Ecoambiguity in Japanese Literature and Culture

“Environmental ambiguity manifests itself in multiple, intertwined ways, including ambivalent attitudes towards nature; confusion about the actual condition of the nonhuman, often a consequence of ambiguous information; contradictory human behaviors toward ecosystems; and discrepancies among attitudes, conditions, and behaviours that lead to actively downplaying and acquiescing to nonhuman degradation, as well as to inadvertently harming the very environments one is attempting to protect.” (Thornber 6).

Although Karen L. Thornber uses the notion of ecoambiguity to analyse a huge corpus of East Asian literatures, it is applicable to human cultures all over the planet. However, in some cultures the ironies do seem a little sharper. For example, the myth of Japan that is backed both domestically and exported abroad is of a people who live in harmony with nature, a people who honour the spirits that reside in the landscape. Myths such as these make it hard to acknowledge the environmental degradation that the Japanese too have a part in, because it compromises their sense of cultural identity.

The result is a kind of uneasy hypocrisy, which is called out by authors such as Nobel prize winner Kenzaburō Ōe. In his 1994 speech titled ‘Japan, TheAmbiguous and Myself’ he laments the Western-style modernization of Japan, which he argues has isolated it from other Asian countries, as well as its own traditional Buddhist and Shinto philosophies. In his speech, Ōe addresses what he calls “Japan’s ‘ambiguity’ [which] is a kind of chronic disease that has been prevalent throughout the modern age. Japan’s economic prosperity is not free from it either, accompanied as it is by all kinds of potential dangers in the light of the structure of world economy and environmental conservation. The ‘ambiguity’ in this respect seems to be accelerating. It may be more obvious to the critical eyes of the world at large than to us within the country.”  

This ambiguity also plays a role in many of his novels, as is the case in Somersault (1999). Throughout the novel, the feeling of a looming nuclear disaster that could possibly bring about the already on-going ‘falling’ or dying of the environment is a constant reminder of human responsibility in environmental degradation. Humans are those “who’ve destroyed […] the totality of nature and given [it] an incurable disease” (Ōe 221). Human carelessness is polluting and killing the non-human, therefore bringing about the ‘end of the world’. In this novel, as in the rest of his work, Ōe makes readers uncomfortable by exposing this Japanese ambiguity towards the environment and ‘nature’. In this way Ōe deconstructs the ‘dream’ of coexisting in a harmonious and respectful ways with nature, by creating a constant feeling of insecurity and doubt. Somersault has become even more relevant after the Fukushima disaster of 2011 when the Japanese myth of national safety and security was challenged by the nuclear accident.

Rereading Somersault with Thornber’s concept of ecoambiguity in mind, especially after the Fukushima disaster enables a new layer of analysis. It is as Ōe writes, if “[this] exact thing is happening everywhere around the globe, doesn’t this scene show us the human race becoming extinct?” (Ōe 145).

Laura op de Beke and Giulia Baquè


Work Cited
Thornber, Karen Laura. Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crisis and East Asian Literatures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. 
Ōe, Kenzaburo. Somersault. Grove Press, 2013.