By Justine Wiesinger, Bates College (jwiesing@bates.edu)
I have been researching theater and film that responds to the March 11, 2011, earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Japan (sometimes known by the colloquial abbreviation ‘3.11’) since the summer after the events began. When I tell people what I am doing, either in Japan or the US, people often express surprise and doubt, asking if there are many productions about the disasters. In fact, there are.
Plays are the most numerous among productions about 3.11 because they can be made independently with minimal equipment and shared with large or small audiences. Some of the plays I have seen have been performed on a large scale or as part of high-profile theater festivals, while many are performed in the little theater or mini theater setting, with houses that might seat as few as forty audience members—but whatever the number of seats, the theaters are typically packed. Some plays tour internationally and are recorded for DVD versions that can be purchased through major retailing platforms with subtitles in multiple languages. (For example, DVDs of Okada Toshiki’s Genzaichi (Current Location) and Jimen to yuka (Ground and Floor) are currently available on Amazon.) However, many plays remain embedded within their communities with scripts that will probably never be officially published.
Performance scholars like Peggy Phelan argue that part of the nature of a play is to disappear. A key difference between theater and film is that, even if a theatrical performance is recorded, the recording is not necessarily the definitive version of the play. (As a side note, Shinozaki Makoto’s 3.11 film Sharing has challenged the idea of the “finished” and redefined the work of film by creating and screening independent, different versions of the same film material). Each production of a play may be its last. Particularly when it comes to site-specific 3.11 plays, there is some doubt as to whether and how certain works might be repeated. The playwright Okada Toshiki has raised this question regarding Ameya Norimizu’s Blue Sheet, which was written and performed together with Iwate high school students affected by the disaster and first staged on the grounds of their school. Some of the works that directly relate to the trauma of 3.11, especially those performed by survivors and staged in damaged areas, may not always be reproducible in other times and places in the way that more typical scripts are.
Therefore, in order to preserve and document these important works, I consider it useful to curate and digitally archive images of posters for 3.11 plays. Advertisements for (and images of) plays are perhaps even more ephemeral than the plays themselves. Some of these images are drawn from theater company websites and ticket selling portals, any of which may shut down or disappear without warning. It is my hope that viewing these images will serve as a reminder of many of the performances that have been crafted, and that it will spur further research in the field of contemporary Japanese theater. While these images are far from a complete record of all 3.11 plays ever written in Japan, they represent a sample of various works from the obscure to the famous, from the immediate aftermath to 8 years after. They are written by men and women; they are written by people directly and indirectly affected; they are written by seasoned professional playwrights and by young amateurs; they have been conceived and first performed in places like Kyoto, Tokyo, and Fukushima.
I would like to highlight a few of the plays that have posters represented here.
Bartlebies – Sakate Yōji
Bartlebies – Sakate Yōji is a prominent contemporary playwright based in Tokyo. With his company, Rinkōgun, Sakate stages socially-engaged drama with large casts. Bartlebies ties together several stories of the 3.11 aftermath with Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” investigating the ethics and hardships of capitalism and disaster. 2015.
Are kara no Rakkii Airando (Lucky Island After That) – Satō Shigenori and his Unit Rabbits
Are kara no Rakkii Airando (Lucky Island After That) – Satō Shigenori and his Unit Rabbits troupe are based in Kōriyama, Fukushima, and have been deeply engaged in telling the story of 3.11 and its lasting impact from the perspective of people within the affected area. Like many of their plays, this one is a musical suffused with both levity and pain. In the not-too-distant future, this play sees an increasingly right-wing Japanese government separating Fukushima and its people—including those with Fukushima heritage—from the general population of Japan and interning them in a Fukushima that they pretend no longer exists as a result of the stigma associated with nuclear contamination. 2015.
Heya ni nagareru jikan no tabi (Time’s Journey Through a Room) – Okada Toshiki and his Chelfitsch company
Heya ni nagareru jikan no tabi (Time’s Journey Through a Room) – Okada Toshiki and his chelfitsch company have toured overseas more extensively than any other group presenting 3.11 drama, and therefore their perspective on the disaster is perhaps the most internationally well-known. This play, which has been produced on four continents to date, centers on a love triangle between a man named Kazuki, his new love called Arisa, and his ghostly wife Honoka. While Kazuki and Arisa are struggling with hopelessness a number of years after the disasters, Honoka remains suspended in the immediate aftermath, and the contrast between these temporal perspectives is poignant. 2014.
Waiting for Godot in Fukushima – Kamome Machine
Waiting for Godot in Fukushima – Kamome Machine famously staged this adaptation of Waiting for Godot for an audience of one person, very close to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011 when it was still in crisis. Little information about the consequences of the nuclear accident was fully known at the time of this staging, and many people felt that the government had been distant, unreliable, and slow to act. 2011.
At time of writing, selected video from this performance can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeEPEUIRp14&t=233s
Sayōnara – Hirata Oriza
Sayōnara – Later adapted into a feature length film of the same name, Hirata Oriza’s short play garnered attention for starring an android “actor” called Geminoid F. In this play, a robot designed to provide companionship for a chronically ill woman is eventually taken to Fukushima where she can recite poetry for the repose of those who died as a result of the 2011 disasters. 2011.
These plays show us a wide range of responses to the disaster. Some plays inspired by the disasters, like Nishio Kaori’s Oneshonuma no owaranai atatakasa ni tsuite (The Unending Warmth of Bedwetting Bog) avoid directly mentioning the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake, the tsunami of 2011, or the meltdowns in Fukushima, using fantastic, fictional, or generalized settings to evoke the controversial events without naming them. Others, like Sakate Yōji’s Tatta hitori no sensō (One-Man War) not only directly address the disasters, but explicitly historicize them in relation to Japan’s history of environmental exploitation of poor and rural people. Plays like Heya ni nagareru jikan no tabi take a more distant, urban point of view on the disasters, describing momentarily positive effects for people outside the immediately affected areas, whereas others like Are kara no Rakkii Airando are firmly embedded within an affected area through characters and settings in the drama and by the playwright and actors who performed it. Still others, like Setoyama Misaki’s Hot Particle describe a journey from the city into the heart of the affected area, which in the case of Hot Particle reflects the playwright’s real-life journey as a docudrama. Although not the focus of this post, people from outside Japan have also written dramas about these disasters that have been performed in Japan, like Romeo Castellucci’s The Phenomenon Called I and Elfriede Jelinek’s Kein Licht. Some plays, like Setoyama’s short play Yubi, are heavy with aggression and tragedy while many others, like several of Satō’s musicals and Ishii Michiko’s Final Fantasy for XI.III.MMXI are humorous and playful, making liberal use of pop-culture touchstones like animation and video games, while simultaneously highlighting incandescent spots where the anger of people directly affected by the nuclear disasters shines through. These diverse texts prove that there is much more to the story of the earthquake, tsunami, and long-term nuclear disaster than a single national narrative of suffering, unity, and transcendence. Some plays directly attack politicians and corporations deemed responsible for exacerbating or minimizing these disasters, while others express experiences of and attitudes toward the disasters that are sometimes in direct conflict. The words of some of these texts, as well as the fact that they continue to be crafted years after Abe Shinzō promised the International Olympic Committee in 2013 that the disaster was “under control” testifies to the fact that these disasters continue to strongly impact the lives, feelings, and ideas of people in Japan in a variety of ways that cannot be boiled down to a single monolithic response.
It is vital that we study and preserve the performance works responding to the disasters precisely because of this diversity. From television PSAs to reports on the disasters in the foreign news, some of the most widely circulated media regarding the disasters has attempted to reduce the many and complex feelings and experiences people have had in and as a result of the disasters to a single, stable story, one which often reinforces “positive” stereotypes of Japan as stoic, orderly, homogenous, and unified that limit understanding of the events and risk Orientalization. These performance texts give us a sample of perspectives and feelings that is both broad and deep. In these plays we see not only beautiful sadness, but anger, violence, crime, discrimination, wild laughter, confusion, fear, greed, sexual desire, catharsis, and a lack of resolution. In studying them, we find a spectrum of imaginative responses to the disasters beyond what people can express or enact as individual real-world survivors and bystanders, from nation-wide acts of revenge to individual acts of compassion. It is important that we continue to connect with the full range of responses rather than uncritically accepting reductive snapshots of the disaster on the scale of the nation.
Many of these plays have entries on The Japan Foundation’s Performing Arts Network Japan database, which has both Japanese and English versions. I recommend looking there as a first step to learning more about contemporary Japanese theater, including 3.11 drama.
Not all existing plays have been represented here. If you would like to make a suggestion for a poster to be included in a future post, please feel free to leave a comment or contact the author via email.