The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 11 | Issue 13 | Number 2 | Article ID 3922 | Apr 01, 2013

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Ikeda Manabu, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, andDisaster/Nuclear Art in Japan 池田学、２０１１年東日本大震災、そして災害と放射能に関する美術

Asato Ikeda

Article summary: This article introduces IkedaManabu and his art, and situates his workwithin the history of imagining disasters inJapanese art by introducing prominentJapanese works, including disaster prints fromthe Edo and Meiji periods and nuclear art byDomon Ken, Fukushima Kikujiro, and MarukiIri and Toshi. The article will ultimatelyconsider what Ikeda’s art means to the largerdiscourse of contemporary Japanese societyand art.

Ikeda Manabu, Meltdown, 2012. Pen,acrylic ink on paper mounted on board,122cm x 122cm. Photo by West VancouverMuseum. Courtesy of the artist and

Mizuma Art Gallery.

Introduction

In January 2013, Ikeda Manabu released hislatest work titled Meltdown at the WestVancouver Museum in Canada. By applyingacrylic ink on paper with pen, the artist drewan incredible image that, with its concise,blunt, and even shocking title, unquestionablyrefers to the meltdown of three nuclear powerplants at Fukushima Daiichi in NortheasternJapan after the earthquake and tsunami in2011. A monumental iceberg-like entity, whosetop comprises a gray-colored, dysfunctionalindustrial complex, is juxtaposed with the livelynatural green forest and emerald blue seabeneath it. It will not be long until the “dead”industrial world touches and contaminates thenatural worlds of trees and water through thebottom part of the iceberg. Meltdown invitesthe viewer to come closer to the work, toexplore visual devices that the artist has setout. Ikeda’s craftsmanship and artistic skillsare impressive: he meticulously draws the tiny,entangled pipes of the plant, renders individualtrees with tremendous care, and presents thetheme in an allegorical framework. Mirroringthe practice of contemporary Japanese art,which consciously merges “subculture” (animeand manga) with “fine arts,” Ikeda incorporatesinto his art the fantastic world of the filmmakerMiyazaki Hayao, to whom, he publicallyacknowledges, his works are indebted.Meltdown is reminiscent of the old butenergetic and living residential castle situatedagainst a mountainous natural background in

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Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (2004).Radiation is invisible, but Ikeda focuses on the“visible” symbol of the Fukushima nuclearmeltdown: the plant. It is the uncontrolled,collapsed nuclear plant that made the nearbyarea uninhabitable, and Ikeda’s drawing, whichis void of human figures, conveys the solitaryatmosphere of this deserted part of Fukushima.The juxtaposition of the radiation-exposedbroken nuclear plant and glorious, pure natureis disturbing and alarming, conveying to theviewer the urgency of the problems that Japanis both facing and causing for the rest of theworld. “This time it occurred in Japan,” theartist says, “but there are hundreds of nuclearplants throughout the world, and you neverknow where an accident will occur next.”1 Theaudiences at West Vancouver Museum foundIkeda’s art disturbingly relevant.

Meltdown reminds us that after nearly twoyears the Great East Japan Earthquakecontinues to haunt us. This work is the artist’sfirst direct engagement with contemporarysocial and political issues. Ikeda’s art withoutquestion adds a new chapter to the long historyof disaster / nuclear art in Japan. The questionis, what kind of chapter will that be? Thisarticle will first introduce Ikeda Manabu andhis art, and situate Ikeda’s works within thehistory of imagining disasters in Japanese artby introducing prominent Japanese works,including disaster prints from the Edo andMeiji periods and nuclear art by Domon Ken,

Fukushima Kikujiro, and Maruki Iri and Toshi.The article ultimately considers what Ikeda’sart means to the larger d iscourse ofcontemporary Japanese society and art.

Ikeda Manabu

Ikeda Manabu (b. 1973). Photographed byYukiko Onley

Ikeda Manabu is one of the most successfulJapanese contemporary artists (see more worksb y I k e d a h e r e(http://mizuma-art.co.jp/artist/0030/index_e.php)). He was born in Saga, southern Japan, in1973 and earned his BA and MA from theTokyo National University of Fine Arts andMusic. Working primarily with pen and acrylicpaint, he has produced fascinating works thatare extremely detailed and combine the humanand natural worlds, the past and the future intoa single pictorial field. Many of Ikeda’s worksintertwine elements of history, culture, nature,and cityscape. His themes and subject matterare monumental but Ikeda draws intricatebuildings, people, trees, animals, birds, trains,ships, and planes. Because of the intensity ofhis work, most of his drawings are small in size,but he has created several large-size works,each taking more than a year to complete. His

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artworks are arresting and entertaining, full ofvisual devices that create unexpectedconnections between disparate scenes. Hisworks compel viewers to “read” them carefullyand remember the joy of looking.

At the same time, there is an alarming, dystonictone in his art: human figures, which arealways tiny and anonymous, have no controlover the overwhelming power and scale ofnature. His Lighthouse (2009), for example,depicts a gigantic lighthouse, which is so oldthat trees grow out of it. Pummeled by stormysea waves, it is falling over. Numerous whitebirds that fly over the lighthouse, perhapsshocked by the weather and the fall of thelighthouse, add an element of drama to thepicture. The human and natural worldsmaintain an intricate balance of power, butIkeda’s man-made objects, like the lighthouse,cannot always predict or endure the forces ofnature. Predominantly drawn in blue and navy,the tone of the work is dark, and highlights themenacing, untamable side of the natural world.

Ikeda Manabu, Lighthouse, 2009. Pen,acrylic ink on paper, mounted on board. 22x 27.3 cm. Photo by Miyajima Kei. Courtesyof the artist and Mizuma Art Gallery.

Ikeda’s works are in the collection of the Mori

Art Museum in Tokyo, one of the largestcontemporary art museums in Japan, and in theprivate collection of Takahashi Ryutaro, a veryprominent collector of contemporary Japaneseart in Japan. His works have also beenexhibited in major international groupexhibitions, including Re-Imagining Asia (2008,The House of World Cultures, Berlin), GreatNew Wave: Contemporary Art from Japan(2008, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario), and,most recently, Bye Bye Kitty (2011, JapanSociety, New York). His Existence (2004), alarge-scale drawing of a humongous treecomprising many separate, uniquely shapedtrunks intertwined into one, was selected asone of the best artworks of 2011 by the NewYork Times, establishing Ikeda withoutquestion at the pinnacle of the contemporaryJ a p a n e s e a r t w o r l d ( l i n k(http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/12/18/arts/design/20111218-COTTER-5.html)).

Ikeda Manabu, Existence, 2004. Pen,acrylic ink on paper, mounted on board.145 x 205 cm. Private collection.

Since 2011, Ikeda has resided in Canada. Hespent a year in Vancouver on a fellowshipprovided by the Japanese government’s Agencyfor Cultural Affairs in 2011. He chose Canadato benefit his art. He was particularlyinterested in Vancouver’s cityscape situated ina natural landscape, and he acknowledges that

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life in Canada has affected his work, especiallyin regard to how to conceptualize space. Ikedanow renders the gap between objects moreexpansively, often incorporating monumentalspace into his visual field. For instance, he fillsthe entire space of the paper in Lighthouse andleaves white, unfilled spaces in Existence, butin Meltdown, which he executed in Canada, heuses the space surrounding the nuclear plantsmore creatively. The bottom portion of thework is rendered into natural landscape, whichinterfaces with the main subject of the powerplant, adding context and dynamism to thepicture.

When the Great East Japan Earthquake tookplace, Ikeda was in Vancouver. He learnedabout what was happening through theInternet and the Canadian media. His decisionto continue living in Canada after his fellowshipended was partially to protect his youngdaughter’s health. The artist also believes thathe would forget about the disaster if he lived inJapan. He thinks that people in Japan are,understandably, eager to get past the traumaticevent, often at the risk of ignoring radiationexposure problems and other threats posed bythe crippled nuclear plants in FukushimaDaiichi. Ikeda needs distance from Japan, forthe moment, to keep “fresh” the memories ofthe anxiety and insecurity he felt being awayfrom home during the disaster. In preparationfor creating works related to the disaster,however, Ikeda made a trip to the Tohoku areain February 2012, visiting Kesennuma andRikuzen Takada, to see the actual site of thedisaster with his own eyes.

Ikeda Manabu, Foretoken, 2008. Pen,acrylic ink on paper, mounted on board.190 x 340 cm. Photo by Kuge Yasuhide.Courtesy of the artist and Mizuma ArtGallery. KAGURA salon/SustainableInvestor co., Ltd.

Ikeda has an interesting story about why hedecided to produce drawings related to theGreat East Japan Earthquake. The artistcreated a work titled Foretoken (Yocho inJapanese) in 2008, which depicts a large seawave, and many of Ikeda’s friends andcolleagues came to associate it with the 2011disaster. After the devastating tsunami, someeven called him “a prophet” (yogensha).Foretoken depicts people skiing on the surfaceof a building, a bodhisattva-like figure on abear’s back chanting a Buddhist sutra,skeletons in a wrecked airplane, and a group ofpeople “rock-climbing” the wave. All thesehuman figures and cultural and technologicalproducts are swallowed by one big wave. Thework reminds us of ukiyo-e artist KatsushikaHokusai’s masterpiece “Great Wave offKanagawa,” which was executed in the earlynineteenth century and is part of Thirty-SixViews of Mount Fuji. Both works are powerfulimages of strong sea waves, but whileHokusai’s wave frames Mt. Fuji and provides adynamic context to the mountain thatsymbolizes Japan, in Ikeda’s work, the waveitself is the sole subject and it is crowded withcityscapes, human figures, animals, and trees,creating a sense that human civilization isbeing completely overturned by the force of the

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wave. He did not set out to produce an image ofa tsunami, however. As the artist states, heinitially wanted to draw snow, but he startedthinking that anything white would do, and itdid not have to be snow. He then developed animage of a large wave swallowing civilization.The title Foretoken also seems uncanny, butIkeda meant it to allow space for ambiguity. Hesays, “You never know if omens refer tosomething good or bad.” Despite the lack ofintention to depict a disaster in Foretoken,however, as somebody who “predicted” it,Ikeda feels “obligated” now to create worksthat are about the Great East JapanEarthquake.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), “TheGreat Wave off Kanagawa,” from the seriesThirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, earlynineteenth century. Color woodblock print.

Disaster Prints: Edo and Meiji

As Japan is vulnerable to various kinds ofnatural disasters, visual artists have made thema subject of their art throughout Japanesehistory. We can trace the genealogy of disasterart to catfish prints (namazu-e) of the Edoperiod, which were produced in response to amagnitude 7.0 earthquake that hit Edo, today’sTokyo , on November 11 , 1855 . Th isearthquake, together with the 1854 Ansei-TokaiEarthquake and the 1854 Ansei-Nankai

Earthquake, is known as the Ansei GreatEarthquake, and it killed more than 7,000people.2 Namazu-e are woodblock printspublished and circulated immediately after thedisaster and allegorical pictures representingthe Japanese folktale that earthquakes arecaused by a giant catfish living beneath thecountry.3 As a result of publication censorshipimposed by the Tempo reforms (1841-43),which made depictions of contemporary eventsillegal, namazu-e were usually unsigned, andtheir production was in fact banned after twomonths. Namazu-e interestingly encompassvarious interpretations of the disaster. Somebelieved that the earthquake was a form ofdivine punishment of Edo, which had flourishedexcessively. Others perceived the earthquakepositively as a kind of “world renewal”(yonaoshi) which would trigger a redistributionof wealth, revitalize the economy, and bringabout social reform. As a whole, namazu-eacted both as entertainment and socialsatire/critique. The print reproduced here andtitled Blessing in Peaceful Times, for example,shows a personified catfish in the lower right,beaten by Edo commoners who were adverselyaffected by the disaster. At the same time,there are two men near the middle of thepicture who try to stop the mob. These are tiledealers who benefited from the reconstructionafter the earthquake. The title of the printreinforces the sense that the earthquakefacilitated economic activity.

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Katsumura Jiemon, The Blessing inPeaceful Times, 1854. University of BritishColumbia Library Rare Books and SpecialCollections.

Woodblock prints on the 1896 Meiji-SanrikuEarthquake published in newspapers(kawaraban) form another prominent collectionof disaster art. The Meiji-Sanriku Earthquakewas a magnitude 7.2 earthquake that hitnortheastern Japan on June 15, 1896. Theearthquake itself did not cause much damage,but the tsunami that followed it proveddevastating. It was as high as 38.2 meters andkilled over 20,000 people, mostly along theSanriku coast of Iwate and Miyagi prefecturesin the Tohoku region.4 It should be noted thatthese are among the places that were hit by thetsunami following the Great East JapanEarthquake of 2011, and that the height of thistsunami exceeded that of the 1896 Meiji-Sanriku Earthquake. Unlike the Edo catfishprints that occasionally parody the disaster andthe following social situation, the kawarabanprints convey the ferociousness of the event byillustrating the catastrophic effect of thetsunami. At a time when photograph and videowere not available to capture the very momentof the disaster, these prints proved to be avaluable visual record with significant newsvalue. One of the prints produced after thedisaster, now in the George Beans Collection atthe University of British Columbia, shows atsunami hitting the coastal town of Kamaishi,Ishikawa Prefecture, which is known for itsfishing industry. It captures the plight of agroup of residents, who try to climb up a hill,followed closely by the great wave. Tiny humanfigures in the right foreground are contrastedwith the infinite size and formlessness of thewave. The utter darkness of the sea and skythat dominate the picture captures a dramaticmoment of the horrifying scene, highlightingthe desperate situation of the people depicted.The printmaker might have been familiar withlate 18th and early 19 th century European

Romantic paintings that explore dramaticphenomena of nature and human’s emotionalreaction to them.5

Creator unknown, Iwate KamaishiTsunami, Disaster Print from the Meijiperiod. University of British ColumbiaL ibrary Rare Books and Spec ia lCollections.

Nuclear Art in Japan

Ikeda’s Meltdown is one of the first directartistic responses by a prominent Japaneseartist to the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, butthere are predecessors who have producedwhat we might call “nuclear art”: art related tothe atomic bombings in Hiroshima andNagasaki. One of the best-known examples isDomon Ken’s photographic collection titledHiroshima, which was shot in 1957 andpublished by Kenkosha in 1959. Domoncaptured images of victims undergoing painfulsurgery at the Hiroshima Atomic BombHospital and suffering from burns and scars,and orphans cheerfully playing at theHiroshima Municipal School for War Victims.Domon confronts the viewer with photographicevidence of their continuing pain and suffering,presenting human bodies that are grotesque,abject, deformed, and severely injured.Domon’s photographs are certainly disturbing,

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and they are even traumatizing to look at.Hiroshima was part of the photographic“realism” movement that Domon advocated inthe early 1950s and disseminated through hiswritings and photo competitions in themagazine Camera.6 Unlike prewar (often avant-garde) photography that only pursued aestheticqualities and was accessible to only a smallnumber o f people , Domon promotedphotographs that represented the “reality” ofthe majority of Japanese people in the postwarperiod, seeking to make photography relevantto larger audiences.

Domon’s ultimate goal was to increaseawareness of the nuclear-exposure inHiroshima and its human costs, which the artistconsidered to be the national responsibility ofthe “Japanese” photographer. His language wasoften clearly imbued with nationalism, and hecontributed to Japan’s postwar representationof itself as an absolute victim, that sufferedfrom American-caused nuclear atrocity.7 Nevercritically reflecting on his own complicity withthe wartime state, mainly through hisparticipation in NIPPON, Japan’s propagandamagazine targeted at foreign audiences, hefailed to acknowledge the aggressive andviolent aspects of Japanese modern history,especially during Japan’s colonial period andWorld War II.

Domon Ken, Hiroshima, 1959

Photographer Fukushima Kikujiro alsoproduced nuclear art. Fukushima was initiallyan amateur photographer who got his startthrough Domon’s realism movement. As YukiTanaka’s article in Japan Focus discusses (link(https: / /apj j f .org/ -Yuki-TANAKA/3623)) ,however, Fukushima’s approach to Hiroshimavictims and his political agenda were verydifferent from those of Domon. Fukushimadeveloped a deeply personal relationship withNakamura Shigematsu, who was suffering fromlethargy sickness and occasional seizurescaused by the illness. Unlike Domon Ken, whovalued the formal elements of a photograph inaddition to its social meaning, Fukushima paidless attention to his photographs’ aestheticsthan to their politics. Furthermore, whileDomon sought to present Hiroshima as auniquely Japanese experience, Fukushima’sphotographs highlighted the ethnic diversityand social inequality among the hibakusha. For

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example, the artist took photographs ofMotomachi, a slum filled with atomic-bombvictims, including Koreans, who had beenexcluded from subsidized medical care.

Probably the best known Japanese nuclear artinternationally is The Hiroshima Panels, aseries of fifteen panels painted by husband-and-wife artists Maruki Iri (Japanese-style painter)and Toshi (Western-style painter) beginningshortly after the war until 1982 (To see theMarukis’ work online, go to the museumw e b s i t e(http://www.aya.or.jp/~marukimsn/index.htm)).8 The artists’ method of producing works of artwas unique; they jointly produced paintings,one continuing to paint directly where theother left off the previous day. The completedpaintings thus combine the impressionisticqualities of Iri’s ink dilution and Toshi’s carefulrendering of human figures. As part of theHiroshima Panels, the artists painted Ghosts I,a panel depicting the aftermath of the atomicbomb, which they witnessed when they visitedIri’s family in Hiroshima a few days after thebombing. Because the SCAP (SupremeCommander of the Allied Powers) prohibitedthe use of the word genbaku (atomic bomb) inpublic, the artists initially displayed this workunder the title August 6, the date of thebombing of Hiroshima.

Maruki Iri and Toshi, The HiroshimaPanels, book cover.

Deformed, fragmented naked human bodies,most of them women and children, emerge outof the black smoke in one of the panels, GhostsI. Here, almost everything is colorless; bodieshave become ashes and ashes cover bodies.Masses of people are walking, while some arelying on the ground and others are praying. Allfifteen panels convey a sense of total confusionin scenes that cannot be comprehended as acohesive narrative. A person covered with ablanket stares at a man who is about to killanother man with a sword. Amid the smoke,girls helplessly gaze at viewers beyond thepanel, sitting and holding each other. They arenot only witnessing the moment when theirfriends and families were blown away by theradioactive blast (neppu), but are alsowitnessing this historical moment ofunprecedented nuclear catastrophe. TheHiroshima Panels evoke silence, a speechlessmoment of chaos. With no background, thespecificity of the peoples’ experiences becomesambiguous, and the painting represents Helland human suffering. The Marukis activelyparticipated in leftist political activities andconsidered their art as a means to convey

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issues of social inequalities and injustice, as didReportage painters of the 1950s such asYamashita Kikuji and Ikeda Tatsuo. And indirect contrast to Domon, they acknowledgedthe violence the Japanese army perpetratedagainst other Asians in The Nanking Massacreof 1937, representing Japanese soldiers as theaggressors.

The legacy of Hiroshima in the discourse ofJapan’s postwar nuclear policy is complicated.While one might assume the city of Hiroshima,having experienced the atomic bomb, wouldhave opposed the nuclear power industry, thiswas not the case. In fact, as Yuki Tanakareveals, Hiroshima was an early supporter ofthe non-military use of nuclear energy, and thecity hosted “The Peaceful Use of NuclearEnergy” exhibition in 1956, with sponsorshipfrom institutions including the Hiroshima CityCouncil, Hiroshima Prefectural Government,a n d H i r o s h i m a U n i v e r s i t y ( l i n k(https://apjjf .org/-Yuki-TANAKA/3521)). 9

Through these institutions, Hiroshima residentsexpressed the hope that precisely because theyhad suffered from the atomic bomb, theywanted to promote nuclear energy. Ironically,whether nuclear plants use atomic energy“peacefully” or not, following the 2011 nuclearmeltdown, residents in Fukushima are nowconfronted by the same problems related toradiation that victims in Hiroshima andNagasaki experienced sixty-six years earlier.Yet both the connection between Fukushimaand Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and the contradictoryhistory of postwar Japan as anti-nuclear-bombbut pro-nuclear-energy have been suppressedin public discourses. One example is anexhibition titled Genbaku wo miru [ViewingAtomic Bombs], which was to display artrelated to the atomic bombs including theHiroshima Panels at Meguro Museum betweenApril and May in 2011, which was cancelled, tothe regret to many people. The museumannounced that the cancellation was due tosympathy for people in Fukushima, but it iseasy to see how the museum might have also

cared about “Japan’s Nuclear Village,”powerful pro-nuclear advocates who benefitfrom nuclear industries and who try tominimize the scale of the nuclear crisis and theseriousness of the damage that it is causing toboth humans and the environment (link(https://apjjf.org/-Yuki-TANAKA/3521)).1 0

Nuclear issues have once again become taboo,as they were during the postwar occupation.But despite this fact, Japanese artists continueto extend their rich history of nuclear art, theart about human suffering from illness andinjuries resulting from radiation exposure.

Epilogue

In addition to Meltdown, Ikeda is planning alarge-scale drawing on the theme of Japan’sreconstruction after the Great East JapanEarthquake, adding to the Japanese visual-culture history of the disaster. This particularwork, which at 4m x 3m will be the largest inhis oeuvre, Ikeda estimates, will take threeyears. He will begin later in 2013 after hemoves to Madison, Wisconsin where he will bean artist-in-residence at the Chazen Museum ofArt . At the museum, he may show theproduction process to the public, and a filmcrew may document it. The artist speculatesthat just as life in Canada affected the work heproduced there, life in Wisconsin may affectthis work, but he does not yet know exactlyhow. Ikeda has been thinking carefully aboutthis work for the past two years, and he alreadyhas a vision for it. The way a new tree trunkgrows out of an old stump and how a newbranch comes out of an old trunk, which heobserved in Canadian forests, for example,have made him appreciative of the sheer powerof life and the multi-generational life oforganisms. It led him to believe that althoughJapan has been devastated by the disaster,there is always hope for life. For this work, healso says that he is increasingly interested inborrowing the forms of mythical animals, suchas the Shinto-inspired serpent Yamata noOrochi. His reference to mythological creatures

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reminds us not only of the namazu-e (catfishimages) of the Edo period, but also of theuranium sculptures of ants by Ken + JuliaYonetani, inspired by traditional aboriginaltales of dreaming in Australia. It reminds usthat humans are not the only inhabitants of theEarth and its natural environment.

So what is Ikeda adding to the Japanese artistichistory of disaster and nuclear images? Whatdoes his art mean to Japanese society at large?Ikeda’s recent works related to the 3.11disaster may signal the arrival of what onemight call “post-Murakami” art, the idea thatDavid Elliot articulated in his exhibition ByeBye Kitty!! Between Heaven and Hell inC o n t e m p o r a r y J a p a n e s e A r t ( l i n k(http://www.japansociety.org/event_detail?eid=359309d1)). The exhibition began a week afterthe Great East Japan Earthquake, and featuredworks by sixteen mid-career artists, includingIkeda. Elliott’s proposition is that unlikeMurakami Takashi’s “superflat” art, whichrepresents Japan as a child and highlights theshallowness of public discourse in Japanesecommercial culture, the emerging artists dealwith serious, existential issues in their works.The exhibition was of course organized beforethe disaster, but several social movementswere beginning to emerge then that resonatedwith the exhibition. Since the explosions at thenuclear reactors in Fukushima Daiichi, tens ofthousands of citizens have participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations in front of the NationalDiet in Nagatacho. For the first time since the1960 Anpo struggle and the 1960s anti-VietnamWar Beheiren movement, “average” citizens,including students , housewives andbusinessmen, who are not affiliated withparticular political parties or ideologies, haveprotested to the government. Ikeda is thus oneof many Japanese who decided not to withdrawfrom society or reside in the “super-flat,”infantile, virtual world of manga and anime.With Meltdown and forthcoming work, theartist seeks to address the urgent issue ofenvironmental damage and celebrate the

resil ience of victims in Japan who arereestablishing their lives completely fromscratch.

At the same time, his attitude toward politics isdecidedly different from that of the creators ofHiroshima-related art of the 1950s and 1960s.While Domon, Fukushima, and the Marukis hadclear political agendas, Ikeda does not directlyassociate himself and his works with the anti-nuclear demonstrations. This is a contrast toother cultural figures, such as Nobel Prize-winning author Oe Kenzaburo and AcademyAward-winning musician Sakamoto Ryuichi. “Imight be too ‘cool,’ but I do not believe that myart has the power to change the world,” hesays. Ikeda is from a younger and moredetached generation, the “post-Murakami”generation. It is too early to assess the impactof his disaster-related art on either Japanesecontemporary art or society, but I am eager tosee how the emerging Japanese artists mightdifferentiate themselves from MurakamiTakashi and form other artistic discourses.

Asato Ikeda earned her PhD from theUniversity of British Columbia and co-edited,with Ming Tiampo and Aya Louisa McDonald,Art and War in Japan and i ts Empire:1931-1960 (Leiden: Brill, 2012). As the2012-2013 Anne van Biema fellow at the Freer |Sackler Galleries of the SmithsonianInstitution, she is currently working on amonograph tentatively titled Soldiers andCherry Blossoms: Japanese Art, Fascism, andWorld War II.

Recommended Citation: Asato Ikeda IkedaManabu, "The 2011 Great East JapanEarthquake, and Disaster/Nuclear Art inJapan," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 11,Issue No. 13, No. 2, April 1, 2013.

Notes

I would like to express my gratitude to N. J.Hall, Maiko Behr, Shirin Eshghi and KatherineBerry-Kalsbeek, who provided editorial help.

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1 This article is based on an interview withIkeda Manabu that I conducted in November2012. I express my gratitude to the artist whokindly shared with me the vision of his art.

2 Noguchi Takehiko, Ansei Edo jishin: saigai toseijikenryoku [The Ansei Edo Earthquake:Disaster and Political Power](Tokyo: Chikumashobo, 2004).

3 For more on namazu-e , see CornellsOuwehand, Namazu-e and Their Themes: AnInterpretative Approach to Some Aspects ofJapanese Folk Religion (Leiden: Brill, 1964).Hidemi Shiga, “The Catfish Underground:Japan’s Earthquake Folklore and PopularResponses to Disaster,” Orientations 37. 3(2006).

4 Yamashita Fumio, Sanriku Otsunami [SanrikuGreat Tsunami](Tokyo: Kaede shobo, 2011).

5 I do not discuss arts and visual culture of the1923 Tokyo Earthquake here, as GenniferWeisenfeld has just published an excellent bookon this subject. Gennifer Weisenfeld, ImagingDisaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of

Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2012).

6 Julia Adeney Thomas, “Power Made Visible:Photograph and Postwar Japan’s ElusiveReality, Journal of Asian Studies 67. 2 (2008):382-386; Frank Feltens, "‘Realist’ Betweennessand Collective Victims: Domon Ken’sHiroshima,” Stanford Journal of East AsianAffairs (Summer 2011): 64-75.

7 For more on discourses about Hiroshima, seeLisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time,Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley:The University of California Press, 1999).

8 Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, The HiroshimaPanels (Saitama: Maruki Gallery for TheHiroshima Panels Foundation, 2004); John W.Dower and John Junkerman, The HiroshimaMurals: The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki(Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1985).

9 Link (https://apjjf.org/-Yuki-TANAKA/3521)

10 Jeff Kingston, “Japan’s Nuclear Village( h t t p : / / w w w . j a p a n f o c u s . o r g / - J e f f -Kingston/3822).”