Abstract
This qualitative research employs expressive forms of writing to explore the author’s traumatic life experience in relation to the Great East Japan Earthquake which took place on March 11, 2011. The methodology chosen in the current study was a poetic-narrative autoethnography. The author selected both a collection of his English poems and poetic expressions of his Japanese second language students in English writing. While looking at each writer’s emotional response to this experience, narrative reflections and understandings of the tragedy were added. This study provides insights into a cultural trauma emergent from the disaster and presents the author’s personal experiences of living alone in a foreign country at the time of the dramatic earthquake and tsunami taking place in his home country.
Introduction
Beginning
It comes over suddenly The ground shakes and Electricity disappears from the classroom The students scream from the outside It’s just a two minute event . . . I’m only sitting on a chair in the room.(Ken Shimizu
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My own emotional interactions with the writing of my students hit me harder than I could ever have predicted. I lost my words when I first read this poem and had no idea how to react. I read it several times, but even now, I cannot envisage what it would be like to experience a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. Imagining a “sudden” and “two-minute” quake, which is unusual, terrified me, and I thought that if I had been there in that moment, I might have thought, “Oh my god, this is the end of my life!” The Great East Japan Earthquake was sudden and just a “two-minute event,” but it changed our lives completely through the ongoing challenges it would create. At this moment, nobody understood that this earthquake was just the “beginning” of this life-changing event.
On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m., the Great East Japan Earthquake and resultant tsunami and nuclear power plant disasters struck Japan. Perhaps not surprisingly, these catastrophes also created serious social problems. While many foreign media focused on the leak of radiation in the Fukushima nuclear power plants and problematized the situation, Japanese people psychologically suffered also from the damage of the tsunami and earthquake. Through the media, we see how big the earthquake was and how seriously it affected the pacific coastal regions in east Japan. 2 However, I believe that more could be done to add the voices and stories of individuals to the overall earthquake report.
The aim of this article is to examine my experiences of the Great East Japan Earthquake through a poetic-narrative autoethnography. We know very little about the subjective perceptions and experiences of people related to this massive disaster. The article therefore furthers appreciation of this deeply traumatic national event through recreating memories of the earthquake. It brings together a collection of my poems and Japanese second language students’ poetic expressions in English writing related to the disaster. I intend to work with the students’ responses and immediacy as a counterpoint to my delayed and physically distant experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami. In so doing, this article provides some insight into my personal experiences of living in metaphorical darkness in the United States at the time my home country, Japan, suffered from the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant accident. This article is not going to just end with my story but also have some lessons that might help others to cope with their own lives.
Poetic Inquiries Into Deeply Traumatic Life Experiences
Investigating the Great East Japan Earthquake experience involves two concepts: cultural trauma and societal shared trauma. Cultural trauma is considered to appear “when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (Alexander, 2003, p. 1). Previous studies on cultural trauma in applied linguistics which explored people’s experience of other earthquake events (Jung, 2009; Ulysse, 2011), as well as the Great East Japan Earthquake (Iida, 2016), have found that telling personal stories in narrative and poetic forms conveys not only the writers’ emotional insights into the catastrophic moment but also how they understand and respond to the event at the individual level.
Likewise, research on shared trauma has been discussed from psychological viewpoints in terms of unique and dynamic interactions between survivors and social supporters or between clients and clinicians in such tragic events as September 11 (Tosone, 2011) or Hurricane Katrina (Boasso, Overstreet, & Ruscher, 2015; Tosone, Bauwens & Glassman, 2016). As supported by Tosone (2010), shared trauma can be used to describe “the experience of clinicians exposed to the same collective trauma as their clients” (p. 25). Sharing and discussing traumatic experiences can have both positive and negative psychological impacts on narrators, survivors, clients, or students and teachers who experienced traumatic events (Boasso et al., 2015; Tosone et al., 2016). Regardless of the psychological effects, it is crucial to listen to their voices to appreciate their experience because “[t]he psychological responses of individuals to trauma vary greatly. The meaning of any traumatic event is a complex interaction of the event itself and the individual’s past, present and expected future, as well as biological givens and social contexts” (Ursano, Fullerton, & McCaughey, 1994, p. 5). From this point of view, to witness someone’s life through personal life stories takes on a significant meaning when understanding societal shared trauma.
As of now, poetic inquiry has been used in the social sciences as a way to investigate both individual and social issues in our lives: for example, love stories (Leggo, 2009), addiction and recovery (Sameshima & Vandermause, 2009), harassment in the academic context (Faulkner, Calafell, & Grimes, 2009), and wartime experiences (Hanauer, 2014, 2015). Philosophically, a poetic inquiry is “aligned with the work of poets through literary history who were and are committed to using poetry as a means to communicate experiences of memory, identity, place, relationality, hope, fear and/or desire” (Prendergast, 2009, p. xxxvii). In this sense, poetry can be qualitative data to explore the poet’s emotional insights regarding experiences (Hanauer, 2010; Iida, 2012, 2016; Prendergast, 2013), and “has the capacity to penetrate experience more deeply than prose” (Furman, 2006, p. 561).
Previous studies on poetry writing have employed arts-based research through which we view “virtual reality created nondiscursively by a whole thinking-feeling person using metaphoric language, symbolic behavior, or virtual shapes, sounds, or movement” (Alexander, 2003, p. 5) and aim to “re-create lived experience and evoke emotional responses” (Richardson, 1994, p. 521). As illustrated by Hanauer (2012a, 2012b), poetry is a powerful resource to recreate, explore, and appreciate the story of Holocaust and Kindertransport—a deeply social and cultural (perhaps, in his case, inherited family) trauma. Likewise, a poetic inquiry into the magnitude 9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake conducted by Iida (2016) exemplifies the effectiveness of using second language poetry produced by Japanese learners of English to characterize their catastrophic experiences and to understand cultural trauma. Thus, poetry writing as data in arts-based research is a “practical and powerful means for reconstruction of worlds” (Richardson, 1993, p. 705) and has great potential to recreate and recontextualize somebody’s unseen or unspoken memories. In other words, the use of poetry can open space for researchers to witness writers’ personal lives and to possibly explore cultural and shared traumas related to such a highly dramatic national event as the massive earthquake or tsunami.
Drawing on theories of poetic inquiry and arts-based research, the current study explores my own experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake. At present, how someone’s mediated or second-hand experience helps to understand a deeply traumatic national event remains relatively unexplored. The current study focuses on this issue and examines my experience of this tragedy by bringing together a collection of my English poems and poetic expressions of my Japanese students of English in their English composition. The question is of interest in relation to the understanding of my self-positioning combined with a critique of positioning discourses.
Methodological Framework
The current study employs a poetic-narrative autoethnography modeled on that of Hanauer (2012a) through which the researcher chooses several poems on personally meaningful life events and adds his narrative reflections and understandings of the experience. This approach is supported with Prendergast’s (2009) theoretical underpinnings of poetic inquiry: Poetic inquiry is found in “practices of autobiography and autoethnography as research methods in narrative inquiry” (p. xxi) and its potential is “to synthesize experience in a direct and affective way” (p. xxii).
In the field of Applied Linguistics, research on trauma and deeply dramatic life experiences involves the analysis of personal stories of the individual. Especially, expressive forms of writing such as narratives (Jung, 2009) and poetry (Iida, 2016; Inwood, 2011; Ulysse, 2011) are seen as crucial resources to recreate and understand catastrophic memories and make invisible events visible. For instance, poetry allows us to make “the world visible in new and different ways, in ways ordinary social science writing does not allow” (Denzin, 2014, p. 86). In addition, personal stories produced in expressive writing not only address sociocultural issues surrounding the writer but also represent his or her state of mind. In this sense, for human beings, writing is “a form of deeply personal communication” (Hanauer, 2010, p. 8) and it can be data to explore and understand personal life events of the individual.
While this study puts an emphasis on personal narratives and poetry, it incorporates the concept of autoethnography into the research framework. Autoethnography is an approach to research which “seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)” (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011, para. 1). Denzin (2014) also argues that the value of this research approach lies in its ability to enable researchers “to take up each person’s life in its immediate particularity and to ground the life in its historical moment” (p. x). While autoethnography has the potential to explore a specific life memory of the individual including his or her voices, emotions, thoughts, and experiences, it has been criticized in some ways. For example, Madison (2006) mentioned that “[w]hen the gaze is on one’s own navel one cannot see the ground upon which one strands or significant others standing nearby” (p. 321). From a different perspective, Duncan (2004) believes that autoethnographies should “not consist solely of the researcher’s opinions, but are also supported by other data that can confirm or triangulate those opinions” (p. 5). In short, criticisms of autoethnography come from being too subjective (i.e., navel gazing) and a lack of analytical clarity and rigor. Reflecting on these points, autoethnographies need to have lessons for others, not just an exercise in self-refection: an autoethnographic approach is of necessity a deeply personal exploration, but it aims to “invite readers to enter the author’s world and to use what they learn there to reflect on, understand, and cope with their own lives” (Ellis et al., 2011, para. 24).
With consideration into these methodological issues, the current study employs a poetic-narrative autoethnography to recreate, contextualize, and explore my experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake by analyzing multiple voices expressed in my English poems and poetic expressions in the writing of Japanese second language students while incorporating my narrative reflections on these texts.
My poems were written during my stay in the United States in 2011. At that time, I was writing poems about my life on a regular basis, and six poems related to the Great East Japan Earthquake were chosen as primary data in the current study. On the other hand, I considered that the students’ writing of direct experience, although less sophisticated than my writing, would help recreate and better understand this national tragedy through contradistinction. Student data were collected in a first-year college English course in the 2011 spring semester at a Japanese public university. A typical 90-minute lesson was divided into two parts: approximately 45 minutes for teaching the textbook and the remaining time for poetry writing. The goal of this writing project was for my students to express their experiences of the Great East Japan Earthquake through second language poetry writing. Though I assigned my students to write poetry on this dramatic experience, they had freedom to choose and express any moment of this tragedy; on the other hand, they did not have to describe memories that they felt uncomfortable to explore. 3 This approach was based on Pennebaker’s (2004) Flip-Out Rule: “If you fear that you might get too upset while writing about a particular topic, don’t write about it. If you think that something will cause you to flip out, write about something else” (p. 13). Through giving this option, the project was conducted in a way that attempted to avoid the experience of further emotional pain for students in the writing process.
This project consisted of the two stages. The first stage was to understand the genre of poetry. As my students have very little experience of poetry writing, my lesson began with teaching the concept of poetry writing by showing some poems produced by second language writers. 4 In this stage, my students analyzed the structure of each poem, understood clues about meaning, and developed a sense of how to interpret the poem. The second stage involved exploration and recreation of the Great East Japan Earthquake experiences. To make the task of second language poetry writing accomplishable, my students first reflected on and freewrote significant moments in Japanese, and then tried to produce poetry in English by drawing on the Japanese freewriting of their earthquake experiences. They composed their poems as they liked with no specific rules or format. This writing exercise was a recursive process through which students wrote a poem, conducted peer review, and revised their writing based on feedback from classmates.
When my students submitted their poems in the last lesson, I gave each student the Informed Consent Form to ask their participation in the current study. To reduce the research bias, they were informed that their participation was voluntary, it would not affect their final grade, and their poems would not be used until I finished grading. In so doing, I collected earthquake poetry written in English from seven students.
Living in Darkness at the Time of the Great East Japan Earthquake
No Title
Magnitude 9.0 earthquake Nobody has expected Nobody has experienced Nobody hasn’t seen Nobody hasn’t known Now, we [Japanese] know it. (Shingo Aizawa)
“Nobody hasn’t seen”—but I did not see the magnitude 9.0 earthquake. “Nobody hasn’t known”—but I did not know it. This poem would help me to gain a sense of being in Japan at the time of the quake although I was not actually there. I am a respondent to mediated experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake—my traumatic experience is mediated by media discourses and also mediated by my Japanese students and their poetic expressions in English writing.
The Great East Japan Earthquake is a deeply personal and traumatic memory for me. I am not sure if I am ready to share my personal experience with others. Six years have already passed since the disaster took place in Japan, but even now it is quite challenging to express this type of experience. Every time I try to share my story with others, I suddenly stop talking, lose my words, and shed tears. Similar to the slow process of ongoing reconstruction of the devastated towns in East Japan, I feel that my inner time stops in 2011 and is moving ahead to the future very slowly. I wonder if this experience will ever completely disappear from my memory.
Beginning
A cold, shiny morning in Indiana, PA A clear blue sky with no cloud Quiet, calm, and beautiful Friday as usual. It is the same morning. Wake up around 10:00 with a headache which is a slightly heavier hangover than usual. Nothing is different in my life Nothing is wrong in my life Until I watch THAT news. Wash my face and Walk to the living room, “Good morning!” I greet my roommate with my raspy voice. “Good morning, how are you feeling? Are you . . . okay?” he responds with his smile. It is the same conversation. His tone of voice, smile, behavior . . . Everything is the same as usual. Suddenly, he asks me, “Is your country okay?” with his soft voice while watching the news on TV. I don’t understand why he is asking me. “Is anything wrong?” I respond. He points at the monitor silently and says “Look!!” Nothing is wrong in my life Until I watch THAT scene. At first, I see unfamiliar phrases on the screen “Tsunami Reached San Francisco” on the headline. I have no idea what the news is about. But, the next moment, Very shocking news comes into sight. “JAPAN HIT BY 8.9 MAGNITUDE QUAKE
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” “TSUNAMI HITS” I can’t figure out what is happening in my county. And then, An unbelievable and tragic scene jumps into my eyes. A big wave swallows the airport. People, cars, houses, bridges . . . washed away. “Am I still in a dream?” asking myself. “Is it a reality or only a bad joke?” asking myself. I don’t remember what my roommate is talking to me about. But, his serious face brings me back to the dark, awful, and unacceptable reality. (Iida, 2011, unpublished work)
My story of the Great East Japan Earthquake begins in March 2011 in the United States. At that time, I was in the midst of busily finalizing my doctoral dissertation in Indiana, Pennsylvania. I defended my dissertation on February 28 and was working hard to submit it to the graduate school on March 15. In fact, I had already purchased my airplane ticket to fly back to my country on March 21. I was to start a new career as an assistant professor of second language literacy education at a Japanese public university. During my very last moments in the United States, I felt an exciting sense of accomplishment that I would be awarded a PhD and return to my country soon; at the same time, I was so sad that I would have to part with my friends and professors and leave the town where I had spent 6 years.
The day before the earthquake, March 10, 2011, I hung out with my friends at a local bar until it closed, much like any regular Thursday night. I had a very relaxing time because I had almost finished revising my dissertation and already sent my belongings to Japan. In such a happy and celebratory atmosphere, how could I foresee such a horrible and shocking event? At that time, nobody could imagine that a tremendous natural disaster would soon occur in my home country.
The next morning, my life dramatically changed. My first contact with the Great East Japan Earthquake was through CNN breaking news on the tsunami reaching San Francisco. By the time I first watched the news, almost 10 hours had already passed since the earthquake took place in Japan. This tragedy caused me to lose my words not only because of the scale of the disaster but also because of the location of the quake. My hometown was located only 220 miles away from the earthquake epicenter. This reality robbed me of a happy, bright, and hopeful future. It took a while to figure out what was happening to me and to understand the current situation in my home country. From the moment I saw the news, my concerns for my life had shifted from myself as an international student who made an academic accomplishment in the United States to my family, relatives, friends, and Japanese people who were suffering from the disaster in Japan.
Even now, I can’t remember what I thought and felt when watching on CNN the series of tragic scenes in my country; but in the next moment, I was sitting at my computer and attempting to make a phone call to my family. I just wanted to know of their safety as soon as possible. It did not matter how difficult it might be to reach the phone in such an urgent situation. Nor did it matter what time it was in Japan. I was just attempting to reach my family, and I continued to try to make a phone call via Skype.
Phone Call
March 11, at 10:45 am, in Indiana Hurry up to log on my computer. Waiting for starting up while wearing a head-set and earphone. Ready to make a phone call . . . Come on . . . Hurry up . . . I need to make a phone call right now . . . Click a Skype icon and find “My Family” from the contact list. Click it without any hesitation No hesitation Doesn’t matter what time it is in Japan. Just click the same line repeatedly until hearing the phone ring. The first ring . . . nobody answers. The second ring . . . nobody answers. Keep calling . . . but no answer for a minute. Call it again with no intervals, Click, click and click. Hear the same ring sound. The first ring . . . nobody answers. The second ring . . . nobody answers. The next moment, Hear a different sound “He . . . o . . .” Jumpy sound, but it’s a low and small voice. “It’s me, Dad, Atsushi. Do you hear me? Hello . . . It’s . . . ” I speak aloud. “Are you Atsushi?” Dad answers. “Yeah, it’s me, dad. It’s me. Are you okay?” I ask. Once hearing his voice, I unconsciously stop clicking and lean back in a chair slowly. Then, I close my eyes to try to catch his every single word. (Iida, 2011, unpublished work)
While making a phone call, I shouted in my heart, “Dad, Mom, and Grandma, please . . . please be safe.” I could sense that something seemed to be wrong with my mother. She looked forward to talking with me every weekend on Skype, but it was not the case this time. My father hesitated to change the phone to my mother. She seemed so exhausted and shocked by the earthquake and ongoing aftershocks that she had no energy to talk with anyone. He said to me repeatedly, “She is okay. She is absolutely okay. Don’t worry.” I knew that my father said this in order that I not worry; but in fact, this really made me wonder: “Why does my dad continue to say that she is ‘okay’ over and over again?” “Hasn’t she probably really been injured?” “Is she really okay?” and “Does he hide something about her?” I started to doubt him. I wanted to believe in my father, but the unusual state of my mind made it quite difficult to accept his words. I was so relieved that none of my family members was dead or missing, but my heart remained in turmoil.
Fear of Aftershock
After March 11th, an aftershock comes any number of times. At least five times a day. Fight whenever it comes. Each time, afraid that a big earthquake may come again. (Junko Katori)
I was unable to anticipate that this was only a beginning of heartbreaking moments. Even in such a difficult situation—massive earthquake, tremendous tsunami, and ongoing aftershocks in my country, I might somehow be optimistic. It was probably because I had confirmed the safety of my family or because I strongly believed that everything would settle down very soon. Contrary to my expectation, however, the situation was getting more serious and even worse than I had thought.
Empty
The day after the earthquake, Glance at the breaking news from Yahoo Click the title, “2,000 people dead or missing” Understand what is happening there now while being worried about my FAMILY. Three days after the earthquake, Follow the news from Yahoo Click the first title, “5,000-6,000 people dead or missing” Better understand what is happening there now while hoping that my FRIENDS and future COLLEAGUES are safe. Four days after the earthquake, Find the latest news from Yahoo See the title, “over 10,000 people dead or missing” But, I stop to click it while believing that EVERYONE is fine. Just sitting on a black, hard, cushionless chair in my dark, cold, dry room. Nothing comes to my mind Nothing I can hear Nothing I can say No attention I can pay No emotion I can express Empty . . . Empty . . . (Iida, 2011, unpublished work)
During the very last moments of my life in the United States, my thoughts were only of my home country. Every time I watched the news on the Great East Japan Earthquake on the Internet, I realized that it had left huge scars in Japan. In fact, the number of dead and missing people dramatically increased day by day. I had never heard of over 10,000 people dying or going missing in one natural disaster. Nor did I know how to react to this reality. I was physically fine and everything was all right in the United States; but I started to feel how helpless and powerless I was, because I could do nothing for my family and friends in Japan. All of a sudden, survivor guilt was hitting me.
Japanese media seemed to broadcast the most devastated areas or shocking moments every day. While having reported on the truth of this highly traumatic national event, many people must have felt the watching of these scenes more painful and shocking than what they actually experienced. One typical scene that symbolized this natural disaster is the tsunami hitting in the most devastated city, Kesennuma—a port town located on the Pacific Ocean side of Japan.
No Title
Every moment I watch TV I can’t think this is my country. A fire at Kesennuma is just like Tokyo Air Raid. In such situation, I can do NOTHING. I think myself powerless. (Saya Komatsu)
No Title
TV warning Tsunami In a while, watching real Tsunami on TV It’s not a dream It’s not a movie Don’t want to see it But can’t stop see it. Every car is going desperately But drivers can’t escape from it. Every driver must think that “If we reach that big-gray concrete bridge, we can survive!!” I want to believe it, too But the bridge is disappearing into the sea. (Kenji Shimura)
I witnessed these scenes on the Internet in the United States, but even after I went back to Japan, I watched the same moments on TV over and over again. The vision of the tsunami striking the airport, cars and broken houses floating away, the town burnt out. It was shocking and depressing. Actually, the metaphorical expression, Tokyo Air Raid from Saya Komatsu’s poem, reminded me of my first impression when I saw an aerial photo of a devastated city in a local newspaper with the headline, “JAPAN SUFFERS EPIC TRAGEDY”: “Is it really happening in Japan now? Oh my god!! I cannot believe it. It looks identical to the scenes in my history textbook in which towns were ablaze because of firebombing raids during World War II.”
While Japanese media was slow in response to the accident of the power plants in Fukushima, the U.S. media took this incident more seriously and immediately reported on the detail every day. I had seen such local newspapers as The Indiana Gazette and Tribune-Review address this issue with the following headlines since March 11: “Nuclear leak less than feared,” “Stricken Japan nuclear plant rocked by second explosion,” “Copters dump seawater on plant,” or “Japan desperate to cool off nukes.” Honestly speaking, I was unable to understand what was really happening and what was about to happen in my country. I was even confused about a slightly different tone between Japanese and U.S. media addressing this disaster. I was wondering why the U.S. media focused more on the accident of the nuclear power plants than the Japanese media. I thought the U.S. media just exaggerated the news on radiation, because the Japanese media reported simply on the situation of damage and the “possibility” of leaking of radiation from the power plants. But in fact, radiation was becoming a more serious problem day by day in my country: Due to the nuclear power plants being struck by tsunami, radiation had been leaking outside the plants. Upon recognizing this chaotic reality through the Internet and social media, Japanese people seemed to become sensitive to the issue and think carefully about the invisible radioactive materials, the effect of radiation on human bodies, the safe level of radiation exposure all the time.
Radioactivity
I think we may die by radioactivity soon. Will we suffer from cancer? My house is 200 km from the power plant Is it far enough to avoid? (Erika Yamashita)
Erika’s poem helped me to consider what Japanese people were concerned about in their postquake lives. I believe that they must have been scared of the invisible, harmful nuclear chemical. Even those who survived from a series of natural disasters must have been conscious of suffering from cancer or death in their daily lives. They always took risk in being exposed to radiation with no recognition of anything. At that moment, Japanese media seemed to be unable to provide updated and precise information on this accident except for the fact that the Fukushima nuclear power plants were destroyed and the radiation was leaking. This is probably because of the government decision that they did not explain it until everything was confirmed to avoid further confusion in the nation. However, the fact is that their slow action confused, embarrassed, and worried many citizens in and near to the devastated areas.
As time went by, Japanese citizens seemed to figure out what was happening then through the media. They must have responded to this series of tragic moments differently. While some people were relieved to survive from the tsunami, others sometimes got frustrated, disappointed, and even upset. What was really confusing seemed to be the Japanese government’s response to this disaster. It was through the media and government reports that people collected updated information. However, the government sometimes failed in providing precise information or taking appropriate measures for the nuclear power plant accident, which made the situation even worse. I still wonder what would have happened had the Japanese media informed citizens of this incident precisely at an earlier stage as the U.S. media did. If the government had taken an immediate and appropriate action for this series of tragic accidents, citizens might have understood the situation better and been able to control themselves even in such a chaotic situation. Unfortunately, Japanese people felt that the government’s comments were only an excuse to justify their approaches and protect themselves rather than a message to us about how to survive in our postquake life.
Various Mental States
My heart is blue. People disappearing Evacuees still crying Politicians just excusing Japan, where to go? (Yuji Tanaka)
I might have somewhat looked at this series of tragic moments from a third-person perspective since I contacted to my family and confirmed their security. Like an observer, I only watched and heard the news on tsunami every day in the United States. But, the event on March 15 made my memory of the Great East Japan Earthquake too personal and unforgettable.
訃報 6
March 15, at 5:34 am An email from my mom See her name and “訃報” on the title line. I hesitate to open the email. I don’t want to open it, because I can guess what it means. I understand something bad happens. “Should I open it now or just avoid opening it and read the message later?” Now, I decide to open and read the message. “My mother-in-law passed away at 11:55 am on March 15.” Read this sentence over and over again. “She died in her sleep. She looked calm.” Read the message silently. “Don’t worry, I’ll offer her incense sticks for you, Atsushi. I’ll pick you up at Narita on March 21. See you . . .” Try to finish reading her email, but I can’t. A big, warm teardrop running down my cold cheeks Warm tears running down onto the desk No way to stop crying Cry . . . Cry . . . Cry . . . No sound in my apartment except for my sobbing. (Iida, 2011, unpublished work)
This email from my mother made my life tougher and more challenging. My grandmother’s death completely broke my heart and I lost control. I was left by myself in a dark, quiet, and lonely world. After the Great East Japan Earthquake, the word “death” had become very close to me through the media. It goes without saying that I was incredibly shocked that the numbers of people dead in the devastated area grew every day.
Yet, I had never realized that losing only one person was much more painful, sorrowful, and heartbreaking than could be the death of hundreds or thousands of people.
Despite it being what should have been a triumphant time of my life as my doctoral studies came to an end, the loss of someone so close to me bit to the bone: I became empty, blank, and unable to think about anything positive. Seriously, I asked myself: How can I make smile? How can I communicate with my friends? Do I have to smile in such a mentally difficult situation? How should I behave in front of my friends? I attempted to behave as if nothing had changed in my life, but it did not work at all. Even when I just chatted with my friends and classmates in the university library, all of a sudden, tears were running down my cheeks. At that moment, I lived in darkness.
Why?
I was supposed to see you again very soon Six days later. Only SIX days . . . I believe that I can see you again I promise that I come back to you in March However, . . . You suddenly disappear from your room You suddenly disappear from our house You suddenly disappear from my sight Only SIX more days. Why . . . why couldn’t you wait for me? (Iida, 2011, unpublished work)
My grandmother’s death might have been unavoidable with consideration to her age, but I was unable to accept the reality. It was not only that I had not witnessed my grandmother’s passing, had just read about it in the email. I believed in my mother’s words a week before the earthquake: “Grandma looks fine, and she will be alive until you come back to Japan. You will see her soon.” As soon as I knew of her death, I thought of rescheduling my flight to attend her funeral, but it was more difficult to go back to my country than I had anticipated. Due to the earthquake, there was no transportation from Narita International airport back to my hometown; trains and buses around the Tokyo area were out of service; the lack of gasoline made it difficult for my parents to pick me up. I was truly thinking that I ought to go back to Japan as soon as possible, but the situation brought about by the disaster meant that I had to stay in the United States. As a result, I severely blamed myself for being unable to attend my grandmother’s funeral: “How come I am here now?” “Why couldn’t I finish my dissertation much earlier?” and “Is there anything that is more important than attending her funeral?” And then, I was overwhelmed and tortured by a guilty conscience.
On the very same day that I received email about my grandmother’s passing, I was supposed to meet and talk with my dissertation advisor. I was to submit the final version of my dissertation to graduate school. I still remember that this opportunity really saved my life: My advisor helped to release my negative feelings, stop blaming myself, and encourage me to think positively. During the meeting, I started to share my emotional difficulty reflecting on my painful moments which had occurred one after another in the last couple of days.
My dissertation advisor just listened to my words. When I finished talking, he advised me to write poems reflecting on my current situation, especially focusing on the loss of my grandmother. However, while I was able to talk about my story, was I ready to write it up? I had never thought of expressing my traumatic experience through poetry writing. After the meeting, I went back to the library and started to reflect on good memories with my grandmother. Then, I wrote haiku—a short three-line, 5-7-5 syllable poem, and dedicated it to her in my dissertation.
Grandmother
Warm, big, wrinkled hand Always pulling my small hands: You are in my heart . . . (Iida, 2011, p. vi)
Writing haiku and dedicating it to my grandmother—this is all I could do for her at that moment. Even now, I regret being unable to be with her in Japan at the moment when she left this world. I do not think that I can completely delete it from my memory. Despair, isolation, apology, family abandonment, these emotions are still deeply engraved in my heart. The loss of my grandmother is really a heartbreaking event, but it makes the Great East Japan Earthquake too personal as well as has me reconsider the true meaning of death, parting, and the existence of family.
The last 10 days of my life in the United States—from the moment of the Great East Japan Earthquake in Japan to the day I left Indiana—were both very special and shocking for me. What really tortured me was that all of these heartbreaking moments were happening in Japan, yet I was not there at that time. In the process of accepting such a serious reality as the occurrence of the earthquake and tsunami, worried attempts at confirmation of the safety of my family, and bitter loss of my grandmother, I severely blamed myself for not having been in Japan. I felt indescribably sad that I was unable to understand and share the same pain and suffering of my family, friends, and other people in my country.
Postscript
While the collection of my earthquake poetry based on my experience outside Japan addressed the emotionality of each described moment in the United States, the writing of my students described their own emotional insights into a series of earthquake moments in Japan—the moment when the earthquake took place at 2:46 on March 11, 2011 to ongoing survival situation in their postquake lives. Through taking a step back, my own earthquake poems illustrate my identities as an international student living the last minutes of his study abroad life, as a Japanese who worried about his family and cared about the situation in his home country, and as a grandson who blamed himself for being unable to accept his grandmother’s death and attend her funeral. Yet via returning to the poems in this poetic-narrative inquiry, I recognize expressions of my potential feelings of survivor guilt and family abandonment while I was in the United States. On the other hand, as a Japanese instructor of English who was not in Japan at that time and did not experience the earthquake and tsunami, listening to and learning about the life-changing moments from my students in a framework that I designed helped me to appreciate exactly what was happening when the earthquake took place, what postquake life felt like, and how the students coped with such a difficult situation. Especially, poetic expressions in the writing of my students show various emotional responses to a series of life-changing moments: fright at the occurrence of the earthquake, fear of aftershocks, sadness and shock regarding the terrifying impact of tsunami on devastated areas, worry about invisible radioactivity, frustration and confusion in their ongoing postquake life, despair at being unable to support evacuees, and anxiety for the future. These poems have made invisible and personal events in the postquake life which the media did not broadcast visible, and make it possible to appreciate this traumatic national event not only at the social but also personal level.
Through this poetic-narrative autoethnography, I reflect on and explore my own experience concerning the Great East Japan Earthquake. As an applied linguist, I am curious about how we use the language to express and communicate our real-life experiences in expressive forms of writing. Of particular interest in the current study was what happened to my identity when I was faced with deeply traumatic events and how I responded to these experiences through poetry writing.
My story of the Great East Japan Earthquake here is based on a mediated, second-hand experience; but the poems presented in this article come from personal life stories of both my students and me, and our emotions are articulated in writing as responses to our experiences related to this tragedy. Each of us has different stories to tell and share about this catastrophe, and all kinds of trauma caused by the tragedy have been best captured through varied personal voices. In other words, our collective voices in writing were a powerful tool to recreate and explore the deeply traumatic national events.
As discussed by other scholars, writing about “personal stories makes witnessing possible” and it enables both “participants and readers to observe and, consequently, better testify on behalf of an event, problem, or experience” (Ellis et al., 2011, para. 27; Hanauer, 2012a, p. 845; Iida, 2016, p. 132). Thus overall, this poetic-narrative autoethnography is an effective approach for me to reconstruct and better understand my experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake. Perhaps one of my roles as a Japanese scholar of English and an earthquake survivor is only to enable people around the world to convey our voices through poetry writing and help them to revisit, explore, recreate, and appreciate this nationally shocking, tragic memory.
The Great East Japan Earthquake was a life-changing moment for my students and me. It was a heartbreaking event, but we must find a way to live with such tough memories. Now, we walk ahead slowly and steadily into the future.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.