Book: A Body in Fukushima
By Eiko Otake and William Johnston
A photographic account of an extended solo performance in irradiated Fukushima, Japan 2014–2019
Published on June 1, 2021
Design by Cara Buzzell and Lucinda Hitchcock
ISBN-139780819580269 English Hardback
288 Pages with 160 color photos.
11.25” x 8.75”
List Prices $35.00 USD, £25.95 GBP
Order the book here.
March 2021 marks the 10th Anniversary of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan. A Body In Fukushima, a collection of insightful essays and 160 probing color photographs, presents the experience of two visitors to a land devastated by the release of radiation following the meltdown of reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Between 2014 and 2019, dance artist Eiko Otake and historian/photographer William Johnston travelled to irradiated Fukushima five times to witness the destruction caused by this human failure. The images in the book manifest Eiko’s performances in this haunting and desolate environment.
This book is the culmination of the authors’ experiences in Fukushima which have also taken the form of exhibitions, memorials, video installations, performances, lectures, and screenings presented in many institutions in the US and abroad. A Body in Fukushima expands the realm of dance photography and the scope of site work. The photographs and essays challenge the viewer’s sense of distance from Fukushima and from nuclear issues.
For more information, see the project timeline.
In the Authors’ Words
“This is a book of wailing and remorse. It is a book about the body: the body of a performer—an immigrant artist from Japan; the body of a historian who is also a photographer; and a body of irradiated land. Going to Fukushima is my choreography. Being there has changed what it is for me to dance.”
—Eiko Otake
“By witnessing events and places, we actually change them and ourselves in ways that may not always be apparent but are important. Through photographing Eiko in many places in Fukushima, we are witnessing not only her and the locales themselves, but the people whose lives inhabited these places. I do not consider my photographs as documents of Eiko’s performance. Rather, each photograph becomes a performance of its own when placed in front of a viewer.”
—William Johnston
Endorsements
“What would bring someone to travel thousands of miles to the still toxic site of a monumental disaster in order to perform in the evacuated silence for a camera? What are the ethical dimensions of such an act? What place does beauty have in the wake of massive trauma? Who has the right to speak, to dance, to situate themselves in places from which others were forcibly extracted? This book is a record of two significant, internationally-oriented artists as they struggle with such questions and resolve that, as Akira Kurosawa once said, 'To be an artist means never to look away.”
—Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Be With
“Otake and Johnston's stunning collaborative work will forever haunt us with a sense of belatedness. It compels us to consider the longue durée of 3.11 disaster and its connectedness to many losses, pain and the ongoing structural injustices in Fukushima and beyond.”
—Lisa Yoneyama, Professor, Department Of East Asian Studies and Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto, and author of Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory and Violence, War, Redress: The Politics of Multiculturalism
“Oscillating across dance and photography, movement and stillness, poetry and prose, history and the everyday, anger and hope—a stunning testament to both the beauty and sadness of Fukushima.”
—Takashi Fujitani, Dr. David Chu Professor in Asia-Pacific Studies, University of Toronto, and author of Splendid Monarchy and Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Koreans in WWII
“In this luminous record of bearing witness to post-nuclear catastrophe, testimony and poetry move together with William Johnston’s pellucid photographs of movement artist Eiko Otake as she performatively embodies the irradiated landscapes of Fukushima. A Body in Fukushima is riveting, gorgeous, not to be forgotten.
—Marilyn Ivy; author of Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, and Japan
Authors’ Bios
Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. For more than 40 years she worked with her partner as Eiko & Koma. Since 2014 has been performing her own solo projects.
Eiko & Koma created their own choreography and presented their works worldwide, including many appearances at the American Dance Festival and BAM’s Next Wave Festival. Durational performance works were commissioned and presented by the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, and MoMA.
The first exhibition of A Body in Fukushima took place at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2014. Since then, it has travelled to cities in the US and abroad. In 2016, Danspace Project (NYC) presented Eiko’s solo works in a month-long platform, A Body in Places, including a 24-hour Fukushima exhibition in its church sanctuary. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City hosted a six-month exhibition which culminated in 2017 with a Fukushima memorial. That same year, Eiko created a seven-hour video from photographs taken in Fukushima and performed a day-long event in each of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s three locations. She also created a film, A Body in Fukushima, which has been screened in many countries including Chile, Taiwan, and Japan.
Eiko teaches courses in colleges, Her teaching uses movement as means of inquiry to further understanding of mass violence, nuclear bombings, and other nuclear disasters.
William Johnston is a historian who focuses on how we can understand complex historical events—particularly epidemics, wars, genocides, and disasters—through the intersection of multiple epistemologies. He was born and grew up in Rawlins, Wyoming, where he developed an interest in the visual arts as well as in Japanese culture and Zen Buddhism. Johnston received his B.A. from Elmira College, in Elmira, New York, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, and also studied in Japan at Nanzan University, Nagoya University, and Tokyo University. Since 1988, he has been employed at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he is the John E. Andrus Professor of History, with a specialization in Japanese history and the history of disease and public health. He is the author of two monographs and numerous essays. Johnston has practiced photography since he was a high school student and has worked in 35mm as well as with large format cameras. Since 2014, he has worked exclusively with digital photography.