On 11 March 2011, the northeastern area of Japan, known as Tōhoku, was hit by an unprecedented earthquake and tsunami. The disaster damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, one of a number of such facilities located in what was already an economically disadvantaged region. This led to a series of explosions and meltdowns and to the leakage of contaminated water and radioactive fallout into the surrounding area. Around 20,000 people were reported dead or missing, with a disproportionate number from the aged population of the region. Nearly four years later, hundreds of thousands of people are still displaced: evacuated to other areas, living in temporary accommodations, or living in makeshift shelters in former public buildings. There has been despoliation of the environment and contamination of food, air and water. Primary industries like fishing and dairy have been curtailed. Livestock have suffered excruciating deaths due to injury, radiation sickness and starvation, or have had to be “put down”. The nuclear power industry in Japan is effectively shut down, and people are enjoined to save electricity (setsuden) in order to cope with the reduced capacity for power generation. This multiple disaster has reverberated on a number of scales - in the local communities immediately affected, in civil society groups who have sent volunteers to the region, in more distant places which have welcomed refugees from the disaster, in the responses of local and national governments, and in international expressions of solidarity and concern.

In their responses to the Fukushima disaster, artists may struggle with the problem of representing these calamitous events in ways that connect meaningfully with audiences. Related to this is the durational experience of nuclear catastrophe; how can theatre deal with the long term effects of radiation? Some plays have tackled these issues realistically, whereas others explore the disaster in more existential ways. In this essay I discuss two such works, Hirata Oriza's Sayonara (2011 version) and Okada Toshiki's Jimen to Yuka (Ground and Floor, 2013) to show how these plays depict the “swarm of ghosts” in the irradiated landscape around Fukushima. Peggy Phelan's notion of mourning is used to reflect on theatre's capacity to embody the wider dimensions of human suffering after Fukushima.

In May 2011, just one month after the 3/11 triple-disaster, the Chim↑Pom artist collective conducted an unauthorised installation of a panel depicting the crippled nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant next to Okamoto Tarō's large-scale mural Myth of Tomorrow in Shibuya railway station. In this paper I read the installation as a commentary on the history of nuclear power and anti-nuclear art in post-war Japan. This commentary reconnects the historical issue of nuclear weapons with contemporary debates about nuclear power.

In this essay I explore the way the internet has facilitated people's participation in anti-nuclear activism in Japan. After contextualising the use of the internet in the anti-nuclear movement which developed after the compound disaster of “3/11”, I present a case study focused on the tweet messages of one twitter user. By undertaking content analysis, tracing tweets over time, and tracing the connections between particular vocabulary items, and an interview, we gain a picture of how one participant in the anti-nuclear movement developed a political consciousness through participating in internet-facilitated activism.

In this essay I provide an account of a series of commemorative events held in Eastern Australia since the compound disaster of March 2011 occurred in Fukushima in Northeastern Japan. Individuals expressed transnational solidarity through the embodied experience of attending and participating in local events. Reflecting on these events reminds us of the entangled and mutually imbricated histories of Japan and Australia, and the ways in which various individuals and groups are positioned in the global networks of nuclear power and nuclear weaponry.

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.

The reconstruction efforts following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami (3/11) have sparked a rediscovery of the concept of kizuna (literally, “bonds between people”). Some Japanese authors, however, are contesting and expanding on this notion as a way of coming to terms with the disaster. Through the analysis of two literary works, I argue that 3/11 literature provides a model for Japan's emotional and physical reconstruction through its resourcefulness and alternative vision of kizuna.

The award-winning picture book Sagashite imasu (2012) was published in response to 3/11. It combines dynamic poetics with poignant photographs of relics from the Hiroshima Peace Museum to evoke emotions about extended suffering from radioactive fallout. I argue that the work plays an activist role in prompting an empathetic response which raises an ethical consciousness, and that this kind of response in turn generates a broader “recognition” of the dangers of using nuclear power in (and beyond) Japan after the Fukushima disaster.

In this essay I explore the visual representation of suffering, resilience and compassion as expressed in a Tokyo-based photography exhibition in April 2011. An analysis of the photographs provides an opportunity to re-examine the meaning of disaster and victimhood, and to re-examine a society that responds to tragedy. Of particular note are intertextual references between the 2011 exhibition and other iconic images, some of which represent other historical moments of suffering in Japan, such as the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Minamata poisoning incident. Others reference ideas about family and community. The Tokyo exhibition sheds light on how a society expresses collective feelings of grief, fear and distrust after a major disaster, and how the socio-economic and political context of a contemporary disaster can be interrogated through reflection on the past.