Bearing Witness to Disaster: Tanaka Takuya's Lyric Sequences on 3.11 and Tōkaimura
Eleven years ago on a cold March afternoon in Mito, Japan, the ground heaved beneath poet Tanaka Takuya’s middle school classroom. In the interstices of a nightlong vigil following the Great East Japan Earthquake he composed a tanka sequence intended to document as “directly as possible” the experience of the triple disasters as they began unfolding. This was not Tanaka’s first attempt to articulate disaster via lyric reportage. On the eve of the millennium, he published “Blue Flash” [Aoi hikari], a sequence documenting “that day” in September 1999, when three workers at the Tōkaimura Uranium Reprocessing Plant just north of Mito accidentally triggered a self-sustaining criticality event that caused the town to shut down and shelter in place while teams of haz-mat suited workers struggled to bring runaway radiation under control. Both tanka sequences—intensely place-centered and temporally specific, speak beyond the local to a global audience today. They bear witness to what it feels like to be caught in the dark, on the edge of environmental catastrophe. They also register the slippage between human-generated accidents and what we used to term—back when we could evade responsibility—“natural disasters.” As one of his translators, I will speak about the ways Tanaka’s poetry engages ongoing conversations in world literature about humankind’s relationship to the non-human world, and what his lyric sequences can teach us now, as human-generated climate change pushes the planet beyond the tipping point.
Edwin O. Reischauer Institute Japan Forum Lecture Series co-sponsored by the Japan Disasters Digital Archive Project