The GW Anthropology Department presents

a special colloquium

This talk explores the recent mix of “sounddemos,” art installations and antinuclear musicfestivals in contexts of political protest in Japansince the tsunami and subsequent nuclear disasterat Fukushima Daiichi on March 11, 2011. I focuson a performance festival called ProjectFukushima! organized by experimental musicianÔtomo Yoshihide, poet Wago Ryoichi, and punkrock legend Endô Michirô to provoke publicdiscourse about nuclear power and the future ofthe partly-evacuated city. Only a few months afterthe meltdown in 2011 and again in 2012, thisgroup of underground performers broughtaudiences in the thousands back to Fukushima.Bands performed on stages, in the streets, and onlocal trains; the audience sat on a giganticfuroshiki cloth tapestry conceived to protect themfrom the irradiated ground. In addition to his roleas primary organizer and performer in ProjectFukushima! Ôtomo has written powerfully on therole of arts and culture in the response to the

Fukushima Disaster, gives public talks aboutcultural activism, and writes widely circulated blogposts and tweets about the antinuclear move-ment. Through my ethnographic research inTokyo, Osaka, and Fukushima in 2012 and 2013, Icontextualize Project Fukushima! as part of anseries of public actions of music and noise makingand “reclaim-the-streets” performance tactics thatgalvanized public response to the nuclear restartand the future of energy policy in Japan.

David Novak, an associate professor at UC-Santa Barbara,

explores the relationship between modern cultures and the

circulation of musical media. Novak is the author of

Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation, (Duke

University Press, forthcoming), an ethnography of Noise,

an experimental electronic music, developed over several

years of multi-sited fieldwork among Japanese and North

American practitioners and listeners. He is the founder of

the Music and Sound Interest Group in the American

Anthropological Association.

Friday, Feb. 14, 11a.m.-12:30 p.m.

HAH 202 (Anthropology seminar room)

David Novak

speaks on

Music, Sound,Noise and theAntinuclearMovement inPost-3.11 Japan