Japanese 469 - Japanese Literature, and Culture II

In class, we watched a documentary about the 2011 triple disaster called No Man's Zone. The line in the above Haiku (5-7-5) by Terashima Tadashi (83 years old), "tsunami scars", is very powerful when watching the documentary because they show image after image of the scars he talks about in his haiku, those scars being the debris and ruined towns. The fact that many of these “scars” are probably still there today because these places and the people who lived there were arguably abandoned by their country, has a feeling that resonates deeply within this poem. When I imagine what this author experienced before writing this poem it gives me a deep sense of sadness. I feel that nobody deserves to experience events like this but the fact that someone of their age had to experience this seems somehow even more terrible. To imagine that they may have lived in the same house their whole lives to have it destroyed and washed away is devastating. I imagine him waking up on the floor of the evacuation site with an aching body and having the memories of his reality wash over him again like it had every morning since the first morning after the disaster.

One of Rachel Dinitto's main points in her article “Narrating the Cultural Trauma of 3.11: The Debris of Post Fukushima Literature and Film” is about debris being a visual reminder of the devastation and destruction of the triple disasters, namely the earthquake and tsunami. This idea of debris creating a narrative of trauma as a collective identity helps me to further understand this poem and the depth to what the author means by “tsunami scars”. Scars are typically very personal and something unique to each beholder, however, in this case, the scars are something that is shared among the communities that were affected. The author of this poem is not alone in his suffering nor in his understanding of the scars that were left physically (in the community) and mentally.