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How to Imagine Japan and the World after 3/11

Jeongmyoung Sim 1

1한양대학교 비교역사문화연구소

Candidate

ABSTRACT

Since the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear accident(3/11), there have been many discourses which compared Japan after 3/11 to postwar Japan. This is not only because the ruins after the disaster remind people of the postwar catastrophe, but because it is recognized as an opportunity to change current Japanese society. However, after the anti-nuclear movement cooled down and people began to talk about a way out of the Fukushima accident, Japan now seems to be on its way to restoration. Based on above consideration, this article analyzes some fictions that imagine the future after 3/11, for fiction or literature is a sort of practice which changes “the real” by presenting a possibility to imagine a different world. Reading Fukuichi Kanko Project as a work of literary imagination, we come to understand that the future Japan or Fukushima it suggests is an extension of postwar Japan. Not only that, the project starts from supposing a collectivity of the Japanese nation as its basic intention shows. By contrast, some literature after 3/11 visualizes gaps and splits in seemingly unchanged reality. God Bless You 2011 reveals differences between before and after “that thing” by juxtaposing these two, and The Island of Eternal Life and Kentousi go one step further to describe Japan as a “closed” nation following an imaginary earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident after 3/11. In particular, Kentousi questions if one imagines Japan and the Japanese language as completely closed boundaries. If it is possible to talk about “post 3/11 literature,” it would be a practice that can alienate so-called reality from itself and reveal differences in seemingly homogeneous collectivity.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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