Clinical Healing or Pathological Reflection: the Imagination that

Links Auschwitz with Fukushima

Session 1
Kyung Sik Suh
Tokyo Keizai University

1. Introduction: the problem of this article

The ‘impossibility of representation of Auschwitz’ or the ‘impossibility of testimony’ has been recurring
themes that have been debated since the 1990s. The main problem I would like to address through this
article is to expand this debate, which has been fixed in a certain time-space of Auschwitz and in the early
20th century. I would like to bring these themes and debates to “here and now” for reflection. In other
words, I would like to examine how to translate concepts such as ‘impossibility of representation’ and
‘impossibility of testimony’ into universal terms to reflect on our current modern society and its people. I
would also like to explore whether such reflections could be considered ethically sound.

On 11 March 2011, the great Tohoku earthquake hit the eastern shores of Japan, which led to a “severe
accident” at the first nuclear power plant in Fukushima. In late 2011, the Japanese government announced
the ‘settlement’ of the incident with the ‘cold shutdown’ of the nuclear reactor. However, I do not have to
mention that this was not a truthful statement that reflected the real state of the incident.

Facing the ‘Fukushima’ incident, I began to reflect on problems of whether it would be possible to
represent and testify on this case, and whether such testimonies would be accepted. You could say such
inquiries were an attempt to examine the problem of the ‘impossibility of testimonies’ and link Auschwitz
with Fukushima. If Auschwitz’s ‘impossibility of testimonies’ has caused the revival and continuation of
the crisis, we could make an identical case for Fukushima in the future. If there are no testimony or if the
testimonies could not be heard, Fukushima might as well continue to be resuscitated again and again in
the future. There have recently been several symptoms indicating materialization of such fear.

103
The 2nd World Humanities Forum
Proceedings

2. Powerful of the earth, masters of new poisons

I have twice visited the disaster site of Fukushima nuclear power in June and November 2011. These visits
have led to an unexpected realization that the incident has “challenged our imagination.”

Following my visit to Fukushima in November, I gave a lecture titled ‘The Witness of Isolation: Primo
Levi’ at the International Peace Museum of Ritsumeikan University at Kyoto. And I met a poem through
the occasion.

The Girl-Child of Pompei

Since everyone’s anguish is our own,

We live ours over again, thin child,
Clutching your mother convulsively
As though, when the noon sky turned black,
You wanted to re-enter her.
To no avail, because the air, turned poison,
Filtered to find you through the closed windows
Of your quiet, thick-walled house,
Once happy with your song, your timid laugh.
Centuries have passed, the ash has petrified
To imprison those delicated limbs forever.
In this way you stay with us, a twisted plaster cast,
Agony without end, terrible witness to how much
Our proud seed matters to the gods.
Nothing is left of your far-removed sister,
The Dutch girl imprisoned by four walls
Who wrote of her youth without tomorrows.
Her silent ash was scattered by the wind,
Her brief life shut in a crumpled notebook.
Nothing remains of the Hiroshima schoolgirl,
A shadow printed on a wall by the light of a thousand suns,
Victim sacrificed on the altar of fear.
Powerful of the earth, masters of new poisons,
Sad secret guardians of final thunder,
The torments heaven sends us are enough.

104
 Before your finger presses down, stop and consider.

Session 1
20 November 1978

Was this a poem that sang of Fukushima? Primo Levi had passed away 25 years ago and the ‘Dutch girl’
referred to in this poem is Anne Frank. The last four verses of the poem refer indeed to nuclear weapons,
but, to me, they seem to sing about Fukushima. Levi’s imagination seems to linger on even after his
death providing perspectives to events such as Fukushima. His imagination goes beyond the time-space
dimension to link victims of ancient volcano bursts, victims of the Holocaust and victims of the nuclear
weapons bombing. It is a sorrowful imagination indeed.

Primo Levi was an Italian Jew and a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. He wrote a record on
his experience in the camps titled If this is Man, which has been translated and known to the Japanese
population as Auschwitz is not over yet. Despite recognition as one of Italy’s prominent writers of the post
war period who sublimated his testimony into literature, Levi ended his life by committing suicide at his
home’s staircase in 1987.

There is a description inside If this is Man of the daily nightmares Levi had in the camps. The dream is
about Levi’s family’s neglect of his struggles when he tells them about it after being released. His sister
even sneaks away to the next room in Levi’s dream. In a collection of essays he published called The
Drowned and the Saved just a year before his death and forty years after his time at the camp, there are
hints of tiredness for not being able to rightly convey his experience despite all his testimonies.

Primo Levi was not just a witness of what actually happened at Auschwitz. He was also a witness to how
difficult it was to testify to such history, how difficult it was to convey such experience and to eventually
the ‘impossibility of testimony’ itself.

3. The Tohoku earthquake and the minorities

The first thought that occurred in my mind at the time that I heard of the Tohoku earthquake of 11 March
2011 was ‘whether the Korean-Japanese and other foreigners in Japan were okay.’ I was afraid not only
of the damages from the earthquake and tsunami, but also worried about violence from demagogies
that followed massive disasters. Amongst the confusion, the Asahi Newspapers published reports with
the headlines such as ‘Foreigner Thefts’, ‘Riot Takes Place’, ‘Endless Rumours, not to be trusted’ on 26
March that expanded on the rumours.

105
The 2nd World Humanities Forum
Proceedings

Reading these reports, I began to fear attacks against minorities due to such ‘groundless rumours.’ The
reason I harboured such fears is due to an event in history of 90 years ago in Japan.

On 1 September 1923 (Taisho 12), a magnitude 7.9 massive earthquake struck the Kanto region of Japan.
It was the Great Kanto earthquake, which resulted in over 100 thousand deaths and missing people. It is
estimated that some 6,000 Koreans and over 200 Chinese were killed along with tens of Japanese due
to the event. But following the quake’s strike, rumours spread of ‘Koreans setting fire to houses’ and
‘poisoning wells’ which led to attacks against Koreans by the Japanese. The army and police formed
vigilante corps consisting of youth and fire-fighter groups. The members of the vigilante groups attacked
Koreans with Japanese swords, fire hooks and bamboo spears. Since the Japanese defeat of the war in 15
August 1945, there has been no action taken by the Japanese government to find the truth, apologize or
compensate for such event.

In 2010, there were 2,134,151 foreigners registered residing in Japan. The largest group of foreigners
residing in Japan are Chinese, being 687,156. The next largest group are Koreans/Chosun with 565,989
and the third largest are Brazilians with 230,552. During the colonial era (before the end of the war in
1945), Koreans worked in coal mines or in 3D (Difficult, Dirty and Dangerous) factories near cities. There
are many mines near Fukushima and Ibaraki, and therefore there are many Korean-Japanese still living in
these regions today.

The youth have been leaving the rural farming and fishing villages of Japan resulting in a sharp decrease
in their population. The villages can no longer sustain their businesses due to the lack of workers. To solve
such problem, Japan has begun to receive foreign labourers, which they refer to as trainees. However,
because of their status as ‘trainees’ they receive a very low salary and there have been problems of human
rights violations in their work environment.

On 11 June, a man working in a dairy farm committed suicide in Soma city, Fukushima prefecture. It was
after a month of throwing away milk that had been contaminated by the radioactive materials from the
nuclear power plant disaster nearby. He confronted a situation where he had to sell some 40 cows due to
a lack of income and mounting debt. He wrote his final words with chalk on the walls of the stable that
was built from a loan, saying ‘if only there was no nuclear power plant.’ If you read the newspaper article
on this incident closely, you will be able to find out that the wife of this dairy farmer was a Filipino. In
an article (‘Parched lands and the ties of a foreign wife’ 25 July 2011, Asahi Newspaper) that follows the
initial report, it is reported as follows: “The wife, age 33, is left alone in the isolated farm in the mountains
where there isn’t even mobile phone coverage. She will have to now take care of her two children, a first
grader and a pre-schooler, by herself. Not knowing proper Japanese, she is worried and sad that she must

106
rely on her neighbours to carry out the legal procedures related to her husband’s death.” How painful
it must be for this woman, who has lost her husband and is left in a place where she has difficulty with

Session 1
communication and where she does not know the social system.

I am worried that the foreigners residing in the disaster areas like the Filipino wife of the dairy farmer
who are indeed members of Japanese society, may once again be abandoned because compensation
and restoration programmes like ‘Japan’s restoration’ and ‘Endeavour Japan’ are carried out based on a
nationalistic logic.

Respect of others and equal treatment is necessary to build a society that live with and accept others
including foreigners. However, Japan has not granted proper status to others that live in its society and
even the Korean-Japanese that have lived in Japan since the colonial era. Hence, I believe it is a bit
shameless for the Japanese to now start requesting more foreign workers to be allowed to come to Japan
because of their current lack of labour.

As mentioned above, the minorities are likely to be victims and their voices are unlikely to be heard in
times of major disasters, wars and severe events. I believe this to be a problem of not the minorities but a
problem of the imagination of the majorities. They lack the imagination to empathize with the pain of the
minorities.

4. The ‘impossibility’ of representation of genocides

The most well known genocide is the massacre of Jews by the Nazi Germans, known as the Holocaust.
There have been layers of difficulties in creating testimonial literature based on the phenomenon of
‘genocides.’ First, the majority of witnesses of the event have literally demised due to the massacre.
Second, many survivors tended to keep their experience to themselves and suppress their own dreadful
memories. Third, even when testimonies are made, they are not conveyed to the audience and tend to be
distorted when consumed.

Furthermore, is it at first possible to represent an event such as Auschwitz? Its representation will likely
lead to problems of under-representation, staleness and commercialization of the event. These kinds of
concerns have been repeated since Theodor W. Adorno first claimed that “It is barbaric to write poems
after Auschwitz.”

The ‘culture’ (or ‘civilisation’ which is the opposite of ‘savage’) of madness that is implied in Adorno’s
statement is itself considered to be barbaric. If the extreme materialisation of “barbarism of civilisation

107
The 2nd World Humanities Forum
Proceedings

itself” was the Holocaust, nuclear power could also be considered another materialisation of ‘civilisation’s
savageness’ centred on the beliefs of scientism, ultra-utilitarianism and profit-centred thinking regardless
of its military or peaceful usage as a power source.

The complexity of such problems results in the difficulty of representing and testifying on events such as
the genocides. The term of ‘impossibility of representation’ or ‘impossibility of testimony’ (of Auschwitz)
refers to such overall phenomena.

5. The lessons of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’

Anne Frank’s family immigrated to Amsterdam, Netherlands from Frankfurt in 1933 when Hitler’s regime
took power and began to suppress the population. However, by May 1940 Nazi Germany moved forward
to also occupy the Netherlands. The Frank’s went into hiding in May 1942 until they were captured by the
German Gestapo at their hiding place. The Frank’s were sent to Auschwitz after being captured, and Anne
and her sister Margot were subsequently sent to Bergen-Belsen in late 1944. At the camp, the sisters were
infected by typhus which led to their subsequent death in late February and early March 1945.

The Diary of Anne Frank continues to have a great value to this day as a textbook of remembering the
history of Jewish suppression and recognising the importance of peace-building.

However, the readers of this book should also take note of the criticism by Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim
was a Jew from Vienna, born in 1903 and is a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp. After
immigrating to the US he became a prominent professor at the University of Chicago, specialising in
development psychology. He left several articles reflecting on his experience at the concentration camp.
He also committed suicide in 1990.

In an article titled ‘The ignored lesson of Anne Frank’, he illustrated three psychological mechanisms that
‘civilised people’ felt when first informed of the Nazi death camps. First, people believe that these abuses
and massacres are conducted by only a mad minded few. Second, they neglect such reports of the events
as propaganda or exaggerations. And third, while they believe the report, they tend to ‘quickly suppress
the knowledge of horror as soon as possible.’ The reason for the success of the book, theatre plays and
movies on the Diary of Anne Frank implies the wish to destroy the personality of the concentration camps
and oppose the murderous character of such perception.

I believe that praises for Anne Frank’s story cannot be explained without acknowledging that there is a
wish to forget about the gas chambers behind them. We must admit our efforts to forget the horrors by

108
admiring Anne’s struggle to run away from the looming disaster by escaping into a world of poetic and
delicate beauty.

Session 1
Bettelheim argues that the major success of the theatre plays and movies based on the Diary of Anne
Frank is due to their ‘false endings.’ In the end, we hear the voice of Anne from afar. She says that “Despite
all these terrible things, I believe that all people are still kind inside.” These unbelievable emotions are
alleged to have come from the girl that had to witness the death of her sister before the same fate awaited
her, the girl that had to face the death of her mother and the girl that had to witness the death of thousands
of other children. These words cannot be justified by any passage that was left in Anne’s diary.

These emotional words on the kindness of people seem to revive Anne Frank and seem to liberate us to
confront the grave challenges that have been instigated by Auschwitz. This is the reason why we tend to
feel good after reading her words. This is the reason why millions of people love these plays and movies.
It is because that while these stories make us confront the existence of Auschwitz, at the same time they
also steer us to ignore its meaning. If all people were kind inside, Auschwitz would never, ever have been
possible and it would be impossible for a similar event to occur again.

Bettelheim’s claim that the Diary of Anne Frank has been distorted internally through psychological
mechanisms of suppression and defensive denial including a “willingness to forget about the gas
chambers.” These are grave warnings that we should take note of.

6. Frankl and Levi

Victor E Frankl’s Night and Mist in Japan (originally Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager or
Man’s Search for Meaning for the English version) is one of the masterpieces written by a survivor of the
concentration camps.

The writer was a psychoanalyst from Vienna that studied under Freud and Adorno. However, being a
Jew his family was captured by the Nazi Germans when they took Austria and sent them to camps in
Auschwitz. His parents, wife and children died in these camps, but he lived on. This book is a record of
such bleak experience.

The Japanese edition of this book has an Introduction by the editor dated August 1956. The Introduction
has the following words.

I wish to believe that “knowing for a person that seeks self-reflection is to go beyond one’s limitations.”

109
The 2nd World Humanities Forum
Proceedings

I also believe that we must endeavour to prevent such tragic journey happening again by political action
and determinations in our everyday lives.

The Japanese version of this book was published ten years after the war, when survivors of the Holocaust
slowly began to introduce their literature and records. The public then also started to take notice of such
publications. The Introduction by the editor mentioned above seems to illustrate the perception and
determination of the publishing community at that time. This book subsequently became a bible to study
the Holocaust in Japan and it continues to enlighten many today.

However, the very foundation of this enlightenment viewpoint that believes in “people’s progress
through knowledge” is being challenged today by wars, massacres and nuclear disasters brought about
by scientism and ultra-utilitarianism. We are now faced with the question of whether indeed humans are
capable of self-reflection and whether humans can go beyond their limitations through knowledge. Primo
Levi was a person that struggled with such dire and difficult problems throughout his life.

The most prominent Japanese scholar on Primo Levi in Japan, Professor Takeyama Hirohide of
Ritsumeikan University, attempted a comparison of Frankl and Levi in his recent biography Primo Levi:
the writer that saw the truth of Auschwitz (Gen So Sa, 2011).

Primo Levi and Frankl both experienced the same concentration camps but had very different approaches
to the experience. Frankl was interested mainly in the psychological changes of people in the camps.
However, his central interests were not the usual prisoners that were exhausted by forced labour and
eventually killed. His writing focused on how to survive in concentration camps and how to raise oneself
in times of extreme conditions. He thought about the ‘meaning of agony.’

Through this journey, Frankl introduced Auschwitz as an environment of extreme conditions which led to
enhancement of the human mind. He also believed there were deep meanings to be ‘sacrificed.’ He even
used words such as ‘martyrs’ in some of his writings.

Takeyama argued that Frankl’s writings “surfaced a strong religious emotion in the end” and evaluated his
writings to be ‘moving’ but “having some kind of vague dissatisfaction.” What is the source of such “vague
dissatisfaction”?

Bruno Bettelheim who was also an Austrian survivor of the concentration camps and a psychologist had
a different position. Bettelheim argued that calling the sacrificed of the camps as martyrs was a “sort of
invented distortion to comfort ourselves.”

110
Such distortion could be considered as taking away the final perception of the sacrificed from them and
neglecting the final respect that we could give to them. It could also be considered a denial to accept the

Session 1
full meaning of their deaths. We must not romanticize their death for the slight psychological liberation
that is generated by such distortion.

According to Bettelheim, Frankl’s writings seem to be strengthening our defensive denial and suppression
by giving false comfort and liberation to the reader. Despite the horrible descriptions, Frankl’s strong
religious interest seems to lead to a ‘moving’ conclusion that there are meanings to all pain. Based on this
view, Frankl’s writings along with the Diary of Anne Frank became bestsellers by invoking such meaning
and emotion. His writings also seem to support the ‘impossibility of testimony.’

In Takeyama’s abovementioned biography, he claims that Levi, unlike Frankl, “did not tend to rely on
religion” and says the following.

If Levi did not rely on religion, what did he pursue? The answer to this question seems to be the meaning
of Auschwitz and why such things were built.

When Frankl tried to show where the human mind leaned against when faced with extreme conditions
such as Auschwitz, Levi focused on why such extreme conditions were made in the first place. Most
people when faced with dire, extreme conditions ‘beyond their normal comprehension’ such as wars,
massacres and natural disasters, they tend to consider such event as fate and the actions of the heavens
and the gods. They tend not to understand the reasons behind the disasters for it is difficult, and they try
to rationalize such events through a transcending existence. However, if the difficulties were the result
of human’s, we must strive to ‘understand’ them and seek the reasons behind such actions even though it
would be difficult.

The difference between Frankl and Levi seems to be one of a ‘clinical approach’ focused on how to live
in such dire conditions, and a ‘pathological approach’ emphasizing the reasons behind such reality. The
two approaches are not mutually exclusive or conflicting. However, the two are often confused and seem
to confront each other being on the same level. Also, they tend to be emotionally consumed by a distorted
mindless message that says “it is important to seek how to live within one’s fate than ineffectively
seeking to understand what one cannot understand.” While such acceptance might help the lives of some
individuals, it will not help to seek the reason behind these terrible events and preventing their future
recurrence.

111
The 2nd World Humanities Forum
Proceedings

6. “The Radius Paradox”

The western region of Tokyo that I live in is 200 kilometres away from the site of the nuclear disaster.
This is a subtle distance. Following the accident, the government announced the evacuation area to be
within a 20 km radius of the site and announced the 30 km range to be ‘preparation areas for emergency
evacuation.’ Later on it was found that there were areas beyond the 30 km boundary which were
severely contaminated by radio-active materials. These areas were announced as ‘planned evacuation
areas’ and shortly became uninhabited. However, there have also been experts that argued that the
cities of Fukushima or Koriyama, which are tens of kilometres away from the nuclear plant, have also
been contaminated by radio-active materials several times the level of Tokyo and should be considered
uninhabitable for everyday life.

Then is Tokyo, which is 200 km from the site, safe to live in? It seems not. It is likely that Tokyo will also
be contaminated by radio-active materials that will flow into the city by wind, rain, rivers and the sea. It
could also flow in through the distribution channels of various agricultural products and seafood.

While it was impossible to conduct a thorough examination following the accident, it has now been
confirmed one year following the event that it was just a work of chance that the nuclear power plant
accident did not have any direct influence on Tokyo. Following the accident, the US government ordered
its citizens residing in Japan to evacuate from within the 80 km radius range. This was not an overreaction,
but turned out to be the right action based on better information and analysis.

The Japanese government announced in late 2011 that the nuclear power plant that caused the accident
to have reached a state of ‘cold shutdown.’ However, the power plant continues to be unstable to this day.
Contaminated water continues to flow out from the reactors and it would not be a surprise if the pools
containing the used fuel rods explode any day. The Fukushima nuclear power plant will continue to exert
radio-active materials for several years onward. And it could be the source of an even more severe disaster
if another accident occurs, such as another earthquake or tsunami.

Despite such facts, most people in Tokyo have no plans of fleeing and continue on with their lives as
usual. Furthermore, even people living in close distances to the nuclear accident site continue on with their
lives. What are the reasons behind such inaction?

The majority of people living further from the damaged site lack the imagination to think about the truth
of such damage. It is not easy for a Tokyo citizen to sympathize with the difficulties of a Fukushima
citizen. It is not easy for a Korean to sympathize with the vague anxiety and horror that the Japanese

112
people live with today. The further you live from the site on the radius, the more difficult it is to imagine
the severity of the disaster.

Session 1
Then would you have a more urgent sense of anxiety and horror if you live closer to the damaged area?
This also seems not to be true. People tend not to confront the dire truth of living in these close areas and
tend to rely on easy, positive thinking. It seems that defense mechanisms such as denial and suppression
that were mentioned above are strong in play.

The people that continue to live in dangerous areas tend to rely on a ‘fabricated truth for comfort’ to
console themselves. The people that are far are unable to properly imagine the event, while people close
by turn their eyes away from the ‘painful truth.’ This wrong combination of forces tends to conceal the
truth, undervalue the damage and avoid responsibilities. It only seems to help the people that would like
to maintain the nuclear power plants for profit or potential military usage. In other words, they are helping
the “sad secret guardians of the final thunder.”

People that live further away from the damaged site should try to be more creative and imaginative in
understanding the truth of the damage. And people that live near the damaged site must have the courage
to face the harsh realities. The witnesses must endeavour to go beyond the ‘limitations of representation’
in their testimony and the common people must strive to use their imagination to go beyond their
‘imagination’s limits.’ This is what our time requires from us to prevent a recurrence of such disasters.
It is without need to say that the majority must also use their imagination to understand the pain of the
minorities.

113