CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Fabian Drixler Japan in the Volcanic Winters of the Little Ice Age
During Japan’s Great Peace (1615-1863), the closest its people came to experiencing a collective apocalypse were nine volcanic winters. Famine rent the veil of material sufficiency and bared the brutality of life amid terrible choices. Locally, famine was a form a system collapse, killing half the population in a single hungry spring and leaving the survivors with the trauma of what they had suffered and done. Among several questions I hope to investigate during my time at CAPAS is a surprising absence: in the teeth of shattered personal, local, regional worlds, apocalyptic language remained muted and rare. The contrast with our own time is thought-provoking, when apocalyptic imagery colours the public conversations of many countries. But a similar contrast can be drawn with people who lived under the same dust-veiled sky. Lord Byron wrote his “Darkness” during the volcanic winter of 1816, inspired by the popular panics that followed the announcement by an Italian astronomer that on July 18 the sun would go out. In Japan’s volcanic winters, no millenarian panics stirred. And yet, the aftermath of the famines may fit some of the patterns of the/a post-apocalypse. A new vision of government emerged. Elements of a welfare state appeared. Radical reform was mooted, too, including totalitarian visions complete with assigned professions and day-care centres for all. These phenomena have not conventionally been understood as post-apocalyptic, but I am eager to see what examining them from this new angle may reveal.