I was very intrigued by the question in Butler’s chapter Precarious Life:

“Have the humanities undermined themselves with all their relativism and questioning and ‘critique’, or have the humanities been undermined by all those who oppose all that relativism and questioning and ‘critique’? (Butler 129)”

She answers this question at the end of the chapter after talking about humanization and dehumanization mechanisms:

“If the humanities has a future as cultural criticism, and cultural criticism has a task at the present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense. We would have to interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense. This might prompt us, affectively to reinvigorate the intellectual projects of critique, of questioning, of coming to understand the difficulties and demands of cultural translation and dissent, and to create a sense of the public in which oppositional voices are not feared, degraded or dismissed, but valued for the instigation to a sensate democracy they occasionally perform.” (Butler 151)

In order to shape an environmentally friendly future we need to humanize and listen to all voices, not just the human ones. We need to ‘listen’ to the plants and animals and analyze their struggles for survival in a world that becomes ever more precarious. We also need to listen to each other in the way Butler describes without fearing, degrading or dismissing, but valuing the other voices. Today the humanities seem to be at the forefront of dehumanizing voices that are not in consent with main stream academia. I believe that this is the reason why the humanities have become under so much attack. The humanities could contribute so much to the environmental debate, but only if they remain open to all voices and refrain from categorizing and deflating everyone into the two groups of victims and perpetrators. The current debates in academia are resembling more a chorus of one opinion than a multitude of voices struggling to understand the world. The humanities should represent the voices of the government and of the victims in Japan concerning the accident. They should not dehumanize the Japanese government nor the victims. Only then can a dialogue between the two voices produce a knowledge of the actual needs and conflict solutions.

Throughout the semester we have heard different voices warning us about the future of nuclear energy. We heard from the victims of the two nuclear disasters and we heard from the victims of the atomic bombs. These voices need to be put into dialogue with the voices of pro- nuclear advocates. It is important to hear their voices as well and to try to understand what seems to be impossible to understand. I would have loved to listen to an interview with a pro-nuclear government official, being questioned about what he/she plans on doing with the nuclear waste. The credibility and strength of an argument comes from testing it against counter arguments. This is what need to happen more with the anti-nuclear movement, especially in Japan. I believe that the humanities should encourage public debates in Japan about the pros and cons of nuclear energy with all valid questions being ask from both side to each other.

There are also very many voices that are speaking about the future of our earth and it is the job of the humanities to place the different ideas and ideologies into dialogue with each other. This way the important questions are being looked at and tried to be answered. If we shut out the voices that we deem irrelevant we might miss important contributions towards the common cause of saving our planet.

Going forward I want to consider this responsibility the humanities have to let all voices be heard and whenever I will write something to include as many voices as possible on the topic.

Bibliography

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.      Print.

Let’s Join TEPCO!, sung by Barakan, is based on Takada Wataru’s 1969 anti-war song Let’s Join the Self-Defense Force, but that one was based on Malvina Reynolds and Pete Seeger’s song Andorra.

The song starts out with Barakan inviting the audience to join TEPCO, just like the anti-war song invites everyone to join the Self-Defense Force. But at the same time, it sounds like an invitation to a paradise vacation. The image shown during the first line “Everyone in the audience, does anyone want to work for TEPCO?” is that of Las Vegas in the 1960s as a place where people went to watch nuclear testing. This sets the tone for the song as a mockery of all the promises of TEPCO about how nuclear energy is the solution to all of our problems. Throughout the movie there are pictures of soldiers looking at a nuclear mushroom cloud. I believe that the song is trying to connect nuclear energy and disaster to war with these images, because it contrasts these images with the image of the stamp that says “Atoms for Peace”. The stamp is shown twice in the song and it accompanies the lyrics “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”, which sounds like a call to war. This is just one example of how contradictions are used as irony and a wake-up call in the song.

Another example of this type of contradiction can be seen when Barakan sings “We’ve got everything you want!”. During that line an image of a Chernobyl liquidator crew is shown and reminds us of what terrible gruesome deaths many of these poor men awaited. I think the line has a dual meaning: On one hand it is reminding us of a commercial line for a luxury vacation spot, but on the other hand it is implying that when working at TEPCO you will get what you don’t want: Disease caused by Plutonium and Uranium radiation. These two are listed in the line before.

The song has a lot of religious references as a mockery of the propaganda acting like silly religious promises that TEPCO cannot deliver. One example is the refrain line: “All the real men are coming to die for TEPCO like flowers that bloom and fall to earth”. It could be referencing the Bible in which Jesus promised that God will take care of you even more so than of the flowers of the field that bloom one day are gone the next day (Matthew 6: 28-30). Another religious reference is the refrain line “It’s like heaven on earth”. This could be referencing the Bible as well. In the “Our Father in Heaven” Prayer, the most known Christian prayer, the plead to God is to let his kingdom and will come “as it is in heaven on earth”. The song is mocking TEPCO leaders acting like gods that promise heaven on earth with the nuclear energy, but they cannot perform miracles and they are not almighty which are qualities you need in order to make nuclear energy a “heavenly gift”. You would need to be able to make the waste disappear and also the radiation after an accident. You would also be able to be in complete control of the nuclear reaction which is definitely something humans are not. The line that follows immediately says: “All those who support nuclear power, please assemble under the reactor.” The song here is mocking supporters of nuclear power as worshippers of it. The lines are accompanied by an image of the Chernobyl memorial of the liquidators in front of the sarcophagus and an image of the inside of the reactor cells. Both images are referring to idolizing something. The image of the inside of the reactor cells is kind of eerie and other-worldly in the way they glow in this mysterious blue light. When the song invites to “assemble”, which is a word that is used very commonly for religious gatherings, the audience imagines a religious service with people worshipping the inside of the reactor.

Barakan mocks the lies of TEPCO in another part of the song as well. When the line “Plutonium is not really so scary” is being sung, an anime character is shown wearing a green helmet and drinking a green drink (see image). This character is from a propaganda video for children and the song is mocking it. According to Matthew Penney, “the 1993 video Our Reliable Friend Pluto was produced by the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, a group associated with the Japanese government. In it, a cute cartoon stand-in for radioactive element plutonium tells children that not a single case of cancer can be traced to him and that he is even safe to drink!” The expression “Plutonium is not really so scary” is child talk. You talk to children like this when you want to comfort them and say something like “See, now that wasn’t so scary, was it?”. I believe it references to how the government and the nuclear industry treat the citizens: They are little stupid kids that can easily be convinced that there is nothing ‘scary’ about nuclear energy. You can see this propaganda video with English subtitles on http://www.evilyoshida.com/thread-11110.html.

There are many more examples of the contradictions and mockery in the song, but I was only able to point out a few. The melody chosen originates from another mockery song that makes fun of the ridiculous defense budget of Andorra. Pete Seeger sings that he wants to go to Andorra, because it is such an amazing place. And then he makes fun of everything that is wrong with Andorra. This theme is picked up by Barakan, setting a light-hearted melody to a mockery. I believe that music like this is needed very much to express the irony and mockery that many citizens feel in Japan and around the world.

Works cited

Penney, Matthew. “Songs for Fukushima.” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (1970). May 2019. <https://apjjf.org/site/view/4672>.

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 1^st-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 3^rd-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).

Ensor quotes Lee Edelman in her essay about Spinster Ecology as arguing “’that politics is predicated on a reproductive futurism embodied by the figure of the child, a fact that “preserv[es] … the absolute privilege of heteronormativity‘and leaves the queer structurally outside the bounds of both politics and social belonging”. I have to agree that a lot of our politics are centered around the nuclear family, but the nuclear family is, as research has shown, the best environment for raising children. I am quoting Jane Anderson in her article “The impact of family structure on the health of children: Effects of divorce”: “Nearly three decades of research evaluating the impact of family structure on the health and well-being of children demonstrates that children living with their married, biological parents consistently have better physical, emotional, and academic well-being.” There is plenty of other research out there that ought to not be ignored. I am not an expert in this area, but we should allow the extensive research to influence the politics concerning families and child rearing and support and protect the kind of environments that have proven to be the most optimal for children to flourish in. It is in the best interest of a society to make sure children have the best environment to grow up in. This does not mean that everyone needs to have children, but we do need some children to carry out the tasks necessary for a society to function in the future. Anything else is unrealistic and would eventually leave us with a average age older than 70…and then what? According to Ensor, “much recent queer theory insistently resist[s] futurity, marked….by heteronormative imperatives.” In order to develop a queer ecocriticism she suggests not to make it heteronormative, which in my understanding would deemphasize the nucleus family. However, this contradicts the research mentioned above that urges society to protect the nucleus family. It does not mean that other groups of society who are not part of this nuclear family structure are not part of the society or somehow “structurally outside the bound of both politics and social belonging”. Just because you are not part of a group in society that has the important role of guaranteeing that children have the best environment to grow up in and you might feel excluded does not mean that that group has to be deemphasized. The nucleus family has to be protected, because any couple who raises children is more vulnerable to the problems and pressures of live and also the ecological problems than a single adult or a childless couple. Wars and nuclear accidents have proven this. Having said that, a society has to give all of its groups an equal space to live and thrive, but at the same time has to protect the most vulnerable and children are definitely on the top of that list. This is exactly the message the mothers in the film “little voices from Fukushima” were sending. They were asking that society protects the most vulnerable and provides a safe environment for them to thrive in. This movie shows that it is much easier for a single person to pick up move out of a contaminated area than an entire family. Therefore, the government should especially assist families to be able to move away from danger. I agree with Ensor that it is very important to listen to all of the groups of society regarding any critical thinking or possible solutions towards our ecological crisis. The more angle we can provide on this problem the better. The angle that the queer population could bring to the table is definitely important. Their emphasis is more on the now than on the future for the sake of future generations and it could provide more urgency which is needed. As Haraway emphasis: “Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something” (p 31). She talks about tentacular thinking which invites all kinds of thinking angles from different groups and people and emphasis the necessity of such dialogue to continue our species and others on this planet. She also, just like Ensor stresses the important of seeing time not as Chronos, with a past, present and future, but as Kainos. “Kainos means now, a time of beginnings, a time for ongoing, for freshness. Nothing in Kainos must mean conventional pasts, presents, or futures” (page 2).

As far as the primacy of biological reproduction is concerned, Haraway has a slogan she promotes: “So, make kin, not babies! It matters how kin generate kin. (pg 103)” She argues that it is more important to take care of and connect with the people and other living beings that are already on this planet (which is making kin) than to make new ones or we will end up with 11 Billion by the year 2100 (pg 4). She argues for birth control methods although it is not clear to me whether she is for top-down birth control or for just promoting birth control everywhere in the world.