I gratefully acknowledge the opportunity to present this essay in its various stages at the following conferences: Elizabethtown College's “Between Cool and 3:11: Implications for Teaching Japan Today,” in spring 2013, organized by Mahua Bhattacharya; and UC Berkeley's “Reframing 3.11: Cinema, Literature, and Media After Fukushima,” in April 2014, organized by Dan O’Neill. My thanks go to Suzanne Keen of Washington & Lee University for first recommending Ngai's book to me. I could not do without the invaluable feedback of Suzuki Ichiro. My thanks go also to Eriko Honda of MindCreators LLC for access to Shiriagari's work from Magnitude Zero and to Asahi Shimbun for providing a Defenders manga not included in Manga Ever Since. Above all, I express my gratitude to Iwai Yoshinori and Shiriagari Kotobuki himself for generously allowing use of the artwork herein.

¹ The translation here is my own, as are any errors. It is excerpted from the concluding 2009 essay to Zonzaina sonzai [Our Sloppy Existence], Tokyo: Enterbrain, 2010.

² Shiriagari received the shijuhōshō in May 2014. Most of the story manga in this August 2011 collection first appeared in Enterbrain's Comic Beam in April 12, 2011. Shiriagari Kotobuki, Ano hi kara no manga 「あの日からのまんが: 2011. 03. 11 J [Manga Ever Since: 2011.03.11] Tokyo: Enterbrain, 2011. Shiriagari Kotobuki's official website can be found here, where visitors can also see the squiggly short animations that he calls “yurumations” (literally, “shaky animations”].

³ Jaqueline Berndt also notes that with Shiriagari's work, and following its reception for the Defenders strips that appeared as early as March 14, 2011 in the Asahi Shimbun, Comic Beam was the first manga serial to take up 3.11 as subject matter (72].

⁴ In May 2011, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry officially adopted a policy of “Cool Japan” to promote overseas its contents industry (see here], Kukhee Choo has written persuasively and informatively on industry and governmental policy shifts in this direction since the 2004 Contents Industry Promotion Law: “Nationalizing ‘Cool’: Japan's Government Global Policy toward the Content Industry,” in Popular Culture and the State in East and Southeast Asia. Eds. Nissim Otmazgin and Eyal Ben-Ari. Guilford Press/Routledge, 2012. 85-105.

⁵ We might compare this kind of imagination to Susan Sontag's “imagination of disaster” in her essay of the same name (38-53], collected in the same volume with Freda Freiberg, “Akira and the Postnuclear Sublime,” Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. Ed. Mick Broderick. New York: Kegan Paul International, 1996. pp. 91-102. Near the end of her essay, Sontag writes: The [fantasy in science fiction] films reflect world-wide anxieties, and they serve to allay them. They inculcate a strange apathy concerning the processes of radiation, contamination, and destruction which I for one find haunting and depressing. The naïve level of the films neatly tempers the sense of otherness, of alienness, with the grossly familiar. In particular, the dialogue of most science fiction films, which is of a monumental but touching banality, makes them wonderfully, unintentionally funny. Lines like ‘Come quickly, there's a monster in my bathtub,’ ‘We must do something about this,’ ‘Wait, Professor, there's someone on the telephone,’ ‘But that's incredible,’ and the old American standby, ‘I hope it works!’ are hilarious in the context of picturesque and deafening holocaust Sontag here stresses both the “uplifting” as well as “normalizing” functions of science fiction fantasy but I am most interested in rethinking this “negative imagination” (48] as part and parcel of an affective atmosphere of the everyday, replete with “banality” and absurdity, characteristic of Shiriagari's work.

⁶ “Cool Japan” is both exploited and resisted by some artists. I would include in this number Aida Makoto, Takamine Tadasu, and Satoshi Kon. Aida Makoto in his controversial 2012-13 retrospective at the Mori Art Museum (“Monument to Nothing: Sorry to be a Genius”] questioned terrorism and the nature of Japan's popular culture internationalization; Takamine Tadasu's 2013 exhibit at Art Tower Mito in Ibaraki parodied Cool Japan as a fiction and a government propaganda tool; and Satoshi Kon's Paranoia Agent (Mōsō Dairinin, 2004) anime is, in my view, one of the most brilliant explorations of Cool Japan's rewards and costs within Japan's contemporary consumer society.

⁷ See the insightful essay by Jonathan Abel, “Can Cool Japan Save Post-Disaster Japan? On the Possibilities and Impossibilities of Cool Japanology.” International Journal of Japanese Sociology 20 (November 2011): 59-72.

⁸ Mizuki Shigeru's work has been rediscovered since 3.11, and I thank Matthew Penney for bringing this to my attention. It features illustrations for the real-life story of a Fukushima “nuclear gypsy,” Horie Kunio, first published in Asahi Graph in 1979: Mizuki Shigeru, Fukushima genpatsu no yami ([The dark side of Fukushima] Asahi Shimbunsha, 2011. Manga and anime scholar Jaqueline Berndt refers to the works of Hagio Moto and Yamagishi as “educational” (72], a term more apt, perhaps, for Yamagishi than for Hagio. See Berndt, “The Intercultural Challenge of the ‘Mangaesque’: Reorienting Manga Studies After 3/11,” in Manga's Cultural Crossroads. Ed. Jaqueline Berndt and Bettina Kūmmerling- Meibauer, New York/London: Routledge, 2013. pp. 65-84. Yamagishi Ryōko's “Phaeton” (1988] takes up nuclear weapons and nuclear power in the wake of Chernobyl. Her manga opens with the Greek myth of the half-mortal son of Apollo, Phaeton, who wished to prove his divinity by driving his father's chariot of the Sun, only to be inadequate to the task, compelling Zeus to destroy him before the out-of-control chariot caused even greater destruction. Yamagishi would go on for many pages to relate this myth to present-day hubris in thinking we can control nuclear power. Her manga lays out the science and the evidence in rather didactic detail. After 3.11, she made this manga available for free online: http://vt.usio.co.jp/paetone/index.html. (I thank Yuki Miyamoto for bringing this site to my attention.] Hagio Moto is arguably Japan's most famous shōjo mangaka, and she adapts Miyazawa Kenji's beloved children's story Ginga Tetsudo no Yoru (Night on the Galactic Railway) to the main episodes of Nanohana (Canola Flowers, 2011). This manga repeats a common trope in nuclear arts and literature of plant life that purifies the earth of radioactive contamination and, by extension, of human mistakes. (Sunflowers planted in Fukushima Prefecture in order to take up cesium from the soil come to mind in this context.) Other manga pieces in Hagio's collection personify Uranium and Plutonium as male and female sadistic or decadent figures, such as Salome.

⁹ Indeed, it is worth noting that gag humor in particular proclaims an intent to be universally funny, or broadly accessible at every class level; often, however, it ends being either inscrutable or funny only to some, as a matter of particular “taste” (one thinks of The New Yorker cartoons, for instance).

¹⁰ Ito Go discusses this in his essay on Azuma Kiyohiko and Igarashi Mikio in Yuriika/Eureka (37.2 [2005]), pp. 75-87. In his book on 4-koma manga, Shimizu Isao notes (as does Ito above] that the traditional essay structure of kishōtenketsu (起承転結) has shaped the four- frame manga format since the Edo period (Yonkoma manga, Hokusai kara “moe” made [Four Frame Manga, From Hokusai to “Moe”], Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 2009). Comprised of Introduction, Development, Turn, and Conclusion, it is the “turn” or diversion, to which I refer here as a provocative characteristic of 4-koma manga, and one that may not lead to a final punchline at all, even as popular expectations of the genre are for just that. Needless to say, while the genre is called “yonkoma manga” and four panels are both very common and fits the kishōtenketsu model, actual manga length has varied since Edo times among ten to eight or three panels, for instance.

¹¹ A good selection from the field can be found in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, e d s. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2010. This volume is dedicated to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick but does not include her groundbreaking work influenced by psychologist Silvan Tomkins (whose reader she edited), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

¹² Ngai differentiates her project from that of others’ in the fields of ethics, affects, emotions or philosophy: More specifically, this book turns to ugly feelings to expand and transform the category of ‘aesthetic emotions,’ or feelings unique to our encounters with artworks - a concept whose oldest and best-known example is Aristotle's discussion of catharsis in Poetics. Yet this particular aesthetic emotion, the arousal and eventual purgation of pity and fear made possible by the genre of tragic drama, actually serves as a useful foil for the studies that follow. For in keeping with the spirit of a book in which minor and generally unprestigious feelings are deliberately favored over grander passions like anger and fear (cornerstones of the philosophical discourse of emotions, from Aristotle to the present), as well as over potentially ennobling or morally beatific states like sympathy, melancholia, and shame (the emotions given the most attention in literary criticism's recent turn to ethics), the feelings I examine here are explicitly amoral and noncathartic, offering no satisfaction of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release. In fact, most of these feelings tend to interfere with the outpouring of other emotions. Moods like irritation and anxiety, for instance, are defined by a flatness or ongoingness entirely opposed ot the ‘suddenness’ on which Aristotle's aesthetics of fear depends. And unlike rage, which cannot be sustained indefinitely, less dramatic feelings like envy and paranoia have a remarkable capacity for duration. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 6-7.

¹³ Activism and citizen resistance movements after 3.11 deserve mention here. To start, much useful information can be found right here at Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. See particularly the NGO and Citizen Activism section in the Guide to 3.11 Sources. I also recommend the website of David H. Slater with links to informative essays: “3.11 Politics in Disaster Japan: Fear and Anger, Possibility and Hope.” Fieldsights - Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology Online, July 26, 2011.

¹⁴ Citizens have taken dosimeters in their own hands in their efforts to understand better what is happening in the environment around them, both ecologically and politically. Also see Christine Marran's excellent article, “Contamination: From Minamata to Fukushima.” The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 19 No 1, May 9, 2011.

¹⁵ Anne Allison, Precarious Japan. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013. Also see her article “Ordinary Refugees: Social Precarity and Soul in 21^st Century Japan. Anthropological Quarterly 85.2 (Spring 2012): 345-370. The epigraph from Alan Wolfe gives this term a longer history in its application to Japan, albeit with a different disciplinary focus.

¹⁶ “Stuplimity” derives from “sublime” and “stupefaction.” Particularly apt in the wake of 3.11, “nuclear stuplimity” describes the blockage of clear and effective action and response to, in particular, the reams and streams of data, scientific “facts,” and information presented to average citizens with ceaseless numbing repetition for their immediate processing in our information society. Needless to say, this processing cannot get done, and the stakes of such processing in the first place is never clear despite the anxiety it generates.

¹⁷ Shiriagari Kotobuki's twin old geezers appeared in AX, the successor to the classic gekiga journal GARO, and two short episodes were translated and included in an English- language collection: AX: Alternative Manga, Vol. 1. Ed. Sean Michael Wilson, compiled by Mitsuhiro Asakawa of Seirin-Kogeisha, Marrietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, 2010, pp. 213-224. Shiriagari's works have been staged as gallery installations and he has presented his work in various places overseas, particularly Europe (see Zonzaina sonzai [Our Sloppy Existence].

¹⁸ Just as Shiriagari was graduating from college, his sempai Yumura Teruhiko (“King Terry”] was drawing covers for GARO and developing the hetauma theory that would exert great influence on Shiriagari and others. Frederick L. Schodt discusses Yumura and his hetauma concept in Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1996: “At first glance Terry's cartoons and illustrations appear to be bad art, but on closer inspection, they are also good. Hence, they are heta-uma, or bad-good. Terry believes that everyone starts as a “bad” artist and tries to become good. But simply becoming “good” is not enough. Artists who try too hard to become “good” begin to emphasize technique over soul, and then the life goes out of their drawings; their spirit fails to keep up with their technique. Terry's philosophy in art, therefore, has been to avoid becoming too good, and to preserve a graffiti-like soul” (141-2).

¹⁹ See note 3 above. Shiriagari's futago no oyaji fall within the AX gekiga genre but also, at times, have much in common with the Defenders or the serialized “Current Events Geezer” (Jiji Oyaji, 「時事おやじ」 Tokyo: Asupekuto, 2000) whose oyaji protagonist looks a lot like the father in the “Defenders” strip.

²⁰ Hizakurige, or Shank's Mare, translated by Thomas Satchell (Tuttle Books, 1960). Shiriagari's most recent Yurumation commercial is for Black chocolate, and appears also on his professional website.

²¹ While appropriation of the disaster for commercial or public relations, even tourist, purposes lurks in the details and context of each case, disengaging from the ongoing crisis in Tohoku remains, arguably, the bigger threat as disaster fatigue becomes palpable.

²² Exhibited at the Kyoto International Manga Museum and now published by MindCreators LLC. Details, including Shiriagari's color version of this panel, can be seen here.

²³ Frances Ferguson first frees the sublime from inspiration in Nature in her essay on this aesthetic category's appropriateness for our times in the nuclear age, not the Age of Enlightenment or Romanticism. Although Freiberg builds on Ferguson's ideas, this brief essay does not deal with Japan at all.

²⁴ Frances Ferguson stresses that the sublime is an experience of subjectivity, not a quality of objects; nonetheless, as an aesthetic category, the “sublime” is regularly invoked in response to subject matter or viewer/reader responses of awe and fear to art objects. Gothic writers in the 18^th-19th centuries such as Ann Radcliffe, not to mention Mary Shelley's father William Godwin whose writings acknowledged Edmund Burke's influence, made important distinctions between crass “horror” and the “terror” of the sublime to which their fictions aspired. Ferguson reminds us that Longinus's ancient essay “On the Sublime” had been rediscovered in the eighteenth century with Peri Hupsous (On Great Writing) (Ferguson, 5). This occurs just in time for the boom in Gothic formula fictions. Apparently the first to separate the sublime from the beautiful, Edmund Burke explores the concept in his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Immanuel Kant takes up the subject several times, in Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764) and Critique of Judgment (1790).

²⁵ See his collection of essays, Hitonami to iu koto [Being just like everyone else] Tokyo: Daiwa Shobō, 2008.

²⁶ Shiriagari, “’Warai’ niwa nishurui aru to ornou” [I think there are two types of laughs], in Hitonami to iu koto [Being just like everyone else], 64-68. A special issue of Yuriika/Eureka (37.2 [2005]) on gag manga features Shiriagari's artwork on the cover. There, in the context of a taidan discussion between Shiriagari and psychologist Kasuga Takehiko, Shiriagari at one point claims, “I want to do the kind of humor that makes people wake up” (“Jibun wa hito o kakusei saseru warai o yaru,” 40). At the end of this volume, the editors include a “map” of gag and contemporary manga artists that places Shiriagari on the extreme end of a spectrum towards the “avant garde,” opposite from “conservative” artists such as the Yomiuri Shimbun's Ueda Masashi or Gomanism's Kobayashi Yoshinori (192-3). This map of manga artists creates an x-y axis that places Ishii Hisaichi in the middle between Shiriagari and Ueda. Forming four quadrants, below Ishii is Nishihara Rieko in the category of “Realism/Explosive Laughter” (Bakusho), while above Ishii is the category of “Moe” eroticism, denoted by Azuma Kiyohiko.

²⁷ Shiriagari, “’Warai’ niwa nishurui aru to omou” 67-68.

²⁸ Kitazawa Rakuten (1876-1955) contributed to Tokyo Puck and Jiji Shimpō, a newspaper founded by Fukuzawa Yukichi that had a Jiji Manga page that Rakuten drew for regularly. See the illuminating essay on Rakuten by Ronald Stewart, “Manga as Schism: Kitazawa Rakuten's Resistance to ‘Old-Fashioned’ Japan,” in Manga's Cultural Crossroads. Ed. Jaqueline Berndt and Bettina Kūmmerling- Meibauer, New York/London: Routledge, 2013. pp. 27-49.

²⁹ Two of Saito Tamaki's books have recently appeared in English: Beautiful Fighting Girl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, translated by J. Keith Vincent, Azuma Hiroki, and Dawn Lawson, and Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, translated by Jeffrey Angles.

³⁰ Others have expressed similar ideas. The woodblock artist Kazama Sachiko, for instance, uses the salient term kimin (棄民; lit. “throwaway people”) to describe those historical moments when the government abandons its own people in order to preserve the unity of the nation state. Takahashi Tetsuya has described the “sacrificial system” whereby nuclear villages are created in poorer rural areas to be the “invisible,” and expendable, source of larger metropolitan areas’ energy supplyKazama appears in Linda Hoaglund's documentary, ANPO: Art x War (2011) and uses this term in the context of post-Occupation US- Japan politics. Hoaglund discusses her film in “ANPO: Art x War - In Havoc's Wake.” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 9, Issue 41, No.5, October 10, 2011. See Takahashi Tetsuya, “What March 11 Means to Me: Nuclear Power and the Sacrificial System (私にとっての ３．１１ 原子力発電と犠牲のシステム). The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol.12, Issue 19, No.1, May 12, 2014.

³¹ This is a term coined by Morimoto Seiichi in the PEN Club essay, Bendo no kiro [A Crossroads at Convenience], which he wrote for the collection Ima koso watashi wa Genpatsu ni hantai shimasu [Especially Now, I Stand Against Nuclear Power]. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2012, pp. 480-483.

³² See Christine Marran's Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

³³ Matthew Penney has reported on public opinion polls in Japan. His research shows that a majority of citizens’ feel “unease” about nuclear contamination and have a desire to eliminate nuclear power plants altogether since 2011, even though some polls also suggest that people see no other way to provide the amount of power needed to sustain the economy: see Matthew Penney, “Nuclear Power and Shifts in Japanese Public Opinion,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, February 13, 2012. In such 3.11 films as Sono Sion's Kibō no kuni (Land of Hope, 2012) and Uchida Terunobu's Odayakana nichijō [The Serene Everyday, Wa Entertainment, 2012], the experts, doctors, power company spokesmen, and politicians are frankly depicted as liars, deliberately obfuscating via their terminology and presentation of science and safety measures the complexity of the contamination. Besides Shiriagari's Manga Ever Since, Uchida's film captures particularly well this gap between those trying to cope with the information and risks after a nuclear accident the best way they know how and those disavowing danger. The majority of the people in the film fall into the latter camp, strangely insisting on ignoring the news in order to go on with their daily lives without change. Those who raise alarms are labeled neurotic and are ostracized for unsettling the smooth odayakana surface of the everyday with “dangerous rumor mongering” (fuhyō higai). Representation itself is at issue for artists and documentarians of all stripes in the wake of Japan's Designated State Secrets Law and the protests against “dangerous rumor mongering” in manga artist Tetsu Kariya's “Fukushima the Truth” arc in the enormously popular series, Oishinbō [The Gourmet] in May 2014 (this time from the affected disaster regions themselves).

³⁴ 1 follow Jaqueline Berndt's lead in not using the more common translation of “self-restraint” here (72).

³⁵ Shiriagari is invariably asked by interviewers (including me) whether or not he was concerned about the jishuku mood or about being indiscreet or improper (fukinshin, 不謹慎), and he invariably denies feeling any such pressure. And yet, he often adds that probably no one cares about his work anyway in such a context as it is “just” gag manga. But Shiriagari clearly touched a nerve in early on - the earliest of any mangaka - taking on 3.11 for representation. That Shiriagari himself slyly dissembles regarding any political or social protest while making an ironic commentary about the lack of seriousness with which manga is taken in Japanese society, anyway - until it is seen as immoral, that is - reveals less Shiriagari's true experience than a common- sense stance artists at risk of censorship have adopted in both the prewar and postwar periods (see footnote 2 regarding a recent furor over a mangaka's 3.11 work].

³⁶ The term is used in contemporary 3.11 films but it had particular resonance for me in a recent talk by Ryan Cook. In his presentation (“Fiction Film After Fukushima”] in April 2014 at UC Berkeley's Symposium, “Reframing 3.11: Cinema, Literature, and Media, After Fukushima,” he used the term “nuclear neurotic” to refer to male and female characters in nuclear films, including Kurosawa Akira's I Live in Fear (1955, otherwise known as “Record of a Living Being”], and Uchida Terunobu's Odayakana nichijo (see fn. 2 above). In Sono Sion's fiction film, Kibō no kuni (希望の国, The Land of Hope], we get a dramatic treatment of the “nuclear neurotic” dressed in hazmat gear to protect her unborn child. It is worth adding here that these characters are treated sympathetically, and often as the targets of discrimination for daring to ask questions.

³⁷ 1 find this particularly ironic in light of the recent pro-nuclear documentary, “Pandora's Promise” (2013, directed by Robert Stone, Robert Stone Productions],

³⁸ One thinks of the NSA, TEPCO, and power plants throughout Japan where manga and anime mascot characters populate websites and exhibits to promote nuclear safety, often aimed at mothers anxious about their families in the vicinity. See Norimitsu Onishi, “'safety Myth’ Left Japan Ripe for Crisis,” with photos by Ko Sasaki, The New York Times (June 24, 2011], available online here]. Also see mangaka Uchida Shungiku's Denkochan for TEPCO, mentioned in Berndt, 2013, p.72, and put in context with other “mascot” figures discussed in Matthew Penney's excellent article, with images: “Nuclear Nationalism and Fukushima,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Voi 10, Issue 11, No 2, March 12, 2012], In a Defenders manga included in Manga Ever Since for 8 April 2011, Shiriagari has the Father try to explain to the Mother the relative difference between the radioactive elements and units of measurement, “sieverts” and “bequerels,” by body contortions that shrink or expand his body (9], In effect, the manga tries to translate the proliferation of confusing, and even obfuscating, science terminology into everyday terms or lived experience, exploiting the success or failure at doing so for humor's end. I cannot help but see this as a parody of those who explain how safe radiation is in everyday life by talking only about background radiation or repeating the banana or x-rays and air travel radiation stories, ignoring the different kinds of radioactive particles and their waves, not to mention the difference between internal and external exposure. Shiriagari's manga highlights the confusions, cross-purposes, and biases that proliferate around such “clarifying” examples.

³⁹ 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, Issue 6 No 1, February 6, 2012.

⁴⁰ Gennifer Weisenfeld, Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan's Great Earthquake of 1923. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. France Ferguson's more generalized essay on the “nuclear sublime,” which informs Freiberg's specific focus on Japan and its youth culture, contends that fear of nuclear annihilation resulted in a new form of sublime for our times. Calling upon Longinus, Kant, and Burke, she usefully recapitulates the theory of the sublime as a theory to compete with beauty; as an experience of fear and awe from the power of nature; as an indescribable experience of atomized subjectivity; as something that cannot rest in manmade objects, and is best represented in negative terms. Ngai, too, retraces these arguments in her chapter on stuplimity and in her book's introduction, claiming htat the sublime was the first ugly feeling (Ngai, 5], Frances Ferguson, “The Nuclear Sublime.” Diacritics (Summer 1984]: 5-10. I am grateful to Marilyn Ivy for insisting I return to Frances Ferguson's original essay on the “nuclear sublime.”

⁴¹ Ngai, 36. In her chapter on the sublime, Ngai discusses Beckett, Stein, and contemporary art installations that revel in presenting simultaneously encyclopedic and ambitiously exhaustive information as endless data become an end in itself. Such works methodically and painstakingly list and repeat every detail, categorizing and cross-categorizing, each item. Here we have knowledge as bureaucratic repetition and industry in the mode of Herman Melville's scribbler, Bartleby - as much Kafka as Beckett.

⁴² The precarity of Japan's labor force and the ways it limits citizens’ responses to 3.11 is dramatized in 3.11 films where workers who want to move, if just for the time being, cannot for fear of losing their jobs (see Uchida's film, Odayakana nichijō, for instance).

⁴³ Referring to Paolo Virno's “sentiments of disenchantment,” Ngai echoes Virno's cautions about romanticizing our radical alienation under finance capital and systems of wage labor, which already so effectively and perversely appropriate such feelings as integral to production itself (for instance, precarity in the workforce itself reproduces a desirable productivity and loyalty based on fear and paranoia about losing one's job]. Ngai, 3-4. Paolo Virno, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment.” In Radical Thought in Italy, Eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

⁴⁴ See Matthew Penney, “Nuclear Nationalism and Fukushima,” Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 10, Issue 11, No. 2, March 12, 2012.

⁴⁵ Shiriagari Kotobuki, Zonzaina sonzai [Our Sloppy Existence]. Tokyo: Enterbrain, 2010.

⁴⁶ “The Atomic Artists.” Directed by Emily Taguchi. PBS Online/Frontline. Aired July 26 2011, and is available online here.

⁴⁷ Kanai Mieko, Chiisai mono, okii koto [Little Things, Big Ideas]. Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun Shuppan, 2013. See the first two essays, in particular, 9-20.

⁴⁸ The commercial exists on YouTube here.

⁴⁹ In contrast to this cynicism, we might position Linda Hoaglund's documentary on activist artists of the 1960s in ANPO: Art X War (2011). See: Chim↑Pom with an introduction by Linda Hoaglund, “The Suddenly Relevant Activist Antics of Artist Collective Chim↑Pom: Challenging Japan's Nuclear Power Agenda,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 30, No. 3, July 23, 2012; and Linda Hoaglund, ‘ANPO: Art X War - In Havoc's Wake, ‘The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 41 No 5, October 10, 2011.

Akasegawa Genpei, “Sekai no omomi wa kaomen ni sayou suru” [The weight of the world as seen in a face], Kagaku to Jojou [Science and Poetry]. Tokyo: Shincho Bunko, 1989. 234-245.

⁵⁰ Shiriagari mentions this in his NHK television interview with Saito Tamaki. Currently, he is serializing a manga entitled Wakai (Reconciliation) in Comic Beam (Enterbrain).