title: Reading post-disaster Japanese narrative cinema as radical democracy: 3.11, trauma and the legacy of the 'Lost Decades'
Creators: name: Bertalanffy, Chantal
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Japanese cinema
subject: trauma
subject: socio-economic problems
subject: Fukushima

description: On 11th March 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake and resultant tsunami claimed the lives of nineteen thousand people in the Tohoku region of north-eastern Japan. Multiple nuclear meltdowns, caused by the tsunami’s waves crashing into the walls of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, made the catastrophe a ‘triple disaster’. In the face of the government’s calls for calm, solidarity and national unity, there were widespread public protests against the government’s handling of the disasters and its nuclear energy policy. Just six months after the devastating events of what has come to be known as ‘3.11’, filmmakers began to weave real-life events relating to these catastrophes into their fictional stories. This thesis examines a selection of films made in post-disaster Japan which refer to the triple disaster. While its summary account of the events and aftermath of the triple disaster as well as its innovative framing of contemporary Japanese political discourse both constitute original contributions in themselves, at the heart of this thesis is a set of analyses of a body of recent and hitherto unexamined Japanese films. The core contribution of this thesis is the identification of a significant strand of Japanese cinema made in the wake of the 2011 triple disaster and characterised by references not only to 3.11 but also to trauma. This thesis provides an original conceptual framework for understanding these films, insisting throughout on the importance of adopting a wide-angle critical view that reads contemporary Japanese cinema in the context of national political developments dating back to the 1990s that continue to shape Japan’s vision of the future. The first major study of post-disaster Japanese cinema, this thesis performs close readings of films by Ishii Yūya, Hiroki Ryūichi, Sono Sion, Uchida Nobuteru, Tsukamoto Shinya and Higuchi Shinji. Few of these films have been distributed outside Japan and none of them have yet been the subject of sustained scholarly analysis. This thesis views the films in question as reflections of contemporary Japanese political discourse and interventions in it. By setting these examples of post-3.11 Japanese cinema carefully into the context of contemporary political discourse, this thesis exposes and explains the importance of the presence of trauma in each of these films. Indeed, all of the films examined do not only refer to the triple disaster, they also all feature individuals who appear to be suffering from some form of trauma. At least, the representation of these characters is characterised by the adoption of established cultural tropes of trauma (Luckhurst, 2008). At the core of this thesis is the argument that an important strand of post-disaster Japanese films – ranging from indie films on shoe-string budgets to lavish blockbuster movies – alludes to 3.11, yet not to engage the tragic fates of those affected by the disasters, but rather, I argue, to draw attention to ongoing socio-economic problems rooted in the so-called ‘lost decade(s)’. Indeed, this thesis maintains that the traumas in the films are not traumas originating from 3.11, but traumas resulting from the socio-economic conditions linked to the first so-called ‘lost decade’ and subsequent neoliberal reforms. In four analytical chapters – respectively focussing on workers, families, women, and the so-called ‘lost generation’ – I reveal how individuals from a variety of social groups are constrained by the limited socio-economic opportunities available to them and thus forced to make decisions that lead to traumatising outcomes. Ultimately, this thesis reads post-3.11 Japanese cinema as seeking to overcome the absence of a genuinely democratic discourse in Japan and to mount a challenge to the neoliberal status quo. To this end, I construct an original theoretical framework, tying ideas from Cathy Caruth’s theory of trauma (2016 [1996]) to Chantal Mouffe’s work on political participation (2020 [1993]). This framework allows me to interpret the films’ recourse to the cultural trope of trauma as attempts to highlight the lack of a democratic discourse in contemporary Japan. This lack is potentially traumatising for citizens, as it debilitates them and excludes them from the imagined community of the nation (Anderson, 1991 [1983]). This thesis concludes that the selected films practice ‘radical democracy’, as defined by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), advocating a more pluralist society centred on social equality and citizen participation.