Not Even The End of the Word is Enough
By: Je Ar
Tags: Japan, Sociology, Japanese, Anime, Capitalism

A summary of “ Imagination After the Earthquake: Japan’s Otaku culture in the 2010s” by Uno Tsunehiro

Image of Your Name, which shows and animated place based on a real location.

Imagination after the earthquake is an Anthropology article written by Uno Tsunehiro and published in Verge: Studies in Global Asia. The article explores Japanese society response to the great East Japan earthquake of March 11, 2011 and the subsequent Fukushima Daichii nuclear powerplant disaster. It frames those events in relation to the consumption of pop culture in the years that preceded the earthquake and those that follow it. The main thesis of the article is that the establishment of a late capitalist society has left Japan without a framework of identity to face the disaster and, in lieu of that, media products of mass consumption have taken the role of providing an ersatz mythology for people to fill their everyday life — which in turns has made unable to build a proper response to the challenge of the earthquake.

To understand Tsunehiro argument one must accept first the premise that the earthquake didn’t change anything about Japanese society. It only made more tangible the patterns that were already present. These patterns can be described as the “everydayness” compose by the day-to-day activities that had come to define Japanese life since the settling-in of a stable post-capitalist society. In such society, the dangers of war, famine, and religious wrath (in all the forms in which God might punish humanity) are not longer a ubiquitous presence. In the same manner, with no dangers and possibilities of change, a series of stifling rituals settled on the every-man’s life. The concept of “everydayness” became so entrenched in Japanese society that it was incorporated in their popular vocabulary — the word is ‘nichijosei’. After the earthquake, the lingering presence of the nuclear reactor remained as a reminder of the disruption in that everydayness, but no proper reorganization of society was achieved to answer to that treat.

The precursor of the everydayness was the concept of “everyday without end”. The concept was adopted in the 1980s and was represented as an endless drama of the perfunctory life. All that was left was to live a childish life and school-like adulthood, reminiscent of the life associated with teenage girls. But living in an immutable society is unbearable. As a response, men develop boyish fantasies of post-nuclear apocalyptic landscapes (mecha animes are the first example that comes to mind.) An imaginary place that was fertile for the change the everydayness didn’t provide. But these fantasies also failed and people switched to make internal adjustments to bury the uncertainties of identity. Now we deal with problems of self-consciousness or mainly produce derivate works (for example fanfiction.) The way people produce and reproduce this new material for the everyday life can be observed in the different pop-consumer products. For example, Moe (which is a type of manga that purports to show the life of high school girls), card games like Yu-Gi-Oh, which can be extended eternally by the addition of new cars and new rules, and new animes like “Your name”, which combine elements of the fantastical and real; specifically, real places. The incorporation of real places in manga and anime has created a new phenomena of fan-boys that peregrinate to this places as if they were the real locations of religious events.

But since derivate mythologies cannot answer existential questions and provide purpose to life, the nation, and history, Japanese society was left detached and unable to reformulate their lives in the vision of the largest catastrophe since war time. Our imaginations hinder our capacity to actuate change in our lives, in the everydayness. To what imaginations has Japanese society defeated?