According to Mary Knighton in The Sloppy Realities of 3.11. in Shiriagari Kotobuki’s Manga, Shiriagari divides his humor into two types: ‘Stimulating’ and ‘paralyzing’ and goes on to explain that “the former generates laughter as readers ‘get’ the joke, while the latter results in rejection, or the weaker ‘ha, ha’ of readers not ‘taking’ it as funny” (9). However, she discovers a second dimension to this tactic by observing that readers are either “being made to laugh” or “being reduced to laughter” (9). Both have the important side-effect that readers forget themselves and therefore are pulled out of their tunnel attention towards their everyday life and instead their attention is drawn to something more important. Knighton describes the effect his mangas have as “worm[ing] [their] way into a reader’s consciousness to offer a new way of seeing or thinking until laughter marks the reader’s surrender” (9). The intentional sloppiness of his mangas create an atmosphere of confusion and humor capturing the reader’s attention partially due to their peculiarity and partially because the readers like reading funny “comics” because it reduces stress. Readers these days are so bombarded with negative news and they get to a point where they become immune to its alarming message and a ‘disaster fatigue’, as Knighton describes it, sets in as a form of a self-defense reaction towards the overwhelming sense of helplessness that these disasters create (Knighton 6). Shiriagari is using his unique technique to try to wake up the readers again and again to the urgency of the pressing issues so they will ‘stay with the trouble’. Donna Haraway uses this expression in her Book Staying with the Trouble” when describing the notion of not shying away from confronting difficult problems that need to be dealt with and that are far from fun to deal with (Haraway 2). Shiriagari and also Haraway like many others know that if people go to sleep over this pressing issue and stop the outcry, the government and nuclear companies will only do what is in their interest.
Shiriagari’s sloppy Mangas also reflect the sloppiness of the thinking and planning behind nuclear power. Both, the disaster of Chernobyl, which Shiriagari addresses in some of his comics, and the disaster at Fukushima are based on human sloppiness. However, human sloppiness in turn is based on humans being imperfect and the world being imperfect. Therefore, to use a technique like nuclear energy that relies on perfectly working conditions and procedures, is ‘a bet against all odds’ in a world that is not perfect and cannot provide perfect, foreseeable procedures and occurrences, as Shiriagari claims in his article in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper (Knighton 6).
“In her book, Ugly Feelings (2005), Ngai discusses ‘emotions’ as the feelings a character might have, or feelings that belong to a 1st-person subject, be it character, writer, or reader. She notes that such emotions are usually distinguished from ‘affect,’ which evokes something rather more like ‘mood’ or ‘atmosphere,’ enveloped in ambiguous 3rd-person modalities” (Knighton 3). Knighton describes these ugly feelings as those that we all have, but that we do not have the ability or desire to address, much less express, partially, because it is considered uncool to lose your cool and partially because we fear that we cannot control them once they break out. A good example would be road rage. I can really observe this on my way to campus every day. There are very aggressive drivers and these are the ones that have bottled up these ugly feelings and are ready to explode at any moment, honking at you when you don’t move over fast enough. Something very similar is going on inside of those that are most affected by the nuclear disasters. They have a suppressed anger against the government and the nuclear companies for ruining their lives and displacing their families. The movie “Little Voices from Fukushima” showed this struggle on what to do with these feelings very clearly. The mothers are worried about their children and voice concerns about the fact that the government considers their area as safe, but they know better and you can sense the feelings trying to come out when they talk about it, but they shy away from criticizing the government openly. Therefore, the government is enabled to operate in this “ nuclear stuplimity” (Knighton 3), in which it is able to make stupid decisions, tolerated by stupefied citizens, ever increasing the narrative of the sublime nuclear future and possibilities. Lori Brau in Oishinbo’s Fukushima Elegy makes this mechanism of nuclear stuplimity evident using the example of the strong reactions on both sides of the isle that the Manga The Truth about Fukushima drew, because it dared to deem the area around Fukushima uninhabitable. The government reacted by calling it fear mongering and not scientifically sound and also discriminatory against people living in Fukushima, but many people supported the publication and one professor of nuclear engineering at Kyoto University suggested that the strong reactions to the comic are based on the suppressed anger over the government’s refusal to take responsibility for the accident (Brau 178).