Christine L. Marran
Japan Forum: Gallery
Seeing Double: Visibility
and Legibility in
Photography of 3-11
Tomohiko Kano’s photograph of the powerful wave that swept over
the seawall in the town of Miyako, Japan, captures the consequences
of overengineering and hyperindustrialization on Japan’s coasts (see
figure 1). The photograph’s depiction of the ocean water, which overwhelmed Japan’s seawall-fortified shoreline and inundated 561 square
kilometers of coastline, is from a relatively high angle, with the wave
churning and frothing below the eye line. It inspires a sense of nature’s
unparalleled immensity: the massive unfurling of water takes up half
of the frame or more while the long shot makes objects normally considered large in our world—cars, fishing boats, roofs, train cars—
appear as hapless bath toys buoyed about by overwhelming currents.1
The lighting is neutral and the color monochromatic—an effect of the
charcoal gray of the sky and the brackish water, both heartlessly ashen.
The furled fury of the water pummels the Japanese landscape of
plywood, cement, and plastic.
This is no pristine wave like that depicted in the famous woodblock
print of a tsunami by Hokusai in “36 Views of Fuji.” Rather, it is a flattened monster, thick with oil and chemicals that are visible to the eye
only in the murkiness of the water, whose sheen reveals a mere hint of
the multitude of pollutants that have been carried in its pulsing
# 2012 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American
Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society. All rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
Christine L. Marran, “Seeing Double: Visibility and Legibility in Photography of 3-11,”
Environmental History 17 (April 2012): 301–306.
doi:10.1093/envhis/ems029
302 | Environmental History 17 (April 2012)
Figure 1: Tomohiko Kano’s photograph of Miyako, Japan on March 11, 2011. Credit: Courtesy of Mainichi Shinbunsha.
currents. The wave is littered with propane and gasoline, asbestos,
household cleaners, pesticides, and other agrochemicals—many of
these produced by the thousands of factories that line the northeastern coastline.2 The tsunami carried sludge and sediment laced
with heavy metals and PCBs that had settled in bays before antidumping laws were passed in the late 1960s and 1970s.3 But these contaminants are only hinted at in Kano’s familiar style of disaster
photography, which creates visual drama through the displacement
of everyday objects and a striking sense of scale. The image of swirling
water draws us in with its haunting depiction of chaos. Do we yearn to
see the worst? Do we feel a perverse pleasure at sensing an apocalyptic
event? Kano’s dramatic, if relatively conventional photographic approach is to capture in freeze frame the destruction of large-scale
human objects by a singular overwhelming force.
In significant contrast to Kano’s photography of spectacle, Yuriko
Nakao’s photographs of 3-11 are far less visually stimulating. They
depict environmental contaminants and danger but only those nefariously invisible to the naked eye. She has taken dozens of photographs
of the testing of objects, food, and human bodies for ionizing radiation
that eludes photographic capture, and therefore her images are not as
dramatic as Kano’s.4 Rather, Nakao’s disaster photography depicts invisible danger through the affective positioning and solemn expressions of human victims, as well as through the depiction of the
Geiger counter and dosimeter apparatuses that can index the invisible
contaminants that digital camera technology cannot.
Gallery | 303
Figure 2: Photograph by Yuriko Nakao of a mother and dog checking on daughter quarantined for
radiation testing in Nihonmatsu, Japan on 14 March 2011. Credit: Reuters.
One of Nakao’s most widely circulated photographs, featured among
National Geographic’s “Top 20” photos of 3-11, depicts a quarantined
daughter standing behind glass while her mother and an inquisitive
dog seek information about her current medical status and when she
might be released (see figure 2). Mother and daughter can see each
other through glass clouded with condensation, but neither can see
that invisible entity that will separate their experiences for the rest
of their lives, namely deadly radiation. The impact of invisible radioactivity is made legible through the metaphor of glass. Nakao’s featuring of the opaquely transparent but impermeable glass in the middle
of the frame captures the conundrum presented by the invisible
danger of radiation exposure. It is transparent but isolating.
While this photograph is rich with the emotion of separation, especially evident in the family’s anxious dog, most of Nakao’s
304 | Environmental History 17 (April 2012)
photographs of radiation testing have a more simple composition and
subtle expression of affect. Nakao has taken innumerable portraits of
Japanese northeasterners, as well as of slabs of meat, vegetables, cars,
and other nonhuman objects being tested for exposure to radiation
in the wake of the compromised nuclear reactors in Fukushima. The
image below, of an elderly gentleman named Hatsuo Osugi, is indicative of her relatively plain portraits of infants, teens, and adults who
stand or sit compliantly before a Geiger wand with stony faces, stoically waiting for a verdict (see figure 3). In this photograph, Mr. Osugi
faces the radiation wand with a tense expression, as if it is a microphone and he is there to perform good health. Nakao’s portrait does
not provide the visual seduction of a large-scale environmental catastrophe like the photographs taken by Kano. Rather, she presents a lone
man sitting patiently for the medical assistant to operate her apparatus. No story unfolds beyond that of a stranger who must submit to
an unfamiliar technology. Nakao’s photograph registers what the
Geiger counter cannot: the stress of being in an eerie, unnerving landscape in which a person dressed in a white lab coat points a giant wand
covered in plastic and tape at his flushed face. This image, along with
Nakao’s other photographs, thus highlights the ecological violence of
progressive technologies through a photographic style that reduces
glossy disaster pictures to plain images of white walls, white coats,
latex gloves, digital apparatus, and stoic faces.
Yet Nakao’s images also illustrate that the natural landscape still
matters, even in photography that tries to capture the invisibility of
natural disasters. This is evident in a second Nakao photograph
Figure 3: Photograph by Yuriko Nakao of Hatsuo Osugi evacuated from Minamisoma who undergoes a
test for signs of nuclear radiation a health center in Yonezawa, 61 miles from the Fukushima nuclear
plant, 27 March 2011. Credit: Reuters.
Gallery | 305
below depicting a dosimeter reading sunflowers (see figure 4). For the
first time in any of her images, Nakao has included the numerical
index of radiation measurement; although it is difficult to read, the
small white machine is centered in the frame and held up against an
expansive field of yellow flowers, transforming that colorful space
into a number. In doing so, Nakao produces a landscape of both
beauty and contamination through her juxtaposition of colorful
yellow flowers, planted to take up radioactive cesium from the soil,
and a small white dosimeter.5
As Tomohiko Kano and Yuriko Nakao’s work illustrates, when it
comes to photography not all environmental catastrophes are alike.
The nature in Kano’s powerful, relentless, overwhelming tsunami is
a familiar subject in part because photographs of rubble, the vestiges
of people’s lives pushed about unceremoniously by those waves,
have been indexed to a past human experience. When Japanese
prime minister Naoto Kan called the tsunami the biggest crisis since
the conclusion of the Pacific War, he implied that the destruction
was reminiscent of the damage caused by Allied air raids and US
atomic bombs.6 But chemical compounds in waves and radioactive
materials inside bodies remain elusive and therefore pose a challenge
for the artist working in a visual medium.
For centuries along the coast hundreds of large heavy stone tablets
demarcating high-water levels of previous tsunamis have served as
warnings to future generations of potential destruction by rogue seawater. The stone monuments have remained, but they have persuaded
precious few to rein in development of the seashores.7 Perhaps this
time the ephemeral zeros and ones of digital photography will serve
Figure 4: Photograph by Yuriko Nakao of a dosimeter gauging radiation levels of sunflowers planted at
Joenji temple in Fukushima to absorb cesium from the soil. 6 August 2011. Credit: Reuters.
306 | Environmental History 17 (April 2012)
as a compelling witness to the industrial arrogance that has replaced
premodern caution.
Christine Marran is associate professor of Japanese literature and
culture studies in the Department of Asian Language and Literatures at
the University of Minnesota and author of Poison Woman: Figuring
Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Notes
1 Winifred A. Bird and Elizabeth Grossman, “Chemical Contamination, Cleanup
and Longterm Consequences of Japan’s Earthquake and Tsunami,” Asia-Pacific
Journal 9, no. 33 ( August 15, 2011).
2 Ibid.
3 Agricultural Information Services, Toshiaki Yoshioka, “Agricultural Crop Pesticide
Use—Studies & Reports,” http://tinyurl.com/44phyro, in Bird and Grossman,
2011.
4 Radiation is invisible to the naked eye, but it can be captured on photographic
film, and therefore film is used to test for radioactivity. The film badge worn to
detect exposure to ionizing radiation is a dosimeter, the subject of one of
Yuriko Nakao’s photographs, discussed later.
5 Reuters US edition, accessed December 3, 2011, http://blogs.reuters.com/
photographers-blog/2011/08/19/invisible-snow/.
6 As with the Pacific War in which the Japanese became victims of their own imperial aggression, the contaminants left in the wake of the tsunami could be understood as the result of an aggressive industrialization that put volatile chemical
factories and nuclear reactors on land known to be highly susceptible to
tsunami waves.
7 Martin Fackler, “Tsunami Warnings, Written in Stone,” New York Times, April 20,
2011, wrote “But modern Japan, confident that advanced technology and higher
seawalls would protect vulnerable areas, came to forget or ignore these ancient
warnings, dooming it to repeat bitter experiences when the recent tsunami
struck.” Placing the plants and reactors on the coast make for easy shipping
and access to water for cooling nuclear systems. The Miyagi prefectural coastline
alone had an estimated one thousand factories on the shore, and the TEPCO reactors were in a corridor in a coastal area called a “nuclear Ginza,” named for the
glittering urban consumer center of Tokyo that the nuclear energy feeds.