When the Tsunami Came to Shore

When the Tsunami Came to Shore <UN> <UN> When the Tsunami Came to Shore Culture and Disaster in Japan Edited by Roy Starrs LEIDEN | BOSTON <UN> Cover illustration: The Great Wave Off Fukushima by Roy Starrs, 2014. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data When the tsunami came to shore : culture and disaster in Japan / edited by Roy Starrs. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-26829-6 (hardback : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-26831-9 (e-book) 1. Disasters-- Social aspects--Japan--History. 2. Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, Japan, 2011. 3. Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Japan, 2011. 4. Typhoons--Japan--History--21st century. 5. Floods--Japan--History--21st century. 6. Atomic bomb--Japan--History--20th century. 7. Kanto Earthquake, Japan, 1923. 8. Disasters--Japan-- Religious aspects--History. 9. Disasters in literature. 10. Japanese literature--History and criticism. I. Starrs, Roy, 1946- DS806.5.W47 2014 363.34’940952090512--dc23 2014020424 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. isbn 978-90-04-26829-6 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-26831-9 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper. <UN> 津波来し時の岸辺は如何なりしと見下ろす海は青く静まる What was it like then When the tsunami came to shore? I look down and wonder – Below me spreads the blue sea Quiet and perfectly still. Emperor Akihito, New Year’s poem, 20121 ∵ 1 Translated by the Imperial Household Agency. Punctuation has been added. <UN> Contents List of Illustrations ix Introduction Cultural Responses to Disaster in Japan 1 Roy Starrs PART 1 Cultural Responses to the Triple Disaster of March 2011 1 Nature’s Blessing, Nature’s Wrath Shinto Responses to the Disasters of 2011 23 Aike P. Rots 2 Gods, Dragons, Catfish, and Godzilla Fragments for a History of Religious Views on Natural Disasters in Japan 50 Fabio Rambelli 3 Buddhism The Perfect Religion for Disasters? 70 Brian Victoria 4 Post-3/11 Literature in Japan 91 Roman Rosenbaum 5 These Things Here and Now Poetry in the Wake of 3/11 113 Jeffrey Angles 6 ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ Responses to 3/11 – Constructing Community Through Music and the Music Industry 139 Henry Johnson 7 Learning that Emerges in Times of Trouble A Few Cases from Japan 166 Joy Hendry <UN> viii Contents 8 Observations on Geomentality in Japan and New Zealand 179 Kenneth Henshall Part 2 Towards a Wider Perspective – Japanese Cultural Responses to Earlier Disasters 9 ‘All Shook Up’ Post-religious Responses to Disaster in Murakami Haruki’s after the quake 195 Jonathan Dil 10 Disaster and National Identity The Textual Transformations of Japan Sinks 214 Rebecca Suter 11 Belated Arrival in Political Transition 1950s Films on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 231 Yuko Shibata 12 Hiroshima Rages, Nagasaki Prays Nagai Takashi’s Catholic Response to the Atomic Bombing 249 Kevin M. Doak 13 The Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923 and Poetry 272 Leith Morton 14 Proletarian Writers and the Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923 299 Mats Karlsson 15 The ‘Silenced Nexus’ Female Mediation in Modern Japanese Literature of Disaster 318 Janice Brown Index 345 <UN> List of Illustrations figure caption 4.1 Brother & Sister Nishioka, “The Crows and the Girl” 105 6.1 “Marching J” publicity logo 145 6.2 Album cover of Songs for Japan (2011) 158 13.1 Police Headquarters in Tokyo burning and the Asakusa Tower in ruins 274 13.2 Drawing by Takehisa Yumeji 279 13.3 Cover of Earthquake Poetry Collection 284 13.4 Poem by Paul Claudel 285 13.5 Aizu Yaichi on the 1923 earthquake 288 13.6 Akiko in 1926, three years after the quake 293 <UN> Introduction Cultural Responses to Disaster in Japan Roy Starrs University of Otago 日本を潰し日本に汚れ春の海 crushing Japan soiling Japan the spring sea seki etsushi … The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age, that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. dylan thomas ∵ It may be said that the twenty-first century is the age not so much of the ‘revolt of the masses’ as of the ‘revolt of nature’. The spread of scientific-industrial civilization and consumer capitalism around the globe has created an immense ‘global middle class’ but it has also damaged our planet’s natural environment to such an extent that ‘natural disasters’, if not actually directly caused by human activity (as in global warming), are certainly made even more disas- trous by those activities. The mega-disaster in northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011, is a prime example of this, with an (avoidable) nuclear accident following quickly in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami. The warning that Rousseau issued after the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755, just on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, that humans were unwise to live crowded together in large cities, alienated from nature, and thus suffered far more from nature’s wrath, has now, over two-and-a-half centuries later, become less easy to dis- miss as the comical rant of a crackpot romantic ‘nature-lover’. (And, of course, the heirs of Rousseau are to be found all around us today, and, as we shall see, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004268319_002 <UN> 2 Starrs include some of the Japanese writers mentioned in this book.) Humanity today is suffering from its ‘alienation from nature’ or ‘abuse of nature’ in ways that even Rousseau could not envision. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that the study of disaster in all its multifarious aspects is an area of urgent and increas- ing interest for many of us as we await with trepidation what the future might bring. As an emerging academic field, ‘disaster studies’ incorporates both scientific and humanistic disciplines. The sub-field that investigates ‘cultural responses to disaster’ may not be quite as wide-ranging but, as I think this book amply demonstrates, still lends itself well to a multidisciplinary approach. The con- tributors to this volume include scholars of Japanese religion, anthropology, history, intellectual history, literature, music and popular culture. One of the things that interested me most as editor was to see how a number of common themes or leitmotifs emerged quite ‘naturally’ despite this diversity of disciplines and approaches and certainly without any prompting on my part. Perhaps the most striking of these was what Brian Victoria usefully calls the ‘shamanistic’ response to disaster and, more particularly, its associated idea of disaster as tenbatsu or ‘Heaven’s punishment’ (84). Other important leading themes which emerged spontaneously in the same way include social- anthropological, political, cultural and even aesthetic issues, and I will touch upon some of the main ones in what follows. The four thematic or subject headings below fall roughly within four disciplinary areas – religion, anthropology/cultural studies, literature and art, and politics – but they are not meant to imply that the book is divided up along strict disciplinary lines into four discrete and unrelated segments. As even my discussion of these ‘four main disciplinary areas’ will reveal, the chapters ‘overlap’ with each other themati- cally in many interesting and thought-provoking ways, not all of which I will elaborate here. Here I am merely pointing to some of the most significant con- vergences, or some of the more suggestive ways the chapters may be seen to ‘mutually illuminate’ each other. 1 Religious/Theological Responses Devastating disasters confront us, in the most immediate and violent way, with the precarious, arbitrary and contingent nature of our existence; they can induce a sense of existential crisis, shaking the foundations of our most cher- ished and fundamental beliefs, or of our very sense of reality and of moral law. Thus, when we address the question of the cultural impacts of disaster, it seems natural to begin on this most fundamental level, with its impacts on <UN> Introduction 3 religious faith and philosophical worldview. Most of the chapters herein touch upon these fundamental issues in one way or another, but our first three chapters deal directly with religious or theological responses to ‘3/11’ (as the March 2011 events are now conventionally designated – suggesting, of course, that they shook Japan as much as ‘9/11’ shook the us) as well as other disasters. Perhaps the most famous, or infamous, immediate ‘theological’ response to the March 2011 disaster came from the Tokyo governor, Ishihara Shintarō (a right-wing politician long notorious for his habit of making offensive remarks), who invoked the hoary old word tenbatsu to suggest that the ‘selfish- ness’ of present-day Japan had incurred ‘Heaven’s punishment’.

Load more