“I Feel Like I Can’t Avoid Dying”: A Poetic Representation of a Survivor’s Traumatic Experience in the Great East Japan Earthquake

Abstract

This article is a poetic rendition of a recorded and transcribed oral personal life story of a survivor of the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. The aim of the current study is to reproduce and explore his series of dramatic experiences in poetic form and better understand cultural trauma caused by the massive disaster–the magnitude 9.0 earthquake, subsequent tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. This article provides insight into the relatively unexamined issue of cultural trauma emerging from the unprecedented disaster and presents what the earthquake survivor saw and felt through such a catastrophe.

Decolonizing Technologies through Emergent Translanguaging Literature from the Margin: An English as a Foreign Language Writing Teacher’s Poetic Autoethnography

“…Moreover, once I obtained informed consent from my former students, I accessed, downloaded, and analyzed their course-related artifacts such as writing samples, written questionnaires, class video recordings, chat records, semester reflections, etc. As I examined these artifacts, I composed and revised poems to embed their words, metaphors, and images so as to approximate my students' voices-a practice adopted by other poetic inquirers [3,15,33].…”

“…More specifically, using slightly changed terminology, I view each piece of writing as a type of cultural product, which interacts with participants (teachers and peers), processes (how a text comes to be), and parameters (structural constraints such as institutional policy and curriculum) [15]. Furthermore, I view translanguaging as an integral part of my classroom writing ecology that shapes all participants' subjectivities and texts [3,15,33].…”

Storytelling, language, and the earthquake swarm of May 2018: Insights into Shimaore and Kibushi from narrative analysis

“…After harrowing events such as earthquakes, people sometimes tell stories to help understand the disasters [Iida, 2016, Parr, 2015, to work on identity construction [Delante, 2019, McKinnon et al, 2016 and to share their experiences with others [Childs et al, 2017, Wu, 2014. Linguistic expression has proven to be an important research avenue, and some have explored the use of poetry to express survival and trauma, for example with the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 [Iida, 2016[Iida, , 2020 or with the typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines [Parr, 2015]. Short texts such as tweets can be analyzed to understand how emotion is expressed, such as signaling fear and anxiety during the Great East Japan Earthquake [Vo and Collier, 2013].…”