The Fractured Looking-glass: Twentieth-century History in Post-meltdown Japanese Theater

The disasters of March 2011 in Japan made a significant impact in the realms of culture, economics, and politics. While the tremendous loss of life resulting from the tsunami was a great shock, long-lasting consequences of the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant have continued to trouble existing understandings of local and national identity. The duration of nuclear contamination has forced people concerned with the affected areas to re-frame their perspectives on time. The disaster’s effects also undermine shared assumptions such as the capabilities of the nation as a guarantor of safety and equality for all citizens, which has led people to revisit dominant narratives of history. As a medium that unfolds over time and manipulates a collective audience’s experience of time, performance is ideally situated as a means for constructing and claiming temporal trauma. This chapter examines post-3.11 perspectives on nuclear history in theater, focusing primarily on a play by Fukushima-based playwright Satō Shigenori entitled Twenty-faces, the Mysterious Man of Looking-glass Land (Kagami no kuni no kaijin Nijūmensō). Originally performed in Kōriyama, Fukushima by local troupe Unit Rabbits, the play combines time travel, thickly layered cross-temporal character identities, and the extra-textual significance of place, community, and actors’ real-life identities to critique state strategies stretching from World War II to the present moment.