Prompt 8

The Challenges of Writing Nuclear Futures

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“Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age Conference” was an amazing opportunity to see the topics of nuclear time, nuclear risk, and especially writing about nuclear futures from a variety of professors from the fields of both Japanese and Germanic studies. A topic that I noticed was a theme in many of the presentations was the difficulty of writing about nuclear futures. The obvious choice when writing about anything to do with nuclear technology is to choose a desolate post-apocalyptic world with no government or social order. Although it can send an effective message about the dangers of nuclear technology, it rarely offers any way of preventing the disaster, dealing with disaster as it happens or recovering from the disaster. Usually the only solace in these stories is either overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or finding a hidden oasis of natural resources, neither of these solutions are realistic nor even a long-term solution. So creating a myth narrative that does not solely rely on a doomsday or apocalypse scenario proves to be both important and difficult. The importance of dealing with the problems of a nuclear disaster, both during and afterwards, is the myth narrative the scholars in the field of nuclear futures wants to emphasize. Donna J. Haraway calls it “Staying with the Trouble” and the “Chthulucene,” i.e. not relying on the future to fix our problems and instead focusing on the here and now.

Professor Suzuko Mousel Knott offered some incredible insight on the idea of writing nuclear futures as a myth narrative, about which she suggests “myth is a narrative of the past and also explains the present and tries to illuminate the future.” She suggests another problem for the doomsday narrative for nuclear futures is that the idea of an apocalypse is mostly a western and Christian-toned construct. Japanese myth and religion do not really have a doomsday or an apocalyptic event that ends the world: it has a more cycle of life and death, which is a more eastern ideal. She highlights the “untranslatability of catastrophe” as a challenge of writing about nuclear futures. Slow violence, changing time-scales and temporalities are very difficult concepts to explain or visualize in writing. She explains changing time-scales and temporalities of myth through the novel The Emissary by Yoko Tawada. Time-scales are challenged from the start by the two main characters, Yoshiro and Mumei. Yoshiro is over 100 years old and still rather naive and active, and Mumei the sickly child is wise-beyond-his-years. The temporalities of myth come into play as well, both di-temporality and synchronicity, when Mumei views the world map for the first time and passes out. He awakes around 10 years in the future, where he is in a wheelchair and his grandfather is still alive. He goes on to have a wonderful date with the girl he met outside his house wearing the strange suit, who has also aged around 10 years. He is allowed to experience a “normal life” for this short period of time, only to again pass out and awakens as a child again only to die shortly after. His last thought being “I’m all right. I had a really nice dream,” a rather fitting end for this child stuck between shifting temporalities. Dr. Knott stated it best that disasters “ruin known time-scales and temporalities,” as well as “make cyclical time seems impossible,” and “make untold futures seem more likely.” We have to face these problems and many others when trying to write about nuclear futures and environmental humanities.

Image result for the emissary yoko tawada

(https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-emissary/)

Professor Bradley Boovy also offered fascinating concepts on the transcorporeality and transtemporality of nuclear radiation. He describe the boundaries between living organisms and the surrounding ecosystem as a “thin and permeable membrane,” through which radiation can easily pass. Relating this idea to human life may be difficult or confusing, so many authors use animals to describe the thin and permeable membrane between living organisms and their ecosystems. Professor Boovy uses the famous three-eyed fish Blinky from The Simpsons, who is mutated by waste from the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. He suggests the fish depicts how the water systems and fish are more susceptible to radiation and contamination, that the membrane between sea life and their ecosystem is an incredibly thin and invisible membrane. By using animals as an analogy or even as a whimsical lens helps us understand how the borders between our lives and ecosystem are thin, even if we try to ignore it with science and technology. While at the same time providing some relief with some of the difficulties of writing about nuclear futures. Professor Boovy also cites the book Bad Environmentalism and suggests that nuclear futures writers “reject the doomsday aesthetic.” He further suggests that nuclear disasters and radiation “transcend space and time,” and that there is “no ‘outside’ the contamination zone or death zone,” which are concepts that challenge conventional temporality and time-scales. These final suggestions, along with the difficulties of nuclear future writing, stood out to me as one of the most significant challenges facing the environmental humanities as a field of study.

Image result for blinky fish simpsons

(http://www.sfweekly.com/news/is-blinky-the-simpsons-three-eyed-fish-headed-for-san-francisco/)

Prompt 7

Finding closure in shot/countershot

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(Note: It isn’t Group C’s week to post or comment—I just got carried away.)

When asked to reflect on the serial form of Dark, I thought immediately of the series of episodes that makes up a season, and the seasons that make up a TV show (Odar and Friese). But while looking back at episode 1, I realized there’s another type of serialization that links film to manga: serial images.

Manga marks the transitions between panels with space, using the gutter; film transitions between shots through time, without pause. I think this distinction affords manga a more involved reader, who is invited to make comparisons and pace their interpretation as meaning allows. Watching film is a more passive experience, as reading goes, and so tends to rely on tacit suggestion to lead viewers toward connections and conclusions.

Either way, both forms speak the same language of closure—the act of putting pieces together into a whole, or moving from observation (observing the pieces) into perception (perceiving the whole).

There are two moments in the first episode that speak to nuclear energy as the backdrop to Dark, as Martina discusses in her post below. In the first example (approx. 7:36–7:50), we see Jonas bike to a stop light, look at the nuclear plant in the distance, look at a “vermisst” (missing) sign for Erik Obendorf, and leave the frame:

A first reading would probably consider this simply an excuse to give new information to viewers. The scene sets place and time for the show: Winden, a town with a nuclear power plant, and 2019, the year local boys begin to mysteriously disappear. And what else do we do at a stoplight, anyway, besides observe our surroundings absentmindedly?

On closer reading, though, we recognize that a connection is being made between the nuclear plant and the missing boy. Once the shot/countershot sequence becomes clear, we see that the camera is centering Jonas as the subject in the scene. The camera appears to be tracing his thoughts, and we, as subjects ourselves, are meant to follow. We are meant to position ourselves in the scene, looking at nuclear energy first, and only then at the mysterious goings-on, and to look at these data up-close and in real time.

And then, well, we leave the frame and continue on our way.

The second example follows a similar pattern (approx. 35:40–36:04). The camera follows Jonas as he looks at the nuclear power plant in the distance:

Long shot
Medium close-up
POV shot
Close-up
Medium shot

The nuclear plant is cast as an omen for what’s about the unfold: Mikkel’s disappearance, followed by the many events in the future (with effects on the past) and in the past (with effects on the future) that compose the show’s plot. More explicitly, we associate nuclear energy with the “Achtung” sign, translated to attention in the subtitles but also of course meaning danger. Nuclear energy calls for our attention because there is imminent (radioactive) danger.

What’s most interesting about this scene, for me, is the way the camera lingers for a moment after Jonas has walked out of the frame, as if signaling to us behind his back. Here, unlike in the first example, we can’t tell whether Jonas notices the sign. We’re left wondering how much he knows, or how great a sense of foreboding he feels, and at the same time are reminded of the advantage we have, able to watch and draw connections from a distance—and, as viewers, stop and replay time.

Prompt 7

Temporality at the heart, nuclear history as a backdrop

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Temporality is a central, maybe the central concern in Dark. A fundamental concept within the series is the theory that history repeats itself in a 33-year cycle and that “the distinction between past, present and future is nothing but an illusion.” In addition to this, Dark builds on an intricately woven web of secrets, mystical predictions, and intrigue. The serialized form makes it possible to unveil mysteries and to draw connections across different time lines. In this vein, the serialization and the non-linear uncovering of mysteries by means of an inherently linear medium, namely the order of scenes being intricately planned out, also mirrors a central outcome of the season: The realization that the mysteries that open up in earlier installments of the series are not explained by what is revealed later but rather the interventions that seem intent to change the course of events are actually what set said events in motion.

Nuclear power is merely a factor and a backdrop for different points in history but not a sinister cause of events. The nuclear power plant in Winden in particular, and Germany’s history with nuclear power in general are mostly a looming presence throughout the series and a mysterious threat that does not become a reality until the very end. While there were shady things going on at the power plant, some radioactivity was released, and the viewer is led to believe that the rips in time are somehow linked to the sinister things going on at the power plants, the radioactivity of the reactor and the work there are not what causes the rips in time and what causes the events of the series in any of its timelines[1]. The actions and activities of people determine the events and set events in motion, while the power plant is just a mysterious backdrop, during the first season because it spite of some shady things going on, the reactor was mostly stable and under control. After the creation of a worm hole in 2019 (and 1953), it can be assumed that the reactor was no longer stable and caused a major fall out, which changes the “future” of Germany after nuclear power when Jonas wakes up. The consequences of the worm hole likely caused an event in the reactor that may go beyond the scope of Chernobyl or Fukushima and determined Germany’s nuclear future but this is not what the first season addresses.

To return to the main concern, the connection between temporality and serialization: What the series presents and discusses as predeterminism, fate, or destiny, turns out to be a series of self-fulfilling or reverse engineered causalities. Jonas, trying to destroy the rip in time by leaving his 2019-self in the power-chamber, actually creates the rip in time that could be called the beginning, namely him touching Egon through the worm hole and waking up dreaming about him, a scene that happens in episode 1 and 10. Ulrich, trying to save Mikkel by killing Helge, actually put him in the chamber that eventually turned him into Noah’s puppet. Ulrich also feels that Egon Tiedemann is biased against him and even thinks he is the antichrist, when in reality, Egon thinks that because Ulrich was accused of murdering Erik and Yasin in 1953.

Although the nuclear reactor does not trigger the events, the series nevertheless discusses the effects of nuclear power on health and society. In 2019, very few people in Winden actively work at the power plant but as several characters in different time lines, particularly Bernd Doppler in 1986 discuss, the livelihood of the whole town still depends on the power plant. In 1986, the effects of Chernobyl are felt and discussed in the news and they affect the power plant as well. They make people feel unsure about nuclear power. But more than that, at this time, Charlotte is already documenting mysterious spots on bird carcasses that are later attributed to a mutation caused by radiation so there must be a cause irrespective of and prior to Chernobyl to cause such mutations. We may believe this was caused by the Winden reactor. Another possible mutation could be the fact that Elizabeth is deaf in a family where deafness is not hereditary, as is another child her age in this small town. Regina Tiedemann is diagnosed with cancer, which, as an individual case, cannot be attributed to the existence of nuclear power, but in the suggestive and elusive context of the series, we cannot help but wonder if proximity to radioactive materials may have had its effect on her.

 

[1] In 1953, investors are planning to build the first power plant and praise the future with nuclear power. In episode 6, one investor threatens others directly not to interfere with the power plant and spews conspiracy theories. This enhances the impression that the power plant is a central, sinister factor in the course of events, a conclusion that is not yet born out by evidence. 1986 revolves around the fall out in Chernobyl but also mentions a minor release of radioactivity a the Winden plant. In 2019, the worm hole and the disruption it caused, likely results in a major nuclear event that changes Germany’s nuclear future.

Prompt 7

The Question Isn’t How, It’s When

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As we’ve discussed, nuclear disaster results in strange entanglements of time and place. From the deep time of radioactive decay to the affinity between Fukushima and Chernobyl, there is a simultaneity and a deferral that are held in close contact within the structure of nuclear futures. We live in contact with multiple time scales. Fears around radioactive waste and climate change bring it into sharper focus but, deeptime is in the rocks around us, the sun, systems of erosion and deposition, fossil fuels, the list continuing ad naseaum.  In Haraway’s reframing that “we are compost, not posthuman” there echoes the fact that our bodies are always already part of the process of earth-making (55). That is, caught up in the process of decay—the deferral of which haunts us.

I want to think about deferral and serialization together as terms that are reflected in the form and content of the two works we recently encountered: Dark and Ichi-F. Both works demonstrate in strange ways what is can be called thick time. Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker in their essay titled, “Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality”, explain thick time as being “a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past” that helps us “to reimagine our bodies as archives of climate and as making future climates possible” (1). Thinking in thick time is, as David Farrier suggests in his new book, Anthropocene Poetics, the “capacity to put multiple temporalities and scales within a single frame, to ‘thicken’ the present with an awareness of the other times and places” (9).

To describe the ways in which thick time is a function of deferral and serialization in these two works, I want to turn to comics theorist Scott McCloud.  McCloud describes the formal elements of narrative time in comics as operating in such a way that “Each panel of a comic shows a single moment in time. And between those frozen moments–between the panels–our minds fill in the intervening moments, creating the illusion of time and motion” (94). But time in comics is also described through the unfolding of sound-as-text in a single panel. The instantaneous and singleness of the moment of sound can’t be taken as coinciding with the image beside it . “Just as pictures and the intervals between them create the illusion of time through closure, words introduce time by representing that which can only exist in time–sound” (95).  Closure is  “The phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole”  (63). How we rely on incomplete information to construct semantically meaningful wholes. Like glimpsing only half of a soda can and recognizing the whole label.  This can help us think of serialization and deferment in that we are presented a splintered text that resists telling a full story until assembled into a coherent whole. However, the whole still has the formal elements of time that complicate and make messy the ways that plot unfold (mirroring/affinities in Dark, the quotidian in Ichi-F). The way that both simultaneity and motion are layered within and between the static images of a panel are a perfect visual model for understanding thick time.

Ichi-F exemplifies this in depicting the process of donning clothing for clean up. Each garment is represented in fine detail along with the process of putting it on. The mask cleaning process, the taping of the wrists of the sleeves, the booties, dosimeters, along with the specifics of where to find each and how to carry and operate them. Something as quotidian as dressing is shown to be part of a larger, more intimate relationship with radioactive deep time, thickening it. The process is drawn out from panel to panel, showing each step and urging the reader to assemble all the parts of dressing into a coherent whole. All of this points to larger moments of deferral that happen in comics—that is,  the way in which content is produced through serialization. Ichi-F was, afterall, originally published in three installments before being translated and resold as one volume in the English edition.

Dark operates differently from other forms of serialized content since it lives on Netflix. As a place so entangled with the concept of binge watching, serialization takes on a different meaning here. Serialization, I would argue, is a function of content over time. However, Netflix complicates that relationship in how it releases shows and encourages viewing habits. These habits we could argue are the by-products of consumer driven content creation. The ease of making and the result of on-demand content created in the age of platform capitalism.

But Dark also confuses the unfolding of plot usual to the serial with the ability to view it in all at once (if one were to follow the ethos of Netflix, as the writer has, or almost has). I want to suggest that because content about nuclear futurity echoes the formal aspects of time in comics, that we can read Dark in a similar fashion. The viewer is invited from the very beginning to give up on the assumption of time’s linearity. The narrator at the beginning most explicitly establishes a sense of thick time when they state that the distinction between “past, present, and future is an illusion” (Dark ep 1). In the same way that closure makes for continuity in comics, we can read closure in serialized media as well, both in content and form.

 

Farrier, David. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifices Zones, and Extinction, Minnesota UP, 2019.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The invisible Art. Harper Collins, 1993.

Neimanis, Astrida and Rachel Loewen Walker, “Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality, Hypatia vol. 29, no. 3 (Summer 2014), pp. 558-575.

Prompt 7

How to win friends and shuffle off this mortal coil

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On the left this week was a very tempting queering of time and relationships that might be well suited to Ensor’s Spinster Ecology. However, my Geiger counter was ticking more toward the right, so I decided to work with Haraway’s ideas of trouble and making kin. Our viewing for the week, Dark is a sci-fi/suspense thriller set in the sleepy German town of Winden, translating as ‘to wind or coil’. Such a word calls to mind a spring or ball of wire, or perhaps a snake ready to strike. In Winden, a troubled history seems to be coiling back around and repeating itself, and few can grasp why or how.

In each time period depicted, the disappearances of these children have the effect of troubling what seemed otherwise a peaceful town. Haraway points early to the curious origins of the word ‘trouble’ in the French language, meaning to “’stir up, ‘to make cloudy,’’ to disturb.”’ The opening episode of Dark would have us believe that this is what has happened in Winden, that the sleepy town is only abruptly transformed. Such as assessment does not hold up after further viewing, and Dark demands (as does Haraway) that we stay with the trouble. Plotlines slowly uncoil and show us there is no simple solution to the crisis facing Winden, and that there was no time in which Winden stood without this trouble. Haraway similarly troubles our understanding of ecology, saying “staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (1).  Throughout the first season of Dark, Jonas and a handful of other figures come to partially understand the prickly, tangled web of events and people in which they live. The adult Jonas refuses to let his younger self return Mikkel to the future, and later refuses to release the younger Jonas from a bunker, in part because he understands that these actions have more far-reaching consequences than initially assumed.

The apparent peace and quiet of Winden mask the pain and grief of nearly a century of disappearances and murder, and many of our plotlines hinge on our characters’ ability, or lack thereof, to respond to this pain. The unresolved grief for his lost brother leads Ulrich Nielsen to attempt the murder of Helge Doppler as a child in 1953, in hopes that he might alter the future and bring back his brother. His belief in time and these events as linear entities renders him unable to recognize the possible intricacy and fragility of the pasts and futures he may create.

Thinking tentacularly in order to look at the roots of these catastrophes, we might recognize a fatal flaw in the inability of Winden to properly grieve, or according to Haraway, to grieve together. She asserts “Grief is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying; human beings must grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of undoing” (39). When the bodies of two young boys are found near the groundbreaking of the new nuclear plant, a cynical Bernd Doppler claims that the murders were likely the work of the coal industry. Within hours, Doppler’s son goes missing (nearly killed by Ulrich Nielsen) and his tune changes. Doppler asks the police chief to find his son at any cost, even the cost of the power plant. We are constantly faced with characters unable to empathize with those outside their own small spheres, and the pain of these losses persists. In Haraway’s terms, we recognize this shared grief in particular and emotion in general as characteristic of networks of kin. She makes the case that we need to reach outside of our nuclear family to craft new connections with unlikely people, that we might build communities from these connections.

We are led to believe that Bernd Doppler does not understand this notion. He leads a life of luxury lobbying for the nuclear industry, and his sympathy is aroused only when his family is on the line. When the troubled dust settles, he remains unchanged. He decides eventually to store excess radioactive materials in the cave system under his own town, jeopardizing both his children and neighbors. As we see later, this quiet act of violence circles back around and enables a series of troubling events in Winden. Change in Dark doesn’t come from tragedy, but from the ability to collectively and effectively grieve tragedy.

Such a process of productive healing is evidenced in the few moments of genuine togetherness in this season of Dark. Jonas returns from the past having learned that Mikkel Nielsen is actually his father. He embraces his mother, saying “I believe Dad loved you very much.” This is one of the few moments of genuine growth and healing among characters, and it comes because Jonas recognizes Mikkel as his kin, and the love that exists despite this strange pairing. The connection may be frustrating to him, but he can empathize with the love that Micky carried for his wife. These moments of genuine healing and production occur when people recognize the complex connections they share, and disaster results when they fail to recognize the same.

Haraway’s notion of kin is far-reaching and finds interesting results in Dark. As she says, “Ancestors turn out to be very interesting strangers; kin are unfamiliar (outside what we thought was family or gens), uncanny, haunting, active” (103). Perhaps Haraway was not envisioning meeting your future self on the other side of a door, but Dark creates an environment that coils back in on itself. Our various time travelers must thus recognize their kin in their own time, as well as past and future. They must work with these kin to win the victories they can and grieve the losses they must, or else expect more tragedy.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

Odar, Baran bo, and Jantje Friese. Dark, Season 1, episode 1-8, Netflix, 2017.

Prompt 6

How Mangas try to deal with Sloppy Realities and nuclear stuplimity

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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).

Prompt 6

The king of sloppy—and stuplimity

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In “The Sloppy Realities of 3.11 in Shiriagari Kotobuki’s Manga,” Mary Knighton defines stuplimity as

comical stupefaction at the sheer scale of the human-wrought crisis and our own passive impotence in the face of it. (21–22)

Here, we see that stuplimity is made up of three parts. First, a cause: we live within or in the wake of a “human-wrought crisis” of shocking magnitude. Next, an effect: we find ourselves caught in a paralyzing state of “passive impotence.” Finally, a response: we take in the grim reality of this crisis and our inability to resolve it, and we respond with “comical stupefaction.” In this way, stuplimity (a) identifies a crisis and (b) counters human impotence, all the while (c) bringing us to rethink catastrophe, in Shiriagari’s case through sloppiness and humor. It’s the sublime turned inside-out, with the object moving from environment to society, or from the natural to the artificial, and with the affect turning from terrible wonder to ludicrous horror.

By identifying a crisis or network of crises, stuplimity says something about the world we live in today. Sloppiness in particular acts as a reflection of our reality, and one that may be more mimetic than at first thought. Shiriagari argues that “‘sloppy’ things are real,” at least in part because we live and die “sloppily” (Knighton 1). As when the Japanese look for reliable information on the effects of nuclear disaster but find too much data, data that’s contradictory, or data of suspicious origin, sloppiness indicates that a single, objective truth is not possible. There is no one feeling to have or single action to take. Techniques harkening back to realism or a third-person perspective belong to the unreal for Shiriagari, in keeping with a satirical or surreal tone (7). Sloppy drawing says something about the mimetic quality of narratives as well. In life, we find no promising climax, no clean resolution, no villain responsible, and in catastrophe, too, we find that the cause belongs not to a single event or mastermind, but rather to a complicated web of banal corruption and poor planning.

This sloppy reality resonates with many of our readings this semester. Shiriagari’s representation of “malaise” (Knighton 1) and “paralysis and enervation” (8) aligns with the precarious existence Anne Allison explains in Precarious Japan. Although precarity begins with precarious employment, which is “uncertain, unpredictable, and risky” for workers (6), it spreads across all areas of life, infecting every moment and thought until our very “human condition” becomes precarious, a state of being marked by doubt and fear (9). Shiriagari places this state of being in a crisis with no end in sight, much like Robert Nixon’s concept of slow violence, which describes crises that not only unfold slowly and beneath the surface, but which also elude “tidy closure” (6). And, not unsurprisingly, this kind of mounting threat points to problems firmly embedded in neoliberalism, with its “relentless and ubiquitous economization” of everyday life, and in capitalist economies, which demand continuous (and impossible) growth (Brown 31).

Shiriagari does more than just represent these crises; he resists them, and counters the “passive impotence” that results as well. He disregards the dangers of reception, for example. Representing nuclear disaster in fiction draws controversy, especially when the means may be considered disrespectful, as is the case with humor (DiNitto). But humor does accomplish something in nuclear contexts. Comparable to the hibakusha’s struggle to communicate their experience through atomic-bomb narratives, Shiriagari responds to nuclear disaster “with new words or even a new language” through humor (Treat 30). Humor allows for a call to action, asking readers again and again to “wake up” from their malaise (Knighton 1, 23, 25, 31) and stay with the trouble, or learn “to be truly present” (Haraway 1). Without provocative and imaginative approaches to human suffering, we might never find the means to represent it. It would be easier to forget what happened at Tōhoku, and even easier to remain complacent. In Milan Kundera’s words:

the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. (qtd. Treat 21)

Even if Shiriagari only manages to provoke readers with the audacity of his approach, this is still an accomplishment of sorts. Indignation and anger, I would argue, are a better alternative to wishy washy feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, or disappointment. Without a catalyst, what Sianne Ngai calls ugly feelings “hum alongside the everyday” without end (Knighton 3). And Shiriagari does give us a catalyst. He combines kakusei (“stimulating humor”) and warawareru (“being reduced to laughter”) to offer readers a “new way of seeing or thinking,” and an outlet for the frustration of an open and ongoing crisis (9). This reminds me of something discussed in another one of my classes this week, on Pseudodoxia Epidemica. In Pseudodoxia, Thomas Browne argues that the production of knowledge depends on the “challenges, corrections, and propositions” of “diverging voices” (West 170). In other words, communities of difference bring us closer to the truth. Maybe the greatest challenge to representing nuclear disaster is silence—that a robust and complex conversation is not already taking place. 

As for the third piece in the stuplimitous puzzle, evoking “comical stupefaction”—well, this is what Shiriagari does best. Shiriagari’s sloppiness pushes against the “idealism” of modes like Cool Japan, and humor disrupts the “arrogance” of powers in both society and fiction (Knighton 8). Shiriagari encourages readers to see and think in new ways by entertaining paradoxical or unsettling conclusions. The family of Defenders, for example, bring us to acknowledge that the conditions of modern life are not safe or in control. The episode “Hope” personifies radioactive materials rather than vilifying them. This reveals the vibrancy of all matter, even nuclear, in its capacity “to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennett viii). When a character in “The Village by the Sea” protests the return of electricity, exclaiming that “he had never been able to see so many stars,” Shiriagari doesn’t glorify a way of life without technology. He reminds us that we’re forced to encounter and adapt to change all the time, and that any solution to catastrophe may be temporary (Knighton 7).

The twin old geezers confront nuclear realities particularly well, I think. Episode 2 emphasizes that it isn’t nuclear energy that has changed, but us, its keepers and neighbors, who have failed to see nuclear energy (which was once, and in some circles still is, the champion of green energy) to its full potential. And episode 3 prompts readers to recognize that the nuclear crisis is, to put it simply, complicated. As pictured below, the episode imagines reactions on either end of the spectrum as ludicrous, short-sighted, and often counter-productive. The jabbering of birds, nothing more than white noise. The sky may be falling, or everything may be fine, sure, but Shiriagari would have us regard nuclear disaster from somewhere in between, first suspending dis/belief. Like Donna Haraway, he would have us stay with the trouble: at times “stir up potent response,” and at others, “settle troubled waters” (1).

Shiriagari Kotobuki, from Kawakudari futago no oyaji (“The Twin Old Geezers Go Downriver,” Episode 3), in Ano hi kara no manga: 2011.3.11, 2011 (Manga Ever Since: 2011.3.11)
Prompt 6

The Place of Belonging in Post-3/11 Japan

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As I skim through chapters of Anne Allison’s Precarious Japan for the fourth time, I begin to feel like I am standing before a sea of Japanese words and phrases: ryuudouka “the liquidization or flexibilization of work and life” (7-8), muen shakai “the relationless society” (8), genpatsu nanmin “nuclear refugees” (12), ikizurasa “pain in life” (17), kodokushi “lonely death” (19), tsunagari “one-to-one connections” (20), gesenbyou “landsick” (183), ganbaru “working hard together” (187). My sea of words, the very image itself, is Japanese as well. It comes to me from Miura Shion’s The Great Passage (Fune o Amu), a 2011 novel I have not read. Indeed, I have not even seen the 2013 live-action film adaptation. I am, however, midway through the 2016 anime adaptation, which tells the story of Majime Mitsuya, an out-of-place bookish young man who finds confidence and a sense of belonging working with an editorial team to develop a new dictionary. As Majime imagines it, this new dictionary, “Daitokai,” will “cross the sea of words,” (often depicted literally in the anime while Majime imagines it). The anime is at once heartwarming and innocuous, inspiring and mundane. I often forget that it is set in the present. Something about it conveys a certain timelessness. How interesting to think then that this popular and award-winning novel was published just six months after 3/11.

One of these Japanese phrases in my sea of words, “ibasho ga nai,” articulates an affective sense of unbelonging, of figuratively having no home. Allison, who was forced to adapt Precarious Japan to the triple disaster of 3/11 as the project was all but complete, highlights the ways that the disaster plays into ongoing trends of instability in Japanese life. On the ground in Touhoku, she sees signs that, even amid all the loss and displacement, the disaster drove many Japanese to pull together: “Belonging became the new buzzword: belonging to one another, to Japan, to a homeland transformed by mud and radiation. References to connectedness (tsunagari) and bonds (kizuna) gushed everywhere—from a rise in marriage applications to surveys pronouncing its new importance to a majority of Japanese” (198). Perhaps it is in this context that a quaint story of a young man discovering himself and overcoming a sense of “ibasho ga nai” became so appealing.

There is of course a demographic for whom “ibasho ga nai” takes on a much more painful and present meaning; these are the genpatsu nanmin, the nuclear refugees, forced from their homes. Lorie Brau’s account of The Truth About Fukushima arc in the long-running food manga Oishinbo asks us to think too about ways home can be lost even when the government has not forced an evacuation. Describing the arc’s emotional climax, she writes, “Yamaoka’s grief over his mother’s passing evokes and heightens the grief over the truth about Fukushima, both the farmer’s and fishermen’s loss of livelihood, and the inaccessibility of the land as mother—home and source of sustenance” (192). Indeed, for Brau, the manga reminds us how food, tradition, land, and home are deeply interrelated. No amount of “working hard together” (ganbaru) can restore a sense of belonging that is inexorably tied to a particular place– once that place has been rendered foreign through contamination. Tawada’s novella, The Emissary, offers perhaps a telling counterpoint. Faced with a breakdown of traditional forms of belonging, both familial and terrestrial, her imagined future Japan turns to an extreme nationalism centered on isolationist foreign policy. National belonging and shared history attempt to replace what has been lost. Is this merely a more sinister and extreme version of what Allison witnessed in Japan?

If one strain of response to 3/11 has been groping toward a sense of communal belonging based in Japan’s ability to overcome the disaster, mangaka Shiriagari Kotobuki offers a very different strain. His “Twin Geezers” for instance find themselves drifting on a river beset by the challenges that face modern Japan—reevaluating the relationship with nuclear energy, sorting through contradictory opinions and information, deciding what path to go down. Faced with these dilemmas, their ridiculous solution—using one of their penises to point the way—seems no worse than any other. For Mary Knighton, “Shiriagari’s ‘sloppy’ aesthetics thwarts…Romantic idealism by working from within the paralysis and enervation of the endless everyday” (8). As is evident with the Twin Geezers, driven relentlessly down river and forced to confront challenge after decision after challenge, Shiriagari also recognizes “that the quotidian has its own dangers, which include its relentless temporal unfolding and the dictatorial ease with which it covers up or incorporates difference and dissent under repetitive normalcy” (Knighton 8). In some senses “ibasho ga nai” is the starting point for Shiriagari’s art; normalcy itself is revealed as strange and the corresponding tension between belonging and unbelonging emerges as humor.

I am on the edge of suggesting that there is something a little insidious about The Great Passage with all its relentless normalcy, its Romanticization of belonging, and its imagination of a Japanese present without the impact of 3/11. I would never deign to criticize escapism, but what I find perhaps questionable is the way it might dovetail with the PR project of TEPCO and the Japanese Government. When does a belonging predicated on the ability to endure and overcome start to occlude the reality and severity of the ongoing disaster? What responsibility do artists have to resist a government that would be happy for everyone to forget? And what role do I, happily consuming the sanitized products of “Cool Japan,”[1] play in abetting this policy of diminishing and forgetting?

 

 

[1]While it’s no Naruto, I would argue this category includes the anime adaptation of The Great Passage, which is available for Americans to stream on Amazon Prime Video.

(“Site Visits in the Fukushima Prefecture (02811058)” by IAEA Imagebank is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

Prompt 6

Prompt 6: Portraying Precarious Labor and the Attempt to Control the Uncontrollable

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(Ichi-F 69)

Katsuma Susumu’s Devil Fish and Tatsuta Kazuto’s Ichi-F depict the precarity of the workers in a matter of fact way that borders on brutal honesty, and that humanizes them at the same time. Their lives are steeped in precarity not just because of their hard, manual labor, protective measures that do not protect them from exposure but are merely intended to prevent them from spreading contamination, and the acceptance of their risk and of protective protocols that cannot protect; the conditions of their work alone are not what makes these workers into nuclear gypsies. Their exclusion from society as something other, something to be feared, something dirty, adds to their precarity. Within this situation of precarity however, both mangas take great care to also depict the community and comradery between workers. This is what humanizes them and may help identify the precarity of their situation. Additionally, the medium of the manga also serves as an important vehicle for the depiction of the unrepresentable that allows us to identify the precarity of these laborers.

One of the most basic elements of precarity, the lack of stable work and steady incomes is apparent in Ichi-F but not directly addressed as such. Throughout Chapter 0, the reader learns why Kazuto Tatsuta decided to work at the plant in spite of not being from the area. Among other reasons, he was attracted by the high pay, but quickly learns that he and his fellow workers don’t make enough money to afford more than cheap fast food. This is accentuated by the fact that every worker is very restricted in the amount of work their can do for the company, not by the company itself but by he amount of exposure that’s permissible, resulting in some workers being out of work for several months after they have reached the maximum amount of exposure. Additionally, the high pay (with hazard bonus) is only awarded to the most hazardous jobs, meaning that in order to make a lot of money, the workers also have to incur a lot of risk to their health. In Devil Fish, this risk to their health becomes apparent when two workers discuss another worker who looks ten years older than he is (36).

The precarity is worsened by the lip-service to control and protocol that do not protect the workers from exposure but are primarily prevent them from spreading contamination. Both mangas depict these measures with almost eerie similarity. The companies that employ these workers in precarity and government try to conceal the risk of the work conditions with meticulous protocols. In both mangas the protocols are so elaborate that both writers spend a significant amount of time and panels depicting them. The nuclear protocols, albeit more sophisticated in Ichi-F seems almost timeless due to their overall similarity in both mangas. E.g. in spite of new developments in nuclear detection and hopefully protection, all workers know to use of two pairs of socks as if they decrease the risk. Still, the laborers adhere to the protective measures with practiced regularity but in the awareness that these measures are not intended to protect them from exposure to radiation, e.g. “APDs set to our planned exposure amount for the day.” (Ichi-F 18) In Devil Fish, the “trainer” worker is even more explicit in his explanation to his student: “Don’t think of it as protecting your body . . . It’s so you don’t take radiation out when you leave” (Devil Fish 34) This awareness also becomes particularly apparent when the injured worker in Devil Fish and another worker with a heart attack were not taken to proper medical care because immediate evacuation would have spread the nuclear contamination. In Ichi-F, the description of the protective measures is so practiced for the narrator that he switches between narrating the measures and prescribing them almost as if he’s writing a training manual for people seeking to join in the decontamination efforts. By following protocols of protection, the companies have convinced the workers that they do whatever possible to keep them safe, and the workers, following said protocols, have accepted that this is the least worst option in their situation. This is what defines their precarity, their willing or rather unwitting acceptance of the risk they incur because they have no other option.

In their precarity, though, the workers have found ways to cope and support each other with something akin to comradery. The narrator in Ichi-F proclaims that he finds the mantra-like statement “Stay safe!” reassuring (22); the workers eat together and share a sense of purpose and revelry in their work; due to their close quarters and the necessity of protocols help each other adhere to them and remind each other; and the narrator becomes almost defensive when he points out that “’The Reality of Fukushima’ that the media rarely ever bothers to show” (36) also includes relaxation in the break room. When one worker has a headache, the whole group returns to the break room because they would be understaffed in an emergency. And even when the coworkers assume that the worker just wants a smoke, they don’t seem to exclude him but they share a laugh, which manifests their bond because they all share this state of precarity. In Devil Fish this comradery and support comes out throughout the teacher-student relationship which is, simultaneously, also the vehicle to tell the reader about the work conditions and protocols of the nuclear laborers.

The visual medium of the manga adds a significant dimension to the discussion about precariarity, namely that of representation, or rather of the attempt at representation that is impossible but nevertheless necessary. As Butler argues “There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we give.” (144) In Devil Fish, this representation happens, for example, by visually representing the impossible to represent radiation exposure (13).

The radiation is counted by a radiation counter that emits a ping and doesn’t leave a visual impact. Yet to represent this impact in the workers, the illustrator adds the radiation to the worker who’s in the process of cleaning. Using a popular, visual medium like the manga to portray the nuclear laborers also serves to humanize the laborers and the subject matter. Although the protocols of decontamination attempt to control the uncontrollable, there are human beings behind said protocols, which become visible through their portrayal in these manga.

 

Works Cited:

Tatsuta, Kazuto. Ichi-F a Workers Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. Kodansha Comics, an Imprint of Kodansha USA Publishinh, LLC, 2017.

Katsumata, Susumu. Fukushima: Devil Fish. Edited by Asakawa Mitsuhiro and Translated by Ryan Holmberg. Breakdown Press, 2015.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2006.

Prompt 6

“Nuclear Gypsies:” the Workers of Nuclear Power Plants

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The tone, visuals, and characterization found in Katsuma Susumu’s Devil Fish and Tatsuta Kazuto’s Ichi-F contribute to their depiction of nuclear laborers as “nuclear gypsies.” In each manga the workers depicted are ostracized from society for being “contaminated,” even called “dirty” and are generally treated like gypsies and forced to live on the outskirts of society. When the main character of Ichi-F attempts to rent a vehicle, he hears “I’m afraid we’re not renting vehicles to anyone traveling to Ichi-F… Some people say that there’s a greater-than-zero chance of contamination, so…” (p.201). Though “nuclear gypsy” may seem callous, this term aptly describes the way these workers are received by other people in Japan in two eras of Japan’s “atoms-for-peace” history, regardless of their separation by more than three decades. Furthermore, the similarities of the work of the employees of a functioning nuclear power plant and the workers who are cleaning and repairing a destroyed power plant are eerily similar, effectively showing the inherent precarity of nuclear power.

In Devil Fish, the economy is booming from the initial success of the nuclear power plants in Japan. However, even this apparent economic success cannot completely obscure the precarity of life around nuclear power when an employee gets hurt while working at plant and it creates a panic instead of being handled appropriately. The characters were faced with two major problems: the injured employee was not allowed to leave without being decontaminated and the representatives of the plant were concerned about word of an accident getting out. The nuclear plant boss emphatically says “No, no, no ambulance. No way. No one can know there was an accident inside the plant… The power company won’t give us any more work” (p. 47). This shows the how the government and businesses (the power companies) were desperate to show nuclear power was completely safe and reliable, even if that safe image was false, exemplifying both the economic and political struggle of having a positive view on nuclear power (as well as the danger and precarity of the job itself.) Devil Fish also uses the image of an octopus as a symbol of the strangeness of nuclear power. The octopus is one of the most alien and mutant-like creatures within the ocean and it being attracted to the nuclear power plant is symbolism for the strange and new world of Japan with nuclear power.

In contrast to Devil Fish, ICHI-F depicts an economy that is reeling after the devastation of the Tohoku earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster. The visuals of the accurate and detailed drawings of the buildings and reactors within the nuclear power plant give the reader the sense they are actually working on the various buildings within the contaminated zone. Many of the workers are the ones who had their home and jobs destroyed by the tsunami and earthquake. The sense of precariousness is everywhere in this book, even as the main character tried to find a job in the nuclear power plant area almost immediately after the devastation but it takes him nearly a year to find a job in the zone. Tatsuta characterizes a widespread eagerness to work in the zone for both altruistic and practical needs, as the main character states “I was swayed by high pay, curiosity and just a bit of altruism for those affected.” (p.25). The precariousness of the work is also evident in Tatsuta’s tone, as the common salutation when leaving for work in the contaminated area is “Stay safe.” Seemingly a harmless platitude, it also shows the acknowledged inherent danger of working in the contaminated zone. Furthermore, it echoes how simple gestures that attempt to create safety only create the illusion of it, as the main character goes on to say “This phrase might sound ominous to people who don’t hear it this often, but I find it reassuring” (p.22). Another part of the precarity of this life inside the contaminated zone is the fact that the work will not always be guaranteed, because you cannot work at the site once you have reached your yearly radiation limit. So, even after the danger of the physical harm the radiation can put on your body, you have another added sense of precariousness with the job only being temporary. The main character enforces this idea when he says “I can only work at the amount of radiation I received today for 20 days a year, so it’s not exactly that lucrative in the long run” (p.279). The manga also documents the progress of the sites he visits and works on, including when certain areas were opened to the public and when certain areas of the nuclear power plant were repaired. This documentation shows how important the cleaning and repairing of the plants were so important not only for the economy of Japan, but also for a sense of security in society and politics as well.

Despite different settings and time periods, nuclear laborers, or “nuclear gypsies,” have been similarly portrayed in the manga by Katsuma Susumu and Tatsuta Kazuto. In his manga Devil Fish, Katsuma details the daily life of nuclear plant workers in the burgeoning world of nuclear power in Japan during the 1980’s. Getting paid rather large sums of money, appropriately called “hazard pay,” for short but dangerous work was apparently very appealing for a lot of people in Japan. This phenomena recurs in Tatsuta’s post-3.11-disaster Ichi-F, in which the more hazardous areas to clean and repair were more dangerous and therefore more lucrative. Tatsuta heavily used visuals and characterization to portray his characters as nuclear gypsies and also establish a prevalent sense of precariousness; for example his characters’ eagerness to work even in an environment known to be dangerous to show how desperate some people in Japan were to make a good wage. Visuals in both manga such as the sharing of clothing, caravanning, and general communal living without modern amenities within the nuclear power plant contribute to the image of “gypsy” life. Portrayed in Devil Fish, much of the work of the nuclear plant worker is the changing of clothes and the decontamination process, which directly mirrors the life of the people cleaning up the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Ichi-F. The frequent visuals in both texts of shared clothing, washing and resting areas for the workers and their limited access to running water and electricity all augment this concept of “nuclear gypsies.”

 

Theorizing Environmental Humanities for the Post-Fukushima Age