STUDIOVOICE #3 — After 3.11: Prayer and Its Shadow

One Year After March 11, 2011

Text and photography by hou

Prayer and Its Shadow

A year had passed since March 11. From February onward, images began to gather in the streets and online: advertisements, campaign cards, columns, moving images, fragments that entered the field of vision whether one wanted them or not. They made the passing of a year feel less like memory than a semi-compulsory appointment.

At 2:45 p.m., when the earthquake struck, I was in the dry cabin of an airplane waiting to land at Narita. I remember a strange unease. A taxi driver in a smoky cab had once told me that winter air in Tokyo was as dry as the Sahara, and that remark returned for no sensible reason. The first announcement in the cabin seemed to come more than ten minutes later. The flight attendants spoke formally, but something unsettled floated around the words.

After landing elsewhere, we watched images of the tsunami from inside the aircraft. Only then did “somewhat large” begin to acquire scale. Some passengers tried coolly to understand the violent light of buildings swallowed by water; others hurried out, thinking only of dead phones and missed connections. I remember thinking, stupidly and honestly, that it looked like a film. Nearby, someone from a tour group worried about a return flight and dinner two days later. A British flight attendant addressed passengers with a face in which anxiety and exhaustion had been mixed without permission.

From that day onward, arguments about the earthquake and the nuclear plant crossed each other everywhere. Some people questioned the existence of the nation, others spoke in trivialities. Many students criticized the social systems that had existed from the past to the present, and were ashamed of the fact that they had participated in them without knowing it. In many cases, their criticisms were more or less correct.

What became interesting was that each position, even when it conflicted with another, carried its own reason. People who could feel more than one logic at once may have been the ones who sensed reality most sharply. I am no specialist, so I want to record here only the scenes from March that felt especially vivid, because they seemed to reveal both the meaning and the actual condition of those of us living in Japan.

On the street, I heard people ask why anyone had to work in such a situation, or why a company could not simply stop. At first these questions sounded like confusion, then like resentment, and finally like a kind of destructive prayer. Perhaps continuing to work after the Friday earthquake, while losing the usual weekend, was a form of prayer in its own exhausted way. Perhaps it was also a form of madness.

Online, photographs of station platforms and streets in the commuting hours after the quake circulated widely. People stood in line for trains as usual. They queued at convenience stores without panic. To people overseas this was taken as evidence of a Japanese capacity to keep going, even under extraordinary conditions. Inside Japan, that outside reaction was quickly reused as proof of a latent national identity to be proud of.

But what stayed with me was more ambiguous. People continued their days, coughing up something like “destructive prayer” while unconsciously performing the act of prayer itself. To live an ordinary day in a city can be one effective way to avoid destructive contagion. Maintaining the steady state of economic activity contributes, in the long run, to recovery. Yet the accumulation of unthinking acts can also become a prayer, and the collective intentions decided without anyone quite deciding them can become the trigger for destruction.

Looking back, the sight of life moving automatically, while the existence of free will remained unclear, looked almost smooth, almost beautiful. It also looked terribly like the self-restraint that Japanese society had been carrying for a long time. To narrow one’s own will until it resembles self-sacrifice, and then to offer an act of prayer to nature without quite hearing the mechanism of destruction: perhaps that too is one way people try to live.