16 POINTING THROUGH THE SCREEN Archiving, surveillance, and atomization in the wake of Japan’s 2011 triple disasters Joel Neville Anderson In a gesture toward increasing transparency following the nuclear accidents caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011 (commonly referred to as “311”), the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) installed a live internet video feed surveilling the nuclear waste clean- up process at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant where the multiple meltdowns had occurred. Nearly six months after the quake, a figure in radiation protection gear walked into view of the stationary camera, extended their right arm, and pointed toward the lens. After holding this position for 20 minutes, the figure disappeared. This mysterious act was recorded and circulated online without explanation until an anonymous email to a Tepco official began to tease at the identity of the finger-pointing worker and the intent to bring attention to the situation of temporary nuclear workers. This study is written in response to the formal proced- ures and social circumstances of the anonymous pointing figure’s protest/performance—subse- quently revealed in a Tokyo gallery exhibition—and those of other artists, archivists, and activists working through the aesthetic and political potentials of the post-311 image and its circulation. Surveying the visual culture of post-311 Japan through cultural workers’ interventions, this chapter argues for a transmedia approach to understanding social crisis amid environmental col- lapse, analyzing a diverse selection of projects in photography, film and video, performance, archiving, and community media. These practitioners repeatedly point to the insufficiency of their mode of representation to render the scale of unthinkable catastrophe, re-contextualizing vernacular photography, appropriating surveillance technologies, and embracing non- representational documentary images to place or displace the self in reference to media in circu- lation. A comparison of these works not only reveals these practitioners’ common interrogation of a disaster’s construction through media, it also identifies disaster management as a paradig- matic model of the mediation of environment and self through the particular context of con- temporary Japanese documentary. The Great East Japan Earthquake, popularly known as 311 (3.11 or 3/11 in international contexts), was a magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck off the coast of the Tōhoku region of Northeastern Japan, causing a massive tsunami that killed over 18,000 people and precipitating multiple nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The immediate effects of the natural disaster and forced evacuation of land deemed uninhabitable because of 263