Nuclear Catastrophes and the Theatre in Tokyo, 1945–2016
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Nuclear Catastrophes and the Theatre in Tokyo, 1945–2016 Kyoko Iwaki Goldsmiths, University of London PhD October 2017 1 I hereby declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own and has not been and will not be submitted, in whole or in part, to any other university for the award of any other degree. Kyoko Iwaki 2 Acknowledgements First, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Maria Shevtsova for her rigorous support of my PhD study through patience, insight, and immense knowledge. Without this kind of mentorship, I would never have completed the thesis. I would also like to thank producers, critics and scholars in Japan for providing images, recording and documents essential to the research. Among many, my thanks go to Professor Uchino Tadashi of Tokyo University; Takahashi Masako of Arts for Hope; Suzuki Taku of Art Revival Connection Tōhoku; Nishimura Seiko of Noda Map; Omiya Natsuko of Bunkamura; Sōma Chiaki and her former Festival/Tokyo team; Nakamura Akane, Ouki Tamiko and Koetting Nana of Precog; Hayashi Kana of Mum and Gypsy; Miyoshi Sachiko of Quinada; Itō Tastuya of Gorch Brothers; Hashimoto Nozomi of Karas; the administration team of Gekidan Mingei; Suzuki Rieko and Kaneda Akiko. Special thanks go to William Andrews and Dr. Matthew Yoxall for proofreading my text. I am especially grateful to those artists, such as Takayama Akira, Okada Toshiki, Matsui Shū and Fujita Takahiro, who have spared their time for my interview. I would also like to thank Nakatsuru Akihito, Ōnobu Perikan, Murakawa Takuya among others who have kindly provided their unpublished texts. My greatest gratitude goes to Ninagawa Yukio, my spiritual mentor who passed away in May 2016. Without his inspirations and encouragements, I would never have taken the decision to study in the UK. My sincere thanks go to the Goldsmiths’ Theatre and Performance Department, British Association for Japanese Studies, The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, Funds for Women Graduates and Suntory Foundation for financially supporting this project. Last but not least I would like to thank my family for supporting me spiritually throughout the course of this thesis and my life in general. 3 Abstract Based on the analytical framework that nuclear threats have always affected Japan after World War II, this thesis develops an alternative narrative of post-war Japanese theatre through the socio-cultural analyses of selected A-bomb (atomic bomb) and post- Fukushima plays. By shedding light on those plays, which respond to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima; and, by juxtaposing those theatre-makers not previously associated with one another, the study introduces five types of theatre, which are products of nuclear-afflicted society. Drawing from Robert J. Lifton’s contention that nuclear aftermath could be ‘invisible’, the study focuses on plays that not only report the tangible outcomes of the event, but also imagine beyond visible calamities. By adopting the interdisciplinary methodology of the Sociology of the Theatre, this thesis demonstrates how the plays in question materialised through constant dialogue with nuclear-afflicted societies. The keynote that this thesis strikes is that the languages, methodologies and aesthetics that are adopted in theatres, which respond to and represent various nuclear catastrophes, challenge the border of polar opposites such as here/there, life/death, science/ belief, rational/absurdity and present/past. The five strands of nuclear-afflicted theatres and the set of theatre-makers introduced are: ‘The Theatre of Collective Kūki’ (air) developed by Noda Hideki; ‘The Theatre of Guilt and Self-Censorship’, introduced through works by Hotta Kiyomi, Inoue Hisashi and Okada Toshiki; ‘The Theatre of Sensate Atomisation’, which argues the political standpoints of Miyoshi Jūrō and Takayama Akira; ‘The Comedy of Post-humanism Absurdity’, that deals with the post-humanist and post-human theories of Betsuyaku Minoru and Matsui Shū; and ‘The Theatre of Nuclear Nostalgia’, in which Kitamura Sō and Fujita Takahiro present a bifocal time structure. Rather than chronologically, the 4 study is thematically structured, through which arguments on why analytical parallels could be drawn between theatres after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima are developed. 5 Table of Contents Page Introduction ………………………………………………………………………… 7 Chapter One: The Invisible Catastrophe……………………………………… 30 1. Illusory Digital Witnessing after Fukushima ………………………………… 33 2. The American Censorship and ‘Atoms for Peace’ …………………………… 38 3. Code of Wa: The Politics of Invisible Kūki …………………………………… 54 4. Noda Hideki and the Theatre of Collective Kūki ……………………………… 62 5. Theatres that Render the Invisible Visible……………………………………… 70 Chapter Two: The Theatre of Guilt and Self-Censorship……………………78 1. Guilt in Shingeki: Hotta Kiyomi’s The Island ………………………………… 86 2. Guilt Beyond Shingeki: Inoue Hisashi’s The Face of Jizō …………………… 97 3. Guilt After Fukushima: Okada Toshiki’s Current Location ………………… 113 Chapter Three: The Theatre of Sensate Atomisation ………………………135 1. Theatre Against Post-Catastrophe Totalitarianism …………………………… 142 2. Sensate Atomisation in Miyoshi Jūrō’s He Who Risked ………………………151 3. The Third Path Independent of Fixed Ideologies…………………………….. 159 4. Politics of the Senses in Takayama Akira’s Tokyo Heterotopia ……………… 166 5. The Pre-Political Theatre of Alienated Awakening…………………………… 176 Chapter Four: The Comedy of Post-Humanism Absurdity…………………189 1. Betsuyaku Minoru’s Language of the Absurd………………………………… 195 2. Shutaisei and Negation of Western Humanism ……………………………… 205 3. The Elephant: Post-Humanist Theatre beyond Everyday Absurdity ………… 210 4. Becoming Non-humans in Post-Fukushima Theatres………………………… 220 5. Matsui Shū’s Absurd Post-Human Theatre…………………………………… 230 Chapter Five: The Theatre of Nuclear Nostalgia ……………………………241 1. Kitamura Sō’s Ode to Joy and ‘Buoyant Nihilism’ in the 1980s………………247 2. Fujita Takahiro and the Post-Fukushima Imagination in the 2010s ………… 261 3. Three Traits of Nuclear Nostalgia …………………………………………… 274 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………287 Notes …………………………………………………………………………………295 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………… 300 6 Introduction Nuclear catastrophes cannot be deciphered from either ‘the hindsight’ or ‘from a vantage point’. This is because, on the one hand, these catastrophes are temporally and topographically unbounded. On 6 August 2014, at the sixty-ninth ceremony commemorating the day of the atomic bombing, Hiroshima City Mayor Matsui Kazumi (familial names are placed first as in the traditional Japanese style) announced that 5,507 new names had been added to the Memorial Cenotaph for the Atomic Bomb Victims in that year: the temporal boundary of Hiroshima is invisible.1 By the same token, according to a citizen test conducted seven months after the Fukushima disaster, it was proven that the amount of radioactive caesium in a patch of dirt near a baseball field in Tokyo was equal to that in some contaminated areas around Chernobyl: the spatial boundary of Fukushima is also invisible.2 The present and the past are disarranged and the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ are disoriented; this imperceptibility foments dramatised fear, which induces socio-psychological disorders in the population. On the other hand, the nuclear narratives cannot be made sense of, because when observed from the purview of existing human law, nuclear catastrophes surpass prevalent ethics. To reason the instant killing of around 140, 000 unarmed people in Hiroshima and approximately 70,000 in Nagasaki is nothing short of impossible, and thus it naturally demands words beyond common ethics. To say more, when catastrophes of such scale are described in existing words, it seems as though the speaker is deliberately short- changing what has happened. More often than not, however, as the act of naming is one of the mainstays of human intellect, people reassure themselves that the situation is 7 under control by labelling all sorts of events with expedient yet not necessarily suitable words. Along the same line of argument, it is important to note that the prefix ‘post’ generates a slightly misguided definition when used in such a context. A more acceptable notation to express the state after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima is intra- or inter- nuclear eras. This is because once a nuclear disaster occurs, as Paul Virilio argues, ‘a whole host of incidents and disasters [unfurl in] a chain reaction’ (intra, Virilio, 2004: 257); it further generates ominous premonitions towards further or another nuclear tragedy in the future (inter). Therefore, although the prefix ‘post’ will be used in this thesis, purely on a linguistic level, one should always keep in mind that the prefix does not suggest that the event is already over. Taking all this as a preamble to set the scene, it is important to note, first and foremost, that one of the contributions of this thesis lies in taking its very premise from the ethical and physical impasse of nuclear disasters. That is, when analysing those Japanese theatre productions that reflect, respond to and represent the collective psyche of the nuclear- afflicted society, the thesis will not even try to render a unanimous narrative of a nuclear catastrophe; nor would it suggest the ethically correct action per se or name the most damaged community through the theatre productions discussed. This is because when one fallaciously tries to depict the multivalent ramifications of the nuclear aftermath within the strictures of