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)