Japanese Writers’ Reflections on the Triple Disaster of 3-11
September 17, 2024
By Derek DiMatteo
On March 11, 2011 an earthquake struck just off the coast of the Tohoku region of Japan, triggering a massive 50-foot-tall tsunami that wiped entire villages off the map and caused the meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima power plant. This became known as the Triple Disaster of March 11, one of the worst disasters in Japanese history. If the triple disaster of March 11, 2011 is unfamiliar to you or has faded from your memory, I recommend watching NHK World-Japan’s video “3/11 — The Tsunami: The First 3 Days” [YouTube]. I should probably mention that in 2011, I was living in Saitama prefecture and teaching at Lakeland University Japan in Shinjuku, Tokyo, and that I volunteered for a few days in the relief effort afterward, so I have a personal connection to the topic of this month’s book selection.
Of the many reactions to the events of 3-11, eighteen were compiled by editors Elmer Luke and David Karashima into the poignant anthology March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown (Vintage/Penguin Books, 2012). The collection of fiction, poetry, manga, and nonfiction includes pieces by Yoko Tawada, Yoko Ogawa, Mieko Kawakami, and Ryu Murkakami that were translated by Jeffry Angles, Michael Emmerich, Margaret Mitsutani, Stephen Snyder, and others. Interestingly, many of these pieces do not even deal directly with the events of 3-11. Rather, these writers approach their subject by analogy, metaphor, and allegory yet still address essential questions of emotional connection, what it means to survive, how one lives through a crisis, and how one deals with fear.
Two of the stories feature anthropomorphized animal characters. A bear is one of the main characters in Hiromi Kawakami’s “God Bless You, 2011” while a dog is a main character in Shinji Ishii’s “Lulu.” By featuring animal characters as protagonists, these stories remind us of the more-than-human lives that were also affected by the triple disaster. They also help readers to see human anxieties from a different perspective. Kawakami’s “God Bless You, 2011” is a revision of his short story “kami” from 1993, in which the human narrator spends the day with his neighbor, who is a talking bear, going to a local river and fishing together. Readers glimpse the bear’s perspective through dialogue and his responses to the reactions of other humans who encounter him during the day. Ishii’s story “Lulu” on the other hand begins with a focalization on the dog, which works as a kind of nurse and child psychologist in an emergency shelter, but in the second half (which occurs at least a decade later) shifts focalization to the now-adult humans the dog had helped. They reminisce about the time in the emergency shelter and disagree about whether the dog was real or a collective fiction that they invented as a game. Imagined or not, the dog had a measurable positive impact, and they credit the dog with enabling them to get through their trauma.
Kazumi Saiki’s short story “Hiyoriyama” struck a few chords with me. First was my recognition of the character Beppu’s attitude toward his neighbor’s plea that he leave his house and go to the evacuation center after the earthquake due to the risk of a tsunami. Beppu scoffs at his neighbor, skeptical of the danger: “Yeah, sure […] just like last year. […] sitting for hours in the evacuation center in the community center, and then nothing happens, and you end up going home again” (167). I think this attitude is fairly common, and I recognized it in myself. But the destructive force of nature should not be underestimated, and evidence of it appears nearly monthly in Japan. The second chord that struck me was when the main characters go to Hiyoriyama, which is a small hill enabling a lookout to see the ocean. On this hill the characters find a stone monument warning about tsunami. When I read this, I recalled seeing a similar stone marker in a town along the coast, with carved words warning people not to build anything between that marker and the beach due to the land being so close to sea level. It was dated roughly 100 years earlier. But of course in the interim, humans had disregarded and then forgotten about the marker and built a lively village and farms between the marker and the sea. And of course when the earthquake and tsunami happened, that whole area was wiped off the map. The message is that we ignore history and the forces of nature at our own peril. It is a reminder that the built environment is not impervious to natural forces, and that human society does not exist outside of nature but rather within nature at all times, even when we think we live somehow beyond nature in our cities.
There are many other great pieces collected in March Was Made of Yarn. Many of them are hopeful and speak to human resilience in the aftermath of trauma, as in the case of Ryu Murakami’s essay “Little Eucalyptus Leaves,” which pairs well with his opinion piece in The New York Times, “Amid Shortages, a Surplus of Hope” (2011.03.17). Another excellent piece, but this time a kind of speculative fiction, is Yoko Tawada’s short story “The Island of Eternal Life,” which became the foundation of her 2014 novella Kentoushi, published in English in 2017 as The Emissary in the USA and as The Last Children of Tokyo in the UK. The work in this collection is thoughtful, engaging, and worth reading.
References and Resources
DiNitto, Rachel. “Narrating the Cultural Trauma of 3/11: The Debris of Post-Fukushima Literature and Film.” Japan Forum, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2014), pp. 340–360. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09555803.2014.915867.
Luke, Elmer and David Karashima, eds. March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown. Vintage, 2012.
Murakami, Ryu. “Amid Shortages, a Surplus of Hope.” The New York Times, 17 March 2011. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/opinion/17Murakami.html.
NHK World-Japan. “3/11 — The Tsunami: The First 3 Days.” YouTube. Feb. 6, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E2Q7kr4L2c.
No Man’s Zone. [無人地帯/ Mujin chintai]. Denis Friedman Productions and Aliocha Films. Directed by Toshi Fujiwara. 2011. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2234297/.
Waseda Bungaku Editorial Department. Japan Earthquake Charity Literature. Waseda Bungaku. http://www.bungaku.net/wasebun/info/charity_en.html.