Catastrophe memories and translation: An essay on education for endless narratives^*

Abstract

Education about catastrophes often begins with, and at times even focuses on, passing down catastrophe memories. For this education, catastrophe memories that are unique to the survivors must be translated carefully to ensure that they can be understood by successors who may not have experienced a catastrophe themselves. This study elaborates on the structure of the translation of these memories between the survivors and successors. It also focuses on the educational significance of the practical application of such translations. Section 1 describes the purpose of this study while Section 2 examines the reasons for the emphasis on passing down survivors’ memories in catastrophe education. Section 3 focuses on telling-listening exchanges while passing down these memories and examines the structure and characteristics of such exchanges. It was identified that it is imperative that these exchanges should communicate the experience that cannot be translated in words or is incommensurable. If both, the survivors and successors, are truthful to the incommensurability, and if they both dare to experience it, they will be able to find the potential and possibilities to transform human lives and societies while weaving together the narratives of catastrophe memories that would be transformed and generated endlessly.

Keywords:

• Catastrophe
• memory
• endless narrative
• impossibility
• truthfulness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 ‘Catastrophe’ in this article is used in a broad sense, including not only a natural disaster, but also wars, refugee crises, persecution due to discrimination, pollution, and large-scale accidents (Yamana & Yano, 2017, pp. 3–4, pp. 284–303, pp. 304–307).

2 Examples outside of Japan include history education in Germany after World War II (Kondo, 1998; Kondo, 2014). The 1755 Lisbon earthquake also had a profound impact on the views of humanity, nation, and science that formed the basis for modern education, for example, through Voltaire’s Candide, J. J. Rousseau's critique of civil society and I. Kant's articles on earthquakes and the concept of the sublime.

3 The majority here refers to people whose words and actions are considered ‘norm’, ‘typical’, or ‘standard’ within a certain group, while minorities are those whose words and actions are likely to be regarded as ‘abnormal’ or ‘exceptional’, which is the reason to get special attention and sometimes to be marginalised (Sakai, 2006, pp. v–ix). The number of people is irrelevant.

4 This is not an attempt to push minorities to join the majority. It is an attempt to elucidate the social structure that (re)produces the political dynamics to divide the two, and to seek to disrupt such structures and find out an alternative mode of living different from the existing one for both the majority and minorities (see Sakai, 2006, p. x).

5 Arendt adds on the same page that not only destructive and violent events, but all human experiences, including those of joy and happiness, become meaningful only when they can be narrated and listened to by others.

6 Catastrophe studies have been influenced in no small part by ‘Memory Studies’, which has been actively developed in many countries around the world since the 1980s, represented by A. Assmann. The first meeting of the Memory Studies Association, an international organisation bringing together academics from various fields related to Memory Studies, was held in Amsterdam in 2016, where most of the catastrophes academically focused on have been war-related. Studies on natural disasters and social problems such as poverty or refugee crises remain rare. Approaches have centred predominantly on psychology, history, sociology, literature, and museum studies, which included memorials, archival studies, and art studies, while educational studies remain rare.

On the contrary, most of the previous studies in the educational field on the subject of catastrophes have been conducted with the aim of disaster prevention and mitigation, particularly in Japan. Studies by Yamana & Yano (2017) and Wigger et al. (2017) are some examples of educational studies that interpret catastrophes in a broader sense, as we see in Note 1, from a perspective of education on/for pathos.

This article inherits and develops the awareness of issues presented in Yamana & Yano’s work (2017), especially in my contribution, Chapter 5 thereof (pp. 151–173). My previous article focused solely on those listening to memory narratives and discussed the ethics around listeners. In contrast, this article discusses the collaborative communication between the catastrophe survivors, including the deceased as narrators and the listeners, which I regard as ‘the Inoperative Community’ following J.-L. Nancy, while focusing on the impossibilities that emerge through their dynamic communications.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mika Okabe

Mika Okabe is Professor of Educational Anthropology in the Graduate School of Human Sciences at Osaka University, Japan. She focuses her interests on philosophy and anthropology during 19–20c by which educational thoughts have been fundamentally defined and regulated. She has been the member of PESA since 2016 and serving as the reviewer of the PESA journal of Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT) since 2017. Okabe, M. (2020). Knowledge of Pathos about Infants. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Vol. 53, No.12, pp. 1204–1205 (https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1772028).