Virtual Solidarities in the Wake of Catastrophe: A Case Study on the Japanese Net-Poetry by Wagō Ryōichi

The triple catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that devastated Japan on 11th March 2011, encouraged a fervent artistic response from novelists and poets, raising a debate about the incommunicability of collective trauma and the role of literature in representing the disaster. The poetry by Wagō Ryōichi 和合亮一 (born 1968), a poet originally from Fukushima, remains an example of collaborative practice in digital spaces by transforming the online commitment of Twitter users into proactive communities engaged in digital activism. Wagō began sharing his “pebbles of poetry” directly on his Twitter profile on 16. March 2011 and has not stopped since, gaining international acclaim as evidenced by his invitations abroad. Wagō’s net-poetry could record in real-time the psychological distress, anxiety, and emotional struggles related to the natural disaster and the risk of radioactive contamination in Fukushima and then transformed into a tool of social denunciation in defence of the rights of the evacuees and the controverse disaster recovery of the Tōhoku region. Moreover, thanks to automatic translation and sharing typical of social media, authorial net-poetry became a global literary means capable of conveying messages of solidarity and social support with psychotherapeutic outcomes. This chapter aims to present Wagō Ryōichi’s net-poetry phenomenon through an interdisciplinary approach that combines an interest in the digital humanities with trauma studies and a socio-anthropological perspective on disaster recovery. The final aim is to demonstrate how Wagō’s net-poetry became an example of participatory culture in the wake of 3.11 by stressing the crucial role played by social media in dealing with psychological trauma, poetic representations and disaster recovery.