Life as Otherwise

Anne Allison, Professor of Cultural Anthropology

In the compound disaster of 3/11 in northeastern Japan—earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown—time literally stopped for 16,000 Japanese. On the wall of a gymnasium at a middle school that had served as an evacuation site—where 98 of the 100 who fled there didn’t make it out—the clock got stuck at the first bolt of the earthquake.

When I visited with volunteers the following summer, one said she felt ghosts pulling at her legs.

But for those who survived in the region—particularly those who couldn’t leave and now lived contained to temporary housing—life was reduced to a temporality of the present. Fields taken from them, spouses now dead, residents from a mixture of locales, such a hodge-podge of folks. They wanted, more than anything from us volunteers, to help them stage a summer festival.

What can we learn from this single wish? It wasn’t about building a future or making something long-range or even conjuring hope—a word I never heard these survivors use even once. Rather, this was something both more and less. Something that involved staying animated in the here and now. Keeping (something) alive until tomorrow, if that day would eventually come.

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