now
one such concern is death.
In the wake of the Great Tohoku Earthquake, survivors have lost their
past livelihood – homes, work equipment, landscapes, roads – and
their partners – friends, family members, beloveds. If there is an
irreconcilable gap between the survivors and the dead, then this must
be brought out forcefully in art, while if there is a possible
reconciliation, this too should also receive treatment. Either way,
one of the first issues which art ought to address is the topic of
death, its essence, its particular manifestation in the case of this
present disaster.
Lucy
Walker's Tsunami
and the Cherry Blossom
is one of the first steps towards a representation of the relation
between the dead and the living. The movie contains a tension between
two streams. On the one hand, the sudden shock experienced by the
survivors is vividly portrayed. The movie opens with a shot taken by
a hand-camera by one of the survivors. Here we see the tsunami
devouring the city, the people running up the hill to save their
lives, while shouts can be heard over the tumultuous sound of the
waves – “everything is crushed!” “all gone!” “get up
here, quickly!” “I can't believe this!” etc. Viewers are then
presented with a series of interviews with survivors, so many
reflections on the devastation. On the other hand, there is the as it
were “divine” stream of images and sounds. We are here introduced
to a gardener whose main occupation is to preserve the oldest cherry
blossoms in Japan. In one interview, the gardener tells us that the
“Japanese have believed that, when a cherry blossom tree survives
for a thousand years, it will be the abode of the divine spirit.”
The message here is clear: while lives are destroyed in the
transitoriness of time, nature, in its divinity, silently and
indifferently maintains its own seasonal repose.
Walker's
film thus can be interpreted as an attempt to shift the gaze of the
survivors from their own particular losses to the “divine” order
of things on a larger scale. The idea is to make room for tranquility
by distancing oneself from the original trauma of the tsunami. The
cherry blossom is beautiful, it is a plant which has crossed through
space and time over many generations of the Japanese people, and it
has been regarded as a divine object. To fix one's gaze onto its
timelessness will hopefully allow one to realize the pettiness of
one's own misery, even that which is triggered by a disaster of such
magnitude.
But
this momentary tranquility is an opiate, an illusion. Instead of
allowing the viewers to actively relate to the real damage caused by
the tsunami, the escapism implied in Walker's film merely prolongs
the pain. There is no real relation between the dead and the living
here. Rather, here the dead is seen as something or someone from
which the living must turn away. The result is a cat-and-mouse game
between two perspectives. The survivors confront the dead, and all
the pains are brought back into experience. They then desperately
turn away towards loftier thoughts which allude to things beyond this
world – the divine. But then, the fact remains that they are
failing to relate to the dead, and this failure is merely suppressed.
Small things will repeatedly remind everyone of their real losses.
Thus we are brought back to the first step without making any
progress.
The
problem with Walker's film is thus the indifference between the
cherry blossom – which is the source of tranquility – and the
real losses of the survivors – which constitute their desperate
situations. More precisely, here death
remains
outside of the sphere of satisfaction. A more authentic treatment of
death must thus allow death to be inscribed into the moment of
satisfaction.
Futuristic
Film: Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea
Elements
of symbolic art, architecture, sculpture, ritual, painting, and music
are all integrated in Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo
on the Cliff by the Sea.
Central
to the movie is the attraction between Sosuke and Ponyo. Prior to the
Great Tohoku Earthquake, the tsunami depicted in the film would have
played a subordinate role to love. In other words, the tsunami would
have been a symbol of love, allowing the viewers to feel the
intensity of Ponyo's feelings. However, after the disaster, the
tsunami emerges in the movie as a “subject” in the Hegelian sense
of the word. Instead of the proposition “love is tsunami,” the
truth appears in the reverse form: “tsunami is love.” Obscene
though this proposition may seem at first sight, the experience of
viewing the movie triggers a reversal in the way we usually
experience the total destruction of a city by seawater.
How
is it possible to transform the grim prospect of total destruction
into a state of absolute delight? In order to find an answer, we only
need to focus on the moment within the film when the characters die.
Although death is not explicitly presented as an event, it is clear
that all the characters are dead when Ponyo and Sosuke wake up in the
morning following the tsunami. We are told that the entire world has
regressed to the “Debon Age” and the entire eco-system has
transformed accordingly. The sea-side town, now underwater, appears
as an Atlantis, and ancient-looking creatures freely populate this
space. What is more, nobody
is anxious of death.
Those “survivors” whom Ponyo and Sosuke meet during their voyage
across the city are all concerned with their own tasks. We never
encounter a person breaking down because everything has been lost,
because he or she will also eventually expire. This lack of anxiety
only makes sense if, in more than one sense, we see all the
characters as already dead.
What
does it mean for these “survivors” to have died? Here, death is
not to be understood as a process by which an organic body turns into
inorganic matter. Rather, death must be grasped subjectively as the
absolute termination of the experiences of a person. With death, we
lose consciousness, and with consciousness also our own persons.
Thus, death cannot be predicated to a person, precisely because in
the moment of predication the subject vanishes, and with it the
predicate also. In this sense, death can be now grasped as absolute
annihilation without
trace.
Since any trace is absent, another subject emerging after death would
have no commonality whatsoever with the person who has died. With
these considerations, the “death” of the characters in Ponyo
starts
to make sense. Although everybody seem to remain in the film as
bodies, their consciousnesses have already been annihilated with the
tsunami. When they have regained consciousness after the disaster,
they are completely
no longer the same person. It is as if the whole world has gone to
bed with Ponyo and Sosuke, only to find that, upon waking up, it has
forgotten that it has existed prior to its sleep. This is the first
sense in which the characters “die.” Furthermore, the newly
reborn characters, by lacking any negative attitudes toward the
prospect of their own annihilation, signal that they are already “at
home” with death. Consider the almost grotesque tranquility of the
characters, and it is clear that they do not yet experience
themselves as subjects of annihilation.
Yet,
amongst the dead, Sosuke is not quite dead yet. This is why Fujimoto,
Granmanmare, and other characters related to Sosuke, call Sosuke and
Ponyo the “key to healing the breach in the world [sekai
no hokorobi wo naosu kagi].”
“World” here refers to the world of the dead. In order for death
to complete its dominion over the people, all relations between the
dead and the living must be severed, so that all traces
vanish.
Here we see that Sosuke and Ponyo have actually
survived.
When they embark upon their voyage, they do so as living
survivors. Eventually, the dark “waves,” Fujimoto's lackey,
devour Sosuke, and Sosuke also enters the world of dead people. When
Sosuke accepts Ponyo as a mermaid, he implicitly consents to the
death of all the rules which govern the world of the living. Here,
death takes over on the side of Ponyo as well. Ponyo “dies” as a
mermaid, and becomes fully human, losing all of her magical powers.
It is in this way that, by means of the total annihilation of the
world of the living, the two protagonists are brought together in a
“happy ending.” This is the monstrous, even scandalous
interpretation of the event of a tsunami which Miyazaki sketches for
us.
Amidst
the intensity of pathos
–
intensified by the organic quality of images, sound, and narrative –
we see here the relation between the pre- and post- tsunami worlds as
a key motif in Ponyo.
In particular, Sosuke's “test” with regards to Ponyo is a riddle
which symbolically captures the riddles which current disaster-relief
workers have to face in relation to the survivors of the Great Tohoku
Earthquake.
However,
in Ponyo,
the world of the dead is presented as just another version of the
world of the living. Instead of seeing death as an absolute
separation between two worlds, Miyazaki uses death as a gimmick for
allowing the characters in the film to realize their fantasies –
the women get to run, Ponyo is turned into a human being, and the
fishermen row in a characteristically Japanese marshal spirit. Here,
what remains untouched is the inner, psychic relation between the
living and the dead. When Miyazaki chooses Sosuke, the innocent five
year old, as the ambassador from the living world, he implicitly
alienates the real
survivors
who, still dwelling in the world of the living, must find a way to
relate to their dead relatives without dying themselves. Instead of
being able to heal the “breach in the world” by dying themselves,
these survivors are destined to indefinitely continue a voyage in the
ambiguous space between life and death which, in the case of Sosuke
and Ponyo, terminate in a death wish. If the predicament of the
survivors of the Great Tohoku Earthquake were to be addressed
concretely, then one must find a way not only to affirm this voyage
itself, but also must take into account the inner dimension of the
aftermath. Poetry, and more precisely poetry expressed from the
standpoint of the survivors of a nuclear accident, will be the new
art in which an inner voyage will find its elaboration.
“Genbakushi,”
or Nuclear Bomb Poetry
Genbakushi
is
a genre of poetry which tarries with the aftermath of the Hiroshima
and Nagasaki nuclear bomb attacks in August 6th
and 9th
of 1945. In the wake of the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi
Power Plant, Japanese intellectuals and critics have repeatedly
suggested that Genbakushi
be
revisited from a contemporary point of view.
A
survey of this genre quickly suggests that the individual poems fall
into one of two categories: therapy or art proper. Therapy aims to
provide comfort or a political voice to victims and other needy
people, whereas art proper concentrates its focus primarily on the
artistic quality of the work as poetry. Thus, while therapists search
for words and facts that they feel would give comfort to their
readers, artists strive for a way of presenting Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
and Fukushima in ways that bring out all the potential of poetry.
Sankichi
Toge is regarded as the canonical figure in this genre. However, many
of his poems in fact fall short of the demands which one may
legitimately make on poetry. Poetry ought to allow its readers to
delve deep into the inner
aspects
of the Great Tohoku Earthquake. Despite this potential of poetry,
many of Toge's well-known works tend to remain on the surface and
outer aspects of the disaster such as the disfiguration of the
victimized bodies and their cries of rancor. For example, his
well-known “Give Back the Human” presents a highly simplified
reaction by the victims:
Give
back my father, give back my mother
Give
back the elders
Give
back the children
Give
me back myself
Give
back the human who is related to me
As
long as a human, a human world exists
Give
back peace,
Indestructible
peace
Although
this short poem depicts the voice of the victims, it does not present
a model for the outsiders to relate to this voice. Just as a
mutilated body by itself cannot determine the way in which it ought
to relate to and be related by another, a pure cry such as the one
depicted in this poem also cannot by itself establish a relation with
its potential receiver. As such, it is as if this cry rings all on
its own in an empty funeral centre: no matter how sincere and intense
it may be, its demands remain abstract, its effects obscure. A
similar one-sidedness is found in another canonical piece, “Wail,”
written by Kazuko Ohira:
Since
the dead cannot return
Since
the dead cannot cry
Since
the dead cannot grieve
What
should the survived do
What
should the survived understand
Shredding
their sadness the survived walk
Freezing
their memories the survived walk
Holding
their stupefied mask the survived walk
Contrary
to Toge, Ohira's poem treats the dead purely negatively, and focuses
instead on the way in which the living react to the aftermath of
Hiroshima. The living here dwell in a state of paralysis, treating
the dead as something absolutely outside their scope of knowledge and
imagination. But to depict the dead in this manner is to not depict
them at all. What Ohira forgets is that the dead do not exist for
themselves as conscious living beings. Rather, the dead exist merely
as pure notions or as our own mental representations, meaning that
they are
accessible
to our knowledge. Without suggesting a way of spiritually relating to
our own ideas of the dead, we regress into a state of subjective
enclosure and indifference.
Instead
of merely engaging in a subjective self-brooding, which sets the
keynote for the works cited above, poetry ought to fully exert its
capacity to grapple with the relation between such subjects. This
higher and deeper dimension of poetry is actualized in “Prayer”
written by Koya Asakura:
Could
a prayer
Truly
take effect?
Humans
have prayed from their heart
From
the moment they have arrived on Earth
In
all times
From
sunrise until sundown
They
have prayed
―To
live in bliss
―To
be in peace
Prayers
minuscule
Shine
forth fiery and nebulous
And
should have already
Let
fearful atomic and hydrogen bombs
Vanish
Here,
Asakura presents a tension existing not between the living and the
dead, but rather between humanity as a whole and its invention, i.e.
nuclear technology. In the first two stanzas, the voices of the
living and the dead merge. To wonder whether a prayer really can take
effect, or to continue to pray for peace through all ages, are acts
which share a certain universality, traversing across particular
bodily and cultural circumstances. The aforementioned voices
presented by Toge and Ohira can thus be re-interpreted, from a higher
standpoint, as particular kinds of prayer. Moreover, by figuratively
representing a prayer as fire and nebula, Asakura allows the prayers
to stand on equal ground with the real fire caused by nuclear
technology. In the wake of this conflict, the poem continues:
Fukushima
of 2011
Not
a natural cataclysm
Hell
painted by men
Apocalypse
written for men
Therefore
It
is impossible to be without
Prayer,
wish, and promise
―Rest
in peace
For
follies will not be repeated
The
utterance “rest in peace” – which is here presented
simultaneously as prayer, wish, and promise – can once again be
interpreted as the words of the living for the dead and
vice
versa. In this sense, both the living and the dead come to partake in
taking responsibility for the “follies,” the “hell painted by
men.” Here, while the opposition still is between humanity and
nuclear technology, Asakura nonetheless treats the latter as
something intrinsic to human activity, a condition for an
“apocalypse” which is written for and by men. This depiction
gives further weight to the prayer “rest in peace,” for if men
are responsible for this “hell,” then this insight also gives men
the possibility of achieving peace by their own hands. This is the
impression which Asakura leaves for the reader at the conclusion of
the poem:
All
men with their feet at the edge of the cliff
As
homo sapiens
Before
anything else
Cleanse
thy hands
Place
thy palm on thy bosom
Contemplate
deeply
And
The
wish of all the living
May
arrive to humans
May
become real through humans
So
repeat
The
last prayer
Despite
its reconciliation between the living and the dead in the unity of a
praying subject, Asakura's poem nonetheless still leaves untouched
the objective aspects of the struggle with nuclear technology. By
centralizing prayer and contemplation as the main way in which
humanity relates to its own invention, Asakura implicitly affirms a
passive spirit, a spiritual attitude which is withdrawn into its own
thoughts and feelings. This spirit is what Hegel calls the “beautiful
soul,” a soul who, by representing itself to itself as beautiful,
excuses itself from performing the dirty work of action and concrete
resistance. This lack is to a certain extent addressed and overcome
in “Fukushima is Mine” by Kasei Kazayama:
No
matter where you are
Fukushima
is yours
Come
to Fukushima, and
Take
Fukushima with you
…
Fukushima
is Mine
I
place a chair onto the soil of Fukushima
And
taking seat hang my head loose
Begging
please condemn my infidelity to Fukushima
But
Fukushima is Mine
Within
my soul I let the spring churn
But,
let us fix our gaze onto
Things
deserving damnation
Dancing
hither and thither
In
these verses, both “you” and “I” are called to “fix our
gaze onto things deserving damnation.” Kazayama's virtue lies in
the fact that this act of turning one's gaze outward is preceded by
an internal struggle, whereby “Fukushima,” left here as an
ambiguous proper name, must somehow register in consciousness as a
shared, universal representation. Fukushima is the property of
everybody, and as such demands a response by all. To stop at the
level of subjective contemplation and prayer will result in
“infidelity” which the poem explicitly condemns and turns its
back by a decisive “But.”
From
this point onwards, the development of our spiritual relation to the
disaster must take place in the sphere of concrete action and its
feedback onto our feelings and thoughts. This loop is too complex and
dynamic for poetry to handle. Thus, Genbakushi
can
only hint at or allude to such a struggle while remaining at its
edge, unable to dive into the heart of the matter.
Short
Stories with a Mythological Flavor
Thus
far we have seen how Ponyo
fails
to represent the ongoing struggle between the living and the dead,
while poems from the Genbakushi
genre
presents a series of one-sided, merely internal reflections. Since
the conflict here is between the internal prayer, wish, and promise
of humanity and its external situation qua “nuclear dread,” the
next task for art is to create an ideal image of such personal and
political struggles by showing how humans interact with their
situations. In order to do so, humans must express their thoughts and
feelings in such way that will have an influence in the external
world. Thus, the key focus of art at this stage becomes human
action.
Human
action is a special kind of activity which involves the coincidence
of the acting person and the result of this action. This is thus also
a free action,
where this freedom consists in this coincidence. This idea of freedom
is already present in the common way we speak about the boundaries
between “our own action” and the action of others. For instance,
when a dog runs, we see this action as not due to our
freedom,
since we are not in command of the direction, speed, or duration of
the run. However, if we say that we “let the dog run,” then this
is an act of freedom, since whatever the manner is in which the dog
chooses to run, it is acting in accordance with what we expect the
dog to do. Here we see that freedom is a matter of our ideas
concerning
a given situation, and that it is up
to us
to see anything as either free or unfree, a truth which is inscribed
even into our most ordinary everyday experience.
Prose
is thus an act whereby the reader and writer alike are set free by
the work. A work is a kind of machinery in which our perception of
the world is set free through a series of ideas powerful enough to
“let things be” in their new conditions. Once the writer or the
reader grasps these ideas, the latter becomes active in our everyday
interaction with certain things. The influence of a prosaic work
becomes real when we experience something as our
own doing which
previously appeared as a result of an alien cause. In other words,
artistic prose allows its reader to own
a
previously alien situation. From this insight it follows that one of
the most important points to be communicated in prose is the style or
manner in which one may take ownership of one's situation.
Yoko
Tawada's “The Island of Eternal Life” is a futuristic short story
set in the year 2017. Despite being only six years after Fukushima,
the story opens with the narrator – quite possibly Tawada's
alter-ego – being discriminated for being Japanese: “Back in 2011
the word Japan elicited sympathy, but since 2017 sympathy had changed
to prejudice” (3-4). But this superficial distinction between “us
non-Japanese” and “them Japanese” quickly melts away when the
reader is told how the narrator, a Japanese, is also alienated from
her own country's present situation. We are told: “Since 2015, when
direct information from Japan was cut off, rumors and myths had been
multiplying like maggots, which had hatched into flies now winging
their way across the world” (4). The narrator herself has been
living in Europe for some time now, and, apart from an account
provided by a certain “Portuguese writer” – whose credibility
remains dubious – she has hardly any access to inside information.
The
book written by the Portuguese writer is called “The
Strange Journey of the Grandson of Ferano Mendes Pinto”
(8). Mendes Pinto is of course famous for writing a book, The
Travels of Mendes Pinto,
which features Pinto himself and is written in an autobiographical
style, yet cannot be determined as to whether the landscape and
culture depicted here are mere flights of fancy or are genuine pieces
of anthropological evidence. In a similar way, the imaginary book
mentioned in Tawada's story reinforces the image of a secluded Japan,
the mysterious land scorched by nuclear accidents, both attractive
and abject, realistic and unreal.
The
portrait of Japan which emerges from The
Strange Journey is
shocking. Tawada writes:
This
is the situation as he describes it. All those who were over a
hundred years old at the time of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in
2011 are still alive; miraculously, not one has died. This is true
not only of Fukushima, but of all the twenty-two locations in the
central Kanto area that were designated as hot spots in the following
years. The oldest woman, who was 120 years of age back then and is
much older now, is still very much alive. When Pinto, through an
interpreter, complimented her on how well she looked, she replied, “I
can’t die.” It isn’t that she has somehow been rejuvenated; it
seems, rather, that the radioactive material in the air has robbed
her of the ability to die. Unable to sleep at night, she wakes up
every morning feeling exhausted, but still has to get up and work.
People who were children in 2011, however, are now falling ill one
after another, and are not only unable to work, but need constant
care. For even if the particles of radiation one is exposed to every
day are very small, once they get into your cells and start
multiplying, there are soon hundreds of times as many as before. So
the younger you are, the greater the damage (8-9)
Tawada
then proceeds by describing in detail the bodily mutilations of the
Japanese people and the geographical decay of the country. The story
ends with the mention of “[d]octors determined to save the lives of
victims of radiation” who “gather swarms of fireflies and by this
insect light continue after dark to pore over scientific studies and
perform experiments, searching for an answer” (12). While these
doctors thus work diligently, or rather, blindly and desperately, for
a possible cure, the rest of the people are said to be immersed in
virtual games.
By
making use of fantastic yet strangely erotic imagery, Tawada succeeds
in giving a vivid expression to the fear which we might feel towards
the future implications of Fukushima. The fact that the story is
framed through the lens of a dubious anthropology book further
enhances a sense of uncertainty. More importantly, Tawada's story is
a unique interpretation of life and death after Fukushima. The old
are not able to die, while the young die – this reversal of the
biological order of things is Tawada's way of forcing the “nuclear
power generation” to feel its own responsibility. In this way,
Tawada broadens the scope of the survivors' vision. Instead of a
subjective lamentation, here the survivors are forced to face an even
more grim future. In reality, what befalls the old in this fiction is
to be experienced by the coming generation. The absurdity of making
an innocent generation suffer, and of multiplying the dead in this
way, comes across very clearly.
What
is lacking in Tawada's story is the involvement of the narrator. Both
the narrator and the book are placed outside the country, and, as
such, the reader is also allowed to assume a certain safe distance
from what is really taking place at the site of disaster.
We
get a fully involved actor's perspective for the first time in
Kazushige Abe's “Ride on Time.” This story starts with an
anonymous surfer expressing his boredom: “[a]nother day of
uninspiring waves” (183). Instead of a chronological unfolding of
events, the narrator is here engaged in a re-construction of his own
cultural foundation. Albeit being a short story, the immanence of
the subject-matter gives a peculiar weight and gravitas to each
sentence.
The
ordinary interpretation of the Great Tohoku Earthquake is that it was
an “unexpected catastrophe” of an “unprecedented magnitude,”
that the people were “totally taken off-guard” and were left
“helpless.” Abe's story challenges each of these pre-conceptions.
The surfers see a continuity between their ordinary, everyday life
and the coming of the “big wave,” i.e. the tsunami. They are thus
not victims, and whether they live or die as a result of their
encounter with the waves, they are not helpless, nor are they in any
way taken off-guard. In short, the disaster is not a tragedy for the
surfers. Their attitude is one of amor
fati which
is not just a capricious shift of perspective, but rather a strength
grounded in their culture which goes beyond individual whims. In this
sense Abe writes:
Each
time the dragon wakes, always in early spring, it swallows a few of
us, then vanishes again for years. The same terrible scene has played
out over and over. And each time, the locals tell the newcomers all
they’ve witnessed, and make them listen. The sharper the account,
the better the listener. The better the listener, the less
meaningless death is. Because when those memories are passed on, they
point the way, and make it less likely that so many will go down the
next time. A decade ago, we were knocked off our boards, it’s true,
but everyone made it back to shore. Because we had learned something
from the past. The experiences of the old surfers, handed down from
one generation to the next, were leading us closer to matching the
force of that huge wave (186-187)
At
the closing scene of the story, the narrator switches from an
explanatory attitude to a more chronological, event-oriented way of
speaking. He shifts his focus onto his present situation, where the
tsunami – most likely the one on March 11, 2011 – is approaching.
One
surfer breaks from the group and dashes into the surf. Another
follows, then a third. They’re paddling toward the wave. The dragon
responds by revealing more and more of itself, spreading its wings to
strike at these pathetic humans. The surfers try to ride and slide
from the crest into a superlong ride. They all go down. That doesn’t
stop other surfers from running into the sea, boards in hand,
slapping them down into the water … I know we can do it. Here I go
(188)
We
are not told as to whether the narrator has survived the wave or not,
but it is appropriate of Abe to cut the story at precisely this
point. The fate of the surfer is left as a riddle for the reader. The
result of the struggle – either survival or death – seems
irrelevant, since this, as the narrator already tells us explicitly,
is not something which the surfer considers important. It is his
willingness to confront the big wave that distinguishes a good
surfer, not his fear of death or his rational calculation in terms of
the probability to survive. After all, only so many “dragons”
exist, and there is no telling when the next opportunity will arise.
Here,
in Abe's imagination, we encounter a concrete case of a free human
action. Abe provides one paradigm towards a comedic, free relation to
life and death after the tsunami. Instead of a passive lamentation or
a detached contemplation, Abe here shows how certain cultures do not
lose their identity but rather strengthens it in response to a
seemingly devastating event. The force which brings devastation is
here welcomed by
those who are allegedly “destroyed” by it.
This
attitude – of fully and freely assuming the fate which befalls the
individual – is one of comedy, and it expresses the highest point
at which one could relate to both the dead victims and the living
survivors of the Great Tohoku Earthquake. The sharpness of Abe's
story lies in how well it expresses this attitude without wasting
words for other, lower expressions of immediate emotions. However,
Abe's narrator nonetheless relies on the cultural code of the surfers
in order to establish his comedic, positive relation towards the
tsunami. To this extent the story is limited, since readers who do
not take part in this culture are unable to directly incorporate
these ideas into their own relation to their surrounding world. In
order to become universally
relevant,
prose
ought
to free the individual – both the
characters in the story and the readers of this story –
from his or her dependency upon a particular culture. The pursuit of
a universal comedy – this will be the next central challenge of
prosaic art.
At
the Edge of In Late Style
Kenzaburo
Oe's In Late Style
is a work of prose par
excellence whose
grand project is to portray and express a comedic involvement with
the aftermath of the Great Tohoku Earthquake. As such, Oe's
work-in-progress deserves a much more detailed interpretation than
the one which will be provided here. Instead of diving into the work
itself and thus letting the work speak for itself, here a mere
overview of the work from its outside will be presented.
The
style of the work has several noteworthy characteristics. Oe
frequently uses the literary method of defamiliarization,
where he makes subtle alterations to ordinary words in order to
produce a fresh experience of otherwise mundane events. Japanese is a
language especially adept at doing this, for it contains hiragana,
katakana,
and kanji
(not to mention the alphabets, which often are used to form “English”
words which would most likely be unintelligible outside the Japanese
world.) The variety which exists at the graphic level of language
allows Japanese to play with a word in many different ways. The
readers can thus recognize the intended meaning of the word at the
phonetic level while simultaneously experiencing the word as
something unfamiliar at the graphic level.
As
a corollary to this play with the Japanese language, Oe manages to
turn general or mundane events into singular, unique moments. Merely
by altering the name, by bringing forth a novel way of organizing
events and thoughts, this conversion is also achieved. This is again
something which is commonly done in our ordinary experience as well,
yet is not often consciously understood. The calendar is perhaps the
most vivid example of such raising of a general object to the status
of uniqueness. A day is any other day, and as such, is a general
object. However, once a day is seen as one's own birthday,
then the same day is singled out from all other days on the calendar.
It becomes unique, and there are possibilities which can only be
realized on that day alone. One could moreover single out a day in a
particular year – August 6th,
1945 – and raise this
day through
a re-naming – the day when Hiroshima was attacked by an atom bomb –
of it. The change in our way of naming things, which seems to be a
superficial, “subjective” decision, is actually woven into the
fabric of reality, since things are organized materially in different
ways according to how we name things. Names even affect the very core
of our emotional involvement with these days. Oe re-names moments,
people, and places constantly, and thus raises each of these into a
unique sphere of experience.
Oe
moreover inserts references
to
other works written by himself or by other authors. These references
and allusions gives the present work a sense of historical
continuity. It also raises the stakes of the work, since it must
respond responsibly to a wider range of events in the past. This
method also allows Oe to suggest that the current work is also
subject
to repeated re-interpretation in the future. In
Late Style thus
acquires a fluid texture, as opposed to being a work which tries to
conclusively state its own content by itself.
At
the level of narration, Oe is known for making self-referential
comments which tell the readers what kind of narrative style he is
currently adopting, for what reasons he has made this choice, and how
this will affect the depicted content. The story is further
complicated by the fact that characters often talk about other
characters with an air of omniscience, which also means that Oe
introduces the thoughts of one character through the voice of
another. This produces an interesting effect, where the possibility
of a self-enclosed mind is denied perpetually. No character is
allowed to form a loop of self-knowledge, and as such everyone is
forced to be open towards others. What another person thinks of
oneself counts just as much as what one thinks of oneself. Thus,
until everyone gets to have a say in each other's dealings, there is
no conclusive meaning given to the story.
Lastly,
the central theme of the work is the relation between the dead and
the living. This is not so much a speculative theme, where some
“correct” or “true” relation is supposed to be found, but
rather a question of style.
For instance, in the September installment of the novel, Oe addressed
himself through the mouth of one Ms. Shimaura, a Japanese journalist
living in Berlin:
In
truth, the poem which you have written... That is, do you remember
that you have made a plan for reading the poems written by a female
German poet and a Japanese poet (in this case, you as an author) as
an accompaniment to Mozart's Requiem
conducted
by a young musician who came from Düsseldorf as a guest conductor.
I have heard that in Ueno you yourself read it as a work written by a
Japanese person, but in the concert conducted in Germany, a
professional actor read a German translation of it... It was not me,
but a more experienced translator who did this work, but the
translator had uncertainties when it came to the parts concerning
your forest's folklore and your mother's words for narrating it, so I
was asked to help. I read the original text many times until it stuck
in my memory, the part where, on the day when the war ended, the
village head spoke to you children in a certain way, and your mother
critiques his words.
In
the presence of children listening
We
cannot re-live,
Are
words we might not be permitted to utter?
And
my mother to me
Eternally
enigmatic words she spoke.
I
cannot re-live. But
We
can re-live.
I,
something else other than this... read that passage where your mother
tells the childhood you when you were sick, even if you die, I will
once again, give birth to you, so it's okay, and I was moved so much
that when I went to your house
I translated it from the German and got Chikashi-san to listen to
it.
In
terms of the living's relation to the dead, the highlight in this
passage is Oe's mother's utterances “I
cannot re-live. But / We can re-live”
and “even if you die, I will once again, give birth to you.” The
first quote is an “eternally enigmatic” possibility, or an idea,
while the latter is the mother's own individual interpretation of
this idea, which is to give birth to another child and treat that
same child as Oe's double. The
“I” vanishes while the “We” remains – this is the first
postulate of Oe's attitude towards death in this novel.
However,
the converse, namely, the “We” vanishes while the “I”
remains, is also asserted. In the July installment, Oe complicates
the relation between parent and child in the episode where his own
son, Akari, buys a new pair of spectacles. Maki, Akari's sister,
reports:
Akari-san's
amblyopia, which has previously been deemed incurable, was actually
not like that at all! Although there certainly is an extreme
astigmatism and myopia, but he nonetheless found that it still is
something which can be corrected! And so Akari-san had to seriously
respond to the words of the doctor whom, in order to make a new pair
of spectacles, was replacing lens after lens with elaborate
machinery. It was the
translation
of my life! And eventually the spectacles became Akari-san's first
ever effective tool. Everything which Akari-san sees now has been
made anew, and the relation between him and the world has also been
changed... or so I would like to think.
As
a result of obtaining this
“first ever effective tool,” Akari comes to play the piano on his
own for the first time, too. Maki further reports to her father:
“right after making a pair of spectacles suited for himself, he has
started to play on his own the piano compositions which he has
memorized by ear.”
In another episode, during an interview session with Oe, a young
filmmaker named “Gī
Jr.,” who is also the chairman of the “catastrophe committee” –
a committee whose mission is to honor those who are “living a
catastrophe” – suggests to Oe the real reason behind Akari's
cure:
—… Akari
doesn't have the ability to perform in front of an audience.
—While
you, Choko-san [Oe's alter-ego], believed in what you have just said,
you also have overestimated the extent of his amblyopia and
astigmatism, and so you have not been told by experts about the
possibility of their correction. Through such a process, albeit as a
result, it has hindered Akari-san's as it were self-emancipation or
self-realization. Maki-san thinks that there really was a long
succession of such days.
Not
to mention the pun between “I” and “eye,” here we see that it
was the parent's interpretation of the situation of his son which
prevented the son from “going live,” “living” in the presence
of an audience, in front of the public. And Oe, as a story-teller and
a novelist, is further criticized by Maki-san by citing a series of
questions written in the postcards sent to Oe from his readers:
1.
… From its very beginning, the mainstream novel took the speaking
“I” as its starting-point, and he [jibun,
I, in this case Oe] will also write in this style. If this is the
case, then is it not only natural that the “I” gets to speak
longer than any other character portrayed in the story? It seems that
the “I” of his novel intends to live longer than any of the
characters which he portrays...
2.
Maybe that is so, indeed, it
may be the case that a writer has the freedom to either live or die
in a literary sense.
But me and Akari-san are both deeply involved in our respective “new
life (vita nuova)”
which expands before us. And we are resolved to continue living after
papa's death.
The
“We” in a novel – the characters portrayed – cannot live
longer than the “I” or the narrator – this is the second
postulate. If we now try to unify the two postulates, we get a
contradictory result. On the one hand, the “We” will live beyond
the “I” in the sense that a species survives its individuals.
However, on the other hand, the “I” as a narrator will live
beyond any particular individual included in the “We” – a
species will go extinct unless there is at least one individual who
perceives it as this
particular
species. In this contradiction, we see a loop-like movement of
thought which alternates between the “I” and the “We” and
which sustains the sphere of the living. Death arrives when this
circle is breached, when the one side is no longer recognized by the
other. The inclusion of the “I” into a “We” is just as
necessary as the inclusion of the “We” under the perception of
the “I.” This is the basic concept of life which is the
foundation of the more specific political paradoxes and tensions
which Oe depicts in this novel.
These
are the main stylistic and thematic features of Oe's work. From this
list, we see that the essence of Oe's literary action, or the free
self-styling of human beings, is one of transfiguration
through death.
But what does this expression mean?
In
raising a particular event or character above the rest as a single,
irreplaceable individual, Oe's act of writing – which really is the
act of constructing a long name – as well as the reader's act of
reading perform two functions at once. On the one hand, the
particular, or that which is mundane, is lost, it is completely left
behind. Thus, a pair of spectacles is no longer just a tool for
looking, but rather that
single pair in the hands of Akari and
thus is something which is absolutely alien to all others of its
kind. On the other hand, there is a kind of birth
in
this moment of naming, where the moment, object, or person is given
the right to take on a unique significance. Here, the particular
thing is transfigured
into
something singular.
Such
as transfiguration, however, is not merely confined to the scope of
things existing directly in the novel. Oe's references and allusions
to other works here implies that these works – by virtue of being
brought under the heading of the name “In
Late Style”
– are also re-christened, that is, given a new significance afresh.
Moreover, this effect pours out into the world of the dead as well.
In the maternal postulate: “the I vanishes in the We,” and
conversely in the author's postulate: “the We vanishes in the I,”
we see the alteration between death and life, between things beyond
consciousness (the
“We” which is no “I”) and things existing
for consciousness (the
“I” and all its experiences.)
It
is the anticipation of death which allows the narrator to reflect
upon his mother's words and thus bring forth implicitly the two
postulates which form a kind of circle. And, in being named, things
“die” as materially present things, and instead become transposed
into the sphere of the mind. Death here has the significance of a
moment of transition,
and this is a positive phenomenon. It is in this sense that Oe is
busy working through a series of transfigurations through death.
Admittedly,
what is here presented as the outcome of Oe's literary style and
theme in In Late
Style is
abstract. This is because it is formulated at the edge of the work
instead of being demonstrated in the actual experience of reading
this fertile text. This latter task is left to the reader to perform,
and to judge for him or her self how such an experience squares with
Oe's project of building afresh a new and unique relation between the
living and the dead. For now, suffice it to say that the image which
underlies much of Oe's story is that of the mother
who
is the transitional figure between life and death.
In
Late Style is
still a work in progress, and the precise extent to which it pushes
the boundaries of our attitude concerning the relation between life
and death, apropos of the Great Tohoku Eathquake, remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, one could speculate that, as far as Oe narrates in this or
that particular style from the point of view of this or that
character, the novel will only ever suggest
an
absolute formulation of the said relation. Each formulation will be
afflicted by the bias of a particular character, and as such, will
not automatically carry the weight which it ought to have for all
other characters and reader alike. A pure, absolute expression of
such a relation is thus to be sought in a style of expression which
is not that of narration. It is here that a transition from narration
to
speculation
is to be effected. This, however, is a new task which has not yet
begun in Japan.
Conclusion
As
a result of our systematic survey of art after the disaster, we have
reached a point where a new demand can be brought to view, that of
expressing the chasm between the living survivors and the dead
victims in a speculative
language,
i.e. philosophy. But this does not mean that one, monumental work of
pure philosophy will suddenly change the scene. The self-education of
our minds must come about gradually.
There
are precedents. The transition from artistic expression to pure
speculation is exemplified in, for instance, Schelling's Clara,
Or Nature's Connection to the Spirit World.
This is a work which is written in the form of a story, yet which
expresses a stream of speculation concerning the relation between
nature and spirit, not merely within the human soul, but rather in
all things. Schelling writes:
And
what would in the end be so bad, she said, about that composition?
Doesn’t
the novel really tend a lot toward dialogue in its life that hovers
between the dramatic and the epic? So, it would come back to the
question again of whether any form is more natural for our time than
that of philosophical discussion.
I
don’t know, I said, but in its very nature the novel contradicts
the unity of time and action; whereas it seems to me that in
philosophical discussions this unity is as essential as it is in
tragedies, for here everything proceeds so completely internally and
everything has to be decided on the spot, as it were, without moving
away from the original location because of the narrow context of
thought (65-66)
And
he continues:
Especially,
she added, I don’t think much of a philosopher who can’t make
their basic view comprehensible to any educated human being; indeed,
if necessary, to any intelligent and well-behaved child. And what is
this current separation of academics from the people supposed to
bring? Truly, I can see the time come when the people, having had to
become thereby more and more ignorant about the highest things, will
rise up and make those philosophers account for themselves, saying:
You should be the salt of your nation; so why don’t you salt us?
Give us the spirit’s baptism of fire again; we feel that we need it
and that we have come back far enough (66)
[S]uch
as in the transition from wakefulness to sleep and vice versa;
life’s rotation does not itself stop in sleep, it is just
transferred from one medium into another. Or from many signs don’t
we tend to attribute the spirit as being busy with thoughts,
inventions, and other activities in sleep, even if we don’t
remember them afterwards? (39)
What
appears dormant, that is, merely natural, might thus be permeated
with a kind of spirituality which may strike as mysterious or unreal
to some. But Schelling poses these questions in an accessible,
relatively simple language in order to invite us to speculate on
these matters from a free, philosophical point of view. Now we are
moreover told that “life's rotation” as it is mentioned here is
made active by death. Clara, the interlocutor in this piece,
converses with her father:
Death,
she said, is the release of the inner form of life from the external
one that keeps
it suppressed?
Excellent,
I said.
And
death is necessary because those two forms of life that couldn’t
exist together at the same time had to exist one after the other
instead, once nature had sunk down into the purely external?
Absolutely
right, I said, and you have expressed it so marvelously (41)
Clara
proceeds
in this style, where Schelling's speculation concerning the
interaction between the body and the mind (what he calls “spirit”)
is directly addressed to
Clara as part of her education. As she is introduced to these fresh
ideas, Clara is at the same time initiated into a new way of
thinking. It is this didactic spice which allows Schelling's work to
be an excellent example of a form of speculative
art,
something which the Great Tohoku Earthquake is quite probably about
to give rise in Japan.
[M]any
other magnificent things could
be predicted about that place, not by just making it up as takes our
fancy, but by following through firmly grounded concepts. Although
those living here would find most of them incredible, as is to be
concluded from how many mourn for the dead; not only for themselves,
in having been left behind by those whom they most loved of all in
life, but also for the sake of the deceased person, too, as if they
too were now robbed of many friends they could have enjoyed here.
However, I will never be able to persuade myself either that any
excellent thing that even the present, subordinated life offers us to
enjoy won’t be found there much more magnificently and purely, or
that—far from the future life’s being the better one for good
people—the future life should rather be a lower and worse one. If,
on the other hand, it’s true that something spiritual lies at the
basis of all sensible existence and that what is actually excellent
is within the spiritual, this must necessarily remain so, such that I
can’t even consider death to be, as they say, a mortal leap and,
truth be said, nor can I even consider it to be a simple transition
into the spiritual condition, but only one into a much more spiritual
one (73)
I’ve
known some people who, though otherwise spiritual, never
let their imagination rest by day or night, and who tried all means,
as they said, to link with their departed loved ones through ecstasy;
but they were never blessed with that wish. Instead, it seems that
throughout time immemorial those who didn’t try anything like this,
but who were simple and pious, were those who were deemed worthy of
receiving openings from another world. In this sense I consider the
decree that man should never seek a link to the spirits to be one
that is good and just (75)
Shouldn’t
we generally more often observe the same sensitivity to the departed
that we
believe we owe to the living? Who knows whether they partake more
deeply with us than we think; whether the pain we feel so intensely,
the excess of tears we weep for them, isn’t capable of unsettling
them? (76)
I
even believe that it is divine intention that
also after death, in the inner being of man, a certain sympathy
remains for the Earth of which he was a part; that this parting from
it will really be felt, for otherwise death would not be death; and
that this feeling is truly embedded in the very depths of our being
(76)
Just
as Schelling wrote in Kant's wake, Kant in that of the Lisbon
disaster, so the chain of influences can come to mature in the case
of the Great Tohoku Earthquake. But in the absence of a concrete work
which goes beyond what we already have with Oe's In
Late Style,
the author of this essay must now close his speech and patiently wait
in silence for more tidings from the future.
