Listening to Disaster: Sonic Ecologies of Contemporary Japanese Cinema. On Works by Ōtomo, Kurosawa, Anno and Shinkai

Abstract

This article reads contemporary Japanese cinema through the ear. It argues that listening, rather than vision, is where technological trauma is best registered. Its path crosses sound studies, the phenomenology of perception and media theory, and pauses on two moments. The first examines Akira (Ōtomo, 1988) and Kairo (Kurosawa, 2001) as two opposed ways of giving sonic form to trauma, with noise turned into liturgy against a silence that saturates. The second turns to cinema after the 2011 earthquake and nuclear accident, with Shin Godzilla (Anno, 2016) and Your Name (Shinkai, 2016) as its central cases. In all of them, noise, silence and vibration cease to be effects and become material and affective memory. Sound does not merely accompany the image. It runs ahead of it and, at times, undoes it. And listening emerges as a practice of the body and of the common. Catastrophe becomes, in this light, a persistent frequency, something heard long after it has happened.