Aerial view post Kanto earthquake
When a disaster strikes, the resulting damage, destruction, and loss impacts individuals on multiple levels. An individual experiences pain, hunger, thirst, displacement or loss first-hand and is often dependent on its immediate community to stay alive. For the individual, the experience is at once painfully unforgettable and indescribable. When it is a natural disaster, the survivor cannot assign blame. The disaster is often localized and the national or global community can provide help. In the case of man-made disaster, the survivor will be on the winning or on the loosing side; rescue activities and rebuilding will depend on the role and position of the local and national community within the larger political and economic context.
Historically, few personal voices were heard, contemporary social media gives individual voices more presence. The personal experience is often disconnected from higher levels of administration and governance, where competing claims for rescue and support have to be addressed. Collective voices about disaster generally have a stronger impact on the historic narration of the event and on its commemoration, specifically in the case of man-made disasters. Nonetheless, the meaning and memory of a disaster can be shared between the individual and community, their narratives may combine to form one narrative incorporating different aspects of each story to appeal to a broad audience, or the voice of the community or even the nation may dominate and drown out individual voices. The meaning and memory of a disaster shifts in the eyes of each survivor and in the larger narratives of the affected community's history. Together they contribute to the construction of local and national identities.
Individual and collective experiences of disaster and trauma find a metaphor in street-level and birds-eye views in literature, art and photography, architecture and city planning. Aerial view photography dwarfs the people on the ground, zooming outwards on a landscape to capture the larger picture of the scenery. Aerial views of Tokyo after the Kanto earthquake or of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima after the atomic bomb exemplify the representations of disasters detached from their impact on people and individual loss. Such generalized overviews of a disaster site can serve information purposes without rising strong feelings. In contrast to the aerial view, the ground view invites the viewer to identify with the individual and experience emotions.
To an individual survivor, the disaster is inextricably tied to their own experience of loss and recovery. Literature, art, and film have sought to give voice and life to these personal narratives in order to fully represent the human toll of catastrophes. This is no different in the cases of Japanese disasters. The art of Ryushu Tokunaga provides one example documenting first-person accounts of the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake. The artist's massive oil paintings render the terrible reality of the Kanto earthquake. These paintings capture Tokunaga's individual interpretation of the earthquake's destruction. Similiarly, Keiji Nakazawa's manga series, Barefoot Gen, narrates the atomic bombing of Hiroshima through the perspective of a small boy, Gen. The manga's illustrations include gruesome depictions of pain, suffering, and death of the bombing as seen by the character Gen, who ultimately survives. After the 3.11 Fukushima triple disaster, many news reports such as Ghost town: Going home years after the disaster aired on local TV channels focusing on personal accounts experienced by victims of the 3.11 disaster. This documentary shows an elderly man's journey back to his home in Fukushima after the nuclear accident.
On the collective scale, individual accounts are actively woven together through media, literature, and manga into a greater narrative that holds significant power in shaping the shared meaning of a disaster. In contrast to the single authored Barefoot Gen, the novel March Was Made of Yarn brings together a collection of Japanese and English works written by a collaboration of authors pertaining to the Fukushima 3.11 triple disaster. This collection incorporates different viewpoints, perspectives, and experiences, connecting multiple personal accounts to create a more comprehensive portrayal of the disaster. By studying collective accounts of disaster experiences, we are able to better grasp a the broader effects on Japanese society.