The roads to disaster, or rewriting history from the margins—Yū Miri’s JR Ueno Station Park Exit

ABSTRACT

In Ruth Ozeki’s words, 3.11/Fukushima represents a “rift in time”, which not only split an imagined temporal continuum into before and after, but makes the before appear in a different light. In the present article, Yū Miri’s JR Ueno-eki kōenguchi is read as a literary response to, and expression of, this perceptual shift. Yū’s focus on an exploited migrant worker from rural Fukushima who spends his last years as a homeless in the capital chimes in with the post-3.11 discourse about the subordinate position of Northern Japan within the Japanese nation-state. The novel can thus be interpreted as a palimpsestic corrective; a critical rewriting of Japan’s post-war history from the viewpoint of those whose existence has been marginalized, if not completely erased from collective memory. To illustrate this point, the analysis focuses on Yū’s deconstruction of the myth surrounding the 1964 Tokyo Olympics (an implicit criticism of the upcoming post-nuclear 2020 Olympics), as well as her provocative juxtaposition of a homeless and the Japanese imperial family. It is argued that by problematizing historical memory and forgetting, discursive visibility and invisibility, Yū not only intertwines various narrative threads, but also manages to re-connect the before and after the disaster in a new, critical way.

KEYWORDS:

• Fukushima/3.11
• Yū Miri
• JR Ueno-eki kōenguchi (JR Ueno Station Park Exit)
• palimpsest
• historical (un)representation
• Tokyo Olympics

Notes

¹ I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my manuscript and their constructive suggestions. Special thanks also go to Iida Yūko for her insightful comments on an early version of this paper.

² For an in-depth discussion of the pre- and post-3/11 academic debates on the marginalized position of Tōhoku within the Japanese nation state, see Hopson (2017); for a concise overview see Hopson (2013).

³ Needless to say, more rightwing positions supporting nuclear power and dismissing public demonstrations were also readily available in magazines, as well as in book form. In particular marching mothers – a driving force of the protests – were often belittled as unscientific, unsophisticated, and above all hysterical. To give just one extreme example, Ipponmatsu Mikio unleashes a stream of lampoons and slanders directed not only at “hysteric” women, but equally at zainichi Koreans, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, critical scientists, etc. (Ipponmatsu, 2012).

⁴ All translations are my own. Note that an English translation of JR Ueno Station Park Exit (titled Tokyo Ueno Station) by Giles Morgan is forthcoming from Tilted Axis Press.

⁵ The interviews were made available through the station’s website for several years; however at the time of writing many of the links were no longer active (Minamisōma Hibari FM 87.0 MHz, n.d.).

⁶ As most of this slandering occurred online, it is difficult to cite permanent sources. At the time of writing, Chimimōryō Otoko’s blog entry – uploaded roughly two weeks before the opening of Yū’s bookstore – was representative of the less openly xenophobic, generally less offensive type of criticism (Chimimōryō, 2018).

⁷ In fact, in some instances the narrator is also addressed by his last name, Mori. This is, however, not only a very common name but, due to its meaning “forest”, could possibly be seen as symbolizing the nature that northern Japan is often associated with.

⁸ So does Yū Miri’s family history, and, for that matter, her literature. Hachigatsu no hate (Ends of August, Yū, 2004) foregrounds the political character of the Games by making reference to Son Ki-jŏng (1912–2002), a Korean marathon runner who, under the name of Son Kitei, won the Japanese Empire its first Olympic gold medal in the 1936 Games at Berlin. In addition, the novel’s protagonist – who is closely modeled after the author’s maternal grandfather – was scheduled to run for Japan in the cancelled 1940 Tokyo Olympics.

⁹ The electrification of the Jōban Line the narrator used was not completed until the late 1960s, and after the opening of the Tōkaidō Shinkansen Line in 1964 it roughly took another 20 years before the Shinkansen network was extended to northern Japan. The Jōban Line runs through the no-entry zone around Fukushima Daiichi and is for this reason currently interrupted; however, the northern and southern lines are scheduled to be reconnected shortly before the Opening of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. Trains, that is, play a highly symbolic role in Ueno Park Exit, but due to space constraints this aspect of the novel cannot be explored in any depth here. On the importance of train transportation in twentieth century modern literature see Freedman (2010).

¹⁰ In Yū’s autobiographic novel Mizube no yurikago (Cradle by the Sea, Yū, 1997), too, tennis is explicitly associated with the imperial couple, and perceived of as a possible gateway to upward mobility by Miri’s mother. Coming from an educationally and socio-economically disadvantaged background, the availability of tennis lessons is one of the reasons for her to enroll her daughter in one of Yokohama’s most elite private schools (Yū, 1997, p. 85).

¹¹ Curiously, there are a number of post-3.11 literary texts, such as Itō Seikō’s Sōzō rajio (Imagination Radio, Itō, 2013) and Ayase Maru’s Yagate umi e to todoku (Eventually Reaching the Sea, Ayase, 2016) written from the perspective of the dead. However, unlike Ueno Park Exit’s protagonist, most of these narrators drowned in the tsunami, and are initially not aware of their fate (Kimura, 2018). These “voices of the dead” generally belong to highly individualized characters that were leading normal, mainstream lives. However, whereas these literary tsunami victims struggle with understanding and accepting their own sudden death, Ueno Park Exit’s narrator needs to come to terms with a long life full of injustice and hardships. Therefore, while narrative mode may be similar, Yū’s narrative focus is clearly different from that of Itō, or Ayase.

¹² Due to the fact that the Japanese language does not require an explicit grammatical subject in every sentence, the difference between first-person narration and omniscient mode is not as clear as in English, which makes it seem fair to regard the passages written in omniscient mode as an integral part of his account.

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Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt

Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt is an associate professor of Japanese modern literature at Nagoya University, Japan. She received her PhD from Trier University (Germany) for a thesis on performative constructions of gender and ethnicity in the literature of zainichi Korean writer Yū Miri. Before coming to Nagoya, Kristina spent six years at the German Institute for Japanese Tokyo (DIJ) as senior research fellow. She has widely published on zainichi Korean minority literature, precarity culture, and literary representations of the 3.11 nuclear disaster. Recent publications include Visions of Precarity in Japanese Popular Culture and Literature (Routledge 2015, with Roman Rosenbaum), and Fukushima and the Arts—Negotiating Nuclear Disaster (Routledge 2017, with Barbara Geilhorn).