Japanese Literature and the Environment

 Japanese Literature and the Environment: From the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves to Fukushima

           Japanese literature has devoted considerable attention to the natural world ever since the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712 CE), Japan’s oldest extant text, and the Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, eighth century), Japan’s earliest surviving poetry anthology.  This deep engagement with nature in creative texts is often cited as confirmation of Japanese “love of nature.” So consistently have Japanese literature and other art forms discussed, celebrated, and demonstrated sensitivity toward the nonhuman world that this “love of nature” has been said to have “uniquely distinguished Japan since before the advent of agriculture.”[1]  Japanese literature, like Japanese culture, has conventionally been associated with celebrations of “nature” and with touching portraits of relatively harmonious human integration with the nonhuman, nature serving as a refuge from society for dreamers, travelers, and recluses. But in fact, when Japanese literature is read from an environmentally conscious perspective – concerned with the larger environmental implications of human/nonhuman interactions – numerous texts reveal much more complex dynamics among people and their environments than has usually been assumed.  This is not surprising considering the extent to which people have impacted the archipelago’s ecosystems across the millennia.

            To be sure, as Edwin Cranston has asserted, “the feeling for the divinity and beauty of the land is one of the most attractive aspects of Man’yō poetry.”[2]  But some verses in the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves that praise Japan’s wondrous terrain also appear to be celebrating people’s notable reshaping of it. For instance, the anthology’s second poem reads: “There are crowds of mountains in Yamato [Japan], and among these is heavenly Mount Kagu.  When I [Emperor Jomei, 593-641 C.E.] climb Mount Kagu, and look out over the land, above the plains the smoke rises and rises [kunihara wa keburi tachitatsu]; above the seas, the gulls rise and rise [unahara wa kamame tachitatsu]. A beautiful land, Dragonfly Island, land of Yamato.”[3]  This verse describes a “land-looking” (kunimi) ritual, whereby a ruler would climb a mountain and look out over the land to affirm his power and the prosperity of his terrain.[4] The poem celebrates Emperor Jomei’s authority over both parts of his realm, land and sea; his power is such that he can see water not actually visible from the diminutive Mount Kagu, which stands only 152 meters high. 

            The smoke in this verse from the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves often is interpreted as manifesting the spirit of the land and the gulls as manifesting the spirit of the sea. But what are the implications of smoke, presumably from human activity, embodying the spirit of the land?  Emperor Jomei’s reign (629-641 C.E.) coincides with the early decades of Japan’s “ancient predation” (600-850 C.E.), an era of construction and logging on a scale never before seen in that country.  At this time, Japan’s rulers, inspired by the introduction of large-scale architecture from the Asian continent, “dotted the Kinai basin with a plethora of great monasteries, shrines, palaces, and mansions” and eventually felled all the old-growth stands in the region.[5]  Read ecocritically and taking into consideration historical circumstances, the poem leaves open the possibility that although gulls and presumably other animals continue to flourish at sea, people have completely overtaken the land.  It is possible that gulls still visibly fly above the land yet are overlooked by an emperor interested only in increasing the human presence.  Just as likely is either that the gulls continue to fly over the land but are obscured by dense smoke, or that they have been driven from the land altogether, jeopardizing their survival.  More important, the emperor seems not the least disturbed by these changes.  In fact, he applauds them.  And his smoky land not only is declared “beautiful” but also is referred to as “Dragonfly Island” (Akizushima), a common appellation for Japan.  Flying animals give the land its name, but the fact that they no longer fly above the land – or at least are not mentioned as flying above the land – is taken as a sign of progress.

            Like most creative corpuses, Japanese literature over the centuries has explored a broad range of human interactions with the nonhuman.  For instance, Yoshida Kenkō’s (1283-1350) Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness, 1332) – a collection of short essays on a number of themes and one of Japan’s best known examples of the zuihitsu (lit. follow the brush) genre – decries the abuse of most animals even while it condones that of horses and oxen:

Domestic animals include the horse and the ox. It’s a shame that we have to bind and hurt them, but there’s nothing else we can do, since they’re invaluable to us . . . When animals that run are confined to pens or fastened with chains, when birds that fly have their wings clipped or are caged, their longing for the clouds and their sadness at being away from the hills and fields knows no end. How can those capable of imagining how terrible they would feel under these conditions enjoy keeping such animals as pets? A person who enjoys hurting living beings is just like Emperor Jie [of Xia] and Emperor Zhou [of Shang].[6]

Kenkō strongly advocates the humane treatment, indeed freedom of nearly all animals, comparing those who harm other creatures to the tyrannical Emperor Jie (1728-1625 B.C.E.), who brought down China’s Xia dynasty, and Emperor Zhou (1075-1046 B.C.E.), the last emperor of China’s Shang dynasty, known for his decadence and corruption.  Yet instead of suggesting how people might better treat their horses and oxen, Kenkō declares the abuse of these animals unavoidable. 

            Although never entirely absent from the corpus of Japanese literature, explicit concern with environmental degradation is most common in twentieth-century creative works. During the Meiji period (1868-1912), Japan’s rapid industrialization began damaging landscapes more widely, seriously, and quickly than ever before. Miyazawa Kenji’s (1896-1933) moving portraits of diverse ecologies and Shiga Naoya’s (1883-1971) descriptions of the Ashio copper mine incident (1880s) are among the most frequently cited examples of early twentieth-century environmentally conscious Japanese literature.[7]  Miyazawa’s poetry, short stories, and children’s literature celebrate flora, fauna, and intimate relationships between people and nature.  At the same time, they evoke nostalgia for a more innocent past, which suggests that these relationships are now threatened if not in some cases already destroyed.  Stories such as “Chūmon no ōi ryōriten” (The Restaurant of Many Orders, 1924) disparage people’s attitudes and behaviors toward environments, including arrogance and sport hunting.  “The Restaurant of Many Orders” features two hunters who enjoy shooting animals just to watch them suffer.  Wandering deep into a forest, they become disoriented, and their dogs suddenly perish.  They then have a horrifying hallucination: they enter a restaurant of “many orders” believing they will have their choice of dishes to select but instead discover that they are the ones being ordered and will soon be served to wild animals for dinner.  Awakening from their illusion just as they are about to be eaten, the men return safely home but with faces scarred beyond repair.

            Speaking of specific ecological tragedies in the early twentieth century were such texts as Shiga’s Aru otoko sono ane no shi (The Death of a Certain Man’s Sister, 1920), which centers on the contentious relationship between a boy and his father; near the conclusion the narrator notes that the most serious argument between the two arose when the boy (then a middle-school student) attended a rally protesting the damage to people and the environment caused by effluent from the Ashio copper mine and announced that he was going to tour the affected sites.  He was forbidden to do so by his father because his grandfather once had been titular owner of the mine; the grandfather overhears the argument between father and son but remains silent, the narrator speculating that he greatly regrets having instigated such suffering.  The Death of a Certain Man’s Sister does not speak at length about the poisoning of the Watarase River, but it does give a glimpse into the psychologies of those involved in its aftermath: youthful protestors, elderly accomplices, and a middle generation fearful of attempting to reconcile the two.[8]

            The 1940s yielded somewhat increased literary attention to ecological degradation.  In Tsugaru (Tsugaru, 1944) the literary leader Dazai Osamu (1909-1948) addressed environmental problems including deforestation.  Although it focuses primarily on human suffering, literature of the atomic bomb from its inception in 1945 has decried destruction of the nonhuman and called attention to many of the global paradoxes of the natural world, particularly how quickly it recovers from injury.  To give one example, the second half of Nakaoka Jun’ichi’s (1937–) twenty-first century “Midori ga shitatari” (Green Trickles), included in the anthology Genbakushi 181 ninshū, 1945-2007 (Atomic Bomb Poetry: Collection of 181 People, 1945-2007, 2007) discusses the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. The poet then remarks: “The dripping green of ‘Beautiful Japan’/ Completely conceals this danger-filled scene.”[9] “Green Trickles” points not only to the global consequences of the explosions at Chernobyl but also to widely shared responsibility for these events and for ecological recovery. Just as significant is the poem’s evocation of “beautiful Japan” (utsukushii Nihon), appropriated from the novelist Kawabata Yasunari’s (1899-1972) Nobel Prize acceptance speech.  Inherently ambiguous, “beauty” – especially beauty in the wake of disaster – often can be a sign of rebirth.  But nature’s regeneration does not preclude future devastation.  In fact, it can give a false sense of security. And this often allows for the continued degradation of both people and the nonhuman.

            Japanese creative work from the 1950s such as Hayashi Fumiko’s (1903-1951) Ukigumo (Floating Clouds, 1951) exposes rampant and needless Japanese wartime deforestation in Southeast Asia. This novel depicts Tomioka, an employee of the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry stationed in French Indochina, writing in his memoirs that he and his men “were forced by the army to fell trees recklessly and violently.”  Many of the trees they fell remain close to where they fall, the narrator noting: “The kacha pines must be fifty or sixty years old, but the Japanese were chopping them down randomly, without hesitation, reporting only numbers to the army.  The numbers were laughing . . . [The slain trees remained on the riverbanks.] Only the numbers moved, from desk to desk.”[10]  Hayashi’s Floating Clouds does not condemn this sportlike destruction, but it does question its appropriateness.  On the other hand, the chief of the Forestry Bureau tells Tomioka that the slash-and-burn agriculture of the local indigenous peoples has radically changed conditions in the primeval forest, suggesting that the Japanese are not the only ones to have altered this region’s ecosystems.[11] 

            Human manipulation of forests, and of the planet more generally, is also addressed in Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Koto (Ancient Capital, 1962), where the woman Naeko alerts her long-lost sister Chieko that the trees Chieko has been admiring in fact are “cryptomeria made by people.” She continues:

These are about forty years old.  They’ll be cut and made into pillars and similar things.  If left to themselves, they would likely grow for a thousand years, becoming thick and tall . . . I like primeval forests best.  In this village it’s like we’re making cut flowers . . . Were there no people in the world, there would be nothing like Kyoto either.  It would be natural forests and weeds. The land would belong to the deer and wild boars, would it not? Why are people in this world? It’s frightening, people.[12]

Readily apparent to postwar Japanese were the dangers of urbanization and industrialization to ecosystems of all kinds.

            The best known and most encompassing environmentally oriented creative works from the late 1960s and 1970s address contemporary events, most notably Ishimure Michiko’s (1927–) Kugai jōdo: Waga Minamatabyō (Sea of Suffering and the Pure Land: Our Minamata Disease, 1969) and Ariyoshi Sawako’s (1931-1984) Fukugō osen (Compound Pollution, 1975).  A creative writer, activist, and native of Minamata (Kyushu), Japan, Ishimure has worked for decades to educate people the world over about Minamata disease (mercury poisoning) and to compel Japanese authorities to compensate more adequately Minamata disease patients and their families. Sea of Suffering, her most famous literary work, is the first part of her trilogy on Minamata and one of her many writings on this tragedy.  Sea of Suffering  is a patchwork of the narrator’s own experiences, stories of Minamata sufferers told from multiple points of view, poetry, documents including medical, scientific, and journalistic reports, accounts of the region’s rich cultural history, and lyrical depictions of its nonhuman landscapes. The novel both openly defies narrow definitions of genre and, more important, underlines the interdependence of scientific, social scientific, and humanistic interpretations of the experienced world.  Chronologically, it loops backward and forward in time, denying suffering a beginning and an end.  It additionally denies suffering any clear spatial borders.  Not only does the narrator speak repeatedly of the Ashio copper mine incident and of Niigata Minamata disease; Sea of Suffering also moves outside Japan, exposing the Chisso Corporation’s controversial history in colonial Korea, including its damming of the Yalu River between China and Korea and the plight of Koreans under Japanese control more generally, including Korean deaths in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   

            Whereas Sea of Suffering focuses largely on the etiologies and realities of Minamata disease, Compound Pollution addresses more generally pollution brought about by drastic increases in Japanese consumerism. Serialized between October 1974 and June 1975, this collection of newspaper columns divided into fifteen sections interweaves fact and fiction in a variety of genres to highlight the dangers of air and water pollution, as well as food contaminated with additives and agricultural chemicals.  The book emphasizes that although pollution often is perceived as occurring in isolated bursts and affecting only small groups of people, it in fact threatens everyone; contaminated air, water, and soil jeopardize the health of rich and poor, urban and rural, young and old.  Presuming its audience, especially female consumers, knows little about pollutants, the text introduces a variety of chemical substances, explaining the politics behind their use, how they are employed in Japan and around the world, and the threats each poses to people and environments.  By revealing the connections between agriculture and pollution, as well as war and pollution, the narrator stresses the responsibilities of the consumer; she refuses to allow her readers to perceive themselves solely as victims and encourages them to make ethical choices. She likens herself to Rachel Carson, insisting that she is not promoting a ban on all chemicals but instead recommending more careful vetting before use.

            Not surprisingly, both Sea of Suffering and Compound Pollution attracted considerable attention, catalyzing Japanese environmental movements and reforms. The endurance of Ishimure’s work is particularly noteworthy: Sea of Suffering and the final two volumes of her Minamata trilogy are the only Japanese novels included in the Japanese publisher Kawade Shobō Shinsha’s Sekai bungaku zenshū (Complete Collection of World Literature, 2007–); the trilogy is advertised as “a masterpiece representing postwar Japanese literature” that “deeply questions what it means to be human.”

            Most of Japan’s early environmentally conscious literature concerns pollution, but in the 1970s Japanese published several significant creative texts focused on conservation.  These include Nitta Jirō’s (1912-80) Kiri no shisontachi (Descendants of the Mist, 1970).  Set in the 1960s, Descendants concerns the potential ecological and cultural consequences of extending the Venus Line toll road through the Kirigamine mountains (Nagano Prefecture, central Japan).  Written to assist the local opposition movement, Descendants describes the ecosystems of the region, exposes the aims of the developers, and urges people to work together to forestall this and similar projects.  This was only one of Nitta’s many works on conservation in/and Japan’s mountains.  For its part, Watanabe Jun’ichi’s (1933–) Mine no kioku (Memories of Mountain Peaks, 1976) discusses the planned construction of a road through Hokkaido’s Daisetsuzan National Park.  The novel’s protagonist is a civil engineer who must determine the route for the highway that will have the least potential effect on the park’s ecosystems.  His desire to preserve a primeval forest is thwarted when an overloaded helicopter carrying supplies crashes and catches fire, charring the woodland.  Unlike many of its contemporaries, Memories describes a potential rather than an actual incident.[13]  The novel warns its readers about the uncertain future of landscapes many believe invincible.

            Similarly focusing on imagined scenarios is Japan’s environmental science fiction. Abé Kōbō’s (1924-1993) Daiyon kanpyōki (Inter Ice Age 4, 1959), considered by many to be Japan’s first science fiction novel, depicts a world in which climate change and genetic engineering have radically transformed human society; rising sea levels have buried continents and people have been replaced by a new species created from aborted human fetuses.[14]  Also noteworthy are texts such as Tsutsui Yasutaka’s (1934–) “Tatazumu hito” (Standing Person, 1974).  This short story features a city that “greens” its streets and parks not by planting actual vegetation but instead by transforming into pillars and ultimately trees its cats, dogs, and people. The city vegetizes individuals who criticize the status quo; the more people complain, the “greener” the city becomes.  Ironically, the city’s “greenness” signals not its environmental health but instead the discontent of its residents and the authoritarianism of its leaders.  “Standing Person” most obviously parodies Japan’s official ideal of shakai kanri (lit. [benign] social management), or the bureaucratically managed society.  Such a culture retains order not by persecuting its people but instead by shaming them into conformity and in extreme cases figuratively vegetizing them.  But in featuring a society that attempts to establish ecological balance among people, animals, and plants through forced metamorphosis, “Standing Person” also satirizes the frequent superficiality and potential lethality of attempts to “green” urban spaces where the nonhuman population is for the most part confined to the animals people nurture (pets) and those they abandon (strays).

            Hoshi Shin’ichi (1926-1977), midcentury Japan’s short-short story writer par excellence, made even larger contributions to environmental science fiction, as did Komatsu Sakyō (1931-2011), who was haunted by the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Komatsu’s bestselling Nippon chinbotsu (Japan Sinks, 1973) depicts Japan as physically collapsing.[15] Even more significant from an environmental perspective are two stories from Komatsu’s 1973 collection Adamu no sue (The Descendants of Adam): “Aozora” (Blue Sky) and “Seijaku no tsūro” (Silent Corridor).  “Blue Sky” highlights a couple who reject a pristine mountain environment in favor of a city so polluted that people must wear filters in their throats to prevent their bodies from being overwhelmed with sand and soot.  In contrast, “Silent Corridor” – which takes place in Tokyo in the 1990s – depicts a couple having difficulty conceiving; the text discusses a range of environmental problems likely responsible for their infertility.  “Silent Corridor” is advertised as a “fictionalization” of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; the story is prefaced by a quotation from the Japanese translation of Carson, and several episodes echo passages in Carson’s book.[16]

            Literary attention to environmental problems across Japan continued during the 1980s and 1990s.  To give one example, Kayano Shigeru’s (1926-2006) Kamuiyukara to mukashibanashi (Yukar, The Ainu Epic and Folktales, 1988) depicts Ainu life in Hokkaido and stresses the importance of preserving that island’s ecosystems; Kayano, one of the last native speakers of the Ainu language, protested the damming of rivers in northern Hokkaido.   Published two years later, Amano Reiko’s (1953–) Mansa to Nagaragawa: “Saigo no kawa” ni ikita otoko (Mansa and the Nagara River: A Man Who Lived on the “Last River,” 1990) deplores dam construction on the Nagara River, highlighting the significance of protecting local landscapes and the lifestyles of the region’s fishers; Amano has published extensively on dams and rivers and is a leading opponent of dam construction on the Nagara River.[17] Many novels by the environmental activist Tatematsu Wahei (1947-2010) from these decades likewise address ecodegradation in Japan and beyond, including Enrai (Distant Thunder, 1980), Nettai urin (Tropical Rain Forest, 1983), and Umi no Kanata no eien (Eternity across the Sea, 1989).  And the horrors of Minamata disease continued to be revealed not only in new editions of Ishimure’s work but also in such contemporary texts as Ogata Masato and Ōiwa Keibō’s Tokoyo no fune o kogite: Minamatabyō shishi (Rowing the Boat of the Eternal World: An Unauthorized History of Minamata Disease, 1996) and its English-language adaptation Rowing the Eternal Sea (2001). 

            Twenty-first-century bestselling Japanese writers regularly express environmental concerns in their work, including the celebrated feminist poet Itō Hiromi (1955–) in Kawara arekusa (Wild Grass on the Riverbank, 2005) and popular novelist Taguchi Randy (1959–) in Konsento (Outlet, 2000), Hikari no ame furu shima Yakushima (Island Where Shining Rain Falls: Yakushima, 2001), Tensei (Transmigration, 2001), Kodama (Echo, 2003), and Fujisan (Mount Fuji, 2004).  While Outlet references global warming, Mount Fuji the garbage scarring this mountain, and Echo the deforestation of ancient groves, Yakushima addresses how or whether to write about breathtaking landscapes; so doing, the narrative argues, likely will increase both demands to preserve them and pressures for tourist travel.  Indeed, the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism runs ecotours to Yakushima, which ultimately harm local ecosystems.  Also noteworthy in this context is the Okinawan writer Ikegami Eiichi’s (1970–) science fiction novel Shanguri-ra (Shangri-La, 2005) and its recent manga and television adaptations, which feature a tropical twenty-first century Tokyo, transformed by global warming.

           Also showing no signs of diminishing are the contributions of Japanese popular culture to discourse on the environment in Japan and around the world.  Japanese film has played a vital role, from documentaries such as Satō Makoto’s (1957-2007) Agano ni ikiru (Living on the Agano, 1992) and its sequel Agano no kioku (Memories of Agano, 2004), both of which dramatize the impact of Minamata disease on a mountain community in Niigata, to Katō Kunio’s (1977–) Oscar-winning twelve-minute “Tsumiki no ie” (The House of Small Cubes, 2008), which depicts an old man attempting to prevent rising water caused by global warming from flooding his house.[18] 

            Environmental degradation occupies an even larger position in Japanese manga and anime.  One example is the anime metaseries Gandamu (Gundam, 1979–), which depicts overpopulation and destruction of ecosystems as causing massive armed conflict and migration to outer space; Gundam began as a television series and now includes a plethora of films, manga, novels, and video games.  Just as noteworthy is celebrated director Miyazaki Hayao’s (1941–) postapocalyptic Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Windy Valley, 1982-1994).  This anime depicts human societies as declining sharply after a millennium of plundering earth’s riches, polluting its air, and changing its life-forms; during the Seven Days of Fire they destroyed their cities and lost their advanced technology.  Nausicaä is set a millennium after the Seven Days of Fire, but the world remains covered by the “Sea of Corruption”; in this environment people are capable of eking out only the most meager of existences.  Even more popular has been Miyazaki’s Mononokehime (Princess Mononoke, 1997), Japan’s highest-grossing film of all time, animated or otherwise.  Set in the fourteenth century, Princess Mononoke opens with a wild boar felling a primeval forest; the boar has been maddened by an iron ball lodged in its body.  The remainder of the film features struggles between people and the beasts and spirits of a magical forest.  Decapitating the leader of the forest, people set off a chain of events that results in its destruction, but in the end harmony between humans and environments is restored.  Miyazaki’s supernaturalization of the “natural” reconfigures conventional Japanese views of the nonhuman, depicting landscapes such as the forest as abjected spaces that ultimately enact revenge.[19]  This animated film, in the words of Susan Napier, is “a wake-up call to human beings in a time of environmental and spiritual crisis that attempts to provoke its audience into realizing how much they have already lost and how much more they stand to lose.”[20]  With several notable exceptions, Japanese films have sounded more strident wake-up calls than have Japanese literary works, but for decades the latter have been actively negotiating the complexities of environmental degradation.

           The March 2011 Tōhoku catastrophe (3/11) – which has prompted renewed and often passionate discussions of the future of nuclear power in Japan and around the world – likewise has notably impacted Japanese literary production.  In the past few years Japan’s best-known contemporary authors including Ōe Kenzaburō (1935–), Murakami Haruki (1949–), and Yoshimoto Banana (1964–), as well as writers virtually unknown outside Japan, have published creative work that grapples with the triple tragedy of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns that devastated large swaths of northeastern Japan.[21]  Much of this work places 3/11 in global context, speaking of the Tōhoku tragedy in relation to Chernobyl and even Auschwitz and 9/11.  Particularly noteworthy is the Kodansha anthology Sore de mo sangatsu wa, mata (Still, March, Again, 2012), featuring fiction, poetry, manga, and nonfiction by Japanese and several foreign writers and translated into English by Elmer Luke and David Karashima as March was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown (2012).  March was Made of Yarn opens with a brief poem by Tanikawa Shuntarō (1931–) on words “resurrected with our pain” followed by Tawada Yōko’s “Fushi no shima” (Island of Eternal Life), a short story set in 2023, six years after the Great Pacific Earthquake of 2017.[22] Japan is so contaminated with radioactivity, the seas and soil polluted beyond repair, that the archipelago is completely cut off from the world; it is no longer possible to travel to or from Japan, and Japanese cannot even access the internet.  The narrator, a Japanese woman living abroad, notes that everyone who was at least 100-years old in 2011 is still alive, radiation poisoning having made it impossible for the very elderly to die.  But the young suffer tremendously; they are unable to walk or even stand, and they can barely see, swallow, or speak.  The narrator laments that Japanese did not learn their lesson after Fukushima.  But remarkably, the remainder of the world seems to continue on as before; there is little sign that ecosystems outside Japan have notably changed.  

            Just as important is Lisette Gebhardt and Yuki Masami’s edited volume Literature and Art after Fukushima: Four Approaches, which examines fissures within the Japanese literary world, writings that link 3/11 to other traumas in Japanese history, literary representations of Japanese relationships with food and eating post-3/11, and Japanese political theater.[23]  In addition, Lisette Gebhardt discusses how a diverse array of Japanese writers have addressed the global implications of Fukushima and laments that, “in the hothouse climate of the cultural scene, which leaves little space for the individual who is forced to make many allowances in order not to offend potential sponsors, criticism has so far been voiced mostly in moderate tones.”[24]  For her part, Lisa Mundt describes the evolving debates on Fukushima in theater, including recent discussions on nuclear power, the social responsibility of theater, methods of enabling civic participation, and the possibilities and limitations of political commitment in the performing arts.[25]        

            In addition to creative writers, manga artists also have engaged extensively with 3/11.  Shiriagari Kotobuki’s (born Toshiki Mochizuki, 1958–) Manga Ever Since: 2011.3.11 (Ano hi kara no manga: 2011.3.11, 2011), in the words of Mary Knighton, “depicts the daily shocks and absurdities following in the wake of 3.11, and links them to the working lives, domestic spaces, and collective psyche of his readers.”[26] Also of note are Shiriagari’s earlier manga, including Gerogero Puusuka: Kodomo Miraishi (Gerogero Puuska: Death of the Children’s Future, 2006-2007), developed in response to Chernobyl and wrapping up with a nuclear winter, as well as Hakobune (The Ark, 2000), which depicts an endless rain that drowns everything, and Jacaranda (2005), featuring a large tree destroying Tokyo, its roots and branches ripping apart the city’s infrastructure, lighting fires, and setting off explosions that decimate the city.[27]

            From earliest times, Japanese literature has illuminated multiple aspects of Japan’s natural legacies that are less readily accessible via documentary sources or even direct experience. Literature’s style and substance – and the space it gives readers to think about global crises – evoke the empathy required to understand the need for changing attitudes and behaviors vis-à-vis the nonhuman.  Like many of the world’s literatures, Japanese literature describes, reminisces, warns, celebrates, condones, and condemns aspects of human/nonhuman interactions in ways more nuanced than other discourses.  Creative texts, with their often demanding and at times unforgiving multivalent discourses, not only provide conflicting perspectives on the empirical world and on the actual and ideal behaviors of human societies vis-à-vis their environments. More important, they also help readers begin to understand better their myriad places within multiple ecosystems, from the local to the global.