It has been ten years since the triple disaster of tsunami, earthquake, and nuclear meltdown happened in Japan. What has changed? How do people view these events ten years hence?  Join us for a panel discussion as UW Japan faculty and academics in Japan take a look back, and also look ahead.

Panelists:

Andrea Gevurtz Arai, Lecturer, UW Jackson School of International Studies
3/11: Tragedy, Revelation, Creative Action: On March 11, 2011, a trio of disasters hit northeastern Japan. The third disaster, the nuclear meltdown of 3 of the 4 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant's reactors earned 3/11 its infamous moniker. It is this ongoing disaster that has brought tragedy together with revelation and socially-altering action. This talk engages with some of the post-3/11 shifts in consciousness and action, including the anti-nuclear protests of 100,000's; local community power initiatives; and members of the younger generation for whom 3/11 has become a literal turning point.

Davinder Bhowmik, Associate Professor, UW Asian Languages and Literature
Tokyo Ueno Station, the 2020 National Book winning novel by Yū Miri (2014), is a meditation on the harsh life its protagonist, a migrant laborer from Fukushima, endures in Tokyo. Bhowmik will draw on the work of Tetsuya Takahashi to show how Fukushima (the home prefecture of Miri’s protagonist) plays a part in a ‘system of sacrifice’ that is oriented around the imperial throne in Japan. She will argue that the pivotal placement of the emperor system at the center of the novel points to ongoing silences and inequities that arise from a devaluation of the periphery. 

Mark Metzler, Professor, UW Jackson School of International Studies
Fukushima and the History of Cheap Power: The history of modernity is the history of cheap and abundant energy. Japan’s own industrial revolution, although not usually imagined this way, was also built on its position as an international energy power. In the 1970s, when Japan’s imports of oil and coal were surpassing 200 million tons a year, nuclear power promised to deliver more energy abundance than ever using only a few kilograms of fuel. The 2011 meltdown at Tokyo Electric Power’s Fukushima Daiichi plant appeared as a surprise and disjuncture, but it also reveals some continuities in Japan’s energy history and in the radically unequal nature of the regional and social exchanges involved.

Christophe Thouny, Associate Professor, Ritsumeikan University, Japan
Between Fukushima and Corona: On Tawada Yoko's Planetary Musings: Thouny will examine two texts by the Japanese writer Tawada Yōko in which, he argues, she questions our planetary futures in the time of Fukushima and Corona. In the 2011 short story ‘The Island of Eternal Life’, time walks backwards : Japan has been reduced to a closed radioactive island-nation in which children, weak and sick, must be taken care of by their elders. Then in an essay published in 2020, Tawada further questions the limits of our societies in the time of Corona when, like domesticated carps unable to breath under the water, we long to return to the planetary surface.

With introduction by Ken Tadashi Oshima, Professor, UW Department of Architecture and Chair, UW Japan Studies Program.

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