Event Date
8th Annual Alan Templeton Distinguished Lecture in Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures: Special Event
November 3-4, 2022
The Culture of the Fukushima Disasters: Japanese Film, Literature, Manga, and Photography after 3.11
https://ealc.ucdavis.edu/news-and-events/join-us-8th-annual-alan-templeton-speaker-series-culture-fukushima-disasters
This two-day event explores cultural texts that have emerged in the wake of the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear catastrophe that hit northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011. All parts of the event are free and open to the public.
Thursday Nov. 3: Cruess Hall 1002 (UC Davis)
6:30-9:00pm
Screening of Bon-Uta, a Song from Home (dir. Nakae Yuji, 2018)*
In English with Japanese subtitles; 134 mins.
Introduced by Ai Iwane, associate producer
The first day of the event features an evening screening of the documentary film, Bon-Uta, a Song from Home. Artist Ai Iwane, an associate producer for the project, will introduce the film briefly and take some questions afterward if there is time.
*This is the first screening of the film in the continental United States.
Short Synopsis: The film tells the true story of evacuees from Futabata in Fukushima. Unable to return to their hometown because of the ongoing disaster of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, residents are scattered throughout the country and mourn the loss not only of their community but of their traditions, such as the Futaba Bon-Uta, a festival musical performance they have celebrated for centuries. Through an introduction by the photographer Ai Iwane, they meet a Japanese American Taiko group and learn of a similar Bon-Uta tradition performed by Japanese Americans living in Hawaii. Thus begins a journey through space and time, a journey that brings discovery, friendships, and new hope.
*Film preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNEkGv-aSkw
For a review of the film, see: https://www.thehawaiiherald.com/2019/10/22/film-review-bon-uta-a-song-from-home/
Friday Nov. 4: UC Davis Student Community Center Multipurpose Room
9:30am-11:30am
Presentations on Film, Manga, Literature, and Photography relating to 3.11
Introduction: Michiko Suzuki and Michael Dylan Foster
Ai Iwane (artist, photographer, film producer)
“FUKUSHIMA ONDO, the Song and its Rediscovered Origin after 3.11: Reconnection Between Hawaii and Fukushima”
Abstract: A journey that began in Hawaii with the search for an abandon ISSEI, the first generation cemeteries, eventually connects me with Fukushima after 3.11. My talk is centered around the photo series KIPUKA, which I was able to create by witnessing a exchange between two regions of performers who participate in the traditional Japanese Buddhist Bon Dance. My attempt is to show the connection that transcends the separation of time and space while showing a bird's eye view of history and geography.
Rachel DiNitto, Professor of modern and contemporary Japanese literary and cultural studies, University of Oregon
“Manga, Radiation, and Politics after 3/11”
Abstract: This talk introduces a variety of manga produced after the 2011 disaster, ranging from the mainstream to the underground, and examines them for their commentary on the nuclear accident. I begin with a comparison of Kariya Tetsu’s Oishinbo (2014) and Tatsuta Kazuto’s Ichi-F: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant (2013-15). The former set off a national controversy when the depiction of a bloody nose was taken as harmful to the local communities in Fukushima. By contrast, Ichi-F claims to depict the reality of the clean-up as it defends the plant owners and downplays the dangers of radiation. From there, I move to the award-winning manga of Shiriagari Kotobuki (2011-2015) and trace the anti-nuclear message as it shifts to one of despair over the course of his post-disaster manga collections. I end with Imai Arata’s F (2015), an edgy, anti-nuclear manga that employs the wars in Syria and Iraq to critique the Japanese government. The talk shows how different manga artists use a variety of styles to represent the events—from detailed, text-heavy images emphasizing facts to more artistic, minimalist designs. I investigate how the visual medium of manga works to portray the effects of the disaster, its history, politicality, and futurity.
Dan O’Neill, Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California at Berkeley
“Animal Media: Documenting Life in Japan’s Nuclear Exclusion Zone”
Abstract: The return of animal life to the nuclear exclusion zone coincided with the emergence of new media forms mobilized to assess life in the post 3.11 moment. I consider this peculiar conjuncture of rewilding and media assemblage as an opportunity to think through the relations of animals and sensing technologies as well as the transformative potential of these relations for critical thought. I take up animal photography and Geiger counter-videos as my objects of study in order to understand how these and other evolving documentary forms are used to produce environmental knowledge as well as how they are reassembled to help us make sense of the phobias, emotional indeterminacies, and new affective relations generated through and with located relationships and encounters among species, human and nonhuman.
Doug Slaymaker, Professor of Japanese, University of Kentucky
“Kobayashi Erika and Radioactive Afterlives”
Abstract: “For as a long as I can remember I have been interested in things invisible to the human eye (mienaimono),” says Kobayashi Erika. The mienaimono I will examine are ghosts and radiation, increasingly important themes across the fiction produced in the wake of the 2011 triple disasters. I will focus on her 2019 novel Trinity, Trinity, Trinity. Just one example of this, the house in which the action takes place was built in 1964, and on the opening day of that Olympics the family matriarch took a fall that influenced the flow of the family, right into the present with the opening of the 2020 Olympics on the immediate horizon. This novel too is one about radiation and its role in Japanese society, that, even though it does not connect directly to the Fukushima Daiichi disasters, it evidences one way those disasters remain in the creative landscape. We also find that this sort of history, although not visible (i.e. mienamono), nonetheless remains visible in multitude ways in every day of everyone’s lives.
11:45am -12:45pm: Roundtable discussion with all participants: “3.11 in Contemporary Japanese Culture”
Moderated by Michael Dylan Foster
Presenter Bios:
Ai Iwane: Born 1975 in Tokyo. In 1991, she left for the United States to study at Petrolia High School, where she pursued an off-the-grid, self-sustaining lifestyle. She began her career as a photographer in 1996 after returning to Japan. She continues to make work exploring the invisible ties between far-removed locations through a process of herself immersing in those environments, such as her KIPUKA series examining the connection established between Hawaii and Fukushima through immigration. The series and the book KIPUKA (Seigensha Art Publishing, 2018) was awarded the 44th Kimura Ihei Award and the 44th Nobuo Ina Award.
Her publications include Journey towards Kipuka (Ohta Publishing), and, A NEW RIVER (bookshop M). Her work has been shown at the Honolulu Museum as part of Hawaii Triennial 2022, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Kanazawa 21 Century Museum, Dali International Photography Exhibition, China.
Rachel DiNitto is a Professor of modern and contemporary Japanese literary and cultural studies at University of Oregon. Her research focuses on the cultural responses to the triple disaster of March 11, 2011 in Japan, with an emphasis on nuclear and environmental issues. In addition to her book, Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan’s Triple Disaster (University of Hawaii Press, 2019), she has published on the film and manga of this disaster and postwar Japan. She is working on a new edited volume: Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema for the AAS/Columbia UP series Asia Shorts.
Dan O’Neill is an associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a scholar of modern literature and cinema (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan). His research interests include gender and sexuality studies, and the intersections of environmental humanities and media theory. His current book project traces an emergent inter-medial history of the 3.11 disasters. His articles appeared in journals including Japan Forum, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, and Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema.
Doug Slaymaker is professor of Japanese at the University of Kentucky, USA. His research focuses on literature and art of the twentieth century, with particular interest in the literature of post-3.11 Japan, and of animals and the environment. Other research projects examine Japanese writers and artists traveling to France. He is the translator of Kimura Yūsuke’s Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa’s Deluge and Furukawa Hideo’s Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (Columbia University Press). His translation of Kimura Saeko’s Theorizing Post-Disaster Literature in Japan: Revisiting the Literary and Cultural Landscape after the Triple Disasters is in production (Lexington Books).
This special two-day event is made possible through the generous support of:
- The Templeton Endowment for the Arts and Letters
- The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
- The East Asian Studies Program
- The Department of Cinema and Digital Media
- The Department of Comparative Literature
- The Department of Asian American Studies
- The Office of the Dean, UC Davis College of Letters and Sciences
For more information please contact: Michael Dylan Foster and Michiko Suzuki; mdfoster@ucdavis.edu; micsuzuki@ucdavis.edu
Event sponsored by: The Templeton Endowment for the Arts and Letters; East Asian Languages and Cultures; East Asian Studies Program; Cinema and Digital Media; Comparative Literature; Asian American Studies; Office of the Dean, UC Davis College of Letters and Sciences