Japan Syndrome

A festival called Japan Syndrome opened at Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin three years after Fukushima—Japanese artists, theatre makers, visual artists, musicians, documentarians gathering to make sense of what the disaster had done to the country’s story. The postwar mythology about infinite growth on cheap energy and technology that could be controlled. All of it shattered when the reactors failed.

Theatre maker Toshiki Okada was there, alongside visual artists, documentarian Hikaru Fujii, and musician Tori Kudo. They weren’t processing a historical event so much as the collapse of the myths that had structured everything—faith in institutions, safety guarantees, the belief that anyone actually knew what they were doing.

What got me about the whole thing was that the festival had to happen at all. That artists felt compelled to gather and articulate what had become nearly unspeakable. And then the part nobody wanted to think about: those same reactors existed in Germany, in France, everywhere. The same promises held up the same weight. So when these artists gathered in Berlin, they were saying something everyone else was sleeping through.

I never made it to that festival, but the fact of it—people feeling like they had to convene to say what couldn’t be said alone—it seemed to capture something true about where we actually were, even if most of us were still pretending we didn’t know.