(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 energyfirst, 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 shotMedium close-upPOV shotClose-upMedium 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.
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.
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 Browneargues 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)
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.
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
