ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a socio-cultural analysis on how the Japanese theatres and the wider society reacted to the Fukushima catastrophe, and also scrutinizes Takayama Akira’s Tokyo Heterotopia as an emblematic performance responding to the event. In contrast to general assumptions that, after a catastrophe of such scale, a theatre of direct political intervention would appear, Takayama opted for a subtler path, which he calls – referring to Jacques Rancière – the politics of the senses. Against the backdrop of carnivalesque society and amidst the post-catastrophe turmoil where stirring up society was considered fukinshin, Takayama develops an ‘atomized theatre’ to sensorically blur the boundary between fiction and reality, and – to borrow from Walter Benjamin – open up a new politico-historical constellation in the present. (120 words)
