The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 9 | Issue 36 | Number 3 | Article ID 3596 | Sep 05, 2011

1

Sorrow, History and Catastrophe in Japan After the 3.11Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Meltdown: A PersonalEncounter　　３．１１地震・津波・炉心溶融後の日本における悲しみ、歴史、惨事−−個人的な出会い

Vivian Blaxell

Sorrow, History and Catastrophe inJapan After the 3.11 Earthquake,Tsunami and Nuclear Meltdown: APersonal Encounter

By Vivian Blaxell

The most precious thing in l i fe is i tsuncertainty. Kenkō, c. 1283-1350

When my marriage ends I am in the middle ofreading Norwegian Wood. Traumatized by thenews that Naoko, the enigmatic and troubledwoman he loves, has committed suicide,Murakami’s narrator, Watanabe Toru, packs hisrucksack, empties his bank account and takesthe first express train out of Tokyo. For monthshe wanders through Japan from town to town.He sleeps in doss houses and car parks,stations, and on beaches, eats anything or notall. Movement is meant to be the antidote toWatanabe’s trauma and sorrow, and whatWatanabe does inspires me. Shocked andgrieving, I travel. I go back to Japan planning toleave my sorrow behind me, dump it in theexhaust of Pratt and Whitney jet engines,meditate it away at a Zen temple, return to thesafety of a land that was once my home, forgetthe loss in work and weeks of wanderingthroughout southwestern Honshū. But once Igo, what I find in Japan is more sorrow than Ihave ever known, more loss than it seemspossible for any community to sustain. In myquest to escape my own sorrow I find manyother sorrows layered across time and space ina Japan deeply etched by the traumas of

catastrophe, traumatic memory and history.Once I am there in Japan, it is all so sad or soenduring in the sadness, that my own grief atlosing the person I love more than any other issimultaneously exacerbated and absorbed byit.

By the time I begin my therapeutic journey, theMarch 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclearmeltdowns in north-eastern Japan, which leftm o r e t h a n 2 0 , 0 0 0 p e o p l e d e a d o rmissing,1 whole cities razed and iodine, cesiumand strontium in the air, water and land, arerelegated to page three or four in theinternational press. Gaddafi, Syria and thesexual crimes of the chief of the IMF now havepride of place. I had turned off the television onMarch 20, unable to watch any more. And eventhough my profession as a specialist inJapanese history and politics meant that Ifollowed the many aftermaths of the March 11disaster, I had done so in a clinical way: dataabout the Fukushima nuclear power plants;millisieverts; efforts to contain what seemedalmost uncontainable; analyses of likely effectson economic growth; criticism of a system ofgovernance that allows energy companies likeTEPCO to get away with negligence in thesiting, construction, maintenance and criticalitymanagement of nuclear power plants. As mymarriage teetered and collapsed, the humanimpact news was too wrenching for me towatch. I kept the emotional matter of thedisaster as far away as possible. But as soon asI take my seat on All Nippon Airways’ Beijing toOsaka flight, my detachment ruptures. The

APJ | JF 9 | 36 | 3

2

flight attendant hands me The Japan Times andAsahi Shimbun. The first four pages of bothnewspapers are full of earthquake, tsunami andnuclear meltdown news, much of it emotionalmatter: orphaned dogs; children suffering fromPost-Traumatic Stress Disorder; the use oftherapeutic animals in shelters; lost wives andbrothers; cesium in the meat. For the first timeit occurs to me that shaking off my own sorrowin Japan might not be such a good plan. I lookaway from the newspapers. In my mind, thesober colors and hushed service of the businessclass cabin now appear suffused with sadness.The flight attendant is too austere, miserly withher smiles, and I imagine grief at work there.The man seated next to me reads nothing butthe post-earthquake news in Asahi, Yomiuri,and Nihon Keizai, after which he only picks athis Wagyu beef lunch while knocking backseveral small bottles of good shōchū as thoughtrying to drink himself out of what he has readin the newspapers earlier.

At Kansai International, Renzo Piano’s long,low curving terminal is almost empty, echoing.The JR West Haruka airport express is almostempty. My hotels are almost empty and one ofthem will close down completely at the end ofJune because, my taxi driver tells me in nearlyperfect Californian accented English, “350rooms! Before the great earthquake and all thisnuclear meltdown they were filling about 60percent of the rooms and that wasn’t good.Now only 15 percent of the rooms are occupiedand that’s shut up shop and go home time,neee?“ Even shinkansen bullet train servicesseem emptied out, reservations unnecessary,empty seats in the unreserved cars alwaysavailable. The Japan Rail group of companiesreports that the number of passengerstraveling on JR bullet and other express trainsfell by 11 percent year on year during the endof April Golden Week holiday, usually the peaktravelling period in Japan.2 My Japanesecolleagues and friends tell me people are toosad to travel and that it seems wrong now tospend money and to enjoy oneself. And

according to the Japan National TourismOrganization, visits to Japan from abroaddropped steeply after March 11; 73 percentless in the last 2 weeks of March 2011 than inthe same period the previous year; 62.5percent less in April than in April 2010, and50.4 percent less in May 2011 than in May2010.3

Japan feels like a land losing density and in thisemptiness, poignancy abounds. A taxi driver inHiroshima complains that he must struggle tomake money now and describes Japan to me as“kanashii kuni” a sad country. Waiters wearbuttons that say “Ganbarō Nippon!” “Try hardJapan!” Many cities I visit -- Yamaguchi, Hagi,Gifu, Mino -- have new signs on street cornersadjacent to the municipal offices and themessage on the signs is always the same: Bestrong; bear it. The eyes of my first Japaneselanguage teacher fill with tears when she talksabout what all the radioactive material in theair, in the earth, the water and the plants willdo to the children, but her sorrow bursts intovoice when she watches the news. “They woulddo anything to hide the truth,” she says, “Theenergy companies. The government. Sacrificeus all.” Two Korean tourists in Hagi ask me ifI’m a Christian. When I tell them not, theyfrown and say, “How could you not be in viewof all this?” and they gesture wide with theirarms to take in the whole country.

Over a hotel buffet breakfast one morning withsigns on the yoghurt telling me it’s not fromFukushima or even close to Fukushima, I comeupon a newspaper story about a barber fromthe small city of Natori right next to Sendai inMiyagi Prefecture, one of the worst hit areas. Aphotograph shows sixty-two year old HashiuraShin’ichi giving free haircuts and hair styling topeople living in shelters in the city andsurrounding areas. His wife, Toyoko, died inthe tsunami trying to help an elderly neighborto safety at the local middle school, which wasengulfed by the great wave. Mr. Hashiurablames himself because he told his wife to take

APJ | JF 9 | 36 | 3

3

the neighbor to the middle school rather thanto the care center where he was heading andwhere he was safe against the tsunami. Eightdays later, he found Toyoko’s body in atemporary morgue. He had cut and styled hiswife’s hair the morning before the earthquake,but he had been rushed and not done his bestwork for her and when he came to her lifelessbody, Mr Hashiura bowed and wept andbegged her forgiveness for telling her to takerefuge in the middle school and for not givingher the best cut and blow-dry he was capableof.4 Mr Hashiura’s story is too close to thebone, partner lost forever to something thatcan only be accepted not understood, clouds ofself-blame and doubt. I fold the newspaper andpay my bill. I have taken my own sadness andattempted to travel it out of existence, but theplace to which I go for this healing or purgingis forlorn and grieving, a nation traumatized bywhat happened on March 11, 2011 and by whatwas and was not done since then. The sorrowpiles up and up in signs and exchanges andstories until it dwarfs my own.

And to make matters more complicated, inJapan I spend much of my time in Hiroshima,which must be one of the saddest places in theworld, especially since its primary sorrow hasbeen so artfully rebuilt and greened in thename of peace. There is little sign of the A-Bomb and what it did on August 6, 1945 inHiroshima these days and most of what there isremaining has been turned into a didacticmuseum, stripped of original emotionalcontent, transformed by the message of worldpeace. Even the iconic A-Bomb Dome seemsless sad than nostalgic in the way that ruinswere beautifully nostalgic for the BritishRomantics. It is carefully fenced off, carefullyexplained on tablets and small billboardsaround the site and carefully preserved, forthrough the gaping windows and doors one cansee metal support beams and joints installed in1967 and painted the same color as thebuilding itself, holding it all together in itsruined state. But the atomic sorrow of

Hiroshima is mostly glossy now, under-signifiedby Kenzo Tange’s Hiroshima Peace MemorialPark with its a raised modernist buildings, itspeace monument inspired by the shape ofancient Japanese imperial tombs and its highlyaxialized spatial arrangements with plaza andgreen swathes covering the space betweenrivers where before August 6, 1945 there hadbeen a maze and hectic bustle of homes,businesses and theaters at the heart of thecity.

On my first day in Hiroshima, I walk for hoursaround the perimeter of what was thehypocenter of the atomic explosion. The springrain clouds break up and release dappledsunshine on the rivers. Everything is green andvery clean. Although I come across monumentshere and there, and scraps of atomic ruins,many of them draped in rainbow coloredshawls made from thousands of origami papercranes, the scene and the sense of the place isnearly idyllic.

Idyllic Hiroshima

A man in baggy shorts sits smoking

a Mild Seven and scratching his crotch

next to an atomic monument.

Homeless men gossip beneath maple trees. A

APJ | JF 9 | 36 | 3

4

panting, pink-cheeked band of high school boysjogs along a towpath. A woman with metalteeth walks two plump tri-color cats along thepromenade across the river from the PeacePark. “Oh, no,” she tells me, “they don't want todo it every day, only when the sun is out andthe river is like a mirror do they come withme.” She strolls away, the cats beside her,grave and rigorously dignified on their outing,tails erect. As Japanese cities go, Hiroshima isbeautiful, especially around the hypocenter ofthe 1945 explosion; what actually happenedhere and the sorrow it generated is hard to see.Walking, I think of my failed marriage andpractice letting my sadness go like invisibledust into the sky and into the pretty parks andthe sluggish rivers of the city, which secrets itsown sorrow behind modernist architecture andpeace conferences, buries it in a locked andcryptic mound in the Peace Memorial Parkcontaining the ashes of 70,000 unidentifiedvictims of the American bomb.5

Near Tange’s buildings at the entrance to thePeace Memorial Park, I trip and fall heavilywhere it should be impossible to trip and fall. Atiny woman, profoundly bowed, withered andnot much more than a concatenation of bonesin web of skin, hobbles over to me and helpsme up. She apologizes over and over again forthe pavement and for Hiroshima itself formaking me fall. Although she can barely walk,she insists on taking me to a drug

Lazing in the hypocenter

store where she buys some disinfectant wipesand bids me apply them to my scratches. Whenshe bends down and bows her head to look atthe graze on my ankle, her shirt gapes at thenape of her neck and I see a blossom of thick,pale scar tissue there, disappearing down herback. It is impossible to ask. What is theetiquette? Is she hibakusha: a person affectedby the atomic bombing? Is she the woman whograbbed an atomic burn victim by the arm tohelp them, but the meat on the skinless armcrumbled like tofu? Now the sorrow ofHiroshima, almost hidden in green swards andpeaceful avenues and fancy architecture,erupts into view. On August 6, 1945, themajority of people living in the city werewomen, children, Koreans and the aged. Manyof those at the hypocenter and in its radius whodid not die in the blast, nor in the 3 monthsfollowing the blast, still live today. Yet theyhave endured lives of almost incomparablesuffering. Stigma clings to them. Traumaticmemories warp emotional life. Hibakusha leadlives dominated by persistent health problemsand fear of health problems, includingdramatically increased incidence of thyroidcancers, breast cancers, leukemia, uterine andcolon cancer. Most show evidence ofchromosomal rearrangement and instability.Goiter and cataracts are common. Somehibakusha carry glass or other solid fragmentsgenerated by the explosion deep in their tissue.Keloid scarring caused by radiation burns oftensoftens over the years but not always, andthere is one medical report describing a manwhose scarred skin is so tight that if he gainsmore then 2 kilograms in weight his skincauses agonizing pain because it cannotstretch.

She looks up at me. “Does it hurt?” she asks,very formal, and I say, “Yes, it really does,” butI don’t mean the ankle and she nods as thoughshe knows, then leads me to a bench outside

APJ | JF 9 | 36 | 3

5

Tange’s Peace Center and says goodbye. I sitthere for a long time. The sun passes its zenithand the spring rain clouds gather again. Yet itdoes not rain. And I think about my partnernow lost to me in Germany and the 20,000 deadin Tōhoku and the s t ron t ium in thegroundwater, cesium in the food, in the bodiesof children, Mr Hashiura’s wife, and I thinkabout the women who bore microcephalicbabies after the atomic bombing of the citywhere I now sit, and I cry.

This multiplicity of sorrows I find in Japan -- thepersonal, the post-catastrophic, the atomic --becomes only more complicated and moreintrusive the longer I stay and the more work Ido on my research agenda. Even Tange Kenzo’sdesign for the Peace Memorial Park escapes itsstated purpose of memorializing the sadness ofHiroshima’s atomic destruction: Lisa Yoneyamahas noted that Tange appears to havetransferred the basic design of the HiroshimaPeace Memorial Park from his larger design forthe Commemorative Building Project for theConstruction of Greater East Asia in 1942, amassive Shintoist memorial zone to be built atthe foot of Mount Fuji.6 Though never begun,perhaps because of funding problems, Tange’searlier project was intended to give builtexpression to a triumphal celebration of Japan’sat once authoritarian and collaborativecolonialism in Asia. Now the design intended tocelebrate imperial domination and victory,scaled down but largely intact, stands for worldpeace and the victims of atomic warfare. Yet,Japan’s imperial past seeps out of Tange’sbuildings and on this day of encounters withthe sadness of Hiroshima, the imperialist taintin the design of the Peace Park points me backto my research, and sends me off to the islandof Ōkunoshima, where I find myself enmeshedin yet another layer of sorrow.

Tange’s Peace Memorial Park

Nothing is remote in Japan, almost everythingis efficient, but by Japanese standards,Ōkunoshima is not easy to get to. I take a taxito Hiroshima Station. Soft rain falls on thestreets. Soft sighs and gasps come from thedashboard: the driver has been streamingpornographic videos on his Docomo mobilephone and forgot to turn it off when I hoppedin. He notices now and switches it off. I take aslower bullet train service to Mihara, a plainlittle city northeast of Hiroshima. Again, thetrain is almost empty. An hour wait at MiharaStation where the station signs sport a pictureof a happy red octopus wearing a samuraihelmet, brandishing a sword and a paperlantern in two of his tentacles. Beneath thehappy octopus the legend reads, “Mihara ---Octopus Town.” From Mihara, Japan Rail Westruns a two-car train down the snaking coastlineof the Seto Naikai, the Inland Sea, to a littletown, Tadanoumi, from where a ferry runs toŌkunoshima. Once the suburbs of Mihara dropaway, everything seems washed in gray. Thecolors of the sea, the cedars on the islands,even the signs warning people not to step intothe road are soft and faded by warm haze.Mountains tumble almost to the sea.

My train curls around the spines of tinybeaches, past dilapidated shrines to localdeities, a small high-tech shipyard. Then, whenwe break out of a tunnel, Ōkunoshima appearsa few kilometers off the coast, right where my

APJ | JF 9 | 36 | 3

6

map and my handbook had told me it wouldbe.

This is the island where much of Japan’s poisongas and poison gas weapons delivery systemswere produced during the long war beginningin China in the 1930s and ending in August1945. In those days the government erasedŌkunoshima from maps. Trains runningbetween Tadanoumi and Mihara went alongwith their window shutters down so the islandcould

Ōkunoshima coast line

not be seen. It was forbidden to look. Curtainswere always drawn on the windows of ferriesplying the waters around Ōkunishima. Sometrains along the Kure line even carriedplainclothes kempei military police to ensurethat nobody peeped.7

By the time I visit Ōkunoshima, I know quite alot about the island’s history and about thesadness of that history. In many ways, WorldWar I had been the first truly total war, andpart of that totality was an overlap of scientificresearch, capitalist Fordist production methodsand weapons technologies. The list of newweapons technologies produced by this overlapis long: interrupter gear, allowing a machinegun to be mounted behind the propeller so the

pilot could fire directly ahead along the plane'sflight path; long range strategic bombers; tanktechnology and mass tank mobilization;“dreadnought” battleships; submarines able tobe powered while submerged; heavy long-rangeartillery, and poison gas weapons. Most ofthese new weapons were, however, tooexpensive for the Japanese government as itsought to reorganize

No looking from the train at Ōkunoshima

and re-arm the military after World War I.8 Notso chemical weapons. Poison gases were cheapand the other colonial powers were making,stockpiling and using them in minor wars andskirmishes around the world throughout the1920s and 1930s, despite internationalprohibitions. The army thus initiated andsupported research, production and training inpoison gas weapons use.9 Scientists fromJapan’s most prestigious imperial universitiescontributed to the program. Production ofmustard, lewisite, phosgene, hydrogencyanide,chloracetophenone and diphenylcyanarsinegases10 and gas weapons delivery systemsbegan at the purpose-built facilities onŌkunoshima.

The loss and sorrow caused by Japan’s poisongas weapons

APJ | JF 9 | 36 | 3

7

Ōkunoshima poison gas factories

program based at Ōkunoshima was and still isconsiderable. Chinese historian, Chi Hsueh-jenestimates that between 1937 and 1945 therewere “2091 instances of Japanese use of gasproducing about 80,000 casualties amongChinese soldiers and civilians,”11 and althoughChi’s figures may be distorted by the ways inwhich memory is used in China’s postwarrelationship with Japan, and though themeaning of the term “casualties” is unclear,there is no doubt that many Chinese died orwere seriously injured by Japanese poison gasattacks and gas experiments on prisoners.What is more, in the last 20 years, tons ofchemical weapons hastily buried by Japanesetroops in China as war’s end approached havebegun to reappear, rusting and leaking andcausing damage to the environment and topeople for whom the second Sino-Japanese waris just history. Late in the summer of 2003construction workers on a site in Qiqihar(Heilongjiang province) dug up a cache of gasweapons buried by Japanese soldiers 58 yearsearlier. The badly decayed weapons leakedyperite gas. One worker died and 43 werepermanently injured by exposure to the gas.Forty-eight Chinese filed suit against theGovernment of Japan in the Tokyo DistrictCourt, claiming ¥1.4 billion in compensation. In2010, the judge ruled against them. Heacknowledged that the weapons were Japanese,

had been buried by Japanese militarypersonnel, and that the Japanese governmentcould have predicted the consequences forhuman beings exposed to the weapons.Nonetheless, the judge ruled that theGovernment of Japan was not responsible forthe leakage of gas, and thus not liable for deathand injury caused by it.12 Similar cases havefoundered on the statute of limitations and onArticle 5 of the 1972 Sino-Japanese JointCommunique, which st ipulates, “TheGovernment of the People's Republic of Chinadeclares that in the interest of the friendshipbetween the Chinese and the Japanese peoples,it renounces its demand for war reparationfrom Japan.” Japanese courts often rule thatthis provision precludes compensation toChinese indiv iduals for war-re latedinjuries,13 although critics have argued thatArticle 5 should prohibit only reparations to theChinese state not to individual victims.

This is what I know about the sorrow ofŌkunoshima when I disembark from the ferrythat br ings me, a long with a ser iousphotographer and a clutch of frantically textingyoung women, the last leg to the island. Notmuch remains now of the poison gas weaponsfacilities. Cedar and pine forest covers the hilland parts of the flat peninsula at the northernend. About 100,000 tourists visit Ōkunoshimaevery year and the island is one of Japan’s 36official kyūkamura, villages of rest andrecreation. Leisure facilities include a full-service hotel, an onsen, tennis courts, aswimming pool, and there are several beachessuitable for fishing and snorkeling. Mostnoticeably, there are rabbits everywhere,descendants of the animals used to test theefficacy of the poison gases made on the island.Now they are tame, aggressive about food, andaccount for Ōkunoshima’s other name, RabbitIsland. A summer holiday mood prevails until Igo into the small shiryōkan research centerwith its displays of gas masks, gas weaponscasings and photographs of hideously blisteredhuman skin. I buy a slim volume with text and

APJ | JF 9 | 36 | 3

8

hand-drawn pictures, an illustrated memoir ofthe island in its last days as a poison gasweapons factory by Okada Reiko, who tells methat Ōkunoshima looked very different in 1944and 1945 than it does today. Safety measuresin the gas factories were so lax that much ofthe island forest was exposed to toxins and thepine trees died. “How pathetic the blightedpine trees looked,” writes Okada, “The wholeisland had become polluted by gas.”14 Sheremembers that one of the girls working on theisland used a pine needle to pick her teeth aftereating. The pine needle was so permeated withpoison from the production and testing of gasthat the girl’s gums swelled and began tobleed.

Poisoned pine needles

I read this sitting in the shade of a tree, thewarm sea sucking gently at the rocks, a kitewheeling above the forest, a fishing boatputtering quietly by on a hunt for octopusperhaps, but Okada’s description of how it usedto be pollutes the beauty of Ōkunoshima,poisons it with that special sadness that onlymemory in the form of history brings.

My discovery of Okada’s little memoir is one ofthose unexpected events in research that dropsyou into another dimension of understandingand feeling. I go through the volume and

realize that my effort to escape my own sorrowin Japan is simultaneously an exercise innarcissism, an exercise bound to fail and anexercise bound to succeed. What personalsuffering could not be both obliterated andexacerbated here, at this time, in awareness ofthis history? Not only is the sorrow of Japan inthe post-Tōhoku cataclysm and in the humanhistory of atomic Hiroshima larger and sharperthan my own personal agonies, the sadness ofpoison gas warfare in China I had known Iwould find on Ōkunoshima now becomesintensified and enormously complicated byOkada’s memoir, for can there be anythingsadder than a state that destroys not just itsenemies, which is after all a sovereign right ofstates that has generally been unyielding torestriction, but destroys its own people as well,and not just its soldiers and adults but itschildren, who are its future?

In the autumn of 1943 the military mobilizedseniors at the Tadanoumi Girls’ High Schooland sent them to Ōkunoshima to work in thepoison gas factories. In 1944, there cameanother mobilization order.

This time, the second-year students, all about13 years of age, including Okada Reiko, werealso sent to work in the

Okada Reiko

APJ | JF 9 | 36 | 3

9

poison gas plants. In all 1084 students wentfrom Tadanoumi to the island every day duringthe last years of the war. Those who stayed athome or skipped a day of work were labeledtraitors. Most were exposed to the gases theymade. There were accidents and explosionsthat left the children with severe chemicalburns to the esophagus, the trachea, the faceand arms. Girls were also set to work onmanufacture of paper balloon bombs, one ofJapan’s quixotic last-ditch efforts at defense.

Since making the balloon paper was fine work,young girls with small dexterous hands wereput to it , working in unheated rooms,constantly having to painfully bend theirfingers as far back as possible to securelyconnect small pieces of the paper with paste tomake up an entire balloon skin. Supervisorsforced the hands of the girls further and furtherback if one pasted spot was not as strong as itshould be. Each group of children worked as ateam. Efficiency was constantly checked andteams that failed to come up to scratch werepublicly scolded. At war’s end, these girls andboys were ordered to dismantle the poison gasproduction facilities and in the course of this,many came into direct contact with the toxinsas they were collected for shipping prior tobeing dumped at sea.

In her memoir Okada notes that after the endof the war many of the girls in her

Entrance to part of the poison-gas plant

class suffered from chronic illnesses caused byexposure to gas and other toxins during theenforced period of labor on Ōkunoshima.Doctors at Tadanoumi Hospital began tosuspect a pattern of respiratory neoplasms informer poison gas workers as early as 1952,though people living in Tadanoumi say therehad been many deaths all along. But this wasjust the tip of the iceberg. Several thousandJapanese civilian deaths caused by the militarypolicy of total war through poison gasproduction at Ōkunoshima must be added tothe Chinese deaths resulting from Japanesepoison gas attacks in China during the 1930sand 1940s. And into this already considerablelagoon of sorrow, we must add the more than5000 Japanese who live with disability andillness caused by their work for the empire onŌkunoshima, and the many thousands ofChinese citizens also living with disease anddisability because of exposure to Japanesechemical weapons, either during or afterhostilities. The most common diseases are lung,larynx and bronchial cancers, but chronicobstructive pulmonary disease also scourgest h o s e w h o c a m e i n t o c o n t a c t w i t hŌkunoshima.15 Among cancers, respiratoryneoplasm is one of the most difficult categoriesto treat. Treatments are often cruelly invasiveand result in significant disfigurement to the

APJ | JF 9 | 36 | 3

10

neck and face along with damage to the voice,breathing and swallowing. To make mattersworse, until 1975 those who worked onŌkunoshima as children did no better in gettingcompensation from the government thanChinese victims of Japanese gas weapons do inthe

Girls make attack balloons

Japanese courts today.16 At work in this 30 yeardenial of compensation to Japanese citizenswas the pre-war Japanese legal theory of kokkamutoseki, which holds that the Japanesegovernment “is not responsible to its citizensfor damages caused by the acts that it performsin the exercise of official authority.”17

There is an ineluctable sadness in this story ofschoolgirls forced to make poison gas weaponsand then denied compensation for diseasescaused by that work throughout their lives.How did they endure it? How do the hibakushaof Hiroshima live as international emblems ofsuffering while the truth of what happened tothem is always at work in their bodies andminds? How do the people of Japan carry on inthe face of the Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami andthe ongoing and deepening disaster of nuclearcatastrophe at Fukushima? Traveling likeMurakami’s hero does in Norwegian Woodturns out to be no panacea, no solution to loss

and sorrow at all. In the novel, Watanabereturns to Tokyo after his months of ceaselessmovement and finds that “The months oftravelling neither lifted my spirits nor softenedthe blow of Naoko's death. I arrived back inTokyo in pretty much the same state in which Ihad left.”18 Running away does not do the trick,so what might be done with all the sorrow inJapan?

One response to loss and grief is anger. Forweeks after the end of my marriage, I dream ofhitting my former partner in the face, one big,hard, cracking slap, and for more weeks, I putthe blame for what went wrong squarely onher: it’s a normal way of bearing the things thatseem unbearable. Yet, in my encounter withJapan’s distress, both present and historical, Ifind little overt retaliation. There is no rage andblame in Okada Reiko’s memoir about workingas a teenager in the poison gas factories onŌkunoshima in 1944 and 1945 and the longterm effects of that work. Autobiographicalaccounts of hibakusha suffering spit no vitriol,point no fingers at Tokyo or even Washingtonwhere the decision to drop the A-bombs wasmade. There is anger, activism and protest inJapan after the Tōhoku earthquake, tsunamiand nuclear acc ident , but g iven themalfeasance of both the government andenergy industry in the matter of nuclear energyin general and given TEPCO’s cr is ismanagement incompetence and thegovernment’s side-stepping in the matter of thecatastrophe at the Fukushima nuclear plant inparticular, the anger seems mostly managed.Privately, my friends and colleagues shed tears,seethe and quietly try to organize a counterdiscourse to the official story. One translatesinterviews with British radiation scientist, ChrisBusby, into Japanese in the hope that thecounter-discourse will reach the mothers ofFukushima and help them protect theirchildren from the serious effects of low-levelradiation.

But Japan is not Athens where Greeks set fire

APJ | JF 9 | 36 | 3

11

to the streets because the Eurozone has notworked out well. This is not London where apolice shooting triggers days of burning,looting and violence. On the surface all is politeand mostly calm in Japan after 3/11. Theinternational media speaks only of the dignityand civility of Japanese. “Order is theirweapon,” writes Rohit Brijnath in the StraitsTimes Indonesia of March 16, 2011. “But howcan they be so composed and orderly in thewake of such unspeakable devastation? Whyare they standing calmly in queues insupermarkets and petrol stations?” asksGhanaian journalist and politician, ElizabethOhene, on the BBC website.19 In ForbesMagazine, former Prime Minister and currentMinister Mentor of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew,writes of Japanese conduct with all theadmiration one might expect of the architect ofSingaporean conformity and authoritarianism:

Few societies could maintain suchorder and solidarity during acatastrophe of this magnitude. Butgroup interaction and cooperationare the foundation of Japanesesociety. The whole world haswitnessed Japan's dignity andgrace in the face of devastation.The capacity to endure theunendurable is the very essence ofthe Japanese character.20

And many Japanese might agree with MinisterMentor Lee. Post 3/11 signs placed in all theJapanese towns and cities I visit exhort thepeople to persevere and not give up: GanbarōNihon! Everywhere I go I hear the word gaman,which in this case might mean something like,don’t enact your own distress, be patient andendure. It’s l ike a survivalist mantra.Historically, both ganbaru and gaman havebeen key terms for creation of an idealJapanese citizen, orderly and productive,especially in the late war years and after defeatwhen things were astonishingly difficult and

survival and reconstruction of the nationparamount. These days, perseverance andendurance seem to be regarded as almostunquestionable features of Japaneseness bothin Japan and out. Certainly, traumatic loss andsorrow in Japan are often managed with an airof stoicism and self-sacrifice. Much is made inthe western media about gaman and ganbaruas signs of just how different Japanese are fromthe selfish and disordered rest of us, and bothconcepts are often used in the western mediato create stories about how and why theJapanese are docile, obedient to their leadersand not given to political protest.

There are costs associated with gaman andganbaru, but there’s not much evidence thatthose costs are political. Since 1868 there hasbeen a sequence of political and social rebellionand protest sometimes resulting in change,including peasant rebell ions againstlandlessness and the pace of modernization inthe late 19th century, a series of government-toppling riots against the price of rice in 1918,nationalistic assassinations of political leadersand attempted coups d’etat in the 1920s and1930s, a vigorous and confrontational anarchistmovement until the end of the 1930s, and inthe postwar period, protests and confrontationsfrom student radicals, right wing groups, theJapanese Red Army Faction which declared waron the state in 1969, victims of the atomicbomb, the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack, andprotests against industrial pollution, theVietnam War, Japan’s military and geopoliticalsubordination to the United States, high pricesand environmental degradation. Even as Itravel around southwestern Japan, citizenswere planning a great anti-nuclear protest totake place outside the offices of the Fukushimaculprit, Tokyo Electric Power Company, inGinza on August 6, the anniversary of theatomic bombing of Hiroshima. Fukushimamothers bring the urine of their children tomeetings with government representatives anddemand that it be tested for strontium, videothe government’s refusals and then put the

APJ | JF 9 | 36 | 3

12

videos on YouTube.21

No, the price of gaman and ganbaru responsesto catastrophe and sorrow is not a politicallydocile community as the international mediasometimes suggests; the price is personal. As aclose friend writes to me in English via emailfrom Japan, “The whole world is so dirty, andthere is no hope for Japan, as Japanese peopleare not riot-type. They just commit suicide.” And she is right, for recent statistics hint thatthe real cost of perseverance and self-sacrificing endurance might be suicide.Mainichi Shimbun reports that the suicide ratein Fukushima Prefecture jumped by 20 percentbetween April and June, 2011, with 160 peoplekill ing themselves, including farmersconfronted with the contamination of their landand a 58 year old woman who burned herself todeath.22 Early in July a 93 year old Fukushimawoman committed suicide in the garden of herhome leaving behind a note: “I have become ab u r d e n . I t a k e s h e l t e r i n t h egrave.”23 Nationwide, 3191 Japanese committedsuicide in May, 2011, 472 more than in May ofthe previous year.24 The Cabinet Office saysthat a link between the 3/11 disasters and thenationwide rise in suicides has yet to beestablished, but at the same time, it admits thatthe dramatic increase in Fukushima Prefecturesuicides is probably a cost of trauma and deepsorrow. Of course, what is also possible is thatthe social obligation to persist, endure andpersevere with dignity overlaps with denial oftrauma and sorrow. As trauma theorists know,the line between endurance and denial is tissuethin. Trauma endured is often trauma denied,and trauma denied inevitably, sooner or later,resurfaces as anxiety, despair, self-harm. Theopposite of gaman is gaman dekinai, I can’tstand it, I’m not taking it any more or, moreaccurately, I think, I can’t sacrifice my ownfeelings for it. Gaman dekinai is the answeroften given by Japanese protestors when askedwhy they protest, and it seems to me as I travelthrough Japan that the rise in suicides as theaftermath of 3/11 unfolds is both a cost of the

gaman imperative and a refusal of it.

Yet suicide also represents a negotiation ofanother central formulation in the ways thatJapanese understand themselves as Japaneseand in the ways in which Japanese deal withtrauma, loss and consequent sorrow: mujō, theconcept of impermanence in which nothing isfixed, all things change, decay and dieendlessly. Mujō comes from an intersection ofthe contemplative impermanence found inBuddhist philosophy with the intenseawareness of seasonality in Japan’s originalrice culture.25 It received its most distilledliterary expression in Japan in 1212 in theHōjōki, an account of various catastrophesbefalling the capital city of Heiankyō, writtenby Kamo no Chōmei and opening with:“Ceaselessly the river flows, and yet the wateris never the same, while in the still pools theshifting foam gathers and is gone, neverstaying for a moment. Even so is man and hishabitation.”26

In Norwegian Wood Murakami’s narrator,Watanabe, finally accepts the death of Naokoas the nature of things as they are in all theirimpermanence, and in a speech accepting theInternational Catalunya Prize in Barcelona onJune 9, 2011, Murakami takes up the conceptof mujō to explain the dignity and near-seamless equanimity of Japanese in the face ofgreat suffering after 3/11. “This concept ofmujō has been seared deeply into the Japanesespirit, forming a national mindset,” Murakamisays.27 Thus it is not so much ganbaru andgaman, not so much perseverance and selflessendurance that accounts for the grace anddignity of Japanese after the 3/11 disaster, thatexplains the dignified lives and work for peaceof the atomic bomb victims, that accounts forOkada Reiko’s gentle remembering ofvictimization as a schoolgirl at the hands of theimperial state on Ōkunoshima. Rather, it is theawareness that everything changes, lifebecomes death, death becomes life, joybecomes sorrow and sorrow becomes joy that

APJ | JF 9 | 36 | 3

13

accounts for the observable equanimity ofJapanese in the face of disaster and greatsuffering. This entails a radical acceptance ofthings the way they are in the certainknowledge that things will change; acceptancethat struggle against the ceaseless flow of lifeand death leads nowhere, except to moresuffering.

After the earthquake and tsunami, as theFukushima nuclear plants explode and meltthrough and bodies seed the mud along thecoast in northeastern Japan, a Chiba fishermanremarks, “You just can’t imagine how beautifulthe sea is after the tsunami!,”28 and he is notbeing perverse. The fisherman’s activediscovery of beauty in the midst of death anddestruction symbolizes the core of everydaymujō consciousness in Japan, and it is thisawareness that permits so much grace, dignity,and yes, order in the face of natural cataclysm,poison gas, fire bombs and atomic bombs, andgovernmental malevolence during the imperialera when Okada Reiko was sent to work and tobe made ill in the poison gas factories on theisland of Ōkunoshima. It is this consciousnessthat I end up meeting in Japan right at thepoint when I see that my attempt to escapepersonal sorrow through traveling has beenfutile. My own grief finds no solace in

White Dragon Shrine

the journey itself. My encounters with currentand historical traumas and sorrow in Japan inthe summer of 2011 do nothing to help meovercome my own suffering.

Then, in the last couple of days of my journey, Iclimb to a tiny ramshackle white dragon shrinein the cedar forest high on the side of amountain in Gifu Prefecture.

My friend and I have been poring over both thehuman suffering and the scientific datacirculating around the Fukushima nuclearaccident, focused so closely on it all that it hasbecome difficult to sleep and our conversationsveer chaotically from the catastrophe to abusesof power in imperial Japan to why my marriageended, as though all sorrows and losses arerolled up into one. Suddenly and withoutdiscussion, we head into the forest. We reachthe shrine, bow and drop some coins in the box,then we sit on the rocks and watch the whitedragon, the waterfall, shoot from a great heightstraight down in a spume of thunder into thepool at the base of the cliff. And in thosemoments watching the white dragon spurt, falland change into a mountain pool, then into abrisk rivulet running to the valley where itbecomes a river flowing through this sorrowingland I find a way to be with my own grief. Myencounter with the multiple sorrows of Japanleads me to the discovery of somethingbeautiful in my own private disaster, some wayof accepting the loss. The irreversible anddeath-infused separation from my partnertangles with a Japanese awareness ofimpermanence, and in this knotting of sorrowwith mujō I see that my own loss is nothingmore and nothing less than the life processitself.

V i v i a n B l a x e l l i s a n A s i a - P a c i f i cJournal Associate. A researcher on the spatial,cultural and social practices of Japanesecolonialism, she currently lives in Melbourne,Aust ra l ia , and may be contac ted a t

APJ | JF 9 | 36 | 3

14

v i v i a n _ b l a x e l l @ m a c . c o m(https://apjjf.org/mailto:vivian_blaxell@mac.com) Recommended citation: Vivian Blaxell, Sorrow,History and Catastrophe in Japan After the 3.11Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Meltdown: Apersonal encounter, The Asia-Pacif icJournal Vol 9, Issue 36 No 3, September 5,2011.

Articles on related subjects:• Winifred A. Bird and Elizabeth Grossman,Chemical Contamination, Cleanup andLongterm Consequences of Japan’s Earthquakea n d T s u n a m i(https://apjjf .org/-Winifred-Bird/3588)

• Adam Lebowitz, Blackout Nippon: Notes from0 3 / 2 0 1 1(https://apjjf .org/-Adam-Lebowitz/3512)

• Tsuneishi Keiichi, New Facts about US Payoffto Japan’s Biological Warfare Unit 731(https://apjjf.org/-Tsuneishi-Kei_ichi/2209)

• Tsuneishi Keiichi, Disposing of Japan's WorldW a r I I P o i s o n G a s i n C h i n a(https://apjjf.org/-Tsuneishi-Keiichi/2077)

• Eric Johnston, Okunoshima: Poison Gas PastB e l i e s I s l e ' s B u c o l i c S e r e n i t y(ht tps : / /ap j j f .org / -Er ic - Johnston /1776)http://japanfocus.org/-Eric-Johnston/1776

Notes

1 Greg Mitchell, “The Great Hiroshima Cover-Up—And the Greatest Movie Never Made,” TheAsia-Pacific Journal, Vol 9, Issue 31 No 4,A u g u s t 1 , 2 0 1 1 , l i n k(https: / /apj j f .org/ -Greg-Mitchel l /3581) ,Accessed August 11, 2011.

2 Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time,space, and the dialectics of memory. (Berkeley;University of California Press, 1999), pp. 1-2.

3 Okada Reiko, Ōkunoshima: Dōingakuto nomonogatari [Ōkunoshima: The Story of theStudent Brigade], (Mihara: Toxic Gases IslandResearch Institute, 1989), p. 5.

4 Leonard Humphreys. The Way of theHeavenly Sword: The Japanese army in the1920s. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,1995) p. 127.

5 Bu Ping, Nihon no Chūgoku shinryaku todokugasu heiki [Japan's Invasion of China andChemical Weapons] translated into Japanese byYamabe Yukiko and Miyazaki Kyoshiro, (Tokyo:Akashi-shoten, 1995) p. 179.

6 Intelligence Report on Japanese ChemicalWarfare, Volume II, The Chemical WarfareResearch And Development Work Of TheJapanese, 1 March 1946, Office of the ChiefChemical Officer, General Headquarters, U.S.Army Forces, Pacific, Tokyo, Japan

7 Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “Research Noteson Japanese Poison Gas Warfare in China” p. 6.chinajapan.org/articles/05.1/05.1wakabayashi4-10.pdf Accessed May 12, 2011

8 Akahata, January 11 & 26, 2007, link(http://www.japan-press.co.jp/2007/2512/justice2 . h t m l ) , a n d M a y 2 5 , 2 0 1 0 , l i n k(http://www.japan-press.co.jp/modules/news/index.php?id=194), Accessed July 25, 2011.

9 Shin Hae Bong, “Compensation for Victims ofWartime Atrocities: Recent Developments inJapan’s Case Law.” Journal of InternationalCriminal Justice 3 (2005), 190.

10 Okada Reiko, Ōkunoshima: Dōingakuto nomonogatari [Ōkunoshima: The Story of theStudent Brigade], (Mihara: Toxic Gases Island

APJ | JF 9 | 36 | 3

15

Research Institute, 1989) p. 12. English texttranslated from Japanese by Jean Inglis.

11 Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “Research Noteson Japanese Poison Gas Warfare in China” p. 6.chinajapan.org/articles/05.1/05.1wakabayashi4-10.pdf Accessed May 12, 2011

1 2 Akahata, January 11 & 26, 2007, link(http://www.japan-press.co.jp/2007/2512/justice2 . h t m l ) a n d M a y 2 5 , 2 0 1 0 , l i n k(http://www.japan-press.co.jp/modules/news/index.php?id=194), Accessed July 25, 2011.

13 Shin Hae Bong, “Compensation for Victims ofWartime Atrocities: Recent Developments inJapan’s Case Law.” Journal of InternationalCriminal Justice 3 (2005), 190.

14 Okada Reiko, Ōkunoshima: Dōingakuto nomonogatari [Ōkunoshima: The Story of theStudent Brigade], (Mihara: Toxic Gases IslandResearch Institute, 1989) p. 12. English texttranslated from Japanese by Jean Inglis.

1 5 Kōno Nobuyaki and Awaya Yukikazu,“Dokugasu to haigan” [Poison Gas and LungCancer], Nihon naika gakkai zasshi, Vol. 91,No.6, pp. 20-22.

16 Tanaka Yuki, “Poison Gas: The Story JapanWould Like to Forget.” Bulletin of the AtomicScientists, October 1988, p. 19.

17 Shin Hae Bong, “Compensation for Victims ofWartime Atrocities: Recent Developments inJapan’s Case Law.” Journal of InternationalCriminal Justice 3 (2005), 187-206.

1 8 M u r a k a m i H a r u k i , N o r w e g i a nWood. Translated by Jay Rubin. (London: The

Harvill Press, 2001), p. 329.

1 9 L i n k(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12847408). Accessed 08/01/2011.

2 0 L i n k(http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0509/opinions-lee-kuan-yew-current-events-under-extreme-stress_2.html). Accessed 08/01/2011

2 1 S e e t h i s l i n k(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVuGwc9dlhQ).

2 2 L i n k(ttp://mainichi.jp/select/weathernews/news/20110709k0000m040151000c.html). Accessed08/04/2011

2 3 L i n k(http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/feature/20110316-866921/news/20110709-OYT1T00649.htm).Accessed 08/05/2011

2 4 L i n k(http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/national/news/20110725-OYT1T00975.htm). Accessed 08/05/2011

25 See Steven Heine, “From Rice Cultivation toMind Contemplation: The Meaning ofImpermanence in Japanese Religion.” Historyof Religions, Vol. 30, No. 4 (May, 1991), pp.373-403

26 The Ten Foot Square Hut and Tales of theHeike. Translated by A. L. Sadler. (KessingerPublishing, 2005) p. 1.

2 7 M u r a k a m i H a r u k i(https://apjjf.org/-Murakami-Haruki/3571).

APJ | JF 9 | 36 | 3

16

“Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer” TheAsia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 29 No 7, July18, 2011. Accessed July 25, 2011.

28 Quoted in 2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from theJapan Earthquake, Patrick Sherriff, editor(London: Enhanced Editions, 2011). Location826 in the Kindle for iPad edition.