Noda Manabu    Department   Undergraduate School  , School of Arts and Letters    Position   Professor
Date	2012/04/29
Presentation Theme	Shakespeare's Romance Plays and the 3/11 Earthquake in Japan
Conference	Seminar on Shakespeare: Great Shakespearean Adventures on Romanian and Foreign Stages, 28-29 April 2012, Craiova, Romania
Promoters	Craiova International Shakespeare Festival (Romania)
Conference Type	International
Presentation Type	Speech (General)
Contribution Type	Individual
Details	After the gigantic earthquake that hit the Tohoku area of Japan on March 11, 2011, Japanese theatre makers faced the dilemma of having to give shape to two totally contradictory things: a longing for an end, a closure, on the one hand, and the lingering sense of anxiety, just like the ongoing and unending process of nuclear disaster, on the other. Although Shakespeare productions in Japan were slow in responding to this call, Yukio Ninagawa managed to tackle this in his production of Shakespeare's Cymbeline (April 2012) through the use of a pine tree on the stage. The paper discusses how his pine tree came to bear double meaning by examining the references it makes to the so-called "miraculous pine tree" in Rikuzen Takata, a town which was devastated by the 3/11 tsunami, and the noh play Matsukaze.