In Tokio regiert die Angst

„Korruptionsverdacht, Kostenexplosion, miese Arbeitsbedingungen: Ein Jahr vor den Olympischen Spielen in Tokio 2020 ist die Stimmung in Japans Hauptstadt schlecht. Vorfreude auf Olympia will keine aufkommen. Das Organisationskomitee verstrickt sich in Widersprüche.“ (Felix Lill, Deutschlandfunk.de)

Im Rahmen der 11. International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) in Leiden tagte am 17. Juli das von der Japanologie Frankfurt unter Lisette Gebhardt organisierte Panel "Japanese-European intellectual and artistic approaches to nuclearity. Human transformation, thought control, atomic landscapes" zum Thema intellektueller und künstlerischer Repräsentationen des Atomaren in Japan, mit besonderer Aufmerksamkeit auf das zeitgeschichtliche Ereignis "Fukushima". 

Abstract des Panels:
While a global cultural history of the nuclear is still missing, the Japanese-European axis of a nuclear modernity would certainly be a central part of it. The experience of the atomic bomb built the basis for a new philosophical debate on human existence both in Japan and Germany that also characterized art and literature in the postwar decades. When “3.11” happened, Japanese as well as German writers and artists reacted almost immediately to the so called trifold catastrophe, often referring to the heritage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Post-Fukushima art relies on postwar questions of life in the Nuclear State (Jungk) and in the state of nuclearity. The Nuclear State clearly shows totalitarian tendencies, exerts control over its subjects, forces them into denial of their personal identities and finally into silence. Living in nuclearity means that the nuclear danger challenges human bios to adapt to a toxic environment – facing the threat of death or deformation.  Authors / artists such as Yôko Tawada, Tsushima Yûko, Doris Dörrie and Henmi Yô create models to reflect on the various aspects of a post 3.11-world such as the decay of democracy, right wing pedagogies, media manipulation, nuclear precarity, psychological crisis management, subversion and resistance, or possibilities of a new conviviality in a nuclear future.

Abstracts der einzelnen Vorträge:
(1) Chantal Bertalanffy (Edinburgh) "The Relationless Society and Fukushima’s Trauma: Doris Dörrie’s 'Fukushima Mon Amour' and Sion Sono’s 'Himizu'" 
Six months after The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami as well as the subsequent nuclear accident on 11 March 2011, narrative films began to merge “real” events with fictional stories. Although ethical questions surrounding the consumption of “3.11”’s tragedy in the form of films can and should be raised, this paper argues that recent Japanese cinema is an artistic intervention towards the government’s dominant narrative of a collective national trauma. Especially in comparison to Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear energy following Fukushima, this paper will illustrate how Japan’s maintenance of its nuclear policy has undermined particular democratic practices and created new precarities. Post-disaster Japanese cinema, therefore, not only challenges the Nuclear State and living in nuclearity, it also highlights what Anne Allison (2013) describes as Japan’s  muen-shakai (relationless society) as the actual cause for individual trauma.
 In Doris Dörrie’s Fukushima Mon Amour (2016), protagonist Marie travels from Germany to Japan after having had a traumatic experience. Apart from the fact that Dörrie’s film is set in the disaster area in Fukushima prefecture, the parallel between a German film’s depiction of individual trauma and many recent Japanese films opens up the question if ‘relationlessness’ is not only a Japanese phenomenon but can be linked to a German and/or more global context. A comparison between Himizu (Sion Sono, 2011) and Fukushima Mon Amour will explore how the fear of nuclear energy could thematically be linked to muen-shakai and the consequential precariousness.
(2) Christian Chappelow (Frankfurt) "The language of nuclear obedience in Japan: Henmi Yô’s literary pensées on ‘Fukushima’
The work of author and journalist Henmi Yô 辺見庸 (*1944) can be read as an anachronistic antithesis to contemporary Japanese literature in the Heisei-Era (1989-2019): Heavily influenced by his travels around the world as a journalist as well as the philosophy and cultural critique of Adorno and others, Henmis literature seemingly follows in the footsteps of modernist bourgeoise intellectuality in a time when mass media, commercialism and political apathy came to the forefront of established literary discussion. After returning to Japan and winning the Akutagawa price in 1991, Henmi begins to construct his own cultural critique of post-war Japan, focusing on topics like the death sentence, the language of state media and the Koizumi administrations support for the Iraq War.
 Living in Ishinomaki (Miyagi Prefecture), Henmi witnessed the destruction of his hometown in March 2011 and the nuclear catastrophe that soon followed. "Fukushima" thus comes to be both pinnacle and tipping point in his late work, with his cultural critique of nuclear energy in postwar Japan a catalyst for his intellectually constructed vision of Japanese society quietly slipping back into neo fascist obedience. This paper aims to discuss how his literary pensées on 3.11, radical in both language and ideas, should be assessed in line of both a continuation of European intellectuality as well as an artistic self-presentation as perpetual oppositionist in the context of literary approaches to nuclearity in the Heisei-Era.
(3) Lisette Gebhardt (Frankfurt): "Transformations of youth in post-apocalyptic futures: Two poetico-political blueprints by Tsushima Yûko and Tawada Yôko"
Mainstream post-Fukushima literature perpetuates the routines of the Japanese cultural life within a mass-mediated reality. A large part of the publishing scene follows the agenda of appeasement and “healing” (iyashi). However, there also were a few representatives of a literary community that still clings to the values of Japanese postwar democracy. They state their opinions frankly, or show aspects of an unwanted reality in their fictional representation of 3.11. To mention are the late renowned writer Tsushima Yûko津島 佑子 (1947-2016), Kirino Natsuo, Yoshimura Man’ichi and Tawada Yôko. In fact, their works suggest that Japanese “post-disaster literature” (shinsaigo bungaku) has made a contribution to today’s world literature in the direction of what was formally known as “political literature”.
 In Hangenki wo iwatte (2016), Tsushima refers to the German “Hitler Jugend” when she characterizes a dystopian totalitarian Japanese society in the near future, where the youth has undergone a mental transformation. Tawada’s protagonist in Kentôshi (2014), Yoshiro, once a friend of the German woman Hildegard, takes care of his grandson Mumei who represents a younger generation in post-apocalyptic Japan that already has mutated genes. While Tsushima describes totalitarian pedagogy in order to expose anti-democratic and inhuman structures under nuclear regimes, Tawada thinks of totally new forms of existence and of a challenging conviviality with the nuclear.

Insbesondere die Einordnung "Fukushimas" zwischen regionaler, japanischer und globaler Katastrophe wurde im Anschluss an das gut besuchte Panel diskutiert.
Die ICAS ist die größte Konferenz asiatischer Studien weltweit und findet alle zwei Jahre statt. Die nächste Konferenz findet 2021 in Kyôto statt.

Link: https://eu.eventscloud.com/ehome/icas11/

In einem aktuellen Blogbeitrag diskutiert der Japanologe und Journalist Andres Singler ein Jahr vor Tokyo 2020 kritische Diskurse um das Verhältnis der Spiele zur demokratischen Kultur in Japan und insbesondere Fukushima:

"Representatives of those people affected in Fukushima wish that at least a small proportion of the twenty billion Euros Tokyo 2020 will cost, according to the Japanese Court of Auditors, would be used to help refugees in a reasonable way. "I'm not against the Olympics in principle, but now is not the time for it," says Sumio Konno, chairman of a plaintiff group that is still arguing for the rightof children to flee from regions where radioactive emissions are higher than the former limit of 1 mSv per year (Kodomo datsu hibaku saiban: http://datsuhibaku.blogspot.com) [...]
In addition to the problem of gentrification, realised, for instance, by joint ventures transforming public property into big companies’ private profit, critics observe direct challenges to the democratic culture in the host countries of the Olympics. Open discourses on the Olympics are no longer possible in an atmosphere of increasing nationalism, many people do criticize. "Opponents to the Olympics will be treated as traitors," writes the physicist Koide. "But in a country that Government abandons innocent people, I am pleased to be such a person," he adds."

Link: https://www.andreas-singler.de/2019/07/17/bad-for-fukushima-bad-for-democracy/

Der Japanologe und Protestforscher William Andrews weist auf seinem Blog „Throw out Your Books“ auf die neugegründete Initiative The Anti-Olympic Poster Committee hin. Diese wurde von dem in Fukushima ansässigen, alternativen Druckzentrum The Institute for Barbarian Books バーバリアン・ブックス ins Leben gerufen, und versteht sich als Gegenkampagne zum PR-Megaprojekt „Tokyo 2020“:

“It is especially apt that a site in Fukushima should launch this project, given that 2020 is overtly framed as the “reconstruction Games” that will bring hope and infrastructure back to the Tōhoku region. This mantra is vehemently rejected by both anti-nuclear and anti-Olympics campaigners, who see it as an attempt to gloss over the remaining problems in the district and the on-going Fukushima crisis.”

(William Andrews, 15. Juni 2019)

Link: https://throwoutyourbooks.wordpress.com/2019/06/15/anti-olympic-poster-committee-anti-2020-designs/

Der Japanologe und Germanist Reinold Ophüls-Kashima (Sophia Universität, Tôkyô) hat Lehrpläne für japanische Grund-, Mittel- und Oberschulen ins Deutsche übertragen, die nach der Dreifachkatastrophe vom 11. März 2011 von der "“Discussing the Nuclear Accident” Lesson Plan Development Working Group entwickelt wurde und im Ethik-Unterricht eingesetzt wereden sollen. Besonderer Fokus liegt auf der Thematik evakuierter Schülerinnen und Schüler der von der Atomkatastrophe betroffenen Regionen. Die Übersetzung erfolgte auf Bitten von Prof. Asaoka (Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology). Auszug:

"Die Verbreitung der radioaktiven Strahlung und das Problem der Strahlenbelastung durch das Atomkraftwerk Fukushima 1 haben im ganzen Gebiet des Nordostens zu gravierenden Schäden geführt. Vor allem im Katastrophengebiet der Präfektur Fukushima haben die Menschen dort weiter mit Problemen wie den Schwierigkeiten, in ein normales Leben zurückzukehren, Angst vor gesundheitlichen Schäden durch die Verstrahlung, die Kontamination des Bodens etc. zu kämpfen, und auch jetzt noch gibt es viele Familien, die gezwungen sind, als Evakuierte in benachbarte Gemeinden oder im Großraum der Hauptstadt Tokio zu leben. In einer Situation, in der eine Unterstützung für die Kinder aus diesen Haushalten dringend erforderlich wäre, ist im Gegenteil ein großes Problem entstanden. Dieses besteht darin, dass Kinder aus den Gebieten, welche Evakuierte aufgenommen haben, gegenüber den Kindern aus den evakuierten Gebieten Vorurteile hegen und in Worten und Verhalten letztere diskriminieren."

Japanisches Original sowie die deutsche Übersetzung von Ophüls-Kashima finden sich auf den Seiten der Japanese Society for Enviromental Education (JSFEE).

Links:
http://www.jsfee.jp/images/npp-and-ee/npp_Deuchland.pdf 
http://www.jsfee.jp/general/npp-and-ee/123/309