i

Spring 88ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTERS

AND COLLECTIVE TRAUMA

A JOURNAL OF ARCHETYPE

AND CULTURE

Winter 2012

SPRING JOURNALNew Orleans, Louisiana

© 2012 by Spring Journal, Inc.All rights reserved.

Published by:Spring Journal, Inc.

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Spring Journal™, Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture™, Spring Books™,Spring Journal Books,™ Spring Journal and Books™, and Spring Journal

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CONTENTS

ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTERS AND COLLECTIVE TRAUMA

A Note from the EditorNancy Cater ........................................................................................3

Guest Co-editor’s IntroductionStephen Foster ....................................................................................7

Solastalgia: When Home is No Longer HomeDon Frederickson ............................................................................. 11

Global Warming: Inaction, Denial, and PsycheLeslie Stein ........................................................................................ 23

The 2011 Earthquake in Japan: Psychotherapeutic Interventionsand Change of WorldviewToshio Kawai ..................................................................................... 47

The Garden of the Heart and Soul: Psychological Relief Work inthe Earthquake Zones and Orphanages in ChinaHeyong Shen and Gao Lan .............................................................. 61

Expressive Sandwork: A Jungian Approach in Disaster AreasEva Pattis Zoja .................................................................................. 75

Hearing the Bugle’s Call: Hurricane Katrina, the BP Oil Spill, andthe Effects of TraumaRandy Fertel ..................................................................................... 91

Hurricane Katrina: The Tequila, the Kleenex, and the IvyMarilyn Marshall ........................................................................... 117

In My Back Yard: Legacies of the American WestStephen Foster ................................................................................ 131

Catastrophe and DreamsLuigi Zoja ....................................................................................... 151

Children’s Dreams Can See ThroughRoberto Gambini ........................................................................... 163

Sons of NarcissusEvangelos Tsempelis ....................................................................... 183

FILMS

Melancholia and Catastrophic Change: An Essay on the FilmMelancholia (2011)Pamela Power .................................................................................. 201

Trauma, Mourning, and Renewal: Agnieszka Piotrowska’s Out ofthe RuinsHelena Bassil-Morozow .................................................................. 217

Archetypes Assemble: How Superhero Teams Save the World fromthe Apocalypse and Lead the Way to Individuation—Marvel’sThe AvengersJames Alan Anslow ......................................................................... 233

BOOKS

Psychopathologia Psychoanalistis: An Essay on The Meaning andMatrix of Character : An Archetypal and Developmental Approach,Searching for the Wellsprings of Spirit, by Nancy J. Dougherty andJacqueline J. WestRonald Schenk ................................................................................ 247

And the Dance Goes On: An Essay on Ron’s Essay on The Meaningand Matrix of CharacterJacqueline J. West and Nancy J. Dougherty ................................. 269

Risky Business: A Jungian View of Environmental Disasters andthe Nature Archetype, by Stephen J. Foster and Moby Dick andthe Mythology of Oil: An Admonition for the Petroleum Age, byRobert D. Wagner, Jr.Susan Rowland ............................................................................... 289

Sandplay Therapy in Vulnerable Communities: A JungianApproach, by Eva Pattis ZojaAstrid Berg ...................................................................................... 299

In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke, a Soul History, by Daniel JosephPolikoffPaul Bishop ..................................................................................... 303

The Animus: The Spirit of Inner Truth in Women, by BarbaraHannahPriscilla Murr .................................................................................. 321

JUNGIANA

The Secret of EranosRiccardo Bernardini ....................................................................... 331

The Dichotomy of M. Esther HardingPolly Armstrong .............................................................................. 343

THE 2011 EARTHQUAKE IN JAPAN

PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC INTERVENTIONS AND

CHANGE OF WORLDVIEW

TOSHIO KAWAI

Toshio Kawai is professor of clinical psychology at Kokoro Reseach Center, KyotoUniversity. He also works as a Jungian analyst. He has written on postmodernconsciousness in connection with psychotherapy and the works of Haruki Murakami,autistic spectrum disorder, Jung’s Red Book, and Jungian psychology in Japan.

The Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, was atremendous disaster. It was the most powerful earthquake everto be recorded in Japanese history with a magnitude of 9.0.

The huge tsunami triggered by the earthquake, with a wave height of30 meters, caused especially heavy damage. It destroyed many citiesand villages near the coast and took many lives. About 16,000 peoplewere killed; 3,000 are still missing. Because the damage was mainly aresult of the tsunami, there was a clear contrast between areas that wereseverely hit by the earthquake and those that were not, which led tomany stories about life and death. Some people narrowly escaped withtheir lives, while others unfortunately died or lost their family members.Moreover, the disaster became more complicated because the shockand the tsunami destroyed several nuclear power plants in Fukushima,which resulted in the secondary disaster of radiation leakages from theplants. There is still ongoing danger of nuclear contamination. These

48 TOSHIO KAWAI

triple damages of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear leakage makeintervention after the disaster especially difficult.

Right after the earthquake not only rescue parties and reliefsupplies, but also psychological relief teams were sent to stricken areas.Various natural disasters in the past, for example, the earthquake inKobe in 1995, the typhoon in Toyooka on the Japanese sea coast in2004, the Sichuan earthquake in China in 2008, and others, havetaught us that the victims suffered not only from material damage, butalso mentally. So when the earthquake hit on March 11, 2011, variouskinds of psychological relief teams were organized and sent to thestricken areas. The Association of Jungian Analysts, Japan (AJAJ) andthe Japanese Association for Sandplay Therapy (JAJP) organized a jointworking committee for the psychological relief work; as chair of thiscommittee, I reported on its activity on the International Associationfor Analytical Psychology (IAAP) website and in other papers.

In the face of earthquake disaster both material support andpsychotherapeutic intervention are necessary for individual victims.Here I would like to address a third dimension: psychology of theearthquake from a global point of view. Although Japanese people arerather used to natural disasters, the 2011 earthquake brought aboutsuch unprecedented damage that it fundamentally shocked theirexisting worldview. In face of unexpected damages caused by thetsunami and the ongoing danger from the nuclear power plants, peopleno longer trust technology and the words of politicians and scientists.Unsatisfactory interventions and explanations after the disaster evokedmore suspicion. In this sense, not only those in the stricken areas butthe whole of the Japanese people were deeply touched by the disaster.

Jung believed that peoples’ worldview and global psychology canbe studied and changed through individual psychotherapy. In hisconcept of the collective unconscious the collective dimension can befound in the individual psyche. If this is the case, our psychologicalrelief work with the victims of the earthquake can shed light on thechanges in the worldview.

SMALL STORIES

Although our psychological relief work is fruitful and meaningful,we have to come to the conclusion that individual intervention andpsychotherapy have less to do with the change in worldview. As I

THE 2011 EARTHQUAKE IN JAPAN 49

reported elsewhere our activity is focused on the care of care-takingpersons, like psychotherapists and nursery teachers, in the stricken areas.The reason for this kind of intervention is that we cannot remainpermanently on site, so it is better to work with people who are ableto endure the difficulty for a certain period of time and wait for support.These care-taking persons have to hold the heavy stories told to them.It is important that these difficult stories are shared in a protectiveatmosphere offered by the psychological relief work team. Care of soulmeans care of stories.

As we made regular visits to the areas hit by tsunami, we couldobserve a general flow of psychological time after the earthquake. Rightafter the disaster everyone seemed to be overwhelmed and in greatconfusion. It was an extreme emergency situation. People were havingto cope with the critical situation in every moment; they had to beevacuated, find food and clothes, rebuild their destroyed houses, andso on. There was no time for reflection. Generally a strong feeling ofconnectedness among the victims was noticed.

After about three months, the populace entered a phase ofremembering and reflection. According to school counselors, childrenfrequently reported nightmares concerning the earthquake and tsunamiin June and July. From some people we had already met with, we heardabout their life and death experiences for the first time. Such nightmaresand critical stories should not be understood as the onset of trauma,but rather as a sign that the people have obtained a certain psychologicaldistance from the disaster. The pictures drawn by an elementary schoolclass support this hypothesis. Almost all the pictures drawn just afterthe earthquake have a distorted structure, while those drawn threemonths later were totally normalized and showed a clear recovery. Anormal psyche seems to recover from crisis after several months if thereis a supportive enough environment and if the crisis does not continue.So the reports of nightmares and the terrible experience of the tsunamithree months after the earthquake do not mean that the psychiccondition is getting worse, but rather that it is getting better.

After this period, and in some cases earlier, people start to talk abouttheir personal problems in psychotherapy, but not necessarily aboutthe earthquake. Children at school show various psychologicalsymptoms, but as reported by the school counselors and nurseryteachers, they complain about their relationships with their parents

50 TOSHIO KAWAI

and schoolmates. We supervised several cases using sandplay therapyin a pediatric section of a hospital in Ishinomaki, a city that was severelyhit by the tsunami. In every case the child expressed a psychologicaldevelopment that was pertinent for his or her age in the sandplay. Forexample, a ten-year-old boy had the task of establishing self-consciousness, which was expressed in his sandplay sessions. Traumaticexperiences of the earthquake and tsunami were not a theme in thesandplay of the children. Only in the case of the mother of a girl didthe sandplay show a literal reproduction of the tsunami; the motherwas fixed on the traumatic experience, and her psychological conditiondid not get better.

We concluded from our psychological relief work that it is not thebig story of the earthquake and tsunami, but small and individualstories that are important for the mental recovery of the victims. Wecan even suggest that a fixation on the big story of the earthquakedisaster blocks psychological development, as the case of the motherhinted at. Psychological development and recovery from the shock ofthe earthquake are brought about by finding small stories. The bigtraumatic story of the earthquake and tsunami is replaced by smallindividual stories which are easier to cope with. Although each seriesof sandplay sessions was interesting, there was almost no indication ofwhat the earthquake disaster meant for Japan and the modern worldor how the collective psyche was reacting against the lost worldview.

PSYCHOTHERAPY AND PSYCHOLOGY

Our psychological relief work for victims of the 2011 earthquakesuggests that psychotherapy does not have to do directly with thesolution of a collective problem. The success of psychotherapy ratherconsists in the shift from the big story of trauma to small personal stories.Jung wrote in a letter, “If the individual is not really changed, nothingis changed.”1 Jung believed that a change of worldview would bebrought about in the unconscious of individual persons. Jung wrotethat the individual “is the one important factor and . . . the salvationof the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul.”2 AsWolfgang Giegerich pointed out, the concept of the collectiveunconscious might be problematic.3 Jung assumed that the lostmythological world was still alive in the collective unconscious, which

THE 2011 EARTHQUAKE IN JAPAN 51

could produce new symbols. But as our psychological relief worksuggested, psychotherapy has to do with the care of the individuals,but not with the salvation of the world.

Giegerich pointed out that the psychotherapy is insignificant forthe Menschheitsproblematik (mankind’s problems) and wrote, “The opusmagnum is somewhere else: in those works that articulate and changethe logic of our being-in-the-world.”4 Such works are created by greatartists and thinkers. In this case, the big story tends to be symbolizedand rendered in metaphors, in a work of art, a novel, or philosophy,instead of being replaced by small stories. We have to deal with suchworks if we would like to discuss our worldview, our being-in-the-world. In this sense it is probably important to distinguish psychologyfrom psychotherapy. While psychotherapy has to do with care of smallstories and individual persons, psychology is concerned with mankind’sproblems by interpreting works of artists and thinkers.

OLD BIG STORIES: LIFE AND DEATH

Since the 2011 earthquake numerous books and special issues ofjournals have been published. They not only report on the aftermathof the earthquake disaster and criticize the preparation before and themeasures devised after the disaster. Some try to suggest a new worldviewand being-in-the-world. In this sense they are attempts to cope withthe big story not only on concrete and political levels, but also onmetaphorical and conceptual levels.

It seems to me that it is still premature to propose a new big storyconcerning the Great East Japan Earthquake, so I would like to lookback and consider two stories based on previous earthquakes. We mayget some hints from them. One is from The Legends of Tono, a collectionof tales from the Tono region in Tohoku, recorded and written by KunioYanagita.5 Yanagita is the founder of Japanese folklore studies, and thiscollection has become a Japanese folklore and literature classic. This isa very interesting and peculiar work which has led to many studiesand still deserves future study from new vantage points. As theexploration of folklore was not yet established in Japan at that time,the collection contains all kinds of stories from myths and fairy talesto gossip. I would like to mention one story which is directly relatedto a big earthquake. The coast of Sanriku has been hit several times by

52 TOSHIO KAWAI

terrible tsunamis caused by earthquakes. Historically, the one in 869seemed to be the biggest. But in 1896 there was a famous Sanrikuokiearthquake, which caused a tsunami and killed more than 20,000people, almost as many as the 2011 earthquake. The story I quote, no.99, is based on this tragedy.6 This story may be an answer to the lifeand death question.

Legend 99. Kiyoshi Kitagawa, an assistant headman in Tsuchi-buchi village, lived in Hiishi. His family had been roving priestsfor generations. His grandfather, named Seifuku-in, was a scholarwho had written many books and done a lot for the village.Kiyoshi’s younger brother Fukuji married into a family inTanohama on the coast. Fukuji lost his wife and one of hischildren in the tidal wave [tsunami] that struck the area last year.For about a year, he was with the two children who survived ina shelter set up on the site of the original house.

On a moonlit night in early summer, he got up to go to the toilet.It was off at some distance where the waves broke on the path bythe beach. On this night, the fog hovered low, and he saw twopeople, a man and a woman, approaching him through the fog.The woman was definitely his wife who had died. Withoutthinking, he trailed after them to a cavern on the promontory inthe direction of Funakoshi village. When he called out his wife’sname, she looked back and smiled. The man he saw was fromthe same village, and he too had died in the tidal wave disaster.It had been rumored that this man and Fukuji’s wife had beendeeply in love before Fukuji had been picked to marry her.

She said, “I am now married to this man.” Fukuji replied, “Butdon’t you love your children?” The color of her face changedslightly and she cried. Fukuji didn’t realize that he was talkingwith the dead. While he was looking down at his feet feelingsad and miserable, the man and the woman moved on quicklyand disappeared around the mountain on the way to Oura.He tried to run after them and then suddenly realized theywere the dead. He stood on the road thinking until daybreakand went home in the morning. It is said that he was sick for along time after this.

We mentioned that the story about life and death was importantin the case of a tsunami. Even near the coast, while some areas wereseriously hit, some areas were saved. In the same area some people could

THE 2011 EARTHQUAKE IN JAPAN 53

barely escape, some were drowned and killed. Even within a family,such a drama occurred. How can the dead and living who wereseparated meet again? Or how can the living say farewell to the dead?In Japan there is a ritual to welcome dead ancestors during the Obontime in the summer. It is around the middle of August. In the case ofthe city of Kyoto, the dead come back to the city between August 7and August 10, and they stick around and leave this world again onAugust 16. The famous sending fire of Five Mountains in Kyoto is aceremony to send the dead souls back to the other world. In other placesthe dead are sent back to the other world by floating dedicatory lanternson the river. Many dedicatory lanterns on the Kitakami River nearIshinomki in the year of the earthquake (2011) had a special meaningbecause they were not only symbolic ancestors but real recent dead bythe latest tsunami. It was not a summer tourist festival at all, but a realritual with sorrow and tears.

In the text of The Legends of Tono story no. 99 takes place in thesummer of the year following the Sanriku earthquake, but in other textsbased on the same colloquial tradition, it takes place in the summer ofthe same year as the earthquake. Considering the intensity of the storythis must be the first Obon for the dead to return home, which is veryimportant. I have heard many dreams of patients who did not believein the return of the dead in Obon, but were surprised to dream of thedead who returned to this world exactly during this period. Fukuji,who had lost his wife, met her again; this story is a verification of theold story and belief.

But this story is not idyllic and sentimental. It does not end witha happy return of the dead. Fukuji’s wife lives now with her formerlover. This story should not be understood as a kind of gossip but as atruly psychological story. Fukuji lost his wife first physically in thetsunami and now loses her again psychologically because she seems tobe living with her former lover. Meeting again leads to anotherseparation. But this second loss is necessary to establish a newrelationship between life and death and to recover from the disaster.

In Greek mythology Orpheus goes to the underworld to look forhis dead wife, Eurydice. He is allowed to bring her back to this worldwith the promise of not seeing her on his way. But he looks back at herand loses her eternally. Orpheus’s action should not be understood asa failure but as an accomplishment of love, sending Eurydice to her

54 TOSHIO KAWAI

proper place since her name suggests that she is queen of theunderworld.7 In analogy to the myth of Orpheus our story from TheLegends of Tono suggests that the dead wife is now psychologically lostand that she belongs to her own world. The film Orphée by Frenchpoet Jean Cocteau makes the double character of Eurydice clearer. Inthis film Orpheus loves la princess de la mort, “princess of death,” andher driver Heurtebise loves Orpheus’s wife Eurydice. Because these fourfigures make marriage quaternio (Heiratsquaternio), there are cross-cousin marriages or relationships to anima and animus betweenOrpheus and the princess of death and Eurydice and Heurtebise. Butbecause the princess of death and Heurtebise remain in the other worldat the end, Orpheus can come back to this world with his wife Eurydice.In comparison with Cocteau’s film, we can conclude that the fourthelement, a real woman in this world, is still lacking in our story fromthe Tono legends, which is probably the reason for Fukuji’s sickness.

Because this story is based on the Japanese tradition of Obon ritualand is similar to the Orpheus’s myth, it can be regarded as a collectiveanswer to the tragedy of tsunami and the question of life and death.But it is at the same time Fukuji’s personal story. In this sense this isan encounter of big story with a small personal story.

HARUKI MURAKAMI: GRATITUDE AND INVOLVEMENT

I would like to introduce another story, written by HarukiMurakami. Murakami is probably the most famous contemporarynovelist in Japan. His recent novel 1Q84 was newly translated intoEnglish and published in October 2011. My understanding of hisnovel is that it shows the state of soul in Japan as having skipped overthe task of establishing modern consciousness so that it now standsbetween the pre-modern world and postmodern consciousness.8

The original title of After the Quake was “All God’s Children CanDance,” and it contains six short stories that take place between theKobe earthquake in January 1995 and the poison gas terrorismcarried out by a religious cult in the Tokyo subway in March 1995.9

One is a natural disaster and the other a manmade disaster. Theyear 1995 was a turning point for Japan and also for Murakami’sworks, marking the end of Japan’s economic flourishing and variouskinds of Japanese systems, such as lifelong employment. Murakami’sbook marked a change from the detachment found in his earlier works

THE 2011 EARTHQUAKE IN JAPAN 55

to more involvement with society. I would like to focus on one of thesix short stories, “Super-frog Saves Tokyo,” which has a direct referenceto the earthquake. The following is my summary of the story.

Katagiri, a banker, was surprised by a huge frog who was waitingfor him in his house. Frog explained that there would be anearthquake in Tokyo caused by a huge worm at 8:30 a.m. onFebruary 18, which according to Frog’s prophecy was in threedays. Frog wanted to prevent it, but needed help. Frogsubsequently proved the accuracy of his prophetic ability toKatagiri by predicting the return of a pending loan. Frog andKatagiri decided to go down to the epicenter, which was locatedexactly beneath the bank by which Katagiri was employed. Butthe day before the earthquake, just when they needed to gounderground below the bank to fight the worm, Katagiri wasshot and brought to a hospital. He woke up in the bed of thehospital and noticed that it was already February 18 and thatthe earthquake had not happened. A nurse explained to himthat, contrary to his memory, he was found lying on the streetwithout a gunshot wound. Frog came up to the hospital afterwardand explained how he, Frog, had fought the worm. Katagiriapparently had been helping Frog in his dream. Frog started tofade out as he was telling the story about the fight with the worm.Boils burst out of the body of Frog and “wriggling, maggotlikeworms of all shapes and sizes came crawling out.” Hundreds ofworms came and crawled up Katagiri’s leg. He screamed and anurse came. He told her, “He [Frog] saved Tokyo from beingdestroyed by an earthquake all by himself.” The end of this storysuggests that Katagiri was also about to die: “Then he closed hiseyes and sank into a restful, dreamless sleep.”

In contrast to the story in The Legends of Tono, which depicts whathappened after the earthquake, this story shows how the earthquakewas prevented. It is interesting that Katagiri has “no wife, no kids, bothparents dead, brother and sister he had put through college marriedoff. So what if they killed him?” The lack of relationship makes itpossible for him to encounter Frog. In this sense he does not live inthe old worldview with its story of meeting the dead ancestors. Whilein The Legends of Tono the motivation is a personal one of meeting thedead wife, the matter here is the collective task of saving Tokyo fromthe earthquake. So the dimension is totally different.

56 TOSHIO KAWAI

Frog fought the worm, while Katagiri wanted to help the frog anddid help him in the dream. We can draw two conclusions. The firsthas to do with connection to the source of the power. The epicenterwas located in the underground of the bank in which Katagiri worked.Is Katagiri a special person, a selected hero, or a godlike prophet?No, rather this suggests that every postmodern person who is notpart of a community or a family nor in a personal relationship hashis epicenter in his depth. To put it differently, the lack of horizontalrelationships makes the vertical encounter possible and necessary.It is important to come into contact with this depth in the form offighting. I don’t think the point is to overcome the danger and toevade the disaster heroically. As Frog was transformed after the fightand died in the hospital, he was sacrificed by coming into contactwith the power of the worm and was even embodied andtransformed into worms. In the case of natural disaster there arevery often aspects both of fear and of obtaining power from it. Forexample, on the coasts hit by the tsunami in 2011 there arehundreds of Shinto shrines. This is because people were both afraidof and at the same time thankful for the power of water, the rich powerof the ocean which brings fish and other fruitful products. People wereafraid of nature but, at the same time, grateful for its richness.

These two attitudes are somehow equivalent to the feelings oftremendum and fascinosum which Rudolf Otto described as feelingtoward the “holy”; in face of the holy we have feelings of awfulnessand fascination.10 These two feelings have been noted historicallyin other rituals. After many natural disasters and epidemics aroundthe ninth century in Japan, a festival was created in Heian time todrive away bad spirits: Gion Matsuri, the most famous festival inKyoto. According to historians, it was important for people at thattime not only to drive away but also to get the power of bad spirits;in the highlight of the festival people felt the power and presenceof bad spirits. So there is a moment of both fear and fascination,presence and disappearance. In this connection I would like tomention that in several sandplay sessions after the earthquake a lotof animals were put in the sand tray. In one case, many animalswere heading in the direction where the patient and therapist werestanding. In another case a lot of animals were gathering around asleeping rabbit (fig. 1). This can be regarded as the power of nature

THE 2011 EARTHQUAKE IN JAPAN 57

in a rather positive sense after people have experienced the extremelynegative power of nature in the form of earthquakes and tsunamis.

After referring to the power of tsunami, I have to make a shortremark concerning nuclear power plants. If we analyze the attitudetoward nuclear power plants in Japan from this point of view, I have tosay that it is totally out of this worldview. Nuclear power does not belongto environmental order and comes from outside of nature. It is nowonder the Japanese have not built any shrines to give thanks to nuclearpower plants and want to discard them now without any gratitude forsuch powers. There has not been a grounded story around the nucleardisaster, but people now know that many of the stories about the safetyand usefulness of nuclear power plants were false, manipulative, andserved only the interests of the Tokyo Electric Company, thegovernment scientists, and the mass media, all of whom colluded andspent billions of dollars developing their version of the storysurrounding safe, clean nuclear power.

The second conclusion we can draw from Murakami’s story is this:after the 2011 earthquake many writers, including scientists,

Figure 1. Animals gathering (offered by Akiko Sasaki).

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highlighted the Japanese attitude of mujo the calm and passiveacceptance of fate, thinking that nothing remains the same, that thereis nothing in the end. While the Western worldview is aimed atattaining a better and higher point, the worldview of mujo is based on“ground zero,” on nothingness. So even if people lose everything afterthe earthquake, they can accept the situation as a basic state. Thisattitude may have prevented them from chaotic rioting and it may havegiven them support to endure the difficult situation after the earthquakein the stricken areas.

But in Murakami’s story, no passive acceptance of fate is recognized.Rather, the power is regarded as evil and the protagonist tries to fightagainst the evil. This is because this work evolved out of both a naturaldisaster, earthquake, and a manmade disaster, poison gas terrorism. Themessage is that we have to be active, we have to fight against the evilpowers. We should not remain in a passive acceptance of fate. Becausethe earthquake of March 11, 2011 resulted in a combination of naturaland manmade disaster, Murakami’s story anticipated somehow a newattitude which may be necessary for the situation today. I would notsay there is already a solution or a hint of a solution in this short work.But at least we may say that the highly praised attitude of mujo amongthe Japanese after the 2011 earthquake is not totally valid anymore.This is because we no longer have to deal only with natural power,which can be accepted with fear and gratitude in the exitingworldview. Besides the natural power, human and evil power playedan important role in the disaster with extremely negative results.So the passive acceptance of power is not enough. We have to beactive and fight against negative power. This means also that naturehas lost its omnipotence. The 2011 earthquake surprised us with theuncontrollable power of nature on one side, but it made it clear to usthat nature had lost its omnipotent power. This loss must be difficultfor the old being-in-the-world.

LOSS OF NATURE AND OLD STORY: CONCLUSION

Though psychotherapy consists of the emancipation from the bigstory and the creation of small stories, the dimension of the big storyis also important. While I have worked with people in Tohoku, I havekeenly felt the loss of the old story, the old worldview, in the

THE 2011 EARTHQUAKE IN JAPAN 59

background. This loss overshadows the personal psychologicalproblems. So there is a need for a new story.

But at the same time it is absolutely necessary to bring to lighthow the Tokyo Electric Company, the government, scientists, and themass media colluded to create their version of the story and manipulatedpeople. We have to learn from the negative consequences of this story.

There are several good ideas for a new story. For example the workof Japanese anthropologist Shinichi Nakazawa is worth mentioningconcerning our relationship to the energy.11 He analyzes theunmediated, immediate character of nuclear power; what happensinside the sun brought directly into a nuclear plant. This does notbelong to the environmental order and hence the Japanese worldview.But instead of asserting a return to the old worldview and technology,he proposes direct but mediated use of sun energy, which is a dialecticalnegation of nuclear power. He points out the importance of interfacein his further papers.

But it is premature to speak about a new story concretely. It is nowimportant to accept and carry the loss as loss. It is a complicatedsituation in which human technology was defeated by theoverwhelming power of nature on one hand, while on the other handthe omnipotence of nature was lost. This is so to speak a double lossbecause we have lost our trust in technology against the power of natureand our naive belief in the omnipotence of nature. I would like to respectthis double loss so that the emptiness may become a place for the birthof a new being-in-the-world.

NOTES

1. C. G. Jung, Letters, Vol. 2: 1951–1961 (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press 1973), p. 462.

2. C. G. Jung, “The Undiscovered Self,” in The Collected Works ofC. G. Jung, vol. 10, Civilization in Transition (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1964), § 536.

3. W. Giegerich, “The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man,”Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice 6(1):39.

4. Ibid., p. 40.

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5. Kunio Yanagita, The Legends of Tono, translated by R. Morse(1910; reprinted Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008).

6. I would like to thank Professor Sukeyuki Miura whose paper ina seminar reminded me of this story and related materials.

7. T. Kawai, “Die Initiation ins Dichterische bei Heidegger undJung: Der Ort der Psychotherapie,” Daseinsanalyse 6:194–209.

8. T. Kawai, “Postmodern Consciousness in the Novels of HarukiMurakami,” in The Cultural Complex, edited by T. Singer (London:Routledge, 2004), pp. 90–101.

9. Haruki Murakami, After the Quake (New York: Knopf, 2002).10. R. Otto, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des

Göttlichen und sein Verhälthis zum Rationalen (Breslau: Trewendt undGranier, 1920).

11. S. Nakazawa, Nihon no Daitenkan [Big Change of Japan](Tokyo: Shueisha, 2011).