It’s been two years since we’ve been in Japan; a fairly short absence in the whole scheme of things, but in light of recent events we had every reason to expect to find much changed. Although we flew southward along the east coast of Honshu, through a constant cover of clouds ranging from gauzy to voluminous it was impossible to get a sense of what we were looking at; aside from Mount Fuji, which popped through the clouds as we turned westward. Once on the ground in Nagoya, though, the only difference that was immediately evident was that the terminal and hotel lobby didn’t seem to be as air-conditioned as I would have expected for July – on account of a general compliance with the government’s call to businesses to set their thermostats to 28 degree Celsius (82F), in order to conserve electricity now that most of the country’s nuclear power plants are off-line, pending safety checks in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Once we got to Toyama, even this modification of the status quo seemed less apparent. Owing to it’s smaller, less urbanized population and ample electric supply from hydroelectric generation, there seemed to be less concern for keeping things lukewarm.
On closer inspection, though, there were noteworthy shifts. A craze for energy conservation has taken hold, even in Toyama – in the form of new products and helpful hints about how to save energy. Actually, to call it a “craze” is a bit too dismissive; faced with the prospect of massive electricity shortages as the reduced capacity of a compromised power grid meets the heat and humidity of the summer months, national and local governments have put out the call to “save electricity” (setsuden – a term that is at once a noun and a slogan in it own right), and most businesses and private citizens have answered the call. At the very least, most people seem to agree upon the necessity of doing so, and some even seem to have made it a personal challenge to see how far they can cut back on their own personal power consumption. (Not that their aren’t dissenters, of course; the weekly news magazine Post – a publication not unlike the recently defunct News of the World in its editorial policies and preoccupation with the lurid side of the news – recently ran a story of the idiocy of what it termed “setsuden fascism.”)
Of even great interest to me, through, is the ubiquity of two other terms: hisaichi and hisaisha. In the present context, the former refers to the areas damaged by the tsunami, and the latter to those who lived there when it struck. These terms come up multiple times during any given hour of the broadcast day, whether one is watching the news or any of the “info-tainment” type shows that are a staple of Japanese TV. You see and hear them in public service announcements in the press and on air, and encounter them on collection boxes that many businesses have placed near their cash registers, inviting patrons to chip in their change to the ongoing relief effort.
This is as it should be, of course. At the same time, though, the ubiquity of these words only seems to underscore just how localized the disaster is. As I sat in the sound-proofed room of a local karaoke emporium the other day with my wife, son, sister-in-law, and nephew the terms suddenly appeared on the large, plasma screen TV on that covered a whole wall of the room while we sat there rifling through catalogues of songs new and old in search of something to sing. This public service announcement to remember the victims of the disaster and contribute was a brief moment of solemnity in what was otherwise a constant stream of loud, flashy video presentations extolling the high-tech features of the AV system in each room, the amenities of establishment, and the selection available at its self-service, all-you-can-drink soft-drink bar. For an instant I found myself pondering how many places like this must have been destroyed by the tsunami. That life outside the hisaichi should go on as it always had before is of course neither mysterious nor insensitive, but the incongruity was striking.
And if the hisaichi becomes a kind of world unto itself through the incongruity, what about the hisaisha – especially those who remain in the numerous shelters that dot the devastated landscape of their former towns and cities, or have been fortunate enough to move move temporary prefab housing? Does their experience also serve to set them apart, whether they want it to or not? If so, will this sense of separation follow them if and when they leave the hisaichi?
I don’t really have an answer to these questions yet. There are a few signs, though, that unfortunately seem to suggest that such could be the case. I’ve read stories about children evacuated for the 30km perimeter around the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to other municipalities being ostracized by the local kids in the schools they entered; the local kids claimed that the Fukushima newcomers might spread the radiation to them if they weren’t careful. (http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T110421006295.htm) Kids aren’t the only ones, either: the July 16 edition of the Chunichi shinbun carried a brief story of a woman, originally from Tokyo but now residing in Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, who returned to Tokyo to visit her parents for a few days. Soon after she parked her car in her parents’ lot, people from the neighborhood began to gossip about how “inconvenient” it was to have vehicle with a Fukushima license plate parked in their lot. (中日新聞、２０１１年７月１６日富山版１６頁、「越中春秋、受け入れてほしい」)
In both cases, it is the ongoing nuclear crisis at the Daiichi reactor and the specter of radioactive contamination that provides the backdrop for the ostracism. This is clearest in the case of the children, of course, but in the case of the woman’s car, whatever her parents’ neighbors might have been thinking, they did not expressly voice the fear that the woman involved – or even her car – was contaminated. Much less certain in their reasons than the local children of the other example, they still felt “inconvenienced” by the mere possibility of a connection being drawn between themselves and the unfolding disaster in Fukushima, by the simple presence of a car with Fukushima plates sitting in their lot. The situation would be comedic if it weren’t a classic example of how discrimination often operates in contemporary Japanese society (as well as elsewhere too, of course). At work here is a desire to avoid difference, and by extension to avoid the perception of having anything to do with it, because having some connection to that which is “different” also serves to set you apart. Again, I wonder if the hisaisha from other parts of Tohoku that are not as identified with the spread of nuclear contamination will experience a similar kind of avoidance outside of the stricken areas.
Of course, the apprehensions of the non-hisaisha aren’t the only factor in the perception of difference, or the perception of ostracism for it. The victims themselves may also perceive a difference in treatment, based upon a heightened sensitivity to the way their plight must look to those outside. To put it simply and crudely, as long as you believe that people have some sort of reason to look at you funny, you may believe that they are doing so even when they aren’t. This may be part of the explanation for why so many people remained in the shelters long after the waters receded and communications and transportation networks were restored. With these in place, there was no legal or administrative barrier to prevent those displaced by the tsunami from leaving, after all; they were free to come and go as they pleased, and could have moved out to live with relatives and friends outside of the hisaichi if they so wished, or even decided to make a new start on their own somewhere far from the devastation.
The Japanese press has commented frequently on the plight of the hisaisha and their apparent unwillingness to move away, even if refusing to do so means staying put in the discomfort and lack of privacy of the shelters. The usual reasons for this offered in these reports ring true enough on one level: many of the victims are elderly folks who have lived in the area all their lives or else have no place else to go; others are concerned about what might happen to their land and their neighborhoods if they leave and entrust everything to the authorities in charge. These concerns are real, of course, and have produced tensions between neighbors, in cases where some families decide to move out even if it means moving away – perhaps for good – while others decide to stay on in the hope of rebuilding the community.
I wonder, though, if there might not be something at work here that is rooted in a community of a much more recent vintage – one that arose after the tsunami rather than being displaced by it. Shelters are not necessarily home to people exclusively from a given neighborhood, after all; while I’m still unclear on the details governing who ended up where, it seems possible at this point that people who never regarded each other as neighbors or members of the same “community” – people who indeed may never have even met one another prior to March 11 – ended up living in the same shelter. Did these groups of survivors thrown together become “communities” in the wake of the disaster, and if so, were bonds formed there that some now loathe breaking?
One of the books I brought along to read on this trip is Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Made in Hell. It is a very provocative look at disasters – both natural and man-made – and how those who suffer them respond to their predicament. It is also a critique of what passes for the common understanding of these things, as presented to us by the media and the authorities in charge of managing disasters and returning things to normalcy afterward. Solnit argues persuasively that rather than despair, hysteria, and the total breakdown of law and order, in the immediate aftermath of disaster most survivors tap into tremendous reserves of moral fortitude and generosity. Instead of a Hobbesian hell-scape in which every person is out for him- or herself, mutual aide and altruism motivate the actions of most people. With a nod to Kropotkin, Solnit surmises that this may be part of the way we are actually wired as a species – without such an instinct, we probably would not have made it this far. Furthermore, using examples from various historical disasters, she underscores how liberating and empowering the experience is or those involved. For some survivors, the experience of not just the disaster but also the “disaster community” that emerges in its wake becomes a life-changing experience. (Aside from these, she also makes the point that the social, political, and economic structures that support what we think of as normalcy – structures which the authorities scramble to reinstitute in the aftermath, are in fact the real disaster, in that they pit individual and against individual and group against group, thus stifling the better instincts we are born with.)
Did such “disaster communities” emerge in the wake of the tsunami? And, if so, could the memory of what some hisaisha discovered through them be another factor in the way they have reacted to things since? If such communities did emerge, how long did they last, and what finally brought about their disappearance – if they have entirely done so? More questions to explore…
If the conditions that Solnit describes ever took shape in Tohoku, though, media coverage of the disaster, domestic and foreign alike, made little if any note of it; the overwhelming image in the aftermath was of isolated pockets of survivors, living on the brink of starvation in unsanitary conditions, waiting desperately for rescue. This may well have been the case, but it is also an image that accords with that which the media put forth in the disasters that Solnit describes a completely different side of. (Also, as my friend Hariu-san has pointed out to me, in those early days after March 11 the reporters arrived on the scene with cameras and microphones to chronicle the suffering, but with nothing in the way of food or other supplies to help relieve it.)
That would have been the whole post for this time, folks. “Would have been,” because between writing the preceding paragraph and this one, I woke up to the news that Japan had won the women’s World Cup. I did not watch it live, since it did not come on until past 3am here, nor do my in-laws have a DVR to record it. As a result, I ended up catching just the highlights on the morning news, as I prepared for the trip up to Sendai (where I am now writing from, by the way). Friends have asked what the reaction is here, with this victory coming in the midst of all the crises. On one level it is just as you would expect; there is a great sense of elation. Even without the disaster in the background, there are more than enough elements of a Cinderella story in this victory to make for a media spectacle. But add to this not only the disaster, but also the fact that two of the athletes on the team are from Miyagi Prefecture, and it seems almost poetic.
The Japanese media have of course been giving this wall-to-wall coverage. Even when there is nothing to report, they have reporters on the scene. Here’s one network’s reporting on the arrival of the team at Narita Airport:
I waited the better part of two hours to record this off of the TV screen at Hariu-san’s place. They started live coverage from the arrival longue at Narita at 8:30am, but with nothing to report until well past 10. At least it’s good to know that American cable news is not alone in wasting its viewers’ time.
(I’m also impressed that the Japanese make these athletes cart their own luggage!)
During the course of this broadcast, I cut over to another channel briefly, and happened to catch the start of a live broadcast of a Diet meeting, in which representatives ask the Prime Minister about various points of policy, etc. The lead off question, from a rep whose name and party affiliation I can’t recall now, was what the PM’s opinion of the victory was, and what he intended to say to the athletes when he met with them. Prime Minister Kan answered just as you might expect: he said he would praise them for raising spirits of the nation in such trying times, and thank them for giving people something to feel good about.
And that, in a way, is what this is all about. I don’t mean to imply that it is all just a show. Certainly there is that element to it, of course; since March the news in Japan has consisted of stories of disaster, death, nuclear catastrophe, political intrigue, and governmental impotence. Even as the Japanese women’s team cruised from one victory to another, the news broke that beef from cattle that had accidentally been fed hay contaminated with Cesium 137 had been processed and distributed for sale throughout the country.
The Japanese women’s victory provides a welcome shift in focus, and the media has embraced it for just that purpose. Since the victory the terms hisaichi and hisaisha have been superseded in ubiquity by another phrase: “Nadeshiko Japan.” This is the nickname of the Japanese women’s soccer team – the counterpart of “Samurai Japan” for the men’s team. Like “samurai,” “nadeshiko” has a cultural-nationalist significance. It is the name of a variety of pink flower, dianthus superbus, which symbolizes the unadorned feminine virtues of the archetypal Japanese woman. So it’s kind of a two-for-one opportunity; a feel-good story that also provides notes of populist nationalism.
I still don’t have a very good sense yet of what people really think about this, outside of the media hype. Although they have every reason to be happy about it – and I’m sure they are – my first impression was that the reaction seemed rather staid. The evening news last night showed small, jubilant groups of Japanese soccer fans, hugging and cheering, but as of yet I’ve seen no crowds celebrating in the streets. Of course, that would probably be out of national character, come to think of it. We’ll see what happens when the official victory parade takes place in a few days. In fact, I may get the chance to see it in person, since I sure that there will be a parade in Sendai in the near future.