Art created in immediate response to disaster must confront certain ethical as well as aesthetic issues. Indeed, this is one clear case in which ethics and aesthetics seem inextricably linked – and, more than that, a case in which they often seem to conflict with each other. With time comes detachment, but in the immediate aftermath of a disaster writers and artists can feel themselves condemned to silence by the sheer overwhelming magnitude of human suffering that surrounds them. They are virtually compelled to ask fundamental questions about the value or appropriateness of their art in the face of such suffering. And they often tend, in the first instance, to be overcome by the debilitating sense that mere words or images cannot do justice to the enormity and tragic meaning of the disaster, or even that the making of ‘artistic capital’ out of it is a kind of ‘disaster exploitation’ on a par with the proverbial ambulancechasing of other professions. But such fainthearted hesitations or ambivalences also, almost inevitably, give rise to a creative counter-reaction and new forms of ‘apologia’ for the ultimate value of art. The creative energy of the artist overcomes initial ethical reservations and, especially in those most aware of this ethical/aesthetic conflict, a new and more powerful form of artistic expression may ultimately result.

Writers, for instance, must write, even if almost in spite of themselves, and their words can possess a mysterious healing power of their own. In the wake of ‘3/11’ (as the March 11, 2011 ‘triple disaster’ of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in northeastern Japan is now conventionally designated), Tanikawa Shuntarō, a senior figure in the Japanese poetic world, wrote a poem called ‘Words’ which, as Jeffrey Angles notes, poses ‘the question of how we can even write about things for which there are no words; yet “Words put forth buds / From the earth beneath the rubble”’.

This familiar pattern (in Japan as elsewhere) – an initial traumatized silence followed by a ‘defiant’ outburst of creative productivity – may be seen among writers and artists after an earlier disaster such as the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 and it may also be found in the literature and art produced, ultimately in great profusion, in the aftermath of 3/11. One significant new factor in the recent disaster, however, was the omnipresence of social media: Twitter, Facebook, and other communications progeny of the Internet.