This panel looks at fictional attempts in literature and theater to represent local voices from the 2011 disaster across historical and geographical contexts. The voices include those of local victims, alive and dead, specifically victims of the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. All presentations analyze theses texts for their performative aspects of local voices, their handling of proximity, and their potential for political critique.

In these works, the local is performed as a restaging of a German novel, as dialect, and as the insanity of residents in the zone. Questions of historical and geographical proximity and distance are embedded in the works’ connections with the precedent of Chernobyl and the Tohoku region’s long history of marginalization. The panel also looks at the politics inherent in these artists’ decision to represent the local. In Iwata-Weickgenannt’s case, it is through the issue of dialect, which writers like Kimura Yūsuke wield as a post-colonial critique as they attempt to “write back” the native tongue. For Geilhorn, the political question enters through a Japanese restaging of a novel originally set in the aftermath of Chernobyl in order to allow for the audience to engage critically with difficult issues close to home. DiNitto considers the possibility of political resistance for residents in toxic environments who have been labeled insane by the nuclear industry. Eight years after the disaster, these literary and theatrical works continue to ask questions that are vital for our understanding of the disaster and its impact on the Tohoku region.

‘Fukushima’ from a Post-Chernobyl Perspective – Setoyama Misaki’s Mienai Kumo

Barbara Geilhorn (German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokyo)

In the aftermath of the March 11, 2011 disasters an immediate and ever-increasing output of post- Fukushima theatre productions could be observed. While there was a strong focus on documentary, only few playwrights made use of fiction or tried to situate the calamity in a broader historical or geographical context. Setoyama Misaki's Mienai kumo (Invisible Clouds, 2014) is an interesting exception. The play is an adaptation and recontextualization of Die Wolke (The Cloud, 1987), a best-selling youth novel written by Gudrun Pausewang (b. 1928) in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Setoyama introduces the character of a Japanese playwright who happened to read Pausewang's novel as a youth and now, after the March 11 disasters, travels to Germany to have an interview with the author.

Apparently, the additional character is an alter ego of the playwright being known for her interest in staging recent events and developing her plays based on meticulous research and in-depth interviews with the people concerned. Setoyama skilfully uses the different potentialities of fiction and documentary. Audiences are invited to emotionally connect to the young protagonist, radiation victim and role model of Pausewang’s novel. At the same time, the additional character is a dramaturgical strategy to get audiences involved on a more conscious plane. I will argue that, while the geographical distance between Europe and Japan facilitates audiences' critical engagement with the delicate subject, the Japanese figure in the story links the nuclear disasters of Fukushima and Chernobyl and brings the message home.

Voices from the margins in post-Fukushima literature

Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt (Nagoya University)

The Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 hit a region that was traditionally regarded as periphery in many ways—politically, economically, culturally, and, last but not least, also linguistically. The literature that emerged from the 3/11 calamity echoes with the voices of the marginalized.

The paper outlines what could be considered as the two most important literary strategies to inscribe marginality, the use of dead narrators, and/ or local dialects. Whereas the former is often related to issues of commemoration and the coming to terms with mass death, the latter inclusion of long passages written entirely in dialect has more overtly political undertones. With a focus on Kimura Yūsuke’s post-colonial project of “writing back” in his own native tongue, Yū Miri’s reliance on a local “translator” to give voice to her Fukushima native characters, and Arai Takako’s publication of a collaborative “translation” of Ishikawa Takuboku’s poems into the local language, the presentation explores the related issues of authenticity, performance, appropriation, and paternalism.

Fictions, Visions, and Resistance in Nuclear Literature

Rachel DiNitto (University of Oregon)

Accusations of insanity have been used as a weapon by the nuclear industry to discredit the fears of local residents in toxic environments. This presentation draws inspiration from Lawrence Buell’s arguments to considers insanity as a means for victims of nuclear disasters to claim authority through toxic discourse by crafting narratives of resistance.

This presentation examines the literary trope of insanity in fictional works generated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. I examine Furukawa Hideo’s Horses, Horses, In the End the Light Remains Pure and Kimura Yusuke’s Isa’s Deluge. Unlike characters in Chernobyl works like Alina Bronsky’s Baba Dunja’s Last Love, Furukawa and Kimura’s protagonists are not residents of the irradiated zone, but return to the disaster area and experience inexplicable visions of fictional characters and long lost relatives. Neither protagonist is able to square these visions with the rational world and they question their own sanity. However, through this trope of insanity, the novelists speak with authority and voice resistance to the treatment of northeastern Japan as an internal colony and a victim of the latest chapter in a history of national exploitation—nuclear disaster.