Journal#9 Young and Old
We started the class with movement this week as well. Eiko began the class talking about two factors of silence and activeness in performance: the performers know their intention and feeling that create their movement but the audience only can tell what the performers are expressing by their performance. Eiko said this gap sometimes frustrates her, and then she suddenly started drinking water from a cup. As an audience of her movement of drinking water, I can only guess and feel what Eiko is trying to express through the movement, and I agree that it is always frustrating. But, at the same time, seeing Eiko’s water-drinking movement with that idea in mind, I felt that movements also have their fortes in strength in expression (visual) and capturing the audience’s hearts and encouraging the audience to actively imagine through the movements in context. And, I think that those elements are hard to achieve in a writing format, though words are an effective tool to address the exact idea in our minds.
After we reflected on movements, we tried expressing our actions through our bodies. I did swimming. First, I was standing and tried doing swimming, but it turned out that I could fully express swimming motion so I lay down on the floor and try different styles. I first did my favorite style, breaststroke, and then did the crawl and butterfly. I had more time left so I did a totally different movement next, baking. I was whipping cream and making dough or becoming dough. Come to think about it, swimming and baking are favorite things to do and enjoy doing those movements. But, I might have looked funny to the audience since I was crawling on the ground and swinging from right to left like dough being kneaded. So, I noticed that this dilemma of body movement and expression by realizing this notion and thinking of the audience. In the next movement, we did animals. We watched the video of seagulls flying and croaking. When I did the movement of seagulls, I realized how demanding the flying motion is. I had to move my arms from the armpits back and forth quickly. But I also thought about how liberating it will be if I could fly with my hands frantically. Putting myself in a different animal and thinking about how my human body would work with those animals pushed me to think about liberation and limitation of my full body as a human being, which I took for granted. Wallowing with the seal’s body gave me another perspective. When we watched young Eiko wallowing on the beach, survival was a concept coming up in the conversation. From our eyes, seals look lazy and sleeping all the time, even when they wallow. But after I did the seal’s movement, wallowing mattered with my survival. With the body with short arms and tails
, it was hard to even move and wallowing used all parts of my body muscles. So, I understand why seals often lie on the ground and through my body, and it was a pleasure learning process. Lastly, we did the maggot movement. After seeing a little disturbing image of many maggots scavenging food (though that’s how they live and grow), the maggot movement was an energy-taking movement. But it should consume a lot of energy since wiggling is about their survival. When thinking about my survival as a maggot, I was wiggling frantically to touch and eat everything around me.
After the movement study, we talked about the last week’s experience and movement in class in a breakout room. I was in the same group as Will and Gabrielle. We extensively talked about the movement of touching our faces with our hand imagining another person’s hand. And, Will shared his story with us about thinking about his hand from childhood. He described it as unique from other’s hands he tried different times. And yes, when I did it the other day, it was very “touching” and made me emotional. I touched my Adam’s apple on the neck as I’ve noticed that my hand from my childhood is curiously examining it And, I thought about how I changed from a child. I grew into an adult body and experienced a lot of events and accumulated memories and learned knowledge and thoughts. In that sense, I am a different person from myself in childhood. But at the same time, I am the very person who grew out of myself in childhood. So, the basis is the same, me… I was struck by thinking about my growth and time had passed in my body and overwhelmed by the memories pouring out as my childhood hand touched my face.
We also watched the video. The video simply visualizes all the atomic and hydrogen bombs used on earth in the past. The alarming sounds (a lot of classmates pointed out too) as the atomic and hydrogen bombs go off and obnoxiously scared me as if the end of the earth came to us. But I thought it should be the actual sense of threat that people at that time when the atomic and hydrogen bomb tests happened with this frequency. It also irritates me when I see the tests were intentionally conducted far from where the places of authority, such as France always testing the bombs in Africa… this ugly arrogance and rudeness pissed me off the most. And this arrogance always shows up when it comes to nuclear power: nuclear plants are always constructed in an isolated place. THEY KNOW THE DANGER OF RADIATION. But they continue to test for their vanity and selfishness, without knowing what would bring about to people and lives and nature under the bombs.
Reading reflections:
It was my sixth grade’s March when the earthquake hit the island. Even for a sixth-grade elementary student in Tokyo, the shocking image of the roofs of Fukushima Daichi nuclear plants exploded on TV gave me the sense of danger. But, now as I think of the elementary school students in Fukushima at that time, and it’s painful and almost made me angry. And, the story about a boy in Fukushima starting to bleed in To Rui, Once Again, I only can say “ah-ah…” And, as “In Japan, a Culture That Promotes Nuclear Dependency” and “Japan Extended Reactor’s Life, Despite Warning” reveal, I couldn’t open my mouth in the depth of despair and anger to face the toxic system that almost forces isolated places to accept more and more nuclear plants when no authority (TEPCO and government) doesn’t have a clear sense of the responsibility and no one holds an account of the security of nuclear plants and the TEPCO even finished the examination in three days… it shows Fukushima nuclear plant accident is definitely the first and foremost environmental disaster that humans caused on the earth.Connect to this, Oē’s Op-ed in the New Yorker painfully suggests Japan’s hypocrisy and deception with nuclear power. “The Japanese should not be thinking of nuclear energy in terms of industrial productivity; they should not draw from the tragedy of Hiroshima a ‘recipe’ for growth…the experience of Hiroshima should be etched into human memory” Japan introduced “defense” force, installed nuclear plants all over the archipelago, and is under the nuclear umbrella of the US. But Oē is still trying to find his courage and hope in the memories of the dead under the atomic bombs. And what they left us in the future generation would teach us to stay away from the danger of nuclear power. And I think that it’s our responsibility to imagine the courage to go through suffering by nuclear power and stay away from nuclear energy and, without saying, nuclear weaponry. I understand political realism like “Don’t Ban the Bomb” is enticing. Some people argue that the atomic bombs are necessary for prevention of wars. But we shouldn’t fall for it and should keep saying NO and protest to those ideas as we were in Yoyogi. Though Bret Stephens writes in “Don’t Ban the Bomb,” “Ukrainians can rue their 1994 decision to abandon their nuclear arsenal as the reason Vladimir Putin felt free to invade in 2014,” I argue that Ukrainian people know that nuclear power is malicious by their memories through the experience of Chernobyl. ICAN achieved 50 states ratification just recently. I think the memories and beliefs are crucial to beat “political realism,” which is hypocritical and ended up repeating a mistake. And, “Britain’s Nuclear Cover-up” demonstrates those hypocritical ideas entail someone in greed to flourish and let them escape when the mistake happens.
I felt Hayashi’s quiet and humble indignation in To Rui Once Again and Harvest. I felt that Hayashi writes To Rui Once Again personally and humbly as one hibakusha to the letter to Rui, us. And her modesty and honesty and kindness in To Rui Once Again encourage and accept us – not hibakusha – to express our will and anger against wrongdoings that caused hibaku. She frankly talked about “stupidity” of human kinds, her struggles as hibakusha to face Fukushima’s nuclear incident, and her experience with the Great East Japan Earthquake. But she puts her quiet and humble indignation as hibakusha in those stories and supports us to have courage to have the indignation. So, when I read the last part of To Rui Once Again, I wanted to go to a demonstration against nuclear power in Yoyogi Park.
Hayashi’s storytelling in To Rui Once Again has a lot of points I wanted to learn for my final project. After I did my speech and shared it with my classmates and friends, I am facing a difficult task to encourage people: not finishing presenting my opinion but encourage them. I presented my own feelings and personal story about Hiroshima, but my way of telling might be difficult to reach someone farther from Hiroshima or Nagasaki. As it was difficult to visit Nagasaki for me until I read Hayashi’s work. I should be more aware that it’s also difficult for a lot of people to visit Hiroshima. But I think Hayashi’s writing accepts us even we don’t have much knowledge or interest in Hiroshima or Nagasaki or nuclear energy but kindly encourages us to do so. Her way of telling a story made me feel like she sits next to me and talks to me with her genuine heart and honest feeling. And I came to believe that that’s the writing that moves people’s heart.
Lastly, I’ll talk about Harvest and my movement core being sweet potato in the field. In Harvest, the motif stroke me the most was sweet potato. The sweet potato that the farmer man grows. When the accident happens. The old man is quiet and does not openly protest. But I were the old man I would be angry and scared when the nuclear facilities took over the peace of the sweet potato field and finally took over their peace. So, I wanted to be being sweet potato in the field. The movement without movement. And I felt, if I could not move, the only thing I can do is strongly stand here and do what I can do. I think that the old man couldn’t move even though in his head he understood that he should move out. But he didn’t move, because the sweet potato field is everything for him. And, whatever the nuclear facility’s blast, he continues to work in his sweet potato field. The story of Harvest made me realize and imagine people like the old man around the nuclear power plant, having their lives there and suddenly destroyed by greed and irresponsibility of people outside.
