Tag Archives: Japan

Prompt 8

Solidarity, resistance, and the will to live freely

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Naše země dostala příležitost prokázat absurdnost okupánských záminek a žalob, dostala příležitost veřejně osvědčit a demonstrovat solidaritu, odolnost, a vůli žít svobodně, a uskutečňovat jen humanitní socialismus (Our country has the opportunity to show the absurdity of the occupation’s pretenses and accusations, has the opportunity to publicly establish and demonstrate solidarity, resistance, and the will to live freely, and to realize humanitarian socialism). (3:46–4:04)

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty Czechoslovak Broadcasting
28 August 1968

Context: the mood of restraint.

Alexander James Brown provides some helpful context for the anti-nuclear movement. He explains the “mood of restraint” in post-3/11 society, an “atmosphere” built on tragedy and spun with threads of ugly feelings: anxiety, uncertainty, failure (39). The Japanese people were “stupefied,” “overwhelmed,” and “confused,” in the words of activist Amamiya Karin, by the series of unknowns leading to and following after the triple disaster (qtd. 43). How can someone make sense of a disaster with unknown causes and unknown effects? As organizer Oda Masanori writes of the anti-war movement,

People dashed outside with this feeling of being at one’s wits end, of being unable to bear this suffocating feeling. (qtd. 46)

It’s suffocating—the static, stubborn not-knowing, the not-speaking, not-expressing, not-doing—such that a person might be compelled to “dash outside” in hopes of any change at all. And still, only silence.

As I wrote in my last blog post, without a catalyst, ugly feelings might continue without end alongside the everyday. That’s just what the mood of restraint called for, a catalyst for “emotional release,” and that’s what it found in the form of protest, according to Brown (41):

Affective protest creates space for the expression of emotions, particularly negative emotions, which otherwise may not be socially acceptable. (43)

Protest, in words and body, allows for the release of pent-up anger, frustration, and blame, and of the hopelessness that comes with inaction (64). Through the play of sound demonstrations, it can tend to “feelings of powerlessness,” or the impotence recognized and resisted by stuplimity (48). A sort of disorganization can help, too, as countering the mood of restraint didn’t have to mean defending a single argument or posing a single solution, but might instead take the nebulous shape of solidarity.

This is what we find in humanERROR—a performative protest that resists the mood of restraint by giving voice to the fury, the frustration, the indignation, and most of all the silence following 3/11. It’s a protest in the name of feeling, not reasoning; of experience, not ideology. When the vocalist is seen from a low angle, framed against clear sunny skies, we see this best. In those moments, he isn’t preaching to Japan, but screaming into the skies in a visceral act. “This is no time for hair-splitting arguments” (9:14).

Context: place, time, body.

By nature of performing, speaking, even being in public, Frying Dutchman put themselves at risk. Not bodily, in the strictest sense, as would be the case in or near exclusion zones, for example, but in mind or spirit. Breaking the silence, they enter into a state of being vulnerable to the censorship upheld as much by the powers of government, corporation, and media as by society and the self. That’s the price of confronting the expectations of group conformity, as Brown describes through sociologist Shibuya Nozomu (42). Vulnerability is the price of bodily assembly, which “puts livable life at the forefront of politics” (Butler 18).

The protest of bodies assembled in the street (and let’s not forget other forms of protest: by nature, such as those in virtual space, or by necessity, as in the hunger strikes of prisoners) calls attention to what Judith Butler calls interdependencies. humanERROR embodies the feelings shared by many Japanese, especially in this historical moment, but also the basic needs of human life—safe access to public space, air, mobility, land, shelter, sustenance—which are denied to some by the nuclear power industry and threatened for all of material life in the nuclear age. Butler explains:

What I am suggesting is that it is not just that this or that body is bound up in a network of relations, but that the body, despite its clear boundaries, or perhaps precisely by virtue of those boundaries, is defined by the relations that make its own life and action possible. (130)

Frying Dutchman are working to strive in concert, as Butler would say, to demonstrate the symbiosis between one body and all other bodies, one individual and all of society. They suggest, I depend on you, and you on me. We have to work together.

Frying Dutchman invite participation from anyone who crosses their path, on the street or with a flyer, to witness in the moment or replay after the fact. They “accept a kind of unchosen dimension to our solidarity with others” (Butler 152). The vocalist, especially, moves across speech, scream, and melody, giving voice to more than one response to 3/11. He moves across space, too, directing address to three crowds: passers-by pausing along the bridge, the audience standing on the shore, and viewers watching online. And the performance moves across time as well, as people go about their way, search for more information online, tell a friend, share a video, play the audio at home or in a demonstration.

Content: evocations and other effects.

For me, what’s most effective about humanERROR is its evocative potential. The cyclical, lo-fi rhythm as backdrop to exclamatory and at times harsh vocals reminds me of a song by the Velvet Underground, “The Gift.” Whereas “The Gift” privileges rhythm over speech, Frying Dutchman balance the audio with clear emphasis on vocals. Lou Reed tells the story of Waldo Jeffers, a lovesick teenager who mails himself to his college girlfriend, Marsha, only to be impaled by a sheet metal cutter, “(thud),” when Marsha’s friend opens the package. He narrates this without feeling, as if it were simply a matter of fact. The performance in humanERROR tells an equally absurd and morbid story, that of nuclear energy, with an affective tone. It’s not a comparison that works for everyone—but I can imagine endless associations for those who protest against precarity.

A more relatable example might be that of place. I’m not familiar with the specific setting of humanERROR, but, similar to the audio, the visuals resonate with personal experience. The setting reminds me of long afternoons sitting along Náplavka, the bank of the Vltava River in Prague, just below the busy street of Rašínovo nábřeží. There, on any given Saturday, you’d find local beer, live music, and food markets. Náplavka brings back a host of sensations—the sun in my eyes, a cool spring breeze—but most of all it reminds me of time, or the absence of time. It reminds me of whole days spent without a thought for time, the excitement of opening a new book, the wandering of good conversation. It’s the sort of place that makes a person appreciate the moments, and the infrastructure, that make life livable.

To conclude, “demonstrations do not need to make specific demands” (Brown 49). humanERROR may ask participants to “wake up” (like Shiriagari Kotobuki, as we read last week) to the propaganda in the media, the dishonesty of the government, and the exploitation throughout nuclear histories. It may advocate for hydroelectric and geothermal power. What it doesn’t do, though, is frame action between only two possibilities, a population targeted or protected (Butler 144). Rather, humanERROR embodies a call to act, and leaves open which specific action one might take: “Each of us must now carefully consider various information with an open mind and decide our own opinion” (humanERROR Parade).

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 3

Doing the Garden—Digging the Weeds

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Reading this week’s texts was indeed hard. Writing about them seems like an even harder (if not ludicrous) task. For, as John Treat states, what prerogative do we-(foreign)-readers have in talking about such outlandish events? In the midst of irresolution —as to when and where to start writing, or if to write at all— I figured that perhaps the strange and pervasive after-effects that Ōta’s and Hayashi’s stories left in my brain’s very tight and tidy web-of-ruminations, provide a productive example of the ways in which literature (fiction or otherwise) can shift how we-readers interact with unfamiliar realities, ushering us into what we might have formerly thought of as unfathomable.

For a hypochondriac such as myself, City of Corpses and Two Grave Markers defied my expectations in a very peculiar way. They certainly presented gruesome and highly disturbing imageries of Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s human and non-human landscapes after the atomic-bombs were dropped; however, whilst reading, the kind of imaginative leaps that I experienced were different from those induced by non-nuclear narratives. The latter usually touch the image-based and intellectual wirings of the brain, while the former touched a kernel that triggered a lasting and physical discomfort that had to do with an irrational sense of contamination. The gap between reader and writer, between 1945 and 2019, between Japan and America, was suddenly bridged by a piece of literary fancy that weaved itself not through language, but through bodily uproar, ultimately causing the reader to develop an eerie awareness of her own organic bits, i.e. red corpuscles, hair follicles, thyroid glands.

I would call this experience a defamiliarizing one, for it not only causes dread from gore, but it twists the sense of the real and the imaginary by blurring and problematizing the line that severs the human from the non-human, and the natural from the unnatural. Freud, in the very beginning of his essay Das Unheimliche (1919), states that “the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (1), but which has suddenly lost its recognizable and comforting quality, such as when “something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality” (14). Following this line of thought, we could say that nuclear-bomb literature recreates a scenario that obliges the reader to transgress its own network of certainties, thus breaking the spell of normality, custom, habit, and language —language! our rational organizer par excellence, as both Christa Wolf and John Treat recognize.

It is interesting to notice that language and other rational (technological) forms of organizing reality are the very tools that help efface humans’ reliable patterns of existence —technology carries within itself an unsolvable paradox, for it breeds both familiarity and unfamiliarity; it embodies, in the midst of disaster, what Freud called das unheimliche. There are two very striking images that help create this dreaded feeling in Ōta’s and Hayashi’s stories. The first is when Ōta’s protagonist sees her mother in the cemetery: “the fence had been blown away, so I could see the whole cemetery. Mother was coming and going between cemetery and house” (184). The second is when Hayashi’s Wakako sees people drinking water from the river: “there was a kind of intimacy about this scene of river and people, as if the running water were a giant centipede and the people its legs” (36). In both scenes there is an estrangement from reality caused by a disruption of predictable patterns; progress itself (science) has obliterated the distinctive traits of a controlled/civilized environment: the dead are no longer segregated from the living by a fence, they are now thrust upon each other in a space of ambiguity where the human body (and other bodies as well, such as plants and insects) is no longer sacred, but a defiled conjunction of matter. The scene of the giant centipede, on the other hand, shows a novel and uncanny form of harmony that prevents the eye from distinguishing one organism (i.e. the river) from the other (i.e. humans), thus creating an image of mutated animation in which, again, the sense of humanity as separated from the realm of the non-human or inorganic is violently reversed.

This, I believe, resonates with Jane Bennett’s idea of Thing and Object, for every scattered piece of soil and every human cell alters its literal and figurative meaning under the synesthetic light of the atomic-bomb, signaling the moment in which the “Object becomes the Other, when the sardine can look back, when the mute idol speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny” (2). Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s scenery post-nuclear-reaction is one in which ordinary things —breakfast, stairs, trees, eyes, noses, words, roots, graves— look back at their human “protagonists”, embodying a form of life that can only be achieved through death and decay, not unlike what Wakako projects when she returns to her parents: “You’re beautiful, Waka-san. Like a wax doll… If this beauty was something she had brought home from N City, didn’t it signify death?” (29). There is an almost untraceable presence, as Freud would say, that ought to be absent: death is the unwanted and intrusive guest in the (seemingly) living body of a child.

These are not tales in which the beautiful/bright/strong/fascinating protagonists thrive and conquer the depths of cruelty; on the contrary, they are the theaters-of-truth in which (due to a link missing between common understanding and facts) nothing can be forecast[1]. This, I believe, is what profoundly shakes the reader’s imagination, for we simply cannot “bear being the victims of chance” (Wolf 79). As a result of this, our own bodies begin to look and feel different under the radioactive light of uncertainty, projecting that vulnerable glow we thought only existed in the nonhuman.

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[1] As Treat states: “It is the conspicuous lack of conventional malice and vengeance that, in part, distinguishes the start of the nuclear age. It is an age not enjoined by emotions of epics, the stuff of storytelling from the beginning of our literacy, but rather one effectively voided of them” (17).

Image: From Japanese Manga Hadashi no Gen (1973 – 1974).