How to teach devastation? Speaking about the Japanese tsunami with a Japan Society educator

How do you educate people about one of the most horrific disasters of our time? When is something too gruesome to show in a museum exhibit? And why are the most powerful images sometimes the least gruesome?

Digital Dying recently spoke with Dr. Robert Fish, who directs education and lecture programs at the Japan Society in New York City. He is coordinating the society’s events related to the one-year anniversary of the tsunami.

Describe the current situation in Japan.

The human implications are devastating, but the economic implications are also devastating. There has been some recovery, but unemployment remains very, very high. Many people in the agriculture and fishing industries, which are very important in that region and not covered by insurance, took terrible losses. Other industries, particularly fish processing, took large hits. Fish processing plants are very expensive and tend to be built right on the shore, so when the tsunami came, it knocked a lot of them down. Or they got burnt down in the fires that came afterward.

How did the massive scale of the disaster affect the way people dealt with individual deaths?

Very few things will make people sadder than if a young child dies suddenly. Typically, a lot of people would come out and help the family deal with their grief. A lot of the areas badly affected by the tsunami were small towns. The question I have is, when you have towns where lots of young kids die, how does that change the dynamic? And when communities are split apart, how does that change things? One problem in resettling is towns that were once connected are no longer connected. Communities have been broken apart, and extended families have been pulled apart. And a big part of dealing with grief is relying on your community. When your community is broken apart, how do you deal with grief? I don’t know the answer to that.

Other Great Reads: How to deal with grief after a death

How do you decide how gruesome it is to make an exhibit or educational materials on the tsunami?

The photos are not graphically gruesome, and there are no bodies, but when you know the backstory, they become gruesome. In my opinion, photos like this are actually more effective. For one, we already see so many graphic pictures through the media. And when you see a graphic picture you have this visceral response. You focus so much on the brutality that it’s hard to pick up on other parts of the story. There is a devastating photo in our current exhibit of all these elementary school kid backpacks lined up. It’s not gruesomely violent, just a picture of colorful backpacks, but they all belong to children that have died. To me that is more gruesome and graphic because you have to think a little bit and make the connection yourself, which can often create a more long-lasting memory.

I imagine there’s a difference between what’s appropriate for kids and what’s appropriate for adults?

For adults it’s appropriate to see the gruesomeness, because it was a gruesome event. For younger people you can’t put too much in there because then you can’t show a whole portion of the audience your images. It just isn’t appropriate for an eight year old to see such gruesomeness. But it is appropriate for an eight year old to think about it in a useful way.

How do you continue to tell the story of the tsunami without wearying people out?

The curators in our exhibits have tried to balance the fact that a terrible tragedy has occurred but also that some people have moved beyond it, and are trying to cope with it in a meaningful way. Sometimes you can do this with pictures of rebuilding, sometimes it’s by going back to some of the areas that were devastated but that are now looking healthier. Or, and it is very sad, but it’s done through the process of memorializing people who were lost. This is part of the process of moving forward emotionally. There is an immediate way people deal with death but it doesn’t just go away. It’s still there but people also still have to function. I think what you see in the exhibit is people starting to move forward and starting to function again, which doesn’t mean they still don’t have tragedy and they don’t have sadness.

Other Great Reads: Japan’s mummy monks rise again

Do you feel that Americans really got the scope of the disaster, and responded to it in an appropriate way?  

I was very heartened by the response Americans had. People have donated more than 12.5 million dollars to our earthquake relief fund. We have all kinds of educators asking how their students can help, or how they can teach about the tsunami. People think of America and Japan as different but in many ways they also see the two as similar countries. Both are economically strong, and technologically strong. People seek Japanese products. So I think another thing that happened is when people saw this tragedy they saw it as happening to a similar group of people. It’s sad but often when people in the United States see tragedy they think of it as occupying a group of people who live very different lives than their own. Here you see a tragedy that affected a group of people living lives materially very similar to the lives that many Americans live. I think Americans made a connection.

What other exhibits dealing with death have you had at the Japan Society?

We had an exhibition called Bye Bye Kitty!!! that dealt with the idea of death and dystopia in Japan. It touched on the idea of spiritual death and the loss of the individual in a consumer society. In education we deal a lot with the issue around the line between living and dying. One area where a lot of studies have been done in Japan is organ transplant. It is a very controversial issue in Japan, a lot of it has to do with the idea of when someone is actually dead. There’s a whole history to it.

Has the tsunami provided a good chance to educate about Japan?

There has been more attention focused on Japan after the tsunami and I think there has been considerably more attention focused on this particular region of Japan than there ever has been before. The areas that were hit hardest by the tsunami and suffered the most death were areas along the shore, most of those areas were not urban. This northern region of Japan, called Tohoku, is not a region you spend a lot of time focusing on. I mean people like me, yeah, but your average American doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about Tohoku. After the earthquake occurred there was a sudden surge in people looking at our site and looking for materials. If there is an increase in people looking for materials to teach about Japan then even more people are being educated about Japan in general. People abroad will forget, other disasters happen, the world moves on, but in Japan they still have to deal with recovering. Recovery is a long process. A long process to recover economically, a long process to recover physically and a long process to recover psychologically. We want to keep people engaged.

Through May 27 photos and videos from the tsunami, its aftermath and the ongoing recovery efforts will be on display at the Japan Society in an exhibit entitled, “Memory: Things We Should Never Forget”. Resources for teaching about the tsunami are available on the society’s website. Donations to the Japan Society’s Earthquake Relief Fund can be made here. Have your own stories or thoughts about the tsunami? Share them in a comment below..