One Month Later, Japan to America. 4/1~20

----
Leaving Japan was lonesome, like checking out of the hotel of your life: leave house keys loose on the table, door unlocked, push your belongings away...
----

Dim the lights of Tokyo and people start to see the beauty of dusk again.

Power is never cut to the administrative heart, to central Tokyo. Grandmas and grandpas outside Tokyo can wait for their miniscule daily ration of electricity while shops in Shinjuku keep the new shit flowing, and the central governmental decision-makers (those guys in jumpsuits) stay insulated from lived reality. Tokyo governor Ishihara admonishes residents to stop cherry blossom viewing this year, not adequately solemn enough. Yes, let's reflect somberly while he readies yet another gubernatorial campaign for more of the same collective corporate back-scrubbing. Don't forget, it was the downfall of the newly created Environmental Protection Bureau of Japan when in the mid-1970s, Ishihara became chief and reversed his predecessors conservation work in favor of industrial development. What looms behind this is yet another renewed incarnation of bland capitalistic equanimity; the same kind of happiness we've been buying since before I was born. In solidarity with global protests, how can we waylay a nepotistic governing class that strives to continue business-as-usual nuclear power development?

Not to say new possibilities don't abound. But as Karatani Kojin pointed out recently, "there's always space for possibility, even when there isn't a disaster at work." For him, the current situation is disappointing precisely because larger changes, new forms of social reorganization, aren't taking place. Or are they? Effectively, Japan is going through a period of diaspora and migration. Relocation from destruction, relocation by choice, people are moving. I wonder if Tokyo's position as a cultural capital can be de-centered as a result? Will people move away from the center? Some friends may move to parts of Japan with space and air, with warm dialects, and beautiful ocean towns, islands, and plains. Plant new seeds, make new scenes, bring new life.
The first wave of photos of depopulated Fukushima prefecture have surfaced online. The internet gives us a distant, fetishized gaze, our homes safe from ruin. In terms of infrastructure, since the unplanned now regularly takes place, Fukushima's evacuation can be seen as part of a the larger global trend: the threat is uninhabitabilty of whole regions. We've already contaminated plenty of places now "unsafe to live." The fact we cannot swallow, the trauma we cannot feel here, is that people do live in these places. For many reasons people cannot move away from toxic places. We see the bleeding edge of 'first-world' society: slums, industrial centers, processing plants, special economic zones, whole villages picking apart the shards of computer hardware for elusive jewels. Groundwater undrinkable, air choked, too cold, too barren, too stripped. Continuously, we use more energy, expending resources in search of a fuller life. Flow toward the centers, steal from the periphery.

...somethinsgottagive


------
I've been asked so many times how the quake was, and I'm tired of it. The event isn't over, it might not ever be. It's the new state of affairs, the new yellow-turning-to-orange level of daily stress: quake+radiation+power shortage. Yet, I can't keep my mouth shut, that despite what you see on TV, everyone I know is fine, likely, they're just tired and want to move on. I'm waiting for the better questions.

How are people to answer for their experience? I squirm at the quiet beauty of a Japanese fisherman's calm spirit as he rode his forty-year-faithful boat out to meet the tsunami (and survived). He is member to a generation that can cope with this. To people 60+, life without electricity or gas, without enough food, that was their youth, or the shadow hanging over their youth. Younger people, 20-40 are more shaken, more in need of psychological insulation. Already cast out of the bubble economy's consumer elation into slowly deflating reincarnations of the same consumer practices: our preoccupations with new crap can not, should not, fill the void. We've always used things to change our mood, like emotional tools, enhancements to our exterior character make us happy. But maybe we can get some perspective through this event.

There is a word in Japanese used to describe those who were irradiated by the US weapons used at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini Atoll: hibakusha・被爆者. It denotes someone who has been exposed to radiation, the injured party, they to whom the violence was done. Later, it became a rallying word that problematized the conditions of radiation discrimination. Radiation was and is the problem that won't go away, victimhood that ages through dozens of political terms. Now, in all of it's fund-raising glory, the recovery of Japan has left the people living there, their food and water, their very being, verging on the same discrimination on a international scale. Lack of forthrightness by the nuclear authority and TEPCO continues this to swell the ranks of those seen as part of the "injured party." A creeping stigma approaches. You don't want American beef? Well, we don't want Japanese produce.

As a media side note, it seems necessary to point out that we enjoy the fantasy provided by apocalyptic narratives: world destruction to which we can bear witness. Maybe we get it in the end, and when we do, we’re likely more satisfied, because that's realistic fiction right? With the events of the last month, we've taken another step toward the cynical yet foreboding sentiment of a zombie film: a world finally ravaged by the warning signs we always see. We notice the signs, lying limp on the side of the freeway, abandoned at the edge of town, the indication that we're burning the world to the ground through our gastanks and checkbooks. But do we feel it deeply? For to feel sadness in America would also mean we feel beauty; truly, immediately, deeply. Fleeting beauty in the moment, unmediated emotional embrace. America is unpracticed. We are charmed, giddied, standoffish, and proud, but rarely sublime, grounded, or deeply sorrowful. Everything is externalized. We adorn ourselves with cars, homes, clothes, profiles, personality quirks, tattoos, titles, and badges, making "me" more Me. We encourage our egos on bumper stickers and appliances magnets. It's honest right? It's depressing.

-----

Home four days and it hit me. Embracing my mom I sputtered, "it was so hard," before bursting in tears, feeling for the first time not even destruction, but just erasure. The void gapes open between how things were and how they are.

The day I returned to the America I found myself with a car and more darkness and quiet than I’d I felt in a long time. The next day I circumnavigated San Francisco bay to reacquaint myself with life here, smells and colors of my homeland. America: society through a sideways freeway glance and incredible scales of distance and quantity.

Trauma seems unfelt by most here. The stagnancy of a saturated labor market vies with rising gas prices. And Japan is so contained in its distance as a radio expert tells me about how far radiation can travel. My new co-worker asks casually if anyone has died of radiation poisoning in Japan and ironically mentions how local soccer moms bought iodine tablets with the same detached fear that fuels antibacterializing their homes and their children's immune systems.

All the news, the diluted information, does it fill our void of understanding? Too many shallow sources drown us in informed speculation. Lap it up and be ill on the consumptive history of privatized energy, media, and shareholder return: scare us straight, protect us blind, inform us stupid. But only with peripheral information, not enough to foster a real response. A world built on durable goods is designed to be wasteful. The energy infrastructure must be supplied cheaply to facilitate projected annual growth. In some eyes, Fukushima is just an absorbed cost.

Press your face to the glass. The nuclear disaster is another indication that our place can become that place. That place we see on TV, or if it's the middle east or north Africa, that place which is distinctly absent from our screens. You don't see Red Cross boxes to clean up the irradiated produce and groundwater, or warzones. That would imply fault, responsibility. An earthquake's "accident" to a meltdown's "collision." We can watch natural disasters and send money, but man-made disaster is kept from our daily feed. Image on screen form a hallucinatory grasp: our contemporaneous global society. We "know" but can never know.

Conditions of Recovery

Warm winds caress my face as Spring nudges life back into western Japan. We must lift our eyes to the quickening blue sky and acknowledge that time is not frozen. Yet now that we are in motion again, we look up from our shaken feet as see the road to recovery looms long in the distance. These last days a sense of social normalcy is returning: invitations and chance meetings with friends, random words exchanged. Stories of where and how, but almost never why. Outside our tiny house, my plants bud back to life and I realize it's times to water more often, time to nurture that stubborn energy: life ceaselessly pushes forward.

Two weeks have passed since the quake and the traumatized aperture of our gaze slowly clicks wider, allowing a bit more light to pass through our lens, exposing film, our minds, to the changed world around us. The full glare of life destroyed in Tohoku, the nuclear threat, the media cacophony, left our eyes and emotions overexposed. In Japan, since March 11th, our eyes allowed only pinpoints of reality to enter, any more overwhelmed our gaze, rendering us frozen or fleeing. I think the reason we keep exchanging stories of the quake and its following is to get in touch with an ungraspable event. A futile task but therapeutic nonetheless. It's our nature that even as glass shatters around us and the earth splits open, still we are in a state of disbelief, outside of ourselves, cracking jokes or screaming. Raised on heaps of images, we watch fictional and non-fictional things we never want to experience, so we doubt our eyes when the real thing occurs. In trying to remember, to bring ourselves back, we construct a memory, but memory is not experience, it is failed representation. As the gravity of the event pulls at us, our attempt to close off this trauma neatly into memory is bound to be lacking.

I was accused of being in denial of the danger of staying in Tokyo, and I supposed it's true. Denial is a part of coping, part of scraping out space to think, space to not panic. Now that I'm leaving, it's time to wrestle with this place, because even if I convince myself this is the right move, a normal move, I'm denying a part of my self who still needs to mourn, needs to affect the changes coming over the next weeks, months, and years.

'what to build?'

---

Although I take photographs normally, I've been unable to throw the shutter since the quake. Being in Tokyo, the most visible 'disaster' was people's fear: pushing crowds, panicked lines for taxis, self-justified (self-serving) hoarding. As each day passes, I feel the ripples of the disaster spread. Not in real chaos but simply growth: there is ever more happening and much more to talk about. Now we deal with a perpetual cascade of reactions. My observational ability is not up to the task. There are many heroes who the media cannot notice or follow. There are many direct and consolidated efforts to help the situation. There are pitiful but typical attempts by companies and politicians to use this disaster to improve brand image with paltry donation campaigns, bleeding member point systems while encouraging love for thy neighbor. Rightfully angry anti-nuclear protesters crowd my local train station and I shake their hands in solidarity but know that I have no vote here. New lines are being drawn. All these different stakes and different needs branch out into a new tree that will hopefully support the weight of the older one. These branches are the ripples I can track only so far. At the same time, with my imminent departure, I find myself grouped on the side of the 'abandoners,' those who are leaving when help is needed. Despite my attempts at solidarity, this is my feeling. Life is all in the timing.

Yesterday I saw a special edition of Asahi Graph weekly magazine, a photo issue filled with powerful images of the Tohoku disaster. While I couldn't help looking, I felt somehow ashamed, was I exploiting people's misfortune as these images helped me piece together a memorial image?

A friend mentioned how the aesthetic trope of impermanence is fitting for thinking about this kind of disaster in Japan. In the classic text, "Tales of a Ten Foot Square Hut" [hojōki](12th C.), the fragile and fleeting nature of human life is embraced as traumatic yet beautiful. Through Kyoto's repeated destruction, the observer notes their own fragility and finds there a new liberation. Keep in mind, stories of impermanence have a victim, but necessarily there is an observer who narrates the tale, and who continues on with life. In this sense, through our stubborn continuation of life, we can understand the need to stay, how our everyday is an affront to the frozen effects of disaster. This gravity draws me in, tries to keep me here. We are all scared, but we can see this solidarity is also a beautiful thing. And arguably, the unique strength of this place.

------

A Return to Normalcy?

Lying in bed, I mistake the reverberations of my own heartbeat for tremors in the earth below. Sometimes the phantom ripple in my chest is answered by creaking beams and barking dogs that confirm something beyond my imagination. I think everyone in east Japan must suffer from such a feeling. An unsettling sense that our own bodies are not trusted: the ground beneath our feet is the new phantom limb of our earthy existence.

Many people have left Kanto to escape this shaken state of being, to regain their peace of mind on firmer ground south or abroad. Or arguably, more have left from the fear of radiation. Governments, universities, and companies were quick to move people out, and over the week following the quake, no information could appease this nuclear panic. However I sense this was more to protect liability, a "Get out now or you're on your own/Better safe than sorry" stance provided a quick handwashing of the situation for the administrators. We see the shallowness of corporate and diplomatic bonds in crisis. Don't forget you have to sign an agreement to absorb whatever price tag they put on your evacuation. Life continues in Japan with a slightly depleted population and plenty of people who still need help, peace of mind.

Our heads seem loose on our shoulders. We are still shaken regularly, and it's no surprise people took to imbibing more, self-medicating you could call it, because it seems the world itself is sloshing drunk in its geologic infidelity.

"see yourself"

----------

After a dry spell following the quake, it started to rain on Monday. Pollen allergies this year are horrible, tens of millions of cedars shaking their dusty yellow gametes on the wind only to find home in our eyes, nose, and throats. The rain provided respite but also filtered out that which invisibly floats above. Stepping out of the rain that fell yesterday, some drops from my umbrella fall toward a bag of fresh bread in my hand and I wonder: did any drops got on the food? Can I eat this?

Radiation breeds irrational fear: invisible and carried on the wind, Gamma rays flow through wood and concrete with ease. Flow through our bodies to embed intangible seeds, the fruit of which takes years to ripen. What defense is there against such an agent? Many sirens sing from abroad about this threat, yet radiation levels in Tokyo remain lower than Los Angeles. However, we are far from unscathed. The new sadness is more systemic, food and water now bear detectably higher radiation. Flowing up from the roots of life, from water to soil, rain and produce, we count particles. Adjustments by government bodies redefine "acceptable levels for human consumption" in figures I cannot equate to the coffee in my hand and the food on my plate. From now, we have to be careful about where spinach and milk comes from, and the water from my tap. On the other hand, I wonder what kind of readings you would find on oranges in Southern California, or rice is west China in the 1950s? Winds from the Gila Flats and Semipalatinsk test sites blew across the US, Russia, Europe, and China. Bikini, Nevada, northern Kazakstan all experienced many times Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, we weren't measuring spinach and milk then. What remains unspoken today is the history beyond Three Mile Island and Chernyobl, the nuclear weapons testing history. What were the radiation readings from the foodstocks of the baby-boom generation? Would they meet "acceptable human levels" today?

As the Japanese disaster ebbs out of international news for the new US aggression, we move toward recovery and problems of deep ecology. Solar, Hydro, and Wind power are the obvious solutions for the energy future but the still nuclear plans move ahead. The wind power stations on the eastern coast of Japan survived the tsunami and continue to produce power. And even if they'd been destroyed, no one would have fled their charred remains.

All the while, I pack my belongings and prepare our life for travel to a new home that was planned long before the quake. We try to maintain a sense of routine in the non-routine. Try to say goodbye to a changed place. Try and re-tune my heart to a new seismological reality.

"Here" or "There" - Yamanashi and Tokyo 3/16~17

---Flee---

On Wednesday morning I saw the ordinary and familiar: my cat lounging in the dirt, old men on constitutional, deliveries made with expediency and politeness. All of these things tell me to relax, try to persuade me to settle into the unsettling.

From my phone, the TV, and the computer screen, cries resound, "duck and cover!" competes with "we'll be fine." We freeze and think, "where to?" "what's coming?" Speculation undermines my being. Speculation is the moisture creeping around my friend's eyes as she smiles and worries that we will be irradiated martyrs to the rest of the world, that she will live on a lonely island. Speculation is the knot in my stomach every time I read another embassy report. What do we learn in realizing that all of the work toward clean agriculture is ruined, that our nurturing actions toward the earth and each other are invalidated? That things may not recovery for a long time and that things will never be the same.

I cannot overcome a sense of abandoning parts of myself, memories that no longer match reality. My sense of place is formed upon these memories that each day are caste to the void without ceremony. I think this is the sorrow that people speak of when they mourn Japan: the unrememberability of the traumatic break between now and then. Through media we try to represent and grasp what happened, but our ability to transcend these events is caught in the twilight that is trauma. The wide reaching power of this event renders us emotionally powerless, yet we throw our best punches trying to prove we're still alive and that we can save what's in danger. People tell me to drop everything and just "get the fuck out!" It would be easier to react if we had no home.

Setō sunset

---All clear?---

When will this disaster finish so we can start again? Following 3/11, many including myself have embraced Japanese society as resilient and felt hopeful. However, in order to start rebuilding we need a starting point, a foundation upon which to build. It is beyond a matter of extinguishing fires or cleaning up ruble. This disaster has not ended and the call of "all clear!" seems perpetually held hostage by geiger counters, sea water, and politicians in jumpsuits.

Today we are in a hotel room in Kofu, Yamanashi prefecture, two hours west of Tokyo, separated from Fukushima by large mountains and hundreds of kilometers. Even here streets are empty. Gazing out to the street, a local acquaintance said, "no one is out, they're all eating cup ramen sealed in their tiny apartments." It's less obvious but fear is here too.

Tokyo's geiger counters were calm over the last day and a half and I wonder if our trip, this gamble for escape and a sense of relief, was well timed. Will distance alleviate our mental and physical stress? I asked before: how would it feel to not be here? In that case, 'here' was Tokyo, but for many people abroad, 'here' is Japan as a whole. People all fear for the safety of their loved ones but how far do we have to go, how much do we have to abandon to get 'there'? Unfortunately, coming to Yamanashi provided only temporary relief, much like what I would felt days ago in Tokyo as the sun sets and we can tell yourself, "we made it through another day." But the sinking feeling returns as I gaze up at my wooden ceiling in morning's sun. What seeps in? The problem is that once you start seeking for 'there' you feel that home will never be the same and therefore any resuscitation of life as you knew it is also lost. A very empty feeling.

Prior to the quake we planned to leave Japan at the end of this month. Our tiny house, filled with half-packed moving boxes, feels dark and cramped. Not organized, not ready to go. For close to five years I've tried to make Japan my home: to make this place, my place. But now we want to go if only to feel relief, to feel safe. But 'leaving' now means something different than a change of venue. We can place distance between here and there (us and them?), but where is safe, where is relief? How far is 'there' from 'here'? I feel like I'm sabotaging something: my sense of space falls apart in this suspended disaster. Today boundaries of safety and judgment are built and destroyed with each article, email, or memo. But even as I flee, judgment or action becomes no easier. This is what plagues us, lack of respite, lack of finality to confirm the effects of our action. We can judge the chance of dying in a car crash or from cancer because there are countless other examples of that risk. We cannot point to what "a 99% chance of safety in Tokyo" begets us in a nuclear disaster.