Eco-Meloncholy and the More-Than-Human World: Bontaro Dokuyama

This paper examines the entanglement of oceanic and terrestrial worlds in Bontaro Dokuyama’s 1/150 (2015), a video work that documents the body of a dolphin washed ashore near Fukushima. Part of a pod of melon-headed whales that stranded themselves in 2015—echoing a similar event just before the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster—the lone dolphin becomes, in Dokuyama’s frame, a more-than-human proxy for collective trauma and ecological precarity. By dwelling on the interstitial space of the beach, the work reframes the shoreline not as a stable boundary between land and sea but as a threshold charged with death, memory, and portent. The dolphin’s return to land to die, despite human attempts to save it, resonates with the artist’s own struggle to navigate life in the shadow of Fukushima’s contamination, situating suicide, survival, and interspecies empathy within a shared ecology of vulnerability.

Engaging with discourses of the Blue Humanities and the “oceanic turn,” this paper argues that 1/150 renders the ocean an “agentive force” rather than a passive backdrop. The tides, the dolphin’s body, and the radioactive landscape of coastal Fukushima together produce a field of meaning that exceeds human perception, evoking forms of temporal and ecological awareness grounded in the more-than-human. Through long, unedited takes, Dokuyama suspends the viewer within the temporality of ocean waves and deep time, suggesting that the sea itself may offer forms of prognosis or warning inaccessible to terrestrial sensoria.