Hiroshima 1945 and Fukushima 2011 mark two turning points in the long nuclear age. On one side, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand at the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, marking a transitional period in which Japan—in the wake of the ideology of peaceful nuclear power utilization—grew into an increasingly hypermodern society and economy. On the other side, Fukushima with the triple catastrophe – the cascade of earthquakes, tsunami, reactor meltdown, and leakage of radioactive substances – is an entirely different event, situated in-between a natural and technological desaster. 

The Hiroshima-Fukushima complex can thus be seen as an ambiguous image in which the past—the longue durée of the nuclear age, enacted via institutions, ideologies and imaginations—has an impact on the present and, on the other hand, understandings of the present affect its past. This complex is expressed by the ubiquity of paraphrases such as Fukushima, mon amour. The present sees itself as a revision of the past. Hiroshima and Fukushima are radically different from one another, and yet they are mutually dependent, so that the field of discourse formed around Hiroshima continues to affect the present, particularly in Japan, and on the other hand Fukushima calls for a different view of the history of the nuclear age and its relationship to the Anthropocene.

Hiroshima and the associated fear of nuclear war made the notion of an immediate, planetary end of humanity look like a plausible scenario for the first time. The earliest ethical reflections that followed the development of the atomic bomb and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are strongly linked to traditions of humanism and express concerns for humankind. This applies in different ways to a diverse set of historical positions, such as the pacifist letters of Albert Einstein, the philosophical interventions of Karl Jaspers, but also to the fields of the arts and aesthetics after 1945. The topoi of non-representability, the testimony of survivors and memorial culture, as well as tropes of nation, peace and humanity defined the field of discourse well into the 1950s.¹

A first paradigm shift became apparent in the 1960s. In the performances, sculptures and installations of Tetsumi Kudo, the unity of nature and the image of the body were shattered. Beginning with his early performances, such as Hara-kiri of Humanism (1963) and Cultivation of Radioactivity (since 1968), Kudo exposes the paradoxes of humanism after Hiroshima. In transparent cages, in which deformed creatures and mutated organs experience the forces of radioactivity, the invisibility of contamination turns into an abstract figurative form, fluorescent color and sculptural space. According to Mike Kelley, a “rejection of an existentialist humanist politic”²  materializes in Kudo’s work and a dystopian, ecological world view is prototypically imagined.

Humanist ethics, or anti-humanist imaginations, do not completely lose their significance after Fukushima. However, today they are put into perspective, beyond this antagonism. In many respects, the reaction to Fukushima can be understood as a paradigm shift in the nuclear age, which was already in sight with Chernobyl.

But only after Fukushima this perspectival shift started to shape an entire field of discourse and take hold of artistic practices. The catastrophe of March 11, 2011 was then understood as a paradigm of the Anthropocene. Collective forms of work—such as the exhibition series Don’t Follow the Wind (2015), initiated by Chim Pom, or the documentary “post-studio practice” in The Otolith Groups’ The Radiant (2012)—are based on interdisciplinary research, intensive field research, collaboration and exchange with activists and scientists, and above all on local engagement with specific communities on the Pacific coast around the reactor in Futaba. Instead of individual modes of expression or allegorical forms of representation, the fragility of specific ecosystems, their connection to everyday life and solidarity with local initiatives are at the center of many artistic practices.

In Akira Takayama’s participatory practice, the nameless have their say in a post-Fukushima Japan. In his participatory video installation Referendum Project (2011/14), students from both Fukushima and Hiroshima are interviewed about their dreams and fears, as well as their view on Japanese society. Takayama describes the intention of his work as a “mobile theater project archiving Japan’s post-3.11 voices”³  and thus includes an important population group, as well as a critique of Japan’s nuclear power politics. Inspired by the referendum on the nuclear power plant in Zwentendorf, Austria, in 1978, the Referendum Project uses the voice of the next generation to think about the possibility of a direct democracy that still does not exist in Japan. In addition to this lack of direct democracy, a follow-up work by Takayama, the video installation Happy Island—The Messianic Banquet of the Righteous (2015), makes a second blind spot of the post-Fukushima age visible.
 

On monitors that Takayama presented at the Maison Hermes Forum in Ginza, one of Tokyo’s most expensive districts, we can observe seemingly peaceful grazing cows in Fuko (“Happy”) shima (“Island”), on a farm 14 kilometers north of the Daiichi nuclear reactor. During the evacuation, farm animals were treated as contaminated, nuclear waste and in many cases literally discarded. Marginalized groups of committed farmers, such as the “Farm of Hope” (Kibō no bokujō), protested this coldhearted disposal of animal life and worried about their survival. With the title of his work, Takayama refers to a medieval depiction of the “messianic banquet of the righteous” in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, which shows the four eschatological animals (the rooster, the eagle, the bull, and the lion), but also strangely profane animal figures such as a leopard and monkeys at the banquet of the last day.⁴  Art historical research has interpreted the substitution of the saints by animals as a transfiguration of animal life, or its difference to humans, during end times and in the messianic kingdom.⁵

The Hiroshima-Fukushima complex manifests itself precisely in such discontinuous reshufflings and openings of anthropocentric and humanistic narratives. In his late, speculative essay Feu la cendre (Cinders) Jacques Derrida proposed to think of this transformation as a transition: after a culture of ruins and remnants, which leaves a trace in the cinders (feu la cendre) after the all-burning (holocaustos), there is greater hope—yet this hope doesn’t unfold through human activity, but as a “religion of flowers”,⁶ in the form of rebirths yet to come. Despite all speculation, this metaphorology of fire ash and fire flowers resonates very closely with numerous works created after Fukushima, which decentralize humankind.

Kenji Ishiguro’s iconic photo book Hiroshima Now (1972), for example, primarily documented urban life in the decades following the nuclear bombings, whereas his most recent photo book Fairyland (2015) chooses a tulip field as symbol for Fukushima’s long aftermath. The same goes for Ana Vaz, whose experimental film Atomic Garden (2018) utilizes the “fire flower” (hanabi) to create an ephemeral time-image, located in-between the spheres of fireworks and the contaminated fauna.

In the “atomic garden”, the human being—a gardener—is decentralized by the fact that she can only return to her garden from the evacuation zone at certain times of the day. In the experimental film’s stroboscopic cinematography, oscillating between explosions in the night sky and contaminated flowers, the gardener is only present in her absence.⁷ Such an absence, or decentralizing of human life, also defines the work of Ikebana artist Atsunobu Katagiri.

In his installations and the homonymous book Sacrifice: The Ikebana of Regeneration Offered to the Future (2015), the flowers in Fukushima herald a future in which humans may only be able to think of their own afterlife as a trace of their ethical-religious concepts. The blue mizuaoi flowers that Katagiri found for his arrangements, not far from the nuclear reactor, were only able to resettle because the tsunami that triggered the technological catastrophe also washed away the herbicides from the rice fields that had previously prevented the mizuaoi from blooming. Loosely based on Kafka’s famous aphorism,⁸ this religion of flowers follows a future in which there is infinite hope, but not for us.

This essay was first published in French in the catalogue of the exhibition L’Âge atomique. Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire (Musée d’art moderne de Paris, October 11, 2024 – February 9, 2025), curated and edited by Julia Garimorth and Maria Stavrinaki.

About the author: After receiving his PhD in Art History at the University of Basel in 2014, for which he received the “Wolfgang-Ratjen award”, Toni Hildebrandt has been working at the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art History at University of Bern since 2014. He was a guest lecturer at University of Basel, New York University, and the Tokyo University of the Arts, and he held fellowships at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome (2013-2017), the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich (2019) and the Walter Benjamin Kolleg (Junior Fellow 2020/21; Senior Fellow 2024-26) at University of Bern. Recently, he edited the volume PPPP: Pier Paolo Pasolini Philosopher (together with Giovanbattista Tusa), and is now working on his second book “Art in the Atomic Age, 1945-2011”.

Footnotes
1  Toni Hildebrandt, “The Aporia of Cinders and the Aporetic Structure of Hiroshima, mon amour,” in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 77/78 (2022), pp. 133–140. For an overview of the aesthetic categories after Hiroshima see Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces. Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

2 Mike Kelley, “Cultivation of Radioactivity,” in Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis, ed. Doryun Chong (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2008), pp. 51–57, here p. 57.

3 Keijiro Suga, “Invisible Waves: One Some Japanese Artists After March 11, 2011,” in Ecocriticism in Japan, ed. Hisaki Wake, Keijiro Suga and Yuki Masami (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), pp. 173–187, here p. 177.

4 Milan, Biblioteca Pinacoteca Accademia Ambrosiana, B32inf., fol. 136r. The Messianic Banquet of the Righteous, Hebrew Bible from the thirteenth century.

5 Zofia Ameisenova, “Animal-Headed Gods, Evangelists, Saints and Righteous Men,” in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 12 (1949): 21–45; Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 1–3.

6 Jacques Derrida, Cinders (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).

7 Toni Hildebrandt, “Die Jetztzeit des Feuerwerks. Über Ana Vaz‘ Atomic Garden,” in Augenblicksaufzeichnung – Momentaufnahmen. Kleinste Zeiteinheit, Denkfigur, mediale Praktiken, ed. Birgit Erdle and Annegret Pelz, Paderborn: Fink/Brill 2020, pp. 155–165; “Fire-Flowers: On Ana Vaz‘ Atomic Garden,” in Berfrois, March 27, 2020, https://www.berfrois.com/2020/03/toni-hildebrandt-on-ana-vaz/

8 “[…] an infinite amount of hope—just not for us.” Frank Kafka, cit. in Max Brod, “Der Dichter Franz Kafka,” Die neue Rundschau 1, 1 (1921): 1213.