Meaning Through Medium

The Twitter Poetry of Fukushima

Social media has allowed modern society to publicize the minutiae of everyday life in ways more far-reaching than ever before, both geographically and temporally. In the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, beyond the tons of mud, waste, and debris, on a far smaller level than the radiation raining down on entire abandoned cities frozen in time, lies the seemingly tiny, insignificant everyday lives of the people who used to live in these now-erased towns. Far removed from earthquake magnitude scales and tsunami statistics, the small, personal moments of pain and heartbreak experienced by each of the thousands of evacuees are the clearest insight into any sort of philosophical meaning that can be gleaned from such an event, if there is any at all. 

Indeed, in the face of the seemingly insurmountable terror of nature, the everyday lives and intimate moments of human experience seem infinitesimally small. Wago Ryoichi’s Twitter poetry collection, however, finds a way to communicate poignantly and tangibly the true sadness and pain each of the residents of Fukushima was experiencing in those few days immediately following the disaster. These small anecdotes, about onions and old ladies and high school gyms, illustrate in painstaking, familiar detail the true pain of any disaster. Wago meditates on the sense of meaningless, powerlessness, and the all-too familiar question: why me? By sharing his musings and experiences through the medium of Twitter specifically, Wago managed to publicize these tiny fragments of mundanity in an unfiltered, unmediated way that immediately reached readers all across Japan, inspiring volunteer action and a deeper cultural understanding of the event. Moreover, beyond the immediacy of his initial accounts, his Twitter account now serves as a kind of ever-accessible diary, frozen in time, for contemporary readers to reflect on and gain a deeper understanding of not only the disaster, but also human resiliency and the struggle for meaning in a senselessly cruel world.

In a recollection that is not so different than the feelings millions across the globe have had since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wago recounts his painful longing for the way things were before the disaster:

 “I believe it is our greatest wish for happiness just to be able to live the same way that we did before all this. 

I went out and received a bunch of onions. A whole box full. A middle-aged man in the neighborhood gave me some of what he had raised. But I don’t like onions. I put the box down just inside my door and have been staring at it for ages. Until just a short time ago, I had my everyday life…” 

Of course, in a moment in which Wago’s town of Minami Sōma did not even have clean running water for the residents to wash their bodies and clothes after exposure to radiation outside, the pickiness of a distaste for onions seems almost comical. However, Wago’s dumbfoundedness in being presented with the seeming blessing of a box of food speaks to the disorientation and violent uprooting of the Fukushima survivors from their previous, ordinary lives. In Wago’s desperation for a return to the way things were, his mind clings to the everyday likes and dislikes which were once his primary concerns. 

Indeed, these are some of the typical topics covered in the personalized mundanity of a Twitter feed; not necessarily supposed to mean anything, the average person’s tweets are simply personal snippets of their own lives, projected out into the seeming endless expanse of the Internet, never to be studied or analyzed. Wago likely did not set out to create a collection of poetry which would be studied by American college students a decade later when he was accounting his experiences in the aftermath of the disaster; the resulting personal, intimate nature of his tweets lends them more authenticity, and perhaps his narrative and others like it were more poignant in inspiring aid and volunteer efforts in the immediate aftermath than sterile news reports. 

Anne Allison recounts the details of such volunteer tourism in her piece In the Mud, capturing the sense of duty and personal obligation many Japanese people felt to Fukushima in the aftermath:

“The words ‘everyone,' ‘support, and ‘connection’ recycle in a grammar of affinity during this period immediately following 3/11. An action of doing something; an affect of enduring; a collective "we" treading a precariousness newly shared.”

 The perspective provided by Wago’s tweets, as well as social media in general, may have greatly humanized the catastrophe in the eyes of the general public; the victims of the disaster weren’t just some random people in backwater towns, but rather fully fleshed out individuals who used the same websites, retweeted the same jokes, and posted the same details of their lives as any more fortunate Tokyoite. Similarly, the equalizing relatability of social media likely contributed to the “[newly shared] precariousness” Allison speaks of; it was suddenly clear that a disaster like this could happen to anyone. It became clear that the cruelty of nature and ineptitude of the government are not constrained to Fukushima, and therefore, Japanese people felt a greater sense of duty to their fellow citizens.

The casual, everyday details of Wago’s tweets also mirror the fact that, overall, the psyches of the survivors were not primed for disaster; they had been going about their daily activities, without a care in the world, when suddenly the comfort and normalcy of their lives was ripped out from under their feet. For some, even a full decade later, there is no hope for ever returning to exactly the way things were.

Atsushi Funahashi’s 2013 documentary film Nuclear Nation presents another account of the Fukushima survivors’ experiences, which represents a difference in perspective namely through its difference of medium. In contrast to the spontaneity and unfiltered nature of Wago’s tweets, the film has clearly been edited and composed by a film team in order to showcase the message that they wish to portray: there is a clear ideological theme of the dangers of nuclear energy, as well as the lack of rectification or reckoning by the government and Japanese society at large. Wago’s tweets were not necessarily so concerned with political implications in the immediate situation; it was all he could do to make sense of the small, meaningless details in his cruel situation. 

Additionally, the perspective of Nuclear Nation incorporates a buffer of time; the film was released two years after the disaster, and shows footage of the survivors who have been refugees in a high school for quite some time. In a way, this makes Wago’s poems even more tragic; Nuclear Nation reveals, similarly to the washed-up diary of Naoko floating across the Pacific years after the tsunami in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, that although the events of a disaster feel harrowing and urgent in their immediacy, eventually the plight of the victims fade away into popular obscurity as time increases. Just as Ruth struggled to reach out to Naoko, reading through the events of her past and not knowing her fate, readers now reflect on Wago’s tweets knowing that even ten years later, the residents of Futaba, the children who so desperately wished to return, are still stranded outside of their hometown. One harrowing scene in the film, featuring a protest, sees a woman shouting through a megaphone:

“We have houses, and we have children! We have jobs too! Please give it all back! If you won’t, quit politics! [...] Don’t you dare forget the residents of Futaba!”

While the Futaba residents may no longer be in the spotlight, works like Nuclear Nation and Wago’s poems alike preserve their struggles in the enduring nature of the media of film and social media.

Throughout his tweets, Wago repeatedly addresses the cruel meaninglessness of the universe “with all the ferocity of an Asura” and creates his own meaning within it. In the end, the biggest meaning which arose from Wago’s reckoning with the disaster was the power of social media to drive change, to inspire those who may never have empathized with the victims to do so forcefully. Anne Allison recounts the increase in political activism and disgust with the nuclear industry and government following 3/11. In describing a protest against nuclear energy which drew sixty thousand, many of them mothers, Allison notes: 

“...many of these newly marching mothers told a colleague who interviewed them [...] their protest wasn’t for politics but for life. As if being an activist for life isn’t political.”

Perhaps, had it not been for the intimate medium of social media, there never would have been such an immense response in support of the Fukushima survivors. The very poignancy and widely-read effects of Wago’s poetry show that there was a meaning to his experience after all: he created a new, deeper understanding of the disaster and of what it means for a community to grapple with forces which threaten to tear them apart. It seems indisputable that his relatable, intimate accounts, along with other firsthand communications from those in Fukushima, drove a national culture of compassion which led thousands to volunteer their time in aiding the displaced communities. Through the fearless vulnerability of sharing his pain and suffering on such a public platform, Wago created an autonomous meaning of the disaster, completely untouchable by the effects of nature or corporate ineptitude: people empathizing with each other, feeling each other’s pain, and being driven to help one another.