“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.