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ABSTRACT
With a death toll surpassing 18,000, the events of 3.11 stand as an unprecedented disaster in post-World War II Japan. Yet we have not actually witnessed people dying, in Japanese mass media, due to self-censorship practices within the industry. Animals, however, are another story. The media have used animals’ corpses as a stand-in for what is otherwise impossible to make visible. In this article, I will carefully listen to the animals who have been forced to become the apparatus by which human death and suffering is rendered visible, or to stand in for disadvantaged groups – including women, children and foreigners – who tend to be overlooked in society. By paying careful attention to these ‘silent’ groups, this article will shed light on the problems immanent to contemporary Japanese mass media and society, as well as the counter-discourses – specifically documentary films – which have responded to this media landscape. The focus will be on three documentaries: Fukushima: Record of Living Things series (2013–2017), by Iwasaki Masanori, Little Voices from Fukushima (2015), by Kamanaka Hitomi, and A2-B-C (2013), by Ian Thomas Ash, an American filmmaker living in Tokyo. I will investigate the discriminatory post-nuclear disaster system governing discussion of Fukushima and the many ways it suppresses unprivileged voices such as the ones in these documentaries.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano is Professor of Transcultural Studies at Kyoto University. Her research interests include: Japanese cinema and media culture, East Asian cinemas, film theories, post-3.11 cinema, Japanese queer and aging film.
Notes
* Some object to the now-widespread practice of referring to the Great East Japan Earthquake simply as ‘Fukushima’ as written in the katakana syllabary (which is usually reserved for the transliteration of foreign or unfamiliar words). The objection arises because some victims of this disaster sense that, by using this syllabic script and writing ‘フクシマ’ rather than using the standard Chinese characters ‘福島’, ‘It feels like they’re slapping a label on it, turning it into a symbol of a bygone place’ (Yanai Michihiko). While it is important never to forget that such objections exist, hereinafter I will be using ‘Fukushima’ precisely because I wish to refocus attention, not on the actual place named Fukushima, but rather on the post-disaster media construct ‘Fukushima’ (Shūkan asahi).
1. Casualty figures taken from the Asahi shinbun, 10 February 2016.
2. For instances, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Citation1962) was already translated into Japanese in 1964. Arne Næss, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, translated and revised by David Rothenberg (Citation1989) was translated into Japanese in 1997 and has a wide range of readers in Japan since then. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (Citation1975), rendered as Dōbutsu no kaihō, has been translated into Japanese twice, by two different publishers: once in 1988 (Tokyo: Gijutsu to ningen) and again in 2011 (Kyoto: Jinbun shoin).
3. An educational program broadcast on an NET affiliate and a TBS affiliate. In total, the program ran from 1973 to 1982. It was a co-production between Mainichi Broadcasting Corporation and Iwanami Film Studio, and had the Nippon Steel Corporation Group (today known as Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal) as its sole sponsor.
4. Translated from ‘Gunzōsha to wa [What is Gunzōsha?]’. http://gunzosha-july.tumblr.com/company (Accessed 2 April 2019).
5. The reference here is to the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006), an exposé on the problem of global climate change starring former Vice President of the United States Al Gore. As is well known, this film won the Academy Award for the Best Documentary Feature at the 79th Academy Awards in 2007, and earned Gore the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in spreading awareness of global climate change, yet despite (or perhaps partly because of) these accolades, the film provoked an antagonistic reaction from the then-current President, George W. Bush, and the Republican Party more generally. The title, ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ is a reference to the challenge the film’s documentation of evidence of global climate change posed for the Bush Administration’s official stance that global warming was a mere scientific hypothesis and their claim that no one had yet been able to prove climate change was actually occurring. Similarly, inasmuch as the Abe administration is on record as claiming, regarding radiological contamination, that ‘the problem has been resolved,’ it is easy to imagine the discordance between the goal of this film series – to continue to show evidence of the serious damage caused by radiation – and the government’s official position.
6. On 5 April 2012, the head of the Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters (the Prime Minister) released the following directive in response to the issue of livestock abandoned within the evacuation zones: ‘Regarding the livestock currently at large within the formerly hazardous area, continue to recapture them, and – having in principle obtained the support of the livestock owners – proceed to cull all such animals in a painless manner (by euthanasia)’. http://www.maff.go.jp/j/kanbo/saisei/sinsai/pdf/siryo_12_2_3.pdf#page=3 (Accessed 13 May 2018).
7. Emphasis added by the author.
8. A concept popularized by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen.
9. Little Voices is indeed noteworthy for using ‘the different layers of interconnectedness’, such as going beyond merely the act of recording the mothers’ locational differences and instead also capturing the ‘phase differences’ – the gaps which occur between multiple topological intervals, or the (subset) differences in interval which are granted to structural composition by abstract space – in their surroundings. Much has been written and said about the emergence of ‘phase differences’ in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. For instance, in his Citation2013 book Hōshanō mondai ni tachimukau tetsugaku (Philosophy’s Response to the Problem of Radioactivity), the philosopher Ichinose Masaki discusses two, namely the ‘ethical phase difference’ and the ‘regional phase difference.’
10. ‘Yamashita Shunichi no tondemo hatsugen [Yamashita Shun’ichi’s Unbelievable Statements]’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuwFrNEgDTg (Accessed 27 May 2018).
11. ‘Garasu bacchi betsumyō: garasu senrōkei, kojinyō garasu senryōkei [“Glass badge”, also known as “glass dosimeter”, “personal glass dosimeter”]’. https://www.weblio.jp/content/%E3%82%AC%E3%83%A9%E3%82%B9%E3%83%90%E3%83%83%E3%82%B8 (Accessed 2 April 2019).
12. ‘“A2-B-C” (Japan Theatrical Trailer 2015)’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xLwVc-V1RU (Accessed 28 May 2018).
13. ‘Hatena blog: shuuei no memo (Shūei’s notes) – 2015−08−30 Fukushima ni kurasu hitobito wo egaita eiga, uchikiri kara saijōei he’. https://shuuei.hatenablog.com/entry/20150830/1440875392 (Accessed 2 April 2019).
14. ‘Filmmakers Ash and Kamanaka Discuss Radiation, Secrets and Lives’. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2015/05/13/issues/filmmakers-ash-kamanaka-discuss-radiation-secrets-lives/#.XKMGWOv7SCR (Accessed 2 April 2019).
15. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, Leon S. Roudiez, orig. pub. in 1988 as Fremde sind wir uns selbst; Japanese trans.: Gaikokujin: warera no uchinaru mono. Japanese trans. from Tokyo: Hōsei daigaku shuppankai, 1990.