I'll be very brief. I just wanted to say
thank you all for coming. As Lonnie said,
my name is Stephen Salel, and I'm
working at the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Tomorrow, our museum will be opening the
second installment in our multi-year
exploration of Japanese manga. The
exhibition that is entitled "The
Disasters of Peace: Social Discontent in
the Manga of Tsuge Tadao and Katsumata
Susumu" will continue until April 15th,
2018, so you have a while to catch it -
hopefully during your winter break or
whenever you can. "The Disasters of Peace"
features work by two artists who were
involved in a form of mature, socially
conscious manga known as gekiga -
literally, "dramatic pictures" - and, like
other artists in that genre, they
exhibited their work in a monthly
anthology called Garo.
In order to avoid saying things that
Ryan will cover, I'll just say that there
is only one scholar in the world who is
focusing his research on the topic of
gekiga and Garo - to my knowledge, at
least - and that is our guest speaker, Dr.
Ryan Holmberg. After receiving his PhD at Yale's
Department of Art History in 2007,
where he wrote a dissertation about the
history of Garo, he later revised that
text and published it three years later
as "Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964
to 1973." He has recently been in
residence at the Sainsbury Institute
for the Study of Japanese Art and
Culture, and he is currently a visiting
associate professor at the University of
Tokyo. In addition to his frequent
contributions to the Comics Journal,
Artforum International, and Art in
America, Ryan is active as both an editor
and a translator working on a number of
works, some of which we have on
display back here and which are part of
the library's collection.
let me single out "Trash Market," a work by
Tsuge Tadao that was published in 2015 by
Drawn and Quarterly. Ryan has two
important publications that will be
published in the coming months - "Slum Wolf," which is another collection of Tsuge Tadao's
work in in English, and "Fukushima
Devil Fish," which features the work of
Katsumata Susumu, and which will
be published by Breakdown Press this
coming March. If you're free, Ryan has
a few other presentations in the coming
days. On Thursday - that's tomorrow - from
5:30 to 7:00 at the Honolulu
Museum of Art School, Room 101, he'll be
talking about "Garo and the Birth
of Alternative Manga," and also, on Friday,
again at the Honolulu Museum of Art
School, he will be giving a presentation
that lasts exactly 6 minutes and 40
seconds on the topic of early Japanese
comics and their American influence. This
evening's talk is "Fukushima Devil Fish:
Katsumata Susumu's Antinuclear Manga."
Please join me in welcoming Ryan
Holmburg.
Thank you for having me to the
University and to the museum, especially
thank you to Stephen for getting in touch
with me a year and a half ago to
organize the exhibition and the events
around it. It's a really real pleasure, a
real honor, to be here and to share this
material with you. As Stephen kind of
mentioned, this presentation is linked to
some research I've been doing over the
past two years... or more likely about a
year ago... that I have to kind of revive and revise now about the career
of a manga artist named Katsumata Susumu, who has been getting more and more
attention in Japan of late, especially
since the meltdowns in 2011, for his work
from the 1980s and 70s on
nuclear energy in Japan, but also for
some literary manga that have nothing to
do with nuclear energy or any kind of
disaster scenarios. Also [he was] receiving a number of prizes in Japan in the past
couple of years.
Now, what's interesting for me about Katsumata Susumu is that he
kind of offers a different category of a
category that's very common within comic
book studies, which is atomic comics. As
you know, many superheroes are formed in
the crucible of radioactivity, and in
Japan, of course Hiroshima casts so long...
Hiroshima and Nagasaki cast a long shadow over all facets of post-World War II
Japanese culture, including manga, and
what always interested me... I mean, I was
living in Japan at the time of the
meltdown and been living in Japan off
and on since... more in... more on than off... is that especially with the protests
that followed the disaster - and then a
lot of writing in English about the
disaster... also in Japanese - they
oftentimes saw the coupling of Hiroshima
and Fukushima - "No more Hiroshima! No more Fukushima!" - and
you know, in some ways, this is a sensible
connection, but for me, and having, you
know, even before I started researching
the back history of nuclear power in
Japan, it seemed to me that this obfuscated quite a bit, which is, you know, a
40- or 50-year history of Japan actively
pursuing nuclear power really without
regard to the legacy of Hiroshima in
many cases. But just to talk about
atomic comics, you know, usually when
people talk about atomic comics in Japan,
manga is represented by Nakagawa Keiji, who himself was a hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor).
He was a child in Hiroshima at the time.
He started publishing a very
political, very anti-American
kind of B-grade, pulp comics in the late
1960s, criticizing the ABCC (Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission) and American lack of culpability or taking
of responsibility of the bombings. And
then in the early 1970s, he started
writing more autobiographical work, the
first of which was something
called "Ore wa Mita" - "I Saw It" -  in
the early 1970s, which subsequently came
out as I believe the first translated
manga into English. They came out in 1982. And also regardless of superheroes with
superpowers created by atomic energy or radiation,
you also had, during the age of hydrogen...
active, atmospheric hydrogen-bomb testing,
many comics in which that was also being
a theme.
Now, there's also kind of an
underappreciated history of anti-nuclear
power comics in the United States, and
one of the things that's interesting
about this object on the left is that it was
published by a publisher called EduComics,
and EduComics was founded by a man
named Leonard Rifas, who lives now in
Seattle. He lived for a time in San Francisco. He was part of the underground comix
movement that was initiated by R. Crumb and Zap in the late 1960s. In the
late... mid-late 1970s, he starts doing
self-published comics under EduComics
on various kind of political and historical topics... about the
American Revolution, the Constitution...
about food politics... and he also did this
All-Atomic Comics in 1976, which is a
very detailed and very informative
diatribe against the American nuclear
power industry. It went through a number
of print runs in the United States. It was
also translated into German twice,
because the anti-nuclear movements in
Germany were really taking off in the
late 1970s. This is before Three Mile
Island - 1976. After Three Mile Island in
1979, of course, much more attention is
paid to nuclear power in a critical
fashion in the United States. So you even
have places like Marvel Comics
picking up not so much on TMI (Three
Mile Island) as the protests north of Los
Angeles at the Diablo Canyon Reactor. So
here you have She-Hulk and The Thing
stopping... I can't remember his name... some guy who... I think he
was fired or something by the plant, and
he decides to wreak vengeance upon the
plant by demolishing it and radiating
all of Southern California.
Right? So you have this kind of category like to call, after like "sexploitation,"
"nukesploitation" comics, of which you have quite a few also in Japan.
I'll show you some. Now, of course, in
Japan, when you talk about nuclear-
powered superheroes, the first who comes to mind is Tezuka's Atomu (Astro Boy). He runs on a
combination of computer microchips,
computer processing, and he has a small
nuclear reactor that fuels him. In
the manga itself, nuclear energy... from
what I have seen... is not a huge issue.
However, even after Atomu is retired... He
comes out of a kind of an era in
Japanese culture in which nuclear energy
was still the future... the first nuclear
power plant in Japan doesn't go online
until 1966... so in the 1950s, when Atomu
is created, it was still kind of a dream... truly a
dream technology. No one really knows how it'll manifest and the problems that
manifest around it. But after Atomu is retired as a manga and animation
serial in the late 1960s... after the first...
not the first but the
next wave of nuclear power reactors
start going online in early 1970s, the
Japanese nuclear power industry has tons
of money from the government and from
the utilities, and they start creating a
lot of propaganda for newspapers, and
also they start targeting children very
heavily. I think they realized that... with
the various pollution issues
that were happening in Japan and
a lot of skepticism about the
dreams of industrialization in Japan by
the late 60s in early 70s... that they were
going to have to target the next generation
of Japanese, so they aggressively start
pursuing children and start hiring top
cartoonists: Matsumoto Reiji, who you might
know as [the creator of] Space Battleship Yamato.
He becomes kind of party to this in the
1990s. But in the 1970s, Tezuka's
studio produces a number of
manga. This is a children's book in quasi-
manga form... meaning that it doesn't really have any panel breakdowns,
but it has speech balloons...
about Atomu... the jungle... the animals of the African jungle. They're
suffering from some kind of new Ice Age
they want Africa to be warm again, so
they need some kind of super-power
energy to warm the entirety of Africa,
which is a really frightening idea now,
with global warming. So one of the
jungle animals, who of course come from
Jungle Emperor... those are the famous
manga from the 50s and animation from
the 60s... they know Atomu, of course,
because they have links with Tezuka,
so they send a party to Japan to get
some education at... I think it's Genshiryoku Daigaku (Atomic Energy University)
in Japan, led by Atomu's creator,
Ochanomizu sensei, and Astro Boy
(or Atomu) goes back to Africa
with the animals carrying a nuclear
power reactor on his head. They create
their reactor, they hook up to the
reactor to these jinkō taiyō -artificial suns - that warm Africa, and all
the animals are happy again. There's a
really scary episode in it where there's
an earthquake... because everyone thinks
that, since there are earthquakes in Japan, you shouldn't
make reactors... the reactors will fall
apart... and this is something you
typically see in children's pro-nuclear
propaganda in the 70s, and that is kind
of the counter-argument: not run away
from the reactor, but that the reactor is the
best built building in the area, so in
the case of a tsunami or earthquake, run
towards the reactor, because that's where
you'll be safe. That appears in this
comic and number of other ones. In the end, all the jungle animals, are happy and nuclear
power saves the day. Now, the nuclear
industry was also doing more covert
things in the biggest manga and youth
publications at the time. Shōnen
magazine, you might know... it was at this time, before Shōnen Jump
outran it... around this time... soon
thereafter... was the weekly manga magazine
with the highest print run... I'm guessing
around this time is around three million
per week... very high-level content, but
occasionally, you'll have content in it
that is such that suggests that someone
bought page space to commission it,
because it's fairly low-grade material
in terms of entertainment value. One of
them that anti-nuclear critics picked up
on was this thing you see on the left,
which is Tokyo Daiteiden (The Great
Tokyo Blackout). This appeared in 1978,
one year after the New York blackout, and the premise is that you have TEPCO -
Tokyo Power Electric Company -
this is a guy who works at the at the company. There's a
blackout for various reasons. It's a super-hot, summer day. Everyone's using air
conditioning, so some freak accidents
occur, where the coal-fired plants have
to shut down, a lightning storm happens,
the power lines fall out,
Tokyo plummets into a blackout, there's
car accidents, people are suffocating
inside...
pregnant women are suffocating inside
elevators, everything... and finally, the
Tokyo Electric (TEPCO) salaryman comes to
the rescue and finds a way to go and
re-rig the grid so that electricity is
back on. And it never names nuclear
energy, but there's a message at the end
that, basically, Japan needs to find more
reliable energy sources, and "reliable" in
this era meant "not depending on foreign
oil," but also "something that could be
expanded very fast," and that in that era...
in the 1970s... that meant
nuclear energy. So you had a kind of a covert manga that wasn't naming
nuclear energy but creating a kind of a
culture of fear and dissatisfaction
around Japan's existing energy
infrastructure.
Now, also in gekiga magazines for young
men,
you also had, by the late... mid-1970s, the
appearance of anti-nuclear power
movements, which started taking off in
this moment, especially in the
countryside, also making its way into
kind of sexploitation/nukeploitation
comics at the time. The first such
example and most interesting and
exciting most example is this worked by
an artist is probably not well known
outside of Japan but well-known
to gekiga fans in Japan named Miyaya
Kazuhiko. He started off in the 70s
doing critiques of American bases, of
issues like Minamata... pollution issues,
usually in exploitation format, and then
in 1976, he spends a summer in Mie
Prefecture and southern Mie Prefecture, and
southern Mie Prefecture at the time was
fighting and successfully fought the
creation of a nuclear power plant a
little bit south of Ise area. So what
this story is that some fishermen will
not sell the rights to their land or to
the sea to the nuclear power industry.
The nuclear power industry and their
lackeys in the local prefectural government
hire yakuza (gangsters) to off the rest of the
fishermen, so they kill... She and her
husband are the last holdouts.
She's a diver for pearls. They come, they
kill him, they think they also drown her,
but she rises back up from the dead and
then spends the last 200 pages of the
serial harpooning yakuza with a
harpoon, and often
diving in and out of the water in a
highly suggestive and sexual fashion. So
already... at this this point, you also
have a number of filmmakers starting to
make manga about... about or with nuclear
power in the background... and it's
interesting that this artist uses a
female protagonist, given the fact
that, especially in the Japanese
countryside, the anti-nuclear power
movement was largely led by women.
Part of the reason is that a lot of men
were on dekasegi, so they would not have been in the countryside. They were
in cities working, but also, people have
argued that women in the countryside
were less satisfied with a one-time
payout from industry to sell fishing
rights and land rights, whereas women
were more interested in kind of
protecting the land for their children,
for grandchildren, and for generations to
come. Now, kind of an interesting figure in
this is Katsumata Susumu, and his
background I'll talk about a little bit
later, but he's interesting, because while
volume-wise he didn't create the
greatest number of pages on nuclear...
anti-nuclear power issues or
pro-nuclear power issues prior to
Fukushima, he did create the widest array
of material, and that includes story manga, so a couple of 30-page stories, one of which is
featured in the show at [the] Honolulu [Museum of Art]. He also created a large number
of four-panel strips for a magazine
called Fujin Minshū Shimbun, which was a
Japanese Communist party-related
feminist weekly newspaper, which later on
broke ties with the Communist Party, but
they hired him as a cartoonist in the
late 70s and 80s to write cartoons on a
number of topics. He stayed with them for
about 15 years, and probably 1/5... maybe
over a hundred of the four panel scripts...
deal with nuclear weapons and nuclear power, and it kind of
gives a very local view of kind of
the range of what nuclear power issues
meant to Japan. It wasn't just about
Hiroshima or Fukushima, right? There's a
whole range of issues that are captured
in his work, and I'll show some examples
at the end. When I got into this, I kind
of got into this... fell into this topic
kind of by accident. I was planning on
doing a very basic collection of Katsumata
Susumu's anti-nuclear manga with a very basic essay. So the
manga would have been about 150 pages,
and my essay was supposed to be about
5,000 words... and ended up becoming 60,000 words... and so the book had this split, and
there's a long story, but it's basically
going to be at least two publications
now. This is not the cover, but this book
from Breakdown Press, which will include
some of the manga and some non-nuclear
manga, will be out probably in March. And
then, I'm currently revising a manuscript
called "No Nukes for Dinner: How One
Cartoonist (referring to Katsumata) and His Country Learned to Distrust the Atom."
Now, the book that's coming out from Breakdown Press is a straight-up translation...
well, that's not true - there's some added material... of a book that came out in 2011 in Japan.
Even though it includes manga from the
1970s and 1980s, the book itself was
published after 2011. And for me, one of
the interesting things about kind of the
outpouring... the cultural outpouring that
came after the meltdowns in 2011 was
also kind of the archive opened up... that
you... if you were attentive, you learned a
lot about the history of nuclear power
in Japan. You also learned about a lot of
artists who had been forgotten, that...
There is this image that Japanese... that
Japan had one of the smallest and
weakest anti-nuclear-power movements... and
that may be the case relative to places
like the United States or Germany, but if
you look at the documentation and you
also look at the cultural responses, it
seems like if Japan is... at least in manga...
there's the most... the largest number and
largest variety of anti-nuclear-power cultural responses
prior to Fukushima than any other country, right?
Now, one of the distinctive things about
anti-nuclear literature and visual
culture in Japan is that there is
quite a large amount of material on the
men who worked in the nuclear power
plants, not in the control room, but who
are hired as maintenance workers during
periodic inspections and shutdowns.
At nuclear power plants, they've gone
by a number of names. One is
"hibaku rōdōsha," - "irradiated laborers." Another one is.. another one's more descriptive:
"shitauke rōdōsha" - "subcontracted laborers." And the "subcontracting" refers to the fact
that they weren't direct employees of
utilities, but oftentimes hired by small
subsidiaries [that] often have a number of
yakuza middlemen, who were kind of
skimming off of hazard pay and daily
wages. The first kind of exposes that
you have in Japan in the late 1970s,
prior to the Three Mile Island, trying to
out the nuclear power industry and its
advertising of being kind of the perfect
industry for energy production in the
future were actually books about the
labor system at the plants. There's a
couple of... one was written by... can't remember his
name... Mori something-or-other. He used to work at the plant, and then he wrote a
diary of the dirty conditions at the plant. And then someone
named Higuchi Kunio wrote a book. He was a journalist who started working at the
plant and then wrote about his
experiences. But this is also the case
since the meltdowns.
Maybe a number of you who have seen this
manga, which was translated into English
this past year:
Tatsuta Kazuto, who's kind of a no-name
manga artist using a pen name here. He
was hard up for work, so he got a job as
a clean-up
worker at Daiichi, and I believe 2013 or
12 is when he first went. And he was there
for two or three stints, and he wrote
about 600 pages worth of kind of a
comics reportage about what was going on
at the nuclear power at the cleanup site
Fukushima Daiichi - not at all critical of
the industry, focusing very specifically
on kind of ground details of what's
happening during the cleanup. But part
of the reason I show this is to
say that although, this is kind
of a new this is a kind of a new manga... a new
approach to manga-making in the disaster,
when it was published after 2011, it also
has a history, in the sense that, like I
said before, that there's a large amount
of literature in Japan focusing
specifically on nuclear power laborers.
And the most famous book used another
name -
"genpatsu jipushi" - here meaning "nuclear
power plant gypsy" - a name
meant to signify these workers' marginal
status in terms of Japanese society, but
also the fact that they didn't have
secure work... that after a month or a few
weeks, a plant... after the inspection
period was over, or after they had
exceeded their radiation doses for that
year, they were either shifted off to a
new plant, or they had to wait the year
until their radiation dosages were
back down under the allowable rate, right? So this is a famous book that kind of broke
things open in 1979. Also, in the late
1970s, the first visual images of inside
nuclear power plants (not produced by the
industry) started to be published. The
best known photographer... photojournalist
who stuck with nuclear power issues even
to the present... his name is Higuchi Kenji.
Higuchi Kenji's
first exhibition and book was about
Yokkaichi...
about the pollution and asthma cases at
the petrochemical estate in Mie
Prefecture and Yokkaichi. Then, he
starts doing a number of other photo
books about things like disabled
veterans, about coal miners, about Okunoshima
in Hiroshima Prefecture, which was the site of a gas...
gas weapons plant during World
War II, right? About the afflictions that
its workers were still suffering in the
post-war period. So Higuchi, like a lot
of the people who were involved in
writing this kind of material, were really
interested in kind of laborers that
didn't fit the model of kind of "Japan is
number one," right? Not white-collar
laborers, but subcontracted laborers who
were not supported by the system. So he
gets access after many tries inside a
nuclear power plant. These were shot at
Tsuruga, north of Kyoto, in Fukui
Prefecture in 1977, and these images had
a huge impact, not just on how people
thought about nuclear power, but also on
more creative expressions
about nuclear power. One of the first
manga - perhaps the first manga depiction
of these hibaku rōdōsha - irradiated
laborers - was actually done by Mizuki
Shigeru, who you might know as the author
of Kitarō, the famous yōkai (ghost)
hunter hero... a popular children's comic
since the 1960s. Because of his (Mizuki's)
fame, also because of his experiences, his
career of depicting that kind of
supernatural and creepy, he was hired by
Asahi Graph, I think... Asahi Graph in
1979 to illustrate a short story by Horie Kunio, who did the genpatsu
jipushi book, about a worker who was at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, who eventually
committed suicide. He eventually
committed suicide... I'll get to it in a
second... but it focuses mainly on work conditions
in the plant. And even though it's based
on Horie Kunio's work, which was on-the-
site reporting, Mizuki took a lot of
liberties in terms of how he represented
the interior of nuclear power plants. So
in 1979 - also the year of Three Mile Island -
but also the year that "Alien" was
released. So, in this... on the left, that
image of... first of all, you don't see any
stacks like this in Japanese power
plants... on top left. And this image of a
frightened laborer - this actually comes
from a PR pamphlet of "The China Syndrome," the movie with Jane Fonda and Michael
Douglas, right? So he's appropriating from
kind of a general culture, and these
images - I don't have the image here, but
these pipe images come from Higuchi
Kenji's photographs. However, if you
imagine HR Giger's depictions of the
interior of the alien spaceship [in the movie Alien], there's also that impact, right? And when he's
showing the kind of labor they do, he
heavily exaggerates. Here, a couple of
laborers are inside the containment,
sucking out contaminated goop so that
the reactor will function well. Now, this
book was reprinted... it was a two-part
series in a tabloid... by "tabloid," I'm talking
about the format, not the content... photo
journal in 1979, it was published as a
small book after the meltdowns in 2011.
But they censored or eliminated or
didn't include without any comment one
image, which was the first image of the
original series, and this image shows a
laborer having hung himself on a tree.
This is actually a report from...
a contemporary report, and they think that
the reason that he hung himself... I can't
remember the details... if he left a
suicide note or what... but recently his
girlfriend had left him,
they believe that the reason that
his girlfriend had left him is because
she wanted to have kids, but she was
worried about... because he works in a
radioactive environment...
what kind of genetic damage that would
be for their offspring, right? So you had
these stories of kind of the
difficulties... not necessarily just about
being in danger because of radiation
exposure, but also kind of the culture of
discrimination that has existed
historically in Japan around those who
are inflicted with radioactive exposure.
But after 2011, for reasons that I don't
know, when this was republished, they
decided that this was too sensitive of
an image, even though the story... the man's story is talked about. Now, Katsumata
Susumu also starts his career as an
anti-nuclear cartoonist plenty before
but around this time. His major most work
is actually not a work of manga, though
it is kind of a work of cartooning and
text... there's this book called
"Genpatsu wa naze kowai ka" ("Why Nuclear Power is Scary").
It was first published in 1980 by
Kōbunken, and if you know what Kōbunken is, they are left-leaning
publisher that specialises in books for high
school students and young adults. They
issued this book in 1980. It went through
an expanded reprint after Chernobyl and
then was reprinted again - still in print
now after the Fukushima Daiichi facility.
If you read kind of old... it was made for
high school students, but if you read old
reportage about anti-nuclear movements
in the countryside, you'll sometimes see
this book cited as the first and
sometimes the only book that farmers and
fishermen are reading to kind of get a
different version than what the industry
was feeding them through various types
of... you know... PR events. So, in that sense,
Katsumata, who is credited as the
illustrator, was but according to
his wife... he died a few years ago...
according to his wife, Katsumata also
wrote most of the book, and the reason he
was able to do this, I'll explain later,
is because he had a degree in nuclear
physics. So this is released and became kind of
the biggest kind of anti-nuclear
handbook back in the 1980s. It's mainly
text, but he does a number of
illustrations for it also. The first page
is actually the Fukushima Daiichi
facility, which already by the 1970s was
fairly notorious as a dirty and
dangerous place, here with a mushroom
cloud behind it and the waves in the
foreground. And then he does a number of
illustrations illustrating such things
as bioaccumulation of radionuclides.
Even though that maybe what's coming
out normally on a normal day is a low
amount of radiation, that, through
ecological processes, becomes a
significant amount, and also how waste
storage... nuclear waste storage, which
still hasn't been solved in Japan, was
also using a very faulty material. Now,
there is this short two-page manga-format
illustration inside the book, which is
interesting, because it's two pages
from Horie Kunio's "Genpatsu Jipushi,"
and what this two pages show is not
necessarily radiation and how
nuclear power is inhuman because of
its size and its lack of safety
mechanisms, but how, in the design of
nuclear power facilities and reactors,
that the industry really didn't think
about maintenance or humans whatsoever.
And now, this is showing... what it's
showing here is... you know... moving from top right is that... one worker... he has to take
a piss while he's inside the containment.
He has to run out, he has to take off his
NPC (nuclear protective clothing) wear... right? ...which takes a long time. He has to go through... he has to check
his various dosometers to see how much
radiation has been exposed [to]. If he has too
much, he has to wash off and then go back
through it. And it's showing the
different layers and showing how far it
is from where he was working to the
showers... to the shower room, right? Then
going through various things, and he has
to wait in line to get to the shower, and
finally, he finds a drain in which he can
piss, right? So there's many ways that
people were talking about the inhumanity
of nuclear power. Katsumata thought
it was interesting, as Horie did,
that this kind of inhumanity of the
nuclear power industry could be found
at a very kind of local and trivial
level, in the sense that power plants
weren't designed with people in mind...
that even though they had to be cleaned
and maintained... people had to work inside them... that the whole... the way that it was
structured, not only because of radiation,
but how things were designed or not
designed, made it such that even... you know...small activities, necessary activities,
like relieving yourself weren't
mapped into the design, right? Now, not
only was Katsumata reading
literature at the time, he also did a
number of... he did site visits. He took
a bunch of snapshots. Very interestingly,
he visited in 1984 the Fukushima Daiichi
facility and then another facility which
is about 10 kilometers south of the Daiichi
facility - the Fukushima Daini facility - on one
trip. And they're interesting photographs, not only
because now we think of Fukushima
Daiichi facility as a site of horror, but
also, you get to see in 1984 someone with
credentials like Katsumata Susumu,
who is obviously connected to the
anti-nuclear power movement... you get to
see how far in he was allowed by the
industry at the time. The thinking
at that time of the industry was, "if
they're enemies, let them in, and we'll
convince them otherwise," right? So here
you have a shot of the facilities. Now
they don't have these kind of coverings...
you know, the blue and white speckled
ones that became famous after 2011.
That's the original
containment. Here you have guards at the gates. He was allowed as far into where workers
were passing out after work, getting their
radiation checks, and changing. Some of
the more interesting, scary photographs
are actually the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
And I think it's oftentimes forgotten
that the Fukushima Daini plant was also
inundated by tsunami and there was quite a fear of that... I think for... maybe someone
here knows better than I do, but I
believe that the Fukushima Daini plant's
power also went out for a short time.
But here's an interesting photograph, and
it tells you very clearly how little the
Japanese nuclear industry thought about
tsunami safety in the 1980s. So this is
the seawall blocking the plant. You can
see how high it is, which is not very
high at all. I think subsequently, in the 90s
they raised this about three times, but
this is the idea of anti-tsunami
protection. What you have here are... These
three boxes are the intakes for the
seawater... the pumps to the intake... sea
water to cool the reactors. This is the
turbine building that generates
electricity, and these are where the
reactors are, right? So you can see that...
no protection, and the first things that
knocked out are the mechanisms for
bringing in water to keep things cool,
right? So you have things like this. He
was also allowed this far into the plant...
into kind of the forest of pipes. Here, you kind of see... you know... how
hard it is to maneuver a human body. You
can imagine if you actually have to fix
things inside here how difficult that is.
And then signage like this... obviously, he
focused on this signage: "Ochiru na! Otosu na!" which means... This is
basically the idea of safety for the
nuclear power industry at the time.
"Otosu na!" means "Don't drop it!" -
In this case, "Don't drop any pipes, don't
drop any tools, because if you drop them,
you'll damage them, and that costs a lot
of money" - and "Ochiru na!" is referring to the workers: "Don't fall, not because if you
fall, you'll get hurt, but if you get hurt,
it means we have to report it to the
Japanese government, which means a lot of money and probably bad publicity, so stay
safe and stay healthy, not for your own
benefit, but mainly for the benefit of
maintaining the image of total safety
and perfect labor safety record
inside the plant," right? Now, Katsumata
used this material, including some of
his other research, to make a number of... two story manga in the
mid-1980s. The one that's exhibited at
the Honolulu Museum of Art was the first
one. I think you have about, what, 10 pages? Yeah, 10 pages of a work called,
"Deep Sea Fish" (Shinkaigyo), that was
published in a magazine called Comic
Baku, which was kind of a torchbearer of
Garo in the early 1980s but only lasted
three or four years. This story begins on a
nice spring day. You have fūzoku (entertainment for commoners)
here, right? A strip joint, obviously for
the male workers at the plant in the
area... traffic into the plant... This is not named as the Fukushima
Daiichi. It's called, I think, like Soma Genshiryoku Hatsudensho (Soma Nuclear Power Facility)...
so Soma being the area just north of
Fukushima Daiichi. So essentially this is set
at Fukushima Daiichi, right? They talk
about their daily life. This guy, he
can't find housing, so he's staying at
the local love hotel, right? Then they get
their jobs for the day. As you can see, this is related to that photograph
earlier... kind of a detailed account of what is involved in getting in and
out of the plant for a laborer... and then,
kind of... these images showing
what work was like inside the reactor.
Again, you can see this is from the
photograph that he took... about, you know,
low-level radiation. "Ga ga ga," of course, is a
Geiger counter crying. And then, how do
you... not only how do you depict kind of
the menial quality of the labor but also
how do you depict the fact of being
attacked by invisible radiation. Here you
have... while the Geiger counter is singing,
you have this man with small dots
starting to accumulate on him like pocks,
right? And this is kind of more than... the
kind of... the irradiation episode... This is
the episode that I think is most powerful.
You have this older worker who is not
allowed outside of the plant until he
gets his radiation count down to a
certain level, and the problem is that,
while he was working, he cut his finger,
and radiation has got into his wound, so
he has to use a wire brush in the open
wound and get out the particles, so the
Japanese is really great, right? "Bari bari!"
"Bari bari bari bari bari bari bari bari..." Right? The sound of iron wires
against this, and the blood's flying out,
right? So this process, and then finally,
they get outside for a lunch break. This
guy has the afternoon out. This is the
guy who stays in a love hotel. Because he's
already had his daily dosage of
radiation, he gets the day off... the
rest of the day off.
They ask him what he's doing. He says, "I'm
gonna pick up a chick and have some fun."
They say, "Yeah, right." Eventually, the
manga ends with him actually at his
hotel with a chick, but only virtually. He's spent the afternoon watching
porn on his TV and then falling asleep.
And then, that last image is very nice.
You have these marks on his back, which
double as... triple as... a couple of... triple
as... not a couple... as three things: one, as
hickeys... imagined hickeys from his
session of imagined lovemaking, right?
And then also perhaps... what do you call it?... spots
from being exposed to radiation...
obviously an exaggeration of what would
actually manifest under those kind of
work conditions. And then also probably
flower petals... cherry blossom... cherry
blossom petals signifying kind of the
passing of youth... all kind of mapped
onto this guy's back and kind of a
layering of different visual symbols. Now,
Katsumata's second work... it's
not in the show... is also about nuclear
power plant laborers, and I won't go into
a synopsis, but I just want to say that
what was interesting about it is that it's called
"Devil Fish." The other work is called
"Deep Sea Fish." Another distinctive thing
about Japanese nuclear visual culture is
the plethora of marine metaphors. Some of
this has to do with the fact that, just... you
know... Japan is by the sea and has a close
relationship with the sea... but also,
unlike in the United States, where
most nuclear power plants are built on
lakes or especially on rivers, in Japan
they're all built on the sea... on the
Pacific Ocean and on the Japan Sea side.
So there's a relationship with the sea there. Obviously! Otherwise, we wouldn't have
the current situation. But also, you have
this guy talking about how it's so quiet,
especially in this outfit. It's so muffled that it's like being at
the bottom of the ocean. It's very scary,
it's very lonely. But also, in this story,
a kind of side story is that an octopus gets stuck in one of the sea
water intakes, and they have to flush him
out, and these guys say that being a
worker is like being an octopus. Being a
nuclear worker like being an octopus,
because it's like killing yourself. I
guess octopi, when they're
stressed, eat their own limbs. I didn't know this. But there's also some other, I
think, metaphors going on here. For those of you
who know a little bit about Japanese
labor history, there's something called
tako-beya, right?
"Octopus rooms." And they were kind of
these small contained rooms in which you
locked laborers in so that they would
work harder and they couldn't get out so
like... bad living conditions for
workers. And also, if you read... I came across this recently... someone named Kamata
Satoshi, who's a well-known journalist.
He wrote an expose about Toyota in the
1970s. It was translated as "Japan in the
Passing Lane." There's also a number of
marine metaphors there, apparently, like
working at... working inside the Toyota
factory on the [production] line was like working at the bottom of the sea
even there. So there's some complicated
things going on here in terms of marine
metaphors and the kind of language used for labor. Now, what I want to just finish
with... I have a lot of material, but I'm just going to look at a little bit... is:
"Why did Katsumata come to write this material?" Right? Because he did not approach it as
a subject matter that was alien to him.
It wasn't as a subject matter for
integrating as a backdrop into an
exploitation action comic. There's
something very personal to him, and that
is because he had an undergraduate degree in
physics and a master's degree in nuclear
physics, which he received in the early 1970s.
Now, there's a lot of writing about the
campus struggles in Japan in the late 1960s,
about how higher education and even high
school education was essentially shut
down by anti-Vietnam protests and
protests about how Japanese
universities were run, corruption
scandals, et cetera. One of the things that's
often not talked about is that some of
the biggest struggles... protests... were
actually about issues about the
Japanese universities' connection to
developing big science... industrialized
science in Japan. And Katsumata was
actually at the center of this. So
Katsumata started off in...
He debuted in Garo in 1966, while he was a
student...
a college student. And he started off
writing four-panel strips and then took
off in the early 1970s doing stories starring kappa (mythological water imps). He himself is from
Ishinomaki in Tohoku. He grew up
on a farm. He spent his childhood leading
cows around grazing and making sure they
got back at night. But he started doing
comics in the early 1970s. They kind of
take the kappa... tanuki (badgers)... you know, these
kind of classical, mythological creatures...
and look at them as if they actually
existed, but also how they would be
subject to the process of modernization in
the Japanese countryside. Typically, the kappa are kind of like
dekasegi workers... left behind. They are
men who cannot... non-men that could not
travel to the city to make a living, so
they kind of live subdued and poor
lives in the countryside and resort
to violence because of boredom and other
reasons. So he does this kind of work, but
what he was well known... best known for and
first popular for was his four-panel strips
on various social and political issues,
sometimes dealing with the campus
struggles. And here, you can see a lot of
the Garo artists were picked up in the
mainstream press, at least briefly, in the
late 1960s and early 70s.
Here, you see an article in the Mainichi
Shinbun from 1969. The Japanese: "Genshi kakubutsu rigakushi ga manga egaitara..."
So, "If a Nuclear Physics Graduate Drew Manga..." And this is
an era in which a lot of magazines since
the 1960s were really
interested in... kind of curious about... this
image of Japanese university students
which was, on a mass scale, a new thing in
Japan... spending their time not reading
Marx and Kant but reading manga in their
free time. So you had lots of essays in
the mid 60s and late 60s about that. But
of course, this takes it another level up,
you know? Not only do you have college
students reading manga, but you have a
nuclear physics graduate student, who's supposed to be the elite of Japanese
education, spending his free time drawing
this frivolous thing called manga, right?
Now, so this is kind of images of what
was going kind of classic images of what
was going on at universities in the late
1960s: political infighting between hard
left groups, barricading of universities...
but as I said, something has often
forgotten is the connections between big
science and the campus
protests in the late 1960s. This is
fairly well documented for the American
case. There's lots of writing about how
professors and students at various
universities, especially at MIT, were
inspired by the Vietnam War and opposing
combinations of kind of military and
academic collaborations and research on
universities. Something like this was
also happening on Japanese universities.
One of the big issues was something that
happened I think in 1966, where it came
out that a number of Japanese
universities in the leading physics
academic society had been receiving
money from the American military to
conduct studies about how to combat
tropical diseases. And, of course, this is
an era during the Vietnam War, so how
to combat tropical disease had very
direct application to how the United
States was conducting itself globally.
So there's a lot of protests about that.
Also, Yamamoto Yoshitaka, who is
probably the most recognizable leader of
the anti-campus protests in the late 1960s -
he too was a graduate student in nuclear
physics, all right? Here, you have a
tate-kanban - a standing sideboard - about howJapanese university researchers needed
to think more about what their research
was going towards. There was no such
thing as "pure research" - that if you were
conducting research, even if you knew
that your own research wasn't directly
going into
different types of military
applications or problematic industrial
applications, that you were part of a
system and needed to think about that
more in detail. This is at Tokyo
University.
Now, Katsumata Susumu was at a place
called Tokyo Kyōiku Daigaku, which
functionally doesn't exist anymore. It's
now Tsukuba Daigaku.
But, Tsukuba Daigaku was also at the... Tokyo Kyōiku Daigaku was also
at the center of this. It was split up -
a number of campuses. The campus that had
the science department (where Katsumata
was) was close to Todai. It's in Ōtsuka.
There's a Tsukuba Daigaku campus
there now. But it was at the center of
things, because the Japanese government
wanted to create a kind of all-science
research university, and so they picked a
university out of the national
university system. They picked Tokyo Kyōiku Daigaku, because, as I
said, it was split up between multiple
campuses. The university was already
thinking about how to integrate, live, and
move outside of the university, so the
government hopped on that and wanted to
basically liquidate all the non-science
departments and move the main
facility... the main university... out to
Tsukuba, which is like 100 kilometers north
of Tokyo. So there's that. Students are
really opposed to it. They were opposed to this idea that science and
humanities education should be split,
that scientists also needed to think
about those kind of issues. It was also interested in Tokyo Kyōiku
Daigaku, because one of its most
esteemed faculty and, for a time, the
university president was Tomonga Shinichirō, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965
alongside Richard Feynman and...
what's-his-name... [Julian Schwinger] for
quantum electrodynamics. So they
basically wanted to scoop out this elite
physics department and move it to Tsukuba. And ,of course, at this time, the main
reason they want to focus on
physics and nuclear physics is, of course,
because the nuclear industry is fast
expanding at this time in Japan in the
1960s. Now, Tomonga Shinichirō was a participant at
the first Pugwash symposium in the late
1970s, which was against the proliferation of
nuclear weapons. He wins the Nobel Prize
in 1965. Also on campus at Tokyo
Kyōiku Daigaku, there's a number of
student Pugwash conferences and
non-proliferation kind of groups and
conferences on campus. So is this kind of
anti-proliferation culture at Tokyo University of Education. And even
Katsumata Susumu, even though he does
very few nuclear comics at this time,
some of his earliest comics, which you see
here, are influenced by this culture
at Tokyo Kyōiku Daigaku. So here
are two of his earliest cartoons from
Garo from 1966. Here, you have Japanese
schoolchildren making an A-bomb... of
course, written in English... Romaji, right?
It's called, "Preschool Stupidification." What was
the Japanese? Can't remember what it was. But, so, you have this, and then you have another cartoon about
the splintering of the anti-nuclear
weapons movement in Japan based on kind
of left-wing political differences in
the 1960s. He also does a number of...
a large number of cartoons about these
campus struggles. A small number of them
deal with science education on campus
and how its kind of an impoverished and
politically problematic system. So,
cartoons like this: We have a professor
lecturing in front of a chalkboard full of equations... looks like
he's talking about something smart, but
then they come out to the end, and he goes, "So...
Audrey Hepburn got divorced?" "Not yet."
Right? So, the setting of high
education, and they're just gossiping
about
the lowest kind of things. This one's good,
too. So a student's been given a tour of
the university. "This is the library."
"Wow, so big!" "This is the laboratory."
"Impressive!" "This is the lecture hall."
"Spacious!" "Anyway, congratulations on
graduating!" Right? And then you have some cartoons which are dealing with the fact
that people were concerned... We have one
here about, you know, radiation... I think
the only one... where this guy says that if
you expose plants [to radiation], they will... you
know... grow more healthily and you'll be
able to feed three times as many people.
And then this boy comes out with three
times as many heads. And then there's
number of of cartoons dealing with, as I
said before, infiltration of American
military money into the Japanese science
research. Here's one: A doctor talking
about why this experimental subject
rabbit has died. They say, "It's strange! We
just bought this machine. How could he
die just from this? The equipment is brand-
new!" "Maybe because we bought it with American
military money..." So the idea that, you know, American military money being researched
for war-making... that obviously it causes
death on its subjects. And here's another
one: The janitor, he peeks over a researcher's shoulder. He says, "I bet
that's American military research." He
says, "No way! Get out of here!" And then, he
stands on the equipment to see what
actually he saw, right? Let's see... and then
a number of cartoons about how students
were forcing elderly faculty to think
more critically about what the purposes
of their research was. And there's no
idea of pure research. Here, one is the
the researcher's locked in his office, and
he has to go to the bathroom. He's told to
basically swallow it, and of course,
swallow it out of a scientific beaker.
And then things like this... what happened
in the early... late 60s and early 70s...
basically, the campus struggle was
broken apart by increased political
police activity. Here, you have high school students at
a university taking an entrance exam,
right? The riot police come in, scribble
over his tests, and then walk out laughing,
right? Now... or this... This is one of the
last ones that Katsumata did on this topic. Here, you have new students
being shown various facilities on campus,
all right? This is the chemistry lab,
electronics department,... But, of course, the tour of campus means very carefully
circumnavigating the political
activities that are going on outside,
right? Now, Katsumata quits his PhD in 1971. He says because he
doesn't have the money, but if you think
about it, he knew also that nuclear physics
research... the most likely job he had for
him was in the nuclear industry, and so
he quits in 1971 - the same year that
Fukushima Daiichi, I believe, is the third
plant goes online. So he's kind of
a defector from this industry. And I'm
gonna stop here, but I just want to give
you a preview of the other kind of
material that he made. As I said, the
great bulk of his work was in something
called Fujin Minshū Shinbun, which was founded by a group called
Fujin Minshū Kurabu, which was active since the late 40s and 50s in the
anti-nuclear protest inspired by the
Lucky Dragon incident. And then, in
the 1980s and 90s, they did a large number
of features specifically about... from a
feminist perspective... about how local
farmers and fisherwomen were combating the
expansion of nuclear power in the
Japanese countryside, right? So,
"Genpatsu wa tomerareru: Onna no pawaa tsunagō." Right?
And then, also about how so-called housewives in the
city we're also doing a lot of protests
against electricity bills going up
because supposedly because of increased
building of nuclear power reactors. And
Katsumata does a large number of
cartoons... not at all from a feminist
perspective... but a large number of
cartoons about various issues. And as I
said before, they're very interesting.
I ended up, you know... Most of them I didn't know what they were about, and the more
you look at them, you realize there's
tons of micro histories of nuclear
issues in Japan that aren't even
represented by knowing the main nuclear
power plants. There's a number of
cartoons about Three Mile Island, about...
you know... radiated marine life, about
different ways that Japanese scientists...
This refers to kind of a project in the
mid-1970s where a certain type of flower
which was highly sensitive to even low
levels of radiation went from blue to
pink even if it was exposed to a small
amount of radiation. Activists planted
these plants around nuclear power
facilities, and they turned color,
showing that some radiation was escaping. A number of cartoons about the labor
system... also things that aren't really
known, which is that Japan tried
aggressively to get rid of its nuclear
waste in the 1980s by dumping it in the
Pacific Ocean following the lead of
England and America and other countries,
and then a lot of the countries in the
Pacific formed the nuclear-free Pacific
movement and opposed this. So you have a number of cartoons in which
representatives at the Japanese nuclear
industry or the government are basically
mobbed and thrown in the ocean by
these men.
And also how Nakasone is using ODA...
overseas development aid... as a kind of
exchange to like get rid of its nuclear
waste... et cetera. A lot of cartoons about
Chernobyl... about proliferation of weapons
and Japan's position as a kind of a new
nuclear weapons base in the Pacific for
the United States... et cetera. So I'm going to stop
there. As I said, eventually this project
will probably result in... actually three
publications. One will be "Fukushima
Devil Fish," a collection of manga about
nuclear power and non-nuclear power
story manga, which should be out in
March. My book manuscript, which... I don't
know when it'll be out or finished... maybe
two years? I don't know. One year? And then, also orphaned in the breakup of this
project were a large... 160 cartoons
that Katsumata drew about nuclear
power. I don't know how I'm going to
publish these. I might have to self-
publish these eventually. I mean, they
are of interest historically, but, you know,
there's there's no market on the
comics market for this kind of material.
So we'll see what happens. But anyway,
thank you for listening, and I hope it was of interest.
