Fragile Connections: Post-Traumatic Care and Relational Ethics in Contemporary Japanese Art Cinema

Xu, Weixu

Chongching University

Abstract

This paper examines how contemporary Japanese cinema reimagines care in the aftermath of collective trauma, focusing on films produced in the post-3.11 cultural context. Rather than staging recovery through dramatic redemption or heroic reconstruction, these works articulate a relational form of care grounded in fragility, interruption, and everyday coexistence. Drawing on cultural theories of trauma, affect, and Raymond Williams’ notion of “structures of feeling,” the paper argues that post-disaster Japanese cinema resists restoring a unified subject or stable social order. Instead, it foregrounds fractured subjectivities and suspended temporalities in which care emerges as a tentative, processual practice. Through close attention to visual strategies—stillness, restrained performance, spatial distance, and ambient sound—these films construct what may be described as a “lowintensity ethics”: a mode of being-with others that acknowledges vulnerability without resolving it. Care here is neither institutional nor heroic; it unfolds through minor gestures— shared meals, silent companionship, hesitant conversations—through which individuals negotiate coexistence amid uncertainty. In contrast to dominant, often Western-centric disaster narratives that privilege spectacle or narrative closure, post-3.11 Japanese cinema proposes an alternative cultural imagination of care. Rather than framing trauma as a wound to be overcome, these films present it as an enduring condition demanding sustained attentiveness and ethical responsiveness. By situating this cinematic sensibility within crosscultural debates on trauma and relational ethics, the paper suggests that film form itself becomes a medium for rethinking care in times of global precarity.

Image Credit: Composite image created by Weixu Xu using film stills from "Drive My Car" (2021, dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi) and "All the Long Nights" (2024, dir. Sho Miyake).