Mark Pendleton

Mourning as Global Politics: Embodied Grief and Activism in Post-Aum Tokyo

When she awoke on the morning of 20 March 1995, Takahashi Shizue was, in her words, ‘‘just a regular housewife’’ planning a long-awaited hot spring holiday to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaidô (Takahashi, 2008, pp. 3–4, p. 81). Just a few hours later, her husband, Kazumasa, had been killed by toxic sarin gas at his workplace, the Kasumigaseki subway station, and Takahashi had begun a transformation into a prominent victims’ rights advocate and international spokesperson for victims of terrorism. This article focuses on Takahashi as an individual and looks at how her changing rhetoric of embodied grief signified a broader shift in her politics. I demonstrate that Takahashi’s understanding of grief was influenced at least in part by connections with international victims of crime and terrorism, predominantly in the United States, and shaped by a global discourse of terrorism and war, made prominent after the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001. Takahashi came to public prominence at a time of intense media interest in the gas attacks that killed her husband, and concomitant interest in Aum Shinrikyô, the religious sect to which the perpetrators of the gassings belonged. As Helen Hardacre (2007, p. 175) has shown, the media was thoroughly obsessed with Aum, with the major newspaper Asahi Shimbun devoting front-page space to stories about the sect for 79 days after the incident, and the Fuji television daily news broadcast featuring Aum stories for 113 days after the gassing. While much of this initial media interest focused on the sect and its leadership, within a short time the focus shifted to victims. Takahashi, as an articulate, grieving widow willing to speak out through the media, came to embody victimhood to the public. The media certainly played a significant role in the promotion of Takahashi into this role, as did members of the legal team that assisted with the creation of victims’ groups. In this article, however, I am primarily interested in suggesting how concepts of grief and the embodied experiences of trauma shape victim activism in a global

Engaging Hashima: Memory Work, Site-Based Affects, and the Possibilities of Interruption

How is memory embodied, narrated, interrupted, and reworked? Here, we take a postphenomenological approach to memory work that is attentive to how site-based affects prompt and ossify, but also transmogrify, memory of place. With reference to an intensely traumatized, but also domesticated and entropied, environment—the island of Hashima, off the coast from Nagasaki City in Japan—we demonstrate the relevance and explanatory reach of culturally specific accounts of memory, time, and place; how an attentiveness to cultural context in the making of meaning helps mark out the epistemological violences that accrue around sites such as Hashima as objects of analysis in and of themselves; and the affective capacities of the materialities and forces that compose such sites, which can present a welter of surfaces and interiorities that are sensuously “felt” as memory.

Subway to Street: Spaces of Traumatic Memory, Counter-memory and Recovery in post-Aum Tokyo

Understandings of urban space in Tokyo underwent two significant revisions in the 1990s, focused on the spaces of the subway and the street. These revisions occurred around the 1995 subway sarin gas incident and in the revival of street protest in new social movements. The article brings together the two spaces by discussing how one group of sarin incident victims staged a commemorative event in 2005 – the Memorial Walking Care – to re-engage with underground sites of traumatic memory by walking a Underground route above them along the streets. It draws on the recognition in Murakami Harukis Underground of a violence in Japanese society figuratively and literally lurking beneath the feet; and on sociologist Mōri Yoshitakas theorisation of the street as a potential site for new oppositional politics. Situating the event within the frames of trauma theory and performance studies, I read the Memorial Walking Care as both traumatic repetition of loss and potential working through of trauma. The underground and the street act as spatial and conceptual markers for the difference between these processes.

Reconfiguring ruins:Beyond Ruinenlust

What explains the global proliferation of interest in ruins? Can ruins be understood beyond their common framing as products of European Romanticism? Might a transdisciplinary approach allow us to see ruins differently? These questions underpinned the Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded project Reconfiguring Ruins, which deployed approaches from history, literature, East Asian studies, and geography to reflect on how ruins from different historical contexts are understood by reference to different theoretical frameworks. In recognition of the value of learning from other models of knowledge production, the project also involved a successful collaboration with the Museum of London Archaeology and the artist-led community The NewBridge Project in Newcastle. By bringing these varied sets of knowledges to bear on the project’s excavations of specific sites in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan, the article argues for an understanding of ruins as thresholds, with ruin sites providing unique insights into the relationship between lived pasts, presents, and futures. It does so by developing three key themes that reflect on the process of working collaboratively across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, including professional archaeology: inter- and transdisciplinarity, the limits of cocreation, and traveling meanings and praxis. Meanings of specific ruins are constructed out of specific languages and cultural resonances and read though different disciplines, but can also be reconfigured through concepts and practices that travel beyond disciplinary, cultural, and linguistic borders. As we show here, the ruin is, and should be, a relational concept that moves beyond the romantic notion of Ruinenlust.

Male sex work and society

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