Haruki Murakami (born January 12th, 1949) is a Japanese novelist.
In 1979, he made his debut, and “Norwegian Wood,” released in 1987, became a bestseller with over 10 million copies sold.
Murakami is popular outside of Japan, and some describe Murakami as one of the most influential writers in contemporary America.
In 2006, he became the first Asian writer to win the Franz Kafka Prize and has since been considered the leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature among Japanese writers.
He received the Catalonia International Prize(Premi Internacional Catalunya) in 2011 and gave a speech denouncing the Japanese nuclear power plant policy at the award ceremony.
In his speech, he said Japanese people should have continued shouting no to nuclear power plants and that the Japanese should regain their ethics and norms.
Here is the complete translation of Haruki Murakami’s speech at the award ceremony of the 23rd Catalonia International Prize(Premi Internacional Catalunya) that took place on June 9th, 2011.
Haruki Murakami’s speech denounced the Japanese nuclear power plant policies
The 23rd Catalonia International Prize (Premi Internacional Catalunya) award ceremony on June 9th, 2011.
The last time I visited Barcelona was two years ago, in the spring.
When we held an autograph session, so many people showed up that we couldn’t finish signing autographs even after an hour and a half.
The reason why it took so long is because a lot of female readers asked me to kiss me.
I’ve held autograph sessions in many places around the world, but Barcelona was the only place where female readers asked me for a kiss.
This episode alone shows just how great Barcelona is.
I am pleased to return to this beautiful city with a long history and high culture.
Unfortunately, I have to talk about something a little more serious than kissing today.
As you know, at 2:46 pm on March 11th, a massive earthquake struck the Tohoku region of Japan.
The earthquake was so large that the Earth’s rotation slightly sped up, making the day 1/1.8 millionths a second shorter.
The damage caused by the earthquake was severe, but damages left by the tsunami that followed were devastating.
The tsunami reached a height of thirty-nine meters in some places.
Thirty-nine meters means that even if you run up to the 10th floor of an ordinary building, you would not save your life.
Citizens living on the coast were unable to escape, and this yielded nearly 24,000 victims, of whom nearly 9,000 are still missing.
Many people are probably still lying at the bottom of the cold ocean.
When I think about that, my heart tightens as I imagine being in that position.
Many of those who survived lost their families and friends, their homes and possessions, their communities, and their livelihoods.
The tsunami completely wiped out some towns and villages and tripped away many people’s will to live.
Being Japanese means living with many natural disasters.
Most of Japan’s land is in the path of typhoons from summer to autumn. Every year, significant damage occurs, and many lives are lost.
Also, there is active volcanic activity in various places.
Japan currently has 108 active volcanoes.
And, of course, there are earthquakes.
The Japanese archipelago is perched precariously in the eastern corner of the Asian continent, sitting on top of four giant plates.
In other words, it is like living in a nest of earthquakes.
Although we can predict the date and path of a typhoon to some extent, we cannot predict earthquakes.
The only thing we know is that this is not the end and that there will definitely be a big earthquake in the near future.
Many scholars predict that a massive earthquake of magnitude eight will hit the area around Tokyo within the next 20 or 30 years.
It could be a year from now, or it could be tomorrow afternoon.
Despite this, 13 million people in Tokyo alone still lead daily lives.
People still commute to work on crowded trains and work in high-rise buildings.
I haven’t heard anything about Tokyo’s population decreasing after this earthquake.
Why? You might ask.
How can so many people live normally in such a terrifying place?
In Japanese, there is a word “mujo”.
Everything born in this world will eventually disappear and continue to change shape without stopping.
In this perspective, there is no such thing as eternal stability or universal immortality.
This way of thinking comes from Buddhism.
But this idea of “impermanence” is firmly imprinted in Japanese spirituality in a slightly different context than religion and has been passed down almost unchanged since ancient times.
The perspective that everything just passes away is a feeling of giving up.
It also shows that it is pointless for people to go against the flow of nature.
However, the Japanese people have actively found beauty in giving up.
Speaking of nature, we can see cherry blossoms in spring, fireflies in summer, and autumn leaves in autumn.
And we habitually, collectively, watch them intently, as if it were something we must do without any reason.
Cherry blossom viewing spots, firefly viewing spots, and fall foliage spots become crowded with people during that season, making it difficult to get even hotel reservations.
Why?
Because cherry blossoms, fireflies, and autumn leaves all lose their beauty in just a short period.
We travel far to witness its temporal glory.
Not only are they beautiful, but I see them fleetingly dissipating, losing their little light and being robbed of their vivid colors right before my eyes, and that actually gives me a sense of relief.
I don’t know if natural disasters have affected that kind of spirituality. However, we have indeed survived by accepting the natural disasters that hit us one after another as something we cannot help.
And we collectively overcame the damage.
Or that experience perhaps influenced our sense of beauty.
Almost all Japanese people were deeply shocked by this earthquake.
Even those of us who are supposed to be familiar with earthquakes are still stunned by the scale of the damage.
They still feel helpless and even worry about the future of the nation.
But in the end, we will regroup our minds and stand up for recovery.
I’m not too worried about that.
I can’t afford to stay in shock forever.
Broken houses can be rebuilt, and broken roads can be repaired.
If you think about it, humans are renting space on this planet called Earth without permission.
The Earth did not ask us to live here.
You can’t complain to anyone, even if it shakes a little.
What I would like to talk about today is that things cannot be easily repaired, unlike buildings and roads.
For example, ethics and norms.
They are not physical objects.
Once they are damaged, people cannot easily restore them.
I’m talking specifically about the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
As you probably know, three of the six nuclear reactors damaged by the earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima have not been repaired. They are still spreading radioactivity into the surrounding area.
There is a meltdown.
The surrounding soil is contaminated.
Wastewater, possibly containing significant concentrations of radioactivity, is being flushed into the ocean.
The wind scatters them over a wide area.
Up to 100,000 people were forced to leave the area.
Fields, ranches, factories, shopping streets, and ports are left uninhabited and abandoned.
Pets and livestock were also abandoned.
The people who lived there may never be able to return to that land.
The damage will not only affect Japan, but I’m sorry to say that it may also affect neighboring countries.
The reason for this tragic situation is apparent.
It happened because the people who built the nuclear power plants did not anticipate the arrival of such a giant tsunami.
A tsunami of similar magnitude had previously struck this region, and there was a call for a review of safety standards.
However, the electric power company did not take this seriously.
Commercial companies would not welcome investing large sums of money to protect facilities from a once-in-a-century tsunami.
Furthermore, the government, which is supposed to control the safety measures of nuclear power plants strictly, has sometimes lowered its safety standards to promote its nuclear power policy.
For some reason, Japanese people are a people who don’t get angry very much.
I’m good at holding back but not very good at letting my emotions outburst.
In that respect, I may be different from the people of Barcelona.
However, this time around, the Japanese people will be outraged.
At the same time, we must also denounce those of us who have allowed or tolerated the existence of such distorted structures because this situation is deeply related to our ethics and norms.
As you know, we Japanese are the only people in history to have had a nuclear bomb dropped.
In August 1945, two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were bombed with atomic bombs by the American military, killing more than 200,000 people. Many of those who survived died over time, suffering from the symptoms of radiation exposure.
Through the sacrifices of those people, we learned how destructive nuclear bombs are and how deep the damage radioactivity leaves on humans in this world.
The following words are engraved on the Cenotaph for the Atomic Bomb Victims in Hiroshima.
“Please rest in peace. We won’t make the same mistakes again.”
Those are wonderful words because they tell us we are both victims and perpetrators at the same time.
We are all victims in the face of the threat of overwhelming nuclear power, and we are all perpetrators in the sense that we have brought out that power, and in that we have failed to prevent its use.
The Fukushima nuclear power plant accident is the second major nuclear disaster that we Japanese people have experienced in our history.
However, this time, it wasn’t like someone dropped a bomb.
We Japanese ourselves are the ones who set the stage for making mistakes with our own hands, polluting our own land, and destroying our own lives.
How did this happen?
Where did the feeling of rejection of nuclear weapons that Japanese people had for a long time after the war disappear?
What has damaged and distorted the peaceful and prosperous society that we have always sought?
The answer is simple.
“Efficiency”.
Power companies claim that nuclear reactors are “efficient” power generation systems.
In other words, it is a profitable system.
In addition, the Japanese government has had doubts about the stability of the crude oil supply, especially since the oil crisis.
It has been pushing nuclear power generation as a national policy.
Electric power companies have spent vast sums of money on advertising, bought up the media, and instilled in the public the illusion that nuclear power is infinitely safe.
Then, before I knew it, about 30% of Japan’s electricity generation was generated by nuclear power plants.
Before the Japanese citizens knew it, Japan, a cramped, earthquake-prone nation, had become the country with the world’s third largest number of nuclear reactors.
First, a fait accompli was created.
People concerned about nuclear power generation are threatened by the words, “So, you don’t have to worry about running out of electricity,” or “You don’t have to worry about not being able to use your air conditioner in the summer.”
People who question nuclear power were labeled as “unrealistic dreamers.”
That’s how we got here.
Nuclear reactors, which were supposed to be safe and “efficient,” are now in a state of devastation that feels like the devil opened the lid of hell.
People who advocate nuclear power plants have often said, “Look at the reality.”
But they are the ones who did not look at the reality.
They were looking at superficial “convenience.”
They replaced the problem with the word reality and changed the point of discussion.
This was not only the collapse of the myth of technological prowess that Japan had been proud of for many years but also the defeat of the ethics and norms of the Japanese people.
“Please rest in peace. We won’t make the same mistakes again.”
We must once again engrave those words in our hearts.
Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, who played a central role in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, was shocked when he learned the damage of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He is said to have turned to President Truman and said,
“Mr. President, my hands are covered in blood.”
Then President Truman pulled a neatly folded white handkerchief out of his pocket and said,
“Wipe it with this.”
However, needless to say, you cannot find a clean handkerchief that can wipe away that amount of blood anywhere in the world.
We Japanese should have continued to shout NO to nuclear.
This is my personal opinion.
We should have mobilized all our technological capabilities, pooled our wisdom, and poured in our social capital to pursue the development of an effective energy alternative to nuclear power at the national level.
It would have been our way of taking collective responsibility for the many victims who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was also an excellent opportunity for us, Japanese people, to truly contribute to the world.
However, in the midst of rapid economic development, we have become swayed by the easy standard of “efficiency” and have lost sight of this critical path.
Rebuilding broken roads and buildings will be the job of people specializing in it.
But when we try to rebuild damaged ethics and norms, it becomes a task for all of us.
It must be a simple but silent and patient task.
Just as the people of a village go out to the fields on a sunny spring morning to cultivate the land and sow seeds, everyone must work together to complete the task.
There must be some parts in this large-scale collective work that we professional writers, who specialize in words, can willingly be involved in.
We must combine new ethics and norms with new words.
We must then sprout and launch a vibrant new story.
It should be a story we can all share.
It should be a story with a rhythmic melody encouraging people, like the song about sowing seeds in the field.
As I mentioned, we live in changing and an ephemeral world called “impermanence.”
Humans are sometimes powerless in front of the great forces of nature.
Recognition of such ephemerality has become one of the basic ideas of Japanese culture.
However, at the same time, even in a fragile world filled with such crises, we must also possess a positive spirituality and a quiet determination to continue living vibrantly.
It is a great honor for me to have my work appreciated by the people of Catalonia and to receive such a prestigious award.
We live in different places and speak different languages.
The cultures they are based on are also different.
However, we are also fellow citizens of the world, burdened with similar problems and experiencing similar joys and sorrows.
That’s why many stories written by Japanese authors are translated into Catalan and made available to people.
I am delighted to be able to share the same story with you all.
Dreaming is a novelist’s job.
However, the more important job for novelists is to share their dreams with people.
You can only be a novelist with that sense of sharing.
I know that the people of Catalonia have overcome many hardships throughout their long history, and even though they faced harsh conditions at certain times, they have continued to live strong and protect their unique language and culture.
I’m sure we have a lot to share.
It would be wonderful if, in Japan and here in Catalonia, we could all become “unrealistic dreamers” and establish new values common to this world.
I believe that this is the starting point for the rebirth of humanity, as we have been through various severe disasters and incredibly tragic acts of terror in recent years.
We should not be afraid to dream.
Don’t be afraid to have ideals.
And we must not let the worst dogs with names like “expediency” and “efficiency” overtake us.
We become “unrealistic dreamers” who move forward with substantial strides.
Lastly, I would like to donate the entire amount of this prize money to the people affected by the earthquake and the nuclear power plant accident.
I am deeply grateful to the people of Catalonia and the Generalitat de Catalunya for giving me this opportunity.
As a Japanese citizen, I would also like to express my deepest condolences to the victims of the recent Lorca earthquake.
Muchas Gracias
