ABSTRACT
This chapter considers aspects of the responses to 3.11 voiced by Saitō Kazuyoshi and Nagabuchi Tsuyoshi, two of contemporary Japan’s hardest-hitting singer-songwriters. While each artist responded to these events with what I have called ‘musical critiques,’ the form taken by each artist’s critique—and their ultimate potentialities—proved quite different. To understand both these individual critiques and the ambiguous potentials of the “new paths” (Karatani Kōjin) opened up by 3.11, we must step back from the moment of the disasters themselves, and situate these actors and their voices along a longer historical arc that both encompasses and informs understandings thereof. (100 words)
