Making Meaning of Trauma: Responses to the Tōhoku Earthquake

This dissertation takes up the question of how authors, artists, filmmakers and others attempted to make sense and meaning in the aftermath of the March 11, 2011 triple disasters of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident in northeastern Japan (3.11). As the works under consideration move from the immediacy of disaster to the eventuality of aftermath, I examine how disaster becomes embedded within the everyday, and how these works render legible different scales and temporalities of trauma, which the language of the event may not capture. This project is firmly grounded in the practices of literary criticism, but also opens up to an interdisciplinary nexus including anthropological approaches to social and economic precarity, historical work on environmental disasters in Japan, and art/visual culture studies. These connections link this project to a broader conversation that understands the localized events of 3.11 to be part of emerging dialogues concerning trauma studies, affect studies, and the ethics of representation./nChapter one focuses on the initial wave of new media responses that challenged the more traditional responses found in television broadcasts linked to corporate and public service advertising. It examines the Advertising Council of Japan’s public service ads which, in the days following the disasters, offered an authoritative narrative promising that recovery was possible as long as individuals practiced self-control and self-restraint. In contrast to this normative narrative of recovery, Twitter poetry by writer and activist Wagō Ryōichi demanded the sympathetic imagination of his readers to grieve with him and bear witness to loss./nThe second chapter examines how writers Kawakami Hiromi and Takahashi Gen’ichirō returned to their earlier literary works in search of a language that could account for the disasters. I take the act of Kawakami and Takahashi rewriting their own previously published works, an act that redirects the illocutionary force of an established speech act, transforming it into an uncanny language of repetition, as an ethical endeavor to address the disasters./nThe third chapter, on post-3.11 film, examines Sono Sion’s Himizu (2011) and Hiroki Ryūichi’s RIVER (2011) to ask how images of the disasters came to be embedded in the discourses on everyday life in a way that gave rise to a visual vernacular invested with reparative potential. Both films resist an easy attachment to a hopeful futurity, but find, nevertheless, a kind of recuperative stubbornness in their characters’ decision to live with grief./nIn the final chapter, I examine how musician Saito Koji’s ambient, repeating musical loops, titled “Hope” and “Helplessness” (2012-13), photographer Takeda Shimpei’s project Trace (2011-13), a series of photographs of irradiated soil from the northeast, and author Kawakami Mieko’s short story “Sangatsu no keito” ([“March Yarn”] 2011), work to render legible the different scales and temporalities of the traumatic events. Kawakami, Takeda, and Saito’s works collapse past, present, and future by refusing narrative closure. In doing so, they call for a lingering with loss that may activate a sympathetic imagination and might attune one to the pain and experience of the other./nIn the epilogue, I consider how the events of 3.11 have been memorialized and archived nationally and locally by examining corporate ad campaigns Yahoo! JAPAN staged in the heart of Tokyo, and examining local museums and memorials in affected towns in the northeast, focusing in particular on the Rias Ark Museum in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture.

Advisor: O'Neill, Dan