Japan is a country marked in its history by a long series of natural disasters. Before the arrival of photography in the archipelago at the beginning of the second half of the 1868th century, paintings and prints were able to illustrate some calamitous highlights. But in reality, until the XNUMXth century, Japanese illustrations of disasters were quite rare. Indeed, the censorship during the military reign of the shoguns (until XNUMX) was important. It prohibited any commentary on the news. The painted scenes were therefore never illustrations of specific disasters, but could sometimes represent an "imagery" of the disaster: fires, storms, earthquakes... presented in Buddhism as divine punishments.

It was mainly the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923 that gave painters, engravers and photographers the opportunity to present for the first time scenes of a very real disaster, and no longer imagined from the angle of morality. religious.
On September 1, 1923, Japan experienced one of the deadliest and most destructive natural disasters in its history. The devastating combination of an earthquake, followed by a tsunami and fires spread by strong winds from a typhoon, ravaged for two days and three nights the eastern half of the Japanese capital, as well as the neighboring city of Yokohama, killing more than 120.

In order to illustrate this catastrophe, photography was used, among other things. The pictures were mainly the work of photographers working for newspapers, but they also served to develop a surprising trade in postcards of the disaster. These black and white images oscillate between a purely commercial status and that of testimony for posterity. A sometimes biased testimony since at that time, many postcards printed from photographs were retouched by hand (on negative), often with the aim of adding or accentuating a dramatic element. Some examples of postcards are currently kept at the Great Kanto Earthquake Memorial Museum located in Tokyo.¹. In particular, we can see an enlargement of the black and white print of a photograph showing the state of the site of the former Honjo military clothing depot, located on the site of the current Yokoamichô park, on 1^er September 1923, a few hours after the earthquake.

Families of refugee survivors at the Honjo site on September 1, 1923, a few hours after the earthquake.©東京都復興記念館, Tokyo fukko kinen-kan

We see families piled up against each other as far as the eye can see, with all the personal belongings they have been able to gather. People had indeed chosen to gather on this vast open ground of approximately 67 square meters, since it protected them from the risks of landslides and collapses of buildings. But the sense of security was short-lived. Around four o'clock in the afternoon on September 000, several fires following the earthquake and amplified by very strong winds converged on this square, trapping the tens of thousands of people who had taken refuge there. In a single night, around 1 people (38% of the refugees) perished in the flames.
When this photograph was taken, the fires had not yet broken out. Gold in the background of the scene, huge gray clouds of smoke have been added by hand using paint. We therefore understand logically that the retouched staging that we have in front of us was carried out largely after the shooting, by a person who had knowledge of the tragic events that took place later on this same place. . This person probably felt that the prints would sell better if the dramatic moment foreshadowing the horrific death of the people in the image was highlighted by a smoke screen…
Most of these photographic postcards were intended for the island market, but foreigners also took an interest in this tragedy, as evidenced by other cards, whose titles at the bottom of the image are inscribed in both Japanese and English. (in a translation however very approximate and most often grammatically incorrect).

What most shocks the current viewer of these old photos, however, are the very raw contents of these first public photographs of the disaster, which do not hesitate to depict corpses and human remains (stacked bodies, gigantic heaps ashes and bleached bones from cremations, etc.). This “direct” – unfiltered – imagery of horror and mass grave aimed at commercial sensationalism is totally absent from the post-disaster photography of March 11, 2011, even in its documentary or journalistic leanings.
Let's now see how photographers of the 2011st century have apprehended the terrible disaster of XNUMX, and what message(s) they want to convey through their works.

There are several ways to "represent" a disaster, which can generally be divided into two large groups: the documentary approach and the symbolic one. The first is to record the situation at the time of the disaster or its consequences later in time. But whoever says "documentary" does not necessarily mean pure "objectivity". Because if it is indeed a question of bearing witness to a situation for posterity, the memorial dimension, and therefore personal, can be primordial.

In 2011, the photographer Naoya Hatakeyama (畠山直哉), usually working on the transformation of landscapes under human influence, achieved his most personal work, immortalizing the remains of his hometown Rikuzentakata, devastated by the tsunami. These photographs have been published in two collections, Kesengawa appeared in 2012 ² et Rikuzentakata 2011-2014 appeared in 2015 ³. In the first publication, which reports on the Rikuzentakata plain just after the tsunami, Naoya Hatakeyama immortalizes the mountains of waste torn by the wave, then washed up on the coast. The disaster is embodied in these devastated landscapes, emptied of all life, with the exception of a few rare silhouettes of walkers or construction workers. No body or corpses in the image, except for a small dog with a pink collar resting, solitary, among the waste. The second publication, later, focuses on the evolution of post-disaster reconstruction between 2011 and 2014. The photographer testifies month after month, year after year, to the metamorphosis of the landscape of Rikuzentakata, moving from the chaos of debris in the void left by the bulldozers.

In the article Rikuzentakata. Biographical landscape accompanying his 2015 publication, the photographer evokes his impressions, his feelings and above all his infinite sadness. Because the artist has not only lost the place of his childhood or his family home, his mother has also been swept away by the wave. Hatakeyama questions the relevance of taking photographs of devastated landscapes. Those of Rikuzentakata from before the disaster no longer exist. With the destruction of the coast by the wave, follows the destruction of the wooded mountains by the bulldozers initiating the reconstruction of the region. Because there is no plateau in Rikuzentakata, only mountains, which now have to be "decapitated" to create flat surfaces on which to build the new, higher houses. But his own role is that of witness: witness to his city's past and witness to its present. Thus, in the book Kesengawa, Naoya Hatakeyama added to the poignant images of chaos, other shots taken several years earlier, between 2002 and 2010, when the city was still teeming with life. Through his photos and his memories, the photographer tries to redo a three-dimensional map of his hometown which is nothing more than a totally flat devastated field, without buildings, mountains and trees...

Far from any sentimentalist discourse, Naoya Hatakeyama shows the disorder of materials thrown, piled up, twisted by the force of a nature that nothing can resist. In this intimate and universal “memorial documentary”, destruction is not shown as the opposite of beauty. It is a step towards a renewal. This term “renewal” is important. One of his Japanese translations, yonaoshi (世直し), was used extensively in various post-disaster contexts of the past, calling for a rebirth from the chaos that wiped out the slate of the past. The text that accompanies the images of Rikuzentakata 2011-2014 is taken from Naoya Hatakeyama's own logbook, written during his journey through stricken Tohoku immediately after the disaster. The photographer talks about his fascination with these "unprecedented" images (未曾有, mizo), which are both aesthetic and documentary photographic evidence of a memory destroyed by the wave.

Other photographers immediately on the scene after the disaster include Keizo Kitajima (北島敬三)⁴  or even Kozo Miyoshi (三好耕三)⁵. Keizô Kitajima, famous in particular as co-founder with Daido Moriyama in 1979 of the CAMP gallery (first independent photography gallery in Tokyo), began in April 2011 his first post-disaster color photos, which are soberly titled the exact date and the place (city and prefecture) of the photograph, exactly like those of Hatakeyama or Miyoshi. As if no title could correspond to the shocking images of the period immediately following the disaster, so great is the amazement. Keizô Kitajima's photographs document the state of devastation in the region. But they also reveal to us a kind of "aesthetics of ruin", where the debris are like the colored strokes of a paintbrush on a canvas. Like those of Naoya Hatakeyama, Kitajima's color images are breathtaking in construction (formal) within deconstruction (field of ruins).

Kōzō Miyoshi said he wondered whether or not he should take pictures of the area after the tsunami hit.⁶. The question seems to have been posed to many artists who did not know if disaster photography could rhyme with ethics. As soon as the roads reopened, Miyoshi headed north, not really knowing what he would do there. The project for his black and white series was formed during a trip to Tohoku. In the 1980s, he had already photographed this region; in 2011, he immortalized these same places where everything had changed, covered with debris left by the wave.

Documentary photography took off in the 1950s in Japan, bearing witness to the harsh social reality and miseries of the post-war period. This documentary trend made a remarkable comeback on the Japanese art scene after the tragedy of 2011.
Documenting humanity in the face of catastrophe is one of the favorite subjects of photojournalist Yuki Iwanami (岩波友紀) ⁷, whose topicality is marked by the Irie Taikichi Memorial Museum of Photography Prize won in 2021 for his series Threads in the dark. This series, devoted to the difficult and slow return to normality of the disaster-stricken inhabitants of Tohoku ⁸, shows the links forged between the populations and their local festivals, which together resisted the tremors and the wave. The series testifies to the devastation, human and material, suffered by these weakened populations, but also to the resilience of the ceremonies and folk dances, moral and psychological support of the inhabitants.
The many photographs of Threads in the dark presenting dancers in uniform with their masks, demonstrate the importance of this Japanese intangible cultural heritage in danger of disappearing following the 2011 disaster. Indeed, in certain towns or villages, the wave had taken everything away: costumes, dancers and knowledge - do ancestral. However, the Tohoku region is particularly rich in folk heritage. For example, dance shishi odori (the deer dance) finds its roots in this mountainous and wooded region, which abounds in game. It has played an even more essential role since the disaster, since the shishi odori is practiced in particular in homage to the deceased.
In one of the photos in the series, we can see, on a black background, a broken dancer's mask. Found in the debris after the passage of the wave, this mask looks at us with the only eye it has left.

The 2011 disaster was one of the most photographed in our history, partly because it took place at a time when photographic and video technology allowed it. And on the other hand, for its extraordinary character: the meeting of the double natural disaster (earthquake and tsunami) with the nuclear disaster of the Fukushima power station. The large wave that engulfed the east coast of the main island Honshu shortly after 15 p.m. (Tokyo time) also submerged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, knocking out the plant's main cooling system, causing the partial melting of cores of four reactors. Significant radioactive releases into the air took place from March 12 to 15, contaminating the surrounding regions, not to mention the release of contaminated water into the ocean. In fact, this plant – built 10 meters above sea level – was only designed to cope with tsunami waves of 3 meters. This calculation was based on the height of the waves of the tsunami coming from Chile which had hit Japan in 1960. However, the waves of 2011 reached up to 35 meters in height... On October 12, 2012, the Japanese electricity company Tepco which operates the Fukushima power plant, admitted for the first time that it had deliberately minimized the tsunami risk, lest a shutdown be demanded to improve safety. Unlike the earthquake and the tsunami, which are terrible but natural disasters, the Fukushima disaster is indeed human.

Takahiro Yamashita (山下隆博) is a photographer who has produced several series on the triple disaster of March 11, including one, started in 2011 and still in progress, entitled Remember not to forget. As its title indicates, it is important to Takahiro Yamashita not to forget the disaster, and to continue to bear witness to the situation of people living in the disaster areas, particularly in Fukushima prefecture. Because his native village is in an area close to a nuclear power plant, the photographer was particularly aware of the Fukushima disaster. In a recent comment regarding the latest photos (2020-2021) of Remember nor to forget, he says he still feels guilty, 10 years later, to feel “lucky” that such a disaster did not occur at home ⁹.

At the origin of this series, a few days after the disaster in 2011, there is the discovery on the Internet that the victims were no longer supplied with food and various products, because the truck drivers were afraid of exposing themselves to radiation. driving around the Fukushima power plant. Feeling the need to do something for these people, Takahiro Yamashita jumped on a train to Iwaki, one of the still accessible towns in Fukushima prefecture. There, he discovered the same images of desolation as on television: people digging through the rubble, military self-defense forces looking for bodies, and endless queues at gas stations. Collecting testimonies from survivors while helping the locals as best he could, Takahiro Yamashita noted the anguish for the future of these people outrageously left behind by Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company); its CEO even went on sick leave from March 13 to April 7, 2011! But he also says he realized over the time spent among these people, that the television and press images showing only the inhabitants of Fukushima as victims of the tsunami and the atom were biased. The reality is friendly, frank and courageous people, in a region rich in local traditions and sublime landscapes, and that it is not enough to go for a walk there for a few weeks to take some photos, to understand why these people chose to stay there regardless.

Humbly, Takahiro Yamashita has therefore testified for 10 years to the evolution of the situation in the vicinity of the power plant, but also to the popular anti-nuclear actions carried out in the streets of Tokyo since 2011. His last photographs are an alternation of shots taken at Tokyo (Shibuya, Shinjuku and Ginza) of these “anti-nuke” demonstrations, and in the Hamadôri part of Fukushima, where one still sees a few (normally) temporary habitats and bags of contaminated earth, among peaceful landscapes of greenery and beach.

Many mutual aid actions took place in Tohoku in the aftermath of the disaster. Some aimed to help locals recover their memories of before March 11, 2011, such as the various workshops for recovering, cleaning and restoring personal photos drowned by the wave that have emerged in different cities. Miraculously, some houses were only partially affected by the tsunami. The house is still standing, but the whole interior has been in murky water for varying periods of time. Several large groups of photographic equipment then launched workshops and tutorials so that the victims could at least save this family heritage, this intimate memory of the disappeared city. As of March 24, 2011, the company Fuji Film thus presented on its website a tutorial for washing soiled photographs. It also launched an advertising campaign in the affected region explaining the process. From mid-April to mid-June, 30 employees also traveled to Tohoku to teach the restoration of photographs to volunteers who could then take over from the professionals. Faced with the magnitude of the task and the long period required to process the thousands of photographs torn from the mud, new Tokyo volunteers were trained. From August 2011, the photographs were sent to the 3331 Arts Chiyoda Center¹⁰ to Tokyo for treatment, before being returned to their owners, when possible. The rescue of these images may not be a creation strictly speaking, but the necessary intervention on these photographs has transformed them into "symbols" of an intimate, family and cultural heritage that fell victim to the disaster.

Photographer Lieko Shiga (志賀理江子)¹¹, herself a resident of Kitakama village (Miyagi prefecture) badly affected by the tsunami, was also interested in these "found photos", now without owners, rejected soiled by the wave. His studio was near Kitakama Beach. Settled here since 2008, she had become the community's photographer, documenting village life, from baseball games to local festivals, to portraits of everyone she knew personally. Lieko Shiga narrowly escaped the tsunami: she fled by car as the wave sped towards the land. Four days later, she found that her studio and home were gone, along with 60 of Kitakama's 370 residents. Thinking it was her responsibility as the village photographer to record what was happening there, she borrowed a camera and began documenting Kitakama's post-disaster state. Having herself lost all her belongings, Lieko Shiga actively participated in cleaning up the photos found in the mud. She “saved” many of the negatives, which she set up to dry on a huge wall in the city's assembly hall, thus forming a kind of monument of remembrance.

Most of Lieko Shiga's professional photographs taken before March 11, 2011 were also washed away, but a few stored elsewhere survived. The photographer saw it as a sign of fate and decided to mix these few older shots with the new ones taken after the disaster. This is how a first series was born, Rasen Kaigan (spiral coastline), of which the disaster is not really the object. Her subject matter focuses on the community of Kitakama, the town itself, and how the tsunami impacted her own body, resulting in the visualization of movement during the shot. Rasen Kaigan was exhibited in 2012 at the Sendai media library (Miyagi prefecture): the color photographs (of residents, beaches, stones, etc.) were presented in a large dark room, printed in large format and displayed on vertical supports like tombstones. The works were arranged in a concentric “spiral” movement meant to recall the circle dances practiced during the annual Obon Buddhist festival, dedicated to the deceased.

In 2019, Lieko Shiga exhibited at the Tokyo Photographic Art museum a new series entitled HumanSpring (2018-2019) which is intended as a sequel to Rasen Kaigan, in the sense that the photographer remains focused on the theme of life in Kitakama and Japan after 2011. The atmosphere of HumanSpring is very heavy since it evokes the impossible "return to life" of certain residents of Kitakama. In 2012, Lieko Shiga witnessed several suicides among her neighbours, including farmers who could no longer cultivate in too salinized soil after the tsunami. The following year, she lost another neighbor to cancer, anchoring the idea of ​​the fragility of all existence ¹². HumanSpring plays on disconcerting, disturbing images, in their colors, their breaks or their subjects, but always in a symbolic way, evoking the ghost more than death.

In two different ways, Naoya Hatakeyama and Lieko Shiga – both personally and intimately affected by the tsunami – make visible the feelings of loss and mourning by showing the remains of the disaster. Because the wave allows it, leaving behind carcasses, waste and desolation. But on the other hand, how to show the invisible threat of radioactivity which leaves no trace detectable with the naked eye?...

The Fukushima accident is unfortunately not the first Japanese atomic disaster, Japan being the only country in the world to have experienced several nuclear disasters on its soil. Some photographers like Ishu Han (潘逸舟), Takashi Arai (新井卓) or Tomoko Yoneda (米田知子) were thus able to work on "nuclear imagery" both from the bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki in 1945, or even from the irradiation of the Japanese tuna ship Daigo Fukuryû Maru in Bikini Atoll in 1954, and of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in 2011. Other photographers have focused on the question of the representation of radioactivity in the evacuated area around the Fukushima power plant: how to photograph this invisible evil?

To Takashi Homma (ホンマタカシ), the solution is found in mushrooms. Allegory of the atomic cloud photographed after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the shape of the mushroom has become a symbol of nuclear power. But the mushrooms photographed in close-up on a white background by Takashi Homma in the series Mushrooms from the Forest (2011) are not just a symbol. They all come from forests around the plant: Takashi Homma has collected more than 100 specimens of different varieties. Tested radioactive, they were banned for consumption. Yet irradiated, they continue to grow peacefully in their natural environment, their lethal danger invisible to the naked eye. These photographs are grouped together in the book Mushrooms from the Forest of 2019 ¹³

To Masato Seto (瀬戸正人), the opportunity to enter the Fukushima Daiichi plant arose in February 2012, when a French press agency asked him to accompany the delegation of the French Minister of the Environment to photograph the 'event. Protected in overalls and under masks, the group was able to see the extent of the damage caused by the explosions and the wave. But under a beautiful cloudless blue sky, with the peaceful ocean as far as the eye could see, it was hard to imagine the latent danger of the place. Masato Seto says he tried to capture in his lens the cesium he knew would attack everything there. But his black and white images of the plant and the surrounding landscapes only show us a ghostly universe where the most frightening elements are in fact the suits of the visitors. These photographs were collected in his 2013 publication titled Cesium-137Cs- ¹⁴.

Shimpei Takeda (武田 慎平) was in New York on March 11, 2011, but was greatly affected by the images of the disaster unfolding at the plant, since he is from Fukushima. Unaware of the ins and outs of radioactivity before the disaster, he later realized that photographic negatives and papers were sensitive to radiation as well as natural light. In silver processes, the silver halide darkens when exposed to electromagnetic radiation. After various experiments carried out from May 2011, he became interested in the “autoradiography” of contaminated soils. In December 2011 and January 2012, Shimpei Takeda thus collected 16 soil samples in 5 different prefectures, in 12 places all having a historical link with death: temples, shrines, former war sites, ruins of castles, etc. He then deposited a sample on a photosensitive film (with halide gelatin) for a month. Radiation emitted by radioactive material in the dust from the ground impacted the negative, producing a physical record of the disaster¹⁵.

Since 2011, the photographer Yoi Kawakubo (川久保ジョイ) ¹⁶ started the series The New Clear Age, consisting of color photographs of views of various Japanese nuclear power plants, including Fukushima Daiichi. In addition to these luminous photos of places and landscapes linked to nuclear power, there is another series produced between 2013 and 2016, entitled If the Radiance of a Thousand Suns were to Burst at once into the Sky. This title is taken from a quote from the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), scientific director of the Manhattan Project, nicknamed the “father of the atomic bomb”: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the skies, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...This quote comes from the Bhagavad-Gita, the heart of the epic poem Mahabharata, one of the sacred texts of Hinduism. One of the avatars of the god Vishnu proclaims that he "has become death, the destroyer of the worlds", as Oppenheimer saw himself. ¹⁷.

For this series, Yoi Kawakubo traveled to Fukushima Prefecture. Like Shimpei Takeda, he uses photographic film coated with halide gelatin to capture the action of radiation. But he uses color films and buries them directly in the evacuation zone around the power plant (films buried between 2013 and 2016). He removes them after several months, then prints them on a very large format (prints made until 2019 for this series). Radioactivity generates dangerously seductive images here: it is difficult to see the dark side of nuclear power in these photos with their soft colored tones.

Many other photographers have testified in their own way to the terrible disaster of March 11, 2011, and continue to do so today. Because photography is by definition the recording of a reality, both personal and universal, it is perhaps for this reason the medium best able to bear witness to the impermanence and fragility of all things in a context. post-disaster...

Charlene VEILLON

1. Site of the Great Kanto Earthquake Memorial Museum: https://tokyoireikyoukai.or.jp/ireidou/history.html(Japanese only)
2. Hatakeyana Naoya, Kesengawa /Kesen River, 河出書房新社, 2012. Light Motiv Editions, 2013, for the French/English version.
3. Hatakeyama Naoya, Rikuzentakata 2011-2014 /陸前高田 2011-2014, 河出書房新社, 2015. Light Motiv Editions, 2016, for the French/English version.
4. Keizo Kitajima website: https://keizokitajima.com/about/
5. Kôzô Miyoshi website: https://8x10.jp/
6. In the Wake. Japanese Photographers respond to 3/11, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2015, p. 27.
7. Yuki Iwanami website: https://www.yukiiwanami.com/
8. The SUGOI POD "March 11, 2011 - March 11, 2022: Photographs of life after the disaster by Yuki Iwanami" of March 2022 is dedicated to this photographer: click here
9. Takahiro Yamashita website: http://takahiro-yamashita.co.uk/
10. 3331 Chiyoda Arts Center website: https://www.3331.jp/en/
11. Lieko Shiga website: https://www.liekoshiga.com/
12. Amanda Maddox, "A Japanese Photographer's Encounters with Natural Disasters", Aperture, 2019: https://aperture.org/editorial/lieko-shiga-amanda-maddox/
13. Man Takashi, Symphony - mushrooms from the forest , Case Publishing, 2019.
14. Seto Masato, Cesium -137Cs-, Square M, 2013.
15. Shimpei Takeda website: http://www.shimpeitakeda.com/
16. Kawakubo Yoi website: https://www.yoikawakubo.com/
17. Video of Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad-Gita: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqZqfTOxFhY