Japan's calamities of March 2011 — the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, and the start of an ongoing nuclear disaster — changed not only the social awareness of the general public who make up theater audiences, but also how dramatists approached their work. Many questioned why so many mistakes have been, and continue to be made, in the steering of Japan.
None of those concerns has been allayed as political turmoils at home and abroad, and deepening economic stagnation, have continued to furnish dramatists and stage directors with social themes. This year, however, there has been a shift from grappling with the sheer enormity of Japan's woes to imagining future scenarios in light of them.
One outstanding example was "Kein Licht (No Light) II," a focal point of the Japan Festival/Tokyo 2012, the nation's biggest annual theater event, which ran in October and November. For this piece performed by the Tokyo-based Port B company, Akira Takayama, its director and the company's founder, conjured up scenes from the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, and staged them in different areas of Tokyo's Shimbashi. The audience, guided by maps on postcards, walked amid the noise, neon lights and crowds of the city center to each of the 12 locations, where — whether in a space in a demolition site surrounded by blue tarps, in front of a shop selling Geiger counters, or in a boxy room in a tenement building (set up to look like an evacuee's room in Fukushima) — they would tune radios they'd been issued with to specific frequencies.