The Sinking of Beauty
By: Charz
Tags: Cold War, Culture Creators, Economic Hegemony, Godzilla, internationalism, Japan Sinks, Japanese Detective Writers Association Prize, Nihon Chinbotsu, Occidentalism, Oil shock, Raja of the Senses, Sakyo Komatsu, Seiun Award, Shiro Moritani, Shock Doctrine, Sinking discourse, The Sinking of Japan, Thomas Pynchon, Thought-Producer, Tokusatsu, Vietnam War
Everything we admire on this earth today – anime and manga, figurine and tokusatsu – is mainly the creative product of a few peoples, originating from one country, Japan. On them depends the existence of this whole culture. If they perish, the beauty of this earth will sink into the grave with them.
Nihon Chinbotsu
Japan Sinks (日本沈没, Nihon Chinbotsu) is a disaster novel written by Sakyo Komatsu in 1973. Komatsu took nine years to complete the work. The novel received the Japanese Detective Writers Association Prize and the Seiun Prize for a Japanese novel-length work.
The novel represented the growing discontent in the minds of many Japanese people during the 1970s, as their cultural, economic, and political identity and stability had become under attack from international pressures, and the many adjustments that had to be made after the Cold War ended. This novel is now seen as an important look into the cultural context of 1970s Japan, particularly in its level of popularity.
(wiki)
Chinbotsuron or Sinking discourse
In the early 1970s, Sakyo Komatsu’s science-fiction novel about how a massive earthquake literraly sinks Japan – Nihon Chinbotsu (Japan Sinks) – became a runaway best-seller. the expression Nihon Chinbotsu became a metaphor for all the perils that face Japan – economic, social, political, external and domestic, as well as the forces of nature. The idea that Japan would sink, doomed unless it changed fundamentally, exerts a powerful hold on the Japanese imagination, or at least on the imagination of Japanese opinion leaders. There has been a steady stream of popular books that are part of a “sinking discourse” (chinbotsuron) for the past quarter of a century.
Gerald L. Curtis, The logic of Japanese politics: leaders, institutions, and the limits of change, 1999, p 42
Japanese Shock Doctrine
Komatsu’s central concern here is not the scientific speculation but the impingement of the resultant disaster on the lives of his characters and, in particular, on how it impinges upon the character of the Japanese people as a whole as seen through them. The Japanese, long isolated from the internationl mainstream by geography and language, must come to terms with the fact that their ancient and rich culture, so intimately an organic outgrowth of their beloved Home Islands, can now survive only in a geographically rootless diaspora.
Norman Spinrad, Science fiction in the real world, 1990, p98
Komatsu radically reconfigured the very notion of diaspora into a powerful engine of Japanese capitalism during the high growth period of the 1970s. Although some reinterpret this novel in the late 1990s as a highly accurate prediction of the devasting Osaka-Kobe earthquake, in the 1970s Japan Sinks helped popularize diaspora as the ideal Occidentalist form of internationalism. The blurb for the first Kobunsha edition of the novel designated Sakyo Komatsu as an “international literary figure”, and referred to Japan Sinks as a work “having been awaited internationally”. The novel in turn encouraged contemporary Japanese businessmen or “salarymen” to go abroad as volunteer exiles, and to develop Japanese economic hegemony. Japan Sinks this symbolized the “econo-internationalist” spirit of the high growth period of the 1970s and 80s.
Heide Fehrenbach, Uta G. Poiger, Transactions, transgressions, transformations: American culture in Western Europe and Japan, 2000, p 228
Nuclear Fear in the Global Network
What is more, lest us note that, symptomatic of the oil shock and the end of the Vietnam War, the year 1973 saw the astonishing coincidence between Japan Sinks and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, neither of which could have been written without the kind of nuclear imagination that is represented by Godzilla. Komatsu and Pynchon undoubtedly meditated upon what would happen to the postapocalyptic junkyard and how we should react to the age of reconstruction. This is how they both in equal measure predicted postdiasporic and globally networked space in the posteighties reality, in which everything is connected with everything else, mostly as if through a web of conspiracy.
Takayuki Tatsumi, Full metal apache: transactions between cyberpunk Japan and avant-pop America, 2006, p14
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