On Japan's Natural and Nuclear Nightmare

Of course, we all know what's going on in Japan. But I don't mean "nightmare" in the sense of just the disaster at hand. As a historian and specialist in one area of Asia, albeit not Japan, it occurs to me that what's going on right now is going to impact Japan in a way far deeper than one would of course assume a disaster of this magnitude would, in the concrete sense. What I mean is that Japan's "nuclear nightmare" has been going on for many decades already, and the ongoing dual disaster that we see unfolding right now must have a far darker and more foreboding feeling for the Japanese then most of us on the outside probably know.

One must consider the fact that modern Japanese identity is deeply informed by and has been concretely affected by both the dual specters of disaster and fear of the nuclear. And in the Japanese "nightmare," those two things come together, both in horrible reality as well as expression in fantasy.

As an American, it strikes me just how much 9/11, our first experience with a real attack on such a grand scale, has affected our psyche. And when talking about history's effect on national identity, which is the focus of my ongoing and never-ending dissertation, it raises some interesting points and questions. For example, if you have ever met and talked with German people, you know just how much their relatively recent dark history has affected the German sense of self. Or think about Russia's horrible experience with war and invasion over the last century.

In the Japanese case, the natural disaster looms large in the public mind for a long time, being an island nation subject to earthquakes, along with the term that the Japanese themselves coined, the "tsunami." Then came the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake. I am not a Japan specialiss, but I do know my general Japanese history and think about how incidents as large as this affect public thinking. For the Japanese, this was the first major experience with disaster in the modern period. Then came the Pacific War, which brought with it massive civilian bombing on a scale the world had never seen. This was topped off with the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which still stand in history as the only nuclear attacks on civilians in human history.

This fact has become a central part of Japanese identity, which created a sense of victimhood, one that is well deserved, but which one must note is also made possible by the fact that Japan's role as aggressor has been seriously downplayed in its own representations to and of itself. I am not trying to get into a debate about Japan's culpability for war crimes or textbook debates and the like. But as far as the fact of Japan having constructed itself as a victim of humanity's experimentation with nuclear power, this mention of the matching downplaying of Japan's role as a aggressor in that very conflict that created it as victim is quite pertinent. But that's as far as I'll go with that.

James Orr, in his book The Victim as Hero, which I came to own as part of my own dissertation research related to national identity in history, talks about all of these issues in detail, but the example that is most striking in the many historical arguments and cases he plays out is that of Godzilla.

And when you think about it, Godzilla and everything he represents, both symbolically and in terms of the original narrative of the first film, is the pop culture embodiment of Japan's nuclear nightmare. Godzilla is the product of rampant American nuclear testing in the Pacific, if you remember, and the creature itself is the mutated result of that testing on a small lizard. That creature grows into one of gargantuan proportions and comes ashore to wreak havoc upon the once-again beleaguered island nation. Godzilla is the walking embodiment of both the natural disaster, in terms of the actual destruction he brings, but is also necessarily the result of nuclear power gone very wrong. Importantly, the source of that destructive nuclear power is the United States, and the victim is Japan, clearly. But that particular blame is not so clearly laid, in that Godzilla also represents humanity's errant and arrogant experimentation with nuclear power in general, with Japan as victim.

Indeed, with the Hiroshima Peace Park as the clearest example, Japan has succeeded in constructing an ideology of victimhood, but not with the US as the sole recipients of blame, but with Japan coming to represent, through Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the living lessons of humanity's sole experiment with nuclear terror. There is no single aggressor in this context, but there is certainly a clear victim. And in the Godzilla narrative, it is also interesting that man's attempt to avert disaster vis-à-vis the monster is ineffective and impotent. Only the actions of a few plucky scientists, one of whom happens to be American, actually, succeeds in saving Japan.

And the lingering effects of America's bombings continued to affect the Japanese public in major ways, especially in terms of the nation's fish catch being affected by American nuclear testing in the Pacific, or the people who had to live with the lingering effects of radiation sickness and burns from the original atomic bombing sites. The nation literally had the scars of World War II and the twin nuclear blasts that ended humanity's most savage and bloodiest single conflict writ large and visibly across its skin.

But still, Japan amazingly was able to come to terms with nuclear power and harness that energy for its power plants. The single disaster at Three-Mile Island, and the much larger disaster at Chernobyl effectively killed and kept dead the nuclear power industry in the US, and it never came back. But in  nations like Japan, which had experienced and was living with the visible effects of nuclear radiation and its horror, being able to come to terms with this is an amazing thing. Perhaps those of you out there who are Japan specialists might like to chime in on this point, since I don't have much specific knowledge about politics or what it took for the Japanese public to come to this point.

With all this in the background, the present disaster has a much deeper irony and echoes further into the past then it would if the particular victims here or not Japanese. For Japan right now, one might stop and think about how deeply this will affect their psyche. Or in other words, one might think about just how serious this particular "nightmare" is for the Japanese.

You have the largest earthquake in recorded Japanese history, which brought with it synonymous that swept across entire cities, and then came the unthinkable: not one or two but three nuclear power plants in various stages of meltdown. This is literally all of Japanese culture's and the Japanese nation's various nightmares, from antiquity to the modern period, come true. In a single day.

For any human being, watching the YouTube videos of tsunamis sweeping away cars and airplanes and entire buildings elicits pangs of horror, worse than any of the many disaster movies we've all seen together; because this time, the public spectacle is real. Or thinking about nuclear power plants melting down is also, of course, really scary. But for the Japanese public, seeing civilians being checked by the authorities for radiation exposure, coupled with the actual destruction of the most massive earthquake in their history, along with the slow, sliding, disaster that tsunamis bring-- this must seem completely unreal. But the extra catch for the Japanese is that it's also going to feel hauntingly familiar.

And that's something worth thinking about as we tried to empathize and put ourselves, inevitably, in their shoes.