My father, one of the pioneers of acoustics research, was born in 1927 in Tokyo, a few years after the great Kanto earthquake of 1923. His life reflects a generation of survivors of the greatest natural disaster to hit Japan—until, of course, the recent tsunami of 3/11/2011.

Gennifer Weisenfeld's magnificent Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan's Great Earthquake of 1923 describes Tokyo's recovery. Its text is accompanied by a wide-ranging and carefully chosen selection of images—paintings, photographs, sculptures, cartoons, seismographic charts, woodcuts, and newspaper headlines—that trace the visual record of trauma and of enormous economic commitment to recovery. The images reveal historic passages of darkness, darkness punctuated by the clarity of objective photographic imagery, hauntingly ominous sketches, and even several satirical political cartoons. What the images cannot foretell is the impending disaster of the Asia-Pacific war that would follow, of the nation's cities literally melted down in atomic hell.

Such was the backdrop to my father's childhood. In 1945, when he was a senior in high school whose teachers had already noted his astute scientific thinking, my father's mother perished in the Great Tokyo Air Raids, pierced by shrapnel from an American bomb that landed a few feet from the cave in which she hid.

What haunts me is the story of my family and their nation between the Kanto earthquake and the end of the Great War. This period, from 1923 to the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was marked by intense torment and a sense of national failure. This was the setting that shaped my father's life. Thus, when I first perused Imaging Disaster, my thoughts raced to the past, to my parents and those in their generation. But at the same time, I was thinking of more recent traumas, from 9/11 to 3/11, the Ground Zero realities that make up what is today.

I first encountered Imaging Disaster as I prepared to meet Gennifer Weisenfeld, who teaches at Duke University. She had been invited by Jeremy Begbie to participate in a symposium related to the QU4RTETS project, a collaborative work that responds in visual art, music, and writing to T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Weisenfeld's symposium presentation on Eliot and her book are both remarkable works of visual journeying, and during her presentation my own sense of belonging "in between" the cataclysmic events of 9/11 and 3/11 came alive. One of the works in QU4RTETS, a painting by Bruce Herman, is a portrait of my father, and the symposium was part of an inaugural event for the Fujimura Institute, an entity I desired to dedicate to my father, so I felt keenly the divide and the historic realities behind each of the images presented.

In many ways my father's life as a scientist has been a quintessentially Japanese journey of rejuvenation. Determination—even stubbornness—still flows in his character today at the age of 85. It is a miracle that my father exists at all (and, therefore, that I do); his mother and father lived through the 1923 earthquake and conceived my father a bit later. In the postwar period, my father mostly stayed with his older sister Yoshiko, who lost her husband soon after the war. His aloof father sent him to a prestigious private school where he had further chances to develop his scientific and linguistic acumen.

Weisenfeld's book is based on prodigious research, but it is also a highly aesthetic effort, a narrative that reveals the sophisticated and subliminal visual journey of the Japanese psyche. Japanese aesthetics are deeply embedded in what Weisenfeld calls her "Visual Scholarship." Glossy, heavy paper makes Imaging Disaster unusually weighty, and allows for exceptionally high-quality images of photos and art, to a degree rarely found in scholarly publications; it seems a hybrid of an art catalogue and an academic monograph. Surely, this is beyond the budget of most publishers, university presses included—so how did she manage it? She told me that with Duke University's blessing and support, she raised her own funds relentlessly as she collected images. I find this commitment to aesthetics enthralling, and just as valuable as the scholarly content of her writing.

While many commentators rightly decry publishing trends that undermine a commitment to excellence, we have seen some heartening counter-examples: superbly produced books, and at affordable prices. Take, for example, the recent publication of Carl Jung's The Red Book, finally allowed by the Jung estate to see the light of day—some 212 pages of illuminations of contentious rumination and pre-schizophrenic images. My own experience in producing a book illuminating the four gospels, made possible by a commission from Crossway, was deeply encouraging. But this commitment to a high level of visual excellence, as exemplified by Weisenfeld's book, is scarce in Christian circles. We have much to learn from her: to lavish attention on aesthetics and historical data, to illumine our journeys. However difficult to achieve, such efforts are worth our investment: they will expand our understanding of our Ground Zero existence beyond what words can express.

A passage from Weisenfeld's chapter "Disasters as Spectacles" suggests the outlines of her approach:

The mass media produced a frame of reference for the public imagination of disaster. Artists adorned that frame. … Modernity was itself an ongoing spectacle of new technology, from the weapons of war to the burgeoning metropolis, which, together with the dynamo of capitalism, produced its own kind of "creative destruction."

Even in this short paragraph, her words are pregnant with meaning, and invite visual discourse. She is creating a matrix of visual evidence—historically and culturally specific responses to a particular disaster—but she is also reweaving the fragmented elements of our common journey, from media, art, technology, and weapons to the Wasteland of the city. Her book is full of such coalescing, forcing the reader to rediscover history with vigor and energy.

Great historians like Peter Brown and Luke Timothy Johnson bring imagination to the investigation of facts. Their words explore a range of possibilities rather than constricting interpretation. Weisenfeld shares this generative trait. She is apparently a popular teacher at Duke; I can see students responding to her immense effort to synthesize a socio-aesthetic journey and a historical survey in a single narrative. In Imaging Disaster, she is able to release the potential of classroom teaching of history into an expansive journey for readers.

The ramifications of this type of intriguing visual scholarship are immense. First, a visual medium can in itself be a valid mode of narrative, adding to the layer of available factual data. In other words, visual training— in how to see—can be a viable means of training young minds for distinctive scholarship, just as much as any other method. Second, art education is not valuable only as a way to train a young artist; Weisenfeld's approach shows that art education can elevate our rational discourse, leading to inductive reasoning skills that can be of enormous value to scholarship. Third, in an educational setting like Duke, professors such as Weisenfeld are teaching not only history but also visual intelligence, training young thinkers in a broader diction of how we may draw upon history to understand ourselves and our time.

Imaging Disaster also probes deeply into the psyche of post-disaster culture, fiercely (but carefully) surveying what to expect after a major disaster. This book, therefore, needs to be translated into Japanese and given to every official dealing with the aftermath of the 3/11 tsunami, as a cautionary visual tale about what they can expect during the ongoing recovery process. Though written before the cataclysmic events of 3/11, Imaging Disaster's objective look at the past may pave the way for a deeper understanding of trauma.

Art, of course, provides a specific directive, and Weisenfeld has noted that she began her scholarship with research on the Rato group, an avant-garde art movement that developed during the 1920s. As an artist, I wish she had included in her book more images of the art of that period, and perhaps dedicated a chapter to the relationship between avant-garde visual arts and the larger context of the book. In addition, this book did not answer the questions that it beckoned me to explore as I opened it. I kept looking for clues in the images that might foretell the growth of nationalism that led to the Asia-Pacific war. I kept trying to understand the context of the immense and myopic vision that led to the war. In neither effort was I satisfied. To be fair, these are outside the scope of the author's efforts. But the visual narrative of the book is unquestionably truncated when it abruptly presents Hiroshima as an "epilogue." Perhaps that last chapter should have been omitted. The cataclysmic events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or of the Holocaust or other paradigm-shifting destructions of humanity, cannot be treated as "epilogues."

But this critique, which arises from my deep Ground Zero consciousness, cannot stop me from marveling at what this book and this scholar bring to our bi-cultural dialogue. For me, it was enormously personal and resonant to realize that Weisenfeld's book exists because of visual data and evidence that were only achievable after the 1920s. Only in this century did it become possible to measure earthquakes seismographically—a type of visual data. My revelation was this: my father, as a pioneer in acoustics research, depended on the technological advances that allowed visual interpretation of auditory data.

But it is also true that such technological advances led to the development of atomic weapons and nuclear power, and the fire of disasters to follow, from Hiroshima to Fukushima. What Weisenfeld accomplishes is to capture the tremors and rumblings of disaster in a visual package.

There is a difference between natural disasters and wars. We might argue that the damages brought by war are self-inflicted. In either case, though, the trajectory of recovery may point to exploitation (as when a defeat or a disaster is used to fuel resentment and nationalistic ambitions) or toward humility and collaboration. Often these two trajectories are commingled. Such was the case, well documented in Imaging Disaster, with the responses to the Great Earthquake of 1923. Weisenfeld quotes an American historian who was living in Japan at that time, Mary Beard: "On all sides we hear tales of the daring, resourcefulness, and unselfishness that the laboring class exhibited when the crash came and the fire spread … . It sometimes takes a catastrophe on an immense scale to teach us true values."

Weisenfeld's book veers away from observations that lead to cause-and-effect judgments. Instead, she draws upon the data of post-earthquake art as evidence of a type of universality in all responses to all disasters, in all cultures. Many times, I saw in this book direct parallels between the Japanese responses to the 1923 earthquake and post-9/11 reconstruction efforts in my Manhattan neighborhood. Weisenfeld notes:

This sensational exhibitionary rhetoric of physical trauma and relic veneration was powerfully continued in the quake's official memorial and taken up later in the memorialization of other disasters, such as the wartime atomic bombings. In the early post-quake period, such visceral displays coexisted in a tentative balance with the urban renewal rhetoric of reconstruction, even as government officials tried mightily to harness the powerful emotions os public trauma and empathy in the cause of the future city. Through calculated display of these objects and representations, they importuned the living to honor the sacrifice of the dead by cooperating with the reconstruction effort, going so far as to compare the deaths of earthquake victims to those of soldiers killed for the nation on the battle fields of the Russo-Japanese War. By the end of the decade, this balance would tip, however, as the national and municipal governments felt a need to enfold mourning and memory within the progressive narrative of a forward-looking construction.

Ironically, this "progressive narrative" did not pave the way for a kind of renewal. Instead, the result was a modernistic pragmatism in which budget and utility always outweighed the interests of beauty. Instead of taking care to harmonize Tokyo with nature, "reconstruction" meant to get the work done quickly and cheaply, so resources could increasingly be used for military purposes.

Curiously, Weisenfeld remains silent on these connections. What is most striking to me is that the book, ostensibly an "outsider's" document, does not read like that: Instead, it reads as a lovingly crafted work of visual scholarship that nurtures our interest in a period of history largely left behind. And part of what makes the book fascinating and worth exploring is the reader's awareness of silent, in-between areas of conjecture and historical reality that Weisenfeld herself does not explicitly address. It is haunting that Japan repeated, with the help of the United States, the pragmatism of post-earthquake days in the post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki days. One could argue, looking at this book, that postwar construction was even more short-sighted and gray than the first rebuilding efforts after the earthquake.

The bright, color-filled pages of this book attest to a deeply rooted Japanese disposition toward aesthetics that postwar Tokyo ignored. To behold this book is to imagine a possible future in which such a disposition can be restored, leading to a Japan that a loving observer might wish for.

Weisenfeld devotes significant attention to images related to namazu, the catfish. Catfish can detect earthquake tremors with their antennae, but in Japan's animistic culture, the catfish was endowed with a prophetic voice, expressing an undercurrent of dissent and critique. A cartoon depicts a catfish as the voice of nature, and Weisenfeld notes:

One cartoon … shows an animated catfish labeled "earthquake" rearing its head from the subterranean level beneath the buried electrical power lines and the planned subway construction to view the scorched earth above. It exclaims, "They just don't seem to learn from experience; Tokyoites are really callous..." Here the catfish presumably seeks to punish the city dwellers again for disturbing his lair with their intrusive underground urban development.

The word translated "callous" can also mean "insensitive," and it literally refers to "a numbed nervous system." This word captures the reality of the post-trauma city, as well as the gray utilitarian pragmatism pervasive in the postwar recovery of Tokyo. The Japanese have become numbed to their own sense of beauty. Perhaps the catfish appears over and over in Imaging Disaster in part because Weisenfeld herself identifies with the namazu. What she gives us, and the Japanese people, is a book animated by the opposite of insensitivity and callousness. What she gives us is a delight that permeates to the depth of urban humanity—the gift not only of a scholar but of an artist.

Makoto Fujimura, an artist based in Princeton, New Jersey, is the founder of the International Arts Movement. His illuminated edition of The Four Holy Gospels was published by Crossway in 2011.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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