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YOSHIDA, Yuko., Dismissed Transmission: Disaster Survivor Testimony of the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, “Narrating Lives” International Conference on Storytelling, (Auto)biography and (Auto)ethnography, London Center for Interdisciplinary Research, London, UK., 2021.08, Despite the frequency of natural disasters and increase of potential victims and survivors, disaster reduction studies in Japan has not paid attention to the meaning of disaster survivor testimony when it relates to evaluating the degree to which devastated areas and survivors are revitalized. This paper focuses on the discrepancies of the useful narrative between discourse of memory-lessens transmission to younger generations and the privacy of testimony from a performative case study regarding the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake survivor and her late daughter who was killed by the quake. The author examines how the image of Japanese disaster survivors is systematically shaped for the sake of the collective memory for social revitalization, and accordingly, how the usefulness of survivor narratives are restricted mostly to narratives of commemorating the dead. Consequently, this paper attempts to re-contextualize the survivor’s life narrative standpoint where she and the lost loved one through an artistic act of witnessing that the author named “recipes for the dead”.. |
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YOSHIDA, Yuko., Bearing Witness to a by Chance Encounter: Filmic Embodiment of Intersubjective Temporality, “Narratives of Temporality: Continuities, Discontinuities, Ruptures” International Conference, London Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Cambridge, UK., 2021.07, This paper focuses on two major points: how an appropriate listener enables the survivor to capture time when the memory narrative is elicited from the body of survivors of catastrophic incidents, and how by chance encounter with a potential listener can facilitate joint responsibility between a listener and a witness during the temporary occasion. The author analyzes filmic temporality of giving testimony by comparing Audrey Fouché’s film, Memories Corner (2012), and Inoue Tsuyoshi’s film, Children at that City (2010). Both fiction films deal with the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake survivors’ post- quake life and their acts of giving testimony to a total stranger 15 years after the disaster. Through the film narratological approach to representation of psychological wounds of disaster survivors, this paper considers how bearing witnessing to loss and transmission of its memory confront the limit of representation and embodiment. Further, this paper also contemplates how by chance encounter with a listener can have potential to connect between her and the survivor and how the act of witnessing become possible intersubjectively.. |
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YOSHIDA, Yuko., Recipes for the Dead: An Attempt at Integrating Japanese Death Culture and Acts of Testimony, International Forum on Telling Live Lessons from Disasters, Kobe, Japan., 2020.01, Some written testimonies of families of the deceased of the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake, Japan shows that they contemplate the deceased through sharing meals with them. These particular acts in the domestic sphere are derived from internalized rituals of communicating with the dead via food. This paper conceptualizes them as acts of witnessing. The author emphasizes food is one of the most important medium that enables maintaining mutual communication between the living and the dead, since food and drink can, in a very material way, represent private relationships that the living and the deceased used to share.. |
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YOSHIDA, Yuko., Ordinary Trauma: Discourses of Silence and Loss in Naruse Mikio's Popular Narrative Films, International symposium Naruse Mikio - Films of Women and Misery, Eye Film Institute Netherlands (Eye Filmmuseum), Amsterdam, The Netherlands., 2015.09, This paper discusses how Japanese director Naruse Mikio’s popular narrative films present alternative discourse for image of trauma. A subversive reading of Naruse’s films reveals that ideologically reproduced popular films testify to one’s ordinary trauma on an everyday level. The analyses of the two films, Repast and As a Wife, As a Woman show that the dialectic interplay between nonconventional subtexts and conventional narratives is revealed through the radical reading of conventional narratives in filmic images. Naruse’s films provide viewers with a site from which to experience an uneasy dislocation and gaps that bear witness to untranslatable silence and loss. Such a re-conceptualization within the cinematic space makes unheard and invisible ordinary trauma more accessible and tangible.. |
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YOSHIDA, Yuko., The Cinematic Interplay of Everyday Spaces: Two Classic Japanese Popular Films, Conference on Contemporary Perspectives in Media Studies, LIAS and LUCSoR, Leiden University, The Netherlands., 2014.12, This paper undertakes a subversive reading of ideologically reproduced classical popular films of Ozu Yasujiro and Naruse Mikio. The author argues that popular cinema functions to testify to one’s losses and traumas on a personal, everyday level. The consideration of the cinematic discourse of various silences and the representations of space-place in the filmic world leads the viewer to explore virtually such obliterated parts of one’s everyday history. This filmic analysis attempts a new interpretation of conventional popular cinema as an important aesthetic documentation of one’s missing everyday history that would be named as fiction-documentary.. |
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YOSHIDA, Yuko., An Act of Silence in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, The English Literary Society of Japan, Fukuoka, Japan., 2010.10, This paper sheds light on missing parts of everydayness represented in the forms of undocumented silences and testimony in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small things. The detail analysis of "small things" in the novel shows the ambiguous nature of being subjective but at the same time being rebellious to the hegemonic power, and accordingly small things of small histories appear as silent threats against the official grand narrative.. |
