Ministry of Agriculture exhibition re-frames the Great East Japan Earthquake through its survivors

In the center of a huge white room is a paper diorama model of a seaside town, roughly the size of three tables. It doesn’t seem like much … at first glance. The homes are brightly colored, but there is no clear pattern to them. Some buildings are not painted. Getting out of houses, trees, or a specific hill is what I first took for the adorable sticky notes, and each has a few letters written on it.

At this point, you might ask: What’s wrong with this Paper City?

The answer is simple: this is the memory of a town before the Great East Japan Earthquake. Specifically, the city of Afunato, from Iwate Prefecture.

These homes were painted by community members who survived. And those wonderful sticky notes are full of stories, names, or memories of Avonato, before the disaster.

This model, which is part of the Lost Homes scale model restoration project, resonates painfully and is easy to miss – just like the rest of the Anthropology Museum’s exhibition, A Future of Memory: Art and Life after the Great East Japan Earthquake.

“A Future for Memory” opened on February 11th to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake. This magnitude 9.0 earthquake triggered a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown that devastated the eastern region of Japan – a triple disaster.

However, instead of focusing on the devastation and tragedy of what happened, A Future of Memory seeks to emphasize survival and recovery efforts, looking at nature as an example.

There is strength in the way a memory receiver refuses to engage with images and discussions of devastation, brutality, and death. Instead, there are videos of survivors telling of their experiences and models made from cities, pre-disaster, drawn and filled with stories by residents who survived.

Is this paraphrasing so powerful and emotional? Yeah. It’s also difficult to follow at times.

At first, I attributed this to my general lack of historical knowledge and my terrible memory struggling in distant times like yesterday morning or last week. But when a friend who went to the exhibition as part of her class to honor history said that she also had a hard time understanding parts of the show and putting them in context, she was relieved.

A Future for Memory looks like an exhibit designed for those who are already intimately familiar with the triple disaster of 2011. Sometimes the most poignant details are hidden away from a single image’s caption, or parts of the exhibition relate to other disasters in Japanese history – so Understanding it depends on how much you already know about Japan’s history with natural disasters.

There is a lot that gets lost in the actual planning of an exhibition space, too. For example, there is a short entrance along the back wall with images from a documentary on actual disaster areas. The only direct images of the devastation from the 2011 triple disaster are literally obscured from the rest of the gallery by a wall – which is, metaphorically, awesome.

But it’s also easy to miss, especially if you don’t know it exists.

In general, A Future of Memory attempts to focus on recovery without erasing sadness. Mostly succeed.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is a huge wall of photographs of the “Omoide Salvage” project, which seeks to salvage, clean and digitize the photos swept away by the 2011 tsunami. The photos shown here are those that were badly damaged by water to identify their owners.

In Yamoto-cho of Watari District, Miyagi Prefecture, damaged photos have been found. Munimasa Takakashi

Looking at it reminded me of Gustov Klimt’s painting, “The Kiss” – a tiny imprint of faces and bodies isolated in swatches of yellow, white, and brown. In front of this wall of lost pictures is a book full of stories of those whom the Omoide Salvage Project can reunite with their salvaged portraits.

be seen? There is loss, but there is hope too.

A Future for Memory is open until September 5 at the Museum of Anthropology.

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