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Natural Disaster, Trauma and Activism in the Art of Takamine Tadasu
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
Takamine Tadasu's Fukushima Esperanto (2012) is an immersive project that responds to the unfolding tragedies of the March 2011 Tōhoku disaster. Connecting the experiences of Tōhoku with the devastating floods experienced across Queensland, Australia in the same year, Fukushima Esperanto invites reflection on trauma by a transnational audience. The artist's assemblage of obsolete technologies and objects of childhood play expresses Takamine's opposition to, and Japan's conflicted relationship with, nuclear energy.
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1 Takamine Tadasu, Kaoru Hashiguchi and Mizuki Takahashi (eds.), Tadasu Takamine's Cool Japan, Tokyo, Art Tower Mito, 2012, p. 20.
2 On Dumb Type, see “Dumb Type Biography”. Retrieved on 18 February 2014, from http;//dumbtype.com/biography. See also Peter Eckersall, “1990s Performances of Dumb Type: Towards a New Humanity”, in Theorizing the Angura Space: Avant-Garde Performance and Politics in Japan, 1960-2000, Boston, Brill, 2006, pp. 143-157.
3 Brisbane has hosted The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) Since 1993, first at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) and then jointly at QAG and GoMA. Considered one of the region's most respected and influential visual arts exhibitions, the Triennial has presented works by leading artists from across Asia, the Pacific, and Australia.
4 “APT7 Art and personal Memory: artist talk and discussion”, 8 December 2012. Retrieved on 12 February 2014. A brief video of Fukushima Esperanto can be seen on Vimeo. Retrieved on 7 August 2014 from http://vimeo.com/63897155
5 Jeffrey Alexander, ed. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
6 Sabine Sielke, “Why ‘9/11 Is [Not] Unique’, Or: Troping Trauma.” American Studies, vol. 55 (3), 2010, p. 390
7 Sielke, “Why ‘9/11 Is [Not] Unique’, Or: Troping Trauma.” p. 405
8 Sielke, “Why ‘9/11 Is [Not] Unique’, Or: Troping Trauma.” p. 386
9 Emily Brady and Arto Haapala, “Melancholy as an aesthetic emotion”, Contemporary aesthetics. Retrieved 16 October 2014.
10 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Mourning or melancholia: Christian Boltanski's ‘Missing house’”, Oxford Art Journal, 21 (2) 1998, p.19. For Freud's definition see: Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and melancholia”, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, London, The Hogarth Press, edited and translated by James Strachey, vol 14, 1957 [1912], p. 249. For further discussions on melancholia see Vera Mackie, ‘Doris Salcedo's Melancholy Objects’, Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, Volume 5, No 1, January 2008. Retrieved on 22 November 2014.
11 Solomon-Godeau, “Mourning or melancholia: Christian Boltanski's ‘Missing house‘”, p. 8
12 Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker, “Emotional Reconciliation: Reconstituting Identity and Community after Trauma”, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 11, no. 3, 2008, p. 385.
13 Susanne Babbel, “The Trauma That Arises from Natural Disasters”, Psychology Today, 21 April 2010. Retrieved 30 November 2013.
14 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 2.
15 Bennett, Empathic Vision, pp. 5-6.
16 Charles J. Stivale (ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005, p. 136.
17 Andrew Maerkle, “Interview: Takamine Tadasu: From the Mouth or in the Mouth but not of the Mouth - Words and Objects”. Art iT Asia, 2011. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
18 Carl G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 21.
19 On electricity-saving practices (setsuden) after the disaster, see also Stevens' essay in this issue.
20 See Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, London, Vintage, 1991 [originally published in 1942].
21 Allan Kaprow, Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai and Jean-Jacque Lebel, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings, New York, H. N. Abrams, 1966, p. 162.
22 Amano Taro, “A Provocative Artist”, in Too Far to See, exhibition catalogue, Birmingham, Ikon Gallery, 2011, p. 152.
23 Kaprow et. al., Assemblages, p. 163.
24 Emma Hutchison, “A Global Politics of Pity: Disaster Imagery and the Emotional Construction of Solidarity after the 2004 Asian Tsunami”, International Political Sociology, vol. 8, no. 1, 2014, pp. 3-4.
25 Interview with Reuben Keehan, Curator APT7, QAGOMA, 5 July 2013.
26 Esperantic Studies Association. Retrieved on 20 November 2013.
27 Roger Pulvers, “Miyazawa Kenji's Prophetic Green Vision: Japan's Great Writer/Poet on the 80thAnniversary of His Death”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 11, iss. 44, no. 2, 4 November 2013. Retrieved on 31 March 2014; Gotelind Muller, Hasegawa Teru alias Verda Majo (1912-1947): A Japanese Esperantist in the Chinese Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, Heidelberg, University of Heidelberg, 2013, translation of Gotelind Müller: “Hasegawa Teru alias Verda Majo (1912-1947). Eine japanische Esperantistin im chinesischen anti-japanischen Widerstand”, in Denise Gimpel and Melanie Hanz (eds.) Cheng: All in Sincerity. Festschrift in Honour of Monika Übelhör, Hamburg, 2001, pp. 259-274. Translated by Gotelind Müller and Subei Wu; “Oomoto”. Retrieved on 20 March 2014.
28 “APT7 Art and personal Memory: Artist talk and discussion”, 8 December 2012. Retrieved on 12 February 2014.
29 Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Lying on the Postcolonial Couch: The Idea of Indifference, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. 103.
30 “APT7 Art and personal Memory: artist talk and discussion”.
31 Maerkle, Interview: Takamine Tadasu.
32 Japan Foundation (ed.) Rapt! 20 Contemporary Artists from Japan: Screening Program, Sydney, Japan Foundation, 2006, n.p.
33 On the “forgetting” of the experience of resident Koreans in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999.
34 Dwight D. Eisenhower “Atoms for Peace Speech”, 1953, International Atomic Energy Agency. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
35 Ran Zwigenberg, “‘The Coming of a Second Sun’: The 1956 Atoms for Peace Exhibit in Hiroshima and Japan's Embrace of Nuclear Power”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 10, iss. 6, no. 1, 2012. Retrieved on 30 March 2014.
36 Morris Low, Shigeru Nakayama, and Hitoshi Yoshioka, Science, Technology and Society in Contemporary Japan, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 71.
37 World Nuclear Association, “Australia's Uranium”, 2014. Retrieved on 30 January 2014, from http://world.nuclear.org. In 2008, Japan was Australia's third biggest buyer of uranium and purchased 2,446 tonnes. See also Mackie's essay in this issue.
38 Zwigenberg, “The Coming of a Second Sun”.
39 Asato Ikeda, “On Uranium Art: Artist Ken + Julia Yonetani in Conversation with Asato Ikeda,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 11, iss. 11, no. 1, 18 March 2013. Chim↑Pom and Linda Hoaglund, “The Suddenly Relevant Activist Antics of Artist Collective Chim↑Pom: Challenging Japan's Nuclear Power Agenda”, TheAsia-Pacific Journal, vol. 10, iss. 30, no. 3, 23 July 2012. Adam Broinowski, “Fukushima: Life and the Transnationality of Radioactive Contamination,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 11, iss. 41, no. 3, 14 October 2013. For earlier considerations of artistic genres and the nuclear issue, see Ken Ruthven, Nuclear Criticism, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1993; John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995; Mick Broderick (ed.) Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film, Kegan Paul International, London, 1996.
40 Takamine Tadasu, Kaoru Hashiguchi and Mizuki Takahashi (eds.), Tadasu Takamine's Cool Japan, Tokyo, Art Tower Mito, 2012, p. 20
41 Takamine et. al, Cool Japan, p. 59.