Fukushima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster ed. by Barbara Geilhorn, Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt (review)

Through the essays in this collection on the representation of Fukushima, art becomes—borrowing from the Brechtian tradition—neither a mirror held up to reality nor a hammer with which to shape it. Art, instead, reveals what is beneath the surface, thus becoming a “Geiger counter for truth.”¹ At first glance, it may appear a little audacious to talk about the arts when facing a catastrophe the size of Fukushima, whose toll in human tragedy surely outweighs any other concerns. Yet in a post-truth world where reliable information is almost impossible to obtain, this collection demonstrates that it is perhaps through treatment via the arts that the painful process of working through trauma may be completed most sustainably.

The merits of this collection lie in the breadth of its analyses. The volume presents research on positionality and literary allusion as manifested in the arts in the aftermath of Fukushima. The studies included were conducted across different aesthetic domains ranging from theater, film, literature, and manga to music and photography, and they expose the sociopolitical as well as cultural underpinnings of local disasters within the global amphitheater. From a literary-historical perspective, the research connects with the emerging field of cultural disaster aesthetics. Investigations into the cultural implications of major nuclear incidents like those at Chernobyl in 1986 and Three Mile Island in 1979 are still quite rare, but are already beginning to be connected genealogically to Fukushima.² We find one such example in the examination of American disaster culture via the literary and pop-cultural reproduction of natural calamities, where the “common image carries with it the ideological imperative that man must control nature—fight nature—destroy nature. That is the capitalist fantasy come to life in the traffic snarls of Los Angeles, the oil platforms of the Gulf of Mexico, and the radioactive waters around Fukushima Dai-ichi.”³ With research still quite sparse, Fukushima and the Arts may well be regarded as the first significant investigation into the link between cultural production and the representation of disaster. Metaphorically at least, the Fukushima nuclear accident created a second tsunami whose successive upsurge of destruction (physical, psychological, and cultural) shaped the way artists across various disciplines expressed themselves in reaction to all that occurred in its wake.

Not only do we live in a precariously fragile world full of natural catastrophes, but we must also contend with the human element, which makes all the difference in the severity of any disaster. Our daily sociopolitical choices are mired in a cacophony of competing discourses, with our subconscious minds greeted by narratives that, along with custom-made identities, are ubiquitously available for us to purchase and comfortably slip into. Yet the “rational” choices we make are not always what they purport to be. On the contrary, free will may be but a temporary hallucination that becomes lost in the tremors of reality. The studies in this book make it clear that we cannot yet talk of a post-Fukushima world, and reading Fukushima and the Arts in a post-Brexit, Trumpian world is a particularly troubling experience.

This collection of essays surrounding the art created in the wake of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and the subsequent nuclear meltdown is true to Henry Ward Beecher’s suggestion that “every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.”⁴ In this sense, the arts—especially art borne of trauma—and the aesthetics of recovery are not what we see, but what we make others see. It is via an exploration of these moments of catharsis that lead to epiphany within modes of representation and positionality that the present collection particularly excels in modeling—and thereby demonstrating the inevitability of—the dictum “Life must go on.” There not only is but ultimately must be poetry after a calamity. That the triple catastrophe became quickly circumscribed...