How can art help us process trauma and facilitate healing?
Art can allow us to process complex emotional responses to trauma and begin to heal.
Introduction
Emotional or psychological trauma is severe stress or anxiety in response to an upsetting event. It can be caused by a one-time event like a natural or manmade disaster, a chronic situation like war or bullying, or even by witnessing or seeing images of the event. Trauma manifests physically and emotionally in victims and can have a lasting impact on their lives. Natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, foods, droughts, and earthquakes cause immediate, large-scale devastation, including damage to homes and infrastructure and the disruption of people’s livelihoods, and they can set off long-term emotional impacts like fear, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress over generations.
On March 11, 2011, the Great East Japan earthquake hit off the eastern coast of Japan. The powerful tremor caused a nearly fifty-foot (15-meter) tsunami that damaged coastal port towns, destroying over a million buildings, and resulted in a death toll of about nineteen thousand people. The tsunami caused three nuclear meltdowns and a series of hydrogen air explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which resulted in a release of radioactive material that contaminated the Fukushima region and required the evacuation of 154,000 citizens in addition to the 470,000 who had already been evacuated due to the earthquake and tsunami.
In the case of Fukushima, the impacts of the natural disaster were compounded by the resulting nuclear disaster. The Japanese National Institute of Public Health has studied the way this combination of disasters has led to emotional and psychiatric trauma for survivors and also left a scar on the country’s collective psyche. Futamura Yoshimi, Kondō Takahiro, and Naoya Hatakeyama are three Japanese artists who created artworks in direct response to the events of March 2011 and processed emotions of fear, anxiety, and grief through their art. Learning more about their personal stories and their artworks provides insights into how art and creative expression lets us process complex emotional responses to trauma and begin to heal.
Futamura Yoshimi
Born in 1959 in Nagoya, Japan, Futamura Yoshimi studied ceramics in Seto, a city known for its pottery. She moved to France in 1986 and now lives and works in Paris. When she found out about the devastation caused by the Great East Japan (Tōhoku) earthquake, she started creating artworks in response to the disaster and to her feelings of vulnerability and powerlessness in the face of nature’s power. To create Black Hole No. 8 2015, Futamura threw clay on a potter’s wheel to create a tubular form to which she applied a white porcelain slip. The dried slip cracked as she worked with the clay, before she dried and fired the piece. The resulting cracks and fissures resemble the texture of rocks or tree bark. Futamura says, “My work represents a fear for the uncertain, a force beyond our control which threatens to extinguish everything, even the desire for rebirth. The Tōhoku earthquake reminded me of how grateful I am to have grown up in Japan, as I could not be where I am today without its cultural influence.”
© 2018 Lindsay Cox.
Kondō Takahiro
Kondō Takahiro was born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1958 to a family of renowned ceramicists. His grandfather Kondō Yuzo was named a Living National Treasure and celebrated for his work in traditional cobalt-blue-and-white porcelain, known as sometsuke. He continues to work in his grandfather’s original studio but through many years of work and experimentation has developed an artistic identity all his own. His sculpture Reduction I was part of a series he made in response to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake. Kondō made casts of his own body to represent a figure seated in a meditative posture and covered them in his signature glaze. Made of silver, gold, and platinum metal, the glaze, when fired, produces bubbles reminiscent of beaded water droplets on the surface of his works. Here, the drops refer to the radioactive particles released from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that severely contaminated the natural environment and has caused health issues in people exposed to the radiation.
© Takahiro Kondo.
Naoya Hatakeyama
Before the disaster of March 2011, photographer Naoya Hatakeyama was known for his work exploring the harsh effects of urbanization on Japan’s natural landscapes. The photographs in Mia’s collection are from the series “Rikuzentakata” (2011) and were shot in the artist’s hometown. They document the devastating impact of the Tōhoku earthquake and the long process of reconstruction. Hatakeyama remembers being in a meeting in a Tokyo office with fellow photographers when news of the earthquake and tsunami broke. One of the photographers said that the disaster would provide an opportunity to produce “good photographs.” Hatakeyama recalls thinking, “Even if he could take a photograph of a car floating in front of him, and even if that extremely spectacular image actually is a ‘good photograph’ in his eyes, and the viewer would recognize the value of the image instantly, what kind of ‘goodness’ is realized through such an image?”
© Naoya Hatakeyama.
Many Japanese artists faced a moral dilemma in deciding whether to document the sites affected by the disaster in their art. For Hatakeyama, this series emerged from a painful, personal process of grief and loss. Capturing the demolished villages, flooded landscapes, and massive piles of detritus, Hatakeyama’s photographs serve as a record of the disaster but also memorialize what was lost. The destruction rendered his hometown almost unrecognizable and resulted in the deaths of many friends, neighbors, and his own mother. When asked about how the events of March 2011 impacted him and his photography, and how he sees art’s role in the nation’s healing process, Hatakeyama responded, “I believe that the tragedy has increased among many the awareness that it is important to produce their own art in the process, in addition to the conventional attitude of observing or receiving art made by others.”
Teaching and Learning Strategies
“Psychosocial effects of the Fukushima disaster and current tasks: Differences between natural and nuclear disasters,” an article from the Japanese National Institute of Public Health, will help you and your students better understand the long-term emotional and psychological effects that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster had on Japanese people across the country.
Check out these resources and lesson plans from PBS LearningMedia on Natural Hazards and this Curricular Unit on Natural Disasters from TeachEngineering to connect local, national, and global examples of natural disasters in your teaching.
Learn how “trauma-informed teaching” can help you better support your students who have experienced childhood trauma and how art and creative expression can provide safe opportunities for students to process their feelings, heal from trauma, and develop a sense of empowerment and resiliency.