Fukushima and its Afterlives

Main Speaker: Professor Rachel DiNitto (University of Oregon)

Panelists: Professors Joo-Young Jung & Tomiko Yamaguchi (ICU)

Time: 15:10 - 18:30, December 18, 2019

Venue: Dialogue House, International Conference Room (ICU)

Schedule:

15:10-15:20 Opening

15:20-16:20 SESSION I: "Fukushima, Futurity, and Nuclear Remembrance" - Prof. Rachel DiNitto

In this talk, Prof. DiNitto looks at recent remembrances of the Chernobyl accident in popular culture as a means to consider how the Fukushima accident will be remembered in another twenty years, and how Japanese fiction writers have already been trying to imagine that very future. For the Chernobyl accident, she examines the recent HBO miniseries Chernobyl and the Netflix German TV show Dark, as well as the research of anthropologists such as Sarah Phillips. For the Fukushima accident, she looks to the fictional stories of contemporary Japanese writers, both elite and popular, including Tawada Yōko, Yoshimura Man’ichi, Tsushima Yūko, Kirino Natsuo, Satō Yūya and others. The talk is structured by a series of binaries—fact/fiction, spectacle/slow violence, rupture/cyclical futurity—that put the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents into dialogue, as a means to examine the collective imaginings of Fukushima’s afterlife.

16:20-16:30 Break

16:30-17:30 SESSION II: "Stigma, Community Storytelling and Future Outlook: Empirical Studies in Fukushima" - Prof. Joo-Young Jung

"Institutional Expertise and Lay Responses to Food and Soil Contamination after Fukushima" - Prof. Tomiko Yamaguchi

17:30-17:40 Break

17:40-18:30 Roundtable Discussion

Rachel DiNitto is a Professor of modern and contemporary Japanese literary and cultural studies in University of Oregon’s East Asian Languages & Literatures department. Her current research focuses on the literary and cultural responses to the disaster of March 11, 2011 in Japan. In addition to her new book, Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscapes of Japan’s Triple Disaster (University of Hawaii Press, 2019, she has published on the film and manga of this disaster and postwar Japan.