Paper short abstract:

This presentation, recollecting a fieldwork experience in Hiroshima’s Shukkeien garden and Peace Memorial Park, proposes an opening of time(s)’s definition and suggests some phenomenological methods for regrounding oneself in time(s)’ qualitative possibility.

Paper long abstract:

As I was doing ethnographic fieldwork in Hiroshima, in the summer of 2019, 74 years after the city had been bombed by the Americans’ “Little Boy”, I perceived the blooming of hopes for a different understanding of temporality. Time(s) appeared multiple, indeterminate, entropic, liberated. Time(s) appeared spontaneous, potential. Time(s) appeared as possibilities. In History’s ruins, in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park and in its Shukkeien garden, late irises, early mushrooms, verdant mosses and unwanted weeds were blooming. And pines and their pine-pruners were pursuing heterogeneous pursuits of spacetimemattering, letting the city’s history and its more-than-human temporalities speak for themselves. In Hiroshima, surrounded by such temporalities and acting as an apprentice to master pine-pruners, I reimagined time(s), and in this presentation, I propose an opening of time(s)’ definition and illustrate some phenomenological methods for regrounding oneself in time(s)’ qualitative possibility. In letting History’s ruins speak, I first argue that Time has been destabilized: that unilinear, homogenous, and progressive modernist Time has gone astray; that, in Hiroshima’s and History’s ruins, temporal confusion abounds; and that the actuality and continuance of nuclear radiation vaporizes standardized Time. Second, I present phenomenological propositions, observed in the field, for re-conceptualizing time(s) through sensory engagement: a too-regularized, too-patterned traditionalist Japanese sensitivity to seasons’ Seconds; a slowed-down attentiveness to brute actuality and its Seconds of temporal heterogeneity; and, lastly, a pruning technique embodying and expressing spacetimemattering. This presentation, hence, suggests that a life in ruins can suggest new ways of understanding the world.