Kizuna : Das Schriftzeichen des Jahres 2011 als Antwort auf das gefühlte Auseinanderbrechen der Gesellschaft?

Kizuna: The Kanji of the Year 2011 as an Answer to the Angst that Japanese Society Will soon Break Apart?

Over 60.000 Japanese voted in a national poll for kizuna to be the »Kanji of the Year« in 2011. Kizuna means bonds or connections. This kanji refers to the feeling that after the triple catastrophe in March Japanese people moved closer together to overcome the tragedy. Until a few years ago, kizuna was a rare word in Japanese political and media discourses. Only lately, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and two media campaigns launched by the NHK and the Asahi Shinbun started to use the kanji more regularly. Especially the NHK and the Asahi expressed fears that the Japanese society is loosening its bonds and will soon fall apart. While kizuna was still a minor concept in this context, after 3/11 it became a buzzword. As the paper argues, this is due to earlier discourses of the DPJ, NHK, Asahi and others which raised the need for answers to the potential disintegration. Kizuna became immediately a convincing response to these fears, even though it has not been defined convincingly in the aftermath of the catastrophe. This article also introduces certain critical voices claim that solidarity (rentai) instead of kizuna would have been a better choice.