There is little clarity in Christopher Nolan’s deeply confused movie, Tenet , but there is one line that shines through: ‘we live in a twilight world’. This potentially captures something important about the world we find ourselves in. Between day and night, we exist in an interstitial moment. L'heure bleue . The blue hour.

This week I was reminded of Kenzaburo Oe’s Hiroshima Notes , a powerful book composed of his reflections on the harm and suffering left in the wake of the first atomic bombing. There are passages that capture a remarkable incomprehensibility, when experience outstrips our capacity to make sense of our world. Meaning is shattered, the world is broken, but still people must find a way to deal with what is left.

The COVID experience has been one of revealing and exacerbating latent tendencies and trends. For the most part, what we have is the same as before, only more and faster . Both good and bad, though hardly an equal mix of the two. Only the most hardened of optimists would be able to look at the experience of the last year and feel positive about the world’s scorecard.

Hiroshima is a place burned into our collective conscious, the site of the first atomic bombing. Many people know of Nagasaki, yet for whatever reason it does not seem to have quite the same resonance. Much less known is the name of another Japanese city, Kokura, a place that is now part of Kitakyushu. But Kokura is a name worth keeping in mind, as it offers a reminder of the powerful hand of Fortuna.

The last note drew on the writing of Robert Musil, one further line of his has lingered in my mind: ‘a man can’t be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.’ It gets to the challenge of being out of sync with the moment one finds themselves in. And in this case, Musil’s observation not passing cleanly through the ages.

This week I found myself back in Kyoto. Walking through temples that have been standing for hundreds of years, lasting through wars, plagues and much more, served as a useful reminder that this pandemic too will pass. But seeing so many people flocking to sakura and choosing to ignore a less serene reality made me also think we likely still have some time to go before that passing will happen.

There is a pivotal scene towards the end of Magnolia , where the seemingly impossible happens, a situation that leaves its characters confused and confounded. A camera shot shows the words written, ‘but it did happen’. These words, and that scene, capture the gap that can appear between experience and expectation, the space between beliefs about what can occur and what actually does eventuate.

Nietzsche was close to the tragic end of his lucid existence when he reflected that, ‘this absurd state of affairs must speedily be brought to an end; we are skating upon very thin ice, and the warm breeze of a thaw is blowing.’ This reflection foreshadowed his own future and the world’s. It would take a few more decades before the the Great War arrived and the ice cracked.

With the impending anniversary of Japan’s triple disasters, this piece reflects on an important lesson I learnt from the research I did on the Fukushima nuclear accident: some things break. On 11 March 2011, a huge earthquake off the coast of Japan triggered a massive tsunami that struck the Tohoku region.

This piece was first published in The Japan Times in late January 2021. The year 2020 undoubtedly defied expectations and predictions. Yet as a new year commences, the experience has not deterred many from offering predictions about what is coming next. While it might be tempting to decisively announce that the world after COVID-19 will be fundamentally different, it really is impossible to say.

This piece was first published on E-IR. An important truism within disaster studies is that all disasters are human-made. What this insight conveys is that how people act – before, during, after – plays a crucial role in shaping how a disaster unfolds, even if the trigger is from nature.