National Trauma in Cinematic Landscape: 3/11 Japanese Cinema as Example

National Trauma in Cinematic Landscape: 3/11 Japanese Cinema as Example

Film and Television Studies

Xinting Du

2023

This research is situated at the intersection of Japanese Studies, Film Studies, Memory Studies, and Landscape Studies, and adopts a contrastive case study method to examine how cinema shapes collective memory and connects with traumatic past events (, particularly, the 3.11 disaster). The term “3.11” refers to the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011, a devastating incident that further triggered tsunamis and nuclear disasters. This research seeks to answer how people remember and reflect on such sudden disasters through cinema, rather than any other art forms.

Therefore, this research specifically focuses on how landscapes are portrayed in two cinematic formats: documentaries and fiction. It establishes a solid conceptual framework based on three key notions: sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander’s concept of “trauma drama”, Pierre Nora’s notion of a “memory site” and the controversial concept of the “cinematic landscape” – Through these lenses, it explores the wounded and multi-layered landscape within 311 Cinema.