The WORLD ORDER Solution

WORLD ORDER is a Japanese performance group that dances in flawlessly synchronized robot formations. They’ve been doing this for years—slick, mechanical, almost inhuman in their precision. I’ve seen videos of them in subway stations, hotel lobbies, atriums. Eerie and hypnotic. Someone described them once as what the future looks like if it’s very depressed, and that stuck.

In 2012, they released a video of themselves dancing in Fukushima. Not the city—the exclusion zone. The land around the nuclear plant that was supposed to be safe, then wasn’t. They danced in rows, in formation, in their signature style, while the landscape behind them was flat and empty and wrong. The point was to protest Japan’s continued reliance on nuclear power, to ask for alternatives while the government was still insisting everything was fine. It was completely absurd.

By that point, the Japanese government had spent years pretending the meltdown was under control. Communities were evacuated, the narrative stayed the same: nuclear is necessary, nuclear is safe. WORLD ORDER showed up in a dead zone and danced like robots trying to save the world, which is either the most honest response to catastrophe or a joke about how powerless we all are. Maybe both.

There’s something in the refusal to just stand still. To do something, anything, even if the government won’t listen and it won’t change a thing. That’s the thing I keep coming back to—not the futility, but the refusal to accept the futility.

The robots kept dancing. They still do, I think. The government kept denying. Fukushima kept leaking. And somewhere on the internet, that video sits: WORLD ORDER in their flawless formation, moving in sync in a place that was supposed to be dead. It’s beautiful and terrible and the most Japanese solution to a problem that has no solution.