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Paper short abstract

This paper will examine Tsushima Yuko's Wild Cat Dome and how Tsushima portrays the near future of Japan and traces back the post-war history of Japan in Wild Cat Dome which provides a thought-provoking exploration of the relation between the Fukushima nuclear accident and modern Japan.

Paper long abstract

As a member of the generation who came of age with the Japanese women’s liberation movement in the 1970s, Tsushima Yuko is full of humanism and sincere concern about society. After the Great Japan East Earthquake of 2011, she wrote articles to bring attention to the threat of nuclear disaster in Japanese society and participated in the movement to pressure the Japanese government to address the reality of nuclear disaster. Her novel Wild Cat Dome, published in 2013, combines post-World War II Japanese history with the issue of nuclear disaster in a critical reflection on Japanese modernity. This work focuses on the Japanese-American children who were born in Japan during the American occupation, covering the post-war period, the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and extending into an imagined near future. The term Wild Cat, used in the title of this work, implies these Japanese-American children, who were excluded from Japanese society. This paper will examine how Tsushima portrays the near future of Japan and traces back the post-war history of Japan in Wild Cat Dome which provides a thought-provoking exploration of the relation between the Fukushima nuclear accident and modern Japan.