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Radiant mushrooms of postwar Japanese media

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Radiant mushrooms of postwar Japanese media

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Content RADIANT MUSHROOMS OF POSTWAR JAPANESE MEDIA by Ichigo Mina Kaneko A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE) (COMPARATIVE MEDIA AND CULTURE) December 2023 Copyright 2023 Ichigo Mina Kaneko ii Acknowledgements I did not know, when I started my PhD, that I would be writing a dissertation about mushrooms. Nor did I imagine that comparative studies could be as fluid in its thinking methods as it turned out to be, exploratory in the varied ways research could traverse the boundaries ascribed to a field, a literature, a language, a thing. Thank you to Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture for offering such a program, and thank you especially to my advisors, Akira Mizuta Lippit and Natania Meeker, whose own works imaginatively traverse such boundaries, pushing what interdisciplinary studies can do. It is in Akira Lippit’s seminar (a space in which time itself seems to expand) that this project first began to take shape; his encouragement of creative critical thought and support since day one have been foundational to the work I have done these several years at USC. I am also immensely grateful to Natania Meeker, whose critical insights guided much of the thinking behind this research; her feedback and generosity throughout every stage this project has been vital. Together, their thinking on visuality, catastrophe, and vegetal materialism has been a tremendous influence on my research, and without their mentorship, this project would not have come to be. I would also like to thank my wonderful committee: working closely with Neetu Khanna in research and pedagogy has truly been a highlight of these last few years; her work on decolonial affect has been an inspiration and guide. Thank you to Kerim Yasar for his support of this project since its early stages, for pointing me to resources, for his wisdom in navigating the ins and outs of academia. And last, but not least, thank you very much to Henry Jenkins for his comments, ideas, and encouragement throughout each stage of dissertation writing, as well as during my first semester at USC. His continued support and incisive feedback have meant so much. While at USC I received guidance from many other faculty, including Antónia Szabari, who helped shape my chapters on mushroom clouds and mushroom horror, David Bialock, who gave iii me several resources for thinking about ecology in Japan, and Satoko Shimazaki, whose mentorship was crucial for my development of methodological approaches to research on modern Japan. I would also like to thank the wonderful faculty of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture and East Asian Languages and Cultures for their support: Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, Erin GraffZivin, Olivia Harrison, Samuel Steinberg, Panivong Norindr, Jason Webb, Gian-Maria Annovi, Brian Bernards, and Kate Page-Lippsmeyer. My time with each of them, inside and outside of seminars, has shaped my methods for critical thinking and informed my approaches to research and teaching. I would also like to thank Bertha Delgado Arce for all that she does to make the program run; Katherine Chan Guevarra for her savvy, efficiency, and wit, and for making so many things possible; Christine Shaw, for all of her help and kindness; Shannon Maiko Takushi for facilitating my fellowship at the Shinso Ito Center; and Yumi Matsumoto of the Japanese program for her support and friendship over the years. This dissertation was funded by the University of Southern California’s Provost’s Fellowship Top Off, Research Enhancement Fellowship, Visual Studies Research Institute, the Shinso Ito Center, and Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture program. Additionally, doctoral research was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, in affiliation with Waseda University and Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. During my time in Tokyo, I had the chance of working with several people who guided many aspects of my research. Thank you very much to: Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto for his support for this dissertation and for making my research at Waseda University possible; to Tetsuya Miura, for my involvement at Aoyama Gakuin, helping share my research, and for his many insights; to Kotaro Iizawa, who is a generous guide and inspiration for all things mushroom; Keijiro Suga, for his friendship and support; Kensuke Kono for sharing his insights into the mushroom cloud; and Masami Yuki, for our conversations on ecocriticism and Japan. The research I undertook for this iv project, and my time in Tokyo, would not have been the same without each of them. Lastly, many thanks to Meredith Drake Reitan, who facilitated the Fulbright-Hays fellowship, and to Barry Schein, whose generous feedback made all the difference for my fellowship applications. Parts of this dissertation research were presented at the University of Southern California’s Pacific Asia Museum (2019), the American Comparative Literature Association’s Annual Conference (2021 & 2022), Aoyama Gakuin’s Annual Comparative Studies Symposium (2022), the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Biennial Conference (2023), and the Energy in Asia Conference (2023), sponsored by the EnviroLab at Claremont McKenna College and The UCLA Center for Korean Studies. I am especially grateful to Bethany Wearden at the Pacific Asia Museum for inviting me to speak, and to Albert Park, Namhee Lee, and everyone at the Energy in Asia conference, with special thanks to Derek Kramer for his attentive feedback. I would also like to thank those at this year’s ASLE conference; my conversations with Mimi Long, Jon Pitt, Rachel DiNitto, Christine Marran, and Doug Slaymaker provided me with several key insights as I rounded out my project. I would not have found myself here were not for friends, family, and mentors. Françoise Mouly, whose friendship and mentorship has led me to where I am, and with whom I had my first hands-on lessons in the medium specificity of comics, has been a huge part of my journey. In my transition from publishing to academic research, Shuichiro Takeda supported my learning in Japanese literature and the application process. Elizabeth Beaujour of Hunter College provided feedback on the research paper I randomly put together for my application, despite my cold call, and without having any real reason to help other than kindness. When academia felt opaque and impenetrable, her generosity was especially welcome. Tim Tomlinson has been an incredible teacher, friend, and support throughout my time at NYU and beyond. v I am also lucky to have a community of incredible friends and family around me, in and out of academia. Special thanks to Noraedén Mora Méndez, with whom I wrote much of the first chapter, for her intelligence and creativity, to Rio Katayama for the laughs and friendship, to Hayun Cho for our conversations and good energy. Thank you to Ka Lee Wong, to the larries: Edie Adams, Jane Kassavin, Cord-Heinrich Plinke, to Kendra Atkin and Aidan Diamond for our work sessions, Cynthia Zhang for sharing reading. Ryoko Kato (and the entire Kato family), Alexandra Kaucher, Kengo Tsutsumi, Namku Kim, McKenna Stayner, Becky Cooper, and Liana Finck—I am grateful for your friendship all these years and beyond. Thank you to Toshiko and Kazu Itaya, Noriko and Patrick Foster, Michiko and Hiroko, Manabu and Ayumi, to David, Chelsea, Harley and Cat Stevens, to the entire Abbasi family: Saeid Sr. and Patty, Jaffer, Amber, Baz and Clyde, Sana and Otis. To my anchors: Mark & Jaci, Olivia, Sebastien, Manon, Albert, Maia, Trung and Phuong, Maggie, Tim and Ernie. Thank you to Gucci for the cuddles and infinite support, and thank you especially to my incredible partner and rock, Saied, who has been supportive of my career in academia with all its inconvenience, including multiple cross-country moves and one overseas. Finally: thank you to Arigato Sushi and to my amazing parents, Wataru and Emi, who worked hard to make every opportunity for my career in editing and research possible. I owe them everything. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements.............................................................................................................................................ii List of Figures...................................................................................................................................................viii Abstract..............................................................................................................................................................xiii Introduction: The State of the Mushroom.......................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Mushrooms of Nuclear Empire.....................................................................................................12 The Mushroom Cloud as a Total Image...............................................................................15 The Birth of the Sublime Bomb.............................................................................................22 The Sublimation of the Photographic Image.......................................................................36 The Monster Mushroom of Bikini Atoll...............................................................................48 Revisiting the Figure of the Mushroom................................................................................57 Chapter 2: The Mushroom Cloud Proliferates: Anime, Manga, and Kawaii Bombs...................................61 Time Bokan: The Art of Takashi Murakami...........................................................................63 The Elusive Mushroom Cloud in Japan................................................................................66 Beneath, Under, and Beyond the Mushroom Cloud...........................................................74 Superflat Landscape................................................................................................................79 Kawaii Kinokogumo (the “Cute” Atomic Bomb)....................................................................84 Constructions of Japaneseness in Superflat.........................................................................87 Sprawling Superflat Mushrooms...........................................................................................95 Fungal Lines of Flight...........................................................................................................100 Chapter 3: Fungal Horror: the Mutant Mushrooms of Postwar Japanese Sci-Fi......................................105 Honda Ishiro’s Matango: Social Contexts............................................................................106 Mushrooms in a Blasted Landscape....................................................................................110 vii The Pleasures and Horrors of Becoming-mushroom......................................................118 The Spectacle of the Mutated Body....................................................................................124 A Brief Introduction to Shirakawa Marina’s Kinokonga.....................................................127 Depicting War, Surviving Radiation, and the Violence of Fungal Invasion...................129 Eco-visions of Decentered Humanity................................................................................135 Speculative Mushrooms.......................................................................................................140 Coda: Remediating Fukushima.......................................................................................................................148 Bibliography......................................................................................................................................................159 Figures................................................................................................................................................................170 viii List of Figures Figure 1: Clay sculptures from Japan’s middle to late Jōmon Era, found in Akita Prefecture...........170 Figure 2: Woodblock print by botanist Iwasaki Tsunemasa (1786-1842)..............................................170 Figure 3: Sculpture: String of Mushrooms, late Edo period (ca. 1800-1850)........................................171 Figure 4: Illustration and specimen collected by Minakata Kumagusu, 1901..........................................171 Figure 5: Super Nova, by Takashi Murakami, 1999.......................................................................................172 Figure 6: Photograph from Operation Buster–Jangle, Nevada, 1951......................................................172 Figure 7: Photograph from Greenhouse George test, Enewetak-Atoll, May 8, 1951............................173 Figure 8: Photograph from Buster Charlie, Nevada, October 30, 1951...................................................173 Figure 9: American safety brochure, 1955....................................................................................................174 Figure 10: Mechanix Illustrated, February, 1950.............................................................................................174 Figure 11: Advertisement for Atomic Joe Coffee, exact year unknown...................................................174 Figure 12: Branding for Atomic Firecrackers, exact year unknown..........................................................174 Figure 13: Packaging for Atomic Fireball Candies, exact year unknown.................................................175 Figure 14: Nuclear War Board Game, 1965.................................................................................................175 Figure 15: Photograph by Alan Jarlson, published in National Geographic, 1953......................................176 Figure 16: Photograph above Nagasaki, by Charles Levy, 1945................................................................177 Figure 17: Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818)...............................................178 Figure 18: Photograph above Nagasaki (different version), by Charles Levy, 1945...............................178 Figure 19: Photograph of shadow effects at Hiroshima, 1945...................................................................179 Figure 20: Photograph of shadow effects at Nagasaki, by Matsumoto Eiichi, 1945...............................179 Figure 21: Illustration published in Life magazine, August 20, 1945.........................................................180 Figure 22: Photograph of cloud over Hiroshima, 1945..............................................................................181 Figure 23: Photograph published in Life magazine, August 20, 1945.......................................................181 ix Figure 24: Photograph at Yucca Flats, exact date unidentified..................................................................181 Figure 25: Photograph from Baker, Operation Crossroads, July 25, 1946..............................................182 Figure 26: Colorized photograph from Baker, Operation Crossroads, July 25, 1946............................182 Figure 27: Photograph from Baker, Operation Crossroads, Bikini Atoll, July 25, 1946........................183 Figure 28: Photograph from Baker, Operation Crossroads, Bikini Atoll, July 15, 1946........................183 Figure 29: Time Bokan - Red, by Takashi Murakami.....................................................................................184 Figure 30: Time Bokan - Pink by Takashi Murakami.....................................................................................184 Figure 31: Time Bokan – Green by Takashi Murakami..................................................................................185 Figure 32: Time Bokan – Silver by Takashi Murakami...................................................................................185 Figure 33: “Red Explosion,” by Andy Warhol, 1963..................................................................................186 Figure 34: From 1970s TV anime series Time Bokan...................................................................................187 Figure 35: Vue du siège de Gibraltar et explosion des batteries flottantes (View of the Siege of Gibraltar and the Explosion of the Floating Batteries), artist unknown, c. 1782..................................188 Figure 36: Google Ngram graph for “mushroom cloud.”.........................................................................188 Figure 37: From “Living Mold from Outer Space,” by Osamu Tezuka...................................................189 Figure 38: Still from animation Barefoot Gen, by Nakazawa Keiji, 1983.....................................................189 Figure 39: Eco Eco Rangers Earth Force, by Takashi Murakami, 2005..........................................................190 Figure 40: Diagram of pyramid of visual rays conceived by Leon Battista Alberti, with E indicating the position of the human eye and ABCD marking the four corners of a canvas.............191 Figure 41: The geometrical construction of space based on the horizon line and localized points on canvas indicated by visual rays, by Alberti................................................................................191 Figure 42: Mr Dob - And Then Blue Dob by Takashi Murakami...................................................................192 Figure 43: The Castle of Tin Tin, by Takashi Murakami, 1998. ....................................................................192 Figure 44: Photograph of Super Nova at the Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago in 2017..............193 x Figure 45: Assorted boletes, by Iwasaki Tsunemasa, 19th Century..........................................................193 Figure 46: Amanita muscaria, by Iwasaki Tsunemasa, 19th Century........................................................194 Figure 47: Amanita muscaria, by Jean-Jacques Paulet, 19th Century. ......................................................194 Figure 48: Army of Mushrooms by Takashi Murakami, 2003.........................................................................195 Figure 49: Champagne Supernova, by Takashi Murakami, 2001....................................................................196 Figure 50: Smooth Nightmare by Takashi Murakami, 2001...........................................................................196 Figure 51: The Crab Nebula, remnants of a super nova that exploded 6,500 light-years away in the Milky Way. Image by NASA......................................................................................................197 Figure 52: Mycelia of white fungus................................................................................................................197 Figure 53: Bulbous mushrooms of Matango growing in the rain................................................................198 Figure 54: From George Melies’ Voyage Dans La Lune, 1902.....................................................................198 Figure 55: Research room filled with plant and animal specimens............................................................199 Figure 56: The three men look around the research room.........................................................................199 Figure 57: “Matango,” the “mushroom monster.”.....................................................................................200 Figure 58: Mami and Akiko react to fungal growth.....................................................................................200 Figure 59: Room of red fungi.........................................................................................................................201 Figure 60: Film poster for Matango................................................................................................................201 Figure 61: Sketch of Matango’s mushroom monsters..................................................................................202 Figure 62: Matango’s mushroom monsters...................................................................................................202 Figure 63: Mami after returning from the mushroom forest.....................................................................203 Figure 64: The forest of mushrooms............................................................................................................203 Figure 65: Akiko in the mushroom meadow...............................................................................................204 Figure 66: From Umezz Kazuo’s The Drifting Classroom..............................................................................204 xi Figure 67: Kinokonga’s mushroom monsters................................................................................................205 Figure 68: The old man in the cabin encounters fungal zombies..............................................................205 Figure 69: Aoki and Sada-sensei dig up mushroom zombies....................................................................206 Figure 70: Dr. Shirakuni tells Aoki-shonen about the aliens’ superpowers.............................................207 Figure 71: Gen and his family, from Barefoot Gen.........................................................................................208 Figure 72: Gen’s “monsters,” from Barefoot Gen..........................................................................................208 Figure 73: Aoki’s zombie family returns, from Kinokonga...........................................................................209 Figure 74: From “Living Mold,” by Tezuka Osamu...................................................................................210 Figure 75: Aoki resigned to his mushroom fate, from Kinokonga..............................................................211 Figure 76: Plants begin to germinate as creatures are recycled by fungi...................................................212 Figure 77: Aoki in full mushroom form.......................................................................................................213 Figure 78: Mushroom cloud explodes..........................................................................................................214 Figure 79: Raindrops in the form of mushrooms fall.................................................................................214 Figure 80: Mycological taxonomy from Kinokonga......................................................................................215 Figure 81: Aliens imagined by unidentified narrator...................................................................................216 Figure 82: Aliens imagined by Aoki..............................................................................................................216 Figure 83: Images of disaster from Kahoku Shimpō, a local newspaper from Tōhoku, 2011..................217 Figure 84: Sample photograph from Ed Ruscha’s Colored People...............................................................218 Figure 85: From Homma Takashi’s Symphony..............................................................................................219 Figure 86: From Homma Takashi’s Symphony..............................................................................................219 Figure 87: From Homma Takashi’s Symphony..............................................................................................219 Figure 88: From Homma Takashi’s Symphony..............................................................................................219 Figure 89: From Homma Takashi’s Symphony..............................................................................................220 Figure 90: From Homma Takashi’s Symphony..............................................................................................220 xii Figure 91: From Homma Takashi’s Symphony..............................................................................................220 Figure 92: From Homma Takashi’s Symphony..............................................................................................220 Figure 93: From Michael Marder and Anaïs Tondeur’s Chernobyl Herbarium, 2016.................................221 Figure 94: From Takeda Shimpei’s Trace......................................................................................................221 Figure 95: Illustration by Minakata Kumagusu...........................................................................................222 Figure 96: Illustration by Minakata Kumagusu...........................................................................................222 Figure 97: Cover of Homma’s Symphony.......................................................................................................223 xiii Abstract Mushrooms have appeared in Japanese literature in peculiar ways throughout history, seducing Buddhist nuns into uncontrollable dancing spells, as in the premodern folktales of the Konjaku Monogatarishū (11th century), or invading Earth as a parasitic alien species, as in Shirakawa Marina’s comic Invader Spaceship Kinokonga (1976). Whimsical and provocative, they have long presented themselves in stories as delicious, bewitching, poisonous, or healing, straddling realms of culinary pleasure, hallucinatory drug trips, unexpected death, and medicinal treatment. My dissertation begins with the premise that after WWII, the symbolism of the mushroom undergoes a dramatic change in postwar Japan, influenced by the convergence of factors linking fungi to nuclear power. In particular, I argue that it becomes a key figure in postwar Japanese visual culture through which to articulate nuclear horror and grapple with the legacy of WWII. I propose that the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended WWII—and the images of the atomic mushroom cloud that circulated widely during the Cold War—mark a turning point in which the mushroom in Japanese literature and culture takes on new significance as an emblem of unprecedented military threat in a nuclear age. Moreover, it simultaneously becomes a symbol of resistance to radiation, alluding to scientific research on some fungi’s unique ability to absorb it and turn it into reproductive energy. This process, confirmed by microbiologists in the years following Chernobyl, has led to more recent discussions about potentially clearing deadly levels of cesium at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant through fungi. What follows is not a comprehensive analysis of mushrooms in Japanese visual culture, or its transformation after WWII. Rather, it examines how and why the mushroom came to be the most visible symbol for the representation of the atomic bomb, beginning with its construction in the U.S. beginning in the 1940s. While the mushroom cloud may be widely recognizable today, it was an image carefully created by the U.S. military during their accelerated development of nuclear arms. xiv Erasing unimaginable violence and replacing it with a perfect picture, it served to manage the bomb’s image to further the American government’s Cold War military agenda. Analyzing the military optics behind its sublime aestheticization, I argue that the mushroom cloud is a commodifying image of nuclear empire. I also analyze the ways the image circulated within the context of postwar Japan. “Kinokogumo” (or “mushroom cloud”) is a widely recognized image and phrase in Japan as it is in America, understood to be a placeholder for nuclear devastation. In particular, it often serves as a substitution for the WWII atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In an effort to understand the valences of the mushroom in Japan’s visual culture, I explore the mushroom cloud’s entry and circulation within Japan’s postwar context, tracing its history, conditions of censorship, and cultural connotations. From there, I turn to the art of Takashi Murakami, who frequently draws mushrooms and mushroom clouds, to examine the relationship of aesthetics and war and the complex ways trauma and aesthetics come to be nationalized. Finally, I analyze how the mushroom becomes a figure of annihilation and a means for survival in postwar Japanese media by looking closely at two case studies from science-fiction: Honda Ishirō’s 1963 film Matango and Shirakawa Marina’s 1976 manga Shinryaku Enban Kinokonga (Invader Spaceship Kinokonga), two tales of mushroom horror that envision the necessary transformation from human to mushroom for living in a post-apocalyptic world. Grappling with fears of nuclear violence and expressing concerns about environmental degradation, my project argues mushrooms—and visual narratives about them—help confront unimaginable catastrophe, offering means for contending with precarious futures. 1 Introduction: The State of the Mushroom Mushrooms are having a moment. At least, they are in the North American context from which I write. Over the last few years, they have been cropping up with increasing frequency in popular culture, the mainstream news, in domestic and commercial spaces of all kinds. For instance: this year saw the success of HBO’s videogame-turned-TV-show, The Last of Us, featuring Pedro Pascal (also popping up everywhere), a dystopic science-fiction thriller about fungus-zombies that bring about apocalypse (cordyceps, to be exact, which go haywire due to Earth’s rising temperatures). When the global pandemic, caused by the novel coronavirus, sent communities worldwide into lockdown in 2020, mushrooms were featured heavily in the American news media. The New Yorker featured an article by Hua Hsu about the “secret lives of fungi,” highlighting their unseen but highly active role in ecology. The New York Times published its own cluster of articles, including one titled “Mushrooms, the Last Survivors” in its magazine, with the header: “Neither plant nor animal, mushrooms have confounded humans since ancient times. Now, they’re a reminder of our tenuous place in an uncertain world” (Mishan). Mushroom grow-kits boomed.1 Since gradually re-opening from the lockdown days, the hot new item in Los Angeles’ hip coffee shops seems to be the “chagaccino,” which boasts effects for boosting immunity, improving cognitive function, relieving stress, and obtaining youthful skin. When so-called ordinary life halted on a global scale, mushrooms provided a sense of comfort, pleasure, and purpose, eliciting energized interest. 1According to Matt McInnis, one of the founders of North Spore (mushroom growers based in Portland, Maine), sales of mushroom grow kits for beginners in spring 2020 were four times that of the previous spring (Schlanger). 2 But the solace found through mushrooms in troubling times is not new. Mushrooms have been associated with war and mourning in different cultural and historical contexts beyond this American capitalist one, throughout different time periods. Using the matsutake as a model, Anna Tsing has written beautifully about the ways the mushroom works its way in and out of global commodity chains, its unpredictable growth a source of delight and even hope. In the prologue to her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, she writes: I’ve read that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, thousands of Siberians, suddenly deprived of state guarantees, ran to the woods to collect mushrooms. These are not the mushrooms I follow, but they make my point: the uncontrolled lives of mushrooms are a gift—and a guide—when the controlled world we thought we had fails. (2) A similar sentiment is expressed through a more personal account by anthropologist Long Litt Woon, who in her memoir The Way Through the Woods narrates her grief over the sudden loss of her husband. When moving out of emotional impasse seemed impossible, mushroom-picking helped her regain a sense of connection to life. The Way Through the Woods is a dual account of this process of mourning and the discovery of fungal wonder. Tsing’s and Woon’s works grasp a sense of serendipity, or at the very least surprise, that accompanies our encounter with mushrooms, both because they grow suddenly where we might least expect them to and because they are inexplicably, curiously, odd. Closer to animals than they are to plants, mushrooms grow by “eating” and digesting food, including “dead” matter (animal carcasses, decaying trees, rocks), which they recycle to create soil for new growth. There are mushrooms that leak black liquid as they disappear onto themselves (shaggy inkcap), mushrooms that glow green in the dark (bioluminescent mushrooms), mushrooms that—as in The Last of Us—infect bugs through spores, causing paralysis by encasing them in fungus, before sprouting out of their spines. As mushroom researcher and photography critic Iizawa 3 Kotaro2 writes, “there is no species more varied than the mushroom”3 (13). Moreover, each mushroom is ephemeral, growing and disappearing quickly before our eyes—but as a species, fungi have been on Earth since before the earliest plants.4 The largest living organism on Earth is a honey fungus (discovered in 1998, surpassing the 200-ton blue whale with the previous record), which grows over 2,384 acres in the Malheur National Forest of Oregon State and is thought to be 2400 years old.5 Scientists estimate that we have only discovered around 1% of the world’s existing fungi (Solomon). Which is all to say, what we call “mushroom” scales both time and space in unexpected ways, and compared to plants or animals, relatively little is known about the kingdom fungi. The more one learns about mushrooms, the more curious they become—and for all these reasons, it appears they instill a sense of wonder in trying times. My dissertation begins from an earlier moment in history to mine the link between mushrooms, war, and mourning. Specifically, it analyzes the visual representation of atomic war, and the ways it has been imaged through fungi, ever since the end of WWII. I look in particular at the visual culture of Japan—a country that has both a rich literary and cultural history around mushrooms as well as a history with the first (and so far, last) deployment of the nuclear bomb in war. While nuclear violence is not unique to Japan—and is an issue that must be thought across and between national and local borders—looking at Japan’s stories provides one means for understanding the important role mushrooms can and do play in visual culture. It also offers a window into seeing how mushrooms might help us contend with unimaginable violence, as that inflicted by nuclear war. 2 Names of authors in Asia will be written family name first, given names last, per convention. 3 All translations of Iizawa’s work are my own. 4 While numbers vary, recent estimates suggest that fungi may have arrived on Earth over 1 billion years ago, based on the discovery of new fossils (Solomon). 5 See Casselman, “Strange But True.” 4 Mushrooms have appeared in Japanese literature in peculiar ways throughout history, seducing Buddhist nuns into uncontrollable dancing spells, as in the premodern folktales of the Konjaku Monogatarishū (Tales of Times Now Past , 11th century) or invading Earth as a parasitic alien species, as in Shirakawa Marina’s comic Shinryaku enban kinokonga (Invader Spaceship Kinokonga, 1976). Whimsical and provocative, they have long presented themselves in stories as delicious, bewitching, poisonous, or healing, straddling realms of culinary pleasure, hallucinatory drug trips, unexpected death, and medicinal treatment. After WWII, however, their symbolism undergoes a dramatic change, influenced by the convergence of factors linking fungi to nuclear power. My dissertation begins with the premise that after WWII, the mushroom becomes a key figure in postwar Japanese visual culture through which to articulate nuclear horror and grapple with the legacy of WWII. It proposes that the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended WWII—and the images of the atomic mushroom cloud that circulated widely during the Cold War—mark a turning point in which the mushroom in Japanese literature and culture takes on new significance as an emblem of unprecedented military threat in a nuclear age. Moreover, it simultaneously becomes a symbol of resistance to radiation, alluding to scientific research on some fungi’s unique ability to absorb it and turn it into reproductive energy. This process, confirmed by microbiologists in the years following Chernobyl, has led to more recent discussions about potentially clearing deadly levels of cesium at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant through fungi. In what follows, I look closely at the makings of the mushroom cloud as an image, the historical conditions surrounding its emergence, and how military optics are embedded in its aesthetic. First explaining its circulation in the U.S. context, I then turn to its circulation in postwar Japan, examining its relation to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and postwar censorship. Finally, I analyze key examples of popular art, film, and manga that take up this relationship between mushrooms and the mushroom cloud, offering alternative avenues for imaging catastrophe. 5 Chapter 1 analyzes the aesthetics of the mushroom cloud as a military image, dissecting its visual components to explore how and why a symbol of the mushroom came to be the most visible representation of the atomic bomb. Beginning with an inquiry into the representability of unimaginable trauma, it investigates how the image of the atomic cloud was constructed by the U.S. government as a means for managing the bomb’s representation during its accelerated development of nuclear arms in the Cold War. Mobilizing a sublime aesthetic that wedges a divide between spectator and event, I argue the image abstracts unimaginable violence into a perfect picture that circulates as a commodity within U.S. consumer culture. In Chapter 2, I turn my attention to the circulation and influence of the mushroom cloud image in Japan’s postwar context, considering its relation to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and postwar censorship. Using the provocative theories of popartist Takashi Murakami, who suggests a causal link between the atomic bombings of WWII and the subsequent booming popularity of manga and anime, I investigate how trauma and aesthetics become articulated in nationalistic ways. In this chapter, I also analyze mushrooms and mushroom clouds in Murakami’s own art, which renders the atomic bomb “cute” and teeters uncomfortably between satire and extreme capitalist commodification. While his work is profoundly ambivalent in its politics, his mushroom images are helpful provocations for thinking about the visuality of the mushroom cloud and the flat aesthetics of manga and anime. In Chapter 3, I move to a closereading of two works of science-fiction horror that exemplify how the mushroom is both dramatized as a figure of annihilation and the possibility of nuclear survival. The first is Honda Ishiro’s 1963 film Matango, which I consider a seminal work of mushroom horror, about a group of young castaways on an abandoned radioactive island who must become mushroom monsters to survive. The second is Shirakawa Marina’s aforementioned Invader Spaceship Kinokonga, about parasitic fungi that invade humans on Earth, turning them into zombies for planetary renewal. Bringing these works into conversation with theories of new materialism, ecocriticism, and visual studies, I explore 6 how fears of nuclear radiation transit through the mushroom while fungal transformation offers enticing fantasies of survival in a nuclear world. I conclude with a brief coda on the photography of Homma Takashi, who photographs irradiated mushrooms found at Fukushima, which I read as images of possibility for imagining more-than-human ecologies. In “No Small Matter,” Karen Barad’s analysis of the atomic cloud, she writes, “Radioactivity, like the mushroom, is a pharmakon, and they are entangled with each other in specific ways” (114). One of the aims of my project is to trace these entanglements, to find generative pathways opened by the mushroom despite the oppressive military optics of the mushroom cloud. That said, the mushroom is not necessarily an antidote to the violent images of war. As tempting as it is to find an easy answer, the works I analyze are not a cure to violence or its representation (in the case of Murakami in particular, there is arguably a complicity with nationalistic state rhetoric). Nonetheless, there is a way that these creative works, and the mushrooms within them, provoke affects, thoughts, feelings, and visions to wrestle with nationalism and militarism, even while they remain part of their economy. They open new lines of flight for adapting to uncertain futures. * * * Though my project focuses on visual culture after WWII, mushrooms appear in Japanese literature and culture in all sorts of fascinating ways, and this history frames the research I present. The earliest known mediated mushrooms have been around since at least Japan’s Jōmon period, or Stone Age, in the form of clay sculptures (ca. 1400-1300 BC) (arguably some of the oldest forms of “mushroom art”) hypothesized to have been a kind of early compendium alerting others to the toxicity of certain species of mushrooms (see fig. 1). Mushrooms have also appeared prominently in Japanese folktales, notably in the Tales of Times Now Past, from Japan’s Heian period (794-1185), a 7 collection of oral tales now regarded to be some of the earliest forms of “Japanese literature.” In addition to the aforementioned story of Buddhist nuns is a story about a monk who tries to poison his successor by making a delicious stew with a deathly mushroom called “the great beyond.”6 In roughly the same era, mushrooms appear with aristocratic flair, namely in the Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, 7th Century), the oldest extant collection of Japanese waka (Classical Japanese poetry), as a marker of the autumn season. Noteworthy in the realm of Japanese theater is a comic play (called kyōgen, the comic cousin of Noh theater) from the 14th century called Kusabira, about a man who attempts to exorcise invasive mushrooms from his home; after he calls upon a yamabushi (a priest, or mountain ascetic), however, they multiply interminably. In the Edo period (1603-1868), mushrooms are illustrated in woodblock prints and sculptures (see figs. 2 & 3) and appear in a variety of haikus by famed poet Matsuo Basho. And in what we call the modern era, naturalist, folklorist and writer Minakata Kumagusu (1867-1941) collected thousands of mushroom specimens in and around the forests of his home in Wakayama, meticulously drawing them and taking spore prints (see fig. 4). For Minakata, who later became an activist who spoke out against the national consolidation of shrines for their disruption of local ecosystems, slime molds and mushrooms shaped his nonlinear political and philosophical thought. In the realm of modern literature, mushrooms appear frequently in works by Izumi Kyoka—known for his Gothic supernatural tales, especially Kinoko no Maihime (1918), about enchanting dancing ladies in costume who turn out to be funguses—and by Miyazawa Kenji, whose mushroom works include a children’s story called The Ant and the Mushroom, about a militant ant who panics upon seeing a giant, white mass appearing suddenly behind him, and which turns out to be a mushroom (interestingly, this story was censored during Japan’s postwar years).7 Finally, contemporary authors with noteworthy mushrooms in their 6 See “The Dancing Mushroom,” and “The Best Laid Plans,” in Tyler, Japanese Tales, 134-136. 7 Many thanks to Kana Jenkins, Curator of the Prange Collection at the University of Maryland, for pointing this out. See Prange Collection, “120th Anniversary of Miyazawa Kenji’s Birth.” 8 works include Kawakami Hiromi (such as in A Record of a Night Too Brief, as a sudden growth that appears on the narrator’s body in a dream-sequence), or as the name of a disoriented woman who always gets her idioms mixed up, in Tawada Yoko’s “Spores.” Admittedly, this is a sketchy, breezy map, but I list them here to show the wide variety of ways the mushroom appears in Japanese creative works and to provide a broader cultural context for the very specific threads I trace in my dissertation. This rich literary history allows me context for suggesting that a major paradigmatic shift occurs in the mushroom’s cultural significance in Japan after WWII, one directly imbricated in the visual culture of war. Neither are stories about mushrooms exclusive to Japan, or to loss and troubling times. As various origin stories and folktales attest, mushrooms have captured the imaginations of writers, artists, and creators from around the world since long ago. In Lithuania, for example, fungi were once thought to be the fingers of Velnias, the one-eyed god of the dead “reaching up from the underworld to feed the poor”; in ancient Greece, the result of Zeus placing seeds on lightning bolts, which scattered around Earth; and in an Inuit myth, the detritus of shooting stars (Millman viii-ix). There is even a widely accepted theory in Western culture that the figure of Santa Claus is derived from a magic mushroom (or fly agaric, the red mushroom with white dots)—based on the fact that Santa Claus originally comes from Nordic countries, where Arctic shamans used to eat fly agarics before visiting clients in reindeer-led sleighs, and would sometimes gift them. 8 Which is to say, humans have been trying to make sense of mushrooms long before modern science, before modern literature. Because of their peculiarities, and perhaps because they are so paradoxical, mushrooms have invited widespread speculation into their origins or to explain their essential characteristics; 8 Legend is that one shaman eventually turned into a magic mushroom himself. Reindeer also like to eat fly agaric, which gives one the sensation of flight, leading to the image of Santa Claus flying on a reindeer-led sleigh. See Millman, 138-139, and FantasticFungi.com, “The Interesting Connection.” 9 they exist where our knowledge barely touches, at the limits of knowledge. It is this speculative nature of truth that is captured in mushroom stories such as these. * * * Mushrooms are also an extraordinarily visual phenomenon. What we call “mushroom” is actually the fruiting body of a larger network of fungal threads, called mycelia, that take root in soil and are largely invisible to us above ground. A mushroom is like a flower or fruit, popping up every now and then to release spores. But unlike a flower or fruit, they grow suddenly, voluptuously, seemingly out of nowhere. This element of surprise, combined with what Zoë Schlanger calls the “fleshy, sculptural fruit” of the mushroom is not only a pleasure but a visual spectacle. The mushroom’s place between the invisible fungus and its visible flesh makes it a fascinating object of looking. Signaling that the energetic productivity of the fungus is still there even if we cannot see it, mushrooms are themselves a mediation of the invisible, of the activity that lies beyond the limits of our seeing perception. A mushroom is an image, an image that is not whole or representative, but a sporadic, contingent sign that something else is going on beneath the surface. It is for this reason, I propose, that they are compelling symbols or images for catastrophic experiences that are challenging to see or make sense of. They may not wholly show violence or disaster, but they serve as an energetic sign of life or movement for the invisible, helping us make some sense of things. While this dissertation does not focus on psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis is important for thinking about the ways mushrooms shape imagination. There is a prescient nature to stories, precisely because they capture the nature, or matter, that lives in our unconscious; we are comprised, body and mind, not only by language, but plants, bacteria, fungi, and a whole host of other organisms that do not belong entirely to us. As Eugene Thacker writes, “Scientists estimate that 10 approximate[ly] ninety percent of the cells in the human body belong to non-human organisms (bacteria, fungi, and a whole bestiary of other organisms). Why shouldn’t this also be the case for human thought as well?” (7). Following this thinking, I would suggest it is not only within conscious thought that we incorporate the fungus, but that the fungus has already shaped how we form language, form symbols, and form images of the world. The mushroom cloud is one such example: while on the one hand, I contend that the U.S. government’s military agenda constructed and disseminated the “mushroom cloud” as a means of propaganda, thereby radically altering the meaning of the mushroom in English and Japanese language, it is also true that the meanings mushrooms had and have in literary and visual culture shaped the image of the mushroom cloud; the place it had in collective or cultural consciousness made the mushroom stay.9 On a related note, the radiant-resistant fungi of Japan’s postwar science-fiction arrived before the discovery of “radiotrophic” fungi at Chernobyl. But it does not take the validation of modern science to observe and to know that mushrooms survive destruction or persist in devastated landscapes. It is this speculative vision, here and now, that makes available multiple possibilities for the future. Discussing mushrooms in literature—and drawing a link between mushrooms and literature, Iizawa writes: Following mushrooms allows us to extend the antennas of our imagination to the realm of the invisible. Couldn’t we say this is the very work of “mushroom literature”? It goes without saying, but the “visible” only makes up a small fraction of what writers write about in stories, while the rest concerns things that are invisible, underground (the “mind” and 9 Spencer R. Weart describes how observers and scientists present at early nuclear bomb tests had various descriptions of what the detonation looked like. At the Trinity on July 16, 1945 in New Mexico, for example, observers described the explosion as a “chimney shaped column,” a “geyser,” a “parasol,” a “convoluting brain,” and a “raspberry” (Weart 402). At a test in Bikini Atoll in 1946, another described it as a “cauliflower cloud” (Weart 402). More than any other term, however, the word “mushroom” recurred repeatedly. See Chapter 1 for more details. 11 “unconsciousness” fall into such a category). It seems to me mushrooms are a metaphor for literature. (Kinoko bungaku daizen / Encyclopedia of Mushroom Literature 13-14) This dissertation is not a history of the mushroom across Japanese literature and art, nor mushrooms generally across popular culture, literature, and food. Much could be written about these topics, and perhaps another book that dives fully into these areas of research, whether a history or a compendium, will be written.10 Instead, this project follows mushrooms to “extend the antennas of our imagination” to mine what mushrooms do to mediate the unimaginable event of nuclear disaster. Surprising, lively, and strikingly visual, they offer a fortuitous image of life from destruction that serves as a crucial means for speculation about the future despite the terrors of state violence. What follows is therefore a beginning. I consider it a fruiting body of its own, manifested from the larger fungus of ideas, connections, and entanglements between mushrooms, visual culture, Japan and the atomic bomb. Other mushrooms will surface later. 10 Certainly, more research can and should be done on Minakata Kumagusu. There are also many more mushrooms to follow, even for the particular themes of this project. Just last year, an anime called Sabikui Bisco (Rust-Eater Bisco), adapted from the light novel series by Cobukubo Shinji (with art by K Akagishi and mocha, later adapted into a manga by Takahashi Rokudo), was released; it tells the story of a contaminated rust that destroys the planet. Mushrooms are thought to be the cause of the rust, along with a group of mushroom sorcerers, but it turns out that mushrooms in fact remediate the contamination. This is a work I will undoubtedly return to for a later version of this project. 12 Chapter 1. Mushrooms of Nuclear Empire In Takashi Murakami’s painting Super Nova (1999), an eclectic array of mushrooms sprout across the wide expanse of an empty, gray surface, populating seven vertical canvases in an unusually long and horizontal cluster (see fig. 5). On stems of varying height, shape, and thickness, their caps pop in a range of colors from kelly green to fuschia to mustard yellow. Each dons multiple, circular eyes with bright green pupils, which seem to gravitate toward one gigantic mushroom towering over them in the center. From its pale, fleshy cap hang angular gills like so many teeth; its own eyelids are half-closed, lethargic and blasé. According to NASA, “A supernova is the biggest explosion that humans have ever seen. Each blast is the extremely bright, super-powerful explosion of a star” (NASA.gov). But in this piece, there is no explosion depicted in any literal sense of the term, at least in the definition explosion as “a violent and destructive shattering or blowing apart of something, as is caused by a bomb” (Oxford Languages). What, then, are these mushrooms doing at this scene of explosion? What is being violently and destructively shattered or blown apart, in the biggest explosion humans have ever seen? There is no sky or galaxy as suggested by the title, nor any ground, for that matter, in which these mushrooms are rooted. In a blank, grey void of nothing, the mushrooms remain, eyes open. In its association of mushrooms with explosions, Super Nova evokes a familiar image (see figs. 6-8): that of the “mushroom cloud,” or kinokogumo in Japanese—which, like the supernova, has been widely regarded in history to be “the biggest explosion humans have ever seen.” This figure has become so naturalized within the English and Japanese languages that its peculiarity is easy to take for granted. At first glance, it may seem that if the cloud vapor that rises in the wake of a nuclear explosion happens to look like a mushroom, it is only natural it would come to be called one. Yet, to describe the atomic bomb as a mushroom cloud—and the ability to see the explosion as a 13 metaphor—indicates a particular position of safe remove from the bomb’s violence. As Japanese literary scholar Kono Kensuke suggests, the image reveals a very specific point-of-view to begin with. He writes: Whether we are talking about Hiroshima or Nagasaki, it is impossible to view the atomic cloud from the position of those who were bombed, for the event was incomprehensible. Even in the rare occurrence that someone close to the explosion could take in what was going on and click the shutter, to be able to see it metaphorically as a “mushroom cloud” was impossible…and only possible from a plane of the American military that was already anticipating the event.12 (Kono 104) In other words, to be able to view the atomic cloud in its entirety is possible only from a position of great physical distance, far from the epicenter of a nuclear explosion itself. Moreover, to photographically capture the cloud from a position high in the air is possible only with means and preparation—that is, by those who know the bomb will be detonated. In the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this would have been the U.S. military. The image of the mushroom cloud thus not only records within its visual field an event of a kind, but the relation between the military aggressors and those who were bombed. Murakami’s Super Nova provokes us to consider how the mushroom has become an object of extreme visual interest in modern society, not least of which has to do with its close association with the atomic bomb. In it, the many mushrooms collectively gaze at the monstrous mushroom in the center of them all, guiding us to take in the spectacle of its massive presence—to wonder what place mushrooms have within our signifying economy. Invoking an explosion through its title without offering an obvious image of one, we could say that Super Nova parodies the very process through which the mushroom cloud becomes an image: an operation that involves the substitution of a 12 All translations by Kono Kensuke are my own, unless otherwise noted. 14 mushroom for a scene of nuclear detonation. The mushroom cloud may be one of the most widely recognizable images in our global economy, but a close look at its aesthetics and history reveals a complex set of relations that bind together image with the politics of nuclear empire. This chapter moves away from Murakami’s work as the focus of analysis—a topic I instead return to in Chapter 2—but his work nonetheless provides a point of departure for thinking about the force of the mushroom cloud as an image. While there had been few images of the atomic bomb prior to its use in WWII, a look at the image’s history demonstrates that the U.S. government crafted the mushroom cloud during the Cold War as a means of managing the bomb’s representation during its accelerated development of nuclear arms. First, I consider the question of violence at stake in the mushroom cloud, giving a broad overview of a key debate within atomic bomb literary scholarship about the complexities of representing nuclear devastation. As a commodified image of abstracted terror, I argue that the mushroom cloud is a spectacular domestication of unimaginable violence that embeds a Cold War ideology of nuclear empire within its aesthetics. Next, following the work of scholars such as Peter B. Hales, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, I explore the image’s extreme aestheticization through the concept of the sublime. Looking closely at a photograph of the cloud above Nagasaki in particular, I discuss how the sublime creates a troubling experience of spectatorial transcendence. From there, I break down the processes of signification that occur in the mushroom cloud, showing how the image works effectively through the photographic medium’s claim to truth and the compelling symbolism of the mushroom. Though other figures or metaphors could have been chosen for its representation, I posit that it was specifically the mushroom that the U.S. government would seek to perfect as an atomic symbol. A comparison of the image of the Nagasaki cloud with a photograph taken above Bikini Atoll in 1946 demonstrates how explosive vapor from test detonations was deliberately captured in its likeness to the shape of a mushroom. Exploring the particularities of the mushroom as a figure, I propose that the mushroom’s unique 15 ability to hold contradictory connotations of life and death led it to be an exceptionally compelling figure for the nuclear bomb. Throughout the chapter, I argue that the mushroom cloud is effected through a series of substitutions—photography would convincingly capture a seemingly unmediated view of atomic destruction that ultimately suggests that the atomic bomb is a mushroom. Curiously, however, mushrooms themselves also have a particular resistance to radiation, seeming to make themselves particularly apt to enter—and resist—the nuclear economy. The mushroom cloud is an image of empire that obscures the violence of state-sanctioned genocide, but this matter of mushrooms returns with formidable force through popular media and culture, a topic I turn to subsequently, starting with Chapter 2. The Mushroom Cloud as a Total Image I would like to begin by briefly reflecting on what it means to represent the atomic bomb, to give a word or picture for the destruction the bomb effects—for the mushroom cloud is a total substitution for an event so violent we might say it is unimaginable. For one, hibakusha, or survivors of the bombings, themselves have frequently described the extraordinary difficulty of comprehending the event they survived, let alone of putting it into words or images. If that is so, the events pose complicated challenges regarding their narration and transmissibility. Thinking about this problematic, John Whittier Treat quotes survivor Hashimoto Kunie, who described what she saw in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 as “something so ghastly as to make incredible all that has been before”—and aptly asks, “if Hashimoto herself is hardly able to believe her own experience, how are the rest of us to imagine that we can?” (26). As Hashimoto says, the atomic bombings were so violent that they were not only incomprehensible but made what she once considered “ordinary” life itself unbelievable. Even writers who survived the bombings frequently refer to the insufficiency of language to grasp violence of such extremity and magnitude. As writer Takenishi Hiroko put it, 16 “What words can we now use, and to what ends? Even: what are words?” (Treat’s emphasis) (qtd. in Treat 27). Takenishi’s questions suggest not only that there is a limit to what language can convey, but a limit to its very purpose. If language is a means for communication—conditioned socially and historically—it fails to adequately convey this traumatic history. As Treat has written about at length, this challenge of narration is often woven into literary works by hibakusha writers, creating a kind of tension between writing and the impossibility of writing.13 Describing this gap in understanding as it is narrated in the works of a different writer, Hayashi Kyoko, Treat writes: “The recurring theme of the historical, epistemological, or simply emotional isolation of atomic-bomb survivors most frequently takes the form of an insistence upon the incommunicability of what it meant to be in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, an insistence which challenges the feasibility and even possibility of what might subsequently be written of them” (26). Similarly, film scholars have written about the recurring role of silence in many films about the atomic bomb; for, as Mick Broderick, puts it, silence “is often a considered hibakusha response to the literally indescribable events they have experienced and, in part, a remembrance of the eerie stillness that befell both cities after the atomic pikadon (flash-boom)” (12).14 According to Treat, this paradox of narration lays at the heart of what is now called “hibakusha literature”—which involves questioning the very possibility for readers to understand or relate to their experiences, particularly when language calls for a kind of legibility. Moreover, literature as a form tends towards the figurative rather than informational or factual language, further complicating this matter of legibility. According to Treat, writers will often use analogies to relate their experience into words, but their 13 In Fukunaga Takehiko’s novel Shi no shima (The Island of Death, 1971), for example, a hibakusha artist grows frustrated in her repeated attempts to paint an experience that only remains in “scattered, dead fragments”— but despite her frustration, she never ceases to paint (qtd. in Treat 32). 14 Hibakusha writer Sadako Kurihara also explores the problematic of silence in ‘The Literature of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Thoughts on Reading Lawrence Langer’s The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination,” translated and introduced by Richard H. Minear’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Spring 1993, pp. 91–6. 17 experiences undergo considerable distortion through this figurative language, for it resorts to analogical examples decided through convention. In this way, he suggests that this process of writing is a kind of translation that risks domestication, and that therefore hibakusha literature presents us with complex ethical questions about approaching the experience of the bomb’s violence. Ultimately calling for us to consider the dynamic between writer, reader, and work, as one involving an ethical responsibility on the part of the reader, he writes: What atomic-bomb writers are finally asking for is not our recognition of the impossibility of a specifically Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘language,’ but rather our cooperation in a special relationship between author, reader, and work against the backdrop of history. The atomicbomb writer resorts to analogies to explain his experience to us, but such techniques translate, domesticate, that experience and make it less threatening as it is better ‘known.’ Yet by retrieving or inventing symbols for Hiroshima and Nagasaki we risk unleashing those symbols to act autonomously, to generate thematically spurious readings and interpretations. Fearful of this potential for distortion, the cooperation atomic-bomb writers ask of us is a kind of ethical restraint, a sort of respectful restraint from naively ‘understanding’ what we read. Treat 33 To add to Treat’s points, I would suggest that it is not only figurative language, but language itself that relies on symbols and meanings already familiar to us, inevitably leading to interpretations outside of the authors’ intent; thus, a suspension of our capacity for transparent understanding— while nonetheless engaging with the writing of the other—becomes a crucial means for holding space for trauma without assimilation. What occurs between writer and reader is a translation of a kind—with the written work itself gesturing or moving towards the violence without claiming to wholly represent it, and the reader engaging with the work without claiming to wholly understand it. In many ways, it resonates with Walter Benjamin’s assertion that a literary translation is not the 18 transparent communication of a text—which itself does not “transmit” information—but instead a “mode” that “produces in it the echo of the original” (20). Or, as Jacques Derrida has shown, in translation between two languages, there is no such thing as equivalency, but always a remainder— similarly, we could say that this opacity is something to insist upon in approaching hibakusha representation, both from the perspective of the writer and the reader. The mushroom cloud, however, makes no gesture toward this opacity or the enormity of its unimaginable violence. We might say that the image—rather than holding onto a sense of its incomprehensibility, steps in for the event itself. In this way, there is a totality to the spectacularization of the mushroom cloud. Thinking with Rey Chow, Jonathan Crary writes, “The formal properties of the spheroidal fireball or the swirling undulation of the mushroom cloud lodge the event within the confines of the image and spectacle. The unthinkable, unutterable violence of this outer limit of the real is deleted” (61). Rather than insisting upon the unassimilable nature of nuclear annihilation to ordinary life, the image insists on its opposite: even the “outer limits” of what we might be able to perceive are deleted, replaced by a spectacle we accept as the event. The image, therefore, enacts not only a distortion, but an erasure of the event by spectacularizing its unutterable violence. The mushroom cloud purports to represent the atomic explosion while exploiting our desire for a consumable, digestible image. There is another way in which the mushroom cloud suggests totality, and this was the way in which the image was disseminated widely by the U.S. government, leaving little room for other representations of the bomb. The government had had tight control over any information about the bomb’s development during WWII and into the Cold War—and it therefore had the means to carefully manage its representation and circulation. Though a few images of the atomic cloud exist from WWII, the explosion was notoriously difficult to capture photographically, even from the privileged position of the military. At the Trinity—a controlled experiment and the first nuclear 19 bomb detonated in Jornado del Muerto, New Mexico on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project—photographs came out vastly overexposed due to the unanticipated brightness of the explosion. While the government had put a premium on recording the detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by equipping their B-29 bomber planes with advanced scientific imaging equipment, their attempts to capture the moment were largely unsuccessful. At Hiroshima, failures in film development upon return to their base on Tinian Island left them with no images. At Nagasaki, the intensity of the blast forced the bomber planes to veer away from the explosion, rendering the scientific imaging equipment unusable. It was only during its many Cold War nuclear detonations in Nevada and the South Pacific—repeated explosions observed under a more controlled setting—that the mushroom cloud came to be perfected and popularized within mainstream American culture. In 1946, just one year after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. military would occupy the Marshall Islands. Forcing native inhabitants to become refugees from their own homes, they would detonate 67 thermonuclear and nuclear bombs between then and 1958. Executed by loading naval warships with farm animals such as sheep and pigs, the goals were two-fold: to observe the immediate damage from the blasts, and to observe the lasting effects of the radiation. Here, the visual record was given unprecedented priority—when Operation Crossroads began in 1946, over half of the world’s motion picture film was shipped to Bikini Atoll. Able, the codename for the first test of the operation, was considered to have been the most photographed event, at least on film, in human history.15 Here, along with additional test sites in Nye County, Nevada, beginning in 1951,16 the metaphor of the mushroom cloud would solidify as the bomb’s primary figure of representation. 15 Military planes such as B29 and Z54 planes were loaded with various kinds of advanced photographic equipment, with nearly 500 cameras positioned on the explosion from many possible angles. See Hemez, 6 and Nuclear Weapons Testing Channel. 16 Between 1951 and 1992, the U.S. government conducted 928 nuclear test detonations at the Nevada Testing Site, also known as Nevada National Security Site. 20 Wartime censorship of the atomic bomb continued into the postwar period, and the U.S. government continued to maintain tight control on information connected to nuclear weaponry; this, combined with the postwar consolidation of the mass media, meant that the same images were fed from the government to the media over and over, lending themselves to becoming the dominant representation of the atomic bomb. The military image of the mushroom cloud would be disseminated on a wide scale, circulating not only in the news but enmeshing itself within postwar consumer culture. In addition to appearing in newspapers and television, photographs of the mushroom cloud were published repeatedly in news magazines like Time, Life, National Geographic, and Newsweek—publications catered toward suburban middle-class American life. Drawings and modified photographs were featured prominently in Cold War safety brochures (see figs. 9 and 10). The cloud’s iconization became so popular that it even became a common marketing symbol, ranging from branding for advertisements in coffee shops to consumer goods like firecrackers, cinnamon candies, and children’s board games (see figs. 11 through 14). The mushroom cloud became so entrenched within Cold War consumerism that the Atomic Energy Commission even began planning its Nevada test schedule to coincide with popular tourist seasons, as is evident in Alan Jarlson’s photograph of a family “site-seeing” at a nuclear detonation (see fig. 15).17 As Crary puts it, the mushroom cloud became “woven into the kitsch of Cold War consumer culture,” becoming “part of an iconography of scientific mastery that partly domesticated nuclear savagery and aligned it with fantasies of material progress and middle-class affluence” (59). Or, in the words of Hales, it became an “iconography of nuclear holocaust” (8). That it remains one of the most visible images of atomic warfare even today reveals the hold the U.S. military had on its 17 This image, showing a family watching the explosion from twenty miles away, was printed repeatedly by various newspapers as well as by the National Geographic in 1953. See Hemez, who argues that this photograph “represents the weapon test’s assimilation into a visual network of American domesticity, technological spectatorship, and reverence for the natural world” (10). Hales also describes the [brochures] stating that “travelers and families ‘interested in seeing a nuclear explosion can ‘adjust their itineraries accordingly’” (24). 21 representation. Today, one can purchase a print of the Nagasaki cloud on Amazon for $13.99, and the video footage of the Tsar Bomba, exploded by the Soviet Union in October 1961 over Novaya Zemlya (and considered the largest nuclear detonation), currently has over 17 million views on YouTube. This extreme commodification rendered the atomic bomb palatable to the American public, a means for managing perception during the rapid expansion of the U.S. government’s nuclear arms. Hariman and Lucaites outline the stakes of the image’s representation clearly by asserting that this representation was a direct means for moral containment and government complicity. Claiming censorship surrounding the Holocaust was eventually broken down over time and came to “shock modernity to its foundations” but that the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still today little known to the American public, they write: Public moral reflection about nuclear warfare is difficult because the relevant field of representation has been dominated by the iconic image of the nuclear explosion, and, with that, a Cold War nuclear optic that limits what one can see and imagine. Stated more baldly, the iconic photograph of the mushroom cloud is not a direct representation of atrocity, but rather a condensation symbol of modern destructiveness that anchors a comprehensive strategy of moral containment. The simple but effective substitution of a secondary effect for the devastated city became, through an intensive series of iterations, a sustained pattern of moral avoidance. The mushroom cloud displaces the atrocity of the bomb’s actual use and facilitates citizen compliance with the national security state. (Hariman and Lucaites 137) Relentlessly reproduced, the mushroom cloud became a widely visible icon of nuclear weaponry that served to disengage the public from moral reflection on the military’s actions in WWII and afterward. A condensation symbol of modern destructiveness, the mushroom cloud substituted itself for the 22 unimaginable violence the atomic bomb put into effect, limiting what the viewer could see. As Kono writes: The events [of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] surely can only be truly known by those who experienced it. However, in order to narrate that event in history, to fill in the blanks, a substitution has to occur…Where there are no images, a substitution is inevitable. However, the [mushroom cloud] images turn a blind eye to the fact that they are taken by the military that detonated the bomb. This sort of fact becomes a crucial consideration when reconstructing narrative history. (109) Translating nothing of the unimaginable violence inflicted by its detonation on the ground, the mushroom cloud is an abstracted symbol of a mushroom that serves as a total substitution, a total image, an image of totality taken from the position of the military with the power to explode the bomb and snap the shutter from above. Simple, but effective, the mushroom cloud is an aestheticized image of terror and awe that colonizes the event’s very history. The Birth of the Sublime Bomb In one of the most widely recognized and frequently reproduced images of the atomic bomb, a mushroom cloud erupts above Nagasaki (see fig. 16). Taken in black and white film, a thick, dark column of smoke rises up beyond soft, hazy clouds. Above the column, a puffy parasol of a mushroom floats. Hovering high in the air, the unusual cloud formation stretches upward to dominate the frame. Cast partly in shadow, partly in a bright light, its presence is other-worldly. Captured from a place mid-way up the cloud’s column, the cloud invites the viewer’s gaze to follow its dramatic movement upward. In the darkened sky, the mushroom opens up in near-symmetry above other “ordinary” clouds beneath it. Notably, the cloud is strikingly beautiful, an aesthetic in conflict with the unimaginable violence inflicted by the bomb. 23 In discussing this aesthetic in conflict, Peter B. Hales analyzes what he calls the “atomic sublime”18: a process that renders the bomb a “man-made marvel of nature,” the atomic sublime “presse[s] the bomb away from human responsibility, even as it imbed[s] it in a comprehensible historical heritage of destructiveness mixed with awe and beauty” (10). The imaging of the bomb as a terrible but magnificent natural phenomenon divorces the weapon from history, casting it a part of nature somehow separated from man—as though nature itself could be separated from culture. The concept of the sublime, of course, has a long history with an origin frequently attributed to Longinus in first-century Greece,19 which was rediscovered in seventeenth-century Europe and became widely influential in the eighteenth century: most notably through Edmund Burke, followed by Immanuel Kant.20 It was this philosophical tradition that Hales argues the U.S. government mobilized in its making of the mushroom cloud, and which provided a rhetorical aesthetic for domesticating the nuclear bomb. To provide some historical background: even from the days of the Manhattan Project, it seems that there was a distinctive tendency for witnesses and observers to describe the atomic explosion in natural and spiritual terms. As a new military technology that ‘represented “absolute magnitude, a near-infinite power” itself, the atomic bomb seemed to warrant a new image within our signifying economy, and it is in this way that Hales suggests the government turned to the sublime (8). Harry S. Truman, for example, who was president at the end of WWII, referred to atomic 18 Though not about the mushroom cloud, Frances Ferguson also discusses the relation between nuclear catastrophe and the sublime through her idea of the “nuclear sublime,” while John Sanbonmatsu discusses the aestheticization of WWII genocides through his concept of the “holocaust sublime.” See Ferguson “The Nuclear Sublime,” and Sanbonmatsu, “The Holocaust Sublime: Singularity, Representation, and the Violence of Everyday Life.” 19In his text “On the Sublime,” he describes Homer’s battle with the Gods as an epic confrontation between an individual and an almighty force of destruction that threatens to destabilize the harmony of the universe. 20 See Burke, “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful” and Kant, Critique of Pure Judgment. 24 technology as “the force from which the sun draws its power” and as “the harnessing of the basic power of the universe” (qtd. in Evans 5). Robert J. Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” famously could only invoke the spectacular brightness by invoking a line from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad-Gita: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one…Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” (qtd. in Jungk 201). Colin Hemez suggests that the invocation of the other-worldly served to fill a gap for a phenomenon words could not describe. But, unlike the survivors’ lack of words to describe what they survived, the government-affiliates’ descriptions reveal an aestheticization rooted in the profound separation that exists between spectator and event. This is captured significantly by an account published by science writer William L. Laurence—a journalist for The New York Times and the only member of the press authorized to fly above Nagasaki—which Hales cites as a key moment in the sedimentation of the bomb in the sublime. His account reads: Awestruck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being…At one stage, the entity assumed the form of a giant square totem pole, with its base about three miles long, tapering off to about a mile at the top. Its bottom was brown, its center was amber, its top white…it was as though the decapitated monster was growing a new head. As the first mushroom floated off into the blue, it changed its shape into a flowerlike form, its giant petal curving downward, creamy-white outside, rose-colored inside. It still retained that shape when we last gazed at it from a distance of about 200 miles. (qtd. in Hales 12) Hired by the government, Laurence’s writing was approved by the censors; in effect, his account was the “official” one, published in multiple venues—most visibly in Life on September 24, 1945. Military reports would also adopt his aesthetic preoccupations in their own official documents; his 25 account thus reveals the close-knit ties of the government to the media representation of the bomb. Noting the repression of horror in his markedly aesthetic preoccupations, Hales calls attention to the string of natural figures that comprise his description—a meteor, a mushroom, a beautiful flower— which moves the atomic bomb from the man-made to the natural. I would also suggest that the nature implied in Laurence’s descriptions is itself valorized as something reverently inaccessible. Laurence describes his sense of smallness against a cloud both vast and amorphous, which continues to grow and transform. “Awestruck,” he watches it “become ever more alive,” its shape moving not only from one natural figure to another natural figure, but from inanimate to animate: “no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire” but “a living thing, a new species of being.” By likening the bomb to these highly mediated images, Laurence casts nuclear weaponry—as well as nature—as somehow divorced from war and human history. In the same move, he seems to cast military technology and nature as outsides to culture while promoting a kind of reverence for both. Though at the time the Nagasaki cloud was photographed, the mushroom cloud had not yet been normalized as an image, it encapsulates many of the aesthetics of the sublime mushroom cloud image that would come to be. For a greater understanding of the way the sublime is at work in the image, we can turn to Burke, who said that the sublime is first and foremost an experience rooted in the affect of terror. Facing an object of great magnitude or grandeur causes the subject to feel overwhelmed. However, key to the experience of the sublime is also an experience of pleasure. Burke writes, “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we everyday experience” (my emphasis) (Burke 27). The mushroom cloud is terrifying in its explosive shape and shadowy contours, by what it has come to unquestionably depict. But we could say that it is a danger determined by tremendous distance and significant modification. First, distance is marked not only by that of the military safely taking a picture of the violence they have 26 detonated on the ground, but in the way the mushroom cloud reaches the viewer: through lifestyle magazines, television sets or web browsers, the image travels from the scene of combat to the safety of the domestic home. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites assert that the “atomic sublime” is a “structured experience,” for it “gives one a sense of danger without having to actually take the risk, and the pleasure comes from exceeding a limit on experience while actually remaining on this side of the divide” (140). Invoking Caspar David Friedrich’s quintessential Romantic painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818), in which an individual stands transcendental above a sublime view (see fig. 17), they write: The viewer is drawn close to the magnificent, beautiful, annihilating power released by the bomb, and yet is also safely removed from it. Now even the precipice is invisible, as it has been replaced by the state sponsored and controlled technocratic platform of a military aircraft, and the representative spectator is gone as well, replaced by the sheer transparency of the camera’s lens. (Hariman and Lucaites 140) Annihilation is experienced under the condition of pure spectatorship: the viewer can engage with the nuclear devastation only so long as they remain protected, on this side of the divide. While it denotes atrocity that is absolutely terrible, the mushroom cloud is far above the ground, high in the sky, removed from the center of the explosion. The image appeals to the desiring eye of the viewing subject to consume spectacular images—and in this way, distance allows for an engagement with that terror that is ultimately not painful, but delightful. Distance facilitates the extreme aestheticization of the atomic bomb that occurs in this image—and an unsettling experience of pleasure, the desire to consume something beautiful—that is created in the relationship between viewer and event. In addition to distance, the mushroom cloud also presents nuclear devastation with great modification, particularly in its modes of framing. That is, the grandeur of the image is facilitated by its containment within borders that designate or mark the spectacle a spectacle. Discussing 27 Hollywood’s high-budget action films, Anne Friedberg writes about the fascination viewers have with special-effects explosions within a confined frame; part of the pleasure is the ability to “take part” in a scene of danger from a position of domesticated spectatorship. This gap between spectacular danger and spectator safety, she argues, became amplified in modern society with the advent of televisual entertainment; in particular, the television moved such entertainment from the darkened room of a public theater to the private space of the home, a space that was, as Roland Barthes describes it, “familiar, organized, tamed” (qtd. in Friedberg 345). Though not classified as Hollywood entertainment, we could say that the Nagasaki photograph also plays on this fascination with observing danger through entertainment by giving us an image that dramatically modifies and commodifies its terror. Its containment within borders transforms the event into a purely visual view that removes the possibility of the bomb’s annihilating danger reaching across the threshold of the image. Far from subjecting the viewer to radioactive contamination, the mushroom cloud is a contained picture, readily reproduced and consumed. What Friedberg’s analysis ultimately reveals is the creation of a spectator in control, perhaps even transcendent, over the world contained inside the frame. Framing “impl[ies] a subjective distance, a separation through representation” accentuated by film and photography’s seeming ability to provide a transparent view onto another reality, as through a “virtual window,”21 even though it is in fact a highly mediated spectacle.22 What gives the Nagasaki cloud its grandeur, 21 As she writes, a virtual window is “reliant not on its transparency but on its opacity; its highly mediated modulation of light provides an aperture—not to a reality—but to a delimited virtuality” (Friedberg 344). 22 Though the window was originally invented as “an architectural opening for light and ventilation,” the development of glass led its primary function to be visual, or to “frame a view,” a purpose that informed the development of artistic perspective (Friedberg 339). Windows marked a sign of privilege in this transition to a visual function, and artistic perspective was developed in the Renaissance through this conception of the window separating the seeing subject from a view of the world outside of themselves. As Friedberg, along with scholars like Erwin Panofsky, Jonathan Crary, and Martin Jay, has written, though perspective can be rendered in any number of ways, this mode of rationalizing representation encapsulates a “monocular view” of perspective frequently associated with the Cartesian subject standing outside of his reality. This perspective has come to be so naturalized within modernity that it has come to seem the most “correct” or scientific method for mastering two-dimensional representation of three dimensions, leading Martin Jay to call it the 28 danger, and spectacularity is precisely its delimitation, which ultimately affirms the wholeness of the spectator. Separated by distance and modification, the viewer stands transcendental like Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic spectator, but from the comfortable space of their own home. And yet, the creation of this transcendent spectator is obscured in the mushroom cloud, made to look entirely neutral. For instance, as Hariman and Lucaites note, any subjective marker indicating the specific vantage point of this photograph is gone. In comparison to Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog—which depicts an individual standing over a cliff, gazing out over a cloudy horizon— the representative spectator is gone, replaced by the seeming transparency of the camera’s lens. Where the subject of Friedrich’s painting had clearly marked the subject’s individual point-of-view, here we assume the invisible eye of the military. The Nagasaki photograph was taken by a young American lieutenant named Charles Levy who flew aboard the B-29 Bockscar that detonated Fat Man on Nagasaki, and while the photograph was originally taken in a wider frame that shows the wing of the plane in the foreground (see fig. 18), the image disseminated widely in the mainstream media through the U.S. government is the version that crops the plane out of the frame (Atomic Archive). In this way, the military effaces itself, presenting what appears to be an objective view. The removal of the plane’s wing also erases any visible sign of potential contaminative contact, as though the cloud exists in a void and can grow limitlessly into the space surrounding it. This invisible containment is ironically what gives the mushroom cloud its sense of limitlessness, its grandeur. Cutting off the ground below, the image is decontextualized from ground zero—the cloud exceeds the horizon of the clouds, moves above it, beyond it, into a space unknown. Despite the wartime destruction it purportedly depicts, the image is removed entirely “dominant, even totally hegermonic… ‘scopic regime’ of modernity.” For further discussion, see Chapter 2 and Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” 29 from its supposed referent; so that were it not for the description, it would be impossible to identify the particular time and place of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Amorphous in shape, it appears to exist in an expansive sky—into which the cloud itself might potentially extend into infinity. This impression of limitlessness, in fact, is a key feature of the sublime described by Kant, and his ideas are helpful for thinking through the ways the mushroom cloud is made to look sublime. Building upon Burke’s differentiation between the beautiful and the sublime, Kant writes: The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in limitation; the sublime, by contrast, is to be found in a formless object insofar as limitlessness is represented in it, or at its instance, and yet it is also thought as a totality: so that the beautiful seems to be taken as the presentation of an indeterminate concept of the understanding, but the sublime as that of a similar concept of reason. (128) The form of the Nagasaki cloud is an odd one, because it is comprised of the form of a mushroom that we project onto it. And yet, we might say that the cloud also transcends form, in that its material is made of vaporous debris that constantly changes shape. In this sense, the cloud is a formless object that seems to represent the bomb’s limitlessness. Removed from the time and place of its explosion—from horrific violence marked by finitude—the mushroom cloud enters the realm of the sublime, allowing it to bring delight, even to be a source of astonishment.23 Containment allows us to look up and not down, to notice the great height of the Nagasaki cloud, another element of its sublimity. Where the transcendental subject of Friedrich’s Wanderer had stood atop a high cliff gazing down over the clouds beneath him, the Nagasaki cloud explodes toward the top of the frame, seemingly above us. If we turn to the definition of the term “sublime,” we can 23 Burke writes, “Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in the highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect” (40). 30 see that in its contemporary use, the sublime inspires admiration in part by such elevation. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “sublime” is a noun, referring to something that is “lofty, grand, or exalted in thought, expression, or manner,” as well as “tending to inspire awe usually because of elevated quality (as of beauty, nobility, or grandeur) or transcendent excellence.” This is linked to another definition of sublime, meaning “high in place” (MerriamWebster.com). The sublime is elevated—not only grand, but exalted in thought, expression, or manner, lofty in multiple senses of the word. As the vapor that rises after an atomic explosion, the mushroom cloud focuses our attention away from the devastation, toward a magnificent sky—literally and metaphorically, it invites us to look up to the bomb. Furthermore, a sense of holiness is given by a brilliant, white light that illuminates the top of the mushroom cap, and the tops of the clouds beneath it, which appear as though a halo around the mushroom’s base; this halo of clouds is illuminated by an indeterminate light source that radiates outward from somewhere around the explosion itself, creating a dramatic vignette from the mushroom’s eruption. Its effect is that of a celestial scene of beauty evocative of the heavens, god-like. The cloud’s loftiness terrorizes us with its promise of annihilation at the same time as it asks for us to be astonished, to revere it. Moving the extreme violence on the ground outof-view, what is pictured is the cloud blending seamlessly into the surrounding sea, clouds, and sky, simultaneously extraordinary in size and shape and yet somehow organic to its environment. It is a magnificent scene erupting above an abstract horizon, a threatening vision of nature that obscures— and substitutes itself for—the state-sanctioned genocide set into motion by the atomic bomb. However, while the Nagasaki cloud is indeed portrayed as god-like—transcendent itself, with power over us—the image also provokes a sense of transcendence on the part of the viewer, in the way that Friedberg describes. In this way, the image seems to evoke the Kantian notion that the 31 sublime is an experience that ultimately affirms our own capacities for reason.24 That is, the sublime is not found empirically in a turbulent, stormy ocean, or a violently raging storm, but in the process of conceiving of such magnitude, boundlessness, and indeed extreme danger. Our ability to perceive the sublime while we ultimately remain intact elevates our own mental faculties, or in Kant’s words: the sublime is “actually representing our imagination in all its boundlessness, and with it nature, as paling into insignificance beside the ideas of reason if it is supposed to provide a presentation adequate to them”25 (Kant 140). There is an implied position of transcendence over the aesthetic object; it is we who see the mushroom cloud in its magnificence, who escape genocide and “come close” to the bomb’s danger without truly being threatened by it; in this way, it is we who become sublime. The cloud appears limitless and boundless only to be contained in its entirety, for us to readily consume its image. In mastering this sublime nature, we affirm an illusory sense of control as a sovereign seeing subject, even as the cloud appears to rise above us. In what he calls the “holocaust sublime,” John Sanbonmatsu explores this creation of a sovereign spectator in relation to curated commemorations such as WWII museums. Arguing that the treatment of atrocities like the Holocaust or the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as ineffable or indescribable fetishizes these events as absolutely singular, outside of history, Sanbonmatsu suggests that too often, exhibitions package genocide neatly through a high degree of spectacle.26 Through a “conflation of passive consumption of spectacle with moral action,” such 24 While for Burke, the sublime was found empirically in nature, for Kant, the sublime ultimately reaffirms humankind’s superior capacities for reason. In that there is a limit to our intuitive sense of magnitude or infinity, but not within our mathematical understanding, we perceive the sublime ultimately through our mental faculties: “That is sublime which even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses” (Kant 134). 25 Kant writes, “That is sublime which even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses” (134). 26Sanbonmatsu argues that trauma is often packaged in curated exhibitions through values that reinforce liberal moralism, as a means for “celebrating ‘American’ values like tolerance and democracy” where “exposure to mass atrocity is seen as being in itself a useful form of moral education,” and what gets elided is an honest engagement with the ideologies, politics, and social structures that undergird violence on an ongoing basis. (Sanbonmatsu 118). 32 experiences create a moral divide between the “good” sympathizing museum-goer and the “bad” perpetrators, casting atrocity as isolated instances of violence caused by exceptional criminals.27 (Sanbonmatsu 108). In presenting itself as an extreme commodification of violence, we could say that the mushroom cloud similarly creates an opportunity for the passive consumption of spectacle with moral action. But Sanbonmatsu also raises an important point about the fine line that exists between treating the Holocaust, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to be of unimaginable, unspeakable violence and treating them as singular, extraordinary events of history. Indeed, in that the sublime too gestures toward the unimaginable or the ineffable, it seems in a way proximate to survivors’ description of the bombings as exceeding our limits of representation. It is perhaps in this way that Frances Ferguson argues that the “the notion of the sublime is continuous with the notion of nuclear holocaust” for “to think the sublime would be to think the unthinkable and to exist in one’s own nonexistence” (7). The sublime’s philosophical engagement with the limits of perception or understanding may be what lent itself to becoming an effective rhetoric for the atomic bomb. However, I would suggest that the difference between the indescribability survivors describe with that of the sublime lies in the very relation that occurs between event, image, and spectator. What distinguishes the ineffable sublime of the mushroom cloud from the unspeakable violence of the atomic bomb is the separation and the position of transcendence created for the viewer, one that removes the event from responsibility and history. As discussed previously in the context of hibakusha and representation, perhaps a more ethical approach would be to acknowledge or make space for the unimaginable horror of such an experience while grounding it within the very same political structures that effect violence today. 27 As Sanbonmatsu writes, “The incomprehensible magnitude of the terror and suffering had to be summoned and tamed at the same time. This tension, between depicting holocausts as being both particular and Absolute, and as something everyone can and should experience, has been ‘solved’ by inviting the public to participate in consumable spectacles (118). 33 Aesthetically speaking, this fine but crucial line between the ineffability of the sublime and the unimaginability of violence is perhaps nowhere better reflected than in the mushroom cloud’s rendering of light. If we recall, Oppenheimer had suggested the bomb’s brightness in terms of a “thousand suns,” while President Truman had described the bomb as “the force from which the sun draws its power”—implying that in the face of the great atomic bomb, even the sun becomes a unit of measure. In fact, the invocation of extreme light, encapsulated by the sun, has been discussed as a key feature of the sublime dating as far back as Burke. Though light in and of itself is ordinary—that is, of no real threat or consequence—it becomes sublime with increasing degree; Burke writes, “Extreme light, by overcoming the organs of sight, obliterates all objects, so as in its effect exactly to resemble darkness” and that “such a light as that of the sun, immediately exerted on the eye, as it overpowers the sense” is decidedly sublime (59). Truman’s and Oppenheimer’s descriptions seem to fit into this 18thcentury articulation of the sublime perfectly—even the sun pales in brightness to the light of the atomic bomb, which is so extreme it seems to resist other comparisons. But though Burke alludes to the obliteration of all objects, the overcoming of sight, his sublime is still defined by the distance that leads the experience of terror from pain to pleasure. At the epicenter where the bombs were dropped, however, light was so extreme it left no room for distance. In addition to radiating tremendous heat, the bombs exploded with what Akira Mizuta Lippit calls a “catastrophic light” (82). So catastrophic was this light that buildings, people, and objects of various kinds were seared into the environment, leaving behind burn marks even as their bodies themselves collapsed, or, in some instances, evaporated entirely (see figs. 19 and 20). In this way, Paul Virilio has called the nuclear bombs “light-weapons” (101). Survivors often recall seeing a brilliant flash in which they could see nothing, their vision only to return to horrific sights of devastation—captured in the Japanese nickname “pika-don” for the atomic bomb, where “pika” signals light as well as the flash of a camera taking a photograph. Lippit describes how the atomic 34 bombs were quite literally, massive cameras that turned the material world into a photographic surface. He writes: Nothing remains, except the radiation. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two views of invisibility—absolute visibility and total transparency—unfolded under the brilliant force of the atomic blasts. Instantly penetrated by the massive force of radiation, the hibakusha were seared into the environment with the photographic certainty of having been there. In the aftermath of the bombings, the remaining bodies absorbed and were absorbed by the invisible radiation. These bodies vanished slowly until there was nothing left but their negatives. (Lippit 95) Obliterating its referents, the atomic bombs exploded the visual order, leaving behind only shadow traces of its occurrence in history. At the hypocenter of destruction, nothing is visible, for “a fundamental density left the event invisible”; “there can be no authentic photography of atomic war because the bombings were themselves a form of total photography that exceeded the economies of representation, testing the very visibility of the visual” (Lippit 92). Like the violence that survivors describe as unfathomable, that exceeded the capacities for language, so too did the event exceed the economy of visuality; the bombs were unimaginable in that they were unable to be imaged. They were a form of total photography, the merging of war and its image in one capture, in one flash.28 If we follow Lippit, we could say there is no referent for the atomic bombings because the world was its material surface; at the hypocenter of destruction, there is no representation, no signified or signifier. 28 Paul Virilio writes that in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “observation and destruction” would “merge completely,” for the bombs were “light-weapons” that “literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war’s recording surface, its film” (85). See Logistics of Perception. 35 Bathed in an extreme contrast of light and dark, the Nagasaki cloud seems terrible and seductive. On the one hand, a peculiar column of dark grey smoke explodes into the cap of a mushroom. On the other hand, this darkness is juxtaposed with a brilliant, white light that illuminates the top of the mushroom cap, as well as the tops of the clouds beneath it, which appear in the form of a halo. While the bomb exploded in the daylight at 11:02am, the photograph also gives an impression of night, confusing a sense of time. Similarly, the sea of the port city blends in seamlessly with the darkened sky, disorienting any sense of physical space for an abstracted expanse of sky. There seems to be a halo of light radiating outward from somewhere around the explosion itself; a shallow semi-circle of light cuts through the darkness, as though to create a vignette of the mushroom’s eruption. Strange textures of the cloud are cast in relief, revealing multiple crevices and grooves that seem, despite the eerie stillness of the photograph, to nonetheless be fluid in its movement—as though what we are looking at could easily transform into something else: a monster, a flower. We can consider, then, that the bomb marked our ability to see the mushroom cloud not only in the entirety of its shape, but in that controlled rendering of light only visible from a position of power or privilege. Ironically, this very containment is what allows us to believe we see the cloud as sublimely limitless. It is distance, our ability to see the mushroom cloud in all of its shadows and halos, that marks the difference between Burke’s sublime and the catastrophic light of the nuclear bombs. This separation between subject and light, or spectator and spectacle, is what enables the affects of astonishment, awe, reverence, and admiration. But while for Burke the sublime overwhelms us, the distance of the mushroom cloud image leaves the subject intact; the subject itself is not called into question. If the “totalitarian” nature of the Enlightenment, according to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, was “the mastery of nature,” Lippit writes that this “requires a seeing subject that stands outside the limit and frames the field of vision” (42). In the mushroom cloud too, a 36 separation remains—that we can even see the light of the explosion as sublime betrays the fact that we are left whole, a master of nature. The Nagasaki cloud is a record of what the military saw as they flew away after detonating the bomb and clicked the shutter of a handheld camera. Thus, it is a placeholder, displaced from the violence but standing in for the bomb itself. If the bombs were a total photography, the mushroom cloud is a total substitution, a total image that demands the viewer engage with the bomb in spectacular elevation. The Sublimation of the Photographic Image What exactly do we see in the image of the mushroom cloud? Why do we call the atomic explosion a mushroom? On the one hand, the mushroom cloud is undoubtedly real, a visible phenomenon that is a direct effect of a nuclear explosion, even if it belongs to the vantage point of the military. The cloud is the radioactive debris, vapor, and condensation that arises above a scene of nuclear devastation; and because of this physical link it possesses to the explosion, it appears to be a kind of image of the devastation itself. But the mushroom cloud is also effective through its symbolism, through the abstracted figure of the mushroom that becomes the key icon of the bomb itself. Moreover, the mediums of photography and film, which have a compelling relationship to objective, scientific realism, give the image a certain kind of claim to truth; photography and film show us that the bomb is a mushroom that grows in the wake of nuclear explosion. A closer look at how each of these components operates in the image reveals a chain of substitutions that moves from 1) the event of the explosion, to 2) the smoke, which is a secondary effect of the explosion, to 3) the assumption of the cloud in the shape of a mushroom, captured at the right moment and sedimented through photography, to 4) a simplification (or iconization) of the image, which we see in the branding of atomic fireballs or board games that permeated Cold War consumer culture. 37 The semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce helps break down this chain of signification. Peirce broadly categorizes three kinds of signs: icon, index, and symbol. The “index” is a sign that communicates meaning through a direct physical relationship between the object being represented and the sign that represents it. While indices “have no significant resemblance to their objects,” they “direct the attention to their objects by blind compulsion…psychologically, the action of indices depends on association by contiguity” (108). For example, a plume of smoke may be “indexical” to a fire, since smoke is a direct physical consequence of the fire; though smoke itself does not look like a fire, we come to associate it with fire based on contiguity, even if we cannot see the fire itself. Similarly, as the radioactive vapor that rises up after a nuclear explosion, the mushroom cloud is smoke to a fire. While it bears no resemblance to either the bomb itself or to the violence that occurs at its detonation, it is nonetheless a secondary effect of the explosion, one that we have come to learn to read as evidence of a nuclear explosion. In this way, we could say that the first step in the creation of the image is the shift of the image’s focus from the explosion to an index. However, it is not only this secondary effect of vapor that makes up the image of the cloud, but the cloud’s shape in its likeness to a mushroom that offers the image’s meaning. And, though historical accounts reveal that in the early days of the bomb’s development, the mushroom was only one of many possible metaphors, it was the cloud’s resemblance to a mushroom that would be sought after in the U.S. government’s Cold War images. We could say, then, that the next step in the operation of this image is the interpretation of the index as a kind of “icon.” Peirce writes that the icon “has no dynamical connection with the object it represents; it simply happens that its qualities resemble those of that object, and excite analogous sensations in the mind for which it is a likeness. But it really stands unconnected with them” (114). The mushroom cloud signifies through the figure of the mushroom by the visual resemblance of the cloud’s formation to a similar shape; while mushrooms are not themselves physically connected to the explosion, we transpose its figure onto 38 the bomb through an association based on visual likeness to the smoke. While the mushroom may seem like an obvious choice for the bomb, however, a look at the image’s history—and the process of the atomic cloud’s formation—shows that the mushroom was chosen, aspired to as a sign. That is, the likeness of the cloud’s vapor to a mushroom was created. When we look at the Nagasaki photograph, we may today readily understand it to be the shape of a mushroom—but the cloud’s form is hazy, amorphous, and it is perhaps not difficult to imagine how other metaphors or figures might have been chosen. In fact, American audiences in 1945 would have looked at the Nagasaki cloud with little to no context for what it was meant to represent—and would have likely had a difficult time understanding an image that provided no clues to its time, location, or scale. As Hales puts it, the image arrived akin to what Roland Barthes called a “pure sign,” or a “visual icon so unprecedented that, for a moment at least, it lay outside the webs of signification that comprised a watching culture” (Hales 5). The grandeur of the mushroom was not immediate but taught, acculturated, and sedimented over time, in the many photographs taken at Nye County and Bikini Atoll. Originally, the cloud had no place within our “webs of signification,” had not yet been given a name. In fact, many early visual records, drawn or photographed, do not show a mushroom at all. This can be seen, for example, in the centerpiece of the August 20, 1945 issue of Life magazine, which prominently features a hand-drawn illustration of a large column of smoke erupting after the bomb’s explosion (see fig. 21). Its caption reads: “this drawing shows more graphically than aerial photographs effect of atomic bomb hit on Hiroshima. Smoke billows 40,000 ft” (qtd. in Hemez 9). What the illustration shows is that the mushroom cloud had not been accepted as a common representation for the atomic cloud, nor was photography yet established as a primary medium for capturing it. Depicting a fluffy, s-curve of a column of smoke with a dark, rounded cloud spreading out at its base, it looks little like the mushroom cloud we are accustomed to seeing today. In fact, it 39 looks like an inverted mushroom, upside down on its head, but the image would not have been read this way, for the drawing shows the city below the smoke, and the mountain ranges around it, from an aerial perspective—avoiding any confusion as to the illustration’s orientation. Though the illustration showcases the explosion’s size by featuring the city below (albeit from faraway, like the aerial photograph), it ultimately offers little evidence to suggest this is a scene of the atomic bomb’s explosion over Hiroshima. If we turn to a different example—one of the few photographs of the atomic cloud successfully captured over Hiroshima—we can see that the explosive cloud is indistinct in size and shape, seeming not unlike clouds that erupt after other recognizable catastrophes, such as industrial accidents, fires, or tornadoes29 (see fig. 22). What these early images suggest is that the cloud that rises in the wake of an atomic explosion does not necessarily look like a mushroom; rather, it assumes different shapes depending on when and how you look at it. According to an explanation of the different stages that occur in the formation of the mushroom cloud published online by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the mushroom cloud actually first begins as “a fireball, a luminous bubble of extremely hot air and vaporized weapon residues”; this fireball then pulls air, water vapor, and debris as it rises up in a column. Eventually, this hot air condenses, spreading out into the shape of a mushroom (Los Alamos National Laboratory). The assumption of a mushroom figure, therefore, is the last stage of a shifting process in which the cloud moves from fireball to vertical column before becoming something like a mushroom. This variance in shape is also reflected not only in the early images of the explosion, but in the many different verbal descriptions given by witnesses of the earliest explosions. As historian Spencer R. Weart explains, scientists and government affiliates at the Trinity referred to the cloud as a “domed-shaped column” and a “geyser” (402). The same issue of Life mentioned above, which 29 For further discussion of this image, see Hariman and Lucaites, “The Iconic Image of the Mushroom Cloud and the Nuclear Optic.” 40 featured the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prominently, described the explosions variously as “a huge ball of fiery yellow,” “a tremendous, ugly waterspout,” and “a pillar of swirling particles” (qtd. in Hales 9). Such descriptions seem to observe different, perhaps earlier stages of the cloud’s formation, before it becomes a mushroom. However, even when observers were visually describing the mushrooming last stage of the explosion, “mushroom” was not the only descriptor for the way the cloud opened up. At the Trinity, witnesses variously described it as a “parasol,” a “convoluting brain,” and a “raspberry” (Weart 402). A bystander at Hiroshima reportedly described the shape as a “jellyfish” while an official at Bikini Atoll called it a “cauliflower cloud.” While these figures are given to describe the same ballooning shape as the mushroom, each gives the bomb a different image and a different metaphor. Moreover, while these examples all seem to be visual or imagistic descriptions, in Japan, the atomic bomb is frequently referred to through its aural impact: an atomic bomb is referred to colloquially as pikadon, where “pika” is an onomatopoeia for a flash of light (and is commonly used to refer to the flash of a camera), while “don” an onomatopoeia for something landing with great impact (not unlike the word “boom” in English). We can therefore see how the phrase and image “mushroom cloud” not only select the largest, arguably most spectacular stage of the cloud’s explosion, but present a decidedly visual figure. I walk through this history to show how the association of the mushroom—which again is not directly connected to the bomb by itself—was deliberately selected to become the primary icon of the atomic bomb. Mere physical contiguity by way of the rising smoke appears to have not been enough to create a new, unprecedented image for the atomic bomb—and neither, we could say, did a different stage of the cloud’s formation, or a different figure. But it was the mushroom that would remain. How and why did the mushroom remain? Interestingly, even as early as the Trinity, “mushroom” was the word that recurred most often in witnesses’ descriptions. In other words, even before the government’s efforts to capture the image of the mushroom cloud, affiliate witnesses 41 seemed to associate a likeness, which tended towards the metaphorical connotations of the mushroom. Citing the work of mycologist R. Gordon Wasson, Weart suggests that the mushroom’s association with “dank, dark places, rot and poison—in short, death,” as well as “food, and therefore, life” prompted it to be the most relevant metaphor for the bomb, which was regarded with horror and yet hope, politically rhetoricized as a weapon of mass destruction that was also means for mass salvation (402). Furthermore, because mushrooms grow in places of rot, the mushroom signals “life opposing death—perhaps even life arising from within death, that is, transmutation”30 (Weart 402). In this sense, then, the mushroom also becomes a symbol in Peirce’s sense. According to Peirce, a symbol “refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object” (102). Rather than representation through likeness or contingency, a symbol determines a rule; it operates through general meaning rather than particularities. Death, rot, and poison—along with life, growth and remedy—the general associations we have with mushrooms operate symbolically in the mushroom cloud, in which the mushroom eventually becomes substituted for the bomb; these rules or laws of mushrooms are transposed onto the explosion. The mushroom denotes a virtue of law, of death and life in opposition, a kind—it puts the atomic bomb into the category of mushroom. It was therefore not only the aesthetic of the sublime that gave the bomb its image, but its resemblance to the fungus’ paradoxical qualities of life and death, poison and remedy, that were transposed into the bomb, gave the bomb a symbolic meaning. While other figures like the cauliflower or raspberry may have a visual resemblance to the cloud’s mushrooming shape, we could argue that it is the mushroom’s very capacity to hold these opposite poles together that presents 30 Weart also suggests that the mushroom’s ability to grow suddenly, imperceptibly, from seemingly nowhere—also seems to be apt for the sublime rendering of the atomic cloud. He writes, “the unusually swift growth of mushrooms, which has long inspired folklore, was also fitting, seeming to capture the mobility of a cloud that ‘mushroomed’ up” (402). 42 itself as an ideal symbol. In this way, the mushroom is precisely a pharmakon, that which is both substance and anti-substance, poison and remedy. Discussing a conversation between Theuth and the King about writing—and whether writing would help improve the people’s memory or instead produce forgetfulness—Derrida insists on the term pharmakon for its very capacity for ambivalence.31 In the pharmakon is a “regular, ordered polysemy that has…permitted the rendering of the same word by ‘remedy,’ ‘recipe,’ ‘poison,’ ‘drug,’ ‘philter,’ etc” (Derrida 430). In its multiple modes of existence, “mushroom” performs similarly to the pharmakon. As a species that thrives in decay— conditions that otherwise mark death for us, there is a violence to the mushroom perhaps not found in a cauliflower. The mushroom even inflicts death onto us, even as we consume it as food; ingesting certain species can result in everything from mild nausea to kidney failure to the destruction of red blood cells. One species, called the Death Cap (Amanita phalloides) can bring about the death of four people from a single mushroom, and is responsible for an estimated 90 percent of all fungal fatalities (Millman 53). A fair number of fungi are parasitic, as is the “caterpillar fungi” or “zombie ant,” colloquial names for insect-fungi relations in which a fungus takes over and paralyzes the body of a bug, from whose body sprouts a mushroom. Some fungi have even have been discovered to sprout within human bodies, particularly those that have been immunecompromised. At the same time, fungi are not only a source of food and nourishment—cooked in various ways around the world, throughout history—but of remedy. Many mushrooms are known to aid in immune-system support (the “quinine conk” helps lower fevers, while maitake lowers sugar levels and helps regulate diabetes), and even have achieved claims to fame for allegedly curing cancer 31 Derrida writes, “The pharmakon would be a substance—with all that that word can connote in terms of matter with occult virtues, cryptic depths refusing to submit their ambivalence to analysis, already paving the way for alchemy—if we didn’t have eventually to come to recognize it as antisubstance itself: that which resists any philosopheme, indefinitely exceeding its bounds as nonidentity, nonessence, nonsubstance; granting philosophy by that very fact the inexhaustible adversity [literally, ‘othersidedness’] of what constitutes it and the infinite absence of what dissolves it” (429). 43 (Millman viii).32 In this sense, mushrooms aid health and prolong life. As a figure, the mushroom holds together what we otherwise might regard as opposite poles, signifying at once these seeming contradictions. Beyond its connotations of life and death, its paradoxes could be thought to also hold a space for the many aesthetic conflicts that appear in the mushroom cloud: its limitlessness in confinement, its spectacularity and domestication, its brightness and darkness, delight in terror, all together, at once. It is important to note, however, that the mushroom cloud composes a generic image rather than a particular one: both in its removal of the bomb from its specific scene of violence and in the creation of an abstract mushroom figure. And this too, resonates with Peirce’s definition of a symbol. He writes, a symbol “cannot denote any particular thing; it denotes a kind of thing. Not only that, but it is itself a kind and not a single thing” (my emphasis) (Peirce 114). Taking the Nagasaki cloud as our example, we see could say that we see a mushroom, but it is not any particular mushroom, rather a generic one, a kind: the contours of a shape that signals the genus fungi. Nor does the Nagasaki mushroom cloud signify a particular atomic bomb. For the mushroom is only a pharmakon if we collapse the Death Cap with shiitake, or the chaga with the parasitic caterpillar fungus. In fact, many fungi are unusually specific,33 presenting themselves as a notoriously difficult taxonomic challenge for scientists. The mushroom, as a figure or a kind, holds for us a sum totality of these heterogeneous traits. In this way, the mushroom cloud curates an image of a mushroom in the singular rather in the multiple, asserting a generalized vision of nature under which war is cast. The polysemy of “mushroom” is collapsed into one figure of the mushroom cloud, which becomes a kind: the mushroom of the atomic bomb. 32 In China, the caterpillar fungus is used as a treatment for liver cancer and pulmonary problems. Another species, chaga, has become popular globally ever since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about its remedial effects on doing away with cancer in his 1966 memoir The Cancer Ward (Millman 97; 37). 33 Some fungi feed only on cockroach antennae or on leaves wet with elk urine (Millman viii). 44 The chain of signification that moves from explosion à smoke à mushroom is sedimented through the medium of photography, which gives the image the impression of being entirely objective, the most “true” representation of the atomic bomb. Because photography itself is a chemical imprint of light cast on a given object, the image itself can be thought to be an index, contiguous with the cloud that it records. As Andre Bazin famously writes in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”: The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making. In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space. Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction. (7-8) In that the mushroom cloud erupts in a moment in time, moments after a nuclear explosion, as an event it certainly cannot be entirely refuted or rejected; the moment is indeed being re-presented to us. It is carried over from the moment of its recording to our time and space, here, allowing us to see a particular view of the bomb that somebody witnessed. There is an extreme particularity to the photographic image, in this way, that is linked to its irrefutability. As Roland Barthes puts it, “In the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see; it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This” (4). We could say that the mushroom cloud is a recording of a very visible phenomenon in the wake of a nuclear explosion, something “absolutely particular” to the atomic bomb’s detonation. In spite of any critical objections we may have, we are “forced to accept as real” the existence of the mushroom cloud that is “re-presented, set before us.” It transfers the reality of the moment, above the explosion seen from the Bockscar, from Levy’s camera. This very particularity has a relationship to realism that lends the mushroom cloud a 45 convincing claim to truthful representation. Recording the world as it appears through the mediation of a mechanical instrument, photography “enjoy[s] a certain status within the pantheon of representational media as a particularly truthful or realistic medium,” writes Colin Hemez, who argues that this very medium was therefore “crucial in the construction of the atomic sublime” (3-4). The atomic bomb, which was already presented by the government as an efficient new technology “in the custodianship of scientists and technicians guided by a disciplined, well-organized military,” found in photography a perfect medium that could present itself as the bomb’s “correct,” efficient, and objective representation (Hariman and Lucaites 143). But this medium does not preclude itself from the processes of mediation. As we have been discussing, the Nagasaki cloud, as an example, erases Levy’s point-of-view, the military’s position of power, and instead frames the bomb as decontextualized and limitless, as though a mushroom—while departing from the very conditions of its making. It works to appear as though the bomb, a mushroom, is recorded without the intervention of man. It is this effacement of its own processes of mediation—in the service of substituting itself for nothing short of atrocious genocide—that makes the mushroom cloud a violent image. It dares to represent supremacy and succeeds in obscuring what other images we may have been able to see of the event. Barthes also talks about photography as a catastrophe—as something that conveys: “This will be and this has been,” of a “horror [of] an anterior future of which death is the stake” (96). It is a “catastrophe which has already occurred” (Barthes 96). Looking at the Nagasaki cloud, we might ask: what is the anterior future that is being presented? What death is to occur in its future? In the absence of the particular, the absolute Contingent, there is an utterly abstracted image of a view most observers would not see without the prosthetic capabilities of the camera to extend that vision, to allow us to see from Levy’s lens. There is no context, and the catastrophe that has occurred is displaced along a chain of associations from explosion to vapor to 46 mushroom. While the photographic image is an index of a real time and place, it is a highly mediated image that cannot be only “scientific,” or outside of man. We can imagine that in its abstract shape, the Nagasaki mushroom cloud may have easily been given a different name, another figure—a raspberry, or a cauliflower. Both are in general shape and kind, apt for visually describing the cloud’s explosive form. A raspberry or cauliflower would even suggest the many grooves and crevices of the cloud that we see in the photograph in a way that a smooth parasol of a mushroom does not. And yet, a raspberry is small, sweet, vibrant in color and soft—as a fruit, it has a harmless stature within our signifying economy. And while a cauliflower has a closer texture to the cloud, it signifies no real extremities, perhaps poses no threat in and of itself. It is the mushroom—which presents the possibility of toxicity, death, as well as the pleasures of food, of medicine—that compels itself to be a convincing stand-in for the bomb. In this sense, the Nagasaki mushroom cloud derives its meaning through the transposition of a metaphor onto its photographed index. The words “mushroom cloud,” and the figure of the mushroom within it, are intertwined within the photograph; we read them together. We read the image as a mushroom erupting over Nagasaki. The photograph says: the atomic bomb is formidable, unprecedented, it looks like and is a mushroom. The cloud simultaneously resembled a parasol, a brain, a raspberry, and a cauliflower, but none was as apt to enter the economy of the atomic sublime as the mushroom. Posing as a referent for nuclear warfare, the mushroom cloud takes the place of the atomic bomb’s annihilating force. Moving from explosive vapor to the figure of the mushroom, the image presents a total substitution for the bomb’s violent destruction. In Lippit’s words, “the atomic bombings produced symbols—as opposed to images of war—which drove the representation of atomic warfare from fact to figure, toward the threshold of art” (92). The atomic bomb is but a mushroom, the photographs and film footage seem to say; its violence is captured in the violence of 47 the mushroom itself. We could say that the chain of significations in the mushroom cloud operates through another sublime means, which can think through this time in terms of the sublime’s definition as a verb. As a verb, the dictionary definition entry for sublime reads as such: sublime transitive verb 1: to cause to pass directly from the solid to the vapor state and condense back to solid form 2 [French sublimer, from Latin sublimare] a (1): to elevate or exalt especially in dignity or honor (2): to render finer (as in purity or excellence) b: to convert (something inferior) into something of higher worth Like its definition, the mushroom cloud is constituted by the conversion of the bomb’s explosion into vapor, only to be solidified: the mushroom and its symbol. It elevates or exalts the bomb in dignity or honor, a sublime image of nature pushed to the threshold of art. It converts radioactive vapor, purifies it into a sublime mushroom that solicits our awe-full gaze. It is perhaps in this way that Lippit describes the mushroom cloud as that which embodies the “perverse organicity of atomic war” (92). The mushroom cloud says war is natural and organic, with the nuclear bomb the inevitable culmination of the teleological progress that belongs to an advanced capitalist nation. It gives the impression that the bomb was produced without human intervention, attempts to efface technology itself, predetermined—harnessed from the “basic power of the universe,” to quote Truman again. The sublime of the mushroom is something we see perfected in the images produced during the Cold War, transforming into a kind of image in and of itself, prescribing a nuclear optic limiting what we see of violent devastation. 48 The Monster Mushroom of Bikini Atoll While it is difficult to trace an exact origin to the metaphor of the “mushroom cloud,” the U.S. government seemed to understand not only that the bomb’s representation could be rendered in the aesthetic and philosophical category of the sublime, as others have written, but in the imagery of the mushroom. This is evident in the kind of formal perfection of the cloud’s mushroom shape in the many photographs and films taken during their Cold War tests. This perfection can be seen, for instance, in a comparison of two photographs taken ten years apart, both published in Life magazine, one taken by an amateur rank officer at Nagasaki with a smuggled camera, and the second by a professional photographer for the Atomic Energy Commission during a test detonation at Yucca Flats in 1955, of which Hales offers an astute analysis (see figs. 23 and 24). Arguing that the first cloud is haphazard and imperfect, taken in haste, if recognizably a cloud, Hales suggests that the second seems to be strategically framed within an idealized sublime setting. He writes: In the first, there seems to have been no attempt to construct a set of cues as to what we are looking at, or why, or where and when the picture was taken. In the second, these matters have developed enough importance that they seem to constitute significant parts of the essential stylishness of the picture. Note, for example, the way that the photographer has let the rising sun (or, equally likely, the photographer's own artificial lights) illuminate the cacti in the foreground, so that their shapes reflect and resonate with the shape of the atomic cloud above. Note how the exposure was timed to produce the most spectacularly moody and impressive of skies - a dark, cloud-flecked blue-purple that, had the exposure been altered one way or the other, would have washed into a daytime sky of no particular force or turned a pure, undifferentiated black. And the cloud itself: the photographer made the exposure at the precise instant when it was most a mushroom cloud, almost perfectly reflecting its descriptive ideal. (Hales 7-8) 49 At Yucca Flats, the photograph is taken at just the right moment, showcasing elements of a brooding landscape within which the cloud resides. Compared to the first photograph at Nagasaki, the camera at Yucca Flats is poised, long-range, and level, centering the cloud within its landscape. By contrast, the first cloud is taken from below, the cloud askew within the frame. Although, like the Nagasaki photograph taken by Charles Levy discussed previously, this Nagasaki photograph shows no specific context, it appears to have been taken from somewhere close to the ground rather than from an elevated view high in the sky. More than disparity in steadiness between this photograph and the photograph from Yucca Flats, however, I want to also highlight the timing that captures the cloud in the shape of a mushroom—what Hales calls the bomb’s “descriptive ideal.” Where the verbal description given by journalist William H. Laurence after Nagasaki narrated the explosion in its ever-shifting figuration, the Yucca Flats photograph suspends the shape of the mushroom in time. The mushroom appears to be sought after, pursued by photography’s capture. Now, together with the surrounding setting, the mushroom cloud is no longer high in the sky, but grows out of the sands of Nevada, framed by cacti, set against the desert sun. In other words, it has become positioned within a landscape, re-contextualized rather than decontextualized. The bomb is a mushroom that grows from this barren landscape. That the photograph showcases the desert, as opposed to focusing on a vacuum in the sky, is also deliberate. It cues us to situate the bomb within the Great American Desert, “once a paradigm for wasteland, the stony horror that settlers had to brave to reach the paradise of the west” (Hales 20). While North Carolina or Southern California were also considered as potential nuclear testing sites, Hales writes that Nye County, Nevada was selected for its ruggedness as well as isolation, deemed “safe from the dangerous possibility that the bomb might infect the American landscape” (20). The setting of the “West,” romanticized in literature and cultural history, helped to narrate the development of the bomb as a kind of pioneerdome in technology, the pursuit of a new kind of manifest destiny. 50 This positioning of the mushroom cloud within a designated landscape is arguably most pronounced in the images taken in the Marshall Islands during the U.S. occupation from 1946 to 1958. For our example, let us turn to a widely reproduced photograph taken on July 25, 1946 (see fig. 25), one of tens of thousands of photographs to emerge from BAKER, the second of two test detonations that comprised Operation Crossroads. In the image, a gigantic mushroom cloud erupts over the Pacific Ocean. From the surface of the water, a short, textured stem bursts open into a flat, wide, cap, parallel with the ocean’s horizon. Tiny boats track along the surface of the water, way beneath the cloud. In the foreground is a deserted beach, populated only by swaying coconut palms and small wooden sheds. Set within the shores of the South Pacific, the mushroom cloud has now become part of an idyllic tropical landscape. Its mise-en-scène of palm trees, beachy sands, and expansive ocean—even the hint of a breeze that flutters the palms—provides the visual cues for a postcard paradise, an exoticized vision of Micronesia. Notably, within this setting, the mushroom erupts in all of its mushroom-ness; no longer does its column consist of deep crevices, cauliflowerlike, as in the Nagasaki cloud, but its smooth, cylindrical stem grows up into a parasol that expands into the expansive sky. Its resemblance to a mushroom is unmistakable—this is a mushroom, and it is growing out of the Pacific Ocean. Where the Nagasaki cloud had a celestial, angelic light with rings that resembled halos (god-like, a new light source), the Bikini Atoll mushroom seems to be cast yet again as an object under the sun: the sun illuminates the sand and water at the same time that we see the mushroom’s dark underside. While the viewer would most likely recognize the mushroom as a vaporous cloud, it is given a proper setting, sedimenting the cloud’s likeness to a mushroom. It is a sublime formalization of Peirce’s icon, a solidification of the vapor’s appearance as a mushroom— and the indexical record of photography captures it as though to record it as fact. Moreover, it gives the impression that whoever took this photograph snapped a picture through happenstance, as though the person with the camera happened to come upon this scene of the “absolute Particular, 51 the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This” (4). The objective nature of photography theorized by Bazin thus asserts an undeniable realism, where “we are forced to accept as real the existence of the [mushroom] reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us” (8). Condensing the chain of displacements that occur from explosion to vapor to icon to symbol, the atomic cloud is given a body, a setting, and a weighty credibility through the camera’s ability to record this strange likeness in the real. The image is sublime, solidified firmly as an organism of nature into its metaphor. Pausing to look at the image more closely, we also see the construction of a particular vision of nature as an outside to culture that we had begun to see in the Nagasaki cloud. Tellingly, the photograph presents Bikini Atoll as a tropical paradise void of life, as though existing as nothing but a sight for aesthetic pleasure. Taken from a great distance from the beach, the image shows no visible sign of human or animal life. Ships dot the horizon as though to appear as vegetation growing under the mushroom, or, at the very least, to be recreational ships or carrying cargo—though the majority of them were in fact naval fleets filled with farm animals to observe the impact of the blast and radiation. The military project is again effaced, presenting the Marshall Islands as an exoticized “pure nature” somehow untouched, separated from human life. This construction of the South Pacific as a place of purity is evident not only in the mushroom cloud photographs that were taken, but in other government-issued media34 as well, which explicitly referred to the region as a new kind of Eden. If the photograph at Yucca Flats pits man against 34 This was also frequently shared by popular media, as well. An opening passage from James A. Michener’s short-story collection, Tales of the South Pacific, suggests as much. Based on observations he made while he served as lieutenant commander at the Espiritu Santo Naval Base during WWII, the collection begins: “I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific. The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons, lovely beyond description...” (quoted in Hales page TK). While the stories take place prior to the U.S. government’s occupation of the Marshall Islands for nuclear testing, they reveal the Edenic imaginary the South Pacific held in the U.S. public eye at the time of the tests; Tales became a bestseller in 1947, subsequently won a Pulitzer, and was adapted into a hit Broadway musical in 1948 (while the Broadway musical also won a Pulitzer in 1950). 52 nature through its depiction of the atomic bomb within the brutal but open frontier of the American West, the photograph at Bikini Atoll wedges this divide between man and nature further by presenting the atolls as nature far removed from the “civilization” of mankind. In fact, the Marshall Islands’ supposed lack of inhabitants and distance from “civilization” served as justification for the U.S. government’s selection as a site for its test explosions, which they narrated into their public relations campaigns. In this Edenic, purified nature, the atomic explosion has become a landscape.35 The image of the Baker test aligns the spectator-witness with the eye of the military; but its removal from a scene of combat or from the void of the Nagasaki sky is now given a setting, enacting another erasure of the extraordinary violence that was inflicted onto the Marshall Islands.36 The very idea of the emptiness of the South Pacific must be questioned. Reflecting on the nuclear detonations in the Marshall Islands, Karen Barad critiques this justification by highlighting the colonialist-imperialist logic of absence on which it is founded. She writes: The question of absence is surely as political as that of presence. When has absence ever been an absolute givenness? Is it not always a question of what is seen, acknowledged, and counted as present, and for whom? The void—a much-valued apparatus of colonialism, a crafty insidious imaginary, a way of offering justification for claims of ownership in the ‘discovery’ of ‘virgin’ territory—the particular notion that ‘untended,’ ‘uncultivated,’ ‘uncivilized’ spaces are empty rather than plentiful, has been a well-worn tool used in the service of colonialism, racism, capitalism, militarism, imperialism, nationalism, and scientism. (“After the End” 529) 35W.J.T. Mitchell delineates the connection between landscape as not only an artistic tradition but a medium intimately bound to imperialism; a landscape is something that implies a particular relationship between the spectator and the land represented as aesthetic object, between the human and the non-human, man and nature. 36Hales writes that “the effect of this conjunction of South Pacific Eden and nuclear holocaust cannot be too heavily emphasized, for it was successful in continuing, even amplifying, the strain of aestheticism that had characterized the earliest attempts to anchor the atomic sublime” (19). 53 As she suggests, the paradise of the Marshall Islands is presented as untouched nature: “void,” but void for whom? Of the 167 Marshallese that were displaced when the U.S. government occupied the atolls in 1946, many are unable to return home to this day due to the toxicity of the irradiated environment. Others who were able to stay experienced hair loss and burns from nuclear fallout, or experienced, years later, thyroid cancer and higher rates of birth defects. Radioisotopes have contaminated the islands’ coral reefs, fish, sand, and soil, traveling to coconut crabs, trees, and fruit, leading to altered diets involving higher consumptions of canned foods and an increase in dietrelated health issues such as diabetes (Johnston 12). Four of the islands that comprise Enewetak atoll evaporated in their entirety,37 and others near Runit Island were left with giant, gaping craters.38 Tellingly, reparations have not yet been made to the victims of the explosions and yet, in 1954, the government enrolled the people of Rongelap, Ailinginae, and Utrik in a classified medical research program named Project 4.1 under the guise of humanitarian aid to observe and document the effects of radiation on their bodies (Johnston 12). In the 1970s, 4,000 American soldiers were deployed to “clean up” the radioactive debris by putting it into a gigantic crater left by one of the tests and covering it in 18 inches of concrete, but rising sea levels threaten to burst it open and cause radiation leakage, while the thousands of military men, who were given no special training or equipment, 37 One bomb, called the Castle Bravo dropped in 1954, is reported to have been 1,000 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Barad 525, ABC special). 38 On one of the craters on Runit Island, located off of Enewetak Atoll, is a giant, radioactive dome, in which radioactive debris leftover from a failed bomb detonation was bagged into plastic bags and thrown into a crater covered over in 18 inches of concrete. Moreover, the dangers of performing this “cleanup” were not disclosed to the 4000 American soldiers deployed to do it, nor were they given protective gear or special training for handling hazardous waste, which authorities wore only for a special public service announcement. They were thus unknowingly exposed to toxic, often fatal levels of radiation, and many developed cancerous tumors, aneurisms and other health complications, and left with no special healthcare coverage. The crater is naturally porous; no effort was made to coat or secure the crater itself, and thus radiation travels through the sea water that pervades the dome. Rising sea levels and volatile weather threaten to break apart the dome and release more radiation into its surrounding environment. Alson Kelen, a climate change activist, says: “That dome is the connection between the nuclear age and the climate change age. It’ll be a very devastating event if it really leaks and we’re not talking the Marshall Islands, we’re talking the whole Pacific Ocean” (See ABC; Barad, “After the End of the World”). 54 developed cancers, leukemia, and long-term health complications; several others have died. So we return again to Barad’s question: “what is seen, acknowledged, and counted as present, and for whom?” Bikini as a virgin, uncultivated, far from the American mainland and therefore safe, is part of an apparatus of colonialism—and the images of this mythic purity are part and parcel of the mushroom cloud’s Cold War nuclear optic. What is seen is a distanced view of a postcard paradise, what is not counted as present are the people who live there or the ecosystem of the atolls. Aside from the images of the mushroom cloud, footage of native islanders depicts them as having a complacent, cooperative attitude and yielding to a greater cause: as a video by the military’s PR unit states: “United States Government now wants to turn this great destructive force into something good for mankind and that this experiment here at Bikini is the first step in that direction.” A voice over states: “The Islanders are a nomadic group and are well pleased that the Yanks are going to add a little variety to their lives” (ABC). Marshall Islands climate change and nuclear activist Alson Kelen describes that they were told by the U.S. military that they had “a duty to the world” and that their “evacuation” was for the “greater good” (ABC). This portrayal of the Marshallese as naïve but good “savages” for the larger cause is the same logic that naturalizes war and justifies the development of nuclear arms. It claims that there is a “greater good” for humanity as a whole, which the U.S. and the West are chosen to advance. The violence of the U.S. Occupation—what Winona LaDuke calls a “radioactive colonialism” and Barbara Johnston calls “nuclear colonialism”—operates at multiple levels both political and cultural, and is embedded in the image of the mushroom cloud. As with the cloud over Nagasaki, in the photograph of the mushroom above Bikini Atoll, we still assume the invisible eye of the military, naturalizing the point-of-view and the bomb as organic and sublime. In addition to a black and white version, there is also a colorized version that paints the sea cerulean, the palm trees bright green, and the beach tan, while leaving the black and white mushroom cloud behind it in greyscale (see fig. 26). The exoticization of the tropical setting is 55 exaggerated through garish colors, which appears in contrast to the mushroom cloud’s monochrome figure, kept in greyscale. The cloud thus appears exceptionally distinct from its environment— timeless, we could even say, juxtaposing a kind of moodiness with the brightness of its environment. More than color or light, however, the framing of the mushroom cloud within a landscape gives the mushroom a place and highlights its sheer magnitude. From the tiny navy ships to the huts on the shore to the palm trees on the sand, there is a nested sense of size: the mushroom is now given a sense of scale. The mushroom, which stretches ten miles wide and stands 520 feet tall, overtakes the scene in the utmost spectacle; its confinement within the tight frame, closing in around the mushroom cap, seems to give the sense that the mushroom cloud grows beyond the frame, into infinity. Even the vast ocean is diminished in the formidable force of the cloud that overwhelms the atmosphere. Monstrous and terrifying, here, we see clearly: the mushroom is the ultimate spectacle. We are invited to feel fearful, astonished, and in awe—even as we view the image from a safe space. The apotheosis of the sublime atomic cloud is revealed in the landscape made out of Bikini Atoll, but also undeniably in the image’s perfection of the cloud as a mushroom. The effectiveness of this photograph is in part achieved through the way it appears coincidental, as though the person who took it happened to come across a scene of a mushroom erupting over the ocean. One cannot tell, just by looking at the image, that over 500 cameras were poised to shoot the explosion, or that this mushrooming shape was momentary. In fact, this particular photograph actually captures the cloud moments before the stage of the explosion that is typically characterized as the “mushroom cloud.” That is, the cloud actually depicts something called the Wilson chamber effect, in which condensation covers over the core of the atomic vapor. “The wider, exterior cloud is actually just a condensation cloud caused by the Wilson chamber effect, and was very brief. The actual mushroom cloud is inside the condensation cloud (compare with this image, a photo taken slightly later, after the condensation cloud had cleared)” (Atomic 56 Photographers). If we look at the “actual mushroom cloud” to which the refer (see fig. 27)—and which emerged moments after this condensation had cleared—we see a mushroom cloud more like the one over Nagasaki. Though like a mushroom, its cap is textured like a cauliflower. But the photograph that would be the most widely reproduced from the Baker tests is the one showing the Wilson chamber effect, and which looks most like a mushroom, with a smoother parasol and unmistakable stem. The figure of the mushroom has become so crucial to our understanding of the bomb that the stages of its detonation have become articulated in relation to it; so much has the mushroom come to embody the atomic cloud as the perfect metaphor, that the government has even come to describe the atomic explosion as “real” in comparison it. For example, in “Anatomy of the Mushroom Cloud,” Eileen Patterson discusses a different photograph of the Baker test that shows an earlier stage of the explosion (see fig. 28). A spherical puff of a cloud with a textured crown over its apex, this cloud lacks a stem, cap, or gills of a mushroom. Calling it a “fake mushroom,” she asserts, “This famous photo of the Crossroads Baker test (July 25, 1946) looks like a mushroom cloud but is not. Crossroads Baker was detonated 90 feet under water, so the ‘stem’ in the photo is a hollow pillar of water. The ‘head’ is a short-lived (just seconds), cloud of vapor, caused by moisture in the air condensing in the low pressure behind the explosion’s shock wave” (National Security Science). Scientifically speaking, the atomic explosion has several stages, but its imaging has become so tied to the appearance of the mushroom in a particular stage, that other stages of the cloud’s formation are compared to it; such photographs show inauthentic mushrooms. Thus, we can see how it matters little what physically constitutes what is called the “mushroom cloud,” but its appearance most like the mushroom that was disseminated widely. As previously discussed, viewers in 1945 would not have understood what the Nagasaki mushroom cloud was meant to signify. The image was given meaning through the countless images that would emerge from the Cold War nuclear tests, images like the one taken at Bikini Atoll. On the 57 one hand, we can see that the photograph of the Nagasaki cloud and the photograph of the Baker test at Bikini Atoll are two dissimilar images, not least because of the context or setting that frames them. On the other hand, the mushroom cloud also works through its relentless reproduction and the indistinguishability from one another, as a kind of image rather than a depiction of any particular moment. Referring to the tight control the U.S. government had over its construction and circulation, Hariman and Lucaites write that “the nuclear icon emerges from the combination of spectacular photography and continuous circulation of nearly identical images that exist primarily to mark a general condition rather than a specific event” (142). It is in this way that the symbol of the mushroom was ultimately abstracted and iconized within consumer culture. The many images disseminated during the Cold War would actually come to give the prior Nagasaki cloud meaning, provide a means for the contemporary viewer to project the mushroom onto the Nagasaki cloud’s abstract shape. These photographs were so commonly circulated that the photo of the Nagasaki cloud is often thought to be a record of the explosion at Hiroshima three days prior. And in Japan, the photographs at Bikini Atoll are frequently substituted in feature films as images of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As media scholars like Kono Kensuke and Kawamura Minato write, there were few other images of the bombings on record, and so the American military’s mushroom cloud images often serve as a placeholder for them in fiction. The endless repetition and solidification of the mushroom gave the original event of atomic destruction an image, or created meaning that was later given to the original event. In this way, too, the mushroom cloud is a total image, a total mushroom that stands in for extreme violence under erasure. Revisiting the Figure of the Mushroom The mushroom cloud may be a mushroom in the contingent nature of its form, but in most every other way, it is not a mushroom. What we call a “mushroom” is the fruiting body of a larger 58 network of tiny fungal threads called mycelia that exist beneath the ground’s surface; mushrooms are what pop up out of the soil after a recent rain, or if the conditions are otherwise right. It is often a matter of chance that we come upon them, for they disappear soon after they sprout up. The mushroom cloud that erupts above Nagasaki or in the ocean at Bikini Atoll emphasizes a shape of resemblance, a loose association of abstract concepts that link mushroom to atomic bomb. But the organism of a fungus as a sprawling network of filaments is nowhere to be found in the mushroom cloud, which grows sovereign, phallic, a singular, totemic mushroom. Constructed to appear as though by chance, it is deliberately, painstakingly constructed to further a violent, militaristic agenda. Curiously, there are some ways in which fungi seem to be connected to nuclear devastation in ways that the U.S. government would not necessarily have anticipated, however—ways in which the mushroom as an organism and figure seems to exceed the representation asserted by the mushroom cloud itself. As Anna Tsing has written, rumor has it, “When Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945…the first living thing to emerge from the blasted landscape was a matsutake mushroom” (The Mushroom at the End of the World 4). In this rumor is the truth that mushrooms not only thrive in spaces of rot, but from within devastation. Matsutake, for example, grow in heavily deforested areas, while chanterelles thrive in embers. Interestingly, however, this ability to grow and thrive from destruction caused by humankind—and which could devastate humankind in turn—is no less true when it comes to radiation. In the years after Chernobyl, vast swaths of “radiotrophic” or “radiation loving” fungi were found on the walls of the nuclear reactor and surrounding soil, eating radiation and turning it into reproductive energy. So great was its ability to reproduce from digesting the radiation that recently, microbiologists have been discussing the possibilities of cleaning up deadly levels of cesium found at the Fukushima Daichi power plant through fungi. We could say that in one way, the mushroom that grows from the site of total nuclear annihilation reinforces the symbolic force of the mushroom as an apt figure of that which rises after disaster, 59 captures a sense of life despite annihilation—something growing in the space of death. Seeming to exceed the limits of our perception, at the threshold of our existence, the mushroom grows in a place where there was thought to be nothing left. Lippit writes that “nothing remains, except the radiation.” But the mushroom remains. Perhaps: if Frances Ferguson writes that “to think the sublime would be to think the unthinkable and to exist in one’s own nonexistence,” then the mushroom grows there in this space that is the unthinkable, exists in our nonexistence—and in this way, the figure of the mushroom is remarkable, uncannily perfect as the figure that rises in the wake of the nuclear explosion. And yet, this remarkable mushroom in this space of nonexistence is arguably non-sublime. Unlike plants, it does not grow through photosynthesis. If light—and particularly extremity of light—which has preoccupied philosophers like Burke in the 18th century and leads us through today to thinkers like Virilio and Lippit, has been characterized as one of the quintessential examples of sublime experience, the mushroom needs no light to grow. It thrives in the darkness and in rot. Eating dead matter through its “extracellular” digestion, it is imperviousness to catastrophic light. Rather than being consumed by radiation—at least, if we are talking about the radiotrophic kind—it in turn consumes radiation. The fact that mushrooms also appear to grow suddenly seems to also capture a kind of excess; fungal movement is imperceptible to the human eye, and in this way, the mushroom is itself spectacular differently from what the government could have envisioned. It is a vitality that makes an apt figure for the violent representation of the bomb, but it also exceeds the mushroom cloud, seems to move beyond it. On the one hand, we could say that the mushroom becomes co-opted as a well-managed symbol of military violence, one that aids in the spectacularization of the bomb as well as its domestication. The politics of the Cold War nuclear agenda is not only observable at the level of government policy but woven into the images that helped to further such an agenda; it was what 60 played a major role in the Cold War expansion of the military industrial complex. The mushroom here obscures our vision of atomic destruction. And yet, precisely because the mushroom is an uncannily powerful figure, resistant to radiation, mushrooms both haunt and open new means for grappling with atomic violence. The deliberate cartooniness of Murakami’s Super Nova demonstrates a contrast to the sublime, celestial cloud of vapor made to resemble a mushroom. Instead, his garish, toxic-looking mushrooms gesture toward the ghost of the atomic cloud while offering a different kind of fungal image. While firmly embedded in capitalist processes of commodification, the pop-culture aesthetics of his work also seem to satirize the mushroom cloud’s commodification to the point of kitsch, for these mushrooms appear cute and ripe for consumption. At the same time, they are menacing, threatening the viewer with the capacity to look themselves. The monstrous mushroom in the center, moreover, looks back at the spectator lazily, with lids half closed, as though to say we are not masters of spectacular consumption, but we too, are watched. In a blank grey void where there is otherwise nothing we can see, the mushrooms remain. Peirce writes: “Symbols grow…a symbol, once in being, spreads among the peoples. In use and in experience, its meaning grows. Such words as force, law, wealth, marriage, bear for us very different meanings from those they bore to our barbarous ancestors” (115). While the mushroom cloud is a military image of totality, the figure of the mushroom remains, survives, and proliferates beyond its original emergence as the total image for the atomic bomb. Like the fungi found at Chernobyl, these mushrooms grow, taking on a course of their own. While it may be impossible to fully represent the violence of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, we might say that they translate something of nuclear catastrophe. Mushrooms—in symbol, image, but also in matter—become a crucial means for mediating radiation, undoing the violent aesthetics of the mushroom cloud to open up new ways to think and feel. 61 Chapter 2. The Mushroom Cloud Proliferates: Anime, Manga, and Kawaii Bombs “The world of the future might be like Japan today—super flat.” So begins the short manifesto written by artist Takashi Murakami, published in the catalog to the Superflat exhibition that toured internationally in 2000. Naming a tendency in Japanese visual culture toward twodimensionality—characterized by simple contours, solid colors, and an absence of depth in favor of an emphasis on surface—“superflat” posits that an aesthetic flatness illustrates a flattening of Japanese society as a whole, ever since the end of WWII. No longer is there a distinction between high and low, art and commodity, reality and fantasy. For the otaku—an avid consumer of anime, manga, or videogames, whose world-building modes of consumption Murakami sees as the epitome of the postwar condition—such distinctions are untenable. Included in this collapse of values is Japanese popular culture’s endless fascination with the cute, or kawaii, which according to Murakami, is a direct product of war: a symptom of a national ethos of helplessness after defeat, on the one hand, and an invitation to fantasy as a means for grappling with reality, on the other. Linking the immense devastation wrought by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WWII with the popular aesthetics of manga and anime, Murakami offers a provocative theory about the political nature of visual culture. Murakami is right to point out that the media of manga and anime as we know them today gained widespread popularity beginning in Japan’s postwar period. While comics had existed before and during the war, they took on new forms after WWII, initially as a means for appealing to a new generation of youth that could lead the nation’s war-torn past into a future of renewed hope. It is from this context that artists like Tezuka Osamu, the author and creator of Mighty Atom (Tetsuwan Atomu, better known in the U.S. as Astro Boy), often nicknamed the “Godfather of manga,” emerged. Indeed, Astro Boy, a cute and capable robot-hero with superhuman abilities to save the 62 world from all sorts of political and environmental calamities, arguably redirected attention from the lived horrors of destruction by military technologies to an excitement about peaceful technological futures through the genre of cartoon fantasy. In his own work, Murakami makes this theory of the centrality of war to cuteness apparent by foregrounding it within his art. Among his smiling pandas and anthropomorphic flowers, atomic imagery recurs, even when his images seem endearing and whimsical. This unsettling mixture of innocent play with disturbing violence, this chapter argues, is nowhere more pronounced than in his paintings of multi-eyed mushrooms and kawaii atomic bombs. In this chapter, I analyze the ways Murakami’s atomic art implicates the viewer in a process of uncomfortable spectatorship, prompting questions about the place the mushroom cloud has in the world and in Japan. Looking first at Time Bokan, a series of repeating images of the mushroom cloud shaped like a death skull, I argue that his art employs an exaggerated pop aesthetic to satirize the extraordinary way the mushroom cloud has become a global, consumable icon of mass annihilation at the same time that Murakami himself is embedded in (and embraces) capitalist consumerism. Moreover, it explicitly references Japanese manga and anime through its title as well as its visual style, and in so doing, calls attention to the way the mushroom cloud has been drawn and redrawn in contemporary Japanese media. Taking a detour to trace the history of the mushroom cloud’s circulation in Japan’s specific postwar context—and to consider the socio-cultural meanings it may have taken on in Japan—I then return to Murakami’s painting Eco Eco Rangers Earth Force (2005) and argue it satirically opens gaps in our processes of looking by provoking affects of desire, aggression, and affection on the part of the viewer. Turning the nuclear bomb into a kind of cute character, the piece nonetheless signifies a weapon of mass destruction, suggesting the embeddedness of war in manga aesthetics. Exploring the ways Murakami’s mushroom clouds intersect with his assertions of superflat theory—and acknowledging the limitations or issues of a 63 nationalized rhetoric of aesthetics—I argue that Murakami’s art is best seen as a point of departure for critically reflecting on the ways the military optics of the mushroom cloud might be productively disassembled for critique. Finally, in the last part of the chapter, I turn my attention, not to mushroom clouds, but to the conspicuous presence of mushrooms themselves that repeatedly appear in Murakami’s works. Moving from satirizations of the mushroom cloud to the cute, yet menacing fungal creatures that proliferate across his canvases, Murakami opens up a pop cultural space through which the totality of the mushroom cloud as a dominant representation of nuclear violence might be re-imagined, re-adapted, and re-mixed to provoke questions about the ways images of war are normalized, even as Murakami’s art is complicit in the same processes of capitalist commodification. Time Bokan: The Art of Takashi Murakami In Time Bokan, an outline of a mushroom cloud is transposed onto the icon of a skull (see fig. 29). The skull-cloud is rendered in a solid off-white against a background of saturated red. In each of its hollow eye-sockets is a wreath made up of smiley-face flowers. Above its head is a spitting image of itself rendered in black and purple, shrunken down and flipped upside down. Overlaying the mushroom cloud with a classic memento mori, the piece highlights the fact that, just as the skull is a widely recognizable icon of death, the mushroom cloud has become a widely recognizable icon of atomic destruction since the end of WWII. Wearing its own mirror image like a crown—as though the mushroom cloud’s dominance in visual culture is a crowning achievement— the cloud is simultaneously celebratory and deranged. While the exaggeration of the mushroom cloud’s iconization in global culture is conveyed through this single image alone, its repetition as a larger series also emphasizes the mushroom cloud’s reproducibility. Hardly just one work, Time Bokan exists in multiple versions consisting of different colors: a black skull with a white crown 64 against magenta, a white skull with a pink crown against lime green, a white skull with a red crown against a grey and white grid, like a “transparent” background in a design software like Adobe Photoshop (see figs. 30-32). In its repetition, Time Bokan seems to draw on Andy Warhol’s “Red Explosion,” from his Death and Disaster series (1963) (see fig. 33). In Warhol’s work, the photographic image of the mushroom cloud is repeated over and over across five rows, printed in increasingly dense intervals until the image is no longer discernable by the time your eyes reach the bottom of the frame. Colorized with a menacing red, “Red Explosion” renders the relentless reproduction of the mushroom cloud violent. The increasing density is such that by the end, we no longer know what the image is supposed to signify, just as the traumatic violence of a nuclear explosion is deliberately obscured through the mushroom cloud’s repeated reproduction. In a similar way, Murakami’s Time Bokan repeats its cloud over and over, taking the commodification of the bomb as an image a few steps further into the realm of iconization. For one, the photographic image of the explosion is no longer needed to convey the image’s meaning; drawn in the clean contours of contemporary graphic design, it depicts a clear iconography of atomic war. Moreover, while Warhol’s “Red Explosion” shows the mushroom cloud repeated over and over within the same image like a grid, Murakami’s Time Bokan repeats across several, separate canvases (and sometimes together, like a grid)—making any one “original” image as untraceable as any specific instance of the bomb’s explosion in a place and time. The fact that aesthetically, Time Bokan is reproduced just as clearly on the computer screen as it is printed on a large canvas (the image appears both ways)—in other words, the highly digital aspect of its rendering—further accentuates the image’s remove from a point of origin. Appearing in art galleries and over the internet, existing as one image and at the same time multiple images, Time Bokan captures superflat’s collapse between art and consumption, between the bomb and its image. 65 While Time Bokan calls attention to the branded commodification of the mushroom cloud as a global image, its visual codes also locate its concerns within the context of Japan. This is revealed in the bright, flat, saturated colors of the series, as well as the anthropomorphic flowers that comprise its eyes, both visual styles that evoke the characters of manga, anime, and toy culture. This evocation is reinforced by the piece’s title: “Time Bokan” refers to a 1970s television anime of the same name, a science-fiction slapstick about an insect-shaped time machine and a trio of kooky villains who try to steal it. In each episode, the two protagonists defeat the three villains, whose demise is marked by the eruption of a skull-shaped mushroom cloud in the sky (see fig. 34). By the beginning of the next episode, however, the villains would return recovered and in full form. As the exhibition catalog to Murakami’s Little Boy (2005) states, “Although the creators of the anime series could not have intended to send a positive message about the atomic bombing, let alone a safe return from it, children loved the indestructible villains” (14). Adapting Warhol’s image to the specific codes of Japanese visual culture, Murakami prompts us to wonder when, and how, the mushroom cloud circulated in postwar Japan, as well as the role manga and anime play in contending with the image. Science-fiction manga and anime in particular—the very genre and style Murakami sees as especially shaped by the events of WWII—would draw and redraw this symbol of war, not only as a direct reference to the atomic bombings, but as a generalized narrative device for destruction. As discussed in the previous chapter, the mushroom cloud was an image of abstracted terror carefully constructed by the U.S. government during a time of accelerated nuclear arms development. Japan’s particular histories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, its surrender at the end of WWII, and subsequent U.S.-Japan geopolitical relations undoubtedly create specific conditions for the meaning of the mushroom cloud as an image in Japan. Looking at this history allows us to begin to see why Murakami’s adaptation of the mushroom cloud—and why his turn to mushrooms— 66 might offer a vision that moves beyond the mushroom cloud’s totalizing representation of war. The Elusive Mushroom Cloud in Japan As discussed in Chapter 1, the mushroom cloud came to be the most dominant representation of the nuclear bomb in America after WWII because it was, in effect, a governmentpromoted branding campaign with a tremendous amount of power and financial backing behind it. Obscuring other images of the bombings through censorship and by widely distributing this aestheticized image of terror, the mushroom cloud became so normalized within American consumer culture that it was used as a popular marketing tool for businesses and commodities, appearing on safety brochures, children’s board games, and household products. What then, of Japan? While the image did not appear as an advertising tool in the same way, the phrase “kinokogumo” (meaning “mushroom cloud”) is arguably as commonplace as it is in the U.S. context, existing as a direct marker of nuclear war. From newspaper articles to survivor testimonies to educational textbooks, “kinokogumo” is an oft-used placeholder for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and for the atomic bomb in general—even when the mushroom cloud as a phenomenon is not itself the topic of discussion. When, or how, did the mushroom cloud appear in Japanese culture? And what further implications did it have on how the atomic bombings, WWII, and nuclear arms more broadly, were contended with? While the term “mushroom cloud” existed in the English language (albeit in more limited use) as far back as the 1800s, the equivalent appears not to have existed in Japan, at least according to my research to date. For example, the English term “mushroom cloud” appears at least as far back as 1824,39 in an entry about aqueous vapor in an educational nature compendium, to describe a 39See, for example, Philosophical Instructor: or, Webster's Elements of Natural Philosophy, by John Webster and Aamos Eaton (1824). The entry states: “The only remaining variety is the cumulo-stratose cloud. It is very rarely 67 rare type of “cumulo-stratus cloud” released during thunderstorms or volcanic explosions. The phenomenon of a smoke cloud taking the form of a mushroom, therefore, is not unique to the atomic bomb, and can even be observed in the visual arts as early as the late 1780s, with the Vue du siège de Gibraltar et explosion des batteries flottantes (View of the Siege of Gibraltar and the Explosion of the Floating Batteries), c. 1782 (see fig. 35). Even more common than “mushroom cloud” to describe this phenomena, however, is the term “cauliflower cloud,” as was frequently used to describe the eruptions of Vesuvius.40 The frequency with which the term “mushroom cloud” appears increases exponentially beginning in the 1940s, exactly around the time of the bomb’s development and through the beginning of the Cold War (see fig. 36). In Japan, however, there is little written or verbal record of the term “kinokogumo” before the 1950s, which appears to be a translated term of the English “mushroom cloud” introduced specifically to refer to atomic explosions.41 Exactly when it entered the Japanese language is not known, and its history is patchy. But a look at the archives of Japan’s three major national newspapers—Yomiuri Shinbun, Asahi Shinbun, and Mainichi Shinbun—shows that the phrase “kinokogumo” only starts appearing in the early 1950s, in articles about the American bomb tests in Nevada and the Marshall Islands.42 Recall formed, and always appears to rise up in the horizon like the smoke from a furnace. Its top generally seems to pass into a cirro-stratose cloud above, and there spreads out like the top of a mushroom; it is therefore generally called the mushroom cloud. All snow storms and settled rains proceed from the cirro-cumulose, and all hail storms and showers from the nimbose, clouds. The vapour of clouds, by some unknown process, becomes condensed into liquid globules, and falls in drops of rain” (145). 40Aamos Eaton, an American botanist, appears to be one of the few to more favor the term “mushroom.” It also appears that, at least in some accounts, the mushroom stage is something slightly other than the cauliflower stage, similar to the Wilson Chamber effect discussed in Chapter 1. By the late 1800s, Eaton writes in a language of the sublime akin to the later atomic cloud: “Cumulo-stratus is perhaps the grandest of all the clouds. It lacks the beauty of the simple cumulus, and possesses few points of real interest to the nonscientist. It rises from a horizontal stratum and forms great overhanging masses of cumulus, while it is formed, as may readily be guessed, by a blending of cirro-stratus with the snow mountains of the cumulus, and is not infrequently traversed by lines of dark cloud; it has been called the ‘mushroom cloud,’ as it sometimes assumes the form of a gigantic fungus. It is a lower atmosphere cloud, like the last and greatest of them all” (279-280). The Ludgate Illustrated Magazine, Volume 8, 1899. 41 At this time, a Google Ngram search is not available for Japan, so I could not produce an equivalent graph. 42 The earliest result from a search of “kinokogumo” in the three newspapers archives shows an article in the Yomiuri from August 6, 1946, the one-year anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The image of the 68 that the mushroom cloud had begun to solidify as an image in American culture starting in 1946, when Operation Crossroads began, and verbal descriptions of the atomic mushroom had already been circulating during the Trinity test in 1945. While Japan had been under U.S. Occupation after its surrender in August 1945, the absence of the term in the immediate years following the war is likely attributable to postwar Japanese censorship enforced by the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP) (or General Headquarters/GHQ, as it is more commonly referred to in Japan). Descriptions of the atomic bombings, criticism of the U.S. government’s actions or occupation, and even criticism of Japan’s wartime violence were forbidden, starting in September 1945, out of fear of civil unrest. It was only in 1949, when censorship initially began to loosen, then in 1952, when the U.S. Occupation ended, that this censorship was removed—after which, the Japanese government enforced its own censorship, entangled in its political alliance with America’s involvement in the Korean War. Interestingly, however, it appears the image of the atomic cloud was published in articles about the tests in Bikini Atoll before it was called a “mushroom cloud.” While the reason for this is unknown, it is possible that the unnamed image of the amorphous cloud, not yet “acculturated” within Japan’s webs of signification, was able to bypass postwar censorship in a way that the textual phrase couldn’t, thereby delaying the arrival of the phrase “mushroom cloud” until the 1950s. 43 Of course, this is not to say that the atomic bombs were not discussed in public, or alluded to in the press at all, during this time. As Iwasaki Fumito shows in his research, descriptions of the bombings by survivors were censored, but nonetheless present, and often, euphemisms or record is blurry, however, and it is not clear whether the term actually appears in the article or was tagged as a search term later. This outlier is the only instance before 1951 that appears in relation to the atomic bomb. Another Yomiuri article from January 31, 1951, shows an image of what appears to be a mushroom-cloud like explosion; however, the article is about the Chinese Communist Party’s testing of a napalm balm. The caption for the photograph reads: “The power of the napalm balm: black smoke takes the shape of a mushroom-- photograph taken by the U.S. Air Force, Courtesy of AP). 43 Further research on this point will be pursued in the future. 69 metaphorical allusions were used to refer to those events. In an ongoing project, Iwasaki and his team analyze how censorship was implemented from a sample size of nearly 500 magazines from the Prange Collection at the University of Maryland. The descriptions they analyze surround the following terms: atomic bomb, A-bomb, pikadon, pika, atom, atomic desert, desert, blasted landscape, August 6, and Hiroshima (原子爆弾、原爆、ピカドン、ピカ、アトム、原子砂漠、砂漠、焼野原、焼跡、八月六日、広島) (“Expressions of the Atomic Bomb” 3). However, “kinokogumo,” is not even included as a search term. Of these, “pikadon” warrants further consideration; arguably just as prominent a term as “kinokogumo” for Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the nuclear bomb even today, it serves as a useful frame of reference. An onomatopoeia, “pikadon” refers to the atomic bomb’s brilliant flash of light (pika), followed by the intense force of the bomb’s explosion (don), and was a term that originated from survivors’ descriptions of the two (and often only) effects of the moment they could recall. Therefore, according to scholar Kono Kensuke during a personal interview, “pikadon” can be found in non-fiction and literary accounts much earlier than the mushroom cloud, during the censorship years. What makes the two terms different, at least with regards to the historical conditions from which they emerged, is the perspective ingrained within them. In contrast to the military point-of-view of the mushroom cloud, pikadon indicates the first impacts felt on the ground, before survivors could make out anything else. Kono also points out the notorious difficulty in translating onomatopoeia because of their reliance on culturally specific sounds—which may be why, even with the increased international exportation of Japanese cultural goods in the 1980s, the term “pikadon” is not as known outside of Japan. Descriptions of a strange eerie cloud rising above Hiroshima or Nagasaki exist in survivors’ accounts, as do some photographs of the cloud by witnesses from afar—but the vision of the phenomena as a distinctive mushroom, not to mention the metaphorical association, was not widely shared. While terms like “blasted landscape” or “August 6” likely entered what Peter Hales refers to 70 as the “webs of signification” more quickly than “mushroom cloud” because they were more common to survivors’ memories and in public consciousness, we can infer that the mushroom cloud entered the Japanese language later, after the Cold War tests were well underway and SCAP censorship had ended. Beyond verbal descriptions, there was also a dearth of images to document the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki until censorship loosened. The earliest visualizations of the bomb’s aftereffects to circulate in the public were drawings, notably illustrations collected in a book called Pikadon in 1950 by Maruki Toshi and Maruki Iri, a married couple who went to Hiroshima, where they had relatives, after receiving news of the bombings. Photographers also documented victims’ burns or the rubble after the devastation in secret, but because portrayals of civilian suffering were banned, they only began to circulate after 1952–when photographers like Matsumoto Eiichi recovered their stashed photographic negatives. Perhaps this absence of images is one of the reasons why, despite the fact that the mushroom cloud would arrive late as a representation of the atomic bomb, it would nonetheless become one of the most visible representations even in Japan. Arriving at a time when public discourses of the bomb’s past and future were just starting to be discussed in the open, it conveniently found a place within Japanese postwar nuclear rhetoric. To understand better the cultural significance of the mushroom cloud in Japan, let us look at examples of its earliest appearances in Japan’s newspapers. The first instance of a link between mushrooms to the nuclear bomb appears in the morning edition of the Yomiuri Shinbun on February 22, 1951, about U.S. bomb detonations in Nevada. Describing how the U.S. government was developing a bomb that “shattered windows 80 miles away,” the article reports that these new weapons are “ten times Hiroshima”—“with a power definitively greater than the bombs that exploded high in the skies of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, even Bikini Atoll”44 (“Suibaku?” 2). Not only was 44 All translations of articles from the Yomiuri Shinbun, Asahi Shinbun, and Mainichi Shinbun are my own. 71 the American government in the midst of developing a bomb of greater destructive scope, moreover, but the article describes how it was developing several different kinds of nuclear bombs.45 Referring to five test explosions that took place in Nevada during an 11-day period, the article reads: The first explosion created one column of smoke and then another, passing through the ring before it, and from the center grew a single great column of smoke. The third explosion showed no visible mushroom-like shape, but the fourth explosion was much more terrible: just like the first test at Bikini Atoll, when a distinctive smoke shaped like a mushroom appeared for the first time. The fifth explosion was the greatest of them all. In the second to last explosion, the initial flash of light was followed by a bright orange-colored sphere, which spread out into a violet parasol—and when the light disappeared, mushroom-shaped smoke suddenly rose up into the air. This was all within two-seconds time. Only the fifth explosion seemed to cover the entire sky, like a lingering mist. (“Suibaku?” 2) I should note that in this report, the word “kinokogumo” does not yet appear. Instead, what is used is the phrase “kinoko-jō no kemuri,” or literally, “smoke in the state of a mushroom.” There is no photograph of the cloud. What becomes clear in this passage, however, is that the bomb’s unprecedented terror is narrated through the figure of the mushroom. That is, the horror of a neverbefore-imagined nuclear bomb, with a power ten times greater than Hiroshima, more violent than Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or Bikini Atoll, of many different varieties, is described through an aesthetic preoccupation with the cloud’s mushrooming state. While the third explosion is described to have shown “no visible mushroom-like shape,” the fourth is described to be “much more terrible,” like the mushroom that first erupted at Bikini Atoll. Strikingly, while the fifth and last explosion is described as the largest of them all, it is barely discussed; the passage spends more time on the visual 45 The article states that the tests showed “how without a doubt, America has the capacity to develop nuclear weapons of all kinds, on a massive scale” (“Suibaku?” 2). 72 appearance of the fourth mushroom cloud—which appeared suddenly from a “bright orangecolored sphere,” and “spread out into a violet parasol.” Like American journalist William Laurence’s description of the Trinity discussed in the previous chapter, the Yomiuri Shinbun description is astonishingly spectacular (it is likely that the source of these descriptions originated from international wires like the Associated Press that recorded U.S. officials’ accounts). This impressive quality, attributed to the mushroom’s sudden eruption, is used to emphasize the terror of a new unknown, far more powerful and destructive than the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What “ten Hiroshimas” means is impossible to fathom; questions of numeric scale seem hardly relevant for such immense violence. But what is evident is that the scale of destruction is transited through the mushroom, which emerges as an implicit marker of an unknown future, more unimaginable than the unimaginable. While the spectacularity (we could even say the sublime substitution) of the mushroom for the atomic bomb is similar to descriptions of the mushroom cloud that circulated in the American context, public fear about ever more terrible nuclear bombs, rooted in the recent memories of a war-torn past and in recovery from the destructive effects of radiation, is palpable in the mushroom’s first figurative appearance for the bomb. In subsequent articles about the U.S. tests, the mushroom quickly becomes aligned with the nuclear bomb one-to-one. For example, in October of that same year, the Yomiuri Shinbun published a photograph of a detonation in Nevada, accompanied by the caption: “Powerful explosion leaves a curving mushroom-shaped cloud climbing high in the air” (1). By spring of 1952, the term “mushroom cloud” is being used without further contextualization in both the Yomiuri and the Asahi Shinbun. These articles, too, emphasize the new power of America’s latest weapons. In one about a mushroom cloud erupting in Yucca Flats, the language mirrors rhetoric used by Oppenheimer and President Truman years earlier: the bomb is reported to have released “a flash of light as bright as 50 suns, the largest explosion to be exploded yet, with a destructive force far greater than the atomic 73 bomb that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki” (“Taiyō” 1). Coloring the blue sky completely white, “it was an extraordinarily eerie light (不気味な光であった)…an atomic cloud exploding from the bomb as though simmering, as though boiling over, exploded above the desert experiment grounds, climbing high in the air” (“Taiyō” 1). By 1956 (when the term first appears in the Mainichi Shinbun), the frequency of the term increases exponentially across all three papers, even when the photographs that accompany the articles do not necessarily show a mushrooming shape.46 Writing about how the atomic bombings were popularly discussed during the years of postwar censorship, historian John Dower states that, after initial reactions of nationalized anger and mourning, the bombs came to be narrated by public officials, as well as the public itself, in terms of America’s exceptional scientific advancement against Japan’s failure in science. He writes: The bombs quickly became a symbol of America’s material might and scientific prowess— and this symbol was all the more stunning because it contrasted so sharply with Japan’s relative material backwardness. While the Americans had been perfecting nuclear weapons, Japan’s militaristic government had been exhorting the emperor’s loyal subjects to take up bamboo spears and fight to the bitter end to defend the homeland. (Dower 278) At times, Dower is quick to generalize the Japanese response to the atomic bombings without explicitly acknowledging what he means when he refers to the Japanese people. As each person’s experience with the bombings was different—with some surviving the horrors firsthand, and others associated with it only insofar as it was deemed a national trauma—people living in Japan surely 46 For example, an article titled, “U.S. Hydrogen Testing Starts: This morning, a small atomic bomb: Mushroom Cloud reaches 10,000 meters in Runit Island,” published in the May 5, 1956 of the Mainichi describes a “peach-colored mushroom cloud rising high into the air.” However, the photograph that accompanies the article is hazy, indistinct, like the earlier photographs of explosions that Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites had described as seeming too “mundane” or like “ordinary” catastrophes to signify a brand-new weapon. Despite the fact that the photograph is far from the perfected mushroom cloud of Bikini Atoll, the linking of the verbal phrase with the amorphous cloud is evidence of the sedimentation of the signifier within the Japanese language. 74 made sense of the bombings in highly varied ways. Not to mention, not everyone shared a national sense of solidarity, or aligned themselves in terms of the nation-state, America versus Japan. However, Dower’s work highlights the dominant discourses that circulated among the public, providing us with important context for understanding the weight with which the mushroom cloud entered the mainstream news. The mushroom cloud was a symbol of abstracted terror, but the events it signified were closer to home for many. Because the appearance of its image accompanied news stories about America’s development of its nuclear arsenal at a time when censorship about the bombs was lifted, there is a different valence to the terror that it captured, even if the image itself was abstracted and sanitized. It is possible that the mushroom was a direct appeal to a sensationalized view of American scientism, whether media outlets and audiences were aware of it or not. Beneath, Under, and Beyond the Mushroom Cloud “Kinokogumo” begins to also appear in the realm of cultural production by the mid-1950s. In addition to appearing as a general placeholder for Hiroshima or Nagasaki, many works seem to grapple with its towering nature as a signifier. For example, a poetry collection written by survivors and witnesses of the atomic bombings, called Kinokogumo: genbaku no haiku (Mushroom Cloud: Poetry About the Atomic Bomb) published in 1955, frequently invokes the term. Confronting the symbolism of the mushroom cloud, or “the day ‘Hiroshima’ became a signifier,” the poems are collectively a call to action against nuclear arms development and the U.S. occupation of the Marshall Islands (Moriwaki). Describing their recollections of the cloud’s strange, uncomfortable appearance in the days of the bombings, many emphasize their particular view and position in relation to what we now call “mushroom cloud.” In more recent years, hibakusha and witnesses have similarly invoked their positionality in relation to the “mushroom cloud,” observable already in their titles: for example, 75 Sakamata Yasumasa’s Kinokogumo no shita de (Under the Mushroom Cloud) (1983), Mizobe Makoto’s Kinokogumo no shita de (Beneath the Mushroom Cloud) (1991), Takabatake Toshio’s Ano kinokogumo no naka ni (From Within The Mushroom Cloud) (1999) and Saito Tomoko’s Kinokogumo no shita kara, ashita e (From Beneath the Mushroom Cloud, Towards Tomorrow) (2005), to name a few. Terms like “beneath,” “from within,” and “under,” shift the perspective of the seemingly neutral and unmediated mushroom cloud into focus, alluding to the presence of other, unpictured events. As a totemic signifier that erases the violence it allegedly depicts, the mushroom cloud is an image of nuclear empire created and disseminated by the U.S. government to support its Cold War military industrial complex. But my emphasis here is not a matter of U.S. perpetrators and Japanese victims; to discuss the bombings in national terms, at the level of the nation-state, would be to fall into higaisha ishiki, or victim consciousness, that replicates the same dangerous logic of nationalism that served to justify the Japanese government’s violent actions across Asia leading into the Pacific War. What is instead crucial is a consideration of the power behind the creation of any image, as well as the meanings it takes on in any particular socio-cultural context. This includes considering the violence of Japan as a nation-state as much as the U.S.; a discussion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the mushroom cloud, necessitates a consideration of not only America’s militarism but Japan’s. Significantly, the title of a book tracing the history of postwar reparations to Korean-Japanese citizens, published by the Citizens’ Association for Atomic Bomb Victims in South Korea, reads: “Postwar Compensation for A-bomb Survivors in South Korea: 70,000 Koreans Were Exposed and Neglected Under Two Mushroom Clouds” (2011).47 Those living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time they were bombed (as well as in different cities across Japan that were ravaged by the war prior) consisted of many different kinds of residents, including migrants and indigenous people often excluded from national conceptions of the “Japanese.” For some Korean hibakusha, many of whom 47 This translation is my own. 76 had been forced to migrate to Hiroshima and Nagasaki under Japanese imperial rule without the safety of citizenship, the mushroom cloud has come to signal not only the empire of the U.S. and the trauma of the bombings, but the trauma of Japanese empire and the violence of racialization that subjected them to both experiences in history. Which is to say, in addition to the historical conditions surrounding the origination of the mushroom cloud as an image, the mushroom cloud is a moveable symbol, with meanings that shift connotations dependent on its place and context. Beyond hibakusha testimonies, this moveable symbol would also be taken up frequently in the realms of fiction and drama, first and foremost as a narrative device for signifying Hiroshima or Nagasaki. For example, many postwar films utilize footage, moving and still, taken by the U.S. military. We can observe this as early as 1952, with Shindo Kaneto’s Genbaku no ko, (Children of Hiroshima), about a woman who survives the bombing of Hiroshima. The events of August 6, 1945 are told through a sequence that begins with a clock striking 8:15am, the time the bomb exploded, followed by a great flash of light. Shots of women’s ravaged bodies, and of fish washing up on the shore, are followed by a shot of a great cloud rising from the ground, where a four-second clip of the mushroom cloud above Nagasaki is spliced into the scene. Similarly, Sekikawa Hideo’s Reimei hachigatsu jūgonichi shūsen hiwa (At War’s End, or Dawn of August 15, 1945) (1952) follows a cast of different characters jaded by Japan’s militarism and the destruction of war, narrates the events leading from the Potsdam declaration to the announcement of victory against Japan on August 15, and includes a scene of the mushroom cloud. While the clip that is inserted here is of the atomic cloud at Baker (the second test of Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll), in the film it is made to look as though it occurs at Hiroshima. That the footage shows an underwater explosion, taken in the waters of the South Pacific, is hardly relevant, in that the audience readily understands the image stands in for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In these works, the military mushroom cloud is de- 77 contextualized from its original place and time and re-contextualized as a narrative device for the atomic bombings, dependent on a shared understanding of the cloud’s symbolism. The mushroom cloud would also be drawn and redrawn in manga and animation, and it is here that we see it used over and over as a narrative device, especially in science-fiction. By the late 1960s, for example, Tezuka features it in an episode of Astro Boy, titled “Living Mold From Outer Space.” After discovering the arrival of alien bacteria on an unnamed Pacific Island, the U.S. government drops a hydrogen bomb on the island to eliminate all further possible contamination of Earth; the moment of the bomb’s detonation begins with a fireball that eventually explodes into a mushroom cloud (see fig. 37). The terror of the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, as well as the government’s readiness to deploy the hydrogen bomb, are captured here in the single, wordless cloud that takes over the full page. (The interplay between this terror with powerful alien microbiomes is something I return to in Chapter 3.) In spite of the mushroom cloud, Astro Boy manages to save the alien plant life, reinforcing his role as an endearing character capable of finding peaceful solutions despite the military actions of the U.S. If we recall, Tezuka’s boyish robot hero, while certainly popular with adults, appealed widely to youth, and is thought to embody hope during a period of recovery from the devastating realities of war. It is within this context that the anime Time Bokan emerges and that we start to see the mushroom cloud not only as an evocation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but a generalized symbol for war or destruction. While the mushroom cloud did not become a common advertising tool for commodities the way it had in America, its frequent appearance in popular media is what Murakami satirizes in his version of Time Bokan. As a general symbol of destruction, the original events of the atomic bombings become diluted, especially as new generations unfamiliar with the experiences of war outlive those who survived it. Murakami himself, born in 1962, was part of the newer generation, and his theory and art reflect this simultaneous pervasiveness of and removal from atomic imagery in popular culture. 78 In its abstraction of the atomic bombings, it is possible that the mushroom cloud serves other functions in manga and anime as well. For example, Yoshimura Kazuma, manga researcher and professor at Kyoto Seika University, suggests that the mushroom cloud plays a pedagogical role in teaching symbols to youth. Looking at the works of Nakazawa Keiji—a well-known cartoonist who drew non-fiction and fiction about his experiences surviving Hiroshima—from the 1960s to the 1980s, Yoshimura observes that in Nakazawa’s early series Kuroi ame ni utarete (Black Rain), references or depictions of the atomic cloud are rare, and when it does appear, the image’s military vantage point was emphasized. For example, in “In the Flow of the Black River,” the protagonist states, “If you think the atomic bomb is one giant mushroom cloud, you’re gravely mistaken/Under the cloud were writhing tens of thousands of people, myself too…” (qtd. in Yoshimura pg. 31). By comparison, in Barefoot Gen, a fictionalized autobiographical account, the mushroom cloud is drawn often, sometimes interrupting the protagonist Gen’s narration. Yoshimura hypothesizes that this difference is due to intended audience: while Black Rain had been published in 1968 and was read primarily by adults, Barefoot Gen was written to reach children. In his view, the mushroom cloud serves as a pedagogical tool for communicating about war through symbolism. (It is important to note that Barefoot Gen does not forgo graphic depictions of violence, so the inclusion of the mushroom cloud was not necessarily about censoring the bomb’s effects). The place the mushroom cloud has in manga and anime can perhaps be encapsulated by the depiction of Hiroshima in the 1983 animated adaptation of Barefoot Gen. The bombing of August 6 is told through varied colors and dynamic action lines evoking violent wind and shattering glass. As in the comic version, burned bodies are portrayed through graphically evocative visual details, challenging to watch. Like films before it, the scene of destruction ends with a mushroom cloud erupting over Hiroshima. Rather than high in the heavens, however, the cloud is first drawn erupting from the ground, rising up and up (see fig. 38); the viewer is positioned low on its column. It 79 explodes into one mushroom cloud, from which grows yet another. While the day is mostly portrayed from the view of violence on the ground, the culmination of the moment into a mushroom cloud towering over the destroyed city seems like a metaphor for the way the mushroom cloud towers over other visual representations of Hiroshima. The continuous growth of the cloud seems to suggest the never-ending horror of its growth as an image. As though a reminder of its origin, immediately following this shot is a cut to a photograph of the actual cloud over Hiroshima taken by the U.S. government. The abrupt transition from hand-drawn, moving animation to a still photographic image is stark, juxtaposing Nakazawa’s vantage point with the haunting military image of the mushroom cloud that has pervaded postwar visual culture. It is possible to understand this scene as pedagogical, but it is hard not to read the jarring interruption of an affective memory, drawn through the discursively subjective visual lines of Nakazawa’s hand, by a cold, aestheticized image of distant cloud taken through a militarized scientific gaze, as a provocation to wonder about the totalizing vision of military optics. It is a contrast that brings us back to manga aesthetics more broadly, to war and superflat. Superflat Landscape Takashi Murakami's Eco Eco Rangers Earth Force (2005) depicts a fictionalized scene in the sky: against a gradated background of blue, smiling flowers sprout up among muted, pastel clouds (see fig. 39). From among them explodes two mushroom clouds: one black, one red. Like the flowers, the clouds have two eyes and a mouth—the black cloud has its mouth agape, the red has an openmouthed smile. Hovering in the air around them are whimsical characters, presumably the “rescue rangers” suggested by the title, each donning a costume and circular emblem on its chest like superheroes. 80 Rendering the mushroom cloud part of a cartoon landscape, Eco Eco can be understood as a satire of the photographs of atomic explosions taken during the Cold War. Including flowers from the ground in a scene otherwise taking place entirely in the sky, for instance, the painting calls to mind the deliberate framing of tropical visual cues in the foreground of photographs of ABLE (swaying palms, a sandy beach) that worked to turn the explosion into a postcard paradise. While the mushroom cloud at Bikini Atoll was made to appear coincidental, effected convincingly through the medium of photography—as though someone happened to stumble upon the scene and click the shutter—Eco Eco is anything but a mimetic representation of reality. Taking us not into threedimensional space but a flat space of cartoon fantasy, the painting collapses flowers with the sky, the atomic bomb with superheroes, a landscape with flat lines. No longer are we the Romantic spectator standing over a sublime view of fog, or the neutralized military looking out at the cloud of smoke above a site of devastation. We are no longer masters of nature, looking out a “window” onto reality, but we are somewhere else—somewhere pop-culture, confronted with something childish, cute. Bright colors and curving lines lead our eye from one object to another across the surface of the image, which seems to do away with hierarchical order, both in terms of our position as a viewer and in the diminished power of the atomic bombs. Arguably, Eco Eco can be thought to embody the larger aesthetic philosophy Murakami articulates in his theories of Japanese art, most notably in “The Superflat Manifesto” and “A Theory of Superflat Art,” published in the catalog to the Super Flat exhibition that toured internationally in 2000. As discussed in the opening of this chapter, Murakami argues that postwar Japan’s visual culture is defined by “super flatness,” or extreme two-dimensionality.48 With origins in Japan’s premodern Edo period (1603-1968), superflatness is an artistic style characterized by cartoon 48As Murakami writes, “The world of the future might be like Japan today—super flat” (“The Super Flat Manifesto” 5). 81 abstraction, lack of dimension, and elements of fantasy, as seen in contemporary anime, manga, and games. More than an aesthetic, however, super flatness is an ideology encapsulated by these cultural forms, in which distinctions between art and commodity, politics and aesthetics, highbrow and lowbrow, collapse. Superflat is a visual style, but more than anything, it is a world view—one that, Murakami argues, is the future (“The Super Flat Manifesto” 5). At the core of this provocative theory is a response to what Murakami sees as a hegemonic convention of visuality rooted in Western art, and which I will discuss for a moment here, as it relates to how we see the mushroom cloud. Put simply, superflat is a critical response to linear perspective (also called “one-point perspective” or “perspectivalism”), an artistic method of representing three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional plane. Developed beginning in the Renaissance, linear perspective represents space based on a mathematical principle of “visual rays” that project from the eye outward to connect with different localized points on the canvas. Those points intersect at various locations, such as at a central vanishing point, or a horizon line that passes through the central vanishing point (see figs. 40 and 41). The result is what art historian Erwin Panofsky calls “a fully rational” or “infinite, unchanging and homogenous space; there is “no front and back, left and right,” and instead, “the sum of all the parts of space are all absorbed into a single ‘quantum continuum’” (30). In other words, what is represented on the canvas is a single space, seen from a single vantage point, frozen in one moment in time (30). The modern spectator has become so accustomed to this perspective that it is often understood to be the most objective way to depict physical space in art. Yet, in actuality, space can be represented, even rationalized, in any number of ways. For example, while we humans perceive our physical surroundings through two eyes that constantly move together, linear perspective creates an image that assumes we have only one, immobile eye, gazing down into one space. Moreover, due to the convex nature of our eyeballs, we often perceive straight lines as curves and curved lines as straight in our perceptions of the world, 82 but in linear perspective, straight lines are drawn as straight lines (Panofsky 33). This complete geometric configuration of space has come to be understood as the most naturalized mode of visuality in modernity, commonly taught in art classes in the West as the most scientifically “correct” way to render three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional surface—a pervasiveness that many scholars have been critical of. Martin Jay, for example, drawing upon the work of Christian Metz, describes it as a “scopic regime” that has become “the dominant, even totally hegemonic visual model of the modern era” (4). Because this convention positions the viewer as a transcendent subject looking down into a rationalized depiction of space, media scholars also often align perspectivalism with the Cartesian subject. As in the case of Descartes’ subject, reasoning defines the human and allows her to understand the world; she also assumes a position of mastery over a passive, or frozen view. Linear perspective, therefore, can be more accurately understood as a manifestation of the value placed on reason in modernity. The naturalization of its convention is one way in which we can observe the primacy of the rational subject over nature and image; more than mere artistic style, linear perspective has hegemonized the way we look at and think about the world. It is this “scopic regime” of modern visuality, developed in Western art but carried over with modernity to other parts of the world, that Murakami attempts to decolonize in superflat. Namely, he constructs a different visual field by replacing “space” as the principal concern of representation with “flatness,” and mimetic reality with abstract fantasy. Looking to Japan’s premodern Edo period (a period of seclusion with a flourishing production of woodblock prints), superflat attempts to excavate and make globally visible an alternative artistic lineage from that of Western art. Artists from the Edo period such as Iwasa Matabei, Soga Shohaku, and Katsushika Hokusai,49 writes Murakami, “created surface images that erased interstices and thus made the observer aware of the images’ extreme planarity”—and similarly, contemporary manga and anime seek to “control the 49 Here Murakami builds on the ideas of art historian Nobuo Tsuji’s The Lineage of Eccentricity. 83 speed of its observer’s gaze, the course of that gaze’s scan, and the subsequent control of information” (“A Theory of Super Flat Art” 9). This focus on surface is not a failure of scientific achievement, but rather, has an entirely different aim: flatness dehierarchizes aesthetic elements in an image as much as it dehierarchizes art and commodity culture.50 In superflat aesthetics, Murakami finds an alternative to the scientism of an artistic convention that purports itself to be closest to physical reality. Disregarding depth in favor of visual movement across the surface, superflat is a move to un-sediment the dominance of Western art and theory in the world. When we think about the scientism ingrained in the photographs of the mushroom cloud (and indeed, the invention of photography is thought to have influenced by the development of linear perspective), we can start to see some of the provocations Murakami is making in an image like Eco Eco Rangers Earth Force. Like Time Bokan, it seems to express the inescapable enmeshment of the mushroom cloud in anime and manga culture at the same time as it asserts a counter-aesthetic to the mushroom cloud that colonized representations of atomic destruction. Just as the theory of superflat rejects the normalization of rationalism as the correct view of the world, Eco Eco parodies the postcard landscapes of Operation Crossroads and rejects its vision as the most natural means for imaging an atomic explosion, satirizing its aesthetics by rendering it a childish cartoon. In this way, Murakami’s art and theories comment directly on the friction of visual codes presented in the aforementioned 1983 animation of Barefoot Gen, which provided a stark contrast between the photographic image of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima with the author’s animated memories of that day. Rather than creating a juxtaposition through two mediums, however, Eco Eco remixes the landscape vision of the atomic explosion in superflat anime style, recalling both visual fields into 50 Murakami views the separation between “art” and “entertainment” as a particularly Western view, introduced into Japanese culture during the Meiji era (or the era of modernization, when Japan was forced out of seclusion and “Westernized”). He claims that in Japan today, however, art and entertainment are increasingly fused, as otaku culture involves world-building across different forms of consumption (“A Theory of Superflat Art” 21). 84 its painting. In so doing, the picture creates an uncomfortable disunity of affects that calls attention to the processes of consumption already at work when we consume an image of a mushroom cloud, including the commodification of the atomic bomb into iconography and the position of mastery in which we find ourselves. The way that it effects this is by removing the mushroom cloud’s sublime terror and dramatically exaggerating its domestication. That is, Eco Eco is uncomfortable to look at because it makes the atomic bomb kawaii, or cute, very much embedded in a cartoon world of fantasy. Kawaii Kinokogumo (the Cute Atomic Bomb) What does it mean to make the atomic bomb cute? Where the sublime—with its grandiosity and implication of terror (even if also beauty)—seems somewhat intuitive as a rhetorical aestheticization of the bomb, to say that cuteness is a jarring aesthetic for a weapon of mass genocide is a gross understatement. To make the atomic bomb cute is to diminish it, to treat it with affection, to want to nurture it as an object. To put the words “cute” and “atomic bomb” together in the same sentence is perverse. And yet, that is precisely what Eco Eco does. Given two eyes and a mouth—a simple, but recognizable face—the explosions have become smiley-face versions of the mushroom cloud icon, have become characters in an entertaining scene of whimsical creatures flying in the air. Black and red, like the photographs of the atomic cloud in Warhol’s “Red Explosion,” the mushroom clouds stand out against an otherwise pastel color palette, seeming to vaguely suggest the critical or dangerous. And yet, they are exceedingly passive—one has its mouth open in surprise, and the other smiles wide like the flowers that grow all around them. The mushroom clouds have lost even their abstracted connotations of terror, and instead, they exude the cheery mood of the painting. Their columns of smoke, moreover, spread out like the leaves of the smiling flowers, appearing to us as more plant than explosive weapon. Shedding their original context, the widely 85 recognized icon of the mushroom cloud has become agreeable, far removed from both the unimaginable violence caused by the bomb as well as the sublime terror of the Cold War photographs. But it is precisely through this cute anthropomorphism that Murakami calls attention to the very process through which we already consume images of the mushroom cloud. By recoding elements from the Cold War photographs and making the mushroom clouds kawaii, these mushroom clouds actively invite us to consume them, exciting uncomfortable affects that prompt us to reflect upon the extreme commodification of the mushroom cloud and our position as consumers of that image. To understand the discomforts of this cuteness, we can look to the aesthetic theories of Sianne Ngai, who proposes that the experience of cuteness is itself constituted by profound ambivalence. While on the surface, cuteness appears simply to elicit maternal feelings of tenderness—a cute object is, after all, diminutive, sweet, and innocent, and we are often moved by a desire to cuddle or hold the cute object—we also see cuteness in things with little power, elevating our sense of power over it. As Ngai writes: “in its exaggerated passivity and vulnerability, the cute object is as often intended to excite a consumer’s sadistic desires for mastery and control as much as his or her desire to cuddle” (820). Our experience of cuteness, in other words, is undergirded by feelings of aggression. Our impulses to squeeze or, as Ngai puts it, fondle the cute object are prime examples of this tendency for domination, something especially provoked when the cute thing is just a little bit anthropomorphic: enough for us to register something of ourselves within it, but not so realistic as to threaten us as a fully-formed “other” with agency (“the smaller and less formally articulated or more bloblike the object, the cuter it becomes—in part because smallness and blobbishness suggest greater malleability and thus a greater capacity for being handled”) (815-816). Giving the mushroom clouds two eyes and a mouth on an otherwise blobby, amorphous mass, Eco Eco makes the iconography of the atomic bomb unthreatening, assimilable, and malleable to us, as 86 though to mimic the ways that the Cold War cloud has been readily commodified and consumed within popular culture. If the Cold War images of the mushroom cloud appeal to our desire to have an image for destruction, appease us by giving us an abstracted symbol of terror rather than gesturing towards its violence, Murakami’s kawaii clouds turn this dynamic between image and spectator inside-out by having us involuntarily see the cloud as cute. Put differently, in their cuteness, these mushroom clouds implicate our subject position as spectators in the process of consumption, by provoking us to think, say, or feel that these mushroom clouds are cute. By making the explosions kawaii characters, exceedingly passive and vulnerable, these mushroom clouds provoke affects of tenderness, stimulating the spectator’s desires for mastery and control. In this way, we could say that the painting reproduces and exaggerates the privileged view of mastery we take in the perspective of the military mushroom. Eco Eco brings awareness to the violent place from which the atomic cloud originates, asking us to contend with the (un)comfortable position where we remain consuming its image. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that Ngai finds in cuteness a productive alternative to the sublime. Unlike the sublime (or the beautiful and the ugly), “cuteness” has been granted little legitimacy as an aesthetic category, perhaps because it resides within the realm of popular culture (hence Ngai’s naming it a “minor aesthetic category”). However, while the beautiful, ugly, or sublime operate on values of “good” or “bad,” cuteness is generative because of its ambivalence—not “good” or “bad,” but tender, maternal, sadistic, and violent, eliciting our desires to cuddle and to maim. While major aesthetic categories like the beautiful or the sublime are easy to categorize and understand, the ambivalence of cuteness is unsettling and therefore perhaps an effective means for making light of, and working through, the impossible question of imaging violence. A kawaii atomic bomb is atrocious because it makes the aggression embedded in the image palpable. It asks the viewer to dwell in contradictory affects, to confront but also to destroy our own desires to have an 87 image of and for destruction, even when such representation is impossible. Constructions of Japaneseness in Superflat Of course, kawaii is also a culturally specific kind of cuteness, one associated with Japan. Just as anime or manga are considered “Japanese” mediums in both the U.S. and in Japan (different from American “comics,” for example), “kawaii” is not only a Japanese word but associated with particular forms of cute that emerge from Japan’s postwar consumer culture. Murakami makes this Japanese-ness of “kawaii culture” explicit in various writings, but especially in the exhibition catalog accompanying Little Boy, the third and last part of a tri-part international exhibition that began with Super Flat. Specifically, he articulates kawaii and its close kin, otaku culture, to be symptoms of Japan’s response to WWII and the atomic bombings. For instance, in the catalog, which is divided up into terms that relate to otaku culture (like an encyclopedia), there is an entry on the atomic bomb. In it, Murakami describes pikadon in the following way: “‘Pika-don’ symbolizes the visual, aural, and other sensory imprints made on the Japanese psyche, which has been completely transformed in the wake of the collective subjection of the Japanese people to the horrendous experience of nuclear annihilation. Perhaps from this national trauma did kawaii and otaku cultures emerge in contemporary Japan.” (“Little Boy” 19). In his view, the turn to flat visuality—and immersion into kawaii culture—are a product of this visual and sensory reconfiguration encapsulated by “pikadon.” According to him, the horror of the nuclear bombings shocked the collective Japanese sensorium, necessitating or facilitating a new mode of visuality that found its home in the aesthetics of the flat and the cute. The flat and the cute were able to function as avenues for identification with the nation’s defeat and loss of global power after WWII; manga and anime’s closeness to fantasy and un-reality were well-suited to coax feelings of helplessness after the war. We 88 can see this, for example, in Little Boy’s entry for Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution (which was written by the U.S. government and which renounced Japan’s right to war): The U.S. demanded that Japan have a peace constitution in order to deprive its former enemy of military capability and prevent the nation from waging war again. Article 9 has had a significant impact not only on Japanese politics but also on the Japanese psyche. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the American-made constitution prevented the nation from taking an aggressive stance, and forced the Japanese people into a mindset of dependency under the protection of America’s military might. However just or unjust the American position may have been at the time, it cast Japan in the role of a ‘child’ obliged to follow America’s ‘adult’ guidance, and the nation willingly complied. (“Little Boy” 22) America, in this provocative articulation, is cast as the righteous parent, under whose watchful guidance Japan’s childlike democracy was built. Nationalist aspirations of Japanese empire quashed and its country left in ruins, Japan collectively becomes a vulnerable child dependent on its mightier former enemy, now ally. In coping with this loss of national purpose, kawaii is a form of identificatory solace. Perhaps this helplessness is one way in which we can understand the kookiness of the “Eco Eco Earth Rangers,” who are farcical rather than heroic. One has a stray antennae and pointy ears, another is a sheep-bee hybrid, another a round black character who wears a turd for a hat. Though they wear decals and capes, they are not whom we would entrust with rescuing the earth. Far from the animatronic bodies typical of the “ranger” genre, they seem cheery without any particular sense of purpose. Paired with the cute mushroom clouds, one is left with a feeling of absurdity, or perhaps resignation to the failed possibilities of saving the earth’s future from atomic warfare. If we recall John Dower’s point that the bombs quickly came to symbolize America’s advanced democracy (compared to Japan’s “barbaric” weapons of war), the turn to cartoon 89 expressions, and even child-like fantasies, can be interpreted as a means for grappling with a fractured sense of national identity and at the same time a defiant rejection of the scientism of American vision. In superflat’s turn to Edo and its hand-drawn mediums, there seems to be a decided commitment to an artistic form that has an alternative relationship to technology; being relatively “low-tech,” manga (and, in other ways, anime), like woodblock prints, emphasize the artist’s marks on the page, at the same time as they are highly reproducible images through technological means. While provocative in its attempt to look beside the hegemony of modern visuality, however, superflat and Little Boy also problematically assert an essentialist notion of national identity. This essentialism comes first and foremost from the way that Murakami assumes a “Japanese psyche” that experienced “collective subjection” to the experience of the bombings.51 Far from critically questioning the nation, his articulations homogenize the heterogeneous group of people that live within the borders of what we call “Japan.” In other words, in its move to undo the hegemony of Western rationality in philosophy and art, superflat also flattens Japan and its body politic, each of whom inevitably has different relations to the experience of the bombings as well as different relations to the nation-state. It also flattens the so-called “West,” a giant region represented here only by America, and completely disregards the different ways artists and thinkers from the West have also critiqued linear perspective or offered other forms of visuality. To think Japan or “the West” in this way is to emphasize a kind of “purity,” a dangerous concept that has ideologically justified the infliction of state violence onto others, rooted in notions of difference. What is more, by articulating the transformation of Japanese art only in relation to instances of military aggression by the U.S. towards Japan, superflat theory risks treading into the territory of higaisha ishiki, or victim consciousness, that perceives the atomic bombings as an essentially “Japanese” tragedy. Such a 51 Describing the work of contemporary animators who embody superflat, Murakami also states that they have an “extremely Japanese” approach, “with single-perspective painting never crossing their minds” (“A Theory of Super Flat Art” 15). 90 perspective was not uncommon in postwar national discourses. Here again, Dower is helpful; he writes: Hiroshima and Nagasaki became icons of Japanese suffering—perverse national treasures, of a sort, capable of fixating Japanese memory of the war on what happened to Japan and simultaneously blotting out recollection of the Japanese victimization of others. Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that is, easily became a way of forgetting Nanjing, Bataan, the Burma-Siam railway, Manila, and the countless Japanese atrocities these and other place names signified to non-Japanese. “Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory” 281 While Dower himself does not always explicitly separate the nation from its people in his language (for instance, he frequently makes generalized statements about “the Japanese” or the “non-Japanese”), this passage nonetheless crucially highlights the dangers of a mourning conceived in ready alliance with the nation-state, so that it becomes a point of perverse pride that colonizes the memories of other tragic events in history caused by Japan’s militarism. To conceive of Hiroshima or Nagasaki as uniquely Japanese tragedies is not only to align the nation and its people without critically distinguishing the two, but to erase histories of racialized violence inflicted by the Japanese state. Scholars of Japanese culture studies have been critical of superflat in this way, analyzing it as a contemporary form of nihonjiron, or Japanese exceptionalism rooted in notions of “racial homogeneity,” mobilized by the Japanese state to justify its colonization project across Asia leading to the Pacific War.52 Marc Steinberg, for example, discusses how Edo is strategically invoked to 52 Nihonjiron was particularly employed by the Japanese government during the Meiji Restoration as means for encouraging a sense of national pride in a time of sudden change, offering consolation to a nation that—after having resisted foreign influence for over two hundred years in Edo—perceived its end, and subsequent period of rapid modernization, to be an intrusion by the West. Predicated on the idea of “racial homogeneity” linked to the emperor system (tenno-sei), nihonjiron produced what Mika Ko calls the “myth of the unbroken imperial lineage, to which all Japanese are linked by blood”—a contradictory discourse that served to both subjugate non-Japanese others as inferior and to colonize them under the pretense of Asian unity (11). 91 represent an “authentic” Japan, reified as a “lost-but-not-forgotten authentic Japan, the pre-Western ‘outside of modernity” (449). Collapsing Japan’s artistic history from premodern Edo to postmodern Japan, superflat constructs a Japanese-ness void of outside influence. 53 Steinberg rightly points out, however, that between Edo and otaku culture “lies a large black ‘gap’ indicated temporally, on the one side, by the arrival of Commodore Perry’s Black Ships,” which opened Japan to foreign trade, and, “on the other, by the mushroom cloud that symbolizes Japanese defeat at the end of the Pacific War” (457). Similarly, Thomas LaMarre states that in developing an opposition between Western modernity and Japanese postmodernity, superflat theory “drops out…the possibility of Japanese modernity, and questions about subjectivity, disciplinization, and power that come with it…celebrat[ing] Japan as always already postmodern” (113-114). Such a gesture is selfOrientalizing54 and obscures the complex history behind the development of modernity in Japan. We could say, therefore, that Murakami’s return to Edo is part of a larger discourse that defensively constructs a nationalistic identity against the threat of Western global power, facilitated by a backward projection of Japanese postmodernity into the past.55 It is also a means for replacing one hegemony (Cartesian perspectivalism) with another (Japanese superflatness), and in this way, superflat maintains a kind of hierarchy. 53 See for example: Sharp, Kristen, “Superflatworlds: A Topography of Takashi Murakami and the Cultures of Superflat Art,” 2017; Steinberg, Marc, “Otaku Consumption, Superflat Art and the Return to Edo,” 2004; LaMarre, Thomas, "Structures of Depth," The Anime Machine, 2009; Looser, Thomas, “Superflat and the Layers of Image and History in 1990s Japan,” 2006. 54 Highlighting the fact that Murakami prides himself as a businessman, both Sharp and Steinberg identify this deliberate “nationalistic appeal to Japanese tradition” (in Steinberg’s words) as a marketing strategy, arguing that Murakami’s primary concern is to sell his art (Sharp 77; Steinberg 467). 55 This idea of Japanese exceptionalism has also been mobilized by the Japanese government in more recent years to promote an image of the country’s post-war economic success, especially throughout the 1980s, portraying Japan as an ultra-technological, postmodern nation of the future. Steinberg also notes that Murakami’s invocation of Edo was part of a larger “Edo boom” in 1980s Japan, in which television, manga, literature, and critical theory similarly looked to the premodern era as a source of “authentic” Japanese identity. 92 Yet, despite all the thorny issues Murakami raises, there is nonetheless something productive to take away from superflat. Leaving aside its nationalistic undercurrents, superflat theory, along with Little Boy, illuminates how comics, manga, and anime styles allow alternate visual modalities for imaging war and offers an interesting point of departure from which to consider the explosive popularity of these mediums. I propose that, while we certainly cannot ignore the strategic essentialism asserted by superflat, we consider it one visual style among others, divorced from assertions of Japanese uniqueness. If we think of Murakami’s theories and art as an invitation to reflect upon the ways ideologies sometimes become embedded within the visual field, there is much to explore about the close-knit relationship between politics and aesthetics in manga, anime, kawaii and otaku culture. For Murakami, while there is an element of complacency at work in kawaii culture, it also creates something radically new, despite the immense devastation of WWII and the horrors of nuclear war. This sentiment can be observed in his discussion of DAICON IV, a short sciencefiction animation that premiered at the Osaka Science-Fiction Convention in 1983. The Little Boy catalog states: In the final sequence of DAICON IV Opening Animation, the theme of “destruction and regeneration” is imaginatively reinterpreted. The energetic flight through the sky of a girl in a bunny costume is followed by the explosion of what could only be described as an atomic bomb, which destroys everything. In a pink-hued blast, petals of cherry blossoms—Japan’s national flower—spread over the city, which is then burned to ashes, as trees die on the mountains and the earth is turned into a barren landscape. When the spaceship DAICON, a symbol for the otaku floating in the sky, launches a powerful “otaku” beam, the earth is covered with green, as giant trees sprout instantly from the ground. The world is revived, becoming a place of life where people joyously gather together. 93 Finding something liberating in the devastating power of destruction, the DAICON animators announced their revolution in pictorial form, paying little heed to the conventions of political correctness that surround the atomic bombings in Japan. Little Boy 10 The question of how to portray the detonation of an atomic explosion without trivializing or crudely co-opting the horrendous experiences of those who were forced to live through one, is difficult. Arguably, a narrative like the one Murakami describes does just that, with little regard or attention for those who survived the war. “Liberation” in the power of destruction, when thought in the contexts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seems wrong in the way a cute bomb is wrong, as though it serves to mask the bomb’s violence, like the mushroom cloud. But in manga and anime, similar scenes of nuclear explosions abound, frequently incorporating into their fantasy narratives an atomic fireball from an aerial view or the military mushroom cloud high in the sky, without necessarily gesturing to the violence on the ground the way a more autobiographical tale like Barefoot Gen does. Like Murakami himself, many anime creators were also born after the war, removed from direct experiences of WWII. Nonetheless, the genre of fantasy (and science-fiction in particular) has played an important role in allowing audiences to contend with wartime destruction in meaningful ways, including those who survived the war—and this link, perhaps, is what Murakami is interested in. One of the most prominent examples of such popular fiction would be Honda Ishiro’s original Godzilla (also referenced in Little Boy as foundational to otaku) from 1954, which tells the story of an ancient seamonster awoken by hydrogen-bomb testing. Godzilla’s violent rampages across Japan, while within the fantasy realm of the monster movie, were clearly evocative of Tokyo’s fire-bombings; yet, the film famously drew audiences who had survived such bombings to the movie theater, many returning to watch the film over and over again. As entertainment, Godzilla allowed audiences to engage with war trauma in a different way than through everyday reports of the war, in part precisely 94 because the genres of science-fiction and fantasy provided imaginative conduits for confronting difficult images, and storytelling gave audiences opportunities to find meaning in their experiences. While DAICON IV and contemporary anime may not speak to the same audiences, Murakami suggests that taking up the theme of annihilation and images of the atomic bomb through popaesthetics enables not only a re-imagination of that destruction but opens up a space through which to grapple with living in a nuclear world. According to Murakami, DAICON IV boldly dares to depict the atomic explosion as part of a narrative involving a heroine in a bunny-costume, an otakuspaceship, and the return of joyous life after the end of everything, and in this move, something new is being created. Perhaps this is how we might understand Murakami’s invocation of the artist Okamoto Taro’s famous catchphrase: “Art is an explosion.” Manga and anime erupted in the wake of the bombs, despite destruction that seemed to flatten everything. Even after the mushroom cloud and its military optics, art managed to explode. Explosion, in other words, is being reframed from a term of war to the production of art. Murakami’s ideas are fraught in many ways, but it is my assertion that we can mine them for understanding how flat aesthetics, together with genres of fantasy, have opened up imaginative avenues for seeing, thinking, and feeling that resist the oppressive vision of nuclear empire embedded in the mushroom cloud. To conclude this chapter, I want to suggest that there is something especially productive about Murakami’s mushrooms, which conspicuously appear throughout his works and which we can understand to be mutations of the haunting image of the mushroom cloud. Like his discussions of manga and anime, Murakami’s art suggests that mushrooms also erupt in the wake of explosion, grow and proliferate despite the seeming end of everything. 95 Sprawling Superflat Mushrooms Superflat mushrooms in Murakami’s art crop up in a varied array of shapes, colors, patterns, and sizes, exploding across his canvases in a seemingly orderly and disorderly manner. Like Eco Eco Rangers Earth Force, these works provoke a disunity of affects that include the charmed and the disturbed, the attractive and the repulsive—but instead of effecting satire by portraying a kawaii atomic bomb, these juxtapositions are expressed by highlighting the mushroom at the center of the mushroom cloud. It is in these mushrooms, I contend, that the propulsive force of Murakami’s superflat is on display. While greatly varied, there are a few distinctive features of Murakami’s mushrooms. Rarely existing in the singular, always in the multiple, they are consistently painted in bright, poppy colors with swirling shapes, stripes, and circles on their assorted caps (see figs. 14-17). On the one hand, these vibrant colors and patterns evoke the “magic mushroom” commonly drawn in popular culture, based on the Amanita Muscaria, or Fly Agaric, which features a bright red parasol with white dots. (While the psilocybin mushroom is more commonly consumed as a psychoactive drug, the Fly Agaric, also psychoactive, is more commonly featured in pop culture for its striking visual appearance.) However, where pop culture icons (take Super Mario Brothers, for instance) often caricature the Fly Agaric by depicting round white dots, Murakami has replaced these dots with circular eyes, each with green irises and adorned with black eyelashes. While the eyes themselves are drawn in a cartoon, kawaii style originally attributed to Tezuka Osamu, their sheer multiplicity also gives these mushrooms an unsettling feel. No longer simply anthropomorphic like the mushroom clouds of Eco Eco, the simplicity of two eyes and a mouth has mutated into something else, turning us back from cuteness into the realm of disturbance. For our primary example, let us look at Super Nova (see fig. 5). As previously discussed, the image depicts a sprawl of mushrooms that cluster horizontally across seven vertical canvases; in the 96 middle of the sprawl is one gigantic mushroom that towers over them all. While each has multiple, circular eyes, the smaller mushrooms in the painting are notably more kawaii than the monster mushroom in the center; comprised of bold, saturated colors that go pleasingly together in complimentary or similar shades, they are appealingly vibrant, even as they evoke toxicity. By contrast, the stem of the giant mushroom is a sickly-looking combination of pale pink, beige, and mauve with teal pustules; unlike the smaller mushrooms, its eyelids are not open in curiosity but half-closed, lethargic. With accentuated gills that hang down at all angles, spilling out sharply like teeth, its eyes seem to multiply with the same intensity as the mushrooms themselves. That is, if the mushrooms crowd the foreground so as to become indiscernible, so too do the eyeballs that cover the cap of the mushroom in the center: becoming smaller and smaller, beyond what is visible to us. While drawn in simple contours, this mushroom’s face is no longer recognizably human, but has become another life form with an expanded capacity to see, moving from kawaii appeal to vaguely repulsive. As Sianne Ngai emphasizes, the more unformed, blobby, or simplified a face is, the more squeezable, and therefore powerless, it is to the spectator, who assumes a position of power over it. But in Super Nova, what was supposed to be cute, with two eyes and a face, has mutated from the anthropomorphic to the monstrous. There is something aggressive about these mushrooms—their bright colors caution against ingestion, and their multiple eyes seem able to look back at the viewer, seeming threatening at the same time as they are indeed cute. Interestingly, Ngai makes a similar assessment of a different recurring character of Murakami’s, named Mr. DOB, a kind of cousin to Mickey Mouse with a spherical face (see fig. 42). Like Murakami’s mushrooms, Mr. DOB also has round eyes with prominent eyelashes, as well as a smiling mouth. But Mr. DOB changes form across different pieces of art, and occasionally within the same piece of art: sometimes, he appears with several misshapen eyes, other times with long, pointy teeth, oscillating between the sonorously close 97 kawaii (cute) and kowai (scary) (see fig. 43) (Ngai 822). In this way, Mr. DOB makes the violent ambivalence of cuteness more perceptible than a cute object alone might. Ngai writes: Murakami’s stylistic mutilation of DOB calls attention to the violence always implicit in our relation to the cute object while simultaneously making it more menacing to the observer. The more DOB appears to be the object or victim of aggression, the more he appears to be an agent of aggression. Murakami’s DOB project suggests that it is possible for cute objects to be helpless and aggressive at the same time. 823 Like Mr. DOB, the monster mushroom in the center of Super Nova is somewhat kowai, and it appears to be more an agent of aggression than of tenderness. This, combined with its monumental size, seems to make the piece a metaphor for the way the mushroom has come to be an object of extreme visual preoccupation in modern society ever since the birth of the mushroom cloud. The giant mushroom is, in its relative size, a spectacle to behold, and the other mushrooms’ eyes are directed towards it like a gravitational pull. Their collective gaze seems to suggest that the figure of the mushroom has grown all the more monstrous because we look—and the more we look and the more we consume, the more its monstrosity seems to grow. That the monster mushroom has a human-skin-colored parasol appears to be no coincidence, as though to emphasize the role of the human in the constitution of this image. Understood in this way, Super Nova, like Eco Eco, comments on the process of spectatorship through which the atomic bomb has become a commodified, domesticated icon of a mushroom. However, in Super Nova, the un-formed, blobby face of cuteness becomes malformed, moving us from the kawaii bomb as satire into an image of fungal mutation. Presenting the monster mushroom as both cute and ugly, both helpless and aggressive, the image throws back at us our desire to control and master through assimilation, to understand trauma through commodified images. 98 At the same time as Super Nova is characterized by the relationship between the smaller mushrooms and the massive mushroom in the center—and by the contradictory affects of helplessness and aggression—it also expresses itself through an aesthetic of proliferation. Spilling sideways in excess, the mushrooms become so numerous that at certain points of the composition, it is difficult to discern how many there are and where each is in relation to the other. Moreover, as they spread out horizontally, they simultaneously sprout up. Larger mushrooms sprout into smaller mushrooms, for example, or connect to an adjacent mushroom (this can be seen clearly in pieces like Champagne Supernova or Smooth Nightmare, as well, see figs. 16 and 17). Even on the cap of the monumental mushroom, tiny mushrooms continue to grow. Where the Cold War military mushroom cloud is a single, total mushroom rising up into a celestial sky, framed through a scientific gaze frozen in one moment in space and time, Super Nova offers a different visuality— superflat, our eyes jump from one fungus to the next, their colorful spots and curves leading our eyes to scan the surface of the image rather than gaze into its depths. Furthermore, if the military mushroom cloud’s confinement of the atomic bomb into a neat picture aims for a wholeness on the part of the spectator to fix and objectify, Super Nova creates a more disjointed viewing experience. It is important to note that the original art spans approximately 10 feet by 34 feet—viewing it in person necessitates walking and physical movement (see fig. 44 for scale). This makes the image overwhelmingly larger than the viewer, who is rendered significantly smaller in relation to the work mounted on the wall. This sprawling sense of fungal proliferation destabilizes an easily digestible visual experience. Super Nova cannot be seen in its entirety by a single glance or from a single place, from a position of transcendence over the image. Our gaze as a viewer is not kept unified or whole, and neither is the mushroom a singular object, easily graspable or consumable. The fact that the piece is comprised of many separate but connected canvases also serves to call attention to its frame of representation and to completely disregard it. That is, the borders of 99 what we would typically accept as the boundaries delimiting the work (the edges of a canvas) are shown, and respected, but also made irrelevant by the fact that the mushrooms spill from one canvas over to the next, exceeding its designated borders. This is a deliberate rejection of the Albertian window onto a picture of imitated reality, of the mushroom cloud that is hemmed in to look grand precisely by the erasure of that frame. If we recall, the effacement of the military perspective goes hand-in-hand with the effacement of the borders of its image, mediating the atomic mushroom cloud’s sublimity. By contrast, in Super Nova it is not clear whether we are looking at one collective image or seven separate images, yet it hardly matters, because the objective is not to create a window view but an encounter with patterns, movements, and colors across a surface, of moods and affects rather than a representational picture. Thus, we can say that the work plays reflexively with the process of mediation being presented before the viewer. Furthermore, the atomic mushroom cloud became an icon through the repetition of the same kind of generalized image even though each image glorifies the instance of a single explosion; it signifies by denoting that the mushroom cloud = atomic bomb. The mushrooms of Super Nova, however, while drawn symbolically—that is to say, iconographically, through simple lines and contours—do not seem to symbolize anything, even as the artwork acknowledges the spectacularization of the mushroom in the nuclear economy. The mushroom spectacle exists, but within the sprawling, rhizomatic growth of fungi; just as Deleuze and Guattari’s language spills out in multiple directions, Super Nova spreads out sideways even as the fungi bubble up in the multiple upwards, destabilizing the symbolic detonation of the single, rising mushroom. At once unruly in their proliferative qualities and contained within their neat, smooth shapes and flat colors, it is their capacity to be and remain contradictory, to be not only kawaii and kowai but upwards and sideways, flat and yet in space, that gives the ambiguous aesthetics of Murakami’s mushroom forms such intrigue. 100 Anthropomorphic yet mutated, Super Nova’s mushrooms waver between the ugly and the cute.57 They implicate our desires to look and to consume while confusing those desires by overwhelming us with sprawling aesthetics and unsettling affects. If, in Edmund Burke’s formulation, distance was one of the defining features of safety that constituted the spectator’s position in the experience of the sublime—and one of the defining characteristics of the atomic sublime was precisely the illusion of an Albertian window onto an empirical reality, separated from the onlooker—then Murakami’s mushrooms crucially close that gap by stirring something within us. There is no illusion of separation between self and other, spectator and image, as there is in the mushroom cloud, instead the process of looking is made palpable in the encounter. Moreover, these mushrooms look back, with seeing eyes more multiple than our own. Fungal Lines of Flight Murakami’s mushrooms are drawn through the minimal style of the hand-drawn line, and the mushrooms that appear in his work are undoubtedly characters of whimsical fantasy, evoking the pop iconization of the atomic cloud together with that of the magic mushroom. Yet, his mushrooms are nonetheless decidedly fungal. They have, for instance, the biological components of a mushroom, replete with a cap, gills, and stem. While they are polka-dotted and many-eyed, they are also specific and varied—from small to large, curvy to triangular, conical and slender or wide and flat. Each mushroom is different. And in this variety, we could say that a certain multiplicity is being given back to the mushroom, one that was erased in the consolidation of the mushroom cloud into a single, generic kind. These mushrooms are not, in other words, one generic symbol of a mushroom repeated over and over—that trait on which the atomic cloud’s efficacy depends—but clearly draw 57 In its links to consumption, Ngai also suggests cuteness’ proximity to eating and to food. Certainly, as an aesthetic object, mushrooms invite us to imagine eating even when the mushrooms look inedible. 101 inspiration from the material life of fungi themselves. Some mushrooms have multiple caps, growing in bunches like a honey mushroom. Some are entirely spherical like puffball mushrooms, while others are conical like morels. These various shapes and lines do their work to lead our eye across the surface of the page, as in superflat form; they also shift our focus from an abstracted icon to a sense of the uncontrollable, varied, and highly visual aspect of fungi. This simply drawn, but thoughtful homage to the organism of the mushroom is indeed reminiscent of botanical woodblock prints from the late Edo period, most notably seen in the work of naturalist Iwasaki Tsunemasa (1786-1842). As food writer and mycologist Eugenia Bone puts it, Iwasaki’s prints “exhibit the essential nature of a species with an admirable modesty of line” (9). See, for example, his drawing of assorted boletes (a mushroom with pores rather than gills under the cap) which have wavy lines, tear-dropped shaped patterns, and scaly stems (see fig. 45), or his Fly Agaric,58 which has a rosy parasol and evenly spaced, round white circles on its cap, akin to cartoons we see today (see fig 46). While these images were used as a kind of scientific record before the widespread use of photography, they take a strikingly different approach from the illustrations of fungi found in Europe from the same period (for example, see an Amanita muscaria drawn by French doctor and mycologist Jean-Jacques Paulet, fig. 47)—although there is of course much variety in those, as well. Resonating with theories of superflat, the latter do seem to capture more of a physical shape to the mushroom, while the effect of blocky colors and simple patterns in Iwasaki’s mushrooms leaves us with impressions of colors and shapes rather than a visual sense of threedimension; we could say this is true of Murakami’s mushrooms as well. Presented against a 58 Other mushrooms, also from Edo, that resonate with Murakami’s works include those of Yumeji Takehisa, whose fungal print fabrics Murakami described as ‘‘very cute, but [...] poisonous mushrooms,” as though to describe his own works (qtd. in Daszak and Howard 109) and an ivory sculpture that depicts clusters of mushrooms stuck together horizontally. See Daszak and Howard, “Fungal Foray,” and Metropolitan Museum of Art, “String of Mushrooms.” 102 background of solid color, Super Nova, as well as Army of Mushrooms, Champagne Super Nova, and Smooth Nightmare (see figs. 48-50), could be considered a cartoon homage to the study of fungi in addition to being amusing images of pop culture. The evocative nature of the fungal shapes, colors, and lines leave much to the imagination, as mushrooms have in Japan’s literary and cultural history. From matsutake that signal autumn in waka poetry to “laughing” mushrooms (owaraitake, or psilocybin) that frequently appear in Konjaku monogatarishū (Tales of Times Now Past), mushrooms have inspired aristocratic creative production just as they have the folkloric imagination, and Murakami seems to draw inspiration from this rich history. In his work, Murakami seems to excavate the mushroom from the mushroom cloud by reaching into this history and showing the mushroom’s capacity to convey a multiplicity of meanings and to easily cross between the “high” and the “low.” Without adhering to nationalistic essentialism, we might say that Murakami creates an opening for us think about an organism and figure able to respond to the scientific teleology behind the mushroom cloud by turning to a different visual and cultural lineage. Perhaps mushrooms, in their capacities for multiple, contradictory meanings, are particularly able to hold space for the various emotions through which the spectator encounters images of nuclear violence or consumes commodified images. Where in works like Eco Eco, mastery and commodification were explored through the juxtaposing signifiers of annihilation and cuteness, similarly unsettling affects are elicited in Super Nova through the mushroom, which has become a conspicuous, haunted figure in its contemporary association with the atomic bomb. As the title of his work Smooth Nightmare suggests, the mushroom cloud works through aesthetic containment, invisibly, smoothly, and yet the trauma behind the image lives and grows in our unconscious like a nightmare. Mushrooms, which are similarly pleasing in their smooth contours, but spread multiply beneath the ground and beyond our perception, seem to be a fitting image for bringing this nightmare of the mushroom cloud to consciousness, for sitting with the discomforts of imaging war. 103 The ability of the fungus to thrive in blasted landscapes also opens paths for us to envision survival after devastation in terms that moves from the human to the planetary. Murakami seems to intuit this; depicting mushrooms in place of a “super nova,” Super Nova circumvents signification of the atomic bomb as “the biggest explosion that humans have ever seen” (NASA’s definition of super nova, which also mirrors political rhetoric around the atomic mushroom cloud), moving directly from fungi to astronomy. In so doing, the work redirects our focus from nuclear weaponry as the ultimate explosive force to the material substance of fungi that subsist beyond the human and beyond Earth. Thus far, we have been discussing the ways fungi survive destruction wrought by human civilization—matsutake that grow in deforested land, “radiation-loving” fungi on the walls of Chernobyl. But fungi also thrive in outer space, in conditions with high radiation and zero gravity that are difficult for humans to tolerate. Before and after the Anthropocene and beyond Earth, fungi grow. Strikingly, when you search the internet for an image of a “super nova,” what results are photographic images that resemble the mycelia of a fungus far more than the explosive clouds we see in the sky on Earth (see figs. 51 & 52). Through an elliptical process of signification that loops from fungi to supernovas, Murakami’s Super Nova denaturalizes the extreme anthropocentrism mobilized in the mushroom cloud (the human in mastery over nature) and shifts into perspective a different view of fungal existence with and beyond us. While superflat mushrooms do not necessarily gesture toward the unimaginable violence set into motion by the atomic bomb, they do open cracks in the controlled economy of the mushroom cloud as an image and offers other avenues where the symbolism of the mushroom might grow. If we recall Peirce’s comment that “symbols grow,” we can understand Murakami’s mushrooms to be a proliferation of the mushroom cloud into another kind of fungal form. Despite what Murakami’s own artistic intentions may be, his invocation of mushrooms from different times and places in Japanese culture reclaims the mushroom from the mushroom cloud, integrating an image that 104 presents itself as original and totemic into a longer Japanese history. Like an irradiated mushroom from a blasted landscape, superflat mushrooms spread and grow. After the bomb and after the mushroom cloud, these fungi mutate, iterating and taking a course of their own. Perhaps, in this way, it is not simply art that explodes after war, but literally and figuratively, fungi that are explosive,59 that which grows from where there once was nothing. In Super Nova, the monster mushroom in the center looks back at the viewer lazily, as though to imply we are not masters of consumption, but we too, are watched by a life force that is not our own. In a blank grey void where there is otherwise nothing we can see, these mushrooms remain, eyes open. In this way, Super Nova not only begins to unravel the violent optics of the mushroom cloud, but hints at another figure to which we might turn: the mushroom may offer an image of resilience for contending with violent histories of war. 59 It is not insignificant that the Oxford Languages online thesaurus produces “mushrooming” and “meteoric” as synonyms for the term “explosive.” 105 Chapter 3: Fungal Horror: the Mutant Mushrooms of Postwar Japanese Sci-Fi “There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream- thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium” –Sigmund Freud. 60 This chapter is about two tales of mushroom horror to come out of Japan in the 1960s and 1970s. The first is a film called Matango by Honda Ishiro released in 1963, about a group of young vacationers who set out from Tokyo by yacht; on their way, however, they encounter a violent storm and are washed up onto a deserted island. The island appears to be radioactive, with no signs of animal or human life—but its forest is overgrown with toxic-looking mushrooms of all kinds. The castaways resist eating the mushrooms for fear of poison, but soon they give into hunger; one by one, they eat them, turning into mushroom monsters. The second work I discuss is a science-fiction manga called Invader Spaceship Kinokonga by Shirakawa Marina from 1976, which tells the story of a shonen (or boy) named Aoki. One day, he and his schoolteacher witness the crash-landing of a UFO. Because of the UFO’s cosmic radiation, Aoki and sensei are quarantined. But soon, humans and animals around them begin to disappear, and in their place, mushrooms grow. Upon their release from isolation, they discover the humans and animals have been invaded by fungal spores, transforming them into mushroom-zombies to be recycled back into the earth. In both Matango and Kinokonga, mushrooms are vital organisms that dramatically alter the human condition by transforming them from within. Monstrously thriving in blasted landscapes contaminated by 60 See Interpretation of Dreams, 341. 106 radiation and the developments of human civilization, mushrooms are a source of ultimate terror, yet also a crucial means for survival. Simultaneously playing on the mushroom’s haunting power as a symbol of nuclear annihilation as well as its material ability to grow from radiation, Matango and Kinokonga present fantastical fungal visions that render the human subject out of control, offering terrible but pleasurable imaginations of life after the end of the human. Existence in a nuclear future, these works suggest, is to become mushroom. In this chapter, I examine what literature, together with mushrooms, does. Like a psychoactive drug, Matango and Kinokonga offer hallucinatory images of a nightmarish dream, allowing us as spectator-readers to explore affects of horror, desire, pleasure, and disgust by imagining the human body wildly mutated into mushroom form. Playing with imaginative fantasies, mushrooms have excited in Japanese literature and culture since long ago, and speculating about the mushroom’s resilience in nuclear landscapes, I propose that these two works give visual form to anxieties of living in an age under threat of nuclear war while also providing cathartic avenues for contending with the violence—and invisibility—of radioactive contamination on the body. Mushrooms work in the interstices between the invisible and the visible, the unimaginable and the imaginable. Neither work offers a representative account of the traumas of WWII, nor does either purport to. What they offer instead is a creative means for engaging troubling affects that circulate not only around nuclear violence but also representations of war. Psychoanalysis, and its practices, in this sense, is important here. These texts may not be a cure, but they are catharsis. And catharsis, we could say, is vital for staying with the trouble. Honda Ishiro’s Matango: Social Contexts First, a bit of literary background: Matango adapts a 1907 short story by the British writer William Hope Hodgson, titled “A Voice in the Night.” Hodgson’s story is told from the perspective 107 of sailors who encounter an odd couple at sea. The couple, discovering an abandoned ship overgrown with grey fungus that “took on the forms of vast fingers,” had attempted to clean the boat for shelter when the fungus began to grow on their bodies (Hodgson 268). Discovering that the fungus had turned others before them into fungus-people, the couple resigns themselves to the fate that they too, will soon become fungi. Commissioned by Toho Studios, science-fiction writer and editor of SF Magazine Fukushima Masami wrote a short story based on Hodgson’s plot. With input from the acclaimed “short-short” science-fiction writer Hoshi Shinichi, this short story was eventually adapted into a screenplay by Kimura Takeshi for Honda’s film. Tsuburaya Eiji was assigned to be Special Effects Editor. A prolific director known for both domestic melodramas and popular science-fiction, Honda’s most internationally well-known film is the original Godzilla (1954), about a giant reptilian monster awoken from the depths of the Pacific Ocean by underwater hydrogen bomb testing. Like Godzilla, Matango takes its generic conventions from the kaiju eiga (or monster film), but looks to mushrooms (and people) for its source of monstrosity. In a departure from Hodgson’s narrative frame (in which the story is told through second-person observers), Matango features an array of characters from Tokyo, including: a CEO of a large company, a boat captain, a gruff sailor, a sultry singer, an up-and-coming novelist, a university professor, and a university student. At first, the group collaboratively gathers food and finds shelter, but as hunger overtakes them, each begins to look out only for themselves—the skipper steals the group’s rations and sets out to escape alone, while the sailor hoards turtle eggs and sells them for profit. By the film’s end, all bourgeois social and societal rules have long become irrelevant, and the characters live according to their whims and desires. In this way, though Matango shares generic conventions and anti-nuclear themes with Godzilla, it departs from the humanism that characterizes the latter, portraying a deteriorating humanity rather than a redeeming one. 108 Little has been written about Matango in scholarly analysis, but based on what has been written, the film has largely been understood as a social indictment of the postwar generation’s wealth and bourgeois consumerism, a warning against the pursuit of shallow pleasure. In that desperate circumstances reduce the characters to their base instincts, the plot is reminiscent of William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies—but, as Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski point out, the transformations that occur in Matango are “less extreme” because “from the start, no one is particularly admirable” (198). Describing it as a “taut, tense horror film rooted in psychology and proto-psychedelia, and a critique of the shallow materialism and self-centered attitudes that accompanied Japan’s new prosperity” (197), Ryfle and Godziszewski state that “the island is a claustrophobic hell, where Honda and Kimura magnify the Freudian impulses normally suppressed by the unspoken respect, authority, and hierarchy governing Japanese society” (198). Key to understanding this reading is the historical moment during which Matango was released. The early 1960s saw the beginning of Japan’s postwar economic growth and have been narrated by the Japanese government as a major turning point for recovery from war. Between 1945 and 1963, when Matango was released, WWII and the subsequent U.S. occupation had ended, and the anti-nuclear protests that erupted during the U.S. tests in the Marshall Islands had subsided, as had the tumultuous ANPO protests of 1960, which challenged the revision of the United StatesJapan Security Treaty that allowed the U.S. to maintain military bases in Japan.61 The early 1960s, however, saw a rising middle class and the widespread adoption of Western-style consumer goods. This postwar economic growth went hand-in-hand with the rapid push to develop urban infrastructure in preparation for the 1964 Olympics (including the now famous high-speed railway 61 Originally signed in 1951, the treaty (Anzen Hoshō Jōyaku, known by the shorthand ANPO in Japanese), which was being revised in 1960, reestablished the hegemony of the U.S. military in East Asia, resulting in hundreds of thousands of people protesting at the National Diet (the national legislature of Japan) in Tokyo. 109 system), which Tokyo was set to host.62 On a national level, the 1964 Olympics was narrated as a symbolic overcoming of the devastation wrought by war, the ultimate turning point, whereafter, Japan was headed toward a technologically advanced, democratic future. Matango captures something of these shifting cultural and class attitudes, particularly casting the increased consumerism with a critical eye. As Honda himself stated, “Around this time, there were people who started to be Americanized, or have a modern lifestyle…there were rich people who sent their kids to school in foreign cars, that kind of thing. We tried to show that type of social background in this film” (qtd. in Ryfle and Godzisewski 197). Additionally, according to Ryfle and Godzisewski, Honda was also influenced by a breaking news story about a group of wealthy youth who took their father’s yacht out to sea and got lost, needing to be rescued (197).63 From the beginning, Matango highlights the superficiality of its characters: through boastful discussions of the money the CEO spent on the brand new yacht, for example, or by the way characters frequently express the self-importance of their respective, mostly white-collar, professions. Understood within this social context, the mushrooms of Matango appear first and foremost to be a narrative device that facilitates the human characters’ undoing for an overall message of caution against such materialism or ego. The mushrooms, which are profuse around the island but deemed to be poisonous, become simultaneously that which could save them from starvation and that which could kill them, a paradox that drives the story’s narrative drama. “To eat” or “not eat” becomes a question of desperation and temptation, with the mushrooms possessing the potential to let the characters live or die. Once consumed, however, the mushrooms appear to have psychoactive properties—causing a delusional euphoria that only exacerbates the characters’ hedonism. While in 62 The Olympics were initially supposed to be held in Tokyo in 1940, but were canceled due to the war. 63Separately, there were reports about ships and airplanes disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle. See Ryfle and Godzisewski, 197. 110 actuality psychoactive mushrooms are not necessarily addictive, in the film the dangers of pursuing only pleasure are likened to the dangers of drug addiction, leading to a climactic ending in which Murai (Kubo Akira), the university professor and the narrator of the story, attempts to save his lover Akiko (Yashiro Miki) from becoming a mushroom, but finds her happily intoxicated (provocatively eating a raw pink mushroom like a fruit), surrounded by their deranged, tripping peers.64 Mushrooms are what drive the characters to their demise, what lifts what social decorum had existed, leading them into a kind of madness. Read in this way, the main source of horror Matango depicts is a crumbling human morality, and mushrooms are a means for conveying a larger human message. While I think this understanding of the film is certainly true, I also would like to propose in this chapter a different approach: one that considers mushrooms not only a narrative device that furthers human drama, but are themselves, in their monstrosity, the main spectacle and subject of the story. Growing bulbously, profusely, in a contaminated environment that otherwise destroys the human characters, the mushrooms possess an agency through which fantastical horror can be imagined and felt, destabilizing human morality, subjectivity, or control. Opening our vision to the spectacular lives of fungi that persist and thrive in radiation—and enabling the audience to imagine becoming that fungi themselves—Matango envisions a terrifying multi-species-becoming for contending with the nuclear future. Mushrooms in a Blasted Landscape After being stranded on a deserted island for an indeterminate number of days, only three of the original seven vacationers remain. Or perhaps more accurately, only three remain clinging onto a 64On drugs, Honda states, “Here we did it as mushrooms…that you can get completely addicted and cannot do anything about it. It destroys you. Also, how people can become so ugly and selfish in certain situations” (qtd. in Ryfle and Godzisewski 200). 111 self-proclaimed sense of human rationality. In the days prior, starvation had led to infighting. Yoshida (Tachikawa Hiroshi), the young novelist of the group, had given in to eating the island’s poisonous mushrooms, throwing him into a hysterical state that inspired him to shoot at the others with a rifle—resulting in the death of Koyama (Sahara Kenji), the sailor. Koyama, for his turn, had been selling turtle eggs to the others for cash profit. Sakuta, an employee of the fictional Kasai Enterprises (hired for this trip by the CEO of Kasai Enterprises to be the boat’s skipper, and played by Koizumi Hiroshi), had stolen the group’s last rations and set out to escape alone, tying up his long-time boss, Kasai (Tsuchiya Yoshio), at the bottom of a ship’s cellar. For his attempts to murder them all, Yoshida is exiled to the forest with Mami (Mizuno Kumi), the singer-starlet, with whom he has been having a sexual affair, leaving Kasai, Murai (the university professor), and Akiko, (the university student and his lover) to fend for themselves. It is then that a heavy rain begins to fall. From the deep green ferns of the forest, mushrooms begin to grow. Glistening with rain, the slimy parasols of red, brown, and white mushrooms expand outward, stretching up from the forest floor (see fig. 53). In juxtaposition to the movements of the human characters, which are characterized by fear or panic, lunging at each other in anger or cowering from fungal monsters—the movement of the mushrooms is steady, simultaneously swift and yet curiously slow. Their curious expansion is punctuated by the creeping notes of an orchestral scale that ascends and stops, descends and meanders, before reaching a quickened crescendo. Swelling before our eyes, this scene of fungal growth is unsettlingly attractive—in spite of, or perhaps because of, their sudden appearance where the human cannot help but wither. Appearing at a critical juncture when the protagonists have physically and morally deteriorated, when survival is bleak, the mushrooms are a manifestation of another kind of vitality, of that curious resilience embodied by the fungus. This vitality is manifested through the mushrooms’ visual form: sprouting from somewhere indiscernible beneath the ground, the viewer 112 gets the sense that fungi are all around, have always been present, but unseen. After the heightened drama of human betrayal, the mushrooms are a foreboding sign of what else is to come. This scene of mushroom growth is a cinematic spectacle, the ultimate “cinema of attractions,” in Tom Gunning’s words, a “demonstration of the possibilities of the cinema” (383). Shot in real time, the mushrooming is the effect of two chemicals mixed together in metal cans, which would expand when combined (a compound that would eventually lead to the invention of Styrofoam (Brothers 755). The image itself is not crucial to the forward-movement of the plot, but the form of its peculiar outward expansion excites visual fascination. Paula Amad writes that timelapse films of plant growth have a “nonintellectual or prelogical sensory and affective appeal,” eliciting “active fascination” rather than “passive comprehension” (244). Writing about botanical films (and specifically about the archive of a French banker named Albert Kahn), she states, “The cause of this fascination is not information, narrative, or argument, but the interbreeding of science and dreams as figured in the startling image of a ‘plant’s purposive, intelligent movement’” (Amad 244). While human perception cannot observe vegetal growth in real time, the camera acts as an intermediary between plant and eye, opening our perception to the plant’s “purposive, intelligent movement” by means of fast-forwarding, magnifying, and zooming. In a similar way, the scene of mushrooms growing steadily in the rain mediates for us an imagined vision of fungal movement otherwise imperceptible to our sight. Rather than a time-lapse, however, this is achieved through the presentation of a literal scientific experiment recorded live by the camera. According to Peter Brothers, the film crew had discovered that the chemicals would build pressure and mushroom over the top of discarded cans—“The best ones were corned beef cans since they were narrower at the top,” said Nakano Teruyoshi, who worked on special effects (qtd. in Brothers 755). 65 Once poured, 65 Nakano states: “We brought cans of all sizes from all over…Back then there was no recycling program so it was hard to find empty cans. The best ones were corned beef cans since they were narrower at the top. When 113 it only took two or three seconds for them to grow, so timing was key: technicians would pour the chemicals and stir the liquid in the cans before running out of the frame as the camera started to roll (Brothers 755). What we witness, therefore, is the creation of a live mushrooming that gives us the illusion of our witnessing a mushroom’s growth in real time. Like George Melies’ Voyage Dans La Lune (1902)—which is full of magical optical tricks and, perhaps without coincidence, features a scene of giant mushrooms growing in a grotto on the moon (an illusion created by the open parasols of umbrellas) (see fig. 54)—the scene in Matango interweaves science and dreams through fungal theatricality. A visual delight, the scene showcases the mushroom’s ability to surprise us with their spontaneous, swift, growth, appearing in our field of vision even on remote, harsh lands. This visual spectacularity has directly to do with their growth in a blasted landscape, for their swelling disrupts the sense that nothing exists on the island. The castaways, for one, are constantly coming up against the harshness of the environment. The sandy beaches are black, the mountains jagged with shaly cliffs. The scenes, more often than not, take place in a thick fog; shot on Japan’s islands of Ōshima and Hachijō-jima, which are filled with centipedes and poisonous snakes, the fog was both natural and artificially created. Sources of food for our human protagonists are scarce: a search between the seven of them yields a limited amount of turtle eggs, and later, and some yams. A rifle found on an abandoned ship gives them the promising idea of hunting animals; none, however, are to be found. Instead, birds flying high above are spotted veering away from the island, as though the island is haunted. The reason for this haunting, it appears, has to do with radiation, communicated to us through multiple evocations of the bombed islands around Bikini Atoll. Upon their initial survey of the land, for example, the castaways discover several ships that have sunken to you put in the liquids the pressure building up from the bottom of the can caused it to spread really nicely creating this strange shape with a rounded top” (qtd. in Brothers 755). 114 the bottom of the ocean, what Sakuta, the hired skipper, calls a “boat graveyard,” calling to mind the naval ships blasted in the tests at Operation Crossroads. One ship, which has not sunk but been left abandoned onshore, consists of a research room filled with plant and animal specimens (see fig. 55); the castaways discover these specimens had been used for studying the effects of radiation on the local environment, like the U.S. government had on the plants, animals, and people of the Marshall Islands. Crucially, covering the interior of this same ship is the presence of mold, mildew, and moss that takes the form of a thick layer of dust that cakes walls, counters, and floors, evoking another significant moment in Pacific history, the Lucky Dragon No. 5 (Daigo Fukuryu Maru), when radioactive fallout in the form of dust rained down on a Japanese tuna-fishing boat following the detonation of Castle Bravo (March 1, 1954), a fifteen-megaton bomb at Bikini Atoll. All 23 members of the boat developed radiation sickness, and one died, leading to boycotts of contaminated tuna and nationwide protests of nuclear arms. 66 Seeming to mimic the rhetoric that the South Pacific islands are “remote” and “void” of life from the U.S. and Japan’s occupation of Pacific islands over the course of history, 67 the film sets up an environment seemingly ravaged and barren from the activities of nuclear war. In this blasted landscape, the mushroom thrives. In the depths of the island is a lush, green forest, overgrown with mushrooms of all kinds: in clusters on tree trunks, protruding from the soil, in bulbous growths between plants. Moreover, in the abandoned research vessel, the castaways discover a peculiar species of mushroom that appears to have mutated from radiation. While the plant and animal specimens that line the study’s shelves are preserved in glass vials or by taxidermy, the mushroom is set apart from the rest, stowed away in a giant wooden crate on the floor. It is labeled “Matango.” When three of the men come upon it, they open the crate to reveal, in their 66 Many historians refer to the Lucky Dragon No. 5 Incident as the first time in Japanese history when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were revisited as a nationalized war trauma, due to postwar censorship. 67 If we recall Barad’s discussion from Chapter 1: “void” for whom? 115 words, a “mushroom monster” (or bakemono, meaning monster or specter). Yet, what we see is no monster in the common sense of the word, but what looks to be an oversized eringi or porcini, wrinkled, grimy, covered in warts and mold (see figs. 56 & 57). Where radiation had caused other organisms to mutate violently—the taxidermy turtle had been blinded—the mushroom shows its mutation through its enlargement, by its ability grow in size and essence, even more mushroom than it already was. The unexpected appearance of the mushroom creates an atmospheric horror that toggles between the visible and the invisible. That is, the affect of horror is more frequently derived, not from the sudden appearance of frightening fungal monsters, but from a slow, creeping sense that something the protagonists cannot see surrounds and watches them. Because they find repeated signs of past human life on the island, the protagonists fearfully expect to find corpses or skeletons in the abandoned research vessel—but upon opening the doors, they only discover protruding fungi that cover the surfaces of the ship’s crevices, caking its interior. This is true, too, when the two women open the door to the captain’s room; first we see a close-up of their faces, lit up in red light, letting out an open-mouthed shriek (see fig. 58). We anticipate a horrific scene to spread out before us, as do their peers—but when the rest of them rush over to see what prompted the shrieking, there are no human bodies, but a room glowing red in moldy funguses (see fig. 59). The anticipation of seeing something shocking is, on the one hand, underwhelmingly undercut by the denial of rotting human bodies, and by the presence of a recognizable everyday life form: fungi and mold. On the other hand, their excessive proliferation is oddly unsettling; the air looks rotted, polluted, and infectious. This creeping foreboding is created further by the camera, which often precedes the characters before they enter a room or lingers a few seconds too long after they have gone. Closeups of the characters’ faces show them gazing blindly about, looking everywhere but the camera, 116 facilitating the feeling that they are the ones being watched. As the viewer, we become the fungus behind the lens, observing them as specimens instead. The mushrooms appear in unexpected places, on corners and in crevices, walking the line between the invisible depths from which they grow and our visible surface. Sigmund Freud, in his Interpretation of Dreams, likens the mushroom to a dream-wish that “grows up,” to a moment in interpretation when the tangled, inaccessible material of the unconscious comes close to the surface; like a dream, or a nightmare, the mushrooms unsettle because they come from a place we cannot fathom and cannot reach. The mushroom cap is evidence of an organism that is already there, at the limits of visual perception, yet comes to present itself to us like a hallucinatory state. In Matango’s forest, they grow in clusters on tree trunks and branches, nest among the plants and in the soil, from which they sprout out and up. Like the material of an unconscious desire creeping its way into conscious experience, these mushrooms mediate what is otherwise imperceptible to the eye— mycelia and radiation—indicating a thriving growth in contamination. The mushroom is monstrous, moreover, not only for its ability to grow suddenly (the first scene) and to grow weirdly larger (the second scene), but to proliferate indeterminately in this contaminated environment. Protrusive and profusive, their excessive multiplicity elicits an affect of disgust. This disgust is primarily provoked through texture, which can be observed in the mushroom monsters the characters soon discover haunt the island. Giant, slow-moving creatures with two arms, two legs, and a head, they turn out to be the mutated bodies of past survivors who had given way to eating the island’s mushrooms (see fig. 60). Their heads, in fact, are modeled after the atomic cloud—but the atomic cloud too is given a body (or multiple “fruiting bodies”), for its surface, along with the entirety of the monster’s body, is covered in bulbous, reddish-brown growths (see figs. 61 & 62). Like what Freud “got wrong” in “One or Many Wolves,” the mushroom cannot be thought alone, only in multiples. As Deleuze and Guattari write: “The wolf, as the instantaneous 117 apprehension of a multiplicity in a given region, is not a representative, a substitute, but an I feel. I feel myself becoming a wolf, one wolf among others, on the edge of the pack…” (their emphasis) (32). This is about signification, but it is also about mushrooms, in multiple directions: if the atomic explosion came to be known within our symbolic economy as a mushroom, Matango’s mushroom monsters suggest that our modes of meaning-making were already constituted by mushrooms; the mushroom is not the bomb’s opposite, or inverse, but the two constitute each other. In this way, the mushroom cloud has been turned inside-out, showing us how the fungus has structured our own processes of visual mediation. As though revealing the tangled unconscious of the mushroom cloud, the fruiting bodies of the sublime symbol manifest on its outside. The fecundity of the monsters’ protrusions, somewhat disgusting, are resolutely unsublime. German phenomenological thinker Aurel Kolnai provides one means for thinking about the visual forms of Matango’s mushrooms through his analysis of disgust. Disgust, he explains, is an “aversive reaction” akin to fear; in comparison to fear, however, disgust is “more aesthetically determined” (Kolnai 34). Kolnai writes: Already here we encounter the relation of disgust to what is positively vital, to what is animated. And indeed there is undoubtedly associated with the extinction of life in putrefaction a certain—quite remarkable—augmentation of life: a heightened announcement of the fact that life is there…To sum up, there is hardly anything more to say than that disgusting creatures arouse generally the impression of life caught up in a senseless, formless surging, that they somehow urge themselves upon the subject with a life-corroding breath of moldiness of decay which can be concretely perceived…that we want to eat them, or crush them, might also serve to intensify disgust. (58) Kolnai proposes that visions of uncontrolled plurality particularly arouse this affect, suggesting that the repulsion one feels at swarming insects, for example, is linked to an evocation of rot: “as if their 118 frantic teeming activity were a phenomenon of life in decay” (58). Noting that highly organized insects (such as ants or bees) rarely provoke disgust, it is indeterminate fecundity that arouses repulsion. While fear is dependent on the situational circumstances surrounding safety (and can be rationalized through knowledge), disgust is visceral. We could say that the animation of decay, in the form of a heightened sense of life, is embodied in the fruiting bodies of the mushroom cloud and the scene of mushrooms growing in the rain. The mushrooms teem with life where there is supposed to be rot; where radiation has disastrous, unthinkable effects on the human body, causing severe burning, damaging the body from the inside-out, these mushrooms perform the opposite: a counter-intuitive, reverse movement that grows on the surface of the body, from the radiation, outward like multiple appendages. Being a life form that, to recall Weart’s words, “aris[es] from within death, that is, transmutation”—mushrooms are an “augmentation of life: a heightened announcement of the fact that life is there,” and they “somehow urge themselves upon the subject with a life-corroding breath of moldiness of decay” (Kolnai). For the fungus, there is no “life” and “death,” as we know them, for its very mode of existence is a generation constituted by decomposition. This is a positive vitality, a theatrical visualization of putrefaction becoming something else, something productive. The Pleasures and Horrors of Becoming-mushroom Indulgence in the magic mushroom may be portrayed as dangerous in Matango, coinciding with the moral deterioration of the characters, but even so, they are depicted to be terribly delightful. To start, the characters themselves find horrifying pleasure in consuming the irradiated mushrooms, for not only are they an answer to their hunger, they are inexplicably delicious. Thus, the mushrooms are not merely a disgusting object they must eat to survive, but an object of extreme desire. This satiating quality is captured well in one scene that takes place immediately following the 119 scene of mushrooms growing in the rain. After being exiled to the forest for aiding and abetting Yoshida’s violent rampage, Mami returns to the castaways’ shelter alone. Rain has fallen continuously for days, causing new growths of mushrooms. In the cabin of the boat the castaways now use for shelter, Mami finds Kasai, the former CEO with whom she came. Upon seeing her, Kasai clings to the lower half of her body like a child, asking desperately, “Did you find food?” Appearing formidable in a low-angle shot, she smiles and responds, “Do I look famished?” (see fig. 63). When she leads him deep into the forest, they come upon a branch erupting with dozens of pink mushrooms (see fig. 64). Plucking one and putting it in her mouth, she says, “They look disgusting, but they are delicious. If only I’d eaten them sooner!” Ravenously shoving handfuls of raw mushrooms into his mouth, Kasai soon sees a dream-like vision of cabaret dancers superimposed onto Tokyo’s neon lights. The mushrooms are disgusting, but they are delicious. On this, Kolnai writes: “there is ‘a certain invitation hidden in disgust…a certain macabre allure,” for “not only is an aversion to its object characteristic of disgust, but also a superimposed attractedness of the subject towards that object” (42). In other words, what constitutes disgust is not only an aesthetic quality of life in putrefaction, or a repulsion close to fear, but an invitation, an attraction and allure to the repulsive object. Moreover, if we recall Kolnai’s statement, “that one may eat or crush the object seems to intensify disgust,” the irradiated mushroom is an intensely attractive and repulsive. The magic mushroom is not a raw yam, or turtle eggs, there to provide only sustenance, but an irresistible food, a tempting drug. Voluptuous, crushable, and consumable, easily popped into one’s mouth, the film conveys a sensuality to the disgusting mushrooms. Eating them will turn the characters into fungal monsters, but that begins to matter to little. Round and edible, they are a beckoning from the environment, a luscious poison that is an invitation to live. This invitation promises the pleasures of delicious taste and hallucinogenic euphoria, but also the heightening of libido, exemplified through the transformation of the two women characters. 120 Mami, for example, who from the beginning of the film is portrayed to be promiscuous, appears even more colorful than she was prior to eating them. When she walks onto the ship to lure Kasai into the forest, she looks well-manicured in her colorful floral print dress, deep green sash wrapped around her face. Compared to Kasai, whose disheveled look is a stark contrast from his prior CEOon-vacation-look at the start of the film—his shirt is unbuttoned, ratty, his face dirty with grime and sweat—Mami’s makeup looks freshly reapplied, eyeshadow thicker, lips bright with red lipstick. Similarly, Akiko, who had until the very end refrained from eating the mushrooms with her lover Murai, is at last taken into the forest by the monsters; by the time Murai finds her, however, she is not held captive by the monsters as we had anticipated she would be, but sitting among the mushrooms of the forest floor as though sitting in a meadow. Calling his name, she holds a single, pink mushroom like a flower from which she takes a sensuous bite (see fig. 65). The erotic gestures of her gaze and bite are juxtaposed with her prudish characterization since the beginning of the film (and in her judgment of Mami’s promiscuity), and the previously pale, clammy color of her face is now flush with pink.68 Visually, there is a phallic quality to the economy of desire created for us, in which Mami appears as a bizarre femme fatale, the bewitching woman caught up with the dangers of the magic fungus. Akiko’s character is equally constituted by a male gaze, characterized largely by her sexual reluctance, especially in relation to her male teacher and lover; her transformation in the fungal forest appears to be a deflowering by way of mushroom ingestion. If we wanted to, we could 68 In Bodies of Memory, Yoshikuni Igarashi has a fascinating discussion of the ways the “chastity of the Japanese—particularly female—body was of great concern” during Japan’s postwar period (149). He writes, “Popular magazines in the leadup to the Tokyo Olympics, expressed anxieties about the influence of American and European men ‘corrupting’ Japanese women; around the same time, The Tokyo Metropolitan Welfare Office campaigned to protect Japanese women from foreign, white males and from prostitution, and particularly promoted a campaign in preparation for the Olympics using the message ‘just say no to temptation’” (149). While Matango’s gaze on Mami’s and Akiko’s libidinal energy may be a critical one, there is also an ambivalence in that they are rendered attractive, implicating the viewer’s gaze. 121 arguably even say that the scene of mushroom growth (mushrooms are often regarded as phallic in Japan as well the U.S.), might even be evoking engorgement of the male sexual organ, growing in correlation with, or in response to, Mami’s libidinous transformation into mushroom (since, Akiko had not yet become mushroom).69 If, as Laura Mulvey suggests, the unconscious is structured like a language—and what we have is the language of the patriarchy that constitutes woman as spectacle— our gaze on Mami, and later on Akiko, resides firmly within this visual economy. At the same time, Mami and Akiko signal a desirable transformation that is correlative with the spectacular fungus. Like the mushrooms growing in the rain, they thrive. Despite the fact that we understand them to be on their way to becoming “mushroom monsters,” to us, and to our vision, they are still primarily human, looking nothing like the bulbous monsters, becoming brighter versions of themselves. Like the macabre allure of the mushrooms that swell by eating radiation, this renewed desirability of the women, phallic as its visual codes may be, makes the imagination of fungal transformation—and the end of human subjectivity—seductive. Imaging ourselves in mushroom-becoming is what makes Matango horrifyingly pleasurable. Meeker and Szabari call this allure the plant’s “spectacular appeal”; writing about Invasion of the Body Snatchers films, they state, “[the film’s] images of invasive pod people do more than just provide another venue for the paranoia of being taken over by something that is out there; they consistently allow audiences to imagine, from within a state of delighted fear, the pleasures and pains of becoming another form of lively matter designated as vegetal” (“Century of the Pods” 37). While the mushrooms unleash the monstrosity within the human, they also allow the characters to thrive on the island in a way no other life form can. Where abstinence and starvation (and “acting rationally”) 69 While the correlation within society of a mushroom to a phallus is dominant, Iizawa points out that turned upside down, the mushroom also resembles the female reproductive organ—which is to say, in and of itself, the mushroom and its correlation to any sexual organ merely depends on how one interprets it, of course (“Kinoko bungaku no hō e”). 122 had deprived them of vitality, the ingestion of mushrooms enables our characters not only to survive, but to flourish in an irradiated future. The characters fear the loss of their humanity only to find that the mushroom assimilates the human into a mode of spectacular libidinal striving within the blasted landscape. Consuming the mushrooms enables not the devolvement of the human into the “lesser being” of the fungus, but reconfigures the human into another kind of lively matter that can withstand toxicity. Like fungal growth, they resist destruction by way of the ever-proliferating energy of the mushroom. The fantasy involves letting go of the idea of a sovereign human subject, one that is contained and bounded in and by the skin. It is of relevance here that mushrooms eat through their “extracellular digestion,” in effect, absorbing nutrients through their skin. Where human contact with radiation leaves the body with severe burns, breaking through the boundaries of the body, envisioning the fungal-human self means a becoming that not only withstands this violence, but consumes the source of that violence to expand the boundaries of its body through the skin, morphing into something fuller, larger, and more energetic than before. Thus the growth characterized by the mushrooms seems to be simultaneously an invocation of the horrors or effects of radiation on the human skin, but also the imagination of an antidote, inspired by the matter of mushrooms—an invitation to imagine oneself as another life form that thrives within its violent transformation. Interestingly, radiotrophic (“radiation-loving”) mushrooms have high amounts of melanin within them, the same pigment in human skin that allows for tolerance of sunlight; scientists believe this melanin allows the fungi to convert the radiation into a renewable energy source. We could say then, that the spectacularity of mushroom-becoming resides in the fantasy of resistance to the atomic bomb’s violence as a light-weapon,70 able to absorb light while nonetheless 70 See Paul Virilio and Chapter 1. 123 needing no light itself to grow. 71 It is this fantasy’s closeness to the atomic bomb’s violence that makes it also a fantasy of horror. Unlike other stories in which humans gain superpowers by way of radiation (I am thinking of American superhero comics like the Hulk, or Red Hulk, who grow superhuman through gamma-radiation), there is something perverse, absolutely monstrous, to the imagination of such an existence. In this way, Matango does not merely present fungi as a species with an extraordinary capability to survive, but reveals the seductive horrors of their ability to render us mushroom-human from within. The seduction of fungal becoming is shared by Murai, our main protagonist; in a nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and perhaps to Jon Siegel’s 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, we return at the end of the film to a scene at a psychiatric ward, where he is being observed by doctors (also the start of the film, and the setting that frames the telling of his story). As the only one to have escaped the island, the doctors tell Murai he is lucky to be back to Tokyo. Murai, however, who turns out to have been contaminated (shown this time through the partial disfiguration of his face), remarks that Tokyo is no more human than the monster mushrooms of the island, admitting: “If I really loved [my girlfriend Akiko], I should have eaten the mushrooms, become a mushroom, and remained with her on the island together.”). The so-called dignity of humanity may have crumbled, and perhaps there is no escape from the restrictive, normative bounds of Japan’s postwar capitalist society, but in becoming-mushroom, there is an answer, an opening. 71Both Ryfle and Godziszewski’s analysis and Brothers’ analysis refer to Matango as one of Honda’s darker films, and Brothers reads it as a “horror story without hope.” This darkness is thematic, but it is also literal: “its eerie imagery and atmosphere are a radical departure from the brightly lit and light-hearted Mothra or King Kong vs. Godzilla” (Ryfle and Godziszewski 199). 124 The Spectacle of the Mutated Body I have been writing at length about the pleasures and horrors of becoming something that consumes nuclear violence into its modes of striving. But how does Matango place the human survivors of such violence (hibakusha) or engage the historical trauma of the atomic bomb? About the American Cold War Hollywood context, Susan Sontag writes: “Science fiction films are one of the purest forms of spectacle; that is, we are rarely inside anyone’s feelings…we are merely spectators; we watch” (45). Part of the experience of this “pure” spectacle is the enjoyment facilitated by watching deformity on screen; repulsive aliens and strange monsters are portrayed in their extreme “abnormality” or difference from “normal” bodies. There is overlap in the genres of horror and sci-fi, Sontag writes, because the latter allows for “moral scruples to be lifted, for cruelty to be enjoyed…in the figure of the monster from outer space, the freakish, the ugly, and the predatory all converge—and provide a fantasy target for righteous bellicosity to discharge itself, and for the aesthetic enjoyment of suffering and disaster” (45). Like the Kantian subject in the face of the sublime, we consume horrific images without coming close to the danger itself, allowing the spectator to delight in the visual spectacle made of suffering. If we interpret the island’s toxic mushrooms as an allegory or symbol for radiation, then the mushroom monsters of Matango are arguably hibakusha72; and our gaze on them falls into a problematic position of what Sontag describes as the “superiority over the freak.” It casts the survivors as victims of contamination, objectifying their bodies and wedging a divide between the one who looks and the one who is looked at. In this interpretation, the film would reinforce the discriminatory ideologies that have persisted since the end of WWII toward survivors, perpetuated by the misconception that one can “catch” radioactive contamination from those affected. 72 Indeed according to Brothers, the film has been interpreted by some people to be about the survivors of the atomic bombings, as well as those affected by leprosy (780). 125 Yet, the relationship between looker and looked-at is made more complicated by the fact that the viewer does not witness the human protagonists physically transform, at least not fully, into a mushroom-monster, even by the end of the film. While Mami has what look to be keloid-like scars on her legs, and Yoshida has gigantic mushroom hands, which he claps together like rocks, the visual transformation stops there. In fact, what makes the scene unsettling is not the characters’ radical physical mutation into something else, but a more satisfied version of their human selves. Their pleasure is delusional, and nightmarish (as we see the scene through Murai’s eyes)—an odd cacophonous laughter echoes as Mami happily munches on a mushroom, Yoshida claps over and over, and Akiko calls out “Sensei! Sensei!” in an increasingly rapid succession of cuts. But in the end, the physical retention of their human body, mostly unharmed, arguably leads to identification with the characters more than it wedges a divide. In that sense, the permission to enjoy objectification— the “superiority over the freak”—is not created within the visual field. Rather, mushrooms are the looked-at object from which the viewer derives aesthetic enjoyment. To think of the mushrooms merely serving as symbol or allegory for the bomb would also do an injustice to the film’s focus on the muscular presence of mushrooms, to the way it says: pay attention to them. I would also argue that the process of spectatorship—that is, the way viewers themselves engage with the screen—complicates an understanding of Matango as only allegory. Examining the ways Japan’s postwar condition was frequently articulated through a nationalized discourse of the physical body, Yoshikuni Igarashi writes: Changing bodily images attest to the rapid transformation of Japan from the 1950s to the 1960s. In the 1950s, monstrous bodies reminded Japan of its past destruction. In 1964, the Olympics presented healthy, aesthetically pleasing bodies to metonymically represent the nation and its past. In 1954, Godzilla was awakened from its eternal sleep by American nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll and attacked Tokyo. The monster was the abject object of 126 history—the pre-1945 memories haunting postwar Japan—that many Japanese could not reconcile. Its monstrosity signaled the loss that could not be comprehended or atoned for. Memory returned to the city of Tokyo as a monstrous body, mercilessly destroying what had been reconstructed since the war. The monster also embodied the fear of nuclear warfare in the minds of Japanese people, fear reawakened by American nuclear testing. The monster’s destruction of downtown Tokyo invoked the memories of nuclear destruction in August 1945. However, even the awesome monstrosity of Godzilla was reduced to a benign cultural sign in the prosperity of 1960s Japan. (154) If we follow the historical trajectory Igarashi lays out for us, monstrosity dominated the visual culture of 1950s Japan, through which memories of war transited, while the 1960s saw the media’s investment in a nationalized articulation of a healthy, sanitized, athletic body, one that seemed to represent the “recovered,” prospering nation. Moreover, the literal sanitation of Tokyo in preparation for the 1964 Olympics was rhetoricized through figurative discourses of sanitation. This is perhaps most pronounced by the Japanese government and mainstream media’s investment in of the image of the teenage boy selected to be the Olympic torch bearer, nineteen-year-old Sakai Yoshinori, who had been born on August 6, 1945, the day Hiroshima was bombed (Igarashi 154). Drawing a straight line between the atomic bomb and the Olympic fire that marked a new beginning, the Asahi Shinbun newspaper, for example, reported in detail Sakai’s athletic body, aestheticizing the genbakkuko (“atom boy”) (Igarashi 155). In a postwar context in which there was concerted effort on the part of the Japanese government to erase the troubling memories of war and to present itself as a reborn nation, Matango pollutes the image of the aestheticized, healthy body with memories of war, the militarism of the atomic cloud, and fears of nuclear violence. Rather than the gorilla-whale-reptile awoken from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, however—onto which, scholars like Tanaka Yuki, Chon Noriega, and Susan Sontag suggest symbolic meanings of atomic 127 war or geopolitical relations were inscribed—Matango offers a horror that looks inward at the monstrosity of human sovereignty, offering both affective means for cathartic engagement and imaginative fantasy of a more-than-human existence through mushrooms. A Brief Introduction to Shirakawa Marina’s Kinokonga The last part of this chapter turns its attention to another tale of mushroom horror, one that looks, not to the magic mushroom, but to the parasitic mushroom’s abilities to transform human body and mind through invasion. The plot of the manga is as follows: Aoki, a young boy in grade school, twists his ankle on a school hiking trip one day, and must stay overnight in a cabin in the woods. His teacher, Sada-sensei, is with him, and that night, the two of them witness the crashlanding of a UFO. Scientists come to the site to investigate, and our protagonists soon suspect aliens have arrived on Earth; there is no public announcement, nor authorities present, however, to confirm the UFO’s appearance. Before long, the scientific research team mysteriously disappears, followed by animals, then humans. In their wake, mushrooms sprout from the ground. Saved by quarantine (into which they were forced after exposure to cosmic rays), Aoki-shonen and Sadasensei dig up the mushrooms to find the decomposing bodies of the disappeared beneath the ground. Wrapped in fungal threads like a mycelial cocoon, from their backs or their heads, a single, fruiting body of the alien fungus grows. Robbed of human desire, the mushroom zombies move catatonically, without discernible purpose. Eventually, all creatures become entirely mushroom. An occult piece of science-fiction horror created by Shirakawa Marina (1944-2000), Kinokonga is relatively little known. In fact, little is known about the artist himself, other than that he was an independent researcher of yokai (ghosts) and a prolific artist of pulpy, horror comics from the 1970s and 1980s. Kinokonga appears to be one of his most well-known works, alongside Donzuru Enban (Booming Saucer) (1978), about a devastating takeover of human civilization by extraterrestrial 128 cockroaches. While scarce attention has been given to his work in popular or scholarly criticism, there has nonetheless been a resurgent interest in Kinokonga in recent years, with a special reprint published in QJ Manga (1998), and, more recently, published in the anthology Kinoko manga meisakusen (Masterpieces of Mushroom Manga) (2016), edited by Iizawa Kotaro. In addition to deriving inspiration from Honda’s Matango, online forums published by readers suggest that Kinokonga’s other influences include Sato Hajime’s science-fiction film Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968), about blobby alien creatures that attack survivors of a plane crash and turn them into vampires and Seibutsu Toshi (Bio City) by Moroshoshi Daijiro (1974), a short manga about a strange phenomenon that fuses metals and living organisms together and that received the 1974 Tezuka Award. I would also add that Kinokonga may be a nod to a scene of mushroom-horror from the manga Drifting Classroom by Umezz Kazuo (also known as the “godfather of horror manga”), serialized in Weekly Shonen Sunday from 1972-1974. Umezz’s story is an epic post-apocalyptic tale about a group of grade school students who must survive together after their classroom is transported to a future wasteland; in this dystopic world, they must contend with the loss of human control and order, the scarcity of food, enormous mutant insects, and catastrophically volatile weather. In one hopeful moment of the story, the children find a means to grow vegetables—but after a giant flash flood, their vegetables die, leaving knobby mushrooms with protruding pustules in their stead (see fig. 66). As in Matango, the children refrain from them, but as their hunger gives way, they submit to eating them, after which they morph into hyper-functional humanoid creatures from the even-more-distant-future with bird feet. It is easy to discern how Kinokonga may be inspired by Matango. Visually, Kinokonga’s mushroom monsters closely resemble Matango’s mushroom cloud humanoids. By the end of the story, every living animal being has turned into what appear to be bipedal creatures with multiple fruiting bodies sprouting from the surface of their skin (see fig. 67). Thematically, Kinokonga also 129 concerns itself with the monstrosity of the mushroom that seems to resist and persist within a “post” atomic world. The title, “Kinokonga,” is a portmonteau of “kinoko” (“mushroom”) and King Kong, presenting the fungus as a kind of giant monster capable of bringing widespread destruction, like King Kong, or Godzilla. The title also seems to play on the wordplays offered by Honda’s Godzilla and Matango: the original Japanese name “Gojira” is a portmanteau for “gorilla” and “kujira” (“whale”); it is also possible that the title’s invocation of dance, “conga,” plays on the “tango” of “Matango.”73 Like Matango, irradiated mushrooms (this time, the radiation’s source is cosmic rays) begin to infect the story’s characters one by one, like an epidemic. Rather than focusing on the pleasures of eating mushrooms, however, or the thrills of hallucinating drug trips, Kinokonga’s emphasis is on the violent potential of fungi to control and to colonize other living beings. If the humanist thread of Matango was its portrayal of the weak human will (and an underlying caution to the audience against selfishness), in Kinokonga there is little human agency, which cannot withstand the takeover of the fungus, nor save itself from the planet’s natural processes of decomposition and renewal. By the end of the story, everyone, including the protagonist, is recycled back into the earth in order to make space for new vegetal growth. Considering Kinokonga’s key images in relation to Matango, as well as works by Tezuka Osamu and Nakazawa Keiji, I argue that the work depicts horrifying images of fungal terror to cope with nuclear devastation by picturing planetary survival after the Anthropocene. Depicting War, Surviving Radiation, and the Violence of Fungal Invasion Kinokonga’s major departure from Matango concerns the optics of its narrative. That is, the monstrosity of the fungus, and its capacity for violence, are explicitly depicted as a matter of body 73 Matango is not a portmanteau but seems to be derived from “Mamadango,” a mushroom eaten in the Tōhoku region, according to an online forum (“Matango no gogen ‘mamatango'). 130 horror. This is established in the early moments of the story, when the scientific research team proceeds with its investigation of the spaceship. Members of the team soon drop inexplicably dead. From a cabin in the nearby mountains (where Aoki had stayed overnight when injured), an old man peers out from the window to see blue and white flames from the direction of the UFO’s landing. From the flames, hazy figures approach—upon getting closer to the cabin, we see an unsettling scene. Mycelial cord-like threads weave in and out of the flesh of what recognizably was formerly a human body, snaking through orifices, through nostrils and eye sockets, exposing muscle sinew (see fig. 68).74 A fruiting mushroom grows from their bodies. In effect, their human forms have become substance for soil, a habitat for the fungus to take root. Human skin is no longer intact but exposes interior muscle and the outlines of the skeleton beneath. Their eyes are simplified pupils, blank and white. It is a body decomposed, or decomposing, exposed from the inside, in the process of becoming something else. This is not a “senseless, formless surging,” or a “teeming with life” of the kind Kolnai discusses; the aesthetics of this horror is not one of bubbling fecundity, but a visceral horror if another kind derived from the imagination of what the human body would look like in fungal decay. Piercing the body through multiple entryways, the image stirs up the uncomfortable feeling that our conceptions of bodily control are an illusion. No longer bounded by clean contours, violently altered, the zombies seem—as Linda Williams writes of body horror films—to “designate excesses we wish to exclude” through “sensations that are on the edge of respectable” (2). Drawing inspiration from the “caterpillar fungus” or “zombie ant,” which is not a fungus or insect alone, but a process in which a fungus invades an insect, paralyzes its movements, and grows a fruiting body from its back, the comic calls attention to the reality that—rather than discrete entities with fungi as our others—we are already materially constituted with and by them. Fungi, along with bacteria, live 74 Translations of Kinokonga are my own. 131 within our skin, lungs, oral cavities, and guts, where they help metabolize sugars; they also thrive invasively on our bodies in the form of athlete’s foot or ringworm. As Lawrence Millman writes, “Just as we like to eat fungi, certain fungi like to eat us, or at least parts of us” (xi). Though we have yet to be implicated in invasive relation with the caterpillar fungus or zombie ant, fruiting mushrooms have been found in the bodies of humans that have been immunocompromised, or otherwise are undergoing decay. Moreover, we are in assemblage with the caterpillar fungus in other ways: they are commonly eaten by humans, particularly in Eastern medicine, known to be a remedy for liver cancer or even an aphrodisiac. Turning the fungus into something that eats us at the same time that we eat it, Kinokonga’s terrible images of bodily horror visually undoes the human as the subject or doer: the one who eats, the one who looks at the object seen and eaten, eliciting a visceral response of repulsion to show the vulnerability of the human body that is constantly in flux. The horror of this zombification increases as the parasite infects more and more characters in the story, and more characters we had been introduced to, including the old man from the cabin. Upon escaping isolation, Aoki and Sada-sensei discover several mushrooms growing in a ring where the UFO had previously been. Without anyone to explain this odd occurrence, they decide to visit the cabin where the old man had lived. Once there, they see nothing but an enormous mushroom sprouting from the attic. Finding it strange, Aoki uproots the mushroom, revealing the body of the decomposing old man encased in fungus. Returning to the UFO site to dig up the other mushrooms, they are horrified to confirm what they had been dreading: more bodies, wrapped in mycelium (see fig. 69). In Kinokonga, there is a direct link made between the atomic bomb and the mushrooms from outer space: the head scientist in charge of leading the investigation believes, for example, that the spaceship’s aliens possess a power “far greater than all of our military weapons combined,” and that for them, “destroying humankind would be a piece of cake” (see fig. 70). As he tells Aoki this, a 132 mushroom cloud is conjured in Aoki’s mind. Though a familiar image of mass destruction, it nonetheless seems to mark a limit within imagination or signification—for, when the aliens attack, the source of annihilation is not the nuclear bomb, but fungal spores that have already dispersed and invaded, unbeknownst to them. Like radiation, the fungus simultaneously vanishes people from perceptible ground yet violently manifests its effects on their bodies. Contrary to the scientist’s beliefs, moreover, it becomes clear by the end that the violence done is not due to the aliens’ intent to harm, but rather, to a random event: destructive fungal spores had been hovering in meteor shards for centuries in outer space, arriving by chance via the aliens’ spaceship during their unexpected crash-landing. In this way, fears of contamination, along with anxieties of living in a nuclear age, appear to be displaced onto the fungus; the comic presents for us a story world in which the greatest threat to humankind is not our military weapons, but a force greater, beyond our control, more contingent and violent than we can imagine. As in Matango, there is a way that Kinokonga’s terrifying bodies serve to reinforce discriminatory attitudes about the effects of radiation. The fungal zombies are a visual spectacle that puts the reader in a privileged position of power over what she sees on the page, a position that, recalling Sontag’s words, provides a “sense of superiority over the freak conjoined in varying proportions with the titillation of fear and aversion,” which “makes it possible for moral scruples to be lifted, for cruelty to be enjoyed.” As with the keloid-like scars or skin mutations of the characters of Matango, the bodily transformation into the monstrous “freak” involves images that evoke violent effects experienced by survivors of the atomic bombings. One cannot help but feel that, if the comic is grappling with the specific fear of injury or damage by radiation, there is an ostracization or even trivialization at work in its gaze, perhaps especially because it is rendered through a comic medium, which is closely associated with fantasy or child-like play. At the same time, Kinokonga’s rendering of exposed bodies, designed to scare and to fascinate, are also part of a different visual and cultural 133 tradition than the one Sontag writes about and from. In particular, it is possible to understand Kinokonga’s zombie bodies deliberately evoking Nakazawa Keiji’s depictions of surviving the atomic bomb, most notably in his autobiographical novel Barefoot Gen, and the non-fiction short story on which it is based, I Saw It, about the creator’s own experiences surviving Hiroshima. There are several moments in Kinokonga that are reminiscent of moments in Barefoot Gen, including the scene in which Aoki returns to his home after fungal invasion has begun to find three spherical mushrooms growing in the basement under the floorboards, which turn out to be his mother, father, and sister Harue; the moment is suggestive of a scene in which Gen comes home to find his father, sister, and little brother trapped beneath the wooden planks of his collapsed home (see fig. 71). The zombie imagery itself is also evocative of Nakazawa’s work. I Saw It and Barefoot Gen depict Hiroshima’s horrific events based on the terrible sights Nakazawa himself saw that day and the days afterward; stating “everyone had turned into monsters,” Nakazawa famously draws graphic lines that depict burned skin melting from people’s bodies, their hands limply drawn in front of them like classic yokai or ghosts, their eyes vacant (see fig. 72) (I Saw It). In this way, Nakazawa’s autobiographical works articulate his traumatic experiences through idioms familiar to science-fiction. As Hillary Chute puts it: I Saw It’s mode of witnessing makes us take stock of the gross straight-forwardness we might associate with science-fiction—a booming Japanese genre in the era of censorship—as a genre of reality (“everybody’s turned into monsters”). The grotesque clarity and directness of the comic book’s images, which Nakazawa, who witnessed the fallout of Hiroshima with his own eyes, reconstructs for us here in a popular format, are an undeniable part of what makes I Saw It so powerful. The disjuncture, or lack of disjuncture, between the ‘exaggerated’ rendering in the story—much of which is conventional to manga—and the real, decimating 134 violence of the bomb throws into even greater proportion the catastrophe of ‘the real’ in this narrative. (127) Chute’s comments shed light on the ways the violent atrocity of the bomb was rendered through the “exaggerated” comics form, and through words and images typically ascribed to “fiction” or “fantasy,” gets at the unrepresentable events of Hiroshima and of Nakazawa’s experiences of survival; it is this gap that makes “the real” of I Saw It so powerful. Drawn in “characteristic” manga style, with large eyes and animated or plastic bodies, Barefoot Gen is simultaneously plastic and terrifying for the actuality of the violence it invites us to imagine. It is arguably through the comic medium’s exaggeration (that is, in its decidedly un-mimetic or indexical quality) that Nakazawa facilitates for the reader a certain kind of engagement with the violence of that day, even as, or precisely because, the discursive lines alert the reader that these are only impressions of the actual lived nightmare. Cartoon lines, juxtaposed with the unimaginable, give the reader a sense of Nakazawa’s experience, even as one cannot truly know it. His work shows the urgency of telling and passing on despite the impossibility of straightforward representation when it comes to trauma, and is indispensable for teaching the effects of the nuclear bomb in history. Kinokonga is not a survivor’s story, nor a piece of non-fiction. It is science-fiction, and I am not suggesting a direct comparison in their relationship to the bombings be made. What is pertinent, however, is that in within its genre, Kinokonga alludes to the images conveyed in I Saw It and Barefoot Gen, and by doing so, shows how Nakazawa’s manga affected and transformed the literary and visual arts in a profound way, perhaps especially because of their contentious position within postwar Japanese society. Which is to say, Nakazawa’s works were not readily accepted at the time of their making; his graphic depictions, and the topic they broached, were widely considered as what Williams describes at the “edge of respectability.” Though he had begun drawing his experiences of Hiroshima in the 1960s, his manga were thought to be “so politically radical that he had to publish 135 them in an ‘adult’— meaning ‘erotic’—magazine” (Chute 116). His early fictional story, “Pelted by Black Rain” (finished in 1966) was rejected by major publishers until 1968, when men’s magazine Manga Punch decided to publish it; even then, however, the editor expressed concerns that the CIA would come after him and Nakazawa (Chute 116). As Chute states, Nakazawa’s comics “opened up a significant cultural and aesthetic field of practice” (118). In sum, I would suggest there is undoubtedly a spectacular depiction of disaster in Kinokonga that invites the reader to oscillate between fear and fascination without actually coming into contact with danger. At the same time, by considering its invocation of Nakazawa’s aesthetic field of practice—through the visualization of exposed bodies depicted in graphic form, and which can never truly represent the horror but nonetheless touches upon it on an emotional register—we can understand how science-fiction and non-fiction were closely in contact with one another when it came to visually grappling with the atomic bomb. In this way, Kinokonga engages images of the atomic experience then considered taboo, bringing it to cultural attention through the genre of science-fiction as a means for looking back at the past as well as forward to an ecologically sustainable future. Eco-visions of Decentered Humanity In the aforementioned scene in which Aoki returns home to find his family has turned into mushrooms, Aoki sets his house on fire, believing he is putting his family out of his misery (“Surely, they wouldn’t want to live like this!” he exclaims to himself). In tears, he watches the house burn. Moments later, however, his father, mother, and Harue’s zombie forms appear before him, staring (see fig. 73). While in Gen’s tale, the scene was necessarily marked by human pathos and by the painful goodbye he was forced to say to his family as he watched his house burn, Aoki’s return home is frightening for its voidance of such pathos. Already dying, decomposing, Aoki’s family appears to him as another life form between life and death. The horror largely lies not in witnessing 136 their last moments on earth, or saying goodbye, but in the resurgence of their activity as living beings we do not recognize as our own. Aoki had burned his house believing he knew what human dignity would want, but the appearance of his family’s bodies walking toward him counteracts this assumption; they show another, non-human will to live. The horror of the previous pages thus transforms into even greater horror, in that those closest to our protagonist have become something drastically unfamiliar in form, markedly absent of human faculties. Their vacant expressions and unidentifiable motive for nonetheless surviving on as mushroom create this morbidly fascinating effect. This lack of human pathos—of an encounter with a life form illegible to us—is in direct contrast to Gen, but also to another story about a mold or bacteria (fungi’s kin) in a faraway land, and that is an episode from Tezuka Osamu’s Mighty Atom (also known as “Astro Boy”) series, titled “Living Mold From Outer Space” (exact year unidentified). In Tezuka’s story, a U.S. spaceship sent to Mars encounters a mysterious bacteria that infects the entire crew, causing a “disaster of unthinkable proportions.” After the spaceship returns and lands on an “uninhabited” island in the Pacific, Mighty Atom, the kind-hearted boy-robot protagonist, is deployed by the American government to go to the island for reconnaissance. The island is now covered in fungal forms and alien vegetation, which turn out to be tiny alien creatures in the form of mold spores (see fig. 74). To eradicate further contamination, the U.S. government decides to drop a hydrogen bomb, intending to evaporate the entire island. But Atom realizes they are benign, and in a heroic effort, saves the aliens by transporting each and every microbe to a spaceship before the bomb explodes. In gratitude, the plant-aliens grant Atom a wish, and he wishes for robot rights. Since planetary concerns (and the effects of war on them) are expressed through the sci-fi imaginings of fungal life from outer space, there are many resonances between Kinokonga and “Living Mold.” The importance of microphenomenal plant life is contrasted with the readiness of 137 government to deploy nuclear weapons, completely disregarding the wellness of both human and non-human lives. The uncontrollable overgrowth of microbial vegetation is visually juxtaposed with a giant mushroom cloud that overtakes a whole page (see figs. 37 & 74). The reference to the South Pacific tests is also made explicit in the U.S. government’s decision to “nuke” the entire “uninhabited” island, reminding us of the many islands that evaporated entirely in Enewetak Atoll. Far from being uninhabited, the island Atom visits reveals the importance of ecological life and serves as a critique of the self-serving political actions of government. True to his kind-hearted, boyrobot form, Atom’s story is a humanist one that shows the plants, bacteria, and mold to be peaceloving creatures worth saving. The value, in other words, of “life” is a humanist one, and the comic is constructed on the utopic capacity of technology (Astro Boy) to save the world from greed and war. By contrast, there is no discernible sentience to the aliens nor to the mushrooms of Kinokonga, which are only accessible, in large part, through the speculative stories we attribute to them. Nor are they kind or peace-loving; inexplicably violent, the mushrooms proliferate through the destruction they cause. This dislocation of the human, and human values, from the center of Kinokonga’s narrative is shockingly revealed when we realize no human is spared, including our main protagonist, Aoki. One of the story’s most memorable scenes depicts Aoki in the moment of realization that he too, will soon become mushroom. He initially protests, but ultimately resigns, even finding consolation in the possibilities of life after he is gone (see fig. 75): sitting alone on a swing, he murmurs, “Sooner or later I’ll be a mushroom, too…and if everyone turns into mushrooms, the world will be full of plants…if the whole world is full of plants, there would be no more war, and no more pollution, either.” On the accompanying page, the promise of this possibility is already taking place, as plants begin to germinate in the rain (see fig 76). As it turns out, the fungi had been waiting for centuries to one day be dispersed onto the Earth and renew the planet; invading human bodies enabled the fungi 138 in space to communicate with Earth so they could effectively scatter their spores to grow. The spores, therefore, have a dispersed, yet networked intelligence unseen and undetected by humankind. Most importantly, when Aoki turns completely mushroom, our story does not end—the narration continues, telling us about a new life cycle of plant growth, and about a mushroom wearing an eyepatch (Aoki, who moments ago was telling us his story), seen swinging peacefully in the wind (see fig. 77). We realize that the narrator, whom we had believed to be the focus of the story, perhaps had not even been Aoki all along, or at least that there had been another, non-human one beside him—reinforcing the sense that mushrooms survive on in space and in time, far beyond the Anthropocene. The fungus, in the end, is both itself the source of utter annihilation and also a necessary process of planetary survival. Like “Living Mold,” a scene depicts the contrast between atomic weaponry and fungal forms visually: after Aoki’s transformation, a gigantic mushroom cloud takes over an entire wordless spread. But depicted on the following spread are not anthropomorphized microbial creatures but a wordless spread of multiple raindrops, shaped like mushrooms; beneath them are the bodies of decaying animals, of human skeletons being recycled back into the Earth (see figs. 78 & 79). This contrast of images, encompassing both the symbolic, totemic mushroom cloud and the return of human life to fungi, captures the power of the mushroom in Kinokonga’s story more broadly. The story thus shows the extraordinary resilience of the mushroom in devastated environments, able to withstand even our most horrifying of military weapons (and wreak more havoc than they do)—as well as its singular capacity to create space for new growth within the wreckage. As Millman writes, fungi are “excellent ecologists,” infecting and decomposing dead animal and plant matter in order to make space for new growth: Were it not for the recycling abilities of fungi, [older trees would] be perpetually standing corpses, and the soil wouldn’t get the nutrients on which most plants depend. Eventually, 139 there would be very few plants, as well as virtually none of the organisms that depends on plants for their own nutrients. Our planet would end up even more beleaguered than it already is. (xi) It is in this sense, too, that Anna Tsing writes of the matsutake as a “companion-species” in Donna Haraway’s terms—but as she aptly reminds us, “fungi are not always benign in their interspecies associations” (“Unruly Edges” 143). The unexplained destructive force of Kinokonga’s mushrooms suggests the inability of the human subject to successfully incorporate or assimilate fungal matter into our normative modes of logic; they therefore are, in the words of Meeker and Szabari, “beings that cannot be fully incorporated into our frameworks for understanding or recognizing life, agency, and subjectivity, they oscillate between soliciting our interest and refusing to ratify our concerns” (Radical Botany 7). Following their thought, Kinokonga’s parasitic fungi reveal the mushroom’s violent indifference to human interest, even as they dramatically affect our reality. They capture the horror and delight born from this radical difference and excite our speculative imagination precisely because of it. Meeker and Szabari write: “Plants make available to our imagination a life that continues without humans or renders the human unidentifiable to itself. Throughout, vegetality becomes a propulsive force, as humans are moved by anxiety about our own survival, a desire for companionship, and both delight in and horror at our own insignificance” (Radical Botany 7). Dislocating the human narrator and shifting human subjectivity to one co-constituted by our violent fungal companions, Kinokonga allows us to fear and delight in our own significance, and to conceive, or imaginatively speculate about, what a post-human subjectivity might mean for ecological sustainability. 140 Speculative Mushrooms In addition to the horrific images of bodily transformation, there is an animism to the mushrooms of Kinokonga that feeds into the imaginative fantasy of becoming-mushroom. In the story, mushrooms are an object of tremendous speculation; at once familiar and yet entirely alien, the comic plays on the ways mushrooms have inspired stories of all kinds, since long ago. For example, folded within the pages of Kinokonga are tangential interludes into kinoko no kaidan (“mushroom ghost tales”) dating from premodern times. Included among them is a story from the Chinese text Youyang zazu (9th century) about a mysterious mushroom man who emerges from a deep well; the kyōgen comic play Kusabira (14th century) about a man’s quest to exorcise invasive mushrooms from his home; and the myth that the cause of haiku poet Matsuo Bashō’s (1644–1694) death was mushroom poisoning, after which a giant mushroom grew from beneath his deathbed. Along with the rumor about Basho is also a story about an Edo samurai named Ota Dokan, whose castle sprouted “snow-white mushrooms like a woman’s thigh,” and was later murdered in his bathtub (Masterpieces of Mushroom Manga 373). Noting mushrooms have inspired supernatural tales throughout Asian history, these vignettes show that our experiences with mushrooms are closely bound to our stories about them. These folktales are depicted visually with much speculative allure. In the spread that tells of Matsuo Basho, for example, is a taxonomic illustration of different mushrooms, from the dotted caps of the Amanita Muscaria to the floral forms of the maitake and the shell-like pyramid of the artist conk (see fig. 80). Lush in their shapes, their quality of play is accentuated in particular in English by the whimsical names mushrooms are given: Poisonous shaggy scaly cap, dog stinkhorn, puffball mushrooms, wooly chanterelle, barometer earthstar, to name a few. Lusciously drawn, these forms are familiar to us—after all, they are all identified by name—but they highlight the mushroom’s exciting strangeness, mimicking or mirroring other pages in the work that illustrate the 141 imagined forms of the aliens that have arrived on the UFO (visions of jelly-fish like insects and goblins conjured in Aoki’s mind when he hears about the aliens) (see figs. 81 and 82). The cartoon renderings of these fungal and alien forms display the world of the mushroom as a “space of play and plasmatic possibility” of the kind that Scott Bukatman ascribes to American comic Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1). Because of their flexible, abstract line, Bukatman writes that these cartoons “are filled with tales of playful disobedience in otherworldly realms,” and that these “illogics” enable us to escape the rigor of day-to-day logic, to counter “established habits of mind” (1). On the comic page, we are often free to explore the forms displayed before us at our leisure, inviting us to conjure our own speculative fantasies in participation with the narrative. While the comic style of Kinokonga is rather orderly—that is, it doesn’t play reflexively with its frame in the ways Bukatman identifies in Little Nemo—the transmogrifying bodies of the human-fungus zombies, and the visualization of the ordinary and alien within the mushroom, are served by the storytelling modes of the comic, which does not distinguish on its own between “real” or “illusory” objects but remains fluid across its images. Perhaps it is also in this way that the mushroom is monstrous. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes that the monster is a liminal figure “not bound by classificatory structurations, least of all one as messy and inadequate as time,” and that they serve to work against a narrative of progress; he writes, “The monster haunts; it does not simply bring past and present together, but destroys the boundary that demanded their twinned foreclosure” (ix-x). We could say the same for the mushroom, which does not merely bring past and present together, and can hardly be thought in logical or teleological movement; as such, past and present speculation weaves itself in and out of Kinokonga’s story. Or, as Iizawa writes, mushrooms bridge “this world” and “that world,” (which in Japanese connotes the realms of life and death) and it is this strange liminality that has excited the mushroom’s frequent appearance in literature and art (“Kinoko bungaku no hō e”). Mushrooms are entirely ordinary, vivid 142 to our perception, and yet seemingly, extraordinarily, elsewhere. They exist at the limits of what we perceive, know, and understand, and yet they are undeniably part of our present, acting quietly in ways that radically transform our material reality. Like a literary hallucination or dream (or nightmare), they take us to other worlds. The speculative aspect of mushrooms is conveyed in Kinokonga through one more cultural symbol that links fungi and nuclear weapons, and that is the UFO. Notably, the story opens with an image of a flying saucer, and an introduction to the Unidentified Flying Object. Following this image is a series of eyewitness accounts of UFO sightings that all took place in American history. This includes that of American pilot Kenneth Arnold, who witnessed glittering objects over the Cascade Mountains; George Adamski, who claimed he rode on a saucer with Venusians from Venus; and Captain Thomas Mantell, whose plane was found scattered about after he reported seeing a UFO approaching his aircraft in Kentucky in 1948. It also includes a note about UFO sightings increasing in Japan by the year, including an incident in 1975 (the year prior to the comic’s release), about a man in Hokkaido who was allegedly abducted by dwarf aliens and taken to the moon in a flying saucer. UFOs are pertinent to our discussion because they reveal some of the same Cold War entanglements I have been exploring through mushrooms throughout this project. As Kinokonga’s opening suggests, UFOs have been sighted with frequency since the late 1940s, in the U.S. and in other parts of the world, often by figures of authority or military. As this past year’s declassification of government documents on UFOs (and more recently, whistleblower and former intelligence officer David Grusch’s hearing on Unidentified Anamolous Phenomena) attest, UFOs have been a subject of investigation, and considered a top-secret matter of national security, since the end of WWII (FBI.gov). Perhaps it is no coincidence that mushrooms are also linked to UFOs within the global imaginary. Specifically, there are types of mushrooms that grow in rings, like the kind depicted in Kinokonga. Effected by a fungus that grows outward from a central point, the fungus drains 143 nutrients from the soil from the center-out, creating what scientists call a “necrotic zone” in the middle. Once the fungus has absorbed enough nutrients, it creates a ring of mushrooms around this “dead” center. Before the Cold War, this pattern was believed to be caused by the activities of witches or fairies (hence earning the name “fairy ring”), but in recent years, they are often mistaken (in the U.S. and Japan) to be evidence of UFO landings. Curiously, some parasitic molds also create rings in grass, and are occasionally mistaken for UFO landings. According to Millman, because one such species of domestic mold (Trichoderma longibrachiatum) is “highly resistant to antimicrobial chemicals, scientists in the Soviet Union used to joke that if their country ran out of nuclear weapons, they would simply drop a T. longibrachiatum bomb on the United States” (105). In other words, there is a strange circulation of meanings that traverse the atomic bomb, mushrooms, and UFOs, with mushrooms and UFOs seeming to capture a variety of political and aesthetic concerns about the nuclear bomb. Weaving in and out of Japanese and American popular culture, modern science, and Cold War politics, UFOs seem to simultaneously be an object of the occult and an object of serious “foreign” threat, whether from outer space or from Earth, where the development of other nations’ military weapons is concerned. In a move to rationally explain the phenomenon of UFOs, Carl Jung argues that UFOs are a manifestation of collective fear of earthly catastrophe. As humankind’s population grows and living space becomes more and more limited, he writes, there is an increased anxiety about survival that cannot be easily understood or quelled. While such anxieties are not new, they were explained in the premodern era through folktales or other stories, but in our hyper-rational modernity, such stories no longer have authority.75 These anxieties are therefore projected onto the figure of aliens and UFOs. According to Jung, “from a fear whose cause is far from being fully understood and is 75 Jung writes: “the widespread fantasy about the destruction of the world at the end of the first millennium was metaphysical in origin and needed no UFOs in order to appear rational” (13). 144 therefore not conscious, there arise explanatory projections which purport to find the cause in all manner of secondary phenomena, however unsuitable” (12-13). The UFO, therefore, is a conscious projection of that which cannot be consciously be understood. Like Freud, Jung draws a connection, though less explicitly, between the UFO and the mushroom, in their capacities as signs or manifestations of this unconscious. He writes: The round bodies in particular are figures such as the unconscious produces in dreams, visions, etc. In the latter case they are to be regarded as symbols representing, in visual form, some thought that was not thought consciously, but is merely potentially present in the unconscious, in invisible form, and attains visibility only through the process of becoming conscious. The visible form, however, expresses the meaning of the unconscious content only approximately. In practice the meaning has to be completed by amplificatory interpretation. (14) Like the dream-wish growing up, or a mushroom out of its mycelium (Freud), the mushroom’s round, visible body provides an anchor within consciousness through which to make sense of some of the feelings awakened through the unconscious. While it does not capture this anxiety, or fear, or the traumas of nuclear war, in full, it provides a means for investigation, or speculation.77 If we understand Kinokonga as an engagement with the symbols and images of war, the radicality of the manga is especially pronounced in the context of 1970s Japan. Writing about this period Igarashi describes the national discourse of Japan’s extraordinary recovery encapsulated in EXPO 70, a world fair that celebrated “Development and Harmony of the Human Race” that took place in Osaka in 1970. He writes: Development in EXPO 70 appeared to be a linear progression away from painful memories of the war. By the late 1960s, bright images of progress overshadowed the ghost of the war 77 Freud also writes about the truthful nature of speculation; see “The Unconscious.” 145 in Japanese society. The success of the Tokyo Olympics and the nation’s ensuing economic growth promoted a linear image of history that reduced the war to nothing more than a necessary condition for Japan’s present day prosperity. The hardship and starvation suffered by Japanese people during and immediately after the war became an integral part of the narrative that everyone knew had a happy ending. (Igarashi 165) The same way that Nakazawa’s “monsters” are a rejection of the burial of the ghosts of war, we might say Kinokonga’s mushroom bodies allowed readers (who both survived the war and did not) to contend with war’s large-scale violence through its mushroom narrative. As Chon Noriega describes of Godzilla, the Japanese monster facilitates a cathartic working-through of feelings by way of transference and through entertainment: “The same way that the analysand transfers onto the analyst feelings surrounding an original trauma that would be challenging to work outright, Godzilla films exhibit this compulsion to repeat a traumatic event in symbolic narrative” (68). The mushroom, which has a visible form even while its destructive activities are largely invisible, perhaps provides a compelling visual symbol for working through challenging memories of the past or anxieties about the future, at the same time as it reveals a vitality that can survive radiation. * * * Stating mushrooms open our curiosity (“the first requirement of collaborative survival in precarious times”) Anna Tsing writes (2): Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive. 146 Thinking through precarity changes social analysis. A precarious world is a world without teleology. Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible. (The Mushroom at the End of the World 20). By envisioning survival as something that necessarily involves the destruction of the human self, or a radical transformation of human existence as a whole, Matango and Kinokonga destabilize human subjectivity while providing a therapeutic means for contending with the seemingly inescapable threat of nuclear violence. We could say that, on the one hand, they offer a kind of catharsis for staying with the impossibility of escaping from our present condition. In them, mushrooms play a role as a key narrative and visual device for contending with nuclear war and unconscious anxieties, fears, and memories of lived trauma. Mushrooms propel the works forward by their sudden and pervasive growth and uncontrollable effects on the mind and body. In Matango, they are simultaneously an object of temptation (as food, and as drug) a constant threat with the potential to alter human existence through ingestion (causing hallucinogenic delusion from which the characters are unable to escape). In Kinokonga, they invade and contaminate the body from within, robbing its subjects of all desire. While their messages and overall aims differ, in both, mushrooms appear where humans disappear, signaling the end of human life as we know it and marking the beginning of something new. In doing so, they chart new pathways or trajectories, showing human life as only one species within the larger universe. They invite us to imagine, to the extent possible, a cosmic or planetary existence far beyond ourselves. As discussed in the Introduction, there is a prescient nature to stories. The radiation-resistant fungi of Japan’s postwar science-fiction arrived before the discovery of radiation-eating fungi at Chernobyl. But modern science is not the only means for observing and understanding that mushrooms seem to persist in devastated landscapes. Meeker and Szabari write: 147 What might it mean to think speculatively with plants today? Can we become plants in order to become critically postconscious, posthuman, feminist or queer subjects? If so, this process takes place through assemblages with fiction and other technologies of embodiment. Here we take up the plant as an engine of speculation that helps us negotiate our relationship to a late modernity that seems always on the verge of ending—a constant calamity that might nonetheless still enable a new way of living and being. (Radical Botany 27) The nightmarish narratives of Matango and Kinokonga unfold for us like a hallucinogenic dream. Psychoactive, they activate the speculative faculties of the mind by envisioning bodily transformation as a merger of human and fungus. It is this speculative vision of the future, here and now, that opens up other possibilities. Opening our curiosity so that we may better live with precarity, their visions point us toward some of the new ways we might live and be. 148 Coda: Remediating Fukushima After the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant meltdown that took place on March 11, 2011 in Japan’s Tōhoku region, the Japanese government issued a prohibition on the shipment of harvested wild mushrooms—not only from the exclusion zone, but within a wide radius across Japan. While other vegetable crops had generally been contaminated by radiation, and therefore also subject to shipping restrictions, mushrooms in particular had absorbed an exceptional amount of cesium through the soil.78 Six months after the triple-disaster, when the Japanese government first issued restrictions, photographer Homma Takashi decided to enter Fukushima’s forests to photograph what mushrooms he could find. Symphony is the collection of these photographs. Immediately following 3.11, a deluge of photographs—of ocean waves spilling onto Fukushima’s streets, of wreckage from collapsed houses, of cars floating downstream—circulated widely across the internet and in the news (see fig. 83). Among them, Symphony stands out as a different kind of visual record. For one, the photographs do not seem to depict destruction at all. Like American photographer Ed Ruscha’s photography book Colored People from 1972, from which Symphony draws inspiration, the collection disrupts our expectations of looking. Despite its provocative racist title, Ruscha’s Colored People features no people, or people of color, for that matter, anywhere. Instead, upon opening the book, the viewer finds images of various plants native to California, where Ruscha lives—cacti, succulents, palm trees—photographed against a background of solid white (see fig. 84). Just as Ruscha’s work sets us up to expect those images, only to disrupt that expectation, Homma calls attention to the way “Fukushima” has become a signifier, understood through normalized images of destruction. Seeming to deliberately provoke—and to deny—any 78 According to Yamada Toshihiro, a researcher of forest health at Tokyo University, this is in part because mushrooms eat and digest other irradiated matter, such as leaves and plant debris, leading to increased radiocesium over time. See also Yabe, “Local despair over Fukushima’s radioactive mushrooms.” 149 desire we may have to see such images, Symphony brings our awareness to how and why we look at images of disaster. Instead, Homma, like Ruscha’s California natives, photographs what could be described as portraits of mushrooms, simultaneously scientific study and intimate snapshot. The mushrooms are magnified so that we see their caps, gills, stems, and curves, the moisture or grime on their skins, the mycelia and dirt at their base (see figs. 85-92). Bringing with him a Geiger counter and a 1-meterlong piece of white paper, he uproots the mushrooms and photographs them on the spot, without additional lighting. The contamination of the mushrooms, which are depicted in their vivid colors and robust shapes, is undetectable to our “naked” eye. Juxtaposing a placename that has become a metonym for nuclear disaster with a visual abundance of radiant and radiating mushrooms, Symphony reveals the human positionality at the center of a concept like contamination, for the mushrooms show radiation is not a source of disaster or damage for them at all. If contamination is the state of polluting something, that is, to make or be made impure, for the mushroom, growth and decay are not distinguished but one and the same. Disrupting an idea of nature and culture—understood as a relation in which masterful humans do pollution onto a passive nature—the mushrooms of Symphony suggest the possibility of a futurity radically different from our own. On the one hand, Homma, too, like Takashi Murakami discussed in Chapter 2, plays with the hegemonic process of substitution that occurs in the mushroom cloud. He makes us aware of the ways we have become accustomed to seeing “Fukushima,” by invoking “Hiroshima,” or at least the way “Hiroshima,” “Nagasaki,” and “nuclear disaster” have come to be represented by substituting the mushroom cloud for its event. Violence is absent; the mushrooms of Symphony do not tell of the lives lost or missing after the disasters; it does not tell of damage, at all. In fact, the images are clean, contained, stripped of context like that great ethereal cloud over Nagasaki, subject to a scientific gaze. Because he has uprooted the mushrooms from their surrounding environment, 150 he is arguably performing an extractive act for the purposes of human image-making, in the instrumentalizing fashion humans have done in modernity, to observe it as a specimen, to create from them an image that can be reproduced, commodified, circulated within capitalist society.79 They are spectacles, and we are spectators on the other side of the frame. In works like Svetlana Alexeivich and Michael Marder’s Chernobyl Herbarium, or Shimpei Takeda’s Trace, which consist of photograms made using radiation from plants and dirt found at Chernobyl and Fukushima, respectively, the land and its vegetation are physical mediums that bear witness to a radically altered environment (see figs. 93 and 94). But Homma’s mushrooms do not in themselves materialize evidence of their irradiated nature. As Ursula Heise recently put it at a seminar for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, “They just look like any other mushroom” (July 12, 2023). To be certain, nothing distinguishes them from other mushrooms, and there is no apparent alarm conveyed. The question then becomes whether they are merely aesthetic object, a sanitized commodity like the mushroom cloud, or else what other purpose they might serve. What I propose is that Symphony creates a contact with mushrooms many would not be able to otherwise have, both because the contamination of the environment in which they are found poses health risks and because encountering so many mushrooms—or seeing them in magnified detail as through the camera—is not easily accessible to a widespread audience. These mushrooms come to us, not as an outside to modernity and its processes of extraction, circulation, and distribution, but bound to it, preserved for human vision in a way that nonetheless enlivens our understanding of what otherthan-human life looks like, pointing us toward possibilities that are not our own. The camera facilitates for us a magnification, a close-up vision of mushrooms otherwise unavailable to human visual perception. Its departure from the aestheticized mushroom cloud 79 Thanks very much to Ursula K. Heise for her comments on this section of my research at the 2023 ASLE biennial conference. 151 resides in the enlargement of the fungal organism in relation to us, the human viewer—an enlargement via the lens that allows us to encounter the curiosity of the lush fungal forms, opening to the world of the mushroom. If the mushroom cloud simultaneously rendered the atomic cloud sublime, grand but terrible—larger-than-life and limitless while also containing it within the visual field of the human spectator—Symphony’s mushrooms are microphenomena rendered macro—an earthly, contradictory sublime. In this sense, they undo the hierarchical logic through which the “atomic sublime” is constructed. Noting that normative notions of scale in Western modern philosophy often betray a colonialist, imperialist logic, Karen Barad writes: When the splitting of an atom, or more precisely, its tiny nucleus (a mere 10−15 meters in size, or one hundred thousand times smaller than the atom), destroys cities and remakes the geopolitical field on a global scale, how can anything like an ontological commitment to a line in the sand between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ continue to hold sway on our political imaginaries? (“No Small Matter” 108) Following anthropologist Joseph Masco, who asserts “we need to examine the effects of the bomb, not only at the level of the nation-state, but also at the level of the local ecosystem, the organism, and ultimately, the cell,” Barad suggests that we re-conceive of scale by paying attention to the smallest particles alongside larger-scale phenomena (qtd. in “No Small Matter” 109). The mushroom cloud, which frames the bomb as the ultimate producer of energy, and the culmination of modern capitalism’s technological and military prowess, undoubtedly relies on such a commitment to the micro and the macro, serving to justify government development of the bomb through a human exceptionalist instrumentalization of nature. We could say that in Homma’s photographs, mushrooms radiate their own fungal energy, an energy that has soaked up radiation, invisible to our vision, incorporating it into their own modes of growth and striving. Re-casting radiation as energy produced not through scales that uphold the nation-state and war but through the matter of the 152 fungus, Symphony reveals a macro within the micro, rendering us smaller in relation to their radiant insistence. The view of fungal life that is revealed to us is also one that mediates the mushrooms’ spectacular spontaneity. Coming across a mushroom in the woods is a matter of chance, and photographing them can be a difficult task due to their ephemerality. Like a flower, the mushroom pops up out of the ground’s surface to release spores and disappears nearly as quickly as it appears. Indeed, Symphony’s photographs were taken across multiple visits to the Fukushima. As Homma states in an interview with photography critic and “mushroom literature” researcher Iizawa Kotaro: an acquaintance had once contacted him to tell him there were several interesting mushrooms in the mountains of Dazaifu, but when he arrived two days later, they were nowhere to be found (Case Publishing). Extraordinarily contingent, haphazard, and unpredictable, the capturing of a mushroom by way of a photograph is to preserve it in the moment of its occurrence, to pass on the passing explosion to others, to hold onto what appears and disappears at the limits of our perception. An imprint of light on a life form once found in the contaminated forests of Fukushima, the photograph re-presents the mushroom to us in all its physicality. It is in this relationship to indexing the impermanent that Homma likens mushrooms to photography itself. In another interview, he remarks, “collecting mushrooms is like taking a snapshot of a moment—neither act offers a second chance” (Canadian Centre for Architecture). While they may not capture the horrors of the very real destruction caused by 3.11, nor represent damage in the ways we have come to expect, both the mushrooms, and the photographs of them, are material records of nuclear disaster themselves. The quality of the mushroom’s fleetingness and indeterminacy has inspired philosophers, artists, and writers from premodern to times to present, within Japan and beyond. For polymath, naturalist, and folklorist Minakata Kumagusu (1867-1941), for example, who spent much of his life in the forests of Wakayama, and who became active against the consolidation of Shinto Shrines in 153 the modern era for their disruption to local ecosystems, mushrooms and slime molds were a guide to a non-linear, fluid form of thinking attentive to environmental preservation and the biodiversity of life.80 Notably, over the course of his life, he not only collected over 4,500 specimens of fungi, but drew them in vivid detail, alongside spore prints (see figs. 95 & 96) (Minakata Kumagusu Museum). Minakata’s illustrations, which straddle art and science, seem linked to the urgent need to record and document a life form that cannot be preserved as readily as plants may be, and whose diversity is perpetually open to discovery. This desire to record and to share is captured by Homma’s own project of capturing mushrooms on site as soon as he finds them. As Iizawa says about Homma’s photographs: “There is a sense of excitement, wonder and joy when you discover a mushroom, isn’t there? You would dilute these sensations if you dug out the mushrooms to photograph them elsewhere, which is why it is so important to take photographs on the spot” (Case Publishing). The issue is also a practical one: once picked and cast, Homma could move the mushrooms little, for they would lose form (Case Publishing). The highly visual mushroom specimen readily eludes us; and Homma’s work, like Minakata’s, is an expression of a kind akin to those humans have created since the Jōmon period (which began around 14500 BCE), with clay sculptures built in the likeness of mushrooms;what cannot stay visible in our immediate “present,” in our human time for very long, must be mediated or created, if we are to tell about it to others. And telling is a must, because the mushrooms have both productive and dangerous effects on humans but also for ecology. Mushrooms were also famously beloved by American experimental composer John Cage. Known for composing music that integrated the contingency of unintended noises in a room—his distinguished 4’33” featured no “intended” music at all, but rather, marking distinct periods of time by opening and closing the keyboard lid of a piano, captured whatever noise was created by the 80For further reading, see Adeney Thomas, “Ultranational Nature: Dead Time and Dead Space,” in Reconfiguring Modernity, 2002. 154 room and the audience—Cage was endlessly fascinated by the unpredictability of mushrooms, our inability to control them, and their spontaneous whimsy. Despite having made part of his living selling mushrooms to New York restaurants, co-founding the New York Mycological Society, and having once won $10,000 on an Italian TV show by reciting names of mushroom species from an American encyclopedia, Cage even claimed, “It’s useless to pretend to know mushrooms. They escape your erudition” (Rothstein). And yet, elsewhere, he has said “devoting oneself to the mushroom” helped him to learn about music and was the reason for his move to the countryside.81 Mushrooms elude mastery, and perhaps this is exactly why they have so much to teach us. They teach us about the contingency of our own human life, despite the teleology of progress we have imposed upon ourselves. Homma’s Symphony is, in many ways, an ode to Cage himself. Giving no rhyme or reason for the overall aims of his project, and imposing no intended narrative, the mushrooms are presented merely in their collective diversity, each a stand-alone study that resonates with other mushrooms alongside each other. In fact, after his initial visits to Fukushima, Homma chose to expand the collection to include mushrooms found on other sites, in other locations, which consisted of: Chernobyl, Stony Point (where Cage had lived and foraged for mushrooms), and Scandinavia (Finland and Sweden), traveling and photographing for the next four years. He chose Chernobyl because of its own history of nuclear disaster, and Scandinavia because of the significant cultural presence of mushrooms—like Japan, it is 70% forest, and anyone has the right to enter (Taro Nasu). Sweden had also been one of the regions most affected by Chernobyl, where the northwest winds had carried over to it 5% of the overall radioactive material. In each location, Homma brought his Geiger counter, which revealed that even the mushrooms of Stony Point had shown unexpectedly high amounts of radiation (possibly from Three Mile Island, where winds blew radioactive material 81 See Cage, Music Lover’s Field Companion (1954) 155 as far as Albany, New York, though Homma himself does not explicitly say). His inclusion of other sites seems to be a way to both expand the nuclear commons beyond major catastrophic events exemplified by “Fukushima” or “Chernobyl”—how we talk about nuclear disaster, and the precarity of the energy sources on which we depend—and also to perform a celebration of mushrooms that exceeds merely the framework of the nuclear. On the one hand, adding to Fukushima Chernobyl, Stony Point, and Scandinavia reminds us Fukushima is not a uniquely “Japanese” tragedy. In each location, Homma includes “establishing shots” that capture the place and environment from which the mushrooms were found. The mushrooms themselves, however, do not have identifying markers; it is not just that their contamination is undetectable, the location in which they were discovered is indistinguishable. Interestingly, the titles, along with the sub-sections “Fukushima,” “Scandinavia,” “Chernobyl” and “Stony Point,” are each crossed out (see fig. 97), both marking their different locations but also suggesting an insufficiency of words for the mushrooms found. Or, as though to say the signifiers cast by those words are not entirely correct, for what he found was more than the placenames can represent. Thus, on the other hand, bringing together these disparate sites—some with names that have clear associations with nuclear disaster (“Chernobyl,” “Fukushima”), others known for their associations with mushrooms (“Stony Point,” “Scandinavia”)—positions the focus of Symphony to be more about mushrooms than disaster. There is a sense of wonder conveyed and instilled by the collection of heterogeneous forms, the diversity of mushrooms found in the collection, a similarity in the intensity of their differences across the various sites. Each photograph focuses on a different type of mushroom, from groups of brown boletes to pairs of Angel Death Caps to coral mushrooms growing out of a section of a log. Though some kinds repeat, none is the same. There is a curiosity to the strangeness of these diverse shapes, an awe in their forms and colors, evidence that heterogeneity is there despite the radiation. At the same time as a scientific gaze is cast onto the fungus, the force of the mushroom confronts us through the photographic image. 156 They are not passive objects, but have a vital, radiant agency. There is a celebration here, comprised of the combination of love and the desire to know, as well as a sense of randomness that is suggestive of an openness to a future narrative of another kind. Scientists estimate that fewer than 1% of the world’s mushrooms have been discovered (Solomon); if these photos show only a tiny fraction of what still remains to be encountered, there is something like hope or possibility expressed in them. Like the diverse array of mushrooms that appear alongside one another but are left unhindered by logic, Homma’s photographs could be a visual model for acknowledging heterogeneous but nonetheless interlinked or entangled histories of nuclear disaster and nuclear energy. Mushrooms have always been records of their environment because they absorb so much of what is around them, recording radiation even before the discoveries at Chernobyl and Fukushima. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, an upshot of radiocesium could be detected in mushrooms in Japan from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests (Yamada.). Therefore, according to Yamada Toshihiro, “The radioactivity in mushrooms is an appropriate index for determining radioactive contamination of forest ecosystems” (164). There is also a kind of futurity implied by fungal continuity. The title, Symphony, gestures toward resonances between the mushrooms found across the four sites and Cage’s music. In his artist statement, Homma writes: “I went into these four forests and listened to the tiny voices of the mushrooms in those forests. And I could only think that they were echoing with each other in the four forests” (Taro Nasu). In this way, his collection is a visual “symphony” in the way Cage created music, a symphony without meaning. Once, in an interview, Cage had said: “Whereas I love sounds, just as they are. And I have no need for them to be anything more, than what they are. I don't want them to be psychological. I don't want a sound to pretend that it's a bucket, or that it's president, or that it's in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound” (qtd. in Sebestik’s Écoute). But the 157 full title, which is Symphony: Mushrooms from the Forest, also implies future generation. In Japanese, the subtitle “mushrooms from the forest,” is written, “children of those forests,” (その森の子供たち), gesturing to a wordplay between “kinoko” (きのこ meaning mushroom) and “ki-no-ko”(木の子, a homonym of “kinoko” meaning “child of a tree”). Called “mycorrhiza,” many mushrooms have collaborative relations with tree species, exchanging carbon dioxide for nitrogen through their roots. In conversation with Anna Tsing or Donna Haraway, we could read this as a productive “contamination,” or what Tsing describes as a “transformation through encounter” (The Mushroom at the End of the World 28). The possibility for continued survivance is promised in the contaminated energy of mushrooms. Perhaps we can also think of these mushroom portraits as instilling a sense of enchantment or wonder in the way Jane Bennett describes in Vibrant Matter. In her work, Bennett describes enchantment as the starting point of thoughtful political action, an affect that makes space within the hegemonic, rationalized modes of thought in Western modernity, creating room for something else to occur. This enchantment is created and bound to a leap of faith, as she describes it. We could also say it is bound to a process of speculation, where speculation concerns an act of looking at a specimen, as well as visualizing continued existence with, beside, and beyond the Anthropocene. Here again, I follow Meeker and Szabari, who write: We note that speculation is rooted in the Latin specere (“to look,” “to watch,” “to observe”) and thus evokes both a process of visualization as well as the limits of the human vision. Radical botanists accordingly have a complex and nuanced approach to the plant as a visible object. On the one hand, they are suspicious of regimes of visibility that seek to fix and stabilize the plant body. While human beings are dependent on their limited sensory capacities in order to perceive the world, radical botanists wonder if plants perhaps possess other senses unknown to us. On the other hand, they turn to technologies of visualization to 158 enhance and enrich the encounter with plant-being. The plant, with its resistance to our attempts to fully “see” it, seems to invite us to imagine new ways to come into contact with it. We thus retain an emphasis on speculation in this work despite the more recent Deleuzean coinage of the term “fabulation” as part of a transcendental empiricism that is resolutely non-Kantian. (Radical Botany 17) Symphony stages for us a vision of enchantment as much as haunting, where growth and decay are one and the same. It is a radical mycology, a transcendental empiricism, resolutely non-Kantian;the camera enhances and enriches our encounter with mushroom-being. The mushroom is constantly disrupting our attempts to fully “see” it, yet it invites new ways to come into contact with it, especially because it is contaminated. Eugene Thacker reflects on the paradoxical notion of the “world- in-itself,” that is, “a world without us [humans]”—for, as soon as we attempt to think it, it turns back into the “world-for-us” (5). We may be limited in our means for seeing, but there is a palpable difference that can be experienced or felt through the visual field by means of looking and wondering. When mushrooms show themselves out of contaminated grounds, they signal that the fungus beneath the ground is doing other, invisible work for the environment alongside the contamination. We humans too are not static creatures but constantly changing, constituted and affected by matter that is not readily accessible to our vision but that can open the perspectives from which we view ourselves and our others. Mushrooms are media, indexing the occurrences of their surrounding environment through their matter; agentic, they actively intervene into the very surroundings in which they find themselves. Perhaps this is one way we can consider their remediating nature: they record and yet shift the parameters of contamination as we understand it. 159 Bibliography “120th Anniversary of Miyazawa Kenji’s Birth.” Gordon W. 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Reimei hachigatsu jugo nichi shusen hiwa [At War’s End / Dawn of August 15, 1945]. Toei, 1952. Sharp, Kristen. "Superflatworlds: A Topography of Takashi Murakami and the Cultures of Superflat Art." Thesis. RMIT University. Applied Communication, n.d. Web. 11 May 2017. Shindo, Kaneto. Genbaku no ko [Children of Hiroshima]. Kindai Eiga Kyōkai, 1952. Shirakawa, Marina. Shinryaku Enban Kinokonga [Invader Spaceship Kinokonga]. Akebono Shuppan, 1976. Solomon, Rae. “With so Many Undiscovered Mushrooms, Citizen Scientists Find New Species All the Time.” NPR, NPR, 22 Sept. 2022, www.npr.org/2022/09/22/1124590354/with-somany-undiscovered-mushrooms-citizen-scientists-find-new-species-all-the-. Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster.” Commentary, Oct 1965, pp. 42-48. Stamets, Paul. Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Ten Speed Press, 2005. Steinberg, Marc. “Otaku Consumption, Superflat Art and the Return to Edo.” Japan Forum 16.3 2004, pp. 449-471. Web. 11 May 2017. Takabatake, Toshio. Ano kinokogumo no naka ni [From Within The Mushroom Cloud]. Bungeisha, 1999. Takeda, Shimpei. Trace. Shimpeitakeda.com. https://www.shimpeitakeda.com/trace/ Tanaka, Yuki.“Godzilla and the Bravo Shot: Who Created and Killed the Monster?” Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future: Art and Popular Culture Respond to the Bomb, edited by Robert Jacobs. Lexington Books, 2010, pp. 159-170. Tezuka, Osamu. “Living Mold from Outer Space,” Astro Boy: Vol. 8. Dark Horse, 2002. Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of This Planet. Zero Books, 2011. Thomas, Julia Adeney. Reconfiguring Modernity. University of California Press, 2001. Treat, John Whittier. Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 1, Duke University Press, Nov. 2012, pp. 141–54, https://doaj.org/article/dde3c1fe07c345de82f28bc60c9224b0. 169 - - -. The Mushroom at the End of the World : on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015. Tyler, Royall. Japanese Tales. Pantheon Books, 1987. U.S. Army Photographic Signal Corps. “U.S. Army Photographic Signal Corps: [Operation Crossroads: 21 Kiloton ‘Baker’ Bomb Detonated Ninety Feet Underwater, Bikini Atoll Lagoon, South Pacific, July 25, 1946].” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1 Jan. 1970, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/285321#:~:text=built%20with%20ACNLPatter nTool-,%5BOperation%20Crossroads%3A%2021%20Kiloton%20%22Baker%22%20Bomb %20Detonated%20Ninety,Pacific%2C%20July%2025%2C%201946%5D. Umezz, Kazuo. The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 7. VIZ Media, 2007. Virillo, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Verso, 1989. Vue du siège de Gibraltar et explosion des batteries flottantes [View of the Siege of Gibraltar and the Explosion of the Floating Batteries], Brown Digital Repository. Year unknown/c. 1782. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:239110/ Warhol, Andy. “Red Explosion,” Death and Disaster. 1963, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts., New York. Weart, Spencer R. Nuclear Fear: A History of Images. Harvard University Press, 1988. Wellerstein, Alex. “America at the Atomic Crossroads.” The New Yorker, 10 July 2017, www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/america-at-the-atomic-crossroads. What Is a Supernova?, NASA, 23 July 2021. https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/supernova/en/. Accessed 2 Apr. 2022. Yabe, Makiko. “Local Despair over Fukushima’s Radioactive Mushrooms: NHK World-Japan News.” NHK WORLD, NHK WORLD, 9 Dec. 2020, www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/1401/. Yamada, Toshihiro. “Mushrooms: Radioactive Contamination of Widespread Mushrooms in Japan.” Agricultural Implications of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, edited by Tomoko M. Nakanishi and Keitaro Tanoi, Springer, 2013, pp. 163–176. Yoshimura, Kazuma. “Manga ni hyōgen sa reta ‘sensō no kioku’” [Expressing “Memories of War” in Manga]. Kodomo no hondana [Children’s Bookshelf]. 47(8) 598 2018, pp. 30-33. 170 Figures Figure 1. Clay sculptures from Japan’s middle to late Jōmon Era, found in Akita Prefecture. Figure 2. Woodblock print by botanist Iwasaki Tsunemasa (1786-1842). 171 Figure 3. Sculpture: String of Mushrooms, late Edo period (ca. 1800-1850). Figure 4. Illustration and specimen collected by Minakata Kumagusu, 1901. 172 Figure 5. Super Nova, by Takashi Murakami, 1999. Figure 6. Photograph from Operation Buster–Jangle, Nevada, 1951. 173 Figure 7. Photograph from Greenhouse George test, Enewetak-Atoll, May 8, 1951. Figure 8. Photograph from Buster Charlie, Nevada, October 30, 1951. 174 Figure 9. American safety brochure, 1955. Figure 10. Mechanix Illustrated, February, 1950. Figure 11. Advertisement for Atomic Joe Coffee, exact year unknown. Figure 12. Branding for Atomic Firecrackers, exact year unknown. 175 Figure 13. Packaging for Atomic Fireball Candies, exact year unknown. Figure 14. Nuclear War Board Game, 1965. 176 Figure 15. Photograph by Alan Jarlson, published in National Geographic, 1953. 177 Figure 16. Photograph above Nagasaki, by Charles Levy, 1945. 178 Figure 17. Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818). Figure 18. Photograph above Nagasaki (different version), by Charles Levy, 1945. 179 Figure 19. Photograph of shadow effects at Hiroshima, 1945. Figure 20. Photograph of shadow effects at Nagasaki, by Matsumoto Eiichi, 1945. 180 Figure 21. Illustration published in Life magazine, August 20, 1945. 181 Figure 22. Photograph of cloud over Hiroshima, 1945. Figure 23. Photograph published in Life magazine, August 20, 1945. Figure 24. Photograph at Yucca Flats, exact date unidentified. 182 Figure 25. Photograph from Baker, Operation Crossroads, July 25, 1946. Figure 26. Colorized photograph from Baker, Operation Crossroads, July 25, 1946. 183 Figure 27. Photograph from Baker, Operation Crossroads, Bikini Atoll, July 25, 1946. Figure 28. Photograph from Baker, Operation Crossroads, Bikini Atoll, July 15, 1946. 184 Figure 29. Time Bokan - Red, by Takashi Murakami. Figure 30. Time Bokan - Pink by Takashi Murakami. 185 Figure 31. Time Bokan – Green by Takashi Murakami. Figure 32. Time Bokan – Silver by Takashi Murakami. 186 Figure 33. “Red Explosion,” by Andy Warhol, 1963. 187 Figure 34. From 1970s TV anime series Time Bokan. 188 Figure 35: Vue du siège de Gibraltar et explosion des batteries flottantes (View of the Siege of Gibraltar and the Explosion of the Floating Batteries), artist unknown, c. 1782 Figure 36. Google Ngram graph for “mushroom cloud.” 189 Figure 37. From “Living Mold from Outer Space,” by Osamu Tezuka. Figure 38. Still from animation Barefoot Gen, by Nakazawa Keiji, 1983. 190 Figure 39. Eco Eco Rangers Earth Force, by Takashi Murakami, 2005. 191 Figure 40. Diagram of pyramid of visual rays conceived by Leon Battista Alberti, with E indicating the position of the human eye and ABCD marking the four corners of a canvas. Figure 41. The geometrical construction of space based on the horizon line and localized points on canvas indicated by visual rays, by Alberti. 192 Figure 42. Mr Dob - And Then Blue Dob by Takashi Murakami. Figure 43. The Castle of Tin Tin, by Takashi Murakami, 1998. 193 Figure 44. Photograph of Super Nova at the Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago in 2017. Figure 45. Assorted boletes, by Iwasaki Tsunemasa, 19th Century. 194 Figure 46. Amanita muscaria, by Iwasaki Tsunemasa, 19th Century. Figure 47. Amanita muscaria, by Jean-Jacques Paulet, 19th Century. 195 Figure 48. Army of Mushrooms by Takashi Murakami, 2003. 196 Figure 49. Champagne Supernova, by Takashi Murakami, 2001. Figure 50. Smooth Nightmare by Takashi Murakami, 2001. 197 Figure 51. The Crab Nebula, remnants of a super nova that exploded 6,500 light-years away in the Milky Way. Image by NASA. Figure 52. Mycelia of white fungus 198 Figure 53. Bulbous mushrooms of Matango growing in the rain. Figure 54. From George Melies’ Voyage Dans La Lune, 1902. 199 Figure 55. Research room filled with plant and animal specimens. Figure 56. The three men look around the research room. 200 Figure 57. “Matango,” the “mushroom monster.” Figure 58. Mami and Akiko react to fungal growth. 201 Figure 59. Room of red fungi. Figure 60. Film poster for Matango. 202 Figure 61. Sketch of Matango’s mushroom monsters. Figure 62. Matango’s mushroom monsters. 203 Figure 63. Mami after returning from the mushroom forest. Figure 64. The forest of mushrooms. 204 Figure 65. Akiko in the mushroom meadow. Figure 66. From Umezz Kazuo’s Drifting Classroom. 205 Figure 67. Kinokonga’s mushroom monsters. Figure 68. The old man in the cabin encounters fungal zombies. 206 Figure 69. Aoki and Sada-sensei dig up mushroom zombies. 207 Figure 70. Dr. Shirakuni tells Aoki-shonen about the aliens’ superpowers. 208 Figure 71. Gen and his family, from Barefoot Gen. Figure 72. Gen’s “monsters,” from Barefoot Gen. 209 Figure 73. Aoki’s zombie family returns. 210 Figure 74. From “Living Mold,” by Tezuka Osamu. 211 Figure 75. Aoki resigned to his mushroom fate. 212 Figure 76. Plants begin to germinate as creatures are recycled by fungi. 213 Figure 77. Aoki in full mushroom form. 214 Figure 78. Mushroom cloud explodes. Figure 79. Raindrops in the form of mushrooms fall. 215 Figure 80. Mycological taxonomy from Kinokonga. 216 Figure 81. Aliens imagined by unidentified narrator. Figure 82. Aliens imagined by Aoki. 217 Figure 83. Images of disaster from Kahoku Shinpo, a local newspaper from Sendai in Tōhoku, 2011. 218 Figure 84. Sample photograph from Ed Ruscha’s Colored People. 219 Figure 85. From Homma Takashi’s Symphony. Figure 86. From Homma Takashi’s Symphony. Figure 87. From Homma Takashi’s Symphony. Figure 88. From Homma Takashi’s Symphony. 220 Figure 89. From Homma Takashi’s Symphony. Figure 90. From Homma Takashi’s Symphony. Figure 91. From Homma Takashi’s Symphony. Figure 92. From Homma Takashi’s Symphony. 221 Figure 93. From Michael Marder and Anais Tondeur’s Chernobyl Herbarium, 2016. Figure 94. From Takeda Shimpei’s Trace. 222 Figure 95. Illustration by Minakata Kumagusu. Figure 93. From Michael Marder and Anais Tondeur’s Chernobyl Herbarium, 2016. Figure 96. Illustration by Minakata Kumagusu. 223 Figure 97. Cover of Homma’s Symphony.

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Creator Kaneko, Ichigo Mina (author)

Core Title Radiant mushrooms of postwar Japanese media

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (Comparative Media and Culture)

Degree Conferral Date 2023-12

Publication Date 12/04/2023

Defense Date 08/10/2023

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Tag anime,art,film,Hiroshima,manga,mushroom clouds,mushrooms,Nagasaki,OAI-PMH Harvest,postwar Japan,war memory,WWII

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Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Meeker, Natania (committee chair), Jenkins, Henry (committee member), Khanna, Neetu (committee member), Yasar, Kerim (committee member)

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