Genealogy of Disaster: the Relation Of

GENEALOGY OF DISASTER: THE RELATION OF

DISASTER TO FICTION TO POLITICS

IN POSTWAR JAPAN

Alessandro Ryan Easthope

A thesis submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Asian Studies

College of Humanities

The University of Utah

May 2019

The University of Utah Graduate School

STATEMENT OF THESIS APPROVAL

The thesis of Alessandro Ryan Easthope has been approved by the following supervisory committee members:

Wesley Makoto Sasaki-Uemura , Chair March 4, 2019 Date Approved

Cindi Lynn Textor , Member March 4, 2019 Date Approved

Winston C Kyan , Member March 4, 2019 Date Approved

and by Kim Korinek , Chair of the Department of Asian Studies and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School.

ABSTRACT

This thesis examines the relationship of disaster to fiction to politics in postwar

Japan by using two works of fiction and two disasters as case studies. The first work of fiction is Ishimure Michiko’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease. The second work is Ōe Kenzaburō’s Somersault. The two works of fiction are analyzed for their relationship to the historical memory of their two corresponding disasters, Minamata

Disease and the Subway Sarin Incident. By looking at these two works, I argue that fiction plays an important political role in postwar Japan by contesting dominant state and news media control of the narrative of the two disasters and thereby repoliticize the event. The literary analysis of the novels is supplemented with historical considerations of the change they played a role in creating. I demonstrate that this is critical in a postwar Japanese news media environment that provides little challenge to state narratives on disasters. Analysis of the novels is supplemented with considerations of the historical circumstances which both enabled and prevented the novels from provoking political change.

To the many friends and family members who have heard me ramble about whatever topic happens to interest me at the moment for the last twenty-one years. Out of those ramblings came this thesis. I can only hope that one day I will be able to return that sort of kindness and attention to you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... vi

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

The Disasters and Their Chapters ...... 2 Terminology ...... 6 Japan’s (Dys)functional Democracy ...... 9 Theoretical Premise ...... 14

THE UNIVERSALITY OF MINAMATA DISEASE ...... 21

Ishimure Michiko and Minamata Disease ...... 22 An Overview of Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease ...... 25 Young Yamanaka Kuhei...... 29 The Flags of Wandering ...... 35 High Tide ...... 41 The Smith’s Minamata – Minamata Disease Goes Global ...... 45 The Age of Ideals ...... 50

DEMISTIFYING AUM SHINRIKYO IN ŌE KENZABURŌ’S SOMERSAULT ...... 57

The Latent Disaster ...... 59 Ōe Kenzaburō’s Self-insertion ...... 65 The Dialectics of Somersault ...... 68 The Death of the Big Other ...... 77 The Negation of the Novel...... 86

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION ...... 94

REFERENCES ...... 99

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I should like to first and foremost thank Professor Wesley Sasaki-Uemura who has been my teacher and mentor for the last four years and has never failed to meet with me outside of class and indulge my many ideas, coherent or not. If it were not for him, it is very unlikely I would have continued to study history nor entered this M.A. program. I will never forget the kindness and attention to detail he has always provided in giving me feedback and working with me. Most of all, I will never forget the many enjoyable and relaxed conversations he was willing to share during office hour visits.

Thank you to Professor Cindi Textor for always giving me the freedom to explore my ideas at my own pace and encouraging me to pursue new directions professionally and personally. Thank you to Professor Winston Kyan who pushed me hard to raise my standards as a graduate student. Additional thanks goes to Professor Suhi Choi, Professor

Mamiko Suzuki, and Professor Joseph Metz who let me develop the ideas that became this thesis in their courses.

Over the course of my M.A., thanks to four generous FLAS scholarships provided by the Asia Center, so that I have been able to focus exclusively on producing high-quality research. On top of that, I was able to study abroad in Osaka twice and improve my

Japanese abilities greatly. To which I should like to add, thank you to the dedicated language teachers I have had who looked after me and let me study in my own way, specifically Professor Yoko Azuma and Professor Misao Ashdown.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

This thesis considers the relationship of disaster to fiction to politics in postwar

Japanese history by exploring two disasters and two works of fiction largely neglected in

English language scholarship. I take up Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata

Disease (from here on Paradise) by Ishimure Michiko and Somersault by Ōe Kenzaburō as my two fictional case studies. I argue that the two works taken up as case studies demonstrate the ability for fiction in postwar Japan to contest dominant state narratives and management of the disasters. As a result, the works of fiction themselves have the potential to influence state policy and reaction to future disasters. The two works of fiction are therefore read in relation to historical events, political discourses, and perhaps most importantly to each other.

As an extension of the core argument about fiction’s political capabilities, I also outline both the repressive functions of the Japanese state and the hegemonic functioning of the Japanese news media in attempting to control and create their own narrative of disaster. It is against this repressive and hegemonic role of the state and the news media which I imagine fiction’s political potential as being realized. I do not imagine a simple binary and purely antagonistic opposition between fiction, as a positive political force, and the media or state as a purely repressive one. Instead, part of the argument is the ability

2 for the fiction to shift the way the disasters themselves are discussed in the news media and in state reaction; in other words, fiction performs a democratic function of actualizing the self-proclaimed function of the state and news media – to protect and represent the people.

The Disasters and Their Chapters

The two main chapters of this thesis correspond to the two the works of fiction and disasters outlined in the introduction. Besides these two body chapters, there is an introduction and conclusion chapter that set out to establish the framework by which the works of fiction are being evaluated and then reflect on the nature of the evaluation in the

2019 context. To preface the framework of the thesis and the two chapters of literary analysis that follow, I would like to provide an overview of the disasters taken up as case studies and the questions raised by them along with the chapters themselves.

The first diagnosed case of Minamata Disease was contracted on May 1, 1956, by

Hamamoto Tsuginori.1 Minamata Disease originated from the dumping of mercury waste byproducts into the Shiranui Sea by the Chisso Corporation. The mercury was produced as a byproduct of acetaldehyde production. Once in the water, the synthetic mercury transformed into organic mercury and was absorbed by the fish living in the sea. The fish were in turn consumed by the fishermen who subsequently contracted Minamata Disease.

As a result, the disease hit hardest those who lived in the fishing hamlets and consumed the fish caught there. Minamata Disease is known as one of the four big pollution diseases of Japan (yondai kōgai-byō) joining Itai-itai Disease, Niigata Disease, and Yokkaichi

Asthma as the others.

1 “10 Things to Know about Minamata Disease,” (Minamata Disease Museum, 2016), Accessed January 20, 2019, https://www.minamatadiseasemuseum.net/10-things-to-know.

Even though Minamata Disease was named after the town in which it was first contracted, the majority of the residents of Minamata did not contract the disease.2 Instead, the fishermen became triple victims of the disease. First, they were directly victimized by the contraction of organic mercury poisoning. Second, they were hurt financially as demand for the fish they caught declined drastically on the market in the wake of the disease. Third, social factors exacerbated the misery of families living with disease victims in them. Their children were often ostracized even after the disease was confirmed not to be contagious. Further, the townspeople of Minamata, especially those employed by

Chisso who made up a wealthy and influential plurality, thought of them as selfish for demanding compensation and hurting the prosperity of the town in the process. In total,

13,805 victims have been confirmed to date – I will complicate this number further later in the thesis.3

Ishimure Michiko’s work of fiction has become the dominant narrative on

Minamata Disease, but it was not always this way. Initially, two principle factors contributed to her decision to write the work of fiction. One was the relative lack of media coverage on the disease, and the other was what Ishimure saw as the complete mishandling of the narrative of the disease by the media. The media early on misreported the disease as contagious, increasing the stigma of those with the disease. Following this, they tended to talk about the disease in mechanical and medical terms, dehumanizing and objectifying the patients of the disease in the process. Lastly, they showed a clear bias toward the Chisso corporation by covering the fishermen’s protest in response to the poisoning and

2 George, Timothy, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2002), 265. 3 “10 Things to Know about Minamata Disease”

4 destruction of their livelihood as a violent riot.

The second disaster considered in this thesis is the release of Sarin gas into the

Tokyo subway system by the apocalyptic cult Aum Shinrikyo. The event has become known as the Subway Sarin Incident, and it was the first terrorist attack committed by a religious organization on Japanese soil. The aim of the attack, carried out on March 20,

1995, was to spur on the apocalypse sooner, justified by a warped interpretation of the

Buddhist concept of poa. 4 The idea behind Aum’s interpretation of poa is that by murdering people who had accumulated bad karma, you would ensure their reincarnation to a higher form.

The attacks not only resulted in the deaths of 13 people and the physical injury of an additional 6,000, but it also produced lifelong psychological damage for both the victims and Japanese society at large.5 It shattered the illusion of a Japanese society safe from terrorism and religious fundamentalism. The media and government response to the cult was to exile it from the Japanese social fabric. For the media, this took the form of sensationalist reporting which othered the cult and its members, including those who were not involved with the attack. Further, the media coverage largely overlooked the victims of the attacks themselves or otherwise conflated victims of Aum’s Sarin gas attacks to be members of Aum as in the famous case of Yoshiyuki Kōno.6 On the government side of

4 Lifton, Robert Jay, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyō, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999), 68. 5 Neuman, Scott, Japan Executes Cult Leader Responsible For 1995 Sarin Gas Attack On Tokyo Subway, (NPR, July 6, 2018). https://www.npr.org/2018/07/06/626434965/japan-executes-cult-leader-responsible- for-1995-sarin-gas-attack-on-tokyo-subway. 6 Gamble, Adam, and Watanabe, Takesato. A Public Betrayed: An inside Look at Japanese Media Atrocities and Their Warnings to the West (Washington D.C.: Regenery Publishing, 2004), 122-163. Yoshiyuki Kōno lived next door to Aum Shinrikyo when they began the development of Sarin gas to attack the public prosecutor Sakamoto Tsutsumi. After Yoshiyuki inhaled the fumes and had to be hospitalized, the media falsely reported Yoshiyuki to be a member of Aum developing Sarin gas and had a hard time clearing his name.

5 things, this saw the expansion of the police state and the implementation of special laws never before applied to religious organizations in the postwar era.

Ōe Kenzaburō’s Somersault responds to the sensationalist othering of the media’s reporting to create a narrative that strips away the mystical layer the media added. The novel reimagines a world where Aum Shinrikyo had called off the Sarin attacks and ridiculed its own belief system. The religious organization in the novel, which does exactly that, goes on to found a new religious organization. The novel serves as a response to Aum, validating the concept of attempting to create a new form of community outside the control of the state but rejecting the violence and torture constitutive of Aum as an organization.

Due to the nature of the works of fiction, the authors, and the disasters themselves, this thesis explores a number of subthemes and questions. First, the question of the constitution of victimhood figures heavily into both works of fiction and disasters. How does one become a victim and what does it mean to be a victim? Second, both works of fiction deal explicitly with religious themes. Ishimure Michiko’s work made Buddhism dominant in the narrative of Minamata Disease - for example, when a Memorial Park was constructed in Minamata to commemorate the victims of the disease, small stone statues of the Buddha were placed throughout the park.7 Aum Shinrikyo, in a different way, also had their own interpretation of Buddhism and implemented their beliefs in the real world. The two works of fiction take up the question of what belief means and how it changed in the wake of these horrific disasters. Third, the question of interplay with the media and the influence of the media on political action concerning the disasters becomes a dominant theme in both works of fiction. Lastly, the peripheral status of both authors being from

7 George, 262.

6 rural and marginal regions of Japan figures largely into their portrayal of disaster. I take this peripheral status to be nearly categorical for the two works, imagining the periphery as destabilizing the center and being a vital site of political contestation in postwar Japan.

While the two works have many similarities in terms of subtheme and relation to the overarching argument of the thesis itself, the inclusion of the two works critically enables a chance to analyze and contrast the nature of the default ideological substrate of

Japan. In other words, this paper seeks to construct a small genealogy of disaster in postwar

Japan by covering two drastically different disasters and two drastically different historical periods. The two works of fiction then are read in tandem, as part of continuing and evolving story of disaster in which the argument and subthemes above are complicated and changed as per the unfolding of new disasters.

Terminology

The terms fiction and disaster should be briefly clarified to avoid further confusion about my use of them. The words become complicated in part because of their specific application in this thesis – neither Paradise nor Somersault could be thought of as purely fiction. Paradise borders on journalistic reportage, and it is difficult to label anything contained within the book as pure ‘fiction.’ Ishimure describes the work as “a kind of ballad, both dramatic and lyric, like the chanted texts of the classical puppet theater.”8 In this sense, the work uses elements of fiction and interweaves it seamlessly with historical and medical documents along with more conventional reporting strategies. Somersault, obversely, is largely composed of a fictional plot and formatted as a novel, it blurs the line

8 Ishimure, Michiko, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, translated by Livia Monnet (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, 2003), 378.

7 by interweaving theological and historical treatises along with accounts of historical events into the narrative structure. In this way, the two works have complementary structures. I will elaborate further on my conception of the word ‘fiction,’ which I believes greatly differs from the conventional definition of ‘fiction’ used in literary studies.

Fiction and nonfiction, in so far as they can be delineated, are defined by their relationship to Truth.9 Consider Lacan’s claim that “truth shows itself in a fictional structure.”10 Lacan does not dismiss the notion of Truth but rather asserts that any claims to it are inherently false in so far as the claim itself is subordinate to language. In other words, there is an incommensurable gap between language and truth and the claim to close such a gap is fiction. Fiction, in its more common usage, does not make a claim to such

Truth but rather relates to the Truth only as a structuring fragment. In other words, while there is always an element (fragment) of truth in fiction, avoiding the claim of the Truth precisely provides the Truth on the formal level. Fiction, then, is no more than an outline of this incommensurability of language.

Both of the works I have chosen employ their respective fragments of the Truth in different ways, but neither work presents itself as authoritative. The works of fiction each harbor an element of the universal Truth of the disaster but neither portends to be this universal truth in contrast with, say, media and governmental sources reporting on the disaster of the event in a holistic and ‘objective’ way. Fiction reinserts the traumatic antagonism into the narrative of disaster, making it highly valuable as a tool with which to represent a historical event such as a disaster. My truth-fragment definition does not

9 When I use Truth with a capital T, I am signifying the notion of a universal and objective truth. When I use it with a lower-case t, I mean truth in its conventional sense of a particular verifiable fact. 10 Lacan, Jacques, Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton Company, 2006), 625.

8 deliberate on the aestheticization of disaster but instead partitions the traumatic aspect of the disaster itself as impossible to represent. To reiterate, it is not that fiction and nonfiction are in some sort of binary and antagonistic opposition to each other but rather it is precisely the embedding of the one in each other that enables access to a more universal Truth.

Analogously, in the wake of a traumatic event, the brain rewires itself on the neurological level to defend itself from confrontation with the traumatic event.11 Therefore, both theoretically and biologically, the definition of trauma is that which escapes symbolization.12 While the two works differ to the degree in which they employ what may be called a 'conventional fictional narrative,' neither claims to represent the trauma of the disaster itself. Fiction only outlines the nature of this unrepresentable element and in representing the unrepresentability of the event, it draws existence to the very horror of the event itself – a public awareness that a trauma has occurred even if by nature that very trauma is inaccessible.

Disaster, following this definition of fiction, is that impossible to fully represent traumatic historical event. Such a definition can neatly supplement a more conventional definition of disaster such as the Red Cross one of “a sudden, calamitous event that seriously disrupts the functioning of a community or society and causes human, material, and economic or environmental losses that exceed the community’s or society’s ability to cope using its own resources. Though often caused by nature, disasters can have human origins.”13 One could posit that, for the individual, as much as material resources, the

11 See: Sherin, Jonathan E., and Charles B. Nemeroff. "Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: The Neurobiological Impact of Psychological Trauma." Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 13, no. 3 (2011): 263-78. 12 Also known as the ‘unspoken’. 13 "What Is a Disaster?" International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Accessed January 19, 2019. https://www.ifrc.org/en/what-we-do/disaster-management/about-disasters/what-is-a-disaster/.

9 exceeding of psychic resources makes them experience a disaster on the phenomenological level.

The power of fiction stems from its ability to reclaim the traumatic aspect of the disaster. Unlike the Japanese state’s impulse to manage a disaster and the media’s impulse to create a coherent narrative out of an event which is phenomenologically incoherent, fiction allows the trauma to breathe. The trauma does not become depoliticized but is instead transformed into a powerful political tool to prevent the reoccurrence of the disaster again. Furthermore, fictional narratives enable the unresolvable trauma its proper status as unresolvable, creating affective and political networks which enable the disaster to have political effects well beyond the specific instance of disaster itself.

Japan’s (Dys)functional Democracy

There are two historic institutions which, although they constitute Japan’s postwar democracy on the formal level, have also simultaneously prevented its functioning on the practical level. The first is the parliamentary system and the second is the news media. To concretely set up the historical circumstances which have given fiction its unique power in postwar Japan, it is necessary to provide a brief description of the flaws with these two institutions.

To trace back, Japan’s democratic woes in the postwar began as early as the

American Occupation. When I trace back the problems of Japan’s postwar democracy to the American Occupation, I do not intend to reiterate the right-wing argument that the changes made by the Occupation were a one-sided imposition since the changes were also desired by a significant portion of the Japanese population – the retroactive validation of

10 the effort by members of labor unions, rural tenant farmers, and allies in the intellectual classes to democratize Japanese society in the prewar period.14 The 1947 constitution established similar democratic institutions as those in the United States – a parliamentary system with upper and lower houses, an executive branch with its cabinet, and an independent judiciary branch that reviews the legislation of the legislative branch. The new constitution was paired with universal suffrage and a bill of rights along with the restoration of the right to collective bargaining and for labor unions to be formed.

However, by the time the Constitution went into effect in 1948, the American

Occupation policy had already shifted to one prioritizing anticommunist goals over the promotion of democratic society.15 As a result, many of the communists were purged from power, and many of the former fascists of the wartime era were installed in both parliamentary and bureaucratic positions. The establishment of the 1955 System saw the death knell of the potential for political change stemming from parliamentary action as a representative organ of the people. The 1955 System saw the Liberal and Democratic parties merge to form one probusiness conservative supermajority party which has governed Japan as the leading coalition for sixty out of sixty-four years since. In effect, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has maintained near one-party rule in Japan in the postwar period with the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP) functioning almost as a token opposition to legitimize LDP rule.

Chalmers Johnson’s old yet still relevant model of Japanese capitalism provides a useful tool to analyze postwar politics. Johnson coined the term Capitalist Development

14 Gordon, Andrew, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan. Twentieth-Century Japan: The Emergence of a World Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 188. 15 Gordon, Andrew, A History of Modern Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2014), 237.

State to describe the triad structure of the ruling LDP, the bureaucracy which drafts its legislation, and the business interests which steer the system by financing the LDP and benefit from its legislation. Chalmers model claims that these three institutions constitute the postwar Japanese state.16 According to Johnson, there is not only near one-party rule, but also the democratically elected one-party has limited policy-producing power. The policy approved by the legislature is produced mainly by, to use Johnson’s terminology, a bureaucratic factory who mostly obtain degrees from the same schools. Historically, parliamentary democracy in Japan has had little of its purported representative function and is instead subordinate to bureaucratic and business interests.

Accordingly, the press does little to challenge the dominance of this triad structure and instead provides only a cursory check on power. The weakness of the press can also be traced back to the American Occupation which maintained the same fundamental news media structure as the wartime period in order to stifle criticism about the Occupation.17

After the Occupation, the same news media structure remained intact, in effect maintaining the news media as an uncritical organ. When I use the term ‘news media,’ I am referring to the five private media conglomerates that dominate the Japanese news along with the

NHK, or the public broadcasting channel. The five conglomerates are the Yomiuri, Asahi,

Mainichi, Nikkei, and Sankei newspapers (listed in order of readership). Each newspaper owns a corresponding news broadcasting station, Nippon TV, Asahi Broadcasting

Corporation, Mainichi Broadcasting System, TV Tokyo, and Fuji TV. Of course, there is some degree of variance among the five networks with Asahi and Mainichi being more

16 For more, see: Johnson, Chalmers, Japan, Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1996). 17 Gamble and Watanabe, 38.

12 liberal and critical of the state and the others being more conservative or economically focused. Regardless, the television broadcasting functions more as an auxiliary to the newspaper rather than as a source of news, leaving NHK as the dominant source of television news.18

While there are other alternative media outlets in Japan, they suffer from small viewerships and readerships along with limited access to sources. Three main factors contribute to the news media’s limited ability to function as a check on the power of the government. The first is that access to sources in Japan (for the most part) is contingent on being a member of a press club (kisha kurabu). The press clubs play a role in creating the relative uniformity of press coverage across media companies that is characteristic of

Japanese news. Further, the press clubs function through the development of intimate relationships between journalists and the sources themselves (a bureaucrat or politician).

As a result, as many as 90 percent of journalistic sources are official ones.19 The press club reporters have a dangerous tendency to report official sources uncritically to avoid the appearance of bias but in this way become like mouthpieces for state officials.

Second, the five media companies listed are heavily dependent on revenue from

TV broadcasting to stay afloat. However, broadcasting licenses in Japan must be renewed and approved by the Japanese Diet. In effect, this puts the Japanese media conglomerates under the chokehold of the state. For example, in 1993, when the LDP lost control of the

Diet for the first time since the inception of the 1955 system, news-division director

Sadayoshi Tsubaki bragged that the defeat in the election was on account of Asahi’s

18 Pharr, Susan J., and Ellis S. Krauss, Media and Politics in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 61. 19 Gamble and Watanabe, 62.

13 negative coverage of the LDP. As a sort of warning to Asahi, when the LDP reclaimed

Diet control, they only renewed their broadcasting license for one year instead of five.20

The institutional structure of the broadcasting license system both reinforces and reproduces a cultural tendency to avoid direct criticism and controversy and functions as a form of censorship.

While I have already hinted at the third factor, the tendency for news coverage across all the major platforms to be relatively uniform creates an image of objectivity when often this purported ‘objectivity’ functions to serve state interests. Foreign observers have noted that the coverage is uniform to an extent rarely seen in most liberal democracies and is ‘objective’ (a regurgitation of official sources and facts) to the point it avoids controversy and becomes like a dull recitation of state-provided information.21 NHK, in a publication released to commemorate its fiftieth anniversary, writes the following about its disaster coverage: “… disaster reporting is an area little affected by the personal values or likes and dislikes of members of the audience, which, I believe, makes it possible to objectively gauge the degree of their trust in NHK” (214)22

The issue with the Japanese media is not so much their striving for objectivity, which is a worthwhile endeavor in the field of journalism, but rather the depoliticizing effect of this ‘objectivity.’ The news media, including NHK, are quite explicitly part of the actual crisis management mechanism, shaping and subsequently controlling people’s visualization of the disaster itself.23 The ‘objectivity’ comes to shield the social origins

20 Gamble and Watanabe, 43-44. 21 Gamble and Watanabe, 42. 22 Okamoto, Takahashi, et al., Disaster Reporting and the Public Nature of Broadcasting (Tokyo: NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute, 2004), 214. 23 The NHK is specifically designated to do all it can to minimize damage after a disaster under the Disaster Management Basic Law. See: Okamoto et al., vii.

(antagonisms) that produced the disaster or exacerbated its effects in the first place. The works of fiction in this thesis play a contrastive role to the news media in this sense – if the news media’s job is to manage and eliminate a sense of crisis, the work of fiction has the ability to confront that sense of crisis head-on. Bearing Japan’s institutional flaws with its democracy in mind, the thesis will examine specific flaws in media coverage as they relate to the two disasters taken up as case studies.

Theoretical Premise

The precise way in which a consumer commodity like a work of fiction influences political change requires a proper theoretical framework by which to understand what form politics and change could take. All the more so, it requires a framework which delineates why a product originating out of the consumer economy does not merely reify the supposed oppressive capitalist apparatus which caused the disaster, exacerbated its effects, and prevented a proper response to it. In order to properly construct said theoretical framework, a brief genealogy of the ideas that influence the framework is in order.

The ideas of the early 19th-century philosopher George W.F. Hegel are the origin point of the theoretical framework, and although many of his ideas are now reaching their bicentennial, they remain relevant to this day. At the core of Hegel’s radical conceptualization of history is not an inevitable dialectic toward progress but rather a nonlinear and complex relationship between Subject (consciousness) on the one hand and

Object (that of consciousness) on the other. There is one line early in his famous text,

Phenomenology of Spirit in which he lays out his definition of ‘experience’ and from which we can extrapolate his dialectical process: “Inasmuch as the new true object issues from it,

15 this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and object, is precisely what is called experience [Erfahrung].”24

In this quote, Hegel posits that the Object that exists for consciousness is the only

Object. Further, he posits that the Object is not only continually (re)defined by a Subject’s interaction with it but also that the Subject redefines itself through interaction with the

Object. In Hegel, the Object does not necessarily refer to something that is not human.

Other ‘Subjects’ (people) themselves are also Objects of consciousness, and in this way, in the Hegelian dialectical system, the world is made up of Subjects impressing on each other, changing themselves in the process. Reality is defined through the social relationality between people and people, and people and things. The works of fiction I examine can be imagined as the main Object examined in this text but which is dynamically and continually impressed on by other Subjects (readers). The interaction between Subjects and Objects generates shifts in consciousness, and these shifts in consciousness are the prerequisite for any political action.

Marx’s innovation of Hegel’s system was to theorize this formula of social relationality as a structuring feature of our (capitalist) economic system. In the oft-cited passage from Capital from which the term ‘commodity fetishism’ originated, we see the value of an item as derived not from labor hours put into producing it but rather through social relationality:

As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of

24 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, Phenomenology of Spirit, Translated by A.V. Miller (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 55.

the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.25

Marx here argues that the labor necessary in producing a commodity does not matter so much as its socially-ascribed value. From this one passage, it is possible to derive the entire Marxian politico-economic project. The supposed ‘revolution of the proletariat’ is about nothing more than a change in social relationality concerning the production of goods.

There is a second takeaway from Marx’s argument about commodity fetishism relevant to this thesis: the work of fiction itself, as a commodity, should not be ascribed any ‘objective’ value. In other words, the worth and political value of a work of fiction is derived exclusively via subjective interaction with it, not any inherent value intrinsic to the work of fiction.26 Therefore, it is critical to provide at least a speculative historical analysis of the impact of the works on social reality. Avoiding the fetishization of the Object is central to the Marxian dialectic approach adopted and adapted in this thesis. Later philosophers provide the analytical tools to consider the ways in which the ruling class maintains the social conditions of production. These analytical tools derive from a Marxian definition of Ideology, which, to borrow from Althusser, is what “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”27

There are two theoretical sources I will introduce concurrently that build on Marx’s theory of Ideology. One is Theodor Adorno, and the other is Louis Althusser. Adorno is

25 Marx, Karl, Capital (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 165. 26 To go a step further, to avoid fetishizing fiction, I should also like to make it clear that it is not the exclusive means of political critique in postwar Japan and the news media does not exclusively reinforce state narratives. It is rather that due to historical circumstances, they have a structural tendency to. 27 Althusser, Louis, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 162.

17 perhaps most famous for coining the term and subsequently criticizing the ‘culture industry.’ Adorno conceives of culture under late capitalism as an industry. Accordingly, in Adorno’s view, all cultural products are inherently hyper-commodified, becoming vehicles for the dominant ideology by the time they are eventually published. Their very omnipresence and attractiveness make them all the more powerful and the development of technology (say, radio and TV in Adorno’s time) only serve to make the attraction more powerful and accessible.28

Adorno goes so far as to imagine the culture industry subsuming our entire ideological visualization of the world: “The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry. The familiar experience of the moviegoer, who perceives the street outside as a continuation of the film he has just left, because the film seeks strictly to reproduce the world of everyday perception, has become the guideline of production.”29

Adorno’s provocation is then that there is not a ‘real’ world outside of the culture industry but rather that the culture’s industry’s menacing role is to take the world and reproduce it in a similar but new form, subordinate to ideological interests. It thereby influences how we (as Subjects of Ideology) interact with the so-called ‘real world’ and each other. In other words, the culture industry helps to re-envision the default substrate of Ideology itself.

Adorno’s culture industry could be said to foreshadow Althusser’s notions of the

Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). In fact, the ‘culture industry’ neatly fits the mold of an

ISA. Althusser’s ISA is a complement to Marx’s notion of the state apparatus, which he imagines as functioning “primarily by violence” whereas the ISAs function primarily

28 Adorno, 63. 29 Horkheimer, Max, Theodor W. Adorno, and John Cumming, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002), 99.

18 through nonviolence.30 Althusser locates the central ideological struggle not only in the actual practices of exploitation but in the reproduction of the social reality as a necessary condition of that exploitation: “The reproduction of labour power thus reveals as its sine qua non not only the reproduction of its ‘skills’ but also the reproduction of its subjection to the ruling ideology or of the ‘practice’ of that ideology.”31

It is not just the army, the courts, the police, or the other classic instruments of the

State that enforce the interests of the ruling class as in Marx’s conception. Althusser also lists religion, education, communication, the parliament, and culture as other ISA’s. The works of fiction written about in this thesis would be a part of the culture ISA, doing

Ideology’s work in favor of bourgeois interests. Althusser’s concept of the ISA locates the

Marxist struggle not only in terms of a violent struggle with the legal system and its police/military counterparts but also in removing the various nonviolent obfuscations of the oppressed class’s relationship to its social positions which maintain its oppression.

In the event of a disaster, even the question of victimhood itself is already prefigured by the ISA, and in this way, the testimony of the victim is composed by state mechanisms of control. Lisa Yoneyama wrote the following about the testimony of atomic bomb victims:

The medical and legal discourse inserted into the survivors' accounts an external authority that dissected and inspected their encounters with the bomb. At the same time, it subjected their narratives to the scrutiny of bureaucratic procedures. This medico-legalization of the atom bomb experiences thus turned an individual survivor's testimony into a fragmentary account in need of identification and verification by an external institutional authority.32

30 Althusser, 145. 31 Althusser, 133. 32 Yoneyama, Lisa, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkley: University of California Press, 1999), 94.

In this passage, Yoneyama argues that the victim’s legibility as a victim is contingent on external medical and legal mechanisms. In the case of the news media, the external verification helps shape the victim’s narrative of disaster and the ability for a victim to appear in the news media is in this sense already bureaucratically prefigured. In line with my definition of fiction, the news legal, medical, and media ISA generate a false narrative of coherence over the traumatic reality of the experience.

However, it is precisely where Adorno and Althusser saw obfuscation and reproduction of social conditions that I see the potential for political contestation. While I have considered historical reasons that other ISAs (such as the parliament and news media in postwar Japan) are limited in their function to bring about political change, I believe it is worth reconsidering Adorno’s formulation of the culture industry’s limited function to bring about political change as well. If the culture industry colors our visualization of the world and Althusser says this visualization obfuscates our relationship to oppression, the critical move is not negation of the culture industry as a concept.

Instead, it is precisely the fact that ideology composes everything that makes it so malleable, here writing Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek:

Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension, it is a fantasy-construction which serves a support for our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby makes some insupportable, real, impossible kernel (conceptualized by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as ‘antagonism’: a traumatic social division which cannot be symbolized).33

The key in Žižek’s conceptualization of ideology is that ideology is not only an obfuscating element to be deconstructed and removed but rather it is the constitutive element of our social reality. Which is to say, while there is some degree of obfuscation occurring, what

33 Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso Press, 2009), 45.

20 is being obfuscated is something so traumatic that by definition it cannot be reached. In short, “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.”34 What we are left with instead is a sort of universal ‘antagonism.’ The work of fiction, rather than playing a deconstructive role, plays an additive one, shaping something new out of the malleability of the social reality of disaster.

Žižek’s definition of Ideology recalls the Lacanian consideration of the definition of fiction provided earlier – reality itself is the fiction adding a sense of coherence over the horror of the Real.35 The criticism staged in this thesis does not function to critique

Ideology’s workings and to remove its obfuscations thereby. Instead, in this thesis, I will argue that fiction plays the role of shifting consciousness and enabling a new social relationality. It is not a matter of providing a counter-ideology or any other oppositional terms but rather arguing that fiction, in this shift, plays more than the role ascribed to it by

Adorno or Althusser. In a country like Japan in the postwar period, the works of fiction I analyze have potential as political catalysts in an extensive network of shifts in consciousness which eventually bring about concrete political change and change in people’s social relationalities. This thesis is an examination of a fragment of this network.

34 Žižek, 45. 35 In the Lacanian sense of that which exists before symbolization.

CHAPTER 2

THE UNIVERSALITY OF MINAMATA DISEASE

There are few authors in postwar Japanese history with the same political and literary influence as Ishimure Michiko. A label like ‘poet of the movement’ would not capture the fact that not only was she responsible for creating works of poetry that captured the changes of Minamata over her literary career, but that she was heavily involved in the grassroots activist work of the movement as well. She was on citizen’s committees, visited

Tokyo to plea for the situation in Minamata, and obtained leadership positions in an otherwise male-dominated postwar Japanese Left. All the while, she kept a low profile and always brought the focus of the movement back to the victims of Japan’s rapid modernization.

The work of fiction explored in this chapter demonstrates clearly fiction’s power to invoke material political change and, in line with my theoretical apparatus outlined in the introduction, it does so in very dialectical fashion. I do not intend to strangulate the incredible choice of language, the moving imagery, and the meticulous crafting of a snapshot of Minamata society which Ishimure creates in the work of fiction by pigeonholing it into some sort of ‘dialectical treatise on Japanese modernity’. My first and honest reaction to the book was one of complete admiration and also an inability to shake the imagery from my head – as if through reading the book I carry Ishimure’s critique

22 and the burden of Minamata with me.

Instead, my dialectal interpretation of the work of fiction is intended to carve out what I argue is the overarching structure of power in the work – the relationship of the particular (Minamata Disease) to the universal (global struggle for socioeconomic justice).

In other words, Ishimure, precisely in using language indigenous to Minamata and telling a story that people outside of Minamata may not be able to comprehend fully, turns

Minamata into a universal story. As much becomes apparent when placed into historical context. In order to argue this, I will perform a close reading of three passages from the work, analyzing the relationship of the particular to the universal and the historical events which make this relationship so powerful.

Ishimure Michiko and Minamata Disease

Minamata Disease could also be called methyl-mercury disease. What is today known as Minamata Disease broke out in the wake of the Chisso Corporation dumping mercury waste into Minamata Bay in the Shiranui Sea.36 The mercury was produced as a byproduct of acetaldehyde production and turned into organic mercury once in the water.

The fish in the bay then ingested the organic mercury, and the fish were in turn digested by the fishermen of Minamata. As a result, the organic mercury poisoned many of the residents of Minamata and caused severe damage to the central nervous system. Symptoms included “numbness and unsteadiness in the legs and hands, tiredness, ringing in the ears, narrowing of the field of vision, loss of hearing, slurred speech, and awkward movements.”37 Many victims saw decreased mental functioning, and many died.

36 I have also seen the disease referred to as Minamata-Niigata Disease and as Chisso-Minamata Disease. 37 “10 Things to Know about Minamata Disease.”

While the first confirmed case of Minamata Disease was diagnosed in 1956, it would not be until 1968 that the disease was confirmed to be caused by the Chisso

Corporation dumping mercury into the Shiranui Sea. The press greatly contributed to the delayed confirmation of the cause of the disease. Timothy George describes that the news media uncritically reported all possible theories about the source of Minamata Disease, obscuring the Chisso Corporation’s responsibility in a wave of ‘balanced’ objective reporting.38 Mercury was relativized into just one potential cause with amine produced from eating rotting fish proposed as an equally valid alternative among others.39 Further, the scientific apparatus of Japan at the time was such that those working under the head scientist in a laboratory tended to publish papers reinforcing the head scientist’s theories in order to give further credibility to them.40 As such, the institutions of science and the free press failed to provide protection or benefit to the people of Minamata and in a sense exacerbated the problem by delaying action.

The Japanese government has confirmed a total number of 13,805 victims to date.41

As per the government’s 1995 Final Settlement on the matter, these 13,805 victims will remain the official number as it is no longer possible to sue for compensation. However, these are only the 13,805 confirmed victims; many patients did not come forward for personal reasons, including avoiding the stigma that accompanied the disease. There were also many patients who died before they had the chance to do so. Furthermore, to avoid an image of being selfish, often times only one patient would receive compensation per

38 George, 66. 39 I highlighted this particular alternative theory because it finds fault with the fishermen for eating the rotting fish, making the disease an issue of a personal blunder rather than one of company liability. 40 George, 66. 41 "10 Things to Know about Minamata Disease."

24 household by choice as opposed to all the victims in the household. There were also some patients not recognized as severe enough to deserve compensation or who lived too far away from Minamata to qualify. More recent scientific literature on Minamata Disease suggests those affected by organic mercury poisoning in the area surrounding the Shiranui

Sea numbers closer to 200,000.42 It would take nearly forty years for the government to offer its final settlement from the initial outbreak of Minamata Disease in 1956.

Ishimure Michiko was born in Amakusa, near Minamata, in Southern Japan in 1927 and would maintain residence there until her departure in 2018. She began to write in 1958, participating in the socialist movement, Circle Village, within which she joined a literary circle dedicated to socialist realist poetry.43 Her debut book-length publication is the one focused on in this chapter. She began publishing Paradise “in 1960 as a ‘reportage of the fishermen citizens of Minamata’ taking up the ‘strange disease’ as its topic.”44 The book would not be fully formed until 2004 but the version dealt with in this thesis is the debut version from 1969, which predates the 1975 settlement by the Chisso Corporation.

Ishimure’s literary career is inseparable from the development of Minamata

Disease. However, she had also written prolifically on a wide range of other subjects, publishing Noh plays, poetry collections, and other novels besides the one focused on in this chapter. To date, while Paradise has been used as a historical reference for Minamata

42 Shigeo Ekino et al., "Minamata Disease Revisited: An Update on the Acute and Chronic Manifestations of Methyl Mercury Poisoning," Journal of the Neurological Sciences 262, no. 1-2 (November 15, 2007): 133, doi:10.1016/j.jns.2007.06.036. 43 Kanaike, Keiko ⾦井景⼦ , "tsugunai wo tou: “minamatabyou” to ishimure michiko kugai jōdo no han seiki" 償いを問う：「⽔俣病」と⽯牟礼道⼦『苦海浄⼟』の半世紀 [Questioning compensation: “Minamata Disease” and a Half Century of Ishimure Michiko's Kugai Jōdo], Waseda daigaku kyouikugakubu gakujutsu kenkyuu (kokugo kokubungakuhen 早稲⽥⼤学教育学部学術研究（国語・国⽂学編）58 (2010): 39. 44 Kanaike. 39.

Disease, it has largely been overlooked in English language scholarship. Interest in the literary aspects of the work developed only recently.45

An Overview of Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow:

Our Minamata Disease

The title of the work alone hints to the dialectical structure by which I have decided to analyze this novel. The English title somewhat captures the paradox, the idea of

“paradise” being located in the poisoned Shiranui sea. The Japanese title, however, captures the relationship much more succinctly. The characters are 苦海浄⼟ Kugai Jōdo which directly conjoins two words with opposite meanings in Buddhist lore.

Kugai is usually written with the characters 苦界 which refers to the Buddhist world

(gai) of suffering (ku). Ishimure changes the gai from the character for ‘world’ to the less commonly used character of 海 or ‘sea.’ In Buddhist lore, kugai is the word used to refer to the material realm and the suffering brought about by desire and attachment. As per

Ishimure’s decision, the use of the character for ‘sea’ makes it explicit that the realm she is referring to is the Shiranui Sea. Conversely, 浄⼟ uses the character jō referring to purity and cleanliness along with do which is the character for the earth. The phrase is translated as the Pure Land which is the heaven for those who have obtained Buddhahood in the Pure

Land sect, or the largest Buddhist sect in Japan.

There are a few things to expand on from the title alone. First is the merger of two

45 For a recent collection of English language scholarship on Kugai Jōdo and Ishimure’s other literary works, see: Bruce Allen and Masami Yūki, Ishimure Michiko’s Writing in Ecocritical Perspective between Sea and Sky (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016).

26 oppositional words into one set phrase (in Japanese, it is common to use four-character compounds to create idiomatic phrases). This indicates the inseparability of the material world of suffering from that of heaven itself, and I believe the English translation is correct in the use of the preposition ‘in.’ The story is the insertion of heaven in the world of suffering and the world of suffering in heaven. The title also makes an opposition between a polluted sea and a clean land, which again emphasizes the importance of using the character for ‘sea’ instead of that for ‘realm.’

My interpretation of this title is the negation of both terms in their mutual inclusion of each other – there is no pure land, and there is no suffering sea (material world), there is only their interaction with each other. Such a relation to each other is only revealed in the outbreak of Minamata Disease. In the same way, Minamata Disease is not excluded from the author’s subjectivity nor the subjectivity of Minamata as a town. Accordingly, the end of the title is waga minamata byō or ‘Our Minamata Disease.’ Waga is a pronoun that is commonly used to demonstrate that the object in question is not necessarily one’s possession but still intimately related to the person. It is often used for country, for children, etc.

Lifting off from the title, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease, follows the changes that have occurred in Minamata in the wake of Minamata Disease. It is difficult to label the genre of the work as a ‘novel’ or even as purely fiction as it seamlessly blends poetry, reportage, historical documents, and oral storytelling into a series of vignettes arranged out of chronological order. It is organized into seven chapters with each spinning into the next. Given the complexity of the book on the formal level, it is also difficult to call it a coherent ‘narrative’ and yet, by the end of the novel, the reader can

27 grasp a very intimate and emotionally impactful picture of what Minamata Disease caused.

It is notable for my definition of fiction that this story certainly makes no authoritative claim to be an authoritative ‘history’ of the disease. The narrative structure and word choices are difficult, written in an old prosaic style and yet with traditional poetic imagery heavily interspersed (seasonal flora and fauna and the like). In this fragmented and complicated story, perhaps something of the Truth can be revealed more than an

‘authoritative’ history that cannot fully capture the trauma of the event. The novel then, blending the most modern and bland of linguistic forms with the most archaic and poetic, reflects the fragmented and nonlinear story awoken in the wake of Minamata Disease.

Ishimure’s role is that of a kataribe, or a narrator transmitting stories of old to the present, picking up new ones along the way. In this way, she provides an alternative narrative to the objectifying and dehumanizing function of media, legal, and medical discourse. She quite explicitly juxtaposes medical reports of a patient with the patient’s own words with her personal observations with the folklore of the area with poetry to the point that her own subjectivity becomes that of Minamata Disease. Ishimure once said at a committee meeting of activists seeking reparations for victims of Minamata Disease that:

“Like a kuroko in a Kabuki drama [the actor’s assistants, dressed in black and intended not to be noticed], I tried my best to remain invisible and inaudible.”46 She chose to speak for the victims deprived of their voice by Minamata Disease but did her best to emphasize the struggling of the patients over her own mediating role.

In other words, in order to give voice to the patients, she attempts to disappear, to become nothing more than a stagehand facilitating the narrative of those affected by the

46 George, 181.

28 disease. To repeat the quote from the introduction, Ishimure wrote the following about the structure of Paradise: “To tell the truth, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow is a kind of ballad, both dramatic and lyric, like the chanted texts of the classical puppet theater. I wrote this text only for myself, and intended to recite it only to myself.”47 Ishimure is the stagehand chanting a lyrical ballad. Ishimure’s words hint to her role as a sort of vanishing mediator, someone producing words for no one, telling a story and disappearing into it and, as I will demonstrate, in line with my theoretical apparatus, she leaves behind only a shift in the consciousness about Minamata Disease enabling political action.

In this chapter, three instances of the particular’s relationship to the universal that explain the power of the novel in shifting consciousness are examined. From there, an analysis is provided that links the novel to other works which helped to truly turn the issue of Minamata Disease into an international one. This chapter first explores the relationship of an individual victim of Minamata Disease to the universal of Minamata Disease. In the story of Yamanaka Kuhei, the story of Minamata Disease can be found. The second is the relationship between the movement of the fisherman of Minamata demanding justice from the Chisso Corporation relating to larger left-wing movements opposing the signing of the

Anpo treaty. The third deals with the immutable core of Minamata Disease which extends the life of the disaster past its potential ‘resolution,’ say, with reparations and the like.

47 Ishimure, 378.

Young Yamanaka Kuhei

The first vignette in the book follows a young boy named Yamanaka Kuhei who has effectively gone blind and is largely immobile on account of Minamata Disease. The vignette not only tells the story of Yamanaka Kuhei as an individual but also what it means to be a ‘youth’ in Minamata. The image created in the vignette is of a town robbed of its youth by the process of industrialization with the outbreak of Minamata Disease being the death knell. The first vignette asserts that not only was the present of Minamata destroyed but the future itself changed.

Ishimure writes: “The young people in the village had in short stopped settling down in the village as fisherman some time ago. Especially on account of the outbreak of

Minamata Disease, they could not go back to how things once were. No matter how strong of a fisherman they were, the parents wouldn’t be able to initiate their children into fishing.”48 The livelihood of the fishermen had already been gradually destroyed by the process of industrialization for some generations. The outbreak of Minamata Disease only functioned as the death knell in a long and slow process of their livelihoods being displaced.

The process of industrialization not only took away their livelihoods but also that of their children and their hope for the future. As such, there is then an uneven split of a pre- and post-Minamata Disease Minamata, or in other words, the ghosts of the Minamata of the past continue to haunt the Minamata of the present.

The vignette’s opening imagery reads, “in the summer, the echo of the voices of children playing in the water would scale the sea wall and, stroking lightly the tangerine groves and the oleanders, would furl itself around the gnarled trunk of the tall surmac trees

48 Ishimure, 243-244.

30 and carry into the silent houses of the villages.”49 The use of such bucolic and lovely imagery in a book about a horrific disease is not some sort of aestheticization of the disease itself but rather an imagery that in a negative way reveals the horrific extent of the disease.

In other words, the loud voices of children are only remembered in the wake of the disease

- the beauty of Minamata shining through in the wake of Minamata Disease. Only when that landscape has disappeared could the beauty of the landscape have come through.

After describing the landscape for a few more passages, Ishimure elucidates on the relationship of beauty and destruction in regards to the landscape. She writes that “the well and the trees told not only their story, but also that of the village – a story of destinies leveled to dust by the passage of time.”50 In this way, the landscape itself becomes a stand- in for the story of post-Minamata Disease Minamata. In the passage of time, everything in the village is destroyed but, from its very destruction comes the story. The same goes for the elderly fishermen in the village who are gradually being reduced to nothing but an idea as their children are no longer inheriting their trade. This description of the elderly people in Minamata comes from the Japanese original as it was eliminated in the English translation: “Like the rotting teenager club, their living flesh and hearts continued to weather away. No matter where you walk on the beach in the summer, the drift of their hearts lurks on.”51

The above description of the elderly in Minamata comes in the context of describing a cabin where the teenager club used to meet but which has fallen by the wayside, suggesting the deterioration of youth culture in the town. The abstract concepts of wisdom,

49 Ishimure, 3. 50 Ishimure, 3-4. 51 Ishimure Michiko ⽯牟礼道⼦, Kugai Jōdo 苦界浄⼟：我が⽔俣病 [Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2004), 13. Translation my own.

31 will, and the drift of their hearts is integrated into the physical landscape by Ishimure.

Ishimure, as a mediator, functions to keep the elderly alive in spirit. The drastic changes brought by Minamata Disease have revitalized and shifted the meaning of being elderly.

In a town with no future, what does it mean for the people in it who will soon pass away and whose offspring have had their future robbed on account of Minamata Disease?

This dilemma is artfully captured by Ishimure who captures the reflections of one elderly fisherman affected by Minamata Disease looking at his grandchild:

There must have been ghosts and sounds and memories of his youth lurking in the corners of the dilapidated hut, but he did not seem to be aware of them. He kept staring vacantly, now at his grandson who was crawling around on the floor, now at the blue expanse of the sea. The old man’s vapid expression showed clearly that baby-sitting was a very tiresome job. With half-closed eyes, he appeared to be deep in meditation, in a world of his own, far apart from the reality of the bare room, where his grandson played alone peacefully, sucking his thumb.52

On the one hand, there is the normal physical exhaustion which comes with age, there is the normal sense of alienation which comes with the generation gap, and yet, in the wake of Minamata Disease, the phrase “in a world of his own” should be taken at face value.

The very word ‘exhaustion’ and the process of aging have taken on a new meaning.

Yamanaka Kuhei had contracted the disease at the age of six, and his condition continued to deteriorate from there. It is difficult to avoid making too much of a metaphor out of Yamanaka Kuhei in this essay but conversely, in so far as the reader is limited to reading his story in text, all Yamanaka can be is a metaphor filtered through language.

Ishimure humanizes Yamanaka by describing his hobby – listening to baseball on the radio because he cannot go out and play himself. She also mentions that he wears the jacket of his father who had passed away from Minamata Disease. His mother interpreted this as

52 Ishimure, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, 5.

32 showing that “the spirit of dead members of the family lived on in him.”53 In addition to this, she quite explicitly adopts his voice and perspective later in the vignette.

The central conflict in Yamanaka Kuhei’s story is his obstinate refusal to go to the hospital and receive his clinical examinations. Dr. Yomogi of Kumamoto University

Hospital has come to visit the Yamanaka household to ask Kuhei to receive his periodic examination – one which would increase the indemnities paid out to the family. Despite this, Kuhei refuses to go. Instead, he continues to stubbornly listen to the radio, ignoring both the doctor and his mother. It is hinted he has very limited sight and motor capability, and his speech too is all but gone. In the midst of his mother and the doctor chatting, all the while coaxing him to go to receive the medical exam, he makes the utterance: “No.

They’ll kill me.”54

Even after his mother assures him she will accompany him, he utters again: “No.

If I go, they’ll kill me.”55 To which Ishimure responds in narration: “Kuhei’s reaction was certainly both unfair and illogical: he was denying not only the considerable achievements of the Kumamoto University researchers, but also the attempts of the municipal authorities to introduce the latest techniques in the treatments of the Minamata Disease patients.”56 It subsequently switches to advocating for Kuhei’s perspective:

It was inevitable that Kuhei thought the doctors would kill him: his condition had not improved at all since he was affected with this disease at age six. Moreover, his sister and cousin had died an atrocious death shortly after they were hospitalized. Having witnessed the inefficacy of modern science where Minamata Disease was concerned, he had lost his faith, not merely in medical science, but in men in general.57

53 Ishimure, 17. 54 Ishimure, 20. 55 Ishimure, 21. 56 Ishimure, 21. 57 Ishimure, 21.

Here, what Yamanaka Kuhei negates is blind faith in the progress made by modern science.

For him, there is no value in this progress which, in his lived experience, has led to the deaths of many loved ones. The book makes a direct association between the modern science supposedly curing the disease and the fact that the disease is rooted in the progression of science relating to industrial productivity.

One function of the Yamanaka Kuhei vignette is to reveal the objectivity of science as a false objectivity. This is to say that the information produced by science is always imbued with subjective antagonism. Considered from this perspective, it is only through the vignette about Yamanaka Kuhei that science could possibly reach its purported

‘universal status’ in the Hegelian sense of the word. It is only through acknowledgment of the antagonism and through its very negation that science could proceed to a universal status. For Yamanaka Kuhei, science is not only ineffective but a source of death. He demonstrates the falsity of the narrative of infinite forward progress and blind faith in science. Instead, he exposes science as containing both the problem and the solution. On the one hand, the use of mercury in the acetaldehyde production process was itself an innovation of science bringing further ‘prosperity’ to the town and yet, conversely, brought about an irreversible anguish as well. This mixed bag of prosperity and pain is the Truth of science.

The last paragraph of the vignette is only half-translated into English as per the translator Livia Monnet’s stylistic choice, but I believe it is critical to read the full paragraph as it sheds light directly on Yamanaka Kuhei’s relationship to Minamata Disease as a whole: “If Minamata Disease must be completely forgotten and the sea breeze must eventually tuck it away into the unexplained things of the past, and it is even now, as we

34 are speaking, halfway through the process of being buried into obscurity, then Kuhei has been left behind, completely alone.” 58 Here, Ishimure directly posits the following impossible mandate to the reader which is to remember that which must eventually be forgotten and, in the process, preserves the memory of Yamanaka Kuhei.

Ishimure puts forward a condition that must not be fulfilled – Minamata Disease must eventually be tucked away into the unexplained things of the past. In the process of writing this phrase down, she eliminates the possibility of forgetting. Furthermore,

Yamanaka Kuhei’s eventual symbolic annihilation is prevented precisely in the telling of his story and all the more so in equating him with the whole of Minamata Disease. Ishimure thereby creates a painful duty for the reader – they must carry the knowledge that the inevitable forgetting of Minamata Disease will mean the inevitable forgetting of Yamanaka

Kuhei and vice-versa.

Yamanaka Kuhei had been diagnosed with what came to be known as Minamata

Disease in 1955. 59 With Minamata Disease, the media coverage of it was not only negligent but nearly nonexistent in certain phases. Yamanaka Kuhei’s story likely would have been symbolically annihilated were it not for Ishimure’s mediation. Japanese political scientist Ōishi Yutaka demonstrates that there were two relative blackout periods for

Minamata Disease in which the number of articles published relating to the disease per year slipped into the double and single digits. The first was from 1956-1960, when the disease was initially discovered and thought to be contagious. The second period was from

1962-1968, which was the period between the fishermen’s storming of the Chisso Factory discussed in the next chapter and the confirmation of the disease as a pollution disease by

58 Ishimure, Kugai Jōdo, 33. Translation my own. 59 Ishimure, Paradise, 16.

35 the Japanese government.60 Attesting to the forgotten youth of Minamata that Ishimure took up in this vignette, the year that congenital (mother to child) Minamata Disease was first confirmed in 1962, it was also the year with the fewest number of news articles relating to Minamata disease were published.61

In response to the absence of media coverage and governmental ignorance,

Ishimure performed the role of narrating Yamanaka’s story to avoid him being lost in one of the media blackout periods. The reader must carry the burden of both the boy as an individual and the entire disease if either is forgotten. In a dialectical structure, what

Ishimure does is to both make Minamata Disease inextricable from the memory of

Yamanaka Kuhei but, more importantly, to make Yamanaka Kuhei inextricable from the memory of Minamata Disease. It is here that I locate the power of the novel – in turning the individual story into the universal one. To return to the truth-fragment conceptualization of fiction in the introduction, Yamanaka Kuhei functions as this one fragment of which the Truth of Minamata Disease can be found, not the story in its entirety but the universal Truth.

The Flags of Wandering

Yamanaka Kuhei’s story would join another dozen plus victims turned into universal figures by Ishimure. There is not space in this thesis to analyze each of their

60 Ōishi Yutaka ⼤⽯裕, “‘Seiji’ no naka no media gensetsu: Minamata byō shinbun hōdō ni kan suru ikkousatsu” 「政治」の中のメディア⾔説：⽔俣病新聞報道に関する⼀考察 [Media discourse with “Politics”: A Case Study of Minamata Disease Reports and Texts], Keiō gijuku daigaku hōgaku kenkyūkai 慶應義塾⼤学法学研究会 12 (2004): 409. The statistics referred to are based on Ōishi’s analysis of the Asahi Shimbun Western Branch newspaper coverage of Minamata as representative of national newspaper coverage of the subject. 61 Ōishi, 409.

36 universalizing processes, but the victims as individuals should be borne in mind through the analysis of the vignette dealing with the relationship of the Minamata Disease protests to larger left-wing movements in 1960’s Japan. If the stories of the patients of Minamata

Disease expose the dehumanizing and objectifying lens of science as a false universal, the story in Flags of Wandering performs a similar role by exposing the false universality of the Left in 1960’s Japan.

On the surface level, the theoretical apparatus employed in this thesis may seem to be contradicted in this chapter by Ishimure. After all, the same apparatus has been misappropriated by the communist regimes of the 20th century to subordinate the struggles of minority groups and gender equality to that of the class struggle. However, a closer look reveals that in this vignette, Ishimure argues that there was a false opposition created between the larger struggles of the Japanese postwar Left and those of the fishermen of

Minamata. Consequently, Ishimure argues that there was a missed opportunity in the Japan of the 1960s to link the particular struggle of the fishermen with the broader struggles of the postwar Left. In this case, the struggle is the protest against the Treaty of Mutual

Cooperation and Security Between the United States and Japan, referred to in Japanese as

Anpo for short.

Ishimure’s critique of the Anpo movement failing to offer support for the local struggle of Minamata recalls the nebulous advocacy of the literature circle, Circle Village.

The advocacy was nebulous in so far as its founder Tanigawa Gan explicitly avoided having a set ideological position to counter the uniform top-down ideological platform that the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) demanded of its local units.62 Further, it was a circle

62 Sasaki-Uemura, Wesley, "Tanigawa Gan's Politics of the Margins in Kyushu and Nagano." Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 7, no. 1 (1999): 133.

37 in so far as it did not have fixed hierarchical positions. Tanigawa believed that the fixed position of the JCP stifled the creativity of left-leaning artists and paralyzed them with the

JCP’s dogmatism.63 Ishimure is likely staging a critique in the same vein, advocating for a postwar Left more responsive to local and particular problems as opposed to prioritizing and subsuming more local problems into the supposedly ‘larger’ and more national ones.

When considering the importance of protests against Anpo and the fishermen’s struggle for justice in Minamata, the importance has less to do with the actual political outcome of the events so much as the spirit generated by the events. This is because neither the Anpo movement nor the fishermen’s struggle in Minamata managed to produce the desired outcome in 1959. The Anpo treaty itself was ultimately signed while anything resembling proper reparations and responsibility for Minamata Disease would not come until 1973. Even then, the reparations were only partial. Ishimure, in her serial publication of Paradise, played the role of keeping the spirit of 1959 alive, leaving the door open for the unfulfilled promise to be retroactively fulfilled.

The format of gradually leaking out bits and pieces of the story while the actual history of Minamata unfolds kept the idea of Minamata alive, away from the oblivion and quick news cycles of the Japanese press. Although it can only be retroactively proven, the compensation allotted and responsibility taken by the Chisso Corporation in 1973 must be partially attributed to Ishimure for keeping the spirit of Minamata alive. In the same retroactive way, through Ishimure’s mediation, the struggle of the Minamata fishermen can be merged with that of the Anpo movement only retroactively. This functions as a fictional reimagination of the past, keeping alive ‘what could have been.’ The vignette follows the

63 Sasaki-Uemura, 140.

38 confrontation between members of the various unions and organized labor that were part of the Anpo movement against “a forlorn solitary body of about 300 fishermen.”64

There are multiple voices used in the vignette, including the perspective of an unnamed leader of the Anpo protest groups who comments: “Why the fishermen had chosen to make an appearance on that particular historic occasion and in such a pathetic, anachronistic manner is to this day a mystery to me.”65 The fishermen are described as having a sort of festival aesthetic, resembling peasants looking for an audience with the feudal lords of old, carrying various flags with various slogans on them, trying to get an office with the Chisso factory management. The voice, switching back to Ishimure’s own observation, notes that the fishermen only join the protest against Anpo by chance:

The most plausible explanation for the merging of the lonely procession of the fishermen with the much larger anti-Security Treaty demonstration seems to be the following: the fishermen who had been clamoring for hours in front of the Chisso factory, trying in vain to obtain an interview with the factory management, had finally decided to give up. Feeling more dejected than ever, they ran into the disciplined crowd of demonstrators about to express their strong disapproval of the Security Treat with the United States.66

The fishermen’s labor is unknowingly co-opted into the Anpo movement without the Anpo movement’s labor being co-opted into that of the fishermen. In dialectical terms, this is a false universal as it is only the subsumption of the fishermen into the broader cause of the Anpo movement but not vice-versa. Ishimure takes offense at a pamphlet from the

Anpo group which contains the line: “The working masses, backward, conservative, unenlightened, and yet burning with latent energy.”67 The condescending language used in the pamphlet implies a sort of othering of the very people the movement claims to

64 Ishimure, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, 241. 65 Ishimure, 241. 66 Ishimure, 242. 67 Ishimure, 243.

39 represent, framing them as no more than bodies in the movement, not capable of intellectual thinking in their eyes. Ishimure pushes back against this idea:

It seems that we tend to think in neat categories, to label individuals who cannot keep pace with our mad race toward progress, or who keep aloof from the frantic economic and political life in today’s society ‘ignorant populace,’ ‘passive paupers’ and so on. In reality, however, our profoundest philosophy, our original love relationship with nature, our long-forgotten, naïve and untainted beliefs were still throbbing in the hearts of the Minamata fishermen, still smoldering deep in their eyes.68

In this passage, Ishimure describes what sustained the Minamata movement for those fourteen plus years it had been forced to endure. Latent in the fishermen’s spontaneous demonstration against Chisso was the element of the universal bursting through, the element that could unite both the fishermen and the Anpo movement. In Ishimure’s narrative, it is precisely in the fishermen’s lack of intellectually formulated opinion that this universal element shone through all the more. After all, the fishermen’s movement was for something quite explicitly unrecoverable, not just economic reparations but also their original relationship to the sea and their health. In this way, the fishermen’s movement becomes a potential infinite catalyst in search of the impossible.

In Ishimure’s reflection, the Anpo movement missed out on its opportunity to genuinely integrate themselves into the Minamata movement despite their common interests:

No one had shouted: ‘Comrades, let us join in the fishermen’s demonstration!’ The patriotic, politically conscious residents of Minamata had missed yet another opportunity to join forces with the victimized fishermen, to explore their feelings of loneliness, isolation and despair. In spite of stirring visions of ‘the solidarity between peasants and laborers,’ of ‘the glorious alliance with farmers and fishermen’ or of ‘a movement firmly rooted in the reality of our regional society,’ the citizens made no attempt to take the side of the fishermen.69

68 Ishimure, 243-244. 69 Ishimure, 243.

However, in the literary universe of Ishimure in Paradise, this connection can be retroactively made and solidified. In the very process of wishing for the connection to have been made and in the act of writing it, Ishimure inserts the Anpo movement into that of the fishermen. What is noteworthy about the Anpo movement that Ishimure writes about is that it is composed largely of the townspeople of Minamata: the very structure of the Anpo movement in Minamata reifying the divide between the fishermen and the Chisso factory works. Ishimure enables imagination of a Minamata in which the fishermen and townspeople could work together for their common interests.

Ishimure does not only critique the Anpo movement and postwar Left for being concerned with false-universal dogmatic ideological struggles. The vignette taken up in this chapter was also a response to the media portrayal of the fishermen as violent. She quotes a report from the Research section of the House of Representatives Standing

Committee on Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishery which reads, after a ‘scientific’ and

‘objective’ description of the events of the fishermen’s protest: “Though we deeply sympathize with the sick and impoverished fishermen, we think that the November 2 riot … was a regrettable development that greatly harmed their cause.”70

The media effectively regurgitated the state-line on the issue of the fishermen’s riot, becoming an unknowing defendant of the Chisso Corporation. For example, one article in the Asahi Shinbun from November of 1959 reads: “The fishermen of the Shiranui Sea turned into rioters, the drunkenness of the fishermen only added oil to the fire.”71 The characterizing of the fishermen as drunk and violent was not limited to this article alone; the phrases rioter (bōto) or violence (bōryoku) litter the coverage of the event. To refer

70 Ishimure, 254. 71 Ōishi, 411. Translation my own.

41 again to Ōishi Yutaka’s analysis of media coverage of Minamata Disease, the fishermen’s

‘riot’ was the most covered moment in Minamata Disease history until the eventual court settlement of reparations for victims of the disease began in 1968. 72 Ishimure takes objection to both the JCP and Japanese media’s condescending portrayal of the fishermen and in the process universalizes the cause of the fishermen through fiction.

High Tide

The dialectic movement traced in this chapter has been from that of the individual patient (Yamanaka Kuhei) to that of the fishermen movement in which the patient is embedded (and often explicitly a part of). From there, Ishimure tied the struggle of the fishermen movement into the broader struggle for economic and social justice in 1960’s

Japan. The last dialectic move in the novel is to that of the absolute or the irresolvable. In other words, Minamata Disease’s move into the eternal which lives beyond itself. In order to do so, the book returns to the individual patient who rejects the possibility for genuine reconciliation in Minamata.

The patient Tsuginori Teko has taken the opportunity to prepare herself for the visit of the Chisso company executives on their very belated apology tour in 1968. Ishimure describes herself as following around the company executives using the remainder of her own money to hire a taxi in order to keep on the trail of the paid-for car of the executives.

Tsuginori nearly immediately rejects the apology of the Chisso executives out of hand as insincere, going so far as to reject not only the apology but also the entire existence of the company they stood for:

So you’ve come to apologize.

72 Ōishi, 409.

They say that you tried to intimidate the townsfolk by threatening to close down the factory. Why don’t you do it? Why don’t you keep your promise and shut down your damn factory? Who do you think you are anyway, to put on such airs and try to blackmail us without the slightest sense of shame? Why don’t you really close down your damn factory and clear out of here with your machines, poisons and all? Don’t you think you’ve killed enough people? I’d like to see Minamata without the likes of you …

Who said Minamata will be ruined without you? The folks in Asakusa, Nagashima, and many other places have no industry and live only on sweet potatoes and wheat, but they’re no less happy nor short-lived for that.73

In a town where opinions on Chisso remained divided even after the outbreak of

Minamata Disease, this sort of outright rejection was rare except outside of fishermen circles. Even within fishermen circles, few people flat out rejected the idea that Chisso had brought modernity and prosperity brought to Minamata. This is the final dialectical move of the novel – to elevate the irresolvable antagonisms of modernity and reject them. After berating the company officials with her critiques of their factory and company, Tsuginori asks them to come in and offer a prayer for her parents at the Buddhist altar. While making the offering that the company executives have no choice but to say yes to, she proceeds to hint at the very emptiness of the gesture itself and thereby negates the meaning of her own offer as a chance to offer apology or prayer:

What are you waiting for? Why don’t you come in? My parents’ souls are waiting for you; they’ve been waiting for years. Why do you stand there as if you’d swallowed a stick? Come in and pray at the altar. Whether or not you pray and burn incense, you won’t be punished for your crimes anyway… Come in, I’ve prepared enough incense sticks for all of you. (363-364)74

In this paragraph, Tsuginori rejects the meaning of the apology. She reduces it to no more than a mere formality and perhaps something less than that.

Taeko was so insistent that the Chisso officials had no choice but to go in and pray at the Buddhist altar on which the photographs of the deceased parents were placed.

73 Ishimure, 362-363 74 Ishimure, 363-364.

It was the first time they had paid their respects to the dead victims of Minamata Disease. Having said their prayers and burnt incense, the gentlemen from Tokyo got up and went out into the rain without a word. They had to continue their round of patients’ homes. (364)75

What Tsuginori creates in this vignette as mediated through Ishimure is the impossibility of genuine reconciliation in the Minamata incident. In other words, even if

Minamata were to receive justice, compensation, apologies, and environmental reconstruction (which in some form it did), it could never reverse the damage created in the wake of the Chisso Corporation’s era of dominance. When Ishimure catches up with

Tsuginori after the incident, Tsuginori is reflecting on the hollowness of her confrontation:

I don’t feel relieved at all… I’m so upset I could die, to think that I wanted to say everything, to rid my mind of all I’d been turning over in my mind for fifteen years, to empty my heart of all the sadness and pain weighing down there like a load of stones … But I couldn’t find the words to express what was on my mind…76

Minamata deprived Tsuginori of not only her parents, who passed away from

Minamata Disease, but also of her very ability to express her pain. This indescribability is the eternal trauma of Minamata Disease. Derrida once wrote that: “One cannot, or should not, forgive; there is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable.”77

Tsuginori, in this Derridean sense, opens up the possibility that Minamata Disease could be forgiven precisely by designating it into the realm of the unforgivable. Tsuginori does not enable the forgiveness to be an empty gesture or words but rather makes an infinite and eternally futile attempt to make amends the only possible route to forgiveness.

The eternally unforgivable is the apex of the book. Ishimure made it explicit in an earlier vignette in the novel what her intended dialectic movement was. Ishimure crafts

75 Ishimure, 364. 76 Ishimure, 364. 77 Derrida, Jacques, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London: Routledge, 2001), 32-33.

Paradise to avoid being dismissed under an all-consuming communist narrative of class struggle. Instead, there is something insolvent in the narrative:

It will not suffice to say that what Chisso did to those fishermen was just another form of the ruthless oppression of the working classes by monopolistic capitalism. As a native of Minamata, I know that the language of the victims of Minamata Disease – both that of the spirits of the dead who are unable to die, and that of the survivors who are little more than living ghosts – represents the pristine form of poetry before our societies were divided into classes. In order to preserve for posterity this language in which the historic significance of the Mercury Poisoning Incident is crudely branded, I must drink an infusion of my animism and ‘pre- animism’ and become a sorceress cursing modern times forever.78

Ishimure curses the modern condition with the language of premodernity, inhabiting the souls of the people and landscapes around her. Minamata is not subordinated to a grand dialectic narrative of history toward modernity but rather Minamata speaks on its own terms. Ishimure refuses to let the issue of Minamata Disease go and does so by permanently subsuming it into her subjectivity – it is no surprise that until her death last year, Ishimure remained a constant advocate for the cause of Minamata.

In Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s documentary, The Shiranui Sea, the following interview with a former fishermen woman who had been a victim of Minamata Disease speaks with a similarly possessed conviction as Ishimure in Paradise and with similar Buddhist undertones:

I wonder what message those fish are trying to give me? Some cry of fear, I guess. I wonder how I would feel if I were one of those poisoned fish. My pain comes and goes away. But what about them? If I was a fish and I was caught by a great man… I wouldn’t mind if he ate me. I’d be happy to suffer a fate like that. So, if I was reborn as a fish… I’d want a pure, clean ocean like before. If the sea wasn’t restored to what it used to be, I couldn’t live. I think that’s what the fish wants to tell me.79

This impassioned speech given by the woman makes a similar move to Ishimure, to move

78 Ishimure, 60-61. 79 The Shiranui Sea, DVD, directed by Tsuchimoto Noriaki ⼟本典昭 (Tokyo: Serinsha Productions, 1975).

45 beyond simple class struggle to the level of a fundamental ecological conflict. By subjectivizing a fish and taking on the fish’s struggle as her own, the woman makes the issue one of ecological reconciliation – an elaborate process which will certainly outlast her own life. Again, a gap is created in demanding the impossible return to a pre-Chisso- like state of the ocean. The same could be said to go for Ishimure’s portrayal of Minamata

Disease in Paradise. The vignette telling Tsuginori’s story concludes the novel and aligns chronologically with its publication in 1969 which also aligned with a long-awaited increased spike in media coverage about the struggle for justice in Minamata.8081

The Smith’s Minamata – Minamata Disease Goes Global

Ishimure’s novel was then published at a juncture when the story of Minamata was being decided and focused on. As previously mentioned, Ishimure Michiko was not only a poet but actively involved in the movement to bring compensation to Minamata victims in more direct political ways as well. As such, even though she has been described by

Eugene and Aileen Smith as “a poet so shy that she may hide for months, emerging only when she has words trembling on a page that must be the speaking of other souls.

Minamata souls,” she also came into contact with many of the journalists, scholars, and activists concerned with Minamata Disease.82 Furthermore, in looking at the photography book of Eugene and Aileen Smith, it is clear that her influence is not only in being a treasure trove of information on the experience of Minamata Disease but also in the style in which

80 Ōishi, 409. 81 The Tsuchimoto documentary from 1975 is further evidence of the nationalization of Minamata Disease and Ishimure’s influence as an author. The documentary demonstrates how Ishimure pushed media coverage itself toward humanizing the victims and opening the room for large-scale critique of Chisso. 82 W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M. Smith, Minamata (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1975).

46 the Smith’s chose to produce their work.

Up until her recent departure in 2018, Ishimure Michiko constantly appeared in the press even after the compensation was allotted for Minamata Disease and the final settlement was reached by the government. Throughout nearly the entirety of the postwar

Showa and Heisei periods, Ishimure made Minamata relevant to any disaster that occurred up to the most recent Fukushima Triple Disaster. She commented: “Fukushima and

Minamata occurred with the same background; money was turned into the main reason for living and became our sense of morality.”83 In Timothy George’s definitive English language history on Minamata Disease and its relationship to the citizen’s movement of the 60s which I have cited extensively, Ishimure figures as one of the most cited authors in it.84 It is therefore impossible to construct any sort of history of Minamata Disease without being influenced by Paradise. The same holds true for Eugene and Aileen Smith’s highly influential photo collection entitled Minamata (1975).

Eugene and Aileen Smith were a married couple and a pair of photojournalists who lived in Minamata for three years. After their sojourn there, they compiled the stories they collected and photos they produced in into one volume entitled Minamata and published it in 1975 – two years after the first legal settlement of Minamata Disease. The format of the book is strikingly similar to Paradise with numerous vignettes about individual patients seamlessly interwoven into the history of the larger movement. Furthermore, unlike other journalists from within Japan and without, the Smiths made an effort, like Ishimure, to

83 Ishimure Michiko ⽯牟礼道⼦, "Koujutsu hikki sita kisha ga nigitta te shinjitsu egaku Ishimure san no shijou” ⼝述筆記した記者が握った⼿真実描く⽯牟礼さんの詩情 [The hand held by the reporters who took notes The poetic sentiment of Ishimure who portrays the truth] Asahi Shinbun Digital, February 11, 2018, accessed January 23, 2019, https://digital.asahi.com/articles/ASL293RKBL29TIPE014.html. 84 George, 352-353.

47 integrate into the community. Many of the people photographed by Eugene Smith had also had their stories told by Ishimure and worked with her to receive compensation for themselves. Lastly, Eugene Smith put himself out on the front lines to capture his photographs for the citizens movement, ending up being assaulted by one of the Chisso

Factory Guards – this act of violence being a classic example of the Marxist function of

State-condoned violent suppressing potential alternative media narratives on the event.

For example, Kawamoto Teruo, whose father passed away without being certified as a patient of Minamata Disease, unburied his father’s corpse to take it to be autopsied to prove Minamata was the cause. From there, he allied with Ishimure and others to fight to widen the group eligible for certification as a Minamata Disease patient. The efforts of patients like Kawamoto and allies like Eugene Smith and Ishimure Michiko led to the local

Environmental Agency relaxing the definition of those eligible for compensation. Even after the loosening of the requirements for what qualified for compensation, Kawamoto continued the fight to directly negotiate with the Chisso Corporation and its president

Kenichi Shimada looking for a sense of personal accountability out of him.

Kawamoto Teruo’s story became an international first through the auspices of

Ishimure and then by Eugene Smith who picked it up. Kawamoto figures as the main subject of a section in each of their respective works. The same could be said for the story of Minamata Disease as a whole as Eugene Smith first encountered Ishimure’s works before garnering his own interest in Minamata Disease. 85 The Smiths’ stories internationalized that spun by Ishimure well in advance of the translation of Paradise in

85 Robert Emmet Hernan, "R.I.P. Ishimure Michiko, 1928 – February 10, 2018," Irish Environment, March 6, 2018, accessed January 22, 2019, http://www.irishenvironment.com/blog/a-lawsuit-to-stop-the- expansion-of-dublin-airport-was-rejected-by-the-high-court-2/.

2003. Looking at the language used in the book as well, it would seem that fragments of

Ishimure’s own voice have been scrambled into that of the Smiths as a collective authorship.

Compare even just the description of Minamata’s physical location between the two works: “To get there by train from Tokyo one travels through Hiroshima past Nagasaki and down the west coast of the southern island of Kyushu. The town faces the Shiranui

Sea, of which Minamata bay is a part. I have never seen the sea angry near Minamata.”86 with: “The village of Yudō lies around a small bay bearing the same name. Here the sea is never angry except when a typhoon comes once or twice a year.”87 The use of similar word choices is complimented in the images the Smith’s chooses to use. Like Ishimure, there is a focus on the victims as individuals instead of en masse in order to humanize the patients. Further, there are images of both the polluted sea and idyllic village to create a similar impression of the landscape as Ishimure’s. There is even an image of a blurry swarm of fish creating a story not only of the dehumanization of the fishermen of Minamata but also a story of solidarity with the animals hurt in the wake of Minamata Disease as well.88

Aileen Smith was called out to Canada by a friend part way through the Smith’s residency in Minamata. During this time, harboring images of what she had seen in

Minamata, she began to suspect that the mercury poisoning which had occurred in

Minamata and Niigata may be the same as that which was occurring in Canada in the

English-Wabigoon River. The river itself was both a food source for First Nations people in Canada and a popular fishing site for tourists. Despite Aileen Smith’s pleas for actions,

86 Smith and Smith, 26. 87 Ishimure, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, 6. 88 Smith and Smith, 16-17.

49 things remained immobilized: “The attitude among government people seemed to be one of extreme caution – to disturb nothing, do nothing until there was absolute proof that symptoms were occurring. And they seemed reluctant to accept the proof – the existing symptoms – that was staring them in the face.”89

Aileen Smith recalls the people of Minamata’s grave concern for the situation in

Canada when she returned to Minamata. She recounts one Minamata Disease patient asking:

Are we who know about Minamata Disease not explaining it well enough to them? What more do they have to know? We have already had our Niigata and Minamata. Must we have more? When will people realize that the world is not made of compartments, that what happened in Japan can also happen to the Chicago businessman who carries an airplane load of frozen fish back home? He might not think he is susceptible, but he is as human as the Indians and the Minamata people.90

In this passage, the book shows a concrete event (Aileen’s journey to Canada) literally bringing the story of Minamata to the international scene. Further, using the voice of a patient of Minamata Disease, the plea she makes is put into universal terms. In other words, the story of Minamata is made into an issue of the human condition. In a similar way to what occurred in Japan, the issue at a certain point was not about knowledge of the disease since the cause and origin of the disease were already well known. Instead, in Canada like

Minamata, the question became how to break the blinding deadlock of ideology preventing revisualization and action with regard to Minamata Disease.

When one lawyer for a patient of Niigata disease was asked by Eugene Smith:

“Why drag Minamata into this, since everyone knew from the start that it was a generic thing, methyl mercury?” He replied: “‘Because, awkward as it sounds, we wanted

89 Smith and Smith, 141. 90 Smith and Smith, 142.

50 everyone who hears of this to realize that it isn’t just Niigata’s little local problem,’ they said. ‘It’s industrial pollution, and there is no better way to remind people of the needlessness and hideousness of it than to fold the name of Minamata right into the middle of it.’”91 The point being that in naming the disease after a particular region, it enabled it to reach its status as a universal metaphor for a global epidemic like industrial poisoning.

In the same vein as Ishimure Michiko, the labeling of the disease as belonging to

Minamata and Niigata removed the generic label of it as, say, methyl-mercury poisoning.

In Ishimure’s dialectical movement in the novel, the individual patient is a stand-in for

Minamata Disease, and with the naming of it as Minamata Disease, the disease becomes a stand-in for the fight against industrial pollution. Ishimure’s sustained rejection of a

‘resolution’ to the issue of Minamata reflected in Paradise enables the reader to consider it in relation to the ongoing struggles of the present – it is no surprise many of the comments for Paradise on the Japanese Amazon website mention the Fukushima nuclear disaster.92

The Age of Ideals

The most direct link between Minamata Disease and the Subway Sarin Incident was proposed by Japanese photographer Shinya Fujiwara in his Indian travel book to commemorate the end of the century Yomi no Inu (lit: dog of the underworld) published serially in the prestigious literary magazine Bungei Shunjū (lit: literary spring and autumn).

Before getting into the section on India travel which occupies the majority of the book, he

91 Smith and Smith, 120. 92 One such review reads: “When I finished reading this, I thought that what was written had an unfortunate relation to Fukushima. The whole time I was reading the story of Minamata Disease, what ran through my head was the Fukushima incident.” nacamici, “zange shitai” 懺悔したい [I would like to Repent], Amazon Japan, https://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/customer- reviews/R1I2A98QVWU7KQ/ref=cm_cr_othr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=4062748150.

51 describes a process of developing a deep interest in Minamata Disease and reading widely through archival materials and maps relating to it. It is at this point he makes the passing observation that Yatsushiro, the birthplace of Aum Shinrikyo founder Shōkō Asahara

(Matsumoto Chizuo), is right outside of the range usually ascribed to be the zone where

Minamata Disease could be contracted.

He comes into contact with an advocate for Minamata patients named Mr. Kōto.

While Fujiwara pursues his line of thought, Mr. Kōto receives a phone call from the editor who introduced him to Fujiwara who says something along the lines of: “writing anymore about the relationship between Asahara and Minamata Disease is not permissible.”93

Despite this, he comes into contact with a man referred to anonymously as G who is able to set up an interview between Fujiwara and Matsumoto Mitsuhiro, in other words,

Asahara’s older brother. G mentions how “they would bring out mantis shrimp with sake when they entertained people. A huge pile of mantis shrimp” caught in the Shiranui sea where Minamata Disease broke out.94

Matsumoto’s testimony went like this:

Chizuo loved seafood and ate it the most out of all of us. He was always the one who ate excess amounts of the fish and shrimp we caught. I feel responsible … his hands started going numb and in due time it spread to his eyes … I didn’t know what it was at first but once the whole Minamata thing came to light, I thought, it must be that … I actually submitted an application for him to be recognized as a patient of Minamata disease … it ended up being rejected. ‘Yatsushiro was too far away,’ they said… the countryside is a strange place, when I submitted the application, word spread of his reputation as someone infected [literally: filth]95

Later reflecting on Matsumoto’s testimony on the train, Fujiwara comments: “Even

93 Fujiwara Shinya 藤原新也, Yomi no inu ⻩泉の⽝ [The Dog of Yomi] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunshū, 2006), 57. Translation my own. When I say, ‘along the lines of,’ Fujiwara himself did not hear the conversation but heard only secondhand through Mr. Kōto. 94 Fujiwara, 57. 95 Fujiwara, 73-74.

52 if Asahara wasn’t a victim of Minamata Disease, it’s possible he felt like he was [by the way people treated him]. It’s possible that served as enough motive for his feelings and behavior.”96 Unsurprisingly, this specific passage and the use of the word motive became quite controversial in the critical response to his book. At this point, I should not like to defend Fujiwara’s reflection but instead consider what Mr. Kōto’s editor said in the first place, that writing any more about the relationship between Asahara and Minamata Disease was not allowed. In effect, this is soft censorship in the form of an injunction.

However, it also brings to mind a certain conceptual limit in Ishimure’s writing of

Paradise, which is to say that within the image of victim she creates in her attempt to humanize the patients, she omits any criminal or violent character. This is not to say that the patients were likely violent nor to even say that she should have included such a portrayal of the patients. Instead, it served as a limit and as a part of her political and literary strategy to omit such a character. It is established that Ishimure fought for expanding the number of people who were eligible to be certified as a Minamata patient.

However, the potential for Asahara to be on that list takes the issue of Minamata to its limit

– it exceeds the possible definition of ‘victim’ on the symbolic level, Asahara is unintelligible as a ‘victim.’ In part, this explains the negative reaction to pursuing a connection between Minamata Disease and the Subway Sarin Incident.

The use of the word “motive” in Fujiwara’s reflection is of course dangerously speculative – so much so that I should like to dismiss his causal link between the Subway

Sarin Incident and the contraction of Minamata Disease as false. However, whether or not

Fujiwara’s reflection has any merit is not so important as the universal rejection of the

96 Fujiwara, 77.

53 connection. To pose a hypothetical question, is it impossible to imagine that someone like a Minamata patient could become so angry as to murder people? I pose this hypothetical only because in a certain sense, yes, it is impossible to imagine just in the same way the

Subway Sarin Incident itself was impossible to imagine. Of course, this impossibility was only revealed after the fact of it happening.

Japanese sociologist Ōsawa Masachi wrote the following in a 2018 editorial released in the wake of the execution of the Aum Members responsible for the Subway

Sarin Incident:

When Aum Shinrikyo carried out the Subway Sarin Gas Incident, I argued that this was an event that was a ‘result of the age of fiction.’ In my thinking, Japanese postwar history shifted from the ‘age of ideals’ to the ‘age of fiction.’ The ‘age of ideals,’ whether in regard to all of society or in regard to home life, was one in which the ideal circumstance was clearly defined as ‘peace and democracy’ or ‘my home’ in consensus. The age of ideals ended with the onset of the 1970s. The persuasive power of holding ideals was lost and the space formerly occupied by ideals was filled with personal fictions (anime, video games, etc). The age of being immersed in these things had come along.97

The onset of the 1970s was also the period of time which saw the initial compensation provided for Minamata victims. The age of ideals, which overlaps with the era of high economic growth which produced the problem of Minamata Disease in the first place, also provided the political conditions that enabled the movement leading to compensation. In this way, the era of ideals was this dialectic – a self-destructive and self-resolving collective fantasy for the way society ought to look. It could be said that in any collective movement, the age of ideals outlined by Ōsawa is in play.

The citizens movement in Minamata resulted in several important legal victories

97 Ōsawa Masachi ⼤澤真幸, "oumu yumemita kyokō no hametsu, shokei dewa kienai ima” オウム夢⾒た虚構の破滅、処刑では消えない今 [Aum’s dream of a fictional doomsday will not disappear now with through punishment]. asahi shinbun 朝⽇新聞. Digital, July 9, 2018, accessed January 23, 2019, https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASL764DB5L76UCLV00M.html.

54 for the patients, including the first settlement in 1973 and the final legal settlement in 1995.

Aside from an increase in the compensation amount, the number of victims also increased significantly between the two settlements, from 8,000 certified patients in 1973 up to

10,305.98 In my view, the most important legal change stemmed from the absolution of guilt in the case of Kawamoto Teruo (the aforementioned Minamata patient and activist) who was charged for assault and battery. To borrow a description of the process of absolution from Timothy S. George:

He and his lawyer Gotō Takanori appealed to the Tokyo High Court, hoping it would accept their argument that the indictment itself was illegal because the government had been biased in favor of Chisso from the very beginning of the Minamata disease incident. In June 1977 the High Court agreed, marking the first time in Japanese legal history that a court had dismissed an indictment as illegal.99

The Kawamoto case’s importance comes in the form of indicting the entire postwar democratic system as serving business interests over those of the citizens it purports to represent. The court case, as an indictment of the bias of the legal system, is one of the biggest victories of the citizen’s movements.

After the 1973 settlement in Minamata, the Citizen’s Movement began to see its disappearance from public view. For example, activist “Matsumoto Tsutomu of

Minamata … decided that the one hope for true democracy in Japan lay in the sort of ‘direct democracy’ possible only at the community level.”100 One could see the realization of

Tanigawa Gan’s aim to do away with the hierarchic relation between the periphery and center in Matsumoto’s conceptualization for the future.101 Rather than work on national

98 George, 270. 99 George, 265. 100 George, 182. 101 Sasaki-Uemura, 130. “Tanigawa was further cognizant that resistance might still reproduce the same hierarchic value relation of periphery to core. He did not want to reverse the values associated with the margins mainstream just to revitalize the center.”

55 projects, the citizen’s movement became very localized. In this sense, Ōsawa Masachi’s collectively held ideas began to be concentrated at the local level, abandoning national scale or universal projects. The lack of national vision of the citizen’s movement created a void in which Aum could unite those with the alienated fictions that Ōsawa claims are characteristic of the ‘age of fiction.’

The national-scale vision of the citizens’ movement has been co-opted by the government, evidenced in the LDP Minamata mayor’s use of the term moyai noashi. 102

Moyai naoshi is a term meaning to re-moor a ship, and the image is one of bonding together individual fishing boats in order to weather against the storm and forge deeper bonds. The term moyai naoshi was subsequently adopted by the national government to promote better relations between patient and government and patients and other citizens. Furthermore, moyai naoshi has been co-opted into a movement to turn Minamata into a beacon for the movement to create so-called eco cities, which Minamata has been certified as.103 The issue with the creation of the eco city is not so much its results but rather its regionalizing and individualizing effects.

To return to Ōsawa’s demarcation of the postwar era, ‘the age of fiction’ implies that the Subway Sarin Incident was a result of Asahara’s alienated fiction brought into real life. However, the uncanny part of the Aum affair is that Aum’s fundamental structure comes closer to mirroring the Shōwa era collective ideals more than any fictive isolated ones. Aum Shinrikyo took the form of a group of believers attempting to subordinate non-

102 George, 278. 103 “Minamata byō mondai kara moyainaoshi, kankyō moderu toshi he no chosen – Kumamoto Ken Minamata Shi ⽔俣病問題からもやい直し、環境モデル都市への挑戦 − 熊本県⽔俣市” [Rebuilding from Minamata Disease, the challenge to make a model eco-city – Minamata, Kumamoto], https://www.japanfs.org/ja/news/archives/news_id027276.html. (accessed February 18, 2019.

56 believers to their ideal society led by the symbolic figurehead of Asahara. Other authors have already commented on the ways this mirrors the emperor system.104 In the next chapter, the question of the impossibility of Aum and this ‘isolated fiction’ will be explored and comparisons drawn to the community Ishimure creates in her fiction with what Ōe creates in his.

104 For more see: Lifton, Robert Jay, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyō, Apocalyptic Violence, and the the New Global Terrorism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999).

CHAPTER 3

DEMISTIFYING AUM SHINRIKYO IN ŌE KENZABURŌ’S

SOMERSAULT

Ōe Kenzaburō’s Somersault enables a changed relationship to the Aum Shinrikyo- led Subway Sarin Incident in Tokyo in 1995. In this chapter, I demonstrate that Somersault responds to the way in which sensationalized and obsessive media coverage of Aum

Shinrikyo after the Subway Sarin Incident created the same mysticism that enabled the ascendance of the group in the first place. Ōe’s novel reminds the reader of how concrete material events are mediated into religious ones through both interpersonal interaction and mass media agents. Ōe’s revisioning of the Sarin gas attacks functions to demystify Aum

Shinrikyo itself without reifying the othering mentality of the mass news media. The task of revisualization intimately entwines Ōe’s personal memories with collective ones of the disaster.

Read in tandem with Ishimure’s Paradise, both works have authors for whom their sense of place plays an important role. Somersault enables a ‘peripheral’ and yet international perspective on the Subway Sarin Incident enabled by Ōe’s position as an author. Ōe’s 1994 Nobel Prize acceptance speech puts into words Ōe’s view on his peripheral status in a way that nicely mirrors the argument I made about Ishimure’s peripherality in the first chapter:

The image system [referring to one of his influences] made it possible to seek literary methods of attaining the universal for someone like me born and brought up in a peripheral, marginal, off-centre region of the peripheral, marginal, off-centre country, Japan. Starting from such a background I do not represent Asia as a new economic power but an Asia impregnated with ever-lasting poverty and a mixed-up fertility. By sharing old, familiar yet living metaphors I align myself with writers like Kim Ji-ha of Korea, Chon I and Mu Jen, both of China. For me the brotherhood of world literature consists in such relationships in concrete terms.105

We can therefore imagine both Ishimure and Ōe as authors of the periphery which inform and enable their creation of and access to universal perspectives.

Further, in line with the Fujiwara piece discussed at the end of the previous chapter,

Somersault challenges a simple definition of victimizer and victim reified by the news media and the state in the wake of the Subway Sarin Incident. Aum Shinrikyo is not reimagined to be a sympathetic group in the novel, nor is it made into a pure ‘other’ rejected out of hand, but rather the group analogous to Aum in the novel performs a critical function precisely in its radical alterity. In other words, Ōe advocates for the ability for the radical

‘other’ to be embedded in the Japanese social fabric. He repoliticizes the suppression of this alterity that was awoken after the Subway Sarin Incident and imagines a collectively constructed alternative future. It functions as a nice compliment to Paradise, forming a small genealogy of evolution in reaction to disaster in significantly different historical contexts.

105 "Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself," Kenzaburō Ōe Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1994, accessed February 08, 2019, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1994/oe/lecture/. Emphasis my own.

The Latent Disaster

Before getting into the question of where the power of Somersault to shift consciousness stems from, it is necessary to revisit the details of the Sarin Subway Incident itself. The Sarin Subway Incident was perpetuated by the syncretic and apocalyptic

Buddhist religious organization (or cult, if one prefers) Aum Shinrikyo. The aim of the attack, in so far as Aum asserted, was to spur on the apocalypse sooner, thereby accelerating the general trend of destruction the world was drifting toward. Four bags of Sarin gas were released into the Tokyo subway system, resulting in 13 deaths and approximately 6,000 nonfatal injuries.106

What is striking about the attack is the initial nonreaction to the attack even by those who inhaled the Sarin gas themselves. The immediate response by some victims was not to seek medical attention or to call in to work but rather to ignore their physical symptoms and attempt to proceed about their day. Take one of the victim of the attack, Mitsuo Arima, who shared the following impression when interviewed by author Murakami Haruki after the attack:

I’d been right at the epicenter, but instead of shuddering at the death toll, I felt like I was watching a program on TV, as if it were somebody else’s problem … Since the war ended, Japan’s economy has grown rapidly to the point where we’ve lost any sense of crisis and material things are all that matters. The idea that it’s wrong to harm others has gradually disappeared. It’s been said before, I know, but this really brought it home to me. What happens if you raise a child with that mentality? Is there any excuse for this kind of thing?107

The harm in the previous coverage of disasters by the media reshaped the visualization of

106 Neuman, Scott, Japan Executes Cult Leader Responsible For 1995 Sarin Gas Attack On Tokyo Subway, (NPR, July 6, 2018). https://www.npr.org/2018/07/06/626434965/japan-executes-cult-leader-responsible- for-1995-sarin-gas-attack-on-tokyo-subway. 107 Mitsuo Arima in Murakami, Haruki, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel (New York City: Vintage International, 2001), 65.

60 the world in such a way as to prevent a sense of crisis even in the event of an actual crisis.

(The same could be seen in Fukushima when the American Embassy’s emergency calls created a sense of crisis more than the Japanese media and government).108 Mitsuo’s reaction that it felt like he was watching a program on TV should be taken at face-value.

The biological reality of the event had already been prefigured by media representation of the event.

Slavoj Žižek made a similar argument in regards to media prefiguring of 9/11 in the United States:

Not only were the media bombarding us all the time with talk about the terrorist threat; this threat was also obviously libidinally invested - just remember the series of movies from Escape from New York to Independence Day. That is the rationale of the often-mentioned association with the attacks with Hollywood disaster movies: the unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise.109

A similar argument for the Subway Sarin Incident – the apocalyptic worldview of Aum was already latent in the Japanese social fabric and the Subway Sarin Incident was libidinally invested in a way analagous to 9/11 in America. Former Aum members recall by name the works of Nostradamus having a “huge effect on [their] generation.”110 Other scholars have noted how fictional narratives including works like the animes Akira and

Gundam both have apocalyptic themes as their focus and in a sense create a certain ‘appeal’ for the apocalypse – the sort that may have led to Aum members joining in the first place.

“The role played by the media in shaping definitions of religious practices in this period,

108 For an article that covers the disparity in American and Japanese reactions to the Fukushima incident, see: Sanger, David E., Matthew L. Wald, and Hiroko Tabuchi, "U.S. Calls Radiation 'Extremely High;' Sees Japan Nuclear Crisis Worsening," The New York Times, March 16, 2011, Accessed March 12, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/world/asia/17nuclear.html. 109 Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 15-16. Emphasis my own. 110 Akio Namimura in Murakami, 275.

‘encouraging consumption of occult information as a form of entertainment’ … created an interesting overlap between the spheres of media, religion and marketing.” 111 The apocalypse which shocked the world in its materialization had been dormant in the

Japanese consumer economy well before it happened.

What is relatively consistent in the testimony of former Aum members is a ‘search for answers’ by which they come into contact with Aum. Often, the search for answers led them to consumer goods and services including books, yoga lessons, and so on. For example, Hiroyuki Kano made an observation on his own in elementary school that everything tends toward destruction and wanted answers to the question of this tendency.

Kano recalls: “I didn’t take the entrance exams for college, but went instead to an electricians’ school. I studied engineering, but that wasn’t what I really wanted to do. I still wanted real wisdom. One idea I had was to scientifically systematize Eastern philosophy.”112 His desire to renunciate secular life was a result of thoughts fomenting since childhood that ultimately manifested in him taking up yoga and subsequently being invited to the group by the leader of the religious organization Shōkō Asahara himself. In this sense, his joining Aum was something welling up out of his own interaction with

Japanese social reality and which he continued to participate in on his own accord.

Kano’s recollection of joining Aum contrasts with former members who recall

Asahara Shōkō as being capable of mind control. In a recent article published in the Japan

Times which looked back at the Subway Sarin Incident in the wake of the execution of

Asahara, a former member of Aum Shinrikyo who remains anonymous in the article

111 Baffelli, Erica. Media and New Religions in Japan. Routledge Research in Religion, Media and Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 2016), 20. 112 Murakami, 225.

62 recounts the following about his time in Aum: “Mind control is sort of like magic — anyone is in danger of falling into that trap,” and continues: “Aum made it seem like you were free to make choices but, in reality, you were being guided toward those choices.”113

This former member, who notably chose to remain anonymous now that he has left the organization, is in part and perhaps unknowingly reinforcing the dominant media narrative on Aum. The attestation of the anonymous member reinforces the image that

Asahara’s abilities are not found in the realm of materiality but rather his charisma is supernatural, or in a sense, ‘magic.’ The two members share conflicting testimonies of their time in the group – Kano Hiroyuki claimed relative autonomy while the anonymous

Japan Times contributor claimed that there was brainwashing keeping him in the group.

What becomes clear is that in order to ‘become’ the collective identity of a ‘victim’ or a ‘survivor,’ there is a necessity to adopt the collective rhetoric as it is regulated by

Ideological State Apparati; this recalls Lisa Yoneyama’s argument about what constitutes a victim from the introduction. The key ISA in the case of the Subway Sarin Incident was the news media. For former Aum members, re-entry into society comes with confirming the self-re-enforcing narrative provided by the media. ‘I was brainwashed and lacked agency.’ It is all the more fitting that in the article I quoted, the former Aum member chose to remain anonymous. Aum members re-entering society had to distance themselves so far from Aum that they expel it from their identity. The media narrative of the incident fills in the gap that their expelled memories of their experiences with Aum create.

The relatively hegemonic narrative created by the Japanese news media surrounding Aum Shinrikyo sparked director Mori Tatsuya to produce his 1998

113 Ito, Masami, “Cult attraction: Aum Shinrikyo’s power of persuasion” (The Japan Times, 2015).

63 documentary film A. 114 The documentary powerfully argues that the media’s gaze produced the mystical capabilities of Asahara and Aum Shinrikyo rather than anything intrinsic to the cult itself. Mori follows around members of Aum Shinrikyo going about their daily lives, creating both a counternarrative to the media’s sensationalism and showing the process of that sensationalism being created. The media created an aura around the group members by dehumanizing them – invading their privacy and ostracizing them. Mori films the everyday lives of current Aum Shinrikyo members and rehumanizes them – showing that their motivations and practices are rooted in material reality.

There is a scene in which the acting spokesperson of Aum at the time of A’s filming,

Araki Hiroshi, is harassed by a reporter from Nihon TV with whom he has an exchange that is representative of the media’s narrativization style of the Subway Sarin Incident:

Araki: Are you filming? Reporter: No we’re not. Would it be a problem if we were? You allow him [Mori]. A: Yes, he’s asked us in advance and we’ve allowed him. R: Your main concern is whether we air it or not. I haven’t spoken to the cameraman but I know he’s ready to roll anytime. Yet, you’re saying we can’t use it on our show? … A: Because we can’t trust your show. R: This is about journalistic freedom. I don’t know if we’re filming now but if we were, will you let us use it? … If it turns out that we were filming, then can we just use it?115

Under the pretense of journalistic freedom, the journalist invades Araki’s privacy. Mori exposes the media for not receiving consent for filming and in the process, reveals the lens

114 Director of A Mori Tatsuya recalls an anecdote from his attempt to show what life was like inside of Aum: “I applied to gather materials from a post-arrest Aum and brought my camera to their facilities. I recorded the believer’s everyday lives. However, they wouldn’t let me broadcasted it. The reason was “my efforts to make Aum look bad weren’t enough.” Mori Tatsuya 森達也, "shikei shuukou, rekishi wa kyoukun wo ushinatta” 死刑執⾏、歴史は教訓を失った [The Carrying out of the Death Penalty, History Lessons Lost]. asahi shinbun 朝⽇新聞, Digital, July 7, 2018, accessed January 23, 2019, https://digital.asahi.com/articles/ASL764TPHL76ULZU004.html. 115 A, DVD, directed by Mori Tatsuya 森達也, (Tokyo: 'A' Production Committee, 1998).

64 that is shaping their coverage of Aum. By filming Aum members when they are not aware of it, they deny Aum members the right to express their identity and viewpoint on their own terms. Instead of self-representation, the media may shape its own narrative as it pleases, reinforcing dominant social viewpoints on Aum. In the same vein, treating the current believers as if they are some sort of metaphysical threat not worthy of basic rights to privacy makes them that; it elevates them into something more than they are.

On the meta level, the film itself was a byproduct of mass news media suppression.

Mori recounted as much in his book looking back on the process of making the film also entitled A. The disclosure of the location of the remains of the murdered lawyer Sakamoto

Tsutsumi and his family were revealed by Aum Shinrikyo following the carrying out of the

Subway Sarin Incident. In this context, Mori’s supervisor decided to pull company support for his documentary and as such prevented it from airing on one of the major networks.

There are three specific conditions laid down by Mori’s boss which Mori would need to change in order to have his documentary broadcasted. The three conditions underscore the normalizing and depoliticizing effects of the media.

The first condition was to “actively employ Anti-Aum journalists such as Egawa

Shōko and Arita Yoshio. It is most desirable if you employ them as a reporter.”116 The demand implies that Mori’s attempt to make his own narrative must be mediated and negated by anti-Aum journalism for the sake of ‘objectivity.’ This directly contradicts

Mori’s aim of filming the believers without any “preconceived notions.”117 This is in line with his supervisors second demand of striving for “balance with ideas commonly accepted

116 Mori Tatsuya 森達也, A (Tōkyō: Kadokawa Bunkō, 2002), 39. 117 Mori, 37.

65 in society” by including the testimony of victims of the Subway Sarin Incident as well.118

In other words, the alternative vision of Aum Shinrikyo and the Subway Sarin Incident must be accompanied by its very negation. Third, he wants Araki Hiroshi, the leader of

Aum at the time, to consent to not being shown any of the raw material that would become the documentary. Mori rejects all three of these conditions and as such, his documentary is dropped by the company and never airs on any of the big television networks. The anecdote that Mori faced can be taken as an example of the typical handling of alternative narratives of the event by the media. The media only reinforced ‘common sense’ appeals and, in the process, depoliticized the event. This is the news media context which

Somersault responds to as well.

Ōe Kenzaburō’s Self-insertion

My arguments about the critical function of the novel Somersault and the critical function of the film A coalesce on the surface level. Both works function to demystify

Aum Shinrikyo and both intentionally respond to the media portrayal of Aum Shinrikyo’s activity in the post-Subway Sarin Incident world. Throughout the analysis that follows, special attention will be paid to what can only be conveyed as an idea through fiction; e.g., where does the demystification effect differ? What goes further politically in Somersault?

All the while, in line with my theoretical framework, the analysis will avoid fetishizing fiction by ascribing to it capabilities beyond its means.

To preface the analysis of the novel itself, it is essential to look at Ōe Kenzaburō’s personhood, especially as it comes to explicitly interplay with the novel. Ōe Kenzaburō is

118 Mori, 39.

66 the second Japanese author to have won the Nobel Prize, doing so in 1994 – the year before the Subway Sarin Incident. Coincidentally, the year he won the Nobel Prize, he had finished writing a trilogy of novels about religion and folklore in Shikoku titled The

Flaming Green Tree trilogy. Upon winning the Nobel Prize in 1994, he declared he would no longer write any more novels and yet, in the wake of the Subway Sarin Incident, he felt compelled to start writing again. On the meta level then, this is the author’s own

‘Somersault.’119

Philip Gabriel wrote that: “Critics in Japan have noted two deaths that may have propelled Ōe to write again: the death of his close friend, the composer Takemitsu Tōru (to whom Somersault is dedicated), and the tragic suicide of his brother-in-law, the film director Itami Jūzō … More significant than either was the subway attack by Aum

Shinrikyō.” 120 While Ōe himself explicitly “states that he began by imagining two different reactions the Aum leader Asahara might have in court: he could either insist he’s completely correct, or announce he’s wrong and disband the church. In Somersault, Ōe says, he decided to explore the second alternative, how someone rebuilds his life after renouncing his spiritual beliefs.”121 It can be deduced that Ōe’s drive to explore religion is both prefigured by the death of those close to him and the death of those murdered in the

Subway Sarin Incident.

Here, the relationship to religion is informed by a relationship to personal and collective memory for Ōe. There are many allusions to Ōe’s own life throughout the novel which I interpret as Ōe attempting to make it clear that as the author, he is the ultimate

119 Gabriel, Philip, Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006), 131. 120 Gabriel, 132. 121 Gabriel, 133.

67 mediator of both the event of the Subway Sarin Incident and of the religion created in his novel. Which is to say, the view of God crafted in the novel is not only mediated by the characters in the novel but above all by Ōe himself. He scatters details about his own life into various characters of his novel. For example, he was a visiting scholar at Princeton

University, and he made the protagonist of the novel, Kizu, an American university professor on the east coast who was originally a Fulbright scholar from Japan.

Ōe not only positions himself as the protagonist in Somersault, but his personal story mirrors that of the prophet-like character in the novel as well. Ōe’s Somersault was to continue his writing career after a five-year suspension upon receiving the Nobel Prize.

Patron, the church leader, commits his Somersault when he claims his church’s teachings and beliefs were false (in order to prevent a terror attack by the ‘radical faction’ of his followers) only to come back to start a new religion ten years later, the main plot of the novel. In addition, Ōe inserts a cameo of his son with autism, Hikari, whose parallel makes an appearance in the novel as the virtuoso composer Morio, son of a former follower of the church in the novel with similar developmental disorders.122

Another common motif from Ōe’s literary oeuvre that makes an appearance in the novel is his opposition to the emperor system. The faults of Patron, the prophet figure in the church in the novel, and those who believe in him as prophet are made analogous to those who believe in the emperor system. There is also the split setting of Tokyo (the initial site of the headquarters of the pre-Somersault church) and Shikoku, where the church moves when it is reborn post-Somersault. Ōe himself is from Shikoku but moved to Tokyo

122 Ōe writes that: “I thought I would give up writing. I wrote always to be a voice for Hikari, but when he found his own voice in music I did not need to write further.” This prompted him to commit the ‘Somersault’ in the first place. Gabriel., 131.

68 in order to study French literature, which is also alluded to in the novel. The personal experiences collected over the years inform his reflections on religion. They culminate for

Ōe in 1999 in Somersault, a novel in which there is frequent allusion to Jonah’s protest to

God in the bible. Perhaps we can imagine this novel functioning as Ōe’s own protest to

God: looking for something new in the wake of this protest.

The Dialectics of Somersault

To provide a summary of the novel, Somersault follows the story of the establishment of a new religious organization which is the successor to one that had disbanded ten years before. The old one had disbanded after a radical faction of its followers planned to high-jack a nuclear power plant and convert it into a nuclear weapon, spurring on the apocalypse sooner. The leaders of the religious organization had preached an apocalyptic vision of the future and encouraged repentance but never explicitly encouraged violent action to bring on the apocalypse. In order to prevent their followers from causing widespread damage, the leaders of the organization – referred to in the novel exclusively by their media-given nicknames of ‘Guide’ and ‘Patron’ – went on national television to ridicule their religious beliefs and disband the church.

By doing so, they saved the face of the organization by ending it; this point diverges from Aum Shinrikyo actually carrying out its Sarin gas attacks. The story picks up when the three main characters of the story – Kizu, Ikuo, and Dancer – come across each other at a youth design competition. Kizu is an American professor of art who has lived in

America ever since he received his Ph.D. there and had since become an American citizen.

Ikuo is a young boy described as being particularly muscular but in a natural way in Kizu’s

69 eyes – he has a very technical mindset and makes his first appearance in the novel presenting a model of a city at a design competition. Dancer, as her nickname suggests, is a dancer who is performing at the contest where Ikuo is presenting his project.

Kizu has an immediate attraction to the teenage Ikuo whom he describes as a man- child with “beautiful eyes in a doglike face.”123 Ikuo’s physical appearance reflects the structure and theme of the novel – a thing embedded in its opposite. The man within the child and the beautiful within the ugly supplement the larger theme of the profane within the religious in the novel. Ikuo and Dancer collide and his model city gets stuck in Dancer’s skirt. After he pulls it out, Ikuo slams it on the ground in frustration. Kizu, observing the scene comments: “Did destroying the model city he’d taken a year to create afford him a precocious, lawless sense of confidence … But to what end? He has no idea, but there was plenty of time in life to try to answer that, or at least formulate the question.”124

Ikuo immediately piques Kizu’s interest and after watching Kizu destroy the city, he has a precognition that he will meet the boy again. “Kizu wanted to meet him and see how the boy’s life had taken shape in the intervening years. He grasped at a prescient feeling, akin to the dialectic of dreams, that this reunion could never come to pass, yet somehow – it definitely would.” 125 At the end of this prologue, it is established retroactively that the entire prologue had been from Kizu’s perspective without revealing it earlier. The prologue sets up the fact that this is a novel about the way in which dreams precede reality. In other words, the mystery shrouding dreams does not exempt them from reality but rather inscribes that very mystery into reality.

123 Ōe, Kenzaburō, Somersault, translated by Philip Gabriel (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), 7. 124 Ōe, 8. 125 Ōe, 8.

Further extrapolating from the structure of the prologue, it is not the case that merely dreaming something makes it into reality but rather that its very materialization retroactively reveals its inevitability. The ultimate twist of the novel is that at the very end of the novel, it is hinted that the novel is the narrative of its own creation; in other words, the novel is nothing more than the mediation of a fantasy come into reality: “But if you flesh this out, covering everything from Patron’s Somersault through Guide’s torture and up to the summer conference and the Church of the New Man, won’t the whole thing be enormously long?”126 Indeed, Somersault is that dauntingly lengthy novel covering that portion of the church’s history.

Aum Shinrikyo’s Sarin gas attack itself was precisely the dream that was initially impossible. The difference between Ōe’s novel and the media coverage of the Sarin gas attacks is the status of this impossibility of the dream. The media’s othering tendency is represented by the maintenance of this dream as impossible and refusing to integrate the

Sarin gas attack as stemming from something within Japanese society. The same goes for the coverage of the members of Aum Shinrikyo, anyone suspected of being remotely connected to the cult was subject to a trial by media. By framing the Sarin gas attack as

‘impossible’ and the cult as the ‘other,’ the media in effect created the very metaphysical separation reified in Aum itself. The proper retroactive move is to argue the inevitability of the disaster.

Žižek reiterates the classical Marxist refrain in regard to the crises generated under capitalism; that while the crises themselves are painful they are not, in a sense, to be

‘feared’: “A true Left takes a crisis seriously, without illusions, but as something inevitable,

126 Ōe, 560.

71 as a chance to be fully exploited. The basic insight of the radical Left is that although crises are painful and dangerous they are ineluctable, and that they are the terrain on which battles have to be waged and won.”127 Ōe’s novel has this classically leftist function and applies it to the Subway Sarin Incident. He takes the issue of the crisis seriously by demystifying it and capitalizing on the opportunity it opens up. Ōe avoids the simple reaction of amplifying fears about Aum that the media took and instead channels the fear into a productive energy.

The dichotomy of media mystification and the materialism of Ōe’s novel is demonstrated in the naming of the church’s leaders. It is known that “the leadership of the group took their names from The New York Times and gave a similar name to Dancer.”128

The mystical titles of ‘patron,’ ‘guide,’ and ‘dancer’ did not derive from any self-generated religious beliefs but rather are names from the media. The point being that the media created their roles and from that day forth, Patron and Guide are exclusively referred to as such; no alternative proper noun is given throughout the novel.

Relatedly, Ikuo’s destruction of the model in the novel comes to inlay the vision of apocalyptic destruction with him that we can also retroactively assume to be already latent.

Ikuo reflects a typical young person attracted to Aum – precocious, talented, and in search of answers to complex theological questions. For Ikuo, this takes the form of searching for an answer to the end of the Book of Jonah. Ikuo recalls as much: “I don’t know, I just feel anxious, wondering if the Book of Jonah really ends where it does. I know it’s a childish question, but I can’t help wondering if the Jonah we have now is complete, or whether it

127 Žižek, Slavoj, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2018), 75. 128 Ōe, 9.

72 might originally have had a different ending.”129

Ikuo’s sense of unease with the Book of Jonah stems from Jonah’s protest to God which he views as incomplete. The Book of Jonah follows the prophet Jonah as he is commanded by God to go to the city of Nineveh and preach the end of times unless the entire city repents. Jonah is upset that God ultimately spares the city. However, to teach him the reasoning behind this, God grows out a vine to give shade to Jonah. The vine eventually withers away and dies, in reaction to which Jonah is distraught. God explains that in the same way Jonah cares for this vine, which he did nothing to help grow, so too

God cares for the gentile city of Nineveh. Ikuo, however, is not convinced that Jonah was sold on this parable of the vine. One of the side characters later in the novel, Isamu, comments that: “Ikuo as Jonah wouldn’t obey God’s suggestion that the people of Nineveh be spared.”

Ikuo views Jonah as a figure who would have continued to protest to God, Kizu comments:

Just as the Fireflies see you as Jonah, I’ve been viewing you as a Jonahlike person in my work here. But as you’ve expressed your doubts about it, for the sake of argument let’s say that what’s written in the book of Jonah isn’t the end of the story, that Jonah rejects God’s sermon to him, laughs in his face, and leaves. Isn’t that close to what Patron did with his Somersault?130

Kizu conceives of Ikuo as finding in Patron someone to ally himself with in his protest against God. Patron recalls as much in one of his sermons, speaking on Ikuo who commented to him: “Because you had done a Somersault, when I met you I thought I’d finally met a person who could rewrite the ending of the Book of Jonah, something I’ve

129 Ōe, 37. 130 Ōe, 380.

73 longed to do for such a long time. Let me and my friends stand by, awaiting your call.”131

Former Aum follower Hiroyuki Kano has had a similar experience as the young

Ikuo had with his model, beginning with a simple philosophical pondering of a pair of scissors in primary school:

There was one other reality I came to ponder when I was in the sixth grade. I was staring at a pair of scissors in my hands and the thought suddenly struck me that some adult had worked very hard to create them, but that eventually they would fall apart. Everything that has form will eventually fall apart. Same with people. In the end they die. Everything’s heading straight for destruction and there’s no turning back. To put it another way, destruction is the principle by which the universe operates.132

This small incident revealed a latent attention given to destruction that would later become a desire to join Aum. In fact, this resulted in Kano buying books on Eastern spirituality in the bookstore and eventually books published by Aum and eventually to joining Aum.

Kizu hopes to reconnect with Ikuo and starts to attend the same gym as him. At the gym, Ikuo reveals that it is a children’s book illustrated by Kizu that attracted Ikuo to the

Book of Jonah. When Ikuo reveals this to Kizu in the novel, neither Kizu nor Ikuo has any affiliation with the religious organization that performed the Somersault yet. Kizu develops a physical and romantic relationship with Ikuo, something which makes him realize retroactively that his attraction to Ikuo all those years ago at the design competition was not just pure fascination. Kizu proposes that the two of them seek out Dancer for a reunion. Dancer had been employed by Patron and Guide (and became one of their followers) after being sent to work for them by her father. Through Dancer, they come in contact with the religious organization that the two of them end up working for throughout the majority of the novel.

131 Ōe, 545. 132 Murakami, 253.

Kizu and Ikuo are over at a dinner being hosted by Dancer at Patron and Guide’s apartment. It is revealed that Guide is in the hospital suffering from brain damage. When it is apparent that Guide is likely to die, Patron requests that Kizu becomes his new ‘Guide.’

Patron makes it clear that without Guide to mediate his transcendental visions, he is unable to understand himself. He monologues in the first chapter of the novel:

I don’t have all that much goodness in the past to remember,” Patron said, “and now I feel like I’ve lost the future as well. Even if I were to fall into a trance again and go over to the other side, anything I might say about my experiences there would just be so much nonsense. Guide is the only one who can make my words intelligible, so for the first time people on this side can understand me. Without Guide to listen to me, my words are like a feverish delirium, and afterward I have no memory of them at all. All that remains is the empty husk where the fruit of meaning once resided.133

What Patron means here is that in quite a literal sense, he has no vision without Guide.

There is no trance outside of Guide’s mediation and in this sense, Patron’s subjectivity as prophet is lost outside of his mediation. And yet, in spite of lamenting over the loss of

Guide, he asks Kizu to replace Guide while he is in the hospital. Thus, even though Kizu does not believe in the church and is not a member, he would be able to perform the religious role Guide had previously performed.

Patron reveals that it is irrelevant whether or not Kizu actually believes in the religious message of the church or not. In this way, he negates the spiritual particularity of Guide as a person by highlighting their interchangeability:

Professor, please. You don’t need to say a thing. You can be a Guide who just paints!” Patron implored. “You can express things in a way I cannot. Your painting can clarify what my visions mean. If you turn your eyes in the direction of my beliefs, that’s enough. With Guide in the shape he’s in now, can you really refuse? I have only a handful of young people around me. Other than you, what mature person can I count on?134

133 Ōe, 14-15. 134 Ōe, 132.

Kizu consents to becoming Patron’s new ‘Guide,’ albeit reluctantly; the following morning,

Patron urgently calls Kizu over to his apartment. The morning of his sudden appointment with Patron, Kizu had painted an image of him and Ikuo holding hands walking up towards the clouds together and brings it along with him to show to Patron. Kizu relates that the sky in the painting was borrowed “from my apartment window this morning” while the clouds were those he saw “outside the window of [his] university office in the United

States.”135

Although the inclusion of Ikuo and the clouds is part of Kizu’s personal memory,

Patron nearly exactly describes what Kizu painted when sharing the contents of a dream vision he had that morning:

Often just after I wake up I’m in a kind of half-awake, half-asleep state, and when that happened again this morning I envisioned a scene before me. I interpreted this as a sign that you would take on the role of being the new Guide with Ikuo beside you. I wanted to talk with you about this, and that’s why I called you here without much warning.

What I saw was you and Ikuo, hand in hand as I watched over you, stepping into space, each of you a sturdy support to the other in case one of you was about to fall. That was the scene I saw.136

Although there is a parallel between Kizu’s painting and Patron’s vision, this does not necessarily mean that either Patron or Kizu has any metaphysical capabilities. Patron says as much later in the novel, remarking that: “after Guide was murdered, I was searching for a new Guide. Professor Kizu, Morio [the Hikari cameo in the novel], and our young

Yonah [Ikuo] himself may all have been new Guides.”137 The interchangeability points to the interchangeability of the trance itself; it is not that Patron has metaphysical powers but

135 Ōe, 138. 136 Ōe, 137. 137 Ōe, 547.

76 rather that his trances respond to his current shared social reality. With the arrival of a new mediator, so too comes a new dream vision.

The description of trances in the novels has a rather Hegelian feeling to it:

He [Patron] says he’s standing in front of a kind of three-dimensional mesh, a display screen on which a blur of light is continuously changing, receiving information … might sound exaggerated, but Patron can freely view the entire course of human history and experience every last detail. He traces it all with his own body. He conveys to us what he’s learned about the history of mankind and even its future, speaking to us—in the present—of the end time.138

Based on this passage, it may appear that Patron has the metaphysical ability to see the whole world throughout time and that this ability leaves him unable to cipher out this raw flood of information in any useful way. Instead, the mediator (Guide or Kizu) is the one responsible for making a small fragment of Patron’s sublime utterance comprehensible.

The interchangeability of the role of mediator implies that the church transcends Patron’s existence within it. It was not that Patron saw Kizu’s painting’s contents in his vision but rather that the contents of Kizu’s painting already existed within this blur of light (their shared material reality).

In Aum Shinrikyo, Asahara Shōkō played a role analogous to the one Patron plays in the novel. Like Asahara, Patron has an inherent charisma of his own but mainly played the role of spiritual mystic sharing divine utterances. Jōyū Fumihiro played a role analogous to Guide, as one of Asahara’s mediators. He frequently appeared on the news media and late-night talk show circuit in order to attract followers to Aum. In Somersault, the death of Guide and his replacement by Kizu demonstrates the interchangeability of the mediator. The parallel in the wake of Asahara’s execution was when Jōyū proclaims that he “has no special attachments to Asahara.” In the meantime, Jōyū went on to play a

138 Ōe, 106.

77 leadership role in the nonviolent Aum splinter group Hikari no Wa. 139 Somersault, published in 1999, predicted the split that would occur in Aum with those attached to the pre-Subway Sarin Incident vision and those dedicated to a new nonviolent path. Further, like Guide in Somersault, ultimately even Asahara himself could be replaced, exemplifying the fact of his existence centering around his mediation by other Aum members.

Compare Jōyū’s claim that he has no special attachment to Asahara to a similar quote from Araki Hiroshi, the Aum spokesperson harassed by the reporter in the anecdote from the documentary A mentioned above, when interviewed by the director:

Director: So, you never thought that you might one day leave Aum? Araki: Leaving Aum wouldn’t make a difference. Society with its values or the values it would continue to pursue, is not a place I would return to. D: So rather than being about leaving Aum, it’s about not returning to society. A: Right.140

Aum has become a shell for the two men who play the role of spokesperson for Aum and its splinter group. In a similar way to Somersault, they themselves step into the role of mediating the teachings of the religion without belief in the man Asahara himself. In the process, they demonstrate that their belief does not revolve around Asahara’s metaphysical capabilities but instead in the alternative way of life offered by Aum.

The Death of the Big Other

Ōsawa Masachi wrote the following in an editorial in Asahi Shimbun for a special collection reflecting on the Subway Sarin Incident in the wake of the execution of Asahara:

Today, the reason organizations like Aum can’t appear is that, everyone knows that in the near future complete destruction will come. There are almost no people who

139 "Ex-Aum Executive Joyu Offers Apology to Cult's Victims on Day of Asahara's Execution." The Japan Times. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/07/06/national/crime- legal/ex-aum-executive-joyu-offers-apology-cults-victims-day-asaharas-execution/#.XBGtexPYrjB. 140 Mori, A (film).

think ‘if we continue like this, it will be okay.’ If we continue as things are at present, Japan will not be able to avoid the destructive end of the earth. Whether it will be on account of a fundamental collapse of the welfare system, due to a labor shortage, extreme inequality, nuclear war, ecological destruction, we do not know, but we can realistically predict that something like that will happen. In spite of that, we cannot even find a path to a society that fulfills even the smallest condition of an ideal society.141

Ōsawa, on the one hand, argues, that an Aum-like group could never return to Japan because everyone is too aware an apocalypse is approaching. On the other hand, despite the awareness of an impending crisis, or perhaps because of it, people are too paralyzed to approach the issue and create something new out of it. It is in this area of paralysis that Ōe goes a step further than both Haruki Murakami’s collection of interviews with Subway

Sarin Incident victims and former Aum members and the documentary A cited in this thesis.

Ōe does so by imagining an alternative future where the disaster of the future can be confronted head-on. In Somersault, this takes the form of the replacement of a belief in

God with a belief in humans working together to create a new form of community.

Ōe does not merely negate the news media’s sensationalism but goes a step further and negates the big Other of both the media and the one believed in by Aum. I am using the ‘big Other’ in the Lacanian sense of that which enables a person’s subjectivity in so far as it is symbolically constituted.142 The alternative timeline that Ōe imagines is not only one where Aum had called off the Sarin gas attacks but also one where Aum called off its belief in Asahara as a figure, in other words, in his symbolic constitution. Ōe does not imagine a world in which the followers find an alternative big Other but instead come to the realization that there is no big Other. In Somersault, Ōe replaces the big Other with a

141 Ōsawa, Ibid. Translation my own. 142 “The Other is, therefore, the locus in which is constituted the I who speaks along with he who, what is said by the one being already the reply, the other deciding, in hearing [entendre] it, whether the one has spoken or not.” Lacan, 358.

79 community of believers relying on each other.

It is critical that the ending of the novel is not merely a disavowal of Aum

Shinrikyo’s apocalyptic vision itself so much as the justification of one’s action through belief in divine figures, for example, Patron. The course of events that resulted in Guide’s relationship with Patron charts out a course of negation of precisely said divine figures.

Guide was born in Nagasaki, a town most famous for its horrific disaster (the 1945 atomic bombing) and most famous for being a Christian stronghold within Japan. Nagasaki sets the stage for what initially attracted him to become Patron’s Guide and establish a new religion. Guide was born into a family that had been Catholic for generations, and he was raised in the immediate postwar period. As a result of his upbringing, Guide was driven to find an answer to the question “Who is greater, Jesus Christ or the Emperor?”143

Guide concluded at a young age that Jesus could never hold any real power in a nation like Japan and left the Catholic Church to try out being a Protestant. He confronted one of the ministers with the question of whether Jesus or the Emperor was greater, to which the minister replied:

Our country’s Emperor was no longer the god people thought he was before and during the war. The new constitution defined him as a symbol of the state, with no actual power. This is what the minister told Guide. Stubborn young man that he was, though, Guide insisted: Who is greater, Jesus Christ or the Emperor? And this led to a falling-out between him and the Protestant church.144

The lack of conviction in the minister’s answer led him to leave Christianity in its institutional forms. However, Guide did not abandon his quest for the answer to his question. Guide’s “dream was for Jesus’s Second Coming to take place in Japan so he could finally answer the question of who was greater. However, since it did not look like

143 Ōe, 177. 144 Ōe, 177.

Christ was going to appear, he came up with the radical idea of people creating a substitute with their own hands.”145 Guide’s eventual role as Patron’s mediator was prefigured by his ambition to create a substitute with his own hands.

Apart from being the mediator for Patron’s trances, Guide also performed the role of leading the Radical Faction that would eventually attempt to convert the nuclear facility into a detonator. Before their terrorist ambitions, the Radical Faction was in charge of conducting high-level scientific research and had their work published in renowned papers.

The research became one of the big draws to the church and while it was not a requirement to be a member to work on the research, the researchers “would usually become believers.”146 By conducting scientific research, Guide’s vision of creating a community of believers that usurp the Emperor came into form.

Scientific research figured as part of the appeal of Aum Shinrikyo as well. Asahara

Shōkō had relatively accurately been able to predict the date and location of the Kobe

Earthquake nine days before it happened. Historian Robert Jay Lifton interviewed a former

Aum member who uses the pseudonym Hirota who performed the scientific research that informed Asahara’s prediction. 147 Aum not only successfully predicted the date and location of the earthquake but also seized on the opportunity created in the crisis to earn positive PR for the religious organization; they distributed water, supplies, and aid to the victims of the earthquake.148

Hirota’s elaboration on the ideological structure of Asahara’s apocalyptic predictions is parallel to Patron’s trances: “Asahara had this strong feeling about

145 Ōe, 177. 146 Ōe, 149. 147 Lifton, 131. 148 Lifton, 132.

Armageddon and, whatever occurred, he would say that it was what he predicted. In this case, it happened to be what he did predict. So he felt that his vision about Armageddon was directly expressed by the earthquake.”149 Any event in material reality, including the

Kobe Earthquake, could be retroactively made into a prediction. Science served to supplement this retroactive ideological function.

Murai Hideo had graduated from the prestigious Osaka University Graduate School of Science. As Aum Minister of Science and Technology, after Asahara accurately predicted the date of the Kobe Earthquake, he was able to capitalize on the accuracy of the prediction. He put forward the conspiracy theory that “There is a strong possibility that the Kobe earthquake was activated by electromagnetic power or some other device that exerts energy into the ground,” by the US military.150 The theory was largely dismissed as being fanciful by the media, but the putting forward of the theory was part of Aum’s sophisticated ideological mechanism. The theory itself fosters their persecution complex while any attempt to dispel the theory would only contribute to the complex.

In Aum, the explicit aim of the scientific research conducted was to develop

Weapons of Mass Destruction which could be used to overthrow the Japanese government and eventually dominate the world. Murai Hideo was in charge of supervising the research on the Weapons of Mass Destruction including Asahara’s long sought-after science-fiction inspired laser.151 In addition to this, Murai also conducted research which sought to codify the spiritual worldview of Aum including studies into brain waves and attempting to find

149 Lifton, 132. 150 David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall, "The Cult at the End of the World," Wired, July 01, 1996, accessed February 12, 2019, https://www.wired.com/1996/07/aum/. 151 David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall. Asahara predicted the perfection of the very laser weapons his scientists were researching: "I believe that in the end a giant laser gun will be developed," Asahara preached in 1993. "When the power of this laser is increased, a perfectly white belt, or sword, can be seen. This is the sword referred to in the Book of Revelation. This sword will destroy virtually all life."

82 ways to measure Chakras. Murai both conducted serious scientific research and performed as a dialogic mediator role with Asahara.

Lifton, quoting other Aum members, notes that: “‘It was Murai who seriously tried to realize Asahara’s casual ideas, which were like delusions’ or ‘Murai tried to materialize everything the master ordered’ – and did so with a ‘serene madness,’ a fanatical calm even greater than that of the guru.”152 Like in Somersault, Asahara had actively sought out the finest scientists, making appeals at science-oriented research universities throughout

Tokyo in the early 1990s. 153 Aum’s fantasy derived vision pushed the direction the scientific research took in the group.

In Somersault, the Radical Faction diverges from the historical events of Aum

Shinrikyo because neither Guide nor Patron pushed the research toward the development of Weapons of Mass Destruction. However, both groups were united in their vision to usurp the Emperor or rather displace the power of the Emperor as their own. For Guide, his vision was to create a new form of community in the wake of this displacement. The

Radical Faction would go on to murder Guide while he was suffering from brain damage early on in the novel. The motive for the murder stemmed from the fact that The Radical

Faction felt betrayed by Guide performing the Somersault and ridiculing the beliefs of the church. Patron, when restarting the church, in a sense restores Guide’s original dream of substituting the Emperor and Jesus Christ with a community of believers.

The setting for the penultimate scene in the novel is a festival held to celebrate the founding of the new church. In this scene, a group of women who had continued to believe in the church even after the Somersault, referred to as the Quiet Women, had planned a

152 Lifton, 118. 153 Lifton, 116.

83 mass suicide so as to bring on the end of times sooner for themselves without informing

Patron of their plan. They arrange for one of the workers in the church, Ogi, to bring them bags of cyanide, but Ikuo and the mother of a believer who had a developmental disorder,

Ms. Tachibana, decide to replace the bags of cyanide with bags of laxatives.

The festival is modeled on the sort held in rural Shikoku that have long captured

Ōe’s attention throughout his literary career. Patron plans to commit suicide at the end of the festival perhaps spurred on after hearing that the Quiet Women planned to kill themselves. Patron’s plan for his suicide parallels Hegel’s interpretation of Christ’s crucifixion. In the Hegelian interpretation of the Crucifixion, what dies on the cross is not just Christ the man but the idea of God itself. In other words, Christ’s death leaves his followers with nothing but a radical community of belief in each other embodied in the

‘holy spirit’ – this in turn parallels Guide’s original intention for creating a substitute for

Jesus and the Emperor.

Patron has himself burned to death in a paper-mâché costume of Guide. Ikuo is put in charge of igniting the costume and is cheered on by Dancer to commit the act of dropping the match onto the costume. By wearing Guide as a costume, Patron not only kills himself as a man but also destroys his own mediator. The new church created loses its mediator- god, Patron, and the mediator of the prophet, Guide, in one symbolic act. The ritualistic suicide produces a rift in line with the name for the new church, the ‘Church of the New

Man.’

In the midst of Patron’s suicidal flames, the Quiet Women burst on to the scene from out of the chapel where they were planning to commit suicide. With their cyanide having been replaced by laxatives, they have been forced to relieve themselves outside in

84 the forest instead of going through with the group suicide. The chaos of the conference to announce the beginning of the Church of the New Man concludes with Patron and Guide’s deaths (materially and symbolically) and with imagery of flames and defecation. The epilogue of the book takes up the issue of the traumatic events of the night and their ultimate mediation in the novel.

The act of shitting, to put it in the crude language employed in the novel, is divinely interpreted twice in the novel. The first time is when, after Kizu passes out and then defecates, his cancer is said to have disappeared and been flushed away. It is quickly turned into an object of medical scrutiny, and his miraculous recovery finds itself published in a journal of medicine. Subsequently, the shit is literally turned into a ‘holy shit’ and interpreted to be a ‘miracle’ by both the doctor and fellow members of the church. Word spread of Kizu being miraculously cured leading to the following event:

“A week after this conversation, on the day before Kizu was to be released from the hospital, a special scoop appeared in a weekly magazine—the magazine itself wasn’t to be found in Matsuyama so they were relying only on the ads in the newspapers—that was based on the exclusive account of his attending physician. The headline ran: RELIGIOUS LEADER WITH SACRED WOUND CURES TERMINAL CANCER WITH HIS HEALING POWER! CANCER THROUGHOUT THE BODY EXPELLED IN ONE LUMP!”154

Even Kizu begins to wonder if Patron had had some healing effect on him despite not being a believer in the new church that Patron establishes. Further, like Asahara taking credit for the accurate prediction of the Kobe Earthquake, Patron is able to retroactively assume credit for Kizu’s healing when it occurs whether or not he had anything to do with it.

The second time that shit is turned into something divine is when the quiet women’s mass suicide is turned into a mass defecation. The imagery of the mass defecation

154 Ōe, 453.

85 juxtaposed with Patron’s symbol-laden suicide is another example of the appearance of the profane in the divine. At the end of the novel, a foreign journalist visits Shikoku in order to write an article on the Church of the New Man and is being shown around by Ogi and a regional representative, Mr. Matsuo. Mr. Matsuo relates that the local people have renamed the stream nearby the site of the conference the “Mountain Stream Where Twenty- five Refined Ladies Shat.” In this sense, the least divine of all acts has become part of the mythological topography of rural Shikoku in the novel.155

The epilogue concludes with Kizu on his death bed after a reprise of his cancer.

The death of Patron at the festival coincides with the end of the remission of Kizu’s cancer.

In a sense, Kizu’s original miracle is not denied so much as it is put into question; did the cancer ever go away in the first place? Was it merely interpreted out of existence in this case by a member of the medical community? The cancer’s divinity, like the other sacred wounds in the novel, is no more than a matter of subjective mediation; the desire to believe.

The last line in the novel is reflective of the changes created in the wake of the funeral. Fred Parks asks, is it fair to say that this church “has become a church without

God?” Ikuo takes a long pause.156 He ultimately answers that a church is a place where

“deeds of the soul are done.”157 In other words, the church has become a place of action superseding belief. Ikuo, who had claimed since his youth to have been able to hear the voice of god, reports that he no longer does and he appears to have resolved his unease over the ending of Jonah. In this sense, God has disappeared for Ikuo.

The ending of the novel describes the dilemma faced by many followers of Aum

155 Ōe, 555. 156 Ōe, 570. 157 Ōe, 570.

86 who were unaffiliated with the Subway Sarin Incident and were not aware it was going to occur. In the wake of the negation of their religious beliefs, what was left for them to believe in? What Ōe’s Somersault provides is a potential alternative. There is no religious or national narrative to justify your actions, you have only yourself as an individual and those you interact with. If we are to create the 'ideal society' Ōsawa Masachi called for, it must be in direct and collective confrontation with the impending apocalypse - not an isolated and sustained avoidance of it.

The Negation of the Novel

In a literary career as long as Ōe’s, it is only natural that certain works of his should effectively go out of publication over time and become stored away only in the annals of complete collections. Somersault, perhaps prematurely, met this fate as it is only available for purchase in e-book form or second-hand in Japan. The same goes for Ōe’s other trilogy of novels concerning religion he wrote before receiving the Nobel Price, The Flaming

Green Tree trilogy. Ōe’s brief experiment with taking up religion as the primary theme in his literary career saw its chapter close although it would continue to influence his later works. Many of Ōe’s more popular works remain in print and are relatively popular both in Japan and abroad. The question then is, what made Somersault so unpopular as to go out of print? To answer this, I would like to consider the case of another work out of print save for collected works, A Political Youth Dies.

It is not that A Political Youth Dies was unpopular so much as it generated such an enormous controversy that Ōe chose to rescind the work after he received many death threats and a brick was thrown through his window by far-right wing groups. The Left

87 would later criticize him for rescinding the book. In his fictional memoir, Letters to the

Memorable Year, he would comment:

I blamed myself that I did not handle Seventeen and A Political Youth Dies with greater skill. That is, I could have written without provoking the right wing and yet making my message more forthright. I could have done this here, done that there … such thoughts keep reoccurring. My regret always ended in the shame that I had lost all prospects of book publishing in the face of rightist threats, while having to receive letters from the left wing every day that charged me with cowardice – all this because of my careless way of writing.158

A Political Youth Dies is a fictional reimagination of the 1960 assassination of

Asanuma Inejirō by seventeen-year-old Yamaguchi Otoya. Yamaguchi later hung himself in prison and wrote on the wall of his cell: “Seven lives for my country. Long live His

Imperial Majesty, the Emperor!”159 In Ōe’s reimagination of the event, Yamaguchi is a chronic masturbator and not particularly politically resolute. In the prequel to A Political

Youth Dies, Seventeen, Ōe portrays the character modeled on Yamaguchi as an anxious and confused teenager in search of belonging.

At the beginning of the novel, he tries to argue leftist political points with his sister who is a nurse in the Self-Defense Forces. He is completely unable to stand his ground in argument and feels humiliated in his defeat which prompts him to lash out violently against his sister. He ends up being taken along to a right-wing rally by a classmate after school where he ends up finding a strong appeal in being part of the Right. As a result, he adopts a right-wing persona and enjoys the respect and fear it seems to draw from those around him. The point of the novel is both to mock right-wing and left-wing politics as masturbatory and highlight the fundamental insecurity drawing people to the Right.

158 Ōe, Kenzaburō, Two Novels: Seventeen, J, translated by Luk Van Haute (New York: Blue Moon Books, 1996), viii. 159 Ōe, vii.

There is a parallel between A Political Youth Dies and Somersault which makes it worth considering them in tandem. The mutually reinforcing relationship between state and public reaction which led to Somersault slipping into obscurity also provoked a similar reaction against A Political Youth Dies. In the case of A Political Youth Dies, Ōe explicitly asked for the book to be withdrawn from publication and there is no official English translation of the novel. I argue, then, that the novel demonstrates its own power in its negation in so far as it highlights the areas of Japanese society that remain unspoken or are explicitly repressed by state organs. Somersault and A Political Youth Dies deal with the two groups that the Subversive Activities Prevention Law has been used against or at least considered for use against – one being political groups (primarily the Japanese Communist

Party) and the second being Aum Shinrikyo.160

In Aum Shinrikyo, Ōe found the same sort of appeal that he has found in the

Emperor system throughout his career, a sort of ambiguity where he, on the one hand, rejects the Emperor system and on the other hand sees its attraction.161 Other scholars have commented on the similar ideological structures of Aum with the Emperor system. Aside from saying that the rebranding of Buddhist religion into a belief system which justified murdering enemies in order to elevate them spiritually, there is also the parallel of Asahara to the Emperor. Robert Jay Lifton elaborates:

One fought and killed not for oneself but for the emperor; if one happened to kill women or children, one was serving a divinity and so had done no wrong. Each soldier was both a shinka or vassal, and a sekishi, or baby of the emperor: a servant and a biological extension. Through expressed in the language of its time, that combination was the psychological equivalent of the Aum principle of a clone.162

160 For a list of times the SAPL has been implemented or considered for implementation, see: Uyehara, Cecil H., The Subversive Activities Prevention Law of Japan: Its Creation, 1951-52, (Boston: Brill, 2010). 161 For example, Ōe famously refused to receive the Order of Culture from the Emperor. 162 Lifton, 249-250. During the wartime, as there were no ‘civilians,’ killing anybody could be justified.

It is notable that in the court decision to carry out the death penalty against Asahara, the presiding judge cites explicitly his “fantasy delusion (kūsō) to rule Japan by becoming its king in the name of salvation” – in a sense the fantasy delusion of becoming the Emperor himself.163 Of course, the Emperor himself derives his power in the postwar period as “the symbol of the State and the unity of the people,” in other words from a kind of collective fantasy.164

Aum Shinrikyo offered an alternative to absolute devotion to or complacence with the Japanese State and its Emperor just as the Japanese Communist Party did. When the

Subversive Activities Prevention Law (SAPL) has been implemented, it has to date been implemented against groups conspiring to, or making preparations for, violent acts against the State. This implicitly means that the police would have been already closely monitoring these organizations to be able to make the case against them for the use of the SAPL.

Ironically, hesitation against the use of the SAPL against Aum in part came from the influence of negative memories associated with the Peace Preservation Law of the prewar and wartime period which functioned to control political thought and expression.165 Yet, conversely, the very ability for the SAPL to exist hinged on invasive police state monitoring of potentially subversive groups before they became legally-verified subversive ones.

Unsurprisingly, this network of suppression was targeted even heavier at Aum in

163 Aonuma Yōichirō ⻘沼陽⼀郎, “‘Arasou kyōso’ hōtei de mita ‘Asahara Shōkō sikei hanketsu’ no shunkan” “抗う教祖”法廷で⾒た「⿇原彰晃死刑判決」の瞬間 [“The Struggling Founder” “Watching the moment of the decision of Asahara Shōkō’s death penalty sentence” in the courtroom], Bungei Shunjū ⽂藝春秋, January 7, 2018, 3, https://guides.library.yale.edu/c.php?g=296262&p=1974227. (accessed February 19, 2019). 164 Japanese Constitution, Nov. 3, 1946, art. 1, para. 1. 165 Uyehara, Cecil H., The Subversive Activities Prevention Law of Japan: Its Creation, 1951-52 (Boston: Brill, 2010), 380.

90 the wake of the Subway Sarin Incident. This took the form of applying the Religious

Organizations Law which enabled the government to strip Aum of its rights as a religious organization and seize its assets. Aum had been effectively crippled as a threat although its members remained under tight police surveillance whether associated with the attacks or not. Aum, crippled under the Religious Organizations Law, was deemed to have lost both the ability and intent to commit another violent act and as such, the SAPL was not applied to it. This happened in spite of the fact that it was deemed to have been an organizational act committed with a specific political purpose, the other qualification for use of the SAPL.166

To return to the discussion about the latency of the reaction against the Subway

Sarin Incident in the Japanese social fabric before the incident actually occurred, the implementation of the SAPL was further complicated by the LDP’s relationship with the religious organization Sōka Gakkai. In fact, Sōka Gakkai and its political party Kōmeitō figured as one of the largest opposition forces politically against the use of the SAPL.

However, the year before the Subway Sarin Incident occurred, Kōmeitō had formed a ruling coalition that had overturned LDP dominance for the first time in the postwar era since the establishment of the 1955 system. As such, the attempt to implement the SAPL was prefigured by LDP desire to regain control over the Japanese Diet.

In response to the control of the Japanese Diet by Kōmeitō in 1993, the LDP and opposition Japanese Socialist Party formed a political alliance known as the April Society to take back political power. Part of the April Society’s strategy was to reify media hysteria surrounding Aum in order to push public opinion against Sōka Gakkai. Japanese religion

166 Uyehara, 388.

91 scholar Levi McLaughlin argues that “politicians who pushed for legal changes affecting religions in the summer of 1995 - all affiliates of the still- active April Society - did not have Aum Shinrikyō principally in mind: they were targeting their nemesis Sōka Gakkai, and they were eager to channel hysteria surrounding Aum into tactics in their anti-Gakkai campaign.”167 Here, a postwar trend of LDP political goals and media coverage coalescing was repeated and the LDP merely seized on the opportunity created in the wake of the

Subway Sarin Incident.

Perhaps Somersault was not only overlooked because of its great length and complexity but also because it was touching on such a deeply rooted and uncontroversial part of the Japanese social fabric. There was not only no desire to take a second look at the vision of Aum and its members, but further, the desire had been long scattered by the

Japanese police apparatus, the LDP, and the Japanese news media. Conversely, the violent reaction against the short story Death of a Political Youth serves as a fundamental reminder against the ontological limits of political expression in postwar Japan. Approaching too close to the Emperor system despite (or perhaps because of) its allegedly ‘symbolic status’ garnered violent reactions and resulted in Ōe’s decision to self-censor.

Both Ishimure and Ōe propose alternate envisionings of community enabled in the wake of disaster, reclaiming the disaster from control of the dominant Japanese news media.

To avoid any confusion, I am not making a false equivocation of Aum Shinrikyo, the

Japanese Communist Party, and the victims of Minamata Disease in so far as their visions for community are concerned. Nor do I even claim that those are stable or coherent visions.

167 McLaughlin, Levi, "Did Aum Change Everything? What Soka Gakkai Before, During, and After the Aum Shinrikyō Affair Tells Us About the Persistent "Otherness" of New Religions in Japan." Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 39, no. 1 (2012): 67.

Instead, in so far as the two novels are concerned, their revisioning of ‘what community can mean’ takes the redemptive core out of what may be dismissed as otherwise violent or riotous groups.

Benedict Anderson famously defined nation as “an imagined political community

– and imagined as both limited and sovereign.”168 The process of creating this imagined community was facilitated by the onset of the industrial revolution and specifically the widespread use of the printing press. In this thesis, the novels could function in the facilitation or imagining of a community. However, rather than create a new Nation, the novels function to redefine what ‘Japan’ means. In other words, they take the malleable core of the Japanese social collective and put forth a vision from which the readers can give and take what they please. The novel then influences the material social interactions people have with their world.

There is a vignette entitled “Long Live the Emperor” toward the end of Paradise which negatively illustrates this phenomenon. The Health and Welfare Minister of the time, Sonoda Sunao, comes to visit the patient Sakagami Yuki who shouts:

“Long live the Emperor!” A dead silence fell over the room. Frowning, the minister turned toward Sughiahara Yuri. In a thin, trembling falsetto voice Yuki began to sing the national anthem. The melody sounded all the more forlorn for its being so pathetically discordant and out of place.

Unable to bear the raw ghastliness of the scene, Sonoda and his party hastily left the room.”169

Sonoda himself had been a captain in the Japanese Imperial Army from 1935-1945.

The “ghastliness” of the scene is not the paradox of the patient who has been so

168 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 39-40. 169 Ishimure, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, 351.

93 dehumanized by the Japanese State which prioritized economic growth over human welfare hailing the symbol of that state. Instead, the gesture becomes ghastly in restoring some idea at the core of the Emperor – someone who can protect and unify the nation. In other words, the obvious falseness of the gesture negates the falseness of the emperor as a system in its concrete implementation and reduces it to an idea which at its core could be a powerful and positive force. In the same way, the power of the novels and the pushback against them stems from this point of tension – the push for the actualization of the ideals already latent within the country and its people against the suppression of those collective ideals by State apparati. In this way, it is not that the two novels here are concerned with a complete rejection of Japan but rather are pushing for the realization of its potential, in a sense moving past Japan, the state, to get to Japan, the idea.

CHAPTER 4

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION

Nearly every day, there is another think piece article on the decline of democracy across the globe, trying to figure out why ‘here’ and why ‘now’ democracy is seeing its demise in former democratic strongholds. For example, a recent article in the Washington

Post declares that “One-third of the world’s population lives in a declining democracy.

That includes in the United States.”170 In the article’s analysis, it relies on the Liberal

Democratic Index (LDI), “which assesses whether there are free and fair elections; whether leaders are constrained by the rule of law and oversight by parliament and the judiciary; and whether civil liberties are protected.”171

While the Washington Post article is not wrong in trying to pose fundamental questions relating to the nature of the decline and providing a metric to quantify it, it is hurt by the assumptions it makes. Namely, it is hurt by its reliance on the idea of “liberal” (i.e.: parliamentary bourgeoise) democracy. The point being that the posing of the question obscures the very way in which the decline of liberal democracy is inscribed into the system of liberal democracy itself. The assessment which the LDI makes relates to democracy as

170 Anna Lührmann and Matthew Wilson, "One-third of the World's Population Lives in a Declining Democracy. That Includes the United States.," The Washington Post, July 04, 2018, accessed February 08, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/07/03/one-third-of-the-worlds- population-lives-in-a-declining-democracy-that-includes- americans/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.81aca3ff8398. 171 Anna Lührmann and Matthew Wilson.

a form of state. I think Jacques Rancière puts it best in his book Hatred of Democracy

when he writes:

Let’s take things in order. What is meant when it is said that we live in democracies? Strictly speaking, democracy is not a form of State. It is always beneath and beyond these forms. Beneath, insofar as it is the necessarily egalitarian, and necessarily forgotten, foundation of the oligarchic state. Beyond, insofar as it is the public activity that counteracts the tendency of every State to monopolize and depoliticize the public sphere.172

The point being that democracy is not the form of state itself but rather the activity which

undergirds it and sometimes undermines it. If we were to take Rancière’s conception of

democracy rather than the liberal democratic one, the decline of democracy would appear

much older than the 2018 moment.

The split between “state” and “democracy” makes taking up Japan as a case study

all the more timely. In a country like Japan where it is relatively common knowledge that

the parliament is more or less a surface level institution beholden to business interests with bureaucratically drafted legislation, there is less of the fetishization of parliamentary democracy. In contrast to the US, and certainly in contrast with the premise of the

Washington Post article, democracy’s health need not only be gauged by liberal

parliamentary democracies functioning but rather in the tension between the state and

democracy. To return to the original theoretical premise of the thesis, the question becomes

one of the way social relationality interacts with the state and the way citizens attempt to

interact outside of it.

To borrow again from Jacques Rancière, he describes the tension between the

Marxist dismissal of the parliamentary system of democracy as a mask for bourgeois

interests (not so different from that in my historical background) and democracy’s power

172 Rancière, Jacques, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2014), 71. 96

to provide concrete political and material change along with rights for its subjects:

The young Marx had no troubles exposing the reign of property lying at the foundation of the republican constitution. The republican legislators made no secret of it. But in so doing he was able to set a standard of thought whose resources have not yet been exhausted: the notion that the laws and institutions of formal democracy are appearances under which, and instruments by which, the power of the bourgeois class is exercised. The struggle against appearances thus became the path leading to ‘real’ democracy, where liberty and equality would no longer be represented in the institutions of law and State but embodied in the very form of concrete life and sensible experiences.173

Rancière’s proposal is that it is too shallow to merely dismiss democracy as nothing more than a surface level institution masking class interests but rather that out of this surface,

supposed ‘real’ democracy can arise in lived experience. Hopefully over the course of the

thesis, a clear sense of the way the novel could potentially function as one such lived

experience could shine through. Conversely, the thesis also showed the limitations of the

novels as political tools and in a negative way, provided a critique of the way the state functions repressively.

The issue of how to revitalize democracy can never be merely a ‘topical’ issue given that democracy in nature needs constant revitalization. Perhaps the “re” should be dropped – democracy must be constantly lived. The point being that it would be wrong to call this thesis ‘timely’ in the staging of its critique but rather a simple reminder of the fundamental way in which democracy functions. Instead, this can be imagined as a future direction for research – continuously connecting how fiction, politics, and democracy interact, exploring it in a variety of contexts, creating an ever-expanding theory that integrates the particular case studies into it. In this way, it may be possible to imagine the consumer economy as not merely a depoliticizing hegemonic ideological apparatus but

173 Rancière, 2-3. 97

rather part of the lived experience of democracy.

Any research would necessarily be only the manifestation of a possible fragment of the direction the research could take. Here, disaster became the vehicle to discuss the political potential of fiction in postwar Japan and even in that niche, this research was rather limited. In the vein of future possible research directions, I would like to say a word on the nested nature of disaster in Japanese history. For example, it is not a coincidence that in the wake of the Fukushima Triple Earthquake Disaster on March 11, 2011, the patronage to the Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution in Kobe built to commemorate the Kobe Earthquake (1995) increased in spite of a downward trend the decade before.174

The occurrence of one disaster necessarily digs up memories of past disasters and

in this way, the disaster of the present becomes a vehicle to understand disasters of the past.

Many of the reviews of Paradise on websites like Amazon and Bookmeter commented on how the book made them think of the recent Fukushima situation. Quite explicitly, the eternal lessons of Minamata are transferred into the eternal lessons of Fukushima by the readers of Paradise. One could even go so far as to say that any redress for Fukushima in a sense is a retroactive redress for Minamata - a manifestation of the undying spirit of protest and political energy created by authors like Ishimure. This is to say that both disasters reveal their universality within their relation to each other. I would label this process the mediatization of disaster.

The mediatization of disaster is not an automatic process but rather one which always requires further secondary mediation. So, for example, the research process for

174 Funck, Carolin, “Mourn, Rebuild, Remember, Prepare: Messages of the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake.” Asia Pacific World, vol 5, no. 2 (Autumn 2014), 22. 98

Fujiwara Shinya’s Yomi no Inu connecting Minamata Disease to Asahara Shōkō shows the

functioning of this mediatization at work. The floating of the Subway Sarin Incident in

Fujiwara’s head was likely a result of constant media coverage of the event paired with

constant follow up into the lives of members of Aum Shinrikyo along with their relatives

and loved ones. From there, the disaster of that present became linked to his interest in

Minamata Disease. Perhaps both were spurred from an interest in India and its religions,

with Asahara and Minamata being linked by Buddhism, at least in Ishimure’s mediation.

Fujiwara’s research process demonstrates the phenomenon that Michael Rothberg

described as “multidirectional memory.” His argument about the nature of multidirectional

memory took the Holocaust as its example – the study of the Holocaust long being thought

of as obscuring or dominating the study of past horrors relating to colonialism or those

occurring in the Third World. What he demonstrates instead is that the Holocaust, in its

pure universality and near metaphorical status, became a vehicle by which activists,

scholars, and ordinary people have come to remember other past tragedies, especially those

relating to colonialism and racism.175 In this thesis, I have employed a similar analytic, the one disaster relating to the other. In other words, I hope that in taking up two specific disasters as my case study in this thesis, the disasters do not obscure the other disasters of the past and present in Japan. Instead, I hope this thesis can be part of a multidirectional network of memory and can become a foil to further write about and redress other disasters of the past.

175 For more, see: Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009). REFERENCES

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