The March 11, 2011 earthquake that shook northeastern Japan also reverberated throughout Japanese society, forcing it to reconsider many of things things that it had taken for granted—its usage of energy, its relationship to the natural environment, its relationship with the government, and its modes of organizing at the grass-roots level.  Almost immediately, writers took action.  Many figures known for their involvement in social issues, writers such as Ōe Kenzaburō, Tsushima Yūko, and Ishimure Michiko, began respond and publish statements to the press, helping to use their influence to help shape reconstruction efforts and talk about new directions for the Japanese nation.  

Perhaps the segment of the Japanese literary world where the seismic forces of 3/11 were felt most strongly, however, was the poetic world.  Many Japanese newspapers include regular columns that include free verse (shi), tanka, or haiku poems, but in just the few days after 3/11, poetry began to emerge from those small columns and take a more prominent place in the news, eventually finding its way into a central position in the discourse that had started unfolding across the nation. Poetry exploded into the mainstream, serving as one of the ways that the nation thought about and processed its own complicated feelings about the disasters. 

Because I was in Japan at the time and experienced the quakes, numerous aftershocks, and anxiety personally, I have been unable to forget it.  After a few weeks of uncertainty and great worry, everything I had come to Japan to do was cancelled, and so I cut my stay short and returned to the United States ahead of schedule.   As one way of working through the experience and my complicated feelings about returning to America, I began translating a number of poems about the quake and the resulting disasters, mostly poems written by poets whom I admire.  Most of those translations have been published in various journals, mostly online. 

Here is a collection of links to some of those translations.  Some appear with the original Japanese.  Most of the poems first appeared in the May 2011 special issue of Handbook of Contemporary Poetry 『現代詩手帖』dedicated to the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown.  Some were also published in a special section in the daily newspaper Asahi shinbun published in commemoration of the first anniversary of the quake.  Others were published in various magazines or newspapers, but still, these poems are only the tiniest tip of the iceberg.  There are thousands upon thousands more poems out there.

TANIKAWA Shuntarō: “Words”　
谷川俊太郎「ことば」

WAGŌ Ryōichi: Pebbles of Poetry (Part I)
和合亮一『詩の礫』抄

TAKAHASHI Mutsuo: “These Things Here and Now”
高橋睦郎「いまここにこれらのことを」

YOSHIMASU Gōzō: “at the side (côtés) of poetry”
吉増剛造「詩のcôtésに」

ITŌ Hiromi: “Cooking, Writing Poetry”
伊藤比呂美「料理する、詩を書く」

ARAI Takako: “Half a Pair of Shoes” and “Galapagos”
新井高子「片方の靴」と「ガラパゴス」

HIRATA Toshiko: “Do Not Tremble” and “Please”
平田俊子「ゆれるな」と「どうか」

TANAKA Yōsuke: “Screaming Potato Field”
田中庸介「叫ぶ芋畑」

OHSAKI Sayaka: “Noisy Animal”
大崎紗香「うるさい動物」

Jeffrey ANGLES: “Return After Earthquake”
ジェフリー・アングルス「地震後の帰国」

『三月は毛糸でできていた』震災文学集（英訳）

One year after the March 11, 2011 earthquake that destroyed much of northeastern Japan, editors David Karashima and Elmer Luke have put together a stunning collection of translations of fiction, poetry, and reflections on the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown.  Included in here are pieces by many of Japan’s most important authors, including TAWADA Yōko 多和田葉子, KAWAKAMI Hiromi 川上弘美, IKEZAWA Natsuki 池沢夏樹, KAKUTA Mitsuyo 角田光代, and many others.  There is even one short, surreal manga, and some poetry by TANIKAWA Shuntarō 谷川俊太郎, whom some people have called the “national poet” (国民の詩人) and American poet J.D. McClatchy. 

I received a copy of this collection last week, and within a day, I eagerly devoured most of the pieces in here.  3.11 wrought almost unimaginable devastation, leaving many voiceless, unsure about how language could address the huge gaping hole, the huge rubble of meaning left in language and in the nation.  “How,” I remember Takahashi Mutsuo asking, “can we write after this disaster?  Nothing seems big or strong enough to deal with destruction on this scale.”  Everything, even language, was thrown into doubt; however, this collection shows the many diverse ways in which writers all over Japan (and even abroad) dealt with this crisis of representation.  As we well, the crisis forced these writers forward, compelling them to address the cries of anguish, fear, and anxiety about the future. 

Here are the reflections of TANIKAWA Shuntarō 谷川俊太郎, the poet who opens the collection. (This translation was my small contribution to the project.) 

The Asahi Shinbun online is posting a series of poems about the earthquake written by some of Japan’s most important contemporary poets in commemoration of the first anniversary of the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear disaster.  The poems come with a film of the poet reading his or her work.

Just now, I watched Takahashi Mutsuo’s contribution to the series, a stunning invocation of the effects of the triple disaster on language.  It begins “Language was what was broken / We did not realize this at the beginning / Because the destruction came so slowly.” He continues on through his reflections on the role of poetry and language in the wake of a catastrophe on such an enormous scale.

In his personal conversations with me, Takahashi lamented that after the earthquake, he went through a period of blankness, in which he felt that language was not enough to grasp, to conceive the scale of the horror inflicted upon the nation.  Nothing he wrote could cope with the scale of the disaster, and he did not know how to heal.  This coincided with his own realization of his advancing age—another concern reflected in this poem.  Still, in this poem, he seems to find the way forward, as he realizes that the world began with the destruction of the big bang and is hurtling toward entropy.  He cautions us that language is not always necessary.  It is not always necessary to pour trauma into language.  Waiting can sometimes be the path to heal. 

Takahashi is most recently the author of the book Two Thousand Years of the Poetic Mind: From Susanoo to 3.11 「詩心二千年:スサノヲから3・11へ」, published by Iwanami Shoten（岩波書店, 2011).