The Inside and Outside are One and the Same: Field Recording, Vibration, and Disaster in Northeastern Japan after 3.11

This dissertation maps a politics of listening through the field recording practices of sound artists, archivists and composers directly affected by the earthquake, tsunami, and radiation releases impacting the eastern coastal areas of Tohoku, Japan on and since 2011. The megathrust earthquake on March 11, 2011, set off a series of events—now referred to as the 3.11 Triple Disasters—that not only impacted already struggling, subjugated cities and towns, it also disturbed the ideologies and networks that drive that subjugation under the capital-nation-state. While the individuals discussed here are directly affected and directly respond, their activities are marginalized by the dominant positions taken in the popular 3.11 debates. These latter positions debate Tohoku’s entrepreneur “recovery,” the nation’s role in “recovering” a unified identity, and the state’s failures or victories in effectively distributing “recovery” insights and reparations—shoring up the antinomies of the capital-nation-state hegemony. These dominant understandings reify the disasters. Those affected oscillate between “survivors” and “victims” depending on how they serve the debate.

The individuals discusses here, however, alternative ways of living in vibrating places. I focus on three individuals, K, Sato Nami, and Nagahata Koji. They take up sound-based cultural activities that dynamically and critically intervene in their local post-disaster situations. Each individual centralizes field recording, mobilizing the performativities, meanings, and attunements that such an auditory practice might afford. A blogger and theatre director who lives and works in “the most devasted city” records hours of waves on a wall along the coast; a musician whose town was destroyed and never rebuilt records events in the now open area with members of her community; a professor goes to hot spots within and around Fukushima city and records “radioactive silence”…. The field recording practices are interpreted as various politics of listening, that is, transductions of processes of attention and intensity that rework the patterns in the field of relations imparted to the subject. The dissertation argues that, against the objectification of the vibrations of the disasters, the vibrational disruptions and energies of the events are injected into the practices as sonic demands that emerge in the affected places.