Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 20

A Restatement: The Art of ‘Ground Zero’ (Part 1)
The Runit Dome, Fukushima, and the Lucky Dragon

In the summer of 2004, around the same time as now when the singing of the cicadas was intense, a certain exhibition opened at the Daigo Fukuryu Maru Exhibition Hall in Tokyo’s Yumenoshima Park. Entitled “Collapsing Histories,”the show (curated by Aaron Kerner) included works by the Japanese artists Kenji Yanobe and Katsushige Nakahashi.

As indicated by its name, the exhibition venue was built to preserve and display what remains of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru, the Japanese tuna fishing boat that was exposed to and contaminated by a large amount of radioactive fallout from the United States’ Castle Bravo thermonuclear device test on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on March 1, 1954. The boat returned to Yaizu Port after encountering the fallout, with the crewmembers suffering acute radiation sickness; by September 23, the chief radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama (then aged 40), had passed away.

The seriousness of the incident, however, went far beyond this single fatality. Large quantities of contaminated fish were subsequently caught in the Pacific Ocean, and in no time at all radiation panic was sweeping across Japan. Large quantities of contaminated fish were disposed of (beside the main gate at the Tsukuji fish market, for example, there is a plaque marking the spot where much of the unsold tuna was buried, although due to problems surrounding the plan to relocate the fish market, the so-called “tuna mound” was erected in the grounds of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru Exhibition Hall), while at the same time there arose throughout Japan an antinuclear movement on a thitherto unseen scale. It was due largely to the campaigning and education work carried out at this time that the true meaning of “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” became a matter of common knowledge among the general population (although one can only describe as “ironic” the fact that it was the intensification of this movement that led to the mounting on a massive scale of a campaign for the “peaceful use of atomic energy,” resulting in the shrewd replacement of the “antinuclear movement” with “dream energy development in the form of nuclear power”).

Not long after this, on November 3 of the same year, the Toho Studios movie alluding to the Daigo Fukuryu Maru incident, Godzilla, was released. In the movie, a dinosaur-like creature that lived on earth some 140 million years ago and had survived deep in the ocean is transformed into a daikaiju, or monster, after being showered with radioactivity during a thermonuclear test in the Pacific off the coast of Japan. Climbing out of Tokyo Bay, Godzilla then attacks the capital, Tokyo. As if to underscore the connection to the Daigo Fukuryu Maru incident, the movie opens with a scene showing a fishing boat being attacked by a flash of light. The artist Taro Okamoto was also shocked by this incident, and depicted the exposure of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru to radiation in the painting Men Aflame (1955). Okamoto expanded on the same motif in the giant mural Myth of Tomorrow (1969). Painted in Mexico, this work passed through strange vicissitudes of fortune before being installed in its current location in a corridor in Shibuya Station, where it was recently the subject of an “intervention” by Chim↑Pom that resulted in criminal papers being filed against the art collective. (1)

In light of this, considering the ripple effect on later artists of Taro Okamoto and the “post-Godzilla” tradition of nuclear weapons, radioactive contamination, and so on as common denominators in everything from special effects movies to manga and anime, it could even be said that the significance of Daigo Fukuryu Maru in terms of its potential impact on postwar Japanese culture may be greater than even that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Be that as it may, Daigo Fukuryu Maru (or to use its English name, “Lucky Dragon No. 5”), joined Hiroshima and Nagasaki as yet another proper noun symbolizing Japan’s status as “a country that experienced nuclear attack.” (It can only be described as a strange coincidence that the fourth such symbol, Fukushima, is written in Japanese using the fuku character of Fukuryu and the shima character of Hiroshima.)

In light of this, one would have to say that compared to the prayer-for-peace ceremonies held every year in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, far too little attention is paid these days to the Daigo Fukuryu Maru. For a start, it was purely fortuitous that the Daigo Fukuryu Maru actually ended up being displayed in its current location. After being purchased and decontaminated by the then Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, it was renamed Hayabusa Maru and made a training vessel for the Tokyo University of Fisheries, until in 1967 it was found by a Tokyo Metropolitan Government worker abandoned (as extra-bulky waste?) on a patch of reclaimed land adjoining Yumenoshima. Its discovery sparked a preservation movement that eventually led to the construction of the exhibition hall that stands on the site today. It was the exhibition mentioned at the start of this article that occasioned my first visit to the Daigo Fukuryu Maru Exhibition Hall, and I remember feeling somewhat sad both at the site’s remoteness from the city center and at the fact my visit came at a time when the Daigo Fukuryu Maru incident itself was fading from people’s memories.

But now more than ever we should reflect on the Daigo Fukuryu Maru. This is because in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, which saw radiation leak on an unprecedented scale and radioactive contamination greater than that of an atomic bomb the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima, and at a time when contamination threatens property and people at the most fundamental level – including our ability to breathe, eat and drink, and reproduce – signaling a turning point in the postwar Japanese social, political, administrative and economic landscape after a shift toward the promotion of nuclear power, the events surrounding the exposure of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru to radioactive fallout could be regarded as the most significant foreshadowing of the current nuclear disaster.

But let us return to the original subject. The work Katsushige Nakahashi unveiled here in 2004 was titled Bikini Project: On The Day. In conjunction with this exhibition, Nakahashi visited Runit Island, part of the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where the US was carrying out its thermonuclear tests. In one corner of this island is the Runit Dome, a giant concrete dome structure that to all appearances looks out of place among its surroundings, and which was actually made by gathering in one spot all the soil on the island contaminated by the thermonuclear tests and covering it with a concrete cap to prevent the contamination spreading. Here, Nakahashi spent 12 hours from dawn till dusk taking one photograph every seven seconds, producing several thousand photographs that covered an area measuring 15 meters by 3 meters. Furthermore, on his return to Japan he invited participants to piece the photographs together to recreate the dome next to the Daigo Fukuryu Maru.

This encounter at Yumenoshima between the Lucky Dragon and the Runit Dome brought into the open the many cases that still lie dormant in Japan of widespread contamination due to radiation. Even after the Daigo Fukuryu Maru incident, the US continued the nuclear testing it had been carrying out in these waters under its control since 1946, carrying out a total of 67 such tests through to 1958 with a combined nuclear yield equivalent to 7000 Hiroshima bombs.

Of course, it goes without saying that the Marshall Islands are not no-man’s-land. On the contrary, the people living on the islands have an advanced culture built up over centuries. Many islanders were forcibly evacuated with no prior notice. However, the scale of the destruction was so immense that evacuating them had little meaning, since many of them were still exposed to radiation. The Runit Dome mentioned above was constructed so that some of these islanders could return to the island, albeit decades after their evacuation. But the fields on the island and the surrounding ocean that were contaminated will never return to their former state. The islanders have had to abandon their farming and fishing and are forced to live on canned provisions and so on. One cannot help seeing in this an eerie portent of the circumstances those in the disaster area in Fukushima and the surrounding area may well face in the future.

In my book Senso to banpaku (World Wars and World Fairs), I wrote as follows about the Runit Dome:

It’s not only “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki.” The inhabitants of islands in the Pacific Ocean and the entire population of Japan may already be “hibakusha” (survivors of atomic bombings). I, and even you, may be “hibakusha.” In fact the entire population of the world may be “hibakusha”… In other words, ever since the 1950s the problem has been not “how to avoid nuclear war” but “how to survive in a post-nuclear war world.” And I stress, has been. In this sense, the works of near-future science fiction set on earth after a nuclear war, which have appeared time and time again in Japanese sub-culture, were an actual reaction to things happening in the world at the time. (2)

Not only the land and people, but culture, too, has been subject over decades to “atomic bombing.” There is no doubt that the nuclear disaster currently unfolding in Japan is a serious matter without precedent. But at the same time it also brings to light the fact that we have long been “hibakusha.” What kind of art is possible in a place where “anywhere” may potentially be “ground zero”? As the author responsible for penning “Bakushinchi” no geijutsu (The Art of Ground Zero, Shobunsha, 2002), I intend to devote the next few editions of this column to considering again what “the art of ground zero” is and what it means.

(To be continued)

 

 

 

    1. For more about this episode, see Noi Sawaragi, “Okamoto Taro

Asu no Shinwa

    1. wo meguru

Reberu 7

    1. ” (

Level7

    1. and Taro Okamoto’s

Myth of Tomorrow

    1. ) in Shincho 45, September 2011.

  1. Noi Sawaragi, Senso to banpaku (World Wars and World Fairs) (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppan-sha, 2005) pp.337-338.

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