As I get ready to return to Tōhoku, Japan, I am thinking about being there three months ago following the earthquake, just after the tsunami’s black waters receded and left in their wake a crisis not seen since the atomic attacks of 1945. In substantive ways, the decimated landscapes I witnessed in March were similar to the singed, flattened scenes from Hiroshima and Nagasaki sixty-six years ago. And while man bears responsibility for the nuclear bomb attacks, while the shifting plates beneath the restless Pacific Ocean brought on the tsunami, both events raise crucial questions about modernity, our relationship to one another as human beings, and the future we are to inhabit.
As I get ready to return to Tōhoku, Japan, I am thinking about being there three months ago following the earthquake, just after the tsunami’s black waters receded and left in their wake a crisis not seen since the atomic attacks of 1945. In substantive ways, the decimated landscapes I witnessed in March were similar to the singed, flattened scenes from Hiroshima and Nagasaki sixty-six years ago. And while man bears responsibility for the nuclear bomb attacks, while the shifting plates beneath the restless Pacific Ocean brought on the tsunami, both events raise crucial questions about modernity, our relationship to one another as human beings, and the future we are to inhabit.