Having developed a reading of Nao’s diary that attends to Ozeki’s nuanced representation of racialization and racism in the United States, I wish to return to a point made earlier in this chapter about the limitations of Ruth’s ways of framing, reading, and interpreting Nao’s stories—specifically, as that of a potential victim of Japan’s 3.11 disasters.
Speculating that the Hello Kitty Lunchbox that contains Nao’s diary, Haruki #1’s letters, diary, and wristwatch might have been washed away from Japan by giant tsunami waves, Ruth reads Nao’s diary with a keen interest to know whether Nao and her family members are safe, unhurt by the series of disasters whose destructiveness sent shock waves across the
world. Even though as her reading proceeds, it becomes clear to her that the factors troubling and threatening the precarious lives of Nao and her parents involve not so much natural catastrophes but rather state-sanctioned/directed forms of violence and dispossession, Ruth persists in wondering whether the members of this Japanese family have survived the 3.11 disasters. Indeed, even when forewarned by Muriel, a retired anthropologist living on Cortes Island, that she should not “let [her] narrative preferences interfere with [her] forensic work,”
and informed by Muriel that the Hello Kitty Lunchbox might more likely have arrived on the shore of North America “from a cruise ship, going up the Inside Passage” than “from the tsunami,” Ruth insists on incorporating Nao’s stories into the “tsunami narrative” that she, as a novelist, prefers (32-33). While such narrative preference, as I have noted before, might be helpful to bring forward a reconsideration of how Nao’s stories can potentially be read in relation to the transpacific consequences of Japan’s 3.11 disasters that have affected lives across the Pacific, it also prevents Ruth from directly addressing and further examining the problems of discrimination and bullying that Nao and her parents have experienced as immigrants in the United States and as returnees in Japan.
Indeed, as the primary recipient, reader, and interpreter of Nao’s diary, Ruth has once again arguably allowed her narrative preferences to interfere with her “forensic work.” In addition to the “tsunami narrative,” a dominant frame of knowing through which Ruth attempts to make sense of Nao’s experiences, Ozeki’s readers will find in the “Epilogue”
section in A Tale that there is yet another narrative mode into which Ruth has sought to incorporate Nao’s stories, one that Chih-ming Wang has aptly called the “immigrant mode.”
Put specifically, in face of the sense of helplessness and frustration that arises from her failure to know “how [Nao’s] diary and the rest of the stuff washed up . . . on Cortes Island” (400), Ruth has attempted to overcome the difficulty of “not-knowing” (400) by imagining Nao as having survived Japan’s 3.11 disasters and becoming once again a student-immigrant studying history in a graduate school, possibly in Paris or Canada (382, 402). From a
presumed tsunami narrative to a presumed immigrant one, the epistemological frames
through which Ruth has chosen to approach Nao’s stories have their own shortcomings, each casting certain details of Nao’s precarious life—especially the ones related to the problems of racial discrimination in multicultural America—as irrelevant and/or unworthy of attention. In highlighting the flaws of Ruth’s reading practice here, I do not seek to entirely undermine Ruth’s dedicated attempt to reach out to Nao, to try to save her, or to imagine her as being safe. Instead, I intend to point out that, by having Ruth, a character with her own
limitations—including possessing a self-described “lousy memory” (398)—to read Nao’s diary, Ozeki makes clear to her readers that the task of producing meaning about stories as rich and complicated as those produced by Nao should not be assigned to a single character alone. Indeed, in his observation that Nao’s story is “never Ruth’s alone to engage,”
Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis has pointed out that “what Ruth initially wants to see as her own solitary, interior work is never conducted in isolation but always in communal dialogue, whether she likes it or not.” That is, throughout the process of making sense of Nao’s story, Ruth has to admit that “she needs the help of Benoit to translate, Oliver to remember pieces of the puzzle she’s forgotten, Dr. Rongstad Leistiko to provide backstory about Nao’s father, Haruki #2, and Muriel, importantly, to help Ruth feel not-crazy.” Drawing on Davis’s
observations, I would argue that by characterizing Ruth as a reader with her own flaws, limitations, or even biases when it comes to reading Nao’s diary, Ozeki has sought to invite her readers to engage with Ruth’s “forensic work,” to locate and fill in the missing “pieces of the puzzle” that Ruth has forgotten or overlooked.
In A Tale, Ozeki has largely assigned the task of exposing the limits of the epistemological frames that Ruth has imposed on Nao’s narrative to a character named Oliver, a fictional version of Ozeki’s partner.30 Unlike Muriel, Oliver has not explicitly
30 In an interview with Mary Stein, Ozeki discussed how her decision to create a semi-fictional version of herself in A Tale was actually affected by a suggestion from her husband, Oliver, who observed that in doing so, Ozeki might be able to “directly respond to the real events and to bring the earthquake and the tsunami into the
informed Ruth about the possible futility of her hermeneutic exploration of Nao’s stories through the narrative preferences that she privileges. His seemingly random but potentially constructive comments, observations, and reflections about particular details of Nao’s diary have however provided a useful backdrop for Ruth to advance, adjust, and at times question the assumptions that she has made about Nao’s stories. The background information with which Oliver has supplied Ruth ranges from the formation of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (36), the differences between Japanese crows and American ones (54-55), the time lapse between the different historical presents in which Ruth and Nao respectively live (312-13), to the violence that Canada, as a settler colonial state, has inflicted upon Indigenous peoples (121), and more. To exemplify how Ozeki’s readers might—like Oliver—engage and help out with Ruth’s “forensic work,” I wish to turn to a specific comment that Oliver made in response to Nao’s experiences of being bullied. Such a comment, as I will explain, invites critical reflection on specific histories of violence and dispossession that make visible the interconnectedness of lives across the Pacific in unexpected ways, a form of transpacific relationality that Ozeki’s novel potentially enables its readers to relearn or reimagine.
In one particular scene, having learned about the horrendous forms of bullying that Nao received from not only her classmates, but also her homeroom teacher in Japan, Oliver
responded with outrage, pointing out that:
How could the school allow that to happen? How could that teacher participate? . . . But it makes total sense . . . We live in a bully culture. Politicians, corporations, the banks, the military. All bullies and crooks. They steal, they torture people, they make these insane rules and set the tone. . . . Look at Guantánamo . . . Look at Abu Ghraib.
America’s bad, but Canada’s no better. People just going with the program, too scared to speak up. Look at the Tar Sands. Just like Tepco. I fucking hate it. (121)
heart of the book.” Ozeki mentioned that this decision has also led her to put a fictional version of Oliver in her novel. See Ozeki “Interview.”
As a direct response to the institutional violence facing Nao, Oliver’s comment does more than just to express outrage over the problems of Japan’s education system. As Guy
Beauregard argues, “Oliver’s positioning of Canada as ‘no better’ than the US . . . provides an opportunity to renew forms of critical engagement with Canada in the imperial present”
(106). Observing how specific passages in A Tale represent Canada as a presumed site of safety, especially after the events of 9/11, Beauregard quotes Julie McGonegal’s observation that makes explicit how “Canada has contributed to national and transnational racist
discourses of the other, not only by participating in regimes of war in Afghanistan and elsewhere, but also by enacting legislation aimed at enhancing ‘national security’” (qtd. in Beauregard 106). Such legislation, as elaborated in Enakshi Dua, Narda Razack, and Jody Nyasha Warner’s account, includes “the Anti-Terrorism Act, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, and the Public Safety Act”—all of which “[have] not only affected people of colour and would be asylum seekers to Canada; [they have] also been used to police
Indigenous peoples, including those protesting land claims in British Columbia (qtd. in Beauregard 106-07). Drawing attention to the rise of Canada’s “national security” regime after 9/11 and the regulatory effects it has on minority and Indigenous populations in Canada, Beauregard contends that “[f]or scholars committed to developing forms of Asian Canadian critique, a scrupulous engagement with Ozeki’s novel must prise apart depictions of Canada as a presumed place of refuge, to ask instead how these laws and others have been mobilized to bolster imperial formations and a settler colonial regime” (107).
In addition to Canada’s apparent resemblance to the United States in terms of its systemic discrimination against racialized populations both within and outside of its borders, Oliver’s comment, or specifically, the unlikely comparison he draws between the “Tar Sands”
and “Tepco,” raises concerns over another form of state-directed dispossession, one that is more capitalist-oriented. In their introduction to A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice, Tony Weis et al. have called Canada’s tar sands industry “an
environmental injustice of the highest order” (3). Located in the Athabasca River Basin in Alberta, Canada, where one of the world’s largest reserves of fossil energy sits, the tar sands are “regularly identified as the world’s biggest energy project and site of capital investment”
(4). The major agents facilitating the vast expansion of this industry include energy infrastructure companies such as TransCanada and Enbridge, and the local and central governments of Alberta and Canada, to name but a few. As Weis et al. make clear, while “the heart of the tar sands industry” lies in the Athabasca River Basin, its infrastructure is
“increasingly continental in scope” (4). An ever-expanding network of pipelines and roads, massive refineries and energy-generation facilities, and ports and shipping system spans across the North American continent and beyond, enabling a faster production, distribution, and consumption of the fossil fuel extracted from Alberta. What accompanies the growth of the tar sands industry and the wealth and profit it generated, however, is “immensely more deforestation, habitat destruction, toxic wastewater, and greenhouse gas emissions” (7). The ancestral homelands of First Nations communities, including that of the Cree and Dene, as well as Métis peoples, are particularly vulnerable to the unprecedented scale of damage the tar sands industry has brought forward (4). In his study of how First Nations communities have been disproportionately affected by Canada’s tar sands industry, Clayton Thomas-Muller, echoing Weis et al.’s concerns, has argued that one of the major causes that leads to
“an increase in the presence of deadly forms of cancers and other autoimmune diseases”
among the peoples living close to the tar sands has been the leakage of vast bodies of
contaminated water—a byproduct of the tar sands extraction process—from its tailing ponds into the Athabasca River and ground water in the surrounding area. Thomas-Muller identifies the alarming predicaments of communities threatened by the expansion of the tar sands industry as the “[Canadian] government-sanctioned slow industrial genocide of First Nations in the ‘national sacrifice zone.’”
Building upon Oliver’s observation that the “Tar sands [is] [j]ust like Tepco,” the company responsible for the ongoing nuclear crisis in Fukushima, I would suggest that what Thomas-Muller calls the “slow industrial genocide” that is currently unfolding in the
Athabasca River Basin in Canada is by no means an isolated phenomenon. Instead, it bears a poignant resemblance to the perils facing local residents of Fukushima, Japan’s “national sacrifice zone.” In the immediate aftermath of Japan’s 3.11 disasters, there was a rise of scholarly efforts in Japan and elsewhere aiming to lay bare the Japanese government’s role in obfuscating, rationalizing, or perpetuating the “sacrifices” it imposes on Fukushima as well as other geographically remote and economically disenfranchised communities housing nuclear power facilities. In The System of Sacrifice: Fukushima and Okinawa, Tetsuya Takahashi recognizes the displaced residents of Fukushima as a sacrificed people (giseisha) whose sacrifices are discursively constructed by the Japanese state as something sacred, noble, and therefore justifiable. Specifically, he argues that in Japan’s nuclear industry, a “system of sacrifice,” “the profit of one group of people is produced and sustained through the sacrifice of the lives . . . of another group. . . . While such sacrifice is usually concealed, [at times] it is justified and glorified by the community (state, people, society, corporations etc.) as a “noble sacrifice” (toutoi gisei)” (42).31
In a similar vein, in her article “Fukushima’s ‘Zones of Sacrifice,’” Wendy Matsumura has called attention to the systemic injustice and violence that the Japanese state and
corporations inflicted upon the displaced populations of Fukushima and beyond. Unlike Takahashi, who has placed critical emphasis on the discursive dimension of the problem, Matsumura has sought to understand Japan’s “sacrifice” of sites and communities peripheral
31 The original text of Takahashi’s definition of what he terms as “the system of sacrifice” in Japanese reads as follows: 犠牲のシステムでは、或る者 (たち) の利益が、他のもの (たち) の生活 (生命、健康、日 常、財産、尊厳、希望等々) を犠牲にして生み出され、維持される。犠牲にする者の利益は、犠牲に されるものの犠牲なしには生み出されないし、維持されない。この犠牲は、通常、隠されているか、
共同体 (国家、国民、社会、企業等々) にとっての『尊い犠牲』として美化され、正当化されてい る。
to its urban centers in relation to the logic of capitalism. She argues that the nuclear meltdown in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on and after March 11, 2011 has heightened the Japanese government’s role in facilitating the circulation of capital—both fixed and mobile—in and around the “underdeveloped,” “unproductive spaces” of
Fukushima. While conventionally speaking, presumably remote areas such as Fukushima or the Tōhoku region in general are regarded as sites unworthy of capital investment,
Matsumura has sought to argue otherwise by citing Valerie Kuletz’s argument that
unproductive spaces, or what might be called “zones of sacrifice,” are “desirable because of [their] undesirability.” Following Kuletz’s analysis of the desirability of spaces that are deemed “unproductive” in the “American West”—spaces that the U.S. government has regarded as geopolitically remote, sparsely populated, and therefore usable as nuclear testing sites, Matsumura observes that in the case of Fukushima and other rural regions in Japan, it was precisely their geopolitical marginality that has enabled state-sanctioned capital
extraction, accumulation, and exploitation by nuclear-energy related corporations there.32 Sacrificed “for the broader requirements of national security, international stability, and the pursuit of scientific knowledge,” zones of sacrifice might be “rendered uninhabitable.” Yet, as Matsumura argues, “their value to the nation-state, industry and science are great.”
Similar to that of Canada’s Athabasca River Basin, the profit-making capacities of Japan’s zones of sacrifice come at the cost of devastating the livelihoods of human and non-human life forms that inhabit those places. In Fukushima, due to the uncontrollable leakage of radioactive materials from the three crippled reactors of the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, approximately 109,000 people were evacuated and displaced in the immediate aftermath of
32 In her 1998 book, Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West, Kuletz has argued that for Indian peoples living in the vast desert areas geographically known as the American West, U.S.
nuclearism and its effects on the desert landscapes signifies “a form of twentieth-century genocide” (115). For Kuletz’s further examination of the history of U.S. nuclear colonialism in what she calls “landscapes of sacrifice,” see her 2001 article, “Invisible Spaces, Violent Places: Cold War Nuclear and Militarized Landscapes.”
the 3.11 disasters.33 Matsumura observes that being “pieces in the global puzzle of energy exploitation,” zone of sacrifice like Fukushima “links areas like Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, an unfinished ‘permanent’ nuclear waste disposal site, to uranium mines in indigenous lands in Northern Saskatchewan, Western Australia, Namibia, Niger and Gabon.” It also connects Japan’s own nuclear reprocessing site in Rokkasho village, located in Aomori prefecture, to England’s Sellafield nuclear reprocessing complex, “which reprocesses Japanese reactors’
spent nuclear fuel.” Arguably, more can be added into the “global puzzle of energy
exploitation” that Matsumura calls attention to, including the Athabasca River Basin where the tar sands industry is wreaking havoc.34
Based on an examination of how capital accumulates through the logic of extraction and dispossession, Matsumura’s work on the interconnectedness between differentially produced zones of sacrifice brings us back to Oliver’s comment foregrounding unexpected linkages between Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, the Tar Sands, and Tepco. A response to Nao’s suffering in school, Oliver’s comment, as I have discussed, calls attention to not only
militaristic forms of violence but also capitalist ones. In this way, it does not only help shape into being Beauregard’s critical evaluation of Canada’s contribution to discourses and policies of racism after 9/11. It contributes to an understanding of Canada’s racist treatment of Indigenous communities with regard to the ruthless expansion of its tar sands industry, an industry whose destructiveness shares striking similarities with what is currently unfolding in
33 For more information about official data concerning the number of evacuees from Fukushima, see the official website of Japan’s Reconstruction Agency: http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/english/.
34 In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Nixon has identified a form of violence, namely,
“slow violence,” that is qualitatively different from that which is “customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility”
(2). He defines “slow violence” as a kind of violence that “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). In her introduction to Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, Stoler has similarly called attention to a kind of violence that takes time to unfold itself, describing the processes it exacts its damage on its subjects as ones of “ruination,” imperial acts that “‘bring ruin upon,’ exerting material and social force in the present” (11). She argues that “[t]o speak of colonial ruination is to trace the fragile and durable substance of
(2). He defines “slow violence” as a kind of violence that “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). In her introduction to Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, Stoler has similarly called attention to a kind of violence that takes time to unfold itself, describing the processes it exacts its damage on its subjects as ones of “ruination,” imperial acts that “‘bring ruin upon,’ exerting material and social force in the present” (11). She argues that “[t]o speak of colonial ruination is to trace the fragile and durable substance of