interview Otomo Yoshihide Post-March 11, 2011 Musical Explorations Showing “The Thing that Isn’t That” (6/7)
interview and organized by Ito Junnosuke
published in Beyond Boundaries: Comparative Civilizations Now 23 (2023)
translated by Suzuki Yoshiyuki and Cathy Fishman(Futarri)
I always want to say, “But I like the night”
Q: This is related to what we were just talking about, but recently on the radio (8), you said your activities since the earthquake are connected with pride. I think pride might be closely related to Wago-san’s phrase “I live Fukushima,”
for example.
Otomo: The issue of pride. Right.
Q: Just before the launch of Project FUKUSHIMA!, you also used the words “turning Fukushima into a positive.” (9) I think the activities that took place after the earthquake seemed to have a significant tendency to push individuals into one phrase or one way of seeing things. I’m wondering what you think about having pride, and about the danger of promoting group standardization.
Otomo: I mean, it’s difficult. I think Wago-san said “I live Fukushima” because his pride [as a native of Fukushima] was injured. I think it’s a cry from the heart. I think that’s why it’s painful to hear it. It may resonate with tenderhearted people, but I can’t help think that, from the perspective of other people, people who have no connection with Fukushima, it might just be something heavy. So if you ask whether I can say “I live Fukushima,” I can’t say that at all. I’m not Fukushima. Even though Fukushima is in me. In that sense I’m a really half-baked Fukushima person—I was raised in Fukushima, but I wasn’t born there, and I don’t think that way about any region. Or even about Japan. But I fully understand that there are people who think that way. Saying on that basis that something can only be done a certain way, that alone is unpleasant to me. I think it’s OK for there to be various types of people, somehow. So it’s fine to have people like Wago-san, and then there are scattered people like me. When someone says, “Every night comes to an end [i.e., the morning always comes]” (10) I always want to say, “But I like the night.” If you say “Every night comes to an end,” it makes night the villain—but there are people who like the night. Maybe I always end up thinking about people who don’t fit into that. Because I was one of them. I’m not saying this as a criticism of Wago-san at all. I say things like “recover pride.” You might think, “Who is this guy?” But… On the other hand, I don’t think anyone can survive without any pride at all. I think people who say “I don’t have that in me” are people who have never felt any sense of crisis about pride. To put it in an extreme way, let’s say for example that Japan disappeared and there were only about five Japanese people left. No matter how sketchy the people were, I think they’d think as Japanese people. But I think a world where people don’t usually need to think about that would be a much better world. That’s my idea, but in reality it was no longer a situation where we didn’t need to think about it. We were seriously hurt by what happened in Fukushima. I didn’t think I’d been hurt that much myself, but when I realized afterwards that I’d been hurt, too, and thought about how to heal that wound, I thought I’d probably mess it up if I used a strange approach. By strange approach, I mean you’re not going to get back pride if you use a sort of image-based strategy and say “Fukushima is doing great”— if you project some kind of positive image, like in a commercial.
Fukushima people’s complex isn’t just something that started with the nuclear power plant—there are so many aspects, including the issue of the [Fukushima] accent. Even though solving each of those things is not at all simple, it seemed to me that solving them one by one, in a deliberate way, through their own effort, would probably be the only way for people to recover their pride. Having their activities recognized by other people, and being happy with what they themselves accomplished—I thought that would be the only way to recover. It seemed to me that one of the best ways would be for them to eliminate radiation through their own efforts and produce agricultural products that were completely free of radiation. And in less than ten years, that actually happened. I thought, that’s amazing. But what hasn’t happened yet is that other people haven’t really recognized this. So I’d like people to really be aware of it.
That’s why I thought it would be fantastic if everyone started doing the the bon dance that began in Fukushima and people around the world thought, “This bon dance is the best!” That was kind of a dream I had. I thought it would be great if
the bon dance gained popularity through the Olympics, for example, and people thought, “This bon dance isn’t bad.” But with the way the Olympics turned out,
I gave up the idea.
Fukushima ramen is really good
Q: How did the word “pride” come up?
Otomo: I think it was the first year after the earthquake. I don’t remember who said it first. When various comments were flying around online, I think someone said, “Maybe the biggest problem for people in Fukushima right now is that their pride has been injured.” I thought, that’s right. Of course, there are a lot of problems—the radiation problem, the problems from the tsunami—but I thought the most difficult problem was that people’s pride was injured. At the time, there were various sorts of discrimination—cars with Fukushima license plates weren’t allowed into places, and [people said] girls who had been exposed to radiation wouldn’t be able to get married. People on the outside might think, we didn’t do that kind of thing, and it’s not a big problem, but people in Fukushima were really seriously hurt by these things. I thought it would become quite a traumatic thing. Even now it’s probably a factor in Fukushima people’s behavior. That’s why I’ve always been thinking about what I can do to help keep that from getting worse. I think the reason almost all the activities I’m doing now in Fukushima are workshops with kids, or projects where people make things, is that showing individuals making things like that is the only thing I can do. In that situation, it’s enough for people to have a real sense of having made something. Because that gives them confidence. So making things together and showing that situation to other people—I think that’s probably enough. At a certain point I came to the realization that this is all I can do. Things like eliminating radiation or resolving the nuclear power plant situation—I don’t even know how that would be done, so I decided to do something different. But I don’t know why I thought of that.
And here [on the question sheet] are [Donald] Trump’s words “Make America Great Again.” If we’re not careful, it might sound like that, but America was great to begin with and Fukushima has never been great, right? Unless you go all the way back to the Edo Era. So it isn’t that it would be good if people could say Fukushima is great. Fukushima people think they’re being discriminated against, somehow, in the background. I don’t think anyone outside of Fukushima is discriminating—actually, in reality. Hardly at all. But that’s the nature of discrimination. So I want to do something about that. Something that turned this into comedy in a really skillful and clever way was the TV drama Amachan. It did an amazingly good job of that…while portraying local people who speak with an accent, people who come to the region from Tokyo and start speaking with an accent, local people who don’t have an accent… I think [Kankuro] Kudo, who grew up in southern Tohoku, is the only person who could have written that, but I think it’s that kind of traffic control, you might say—the method of living in that kind of situation. So it feels like a real exaggeration to say “pride,” but the idea that you have to get rid of your accent…Fukushima people get rid of their accent. They work hard to get rid of it. People from the Kansai region don’t worry if they don’t get rid of their accent. There’s that difference. I’m saying this, but I’m the same—I can’t speak with an accent when I’m in Tokyo. I can’t speak the Fukushima dialect like a native, so now I can’t do either. I grew up in an in-between way. So I’m wondering if this is something that someone like me can really do. This might not be in a thesis or anything, but these are my honest thoughts. This is why I’d get a really bad feeling if Fukushima united in saying, “Let’s be great.” I’d hate that. I think it’d be better to go about things differently. For instance, if people from Brazil thought the drumming at festivals in Fukushima was really interesting and said “Let’s get inspiration from it” and came to see it, I think that alone would be great. I think that would change things. I think just small things like that can lead to change.
Q: Do you mean it would be good if various people around the world and in Japan became interested in Fukushima’s music, culture and so on in the way that, for instance, the blues—which was a kind of North American folk music— spread around the world?
Otomo: I thought that alone would be enough. Especially after the earthquake, I thought, for example, if Fukushima became the world’s number one producer of solar power, that by itself could dispel the stigma. At the time I was always thinking about that kind of thing. That’s what I mean by “turn Fukushima into a positive.” After that, Fukushima Prefecture copied that way of thinking and started a campaign where a bunch of kids would be shown in newspapers with phrases like “Fukushima is doing fine.” But that isn’t the kind of thing I had in mind at all. On the contrary, that’s just painful. I think it’s better to actually make something. But, well…I don’t think something like the blues is going to come out of Fukushima, because there wasn’t really anything comparable to begin with. I can’t imagine Fukushima folk songs gaining that kind of universal popularity. I mean, I think there’s a shortage of resources.
But, for instance—most people don’t know this, but Fukushima ramen is surprisingly good. Kitakata ramen [from the city of Kitakata in Fukushima Prefecture] may be famous. But it isn’t promoted effectively, so it isn’t well known. Even something like that would be good, I think. If people say, “Wow, the ramen is great,” [people in Fukushima] would be happy. When people have received so little praise, they become less and less likely to receive it, so you try to get everyone to create something that will get a little praise. But I suppose the
reason I got so obsessed with this is that I’m one of those people—I wasn’t born in Fukushima, but I suppose I think of myself as a Fukushima person. I hadn’t really been aware of it myself, though.
