I wanted to share a small excerpt of
the incredible days we spent in Minamisoma, the town was hit very
hard by the earthquake & tsunami and was also the closest to the
nuclear reactor that exploded in Japan last year. Originally a
population of 70,000 people, after the explosion it was down to
10,000 do to people fleeing the fallout. This year its back up to
40,000. We were leading a workshop and it really went in a tough
direction I was not expecting.
It was a multigenerational workshop,
high schoolers all the way up to seniors. We were of course working
through interpreters, and after my past experiences with translation,
you'd think I would have taken the language barrier more into
account. I tell you though I felt Lost in Translation in more ways
today than I ever had before.
But despite the participants
trepidation, the workshop went quite well. After leading them through
movement warm ups and physical theatre games, we had them read one of
the Grimm Brother's fairy tales out loud as a group. We chose the
Fisher and His Wife, one that we were reasonably sure none of them
would be familiar with, and that dealt with the ideas of Wishing,
material happiness, self restraint, all set in a seaside context. We
figured: total win for a small Japanese seaside town.
WHOAH! Could not have been more
surprised by the reaction. When we circled up at the end to talk
about their reaction to the fairy tale . . . Big Surprise. They were
all kind of angry. They asked us things like:
“Why would you have chosen this
particular fairy tale?”,
or
“This has nothing to do with us, why
are we reading this instead of something else?”,
and the tone of it was really angry. Or
at least that's what it seemed like to me and my German colleague
Annelie. See, it was the end of the day and so we had stopped
translating. Our colleague, Ehito, was taking notes so that we could
facilitate the conversation more quickly and then he would translate
it all for us that night at the hotel. So we watched the discussion
happen in Japanese, but had no idea what was actually being said.
Very strange.
We left the workshop, headed to the
hotel, ate dinner and finally assembled in the lobby (Ehito, Nao, Annelie & I, the workshop leaders) to talk about their reaction. Annelie, and I had
the distinct feeling that the workshop had been a disaster. Like we
started off great with theatre games, and as soon as we got to the
content the whole thing blew up in our face.
Ehito and Nao explained to us however that that was
not the case at all. Yes, the participants were a bit upset at our
use of The Fisher & His Wife . . . but Ehito & Nao read that
as us having hit a nerve; that the story was actually hitting really
close to home, and that was why the folks in Minamisoma had such a
strong reaction to it.
At this point, 18 months after the
disaster, there had been absolutely no public dialogue about what
went on. None. Basically there was an earthquake, followed by a
tsunami, followed by a reactor meltdown, followed by evacuation and a
government coverup . . . and then a year of silence, followed by six
months of painfully slow re-migration. There was also a huge rift in
town between those who left and came back, and those who had stayed.
So there was a lot going on under the surface that we were trying to
get at.
While translating the day's discussion,
Ehito told us that this story, The Fisher & His Wife, hit so
close to home because it was about a seaside village where because of
the people's actions (in this case the Fisher discovers a magical
fish who grants wishes, and through his wife's folly brings about the
destruction of their livelihood) they can no longer fish. In
Minamisoma, because of the meltdown, none of the agriculture, or the
fishing industry can be eaten for the next fifty years at least.
Because the story is also about happiness, and wishes, we had asked
them what they would wish for if they could encounter the fish. There
were not many answers. The whole room had gotten really quiet at that
point, which was sort of the beginning of this tension we felt. Then
one woman, a schoolteacher in her mid-40's, said:
“I would wish that this was all a
dream, that I could wake up and none of it would have happened. But
its not of course.”
And that was the note we ended our
first day on. Heavy.
So we re-strategized for the next day's
workshop, looking for a way to bring Fisher and His Wife to life in
small performance groups. We broke the piece up and after a few hours
of more ensemble/theatre games, spent the rest of the afternoon
working out site-specific performances of each of the four pieces of
the story. We then went to each location and filmed the groups
performing their pieces. It was a big success.
The workshop was over at the end of the
second day, but we were scheduled to have a community discussion the
third night. We spent the third day traveling around Minamisoma
viewing the devastation from the Tsunami and the earthquake, as well
as the meltdown. We went to a nursing home that had been completely
wiped out by the tsunami. They had had only 30 minutes notice, and
many people had died. It really reminded me of a concentration camp,
the level of destruction and misery. It was tough. We also went
through a smaller town that had been completely evacuated because of
radiation levels for over a year. Just since April were the
inhabitants allowed to go back during the daytime and collect their
valuables. But seriously it was a ghost town. The eeriest part was
that someone had set up a loudspeaker hooked up to a stereo to blast
traditional Japanese folk music through the empty town. It was
apparently an attempt to keep it cheerful in this abandoned place,
but really only added to the post-apocalyptic atmosphere.
On the lighter side though, we did meet
this adorable fellow:
Q-chan, the dog. He was accompanying
his master, Mr. Omagari, who was a pharmacist that had lived in this area for many
years. He and his wife were there collecting their things. We spoke
with them and they invited us into their house, showed us their
family's ancestral samurai weapons, calligraphy from famous poets and
other treasures. Their generosity and resilience was a welcome
reprieve from the oppressive ghost-town environment.
That night we geared up for the
community discussion, in an old Sake factory converted into an art
space.The crowd was small, about fifteen; again ranging in age from
15 to 77. About half had been participants at the workshop. We spent
most of the first hour then talking about theatre, including a lively
discussion about Shakespeare in contemporary performance, the German
state theatre system, and the different levels of professional
theatre in each of our countries.
We took a small break an hour in, and
the four of us were strategizing about how to bring the conversation
back to the situation in Minamisoma. Mrs. Wakamatsu, the director of
the Minamisoma International Association that had invited us there,
was adamant that the discussion should address the elephant in the
room: namely that no one in Minamisoma was talking about the enormous
problems they were all facing. A lot of this has to do with Japanese
culture, which is very closed, very private and extremely polite.
This means that often big-picture dramatic events are not discussed
openly in public, rather they are spoken about in private with
friends and loved ones.
So we decided to lead off with a
provocative question. When everyone had gotten tea/coffee and cookies
and sat back down, I asked (through Ehito, translating of course)
what they thought of a bunch of us Westerners, artists, coming to
Minamisoma to put on a theatre workshop. How did they feel about
that?
It was pretty silent for a moment, then
Kuma, one of the workshop participants, raised his hand and said:
“I think its pretty stupid.”
He went on to explain that it doesn't
really have a purpose and he's not sure what we were up to. Then he
started speaking about his own experience as someone who was not from
Minamisoma but moved there after the catastrophe in order to make a
difference in the lives of the people there.
Somehow this beginning, allowing the
Japanese people to be offended and tell us that, gave everyone in
the room permission to speak about their experience. Ehito & Nao
later said it probably had to do with the fact that we were
foreigners, and don't understand the language/culture, therefore we
get let off the hook and they don't have to be so polite around us,
they feel they can speak their minds. After Kuma spoke about his own
experience, it was as if the floodgates opened, and over the next two
hours every single individual in the room spoke for 5-20 minutes
about their experience of the earthquake, the tsunami, the nuclear
meltdown, and the 18 months since all of it had happened.
Now the strangest part for Annelie and
I was that we could not understand any of the words being spoken. We
had agreed as a team earlier that Ehito would simply take notes
throughout the conversation, so as not to impede it. We had found in
the previous days that the act of translation into/out of Japanese
was so laborious that it did not really make sense to do it
simultaneously. So there we were for two hours, listening to these
people pour their hearts out, and not being able to understand any of
it. But we were able to understand the body language in the room, and
to see the affect that certain individuals' stories had on everyone
present.
The stories ranged from the
serendipitous to the horrific. From a fifteen year old girl feeling
excited and a bit guilty about the fact that the catastrophe allowed
her to get into a better school than she ever would have been able to
beforehand, to a middle-aged man who was in charge of waste
management and ended up having to dispose of the bodies in the weeks
and months after the disaster.
The stories were many and varied. All
of them extremely personal and very raw. No one in attendance had
told talked about any of these things with anyone besides their
family. It was an extremely powerful evening and it culminated with a
short poetry reading. Jotaro Wakamatsu, (Mrs. Wakamatsu's husband)
was a local poet who had been writing about atomic catastrophes in
Fukushima and around the world for over thirty years. His poems about
the multiple critical events at the reactors there in Fukushima had
been published for decades, as recently as 2008. One book of his
poems was published last year in a dual-language Japanese/English
version, translated by an American poet who lives in Japan. At the
end of our community discussion, Jotaro read one of his poems in
Japanese, and I was asked to read it in English, to celebrate the
multicultural spirit of the event.
Once the poems had been read and the
event was breaking up, Kuma invited us all back to his place to have
dinner, drinks and relax together. It was a much-needed gathering:
informal and relaxing. It occurred to me that no matter where one is
on this earth, there are some things that are universal. One of
those, I believe, is theatre culture. It felt for all the world like
a bunch of actors hanging out after a performance, drinking beer and
watching goofy old recordings of films they had been a part of. Even
though we each pursue theatre in very different ways, some of us
professionally, some as a hobby, most somewhere in between, the love
of performing and of the community that is created through performing
was common to us all.
Our three days in Minamisoma were
unforgettable. I feel like I've barely caught a fraction of the
impressions and experiences I received there in these five pages. But
I hope that it gives some indication of the huge impact this
experience had on me and that it gives a better picture of what life
is like for those who are still living with the consequences of these
disasters, both natural and man-made.
