Fukushima and the Arts

The natural and man-made cataclysmic events of the 11 March 2011 disaster, or 3.11, have dramatically altered the status quo of contemporary Japanese society. While much has been written about the social, political, economic, and technical aspects of the disaster, this volume represents one of the first in-depth explorations of the cultural responses to the devastating tsunami, and in particular the ongoing nuclear disaster of Fukushima. This book explores a wide range of cultural responses to the Fukushima nuclear calamity by analyzing examples from literature, poetry, manga, theatre, art photography, documentary and fiction film, and popular music. Individual chapters examine the changing positionality of post-3.11 northeastern Japan and the fear-driven conflation of time and space in near-but-far urban centers; explore the political subversion and nostalgia surrounding the Fukushima disaster; expose the ambiguous effects of highly gendered representations of fear of nuclear threat; analyze the musical and poetic responses to disaster; and explore the political potentialities of theatrical performances. By scrutinizing various media narratives and taking into account national and local perspectives, the book sheds light on cultural texts of power, politics, and space. Providing an insight into the post-disaster Zeitgeist as expressed through a variety of media genres, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Japanese Studies, Japanese Culture, Popular Culture, and Literature Studies.

Barbara Geilhorn is a JSPS-postdoctoral fellow based at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. Her publications include Enacting Culture: Japanese Theater in Historical and Modern Contexts, co-edited with Eike Grossmann (iudicium, 2012). Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt is an Associate Professor of Japanese modern literature at Nagoya University, Japan. Her recent publications include Visions of Precarity in Japanese Popular Culture and Literature, co-edited with Roman Rosenbaum (Routledge 2015).

- Negotiating Nuclear Disaster: an Introduction - Literature Maps Disaster: The Contending Narratives of 3.11 Fiction - Summertime Blues: Musical Critique in the Aftermaths of Japan's 'Dark Spring' - Subversion and Nostalgia in Art Photography of the Fukushima Disaster - Uncanny Anxiety: Literature after Fukushima - Problematizing Life: Documentary Films on the 3.11 Nuclear Catastrophe - Gendering 'Fukushima': Resistance, Self-responsibility, and Female Hysteria in Sono Sion's Land of Hope - Antigone in Japan: Life and Death in 'Fukushima' - Poetry in an Era of Nuclear Power: Three Poetic Responses to Fukushima - Challenging Reality with Fiction: Imagining Alternative Readings of Japanese Society in Post-Fukushima Theatre - Oishinbo's Fukushima Elegy: Grasping for the truth about radioactivity in a food manga - The Politics of the Senses: Takayama Akira's Atomized Theatre after Fukushima