During the COVID-19 pandemic, entry to Japan was heavily restricted causing challenges to research and study opportunities. This extended exclusion from Japan has since emphasised questions about the way in which we approach Japanese Studies in the future, and the nature of academic field research more broadly. In this article, we explore these through an innovative digitised ‘field trip from home’ class that we ran for undergraduate students in 2020 as a replacement for in-country fieldwork. Based on these experiences we argue that, while digital approaches are not a replacement for classic field research, digital approaches to scholarship and pedagogy within Japanese studies and related subjects can help to enhance on-site physical field practices and their position in our subjects. We discuss our findings as an example of ‘patchwork ethnography’ through how pandemic-era teaching and research experiences have shone a spotlight on the necessity to rethink the possibilities for classic fieldwork within contemporary academia. As we move beyond the pandemic, we conclude that the future will require both the reopening of borders and the necessary resources to better support the development of both digital and in person fieldwork training.

Be it the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the escalations of the Cold War, or the triple disaster at Fukushima, the problem of representing disaster remains an exigent yet precarious one. Published amid rising global tensions, Abe Kōbō’s The Ark Sakura (Abe, 1984) questions the limits of representation within this perplexing discursive landscape. In this article, I will examine the text’s engagement with the concepts of governmentality, time, and representation, with special consideration towards an overarching structural critique of the role of information – more specifically, the flow and distribution of information – within Cold War nuclear discourse. Just as the tunnels of the quarry in the novel amplify and distort every sound and utterance into confusing, often duplicitous signals, the discourses surrounding nuclear disaster have always had to traverse complex topologies of frequently conflicting signs and signifiers, including but not limited to corporate, geopolitical, and ideological interests. To that end, I propose a reading of the novel alongside a reconceptualization of nuclear discourse as belonging to a larger genealogy of technological narratives, media compositing, and networked power, and in so doing, attempt to situate it within ongoing modalities of how techno-ecological disaster is imagined and discussed.

This essay will explore the material and affective dimensions of the ongoing disaster caused by TEPCO’s Fukushima Dai’ichi reactor meltdowns from the perspective of Akagi Shūji’s photography. Mobilizing Twitter to record the uncanny traces of Fukushima city’s decontamination and recovery efforts, Akagi’s photography affords a renewed consideration of the lived struggles and unsettled realities of the ongoing disaster. Akagi’s work challenges the ideologies of recovery by recording the residual traces of the state’s decontamination process. His photographs constitute a record of bodily encounters with the visible and invisible remnants of disaster, disclosing limits within Fukushima’s ‘environmental restoration’ and its representation. I will explore how Akagi ‘traces’ the processes of physical and affective labor at work in decontamination through the specific context of the Twitter platform. I consider the ways this work operates as a place-based praxis to incite multi-layered and indefinite forms of affect, meaning, and value, elaborated through the aporia of the processes of decontamination and ‘recovery,’ thus recasting the prospects of the ‘environmental restoration’ of Fukushima in a decidedly different light. This novel practice is read as an ethical-aesthetic response that captures the ongoing disaster’s manifold dimensions as an event rife with deeply unsettled futurities.

ABSTRACT It has been observed that ‘3–11’ marked an inflection point in Japanese cultural discourse, after which there prevailed a broad malaise about the social faults and systemic inequities that the natural and nuclear disasters had exposed in their aftermath. Kanehara Hitomi’s novel Motazaru Mono (Those without, 2015) explores this affective shift through her characters’ struggles to contend with the upending of their worldviews and values since 2011. In turn, Kanehara’s stories written during the COVID-19 pandemic’s peak of 2020–2021 show characters responding to the global crisis through the lens of a generalized state of precarity that, I argue, harkens back to 3–11 and earlier. With reference to Lauren Berlant’s notion of the ‘crisis ordinary’ mentality, I analyze ‘Unsocial Distance’ (June 2020), a love story between two youths who regard COVID-19 as an inconvenience rather than a true emergency. I then examine ‘Techno-break’ (January 2021) which ends with the protagonist’s mental and moral devolution in the socially distanced solitude she first enters as an anti-COVID measure. ‘Techno-break’ advocates for confronting the tolls of the prolonged pandemic, and for addressing the deeper-seeded fault-lines of Japanese society that contribute to more recent challenges.