Crisis of Relationality

Yuji Genda “Missing”

6,349: The death toll of the 1995 Kobe Earthquake
4,487: The death toll of American soldiers in Operation Iraqi Freedom (as of December 30, 2011)
2,602: The death toll of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center
1,863: The death toll of American soldiers in the war in Afghanistan (as of January 13, 2012)
15,841: The death toll of the Great East Japan Earthquake (as of December 11, 2011)
 
It is nonsense to translate people's lives into numbers. Around the world, many more people lose their lives than media can broadcast. Still, such tremendous figures do represent the degree of the survivors’ grief.
 
Now, what do you think the following figures represent?
 
“3” and “24”
 
“3” is the total number of the missing persons in the Kobe Earthquake of 1995 and “24” is the total number of those missing in the 9/11 attack on World Trade Center.
 
3,493: This is the number of missing persons in the Great East Japan Earthquake. Most of these were swept away with the sets of the tsunami, and have been missing ever since. No other single incident has resulted in such a large number of missing persons in Japan since the end of WWII. Prior to this disaster in Japan, one of the worst natural disasters in Japan post-WWII was the Isewan Typhoon (Super Typhoon Vera) on September 26th, 1959. 4,687 died and 401 were missing. In response, the National Diet passed the Disaster Countermeasure Basic Act, and the executive branch rapidly developed disaster preparedness infrastructure with the act. With three times more deaths and nine times more missing persons than that of the Isewan Typhoon, what do we have to learn from the Great East Japan Earthquake?
 
In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina caused the deaths of 1,836 people, and 705 people were still missing as of April 18, 2006.  Also, the 2008 Great Sichuan Earthquake (May 12) caused the deaths of 691,207 people, and, as of August 4, 2008, 18,194 people were still missing (and probably buried by debris).  For me, facing such a tremendous figure of missing persons in the Great East Japan Earthquake, it seems that I can finally understand, for the first time, the sorrow of survivors of devastating disasters around the world.  
 
In Japan, people are hesitant to use the word, recovery (fukkou), and the speed of the current recovery is slow.  I suppose that the reason for both the sentiment and for the slow recovery process is because there is still an enormous number of missing persons, most of whom will not be found imminently (especially given the nuclear incident at the Fukushima power plant). 
 
For the families and the friends of the missing ones, the 3/11 disaster is still not over, it is an ongoing matter. Until they find their missing ones, they cannot put an end to this devastating disaster. In other words, the problem is that there are those who will never have “closure."
 
When we design a recovery project, we have to set up a “beginning” point and an “end” point. Also, we have to able to decide what the “end” of the project should look like. For example, municipal governments around the Tohoku region are offering a temporary extension of unemployment benefits, and are hiring disaster survivors who have lost their jobs as temporary staff for rubble/debris clean-up and the like. However, such “temporary” measures will not and should not last for long. If a temporary measure lasts longer than it should, it can take away the motivation of the disaster survivors to become independent by themselves.
 
What should we consider the “starting point” and the “end point?” One of the officials of an affected municipality strongly stated that his municipality would stop any of the recovery projects that won't lead to definitive outcomes. I strongly believe that what we need in the recovery project is such determination to decisively act. Contrary to this, I assume that the survivors of missing ones and those who are restricted from going back to their homes around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant will not have any sense of “closure” or an “end to the recovery effort” within their lifetimes. They suffer from the sense that there will never be any closure from this disaster. It is a similar sense of suffering which families of suicides in Japan (over 30,000 per year) go through, and which they cannot escape.
 
Now, what can we do for those who will not gain closure, including the families of missing ones? At the risk of sounding extreme, I don't think that anybody – including the government – can help them. Monetary remedies and financial relief programs for individuals’ recoveries can provide temporary support for the survivors, but those are not the solution. 
 
We are powerless to do anything for those without closure. Even if we try to share some part of their sorrow, we probably cannot do anything However, even if we cannot understand their sorrow, it is true that they may see it as an encouragement if people around the world do not forget their missing ones and are always praying for them.
 
As with the missing ones of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the victims of nuclear accidents, there are many people who cannot gain “closure.” When we think about characteristics of devastating disasters like the Great East Japan Earthquake (including the Great Sichuan Earthquake), how should we perceive a recovery? I would like to hear opinions from you and those living around the world (including anthropologists, priests, monks, and many more). As we build memorial statues, it seems to me that it is a process to think about how to forge a “non-closure mechanism” to remember the missing, and to concurrently make a “closure mechanism” to ease survivors’ sorrow.
 
We tend to think of “life” and “death” in a binary manner. However, those are in fact not binary opposites. It seems to me that there is one more sphere: the sphere of the “missing.” It seems that “missing” is neither life nor death, but is concurrently “life” and “death.” Such a train of thought on the “missing” might inherently be a Japanese way.
 
However, it may be meaningful if we can discuss the presence of the “missing” – as well as life and death – in a global sphere such as Meridian 180. 

Chika Watanabe “Kizuna (Bonds) after the Great East Japan Earthquake”

The word kizuna (“bonds,” “emotional ties”) is everywhere in Japan now, from advertisements to news reports. It calls for ties that bind “the Japanese nation” together into an imagined collective effort to rebuild the country after the devastating disaster. The message makes apparent sense. It was, after all, a national shock and tragedy.

But after spending some time as a volunteer with an NGO in Ishinomaki, one of the regions in Miyagi prefecture hit hardest by the earthquake and tsunami, I'm no longer sure how to think about this word. I'm struggling with how to define kizuna—what it means, where it can take us, and whom it encompasses (and excludes).

A man whose house was damaged—the first floor was completely destroyed by the tsunami—and currently lived on the second floor, spoke to us volunteers in heated anger about the first few months after the disaster. He told us that, as late as May, the remains of the destroyed houses had not been cleared. But he knew that an elderly woman was buried under the rubble in his house. Other residents also knew where there were dead bodies, and many of them put signs in front of their half-damaged houses saying, “There are dead bodies here, please bring a shovel truck to remove the rubble,” but nobody came for months. One day, he couldn't wait any longer and went out to find some policemen from the National Police Agency to ask for their help. They told him that they could only act on orders from the city. They argued back and forth, until they told him that if he wanted to make such a fuss, he should go to the city himself. So he went, and after some more hurdles, he finally got the city to give the order. “But they showed up with a single crowbar!” he exclaimed.  Then they lined up in single file and took out pieces of rubble one by one, absurdly identifying each item as it was passed down the line. The first officer would yell out “Wood item coming (mokuzai ikimasu)!” and the following officers would echo the phrase down the line. He yelled at them that they needed to bring in shovel trucks, but they told him again that this was outside their authority. “And in the meantime,” he said, “dozens of trucks just sat around not being used!”

The police as well as the Self-Defense Forces moved upon orders from the city mayor, he explained to us, and if this top person is worthless, these forces are also ineffective. He told us that the mayor is an idiot (bonkura), and so the situation was a mess. He was so incredibly angry. And it was infectious. How could the city and anyone with authority leave bodies of missing persons buried under debris because of some boundaries of authority? In a piece on this forum, Professor Yuji Genda speaks of “the people without end,” those who cannot find closure because of loved ones who are still missing. How can we talk about kizuna then, from this anger and this space of the missing?

One of the differences I saw between May of 2011 and January of 2012 was that 10 months ago there was debris everywhere, and now there were empty plots of land. In some ways, this is a kind of progress. But in other ways, it's an unbelievably small one. From what I heard, the city had not yet decided what to do with most of these devastated areas. Could people rebuild there? If so, how? If not, what were their options?  The city's decisions seemed to be too slow and non-transparent for residents left in limbo.

At the same time, I met several residents of Ishinomaki who were paving ways to move forward on their own. For example, a group of women from a local NPO had decided to continue their work teaching handcrafts. They themselves had lost their houses and were now living in temporary housing. When I attended one of their workshops with elderly women in a temporary housing community, I saw how powerful it was that instructors and participants could share the pain and frustration of losing their homes, even if sometimes it devolved into petty jealous gossip.

I was also impressed by the long-term volunteers. Some of them had been there for months, and others came regularly in between their work. And it was these regular volunteers who promised to return and did so that local residents seemed to appreciate most profoundly.

Although the commitment of these volunteers was extraordinary, the local NGO staff—most of them young men and women from Ishinomaki—spoke about the need to plan how volunteers could be most effective. The difficulty lay in figuring out where to draw the line between assistance and over-dependence. For example, the staff told me that some residents scheme and hoard aid items unnecessarily. Someone else pointed out that hoarding itself could be a sign of trauma.

Another issue bubbling beneath the surface was the sense of disparity. The earthquake and tsunami affected even immediate neighbors differently, one house being completely destroyed while the house across the street still stood basically intact. People I spoke with also mentioned that only a third of Ishinomaki residents had insurance on their houses. “Some people became rich with insurance money after the disaster, you know,” said one woman to a group of us once. “While others like myself became poor.” How do you talk about kizuna in the face of such statements?

I'm not against the sentiments of kizuna, but I do think that it needs to be complicated. The warm fuzzy feeling of being connected to other people shouldn't become an alibi for suppressing expressions of anger or jealousy because they make us uncomfortable in the specificity of their demands. Simply the act of being together cannot be the endpoint of kizuna—it seems to me to be the beginning of a much more arduous process.

Shuhei Kimura “Beginning and End”

 Must everything have closure before new beginnings are possible? Can we get to a new starting point only after finding closure? We often start new things without ending others, but sometimes, even with closure, we find that new starts are not possible.

The term “missing person” reminds me of the Japanese abductees in North Korea. Since it is an extremely politicized subject, I would like to not go into details. However, in my view, what the families of the abductees want is to have them back alive, or at least to know the “truth.” The families of victims can accept what happened in tragedies by finding out the “truth” – in other words, by finding a way to understand what happened.

It's not only the families of the missing ones who suffer from a sense of loss; it takes a long time for anybody to accept death or loss and the truth behind it. In this sense, many individuals have not reached the end of the 3/11 disaster. Just as the families of the fallen WWII soldiers still travel to look for the remains of family members, decades may pass before the victims of the 3/11 disaster find closure. On top of the earthquake and tsunami, there was the nuclear accident. I cannot even imagine how long it will take for the survivors to reach an end point.

Meanwhile, some people have found their new starting points without having closure from the disaster. Last summer, the residents in affected areas hosted various events such as memorial services and summer festivals. Those events functioned as “non-closure mechanisms” for them to concurrently start over and not have closure from the disaster. The ceremonial events can make them forget, remember, and recall the disaster. Therefore, it is both a mechanism for the residents to receive a kind of closure and while also marking a point in a never-ending continuation. I assume that this paradox characterizes various upcoming events on March 11.

In such a sphere, a starting point and an end point may entangle with one another because others cannot force survivors to choose a beginning and an end. Residents of one affected fishing village used to organize two kinds of annual “traditional performing arts”: the Deer Dance and the Nembutsu Swordplay (a Buddhist Nianfo dance style). In addition to these traditional performing arts, any acts of handing down traditional practices were closely tied to the local rite of passage for young males becoming responsible adults in the community. Even though local youths constantly have been moving out of this fishing village, some come back to participate in these rituals. However, the tsunami swept their ritual costumes away. On June 18th 2011, when many of the disaster survivors held the 100th day memorial events (based on a Buddhist calendar), male members of the fishing village quietly held the Deer Dance ritual in the middle of debris near a local shore. The Nembutsu Swordplay ritual is for families having their first Bon festival (an annual Japanese Buddhist event). It is a ritual for the family to accept that their family members have passed away. The organizers and the participants of the Nembutsu Swordplay ritual went around the local households to mark the starting point of their recovery project. However, they were told not to dance in temporary housing districts because some of the survivors in those districts would still be struggling to find closure.

A few days after the event and concurrently with other affected areas, members of this fishing village held a fireworks event at a local shore. They removed the debris and cleaned up the local seaside park for the fireworks event. On the day of the event, local stores set up stalls and a large crowd turned out for the fireworks. Some remarked that the event motivated them to “ganbaru” (to try his/her best, work hard, persevere, or stick to it) by seeing many people at the venue and seeing friends again. Yet, an owner of one of the stalls said, “It's good that we can have a lot of events like this over the summer. However, this place will become desolate in winter. If we don't do anything by the upcoming winter, this village will be through.” He implied that the “end” is coming for the village, but this “end” was one that residents around the Pacific coast of Tohoku region had been concerned about even prior to the earthquake.

If we do not want or cannot find closure, we might still move on to a new beginning. The process of recovery is probably an entanglement of infinite starting points and end points. Thus, different opinions about the direction of recovery efforts seem to crash into one another. What we need is not a device to assemble or aggregate different temporalities, but one that preserves entanglements without them becoming conflicts. In my opinion, such conditions of temporality might be important in this interval of ambiguity. Temporality is itself transitional. Though time has an end point, its movement concurrently implies a recovery, regardless of closure. (It is another ordinary day.)

Anne Allison “Rituals for life: Non-closure mechanism”

Yuji Genda has asked us to consider the possibility of “non-closure mechanisms” for dealing with the wounds left gaping from the triple disasters of 3.11. As he notes, many people were killed. But a shockingly large number (3,493) remain missing; neither alive, nor dead. If I am reading Genda right, he's also imputing such a liminal state to Japan/ese more broadly: to the fabric of an everydayness that has now been permanently altered, if not destroyed. Until the life/lives that died get mourned, is it impossible to move forward? “How Can We Bring Closure to Crises,” this forum is poignantly named.

But I agree here with the position taken by Chika Watanabe and Shuhei Kimura that closure itself is problematic. Those who have asked for closure (bodies removed under houses) don't necessarily get it and the “kizuna” advocated for moving forward extracts costs and sacrifices differentially distributed.

This doesn't mean, however, that marking the loss, death, and pain of what has transpired is a bad idea. Anthropologists know how traumatic disruption to the social—of any kind—is and how important—to the person and community—the attempt made to reestablish equilibrium. Rituals perform something collective: respect for the dead, grief at loss, the will to keep going. Kimura notes that memorial rituals of various kinds were performed throughout last summer in Tohoku, as were community-based ceremonies of other kinds.  And Watanabe speaks of the outpouring of volunteerism and relief activities that proliferated across the country in the aftermath of 3.11: activities that could also be seen as ritualistic—rituals of survival in which people not otherwise connected came together to work towards helping others.

I too participated in volunteer activities last summer. I joined Peace Boat in Ishinomaki where I shoveled mud for two days and in Minami Souma I washed family photo albums retrieved from tsunami-battered houses at the local volunteer center. The work was moving though I wasn't always sure how much we actually “moved”; the mud drained slowly from the rain gutters we dug at and the dirt ebbed even slower from the images we were washing. And yet we all worked hard, quite quite hard. And, at the end of the day, this work felt more meaningful that just about anything I've ever done. It struck me at some point that what we were doing was as ritualistic as anything “real;” done as much for those of us doing it as for those we were there to help out.  This wasn't so much about putting closure on something although we really WERE trying to shovel mud from the devastated downtown of Ishinomaki and to retrieve images of life prior to 3.11 for those who would find such photos a salve for their wounds.

But my sense is that these activities were also a means, a method of not standing still—of doing something in some kind of figuration of togetherness.  In neither case was there much talk of “kizuna” or “tsunagari” or anything really concrete at all.  But there was something. A willingness to act even if what that action would produce wasn't totally sure-footed or clear. And there was a different kind of coming together than that based on other kinds of social affiliation (sharing workplace, family, town, for example).

Respect for the dead, an effort made to work for—or with—those who have been wounded, and a collective gesture towards life moving forward. Not closure, but something socially ritualistic (or ritualistically social) in what I take to be a positive way.

Steffi Richter “Kizuna” Fragments

1. I had my first encounter with the term kizuna (“bonds”) in the book “Bonds of Civility. Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Cultures,” written by Ikegami Eiko (Japanese Title: “Bi to reisetsu no kizuna”『美と礼節の絆』). She introduces this term as a new perspective on the premodern Edo Period in Japan: The emergence of civility and proto-modern relationships in the stable and hierarchically structured, state system of Tokugawa (“strong bonds”) can be understood only by simultaneously looking at the “weak bonds.” People formed these weak bonds or kizuna in several places of non-hierarchical, artistic activity, thus building diverse (aesthetic) networks. Those networks then crossed each other, leading to the formation of “public spheres,” where something new could emerge and undergo social change.

2. When I came across the speech of former prime minister Kan Naoto held at the World Economic Forum at Davos (on January 29, 2011), the title, “Opening Japan and reinventing Kizuna,” immediately awakened my curiosity. Interpreting “kizuna” as “interpersonal bonds,” Kan calls for a “Third Opening of Japan” to the world and for forging new connections between individuals in Japan itself, in order to create a “Society with the Least Unhappiness.” Only a few weeks later, the Three-Fold-Catastrophe occurred in Northeast Japan, whereby “kizuna,” invoked by Kan, revealed a new, a dramatic, dimension.

3. Kan in Davos: “Through working, we connect ourselves with society and secure ‘a place to be’ and are given ‘a role to play,'” and so reinvent these bonds. However, long before the tragedy of 3/11, social reality gave Kan's words a different meaning at least in two ways.

The nuclear industry is actually the only industry showing both the dual structure of labor and that the “kakusa” society has existed through the entire postwar history despite the perception that a relatively homogeneous, middle class, nuclear-family society had gained cultural hegemony since the mid-1970s. The inclusive “strong kizuna,” firm/family is possible only by socially and symbolically excluding certain work and workers, without whom this society would not be able to function. “Kaisha” and “katei” – both representing privacy – are spatially connected by a gigantic network of electric (!) private railways and their “consumerist meccas” (the “tâminaru hyakkaten”), through which public space degenerates into a space of transit.

But, this might change after 3/11. On 9/11 2011, a large anti-nuclear demonstration took place in Shinjuku, which followed many others in Tôkyô and other places since April 10^th, and preceded a large demonstration a week later on September 19th, when approximately 60,000 people came together. It was organized by leaders who, even before the catastrophe in March, had looked for other bonds in a society that had been exceedingly affected by precarious (and non-regular) work relations and by a general precariousness from living in a society that simultaneously possesses technological requirements for twitter, the internet, and online social networks. One of these leaders is Matsumoto Hajime with his project “Shirôto no Ran” (Amateur Riot). His team had been acting in two relatively independent networks before they crossed paths and collaborated with the anti-nuclear demonstrations.

4. “Act locally and think in global contexts” to escape from or oppose the capitalist pressures of globalization as you so choose; this theme is also used by the group “Shirôto no Ran.” In Kôenji/Tôkyô, where the first demonstration against nuclear energy took place in April, Shirôto no Ran runs several thriving businesses on a small shopping street, including recycle shops, a vegan café, a second-hand shop, some bars, and an internet-radio station. With this business, they try to elude consumerist pressures by shaping a space for self-determined action and welcoming other, typically elderly, residents of the neighborhood. The shop number 12 also hosts the “Underground university” (chika daigaku), which is “a non-regular university with non-regular lecturers for non-regular workers,” founded in 2008 during the uproar surrounding the Anti-G8-Summit movement and the failed invitation of Antonio Negri to Japan” (Hirai Gen).

Since April, the university has addressed the revolutionary changes in the Middle East and the social uprisings in the West (the “Occupy” movement) mostly in relation to their own, in a double sense, “trembling” society. So, Shirôto no Ran acts interpersonally and transnationally beyond Kôenji/Tôkyô/Japan. They are part of a transnational and transversally acting “multitude,” demonstrating that new forms of “kizuna” already do exist, albeit in a different sense than that dreamt by Kan, politicians, and other elites.

5. I agree with Saitô Tamaki regarding his uneasiness with “kizuna” as an alleged means to confront the dramatic results of the threefold catastrophe (see his article “Solidarity of free individuals” in “Mainichi shinbun” 2011/Dec. 11th). And I agree with Hirose Takashi, who by responding to Noda's “Genpatsu jiko shûsoku sengen” (PM Noda's declaration on regaining control of reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Dec. 16, 2011) complained that “kizuna” should not be the “kanji of the year 2011” but rather the “uso” – the lie.

Naoki Kasuga “Subversive Lies”

“Beginning,” “End,” “Bond,” “What?” -- All of those words deeply resonate with me. They are important words to ponder for life after 3/11. The perspectives of Professor Uno and Professor Riles inspired me, particularly with respect to the role of the disaster in present-day Japanese politics. Last Spring, when I posted my essay in one of Meridian 180's forums, I was feeling stuck, feeling lost, and feeling guilty. Objectifying these feelings about a post-disaster situation is easier by translating them into a political discussion. “‘Kizuna’ should not be the ‘kanji of the year 2011’ but rather the ‘uso’ – the lie.” This is right. I think that we must accept that this “lie” not only includes a political sphere but also non-political spheres. It is impossible to escape the influence of this “lie.”

Helplessly watching the ongoing political transformation, just as we felt the sense of discomfort leading to “jishuku” (voluntary restraint/self-censorship) right after 3/11, we also found it difficult to understand our thoughts. One night, while walking along a road, a dark one because of the post-3/11 energy saving policy, I cynically said to myself, “If it's like this, I guess we can start another war.” Was I the only one who thought this way? I think that self-restraint is important, and I'm not seriously thinking about starting any war. I just muttered to myself, cynically. However, I think that there is a problematic, shared sense that nobody should verbalize such a subtle sense of discomfort. The deterioration of Japanese politics is related to these layers of taboo.

One good example is the pay cut suffered by public employees in Japan. The current majority party of Japan's national Diet, the Democratic Party of Japan [DPJ], emphatically has been claiming that “a bureaucrat = a public employee = ‘Japan's obstacle’” ever since the DPJ was a minority party. Recently, the national Diet passed a bill to cut the salary of public employees by 7.8%, and both majority and minority parties supported the bill. Further, partly as a result of post-WWII, anti-communism policy, Japanese public servants still lack the right to collectively bargain or strike. But we don't hear an outcry from those who had pinned their children's educations and their mortgages on their salaries.

The question, “How can we bring closure to crises?” is inseparable from another question, “How should we deal with a subversive lie?” Unlike a garden-variety lie which we can easily identify, aren't many subversive lies difficult for us to detect? This kind is difficult to resist. It discourages us from expressing our sense of discomfort, and the lie thickens. Its slyness, expanding since 3/11, causes us to think we are lying if we judge the lie as a lie. It turns a crisis into a much worse crisis.

Satsuki Takahashi “Endless Liminality”

When I read the words, “beginning,” “end,” and “closure,” what initially came to mind was an e-mail from a fisherman around the end of last year. 2011 was coming to a close, and he wrote in his e-mail, “The pathway to the end [of this disaster] is still far away. The post-disaster effect may be more serious next year than it has been this year.”

In the same e-mail, he also wrote that the town where he lives finally started restoring their port. It will take time but will probably be completed by the end of 2012. However, even though they can restore the port from the disaster damage, we still have no clear idea when the nuclear disaster will end. Instead of having any closure, the nuclear disaster is expected to get worse.

As Professor Kimura mentioned, the ambiguous time in a temporal state is important. However, when we think about the nuclear power plant's temporality, I get stunned by thinking about what will constitute an “ordinary day” after a transitional phase. In late December 2011, the Japanese national administration announced that they were going to change their temporal “interim radiation safety standards” for food including fish to much stricter standard in April 2012. They are going to change the current interim standard on cesium, 500 becquerel per kilogram, to a new standard, 100 becquerel per kilogram. 

A safety standard establishes the legal distinction between “safe” and “dangerous.” To revise this standard, the national administration chose April, the start of the new administrative/fiscal year of Japanese institutions. That is to say, some food items which the national government currently approves as “safe” will be excluded from commercial distribution after April 2012 because they will be reclassified as “dangerous.” Fishermen's catches, which currently meet the national government's interim safety standards, will soon be excluded this upcoming April. This will be a part of their “ordinary days.” However, how long will such ordinary days last? Probably there will come a time when the government will again revise the distinction between “safe” and “dangerous.” It seems that such ordinary days of a post-nuclear disaster will undergo some transformations but will continue into an endless liminality.

Last month, a Japanese TV program, NHK Special, broadcast a report on the oceanic effects of a nuclear aftermath. In this documentary, a Ukrainian official talked about the continuing fish contamination from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 (which was 25 years ago). It will take thirty years for cesium to reach its half-life period. This Ukrainian official stressed that it was important to continue their research with patience. They still have five more years. What kind of closure will the Ukrainians have five years from now? As the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant is still emitting radiation, it is not clear when the thirty-year period will end, or even which point we will consider the start of such a thirty-year period. Will we live in this post-disaster ordinary period with an unclear closure by tentatively hoping there is closure in thirty years?

Shigeki Uno “Political Closure”

After a crisis, finding closure in the political sphere presents another critical question. Currently in Japan, politicians are trying to find political closure in a very undesirable way. 

Many thought that the 3/11 and nuclear disasters would mark a turning point for Japan.  Japan's national politics had been in trouble since the change of the national executive branch and the Diet in 2009. Many hoped that politicians would restore their leadership by constructing a new Japanese society. However, it seems as though their hope was futile. Ever since 3/11, instead of proposing or implementing recovery plans, the majority party (DPJ: Democratic Party of Japan) and minority parties have spent all of their efforts forcing the Cabinet out of office. Without presenting any new energy policy, the current Prime Minister unilaterally declared an end to the nuclear power plant crisis, but nobody actually believes him. It seems to me that politicians are intentionally ignoring reality. 

Although I understand the mentality of intentionally forgetting an undesirable reality, I find it extremely surprising that those in Japan's national politics have this mentality. Why are we facing this kind of trouble? 

Perhaps, the single-seat constituency system in Japan offers us a clue. This political system brought about the so-called “two-party system” and changed national Japanese politics in 2009. As a result, the two-party system eliminated the differences between the DPJ and the Liberal Democratic Party and forced DPJ members to evoke an imagined “social majority” instead of developing principled political positions. What we now call the political system exiles frustrations and criticism from Japanese society to outside the political sphere. Members of established political parties currently fear such “voices” from these outer regions of politics, while others try to appropriate those “voices” as a political resource. Japanese politics is unstable, and the public is becoming more frustrated with Japanese politics and democracy. 

At this rate, in the realm of Japanese politics, it seems that closure is only found by the negative employment of intentional forgetting. If Japanese democracy continues down this path, the crisis will worsen.

Annelise Riles “Guilt”

Following Shigeki Uno's suggestion that we look not just to Tohoku but to Tokyo, I want to put on the table another class of victims of the March 11 disasters. I have in mind the victims of the psychological trauma of the constant exposure to the unknowability of radiation risks (not to mention the possible long-term health effects of this exposure), and also of the trauma of having to face the stark reality that our leaders are unwilling or unable to put aside politics as usual in order to respond to the human suffering of the moment.  We are all victims in this sense, although my sense is that the trauma has been even more severe for women who in Japan still have the greatest responsibility for ensuring that the family has safe food to eat, that children can have a safe place to play and that the emotional needs of the family are met to the point that office work and schoolwork gets done. 

In one sense it may seem unimportant to raise this, given the magnitude of the suffering of the people most immediately affected by the tsunami and nuclear disaster. Re-reading my journal entries from the days after March 11, 2011, what strikes me now is how often the word “guilt” appears. I felt so guilty that others were suffering so much more than I was, and that made focusing on my own suffering seem completely illegitimate to myself.

Yet from another point of view, this guilt is also contributing to our political incapacitation. Sadly, the recovery is plagued by a number of serious political problems--an unwillingness of the mainstream press to fully investigate or to place news in analytical context, an unwillingness of elites in position of authority, whether in the private sector or the government, to take even small political risks in order to address the needs of the many victims, and a lingering unwillingness on the part of many citizens to openly challenge the government even though many people privately voice their total distrust of government claims and cynicism about its motivations.  And in this sense we are not just victims but perpetrators.

Hiroyuki Mori “Populism”

As for Dr. Uno's point on the Japanese political sphere, I want to add a note about current politics in Japan, specifically the waves of populism from local governments.

Before the earthquake disaster of 3.11 last year, there were some influential trends of local populism, which created new, local parties in Osaka, Nagoya, and so forth. After the earthquake, the populist leaders (typified in Osaka) seem to leverage the disaster to cultivate their popularity, drawing attention to the slow responses of the central government (i.e., the existing political parties such as DPJ and LDP).

Indeed, last November, the local party of Osaka, "Osaka Ishin no Kai" (Osaka Restoration Party), won the dual elections of governor (of Osaka prefecture) and mayor (of Osaka city) with the political promise of abolishing the divisions between Osaka and Sakai city, and uniting them together for greater political heft. The resulting so-called "Osaka Metropolis project,” along with various political attacks on public servants and schoolteachers, serves as a means to garner political favor. One of the reasons that they insisted on the necessity of the Osaka Metropolis project is to benefit from the support of Tokyo capital. Just after the election, the new mayor, Hashimoto, president of "Osaka Ishin no Kai" said that the next national election must focus on federalism. He claimed that federalism, not the crisis of public finance or social security and the like, was the biggest political issue. His focus on federalism ironically overlooks the purpose of the Osaka Metropolis project to merge several smaller prefectures into larger state governments.

These local populist movements have eroded existing political parties and may exert such drastic influence as to melt down the Japanese political system.

I am afraid that there will be no "closure" in terms of the political sphere in Japan, unless we find a point of political stability.

Hirokazu Miyazaki “A Politics of Hope?”

The popular Japanese novelist and influential opinion leader Ryu Murakami published an op-ed piece in the New York Times a few days after Japan's natural and nuclear disasters in which he states,

Ten years ago I wrote a novel in which a middle-school student, delivering a speech before Parliament, says: “This country has everything. You can find whatever you want here. The only thing you can't find is hope.” One might say the opposite today: evacuation centers are facing serious shortages of food, water and medicine; there are shortages of goods and power in the Tokyo area as well. Our way of life is threatened, and the government and utility companies have not responded adequately. But for all we've lost, hope is in fact one thing we Japanese have regained. The great earthquake and tsunami have robbed us of many lives and resources. But we who were so intoxicated with our own prosperity have once again planted the seed of hope. So I choose to believe (Ryu Murakami, “Amid Shortages, a Surplus of Hope,” New York Times, March 16, 2011). 

Hope has been a significant subject of public debate in Japan since the early 2000s. Japanese people, especially young people in Japan, seem to have lost hope for the future. This paralyzing sense of loss of hope and futurity has been amplified by the widely reported aging population and steady decline in the country's birth rate, the two decade-long economic slump and various phenomena associated with increasingly inward-looking youth. Murakami was one of the first social critics to capture this widely shared sentiment in the late 1990s. Have Japanese people ironically regained hope for the future as a result of the March 11 disasters, as Murakami has suggested?

The broad popular support for Mayor of Osaka Toru Hashimoto and his party, Osaka Ishin no Kai (Osaka Restoration Group), is a case in point. Hashimoto's politics can be regarded as one troubling kind of politics of hope. I do not support his politics myself, but I am not being ironic here. Hashimoto's upbringing as a self-made man (a lawyer and a popular television commentator who grew up in a family associated with a socially stigmatized and economically impoverished area of Osaka) and his consistent effort to challenge vested interests from yakuza to bureaucrats, mainstream party politicians and even academics present a concrete image of possible personal and social transformation. Of course, there are other potentially highly problematic and disturbing aspects to his politics which have been regarded as “dictatorial” and “fascistic,” but hope tends to thrive on ambiguity as many philosophers and theologians have long pointed out. What all this suggests is that what is problematic about Japan today is not so much Hashimoto's politics or the apparent rise of fascistic politics per se as the lack of alternative politics of hope.

If Hashimoto's politics of hope takes for granted the irrelevance of academic, bureaucratic and other forms of expert knowledge, I wonder if there is a different kind of politics of hope possibly ignited in those very forms of knowledge currently under attack. I have no intention to defend academics, bureaucrats and other experts whose arrogance and inclination toward preserving the status quo at all costs is clearly part of the problem. What kind of politics of hope would be possible from within those forms of knowledge?

In my view, as I have suggested in my initial posting, one key issue is the question of uncertainty and unknowability. What the ongoing global financial crises and Japan's natural and nuclear disasters have demonstrated is the fundamental truth of the unknowability of the world, and in my view, Japan today is one place in the world where this truth is lived (or consciously denied or forgotten) daily. However, those disasters beyond human control also have destroyed the authority of expertise of all kinds from financial engineering to seismology and nuclear energy science. Scientific approaches to the world share an admittedly often forgotten commitment to embrace the limits of certainty which, in my view, is dearly needed now more than ever. Could we practitioners of expert knowledge imagine an audacious response to political crises like Japan's current crisis? Could Meridian 180, which some of us initiated partially as a response to Japan's disasters, be a site for experiments in a politics of hope?

John Whitman “The Discrediting of the Intellectual Elite in the Post-Fukushima Japan”

Hirokazu Miyazaki's post brings home a point that the triple disasters of March 11 reinforced - if only fleetingly - in the international cultural consciousness. For two decades Japan has been mapping out the dimensions of the kind of postindustrial society imagined by Western public intellectuals in the 1960s and 70s. These dimensions include not just the "hollowing out" (空洞化) of the industrial economy, but social phenomena such as hikikomori and the themes touched on in Murakami Ryu's novel Exodus to a Country of Hope (希望の国のエク ソダス), cited by Professor Miyazaki. (In my opinion this novel is more in need of translation than the novels of the other, internationally more famous Murakami. The fact that the latter, but not the former, have been translated says much about how a particular construction of Japan is marketed by the international Japan Studies community.)

In terms of its movement along this particular historical trajectory, one could argue that Japan is more advanced, in a Hegelian sense, than other countries. The Fukushima nuclear emergency and its aftermath are part of this advanced status, not just in the crude sense that the same could (and will) happen elsewhere, but in the interplay between the government, industry, and the science establishment; the militarization of the emergency response; and especially the international and domestic control and marketing of information.

Professor Miyazaki also spoke to the phenomenon of Osaka Mayor Tooru Hashimoto and his Osaka Ishin no kai. I believe that Professor Miyazaki is correct in placing this phenomenon centrally within the discourse about hope, and also in cautioning intellectuals not to think about Hashimoto and his supporters in traditional terms of left and right. An additional legacy of Fukushima may be the very substantial discrediting of the intellectual elite, in universities and the dominant media. Not only did they fail to anticipate Fukushima, they failed to effectively critique the mass media response to the emergency, shape the public debate, or influence politics in a serious way afterward. Hashimoto's attack on this elite, especially in the universities, has traction, and it is likely to be part of the next episode of the post-Fukushima story.

Ghassan Hage “Hope and Crisis”

I'd like to make two remarks in relation to Hiro's excellent post. They are about the relation between the politics of crisis and the politics of hope. Both are drawn from the experience of the Lebanese civil war which lasted fifteen years with more than one hundred and fifty thousand people dead, the social and political institutions of the country were either totally destroyed or seriously weakened.

First, what does it mean to speak of a politics of crisis rather than simply refer to 'the crisis'? It means that there is an interpretive politics associated with every crisis where people with political and economic interests actively try to make of the crisis what they think is best for them. In Lebanon there was a big difference between those who tried to say the country was in crisis and those who portrayed it to be in a 'critical condition'. A crisis always carries with it the possibility/hope of something new emerging. It invites people to think of possible alternatives.

When a situation is portrayed as 'critical' the hope of something new disappears. Like when a patient is taken to hospital in a critical condition: the only hope people have is that the person makes it. In Lebanon, there was and still is an active in interest in portraying the country as always on the verge of collapse: people wake up and say 'wow, we've made it one more day without collapsing'. In such situations a politics of hope predicated on imagining new possibilities is effectively made obsolete. This is to say, that there is a form of conservatism which denies that there is a severe crisis to argue against the necessity of change, and there is another conservatism which thrives on making the crisis even more severe than it really is and then arguing: 'this is no time for thinking about change, we're lucky if we make at the moment'. I wonder how true this is of the Japanese politics of crisis.

Second, with relation to the politics of hope as Hiro has argued so well hope can be kidnapped by one political tendency or another if no alternative politics of hope is created. There is however another important dimension to this, hope is not simply differentiated in terms of its content but also in terms of the degree of political participation it invites. There is a politics of hope on both the right and the left that encourages dis-engagement from everyday political participation. We can call this passive hope. It involves people hoping but in the form of waiting for others to do something for them. There is on the other hand a participatory hope which encourages mass political action and participation. I'd like to think that academics should be on the side of this participatory hope.

Naoki Yokoyama “Searching in Darkness”

I read Sokyu Genyu's “Fukushima ni Ikiru” (Living in Fukushima: 玄侑宗久『福島に生きる』) and thought that Sokyu echoed Professor Miyazaki's post in this forum. 

In his book, Genyu wrote, “From the beginning, life is like anchu-mosaku (trying various things without any secure approach to a solution, a shot in the dark or grasping at straws). Right from the start, life is our search for subjectivity, as our grasping in darkness pulls us through an uncertain future.”

I found that Genyu's “uncertain future” is similar to what Professor Miyazaki called “the fundamental uncertainty and unknowability of the world.”

Genyu stated, “The future is always uncertain” in any era, and “we should find our subjectivity in our stumbling progress and our grasping in darkness towards an uncertain future.” Meanwhile, Professor Miyazaki observes that we are “[a]t the moment at which the scientific mind is dearly needed. It seems that the authority of scientific knowledge has crumbled before those unprecedented disasters beyond human control.” Then, he asks, “What role can intellectuals and professionals play in this situation?”

I think that Professor Miyazaki says that the workings of nature and human behavior have become and are still uncontrollable. Genyu thinks that the workings of nature and human behavior are uncontrollable right from the start. Even though there is a difference between Professor Miyazaki's and Genyu's arguments, the two of them agree that the workings of nature and human behavior are beyond our control at this time.

If so, I think that Genyu is also asking, “What role can the zen monk play?” His answer to this question is also to teach us, “We should find our subjectivity in our stumbling progress and our grasping in darkness towards an uncertain future.” We may interpret that Genyu is also asserting that religious leaders cannot do anything, and we should not expect anything from them. If the workings of nature and human behavior are beyond human control, couldn't intellectuals and professionals say, “We can't do anything. Don't expect anything from us.”

It seems that the experience from the 3/11 earthquake and the nuclear disaster is asking us to decide whether we think that the workings of nature and human behavior are beyond human control, or whether we think they are controllable.

Whichever position you take, I would like to share that the foundation of Genyu's book, “Fukushima ni Ikiru,” is the message to “not depend on power or authority.” The former position (of uncontrollability) is “to try various things without any secure approach to a solution, being puzzled and confused in too abstract a reality, to grasp at straws.” The latter position (of controllability) is “to establish a system by discovering techniques for living in a fundamentally uncertain and unknowable world.” The role of intellectuals and professionals is to clarify and establish such techniques.

I wrote this comment because I hope that Meridian 180 can be an experimental place for a politics of hope.