Becoming-Animal at Yoshizawa Masami’s “Ranch of Hope”

• In Event: 260. Japanese Literature and the Animal in Person

Abstract

How should we understand the relationship between Yoshizawa Masami and the 330 cattle he keeps alive with radioactive grain and grasses at his “Ranch of Hope” [kibō no bokujō], 14 kilometers from Fukushima Daiichi? When Yoshizawa defied government orders to evacuate all humans and cull all cattle, was he extending to animals the same sovereign rights he refused to have stolen from himself? Or does his gesture merely expose the state of exception in which disposable populations like his were living long before 3.11? People thought only beef-cattle were subject to the politics of “bare life,” but in fact every community subsidized by nuclear incentives was immanently vulnerable to death and extinction.
This paper attempts to sketch a third reading using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal.” Beyond both biopolitics and rights-based humanism, can we imagine Yoshizawa and his cattle in what Deleuze calls a “a deep identity, a zone of indiscernability more profound than any sentimental identification” (Francis Bacon, 22)? Pity would still play an important role – (“pity the meat!”). But so would the distinction between animal life and intelligent life, with an emphasis on the former allowing us to be what Deleuze calls “cerebrally pessimistic but nervously optimistic.” My texts include Funahashi Atsushi’s two Futaba documentaries (2012 & 2014), a recent children’s book, freelance journalist Harigaya Tsutomu’s 2012 Nuclear Rebellion: Record of the Ongoing Struggle of an Evacuation-Zone Cowherd, and a 2012 Buraku Kaihō article by Yamamoto Munesuke (“Ranch of Hope, Where Irradiated Cattle are Allowed to Live”).

Author

• Margherita Long, University of California, Irvine