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Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema

ISSN: 1756-4905 (Print) 1756-4913 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjkc20

The Ethics of Japanese Social Documentary in the Wake of 3/11

M. Downing Roberts

To cite this article: M. Downing Roberts (2019) The Ethics of Japanese Social Documentary in the Wake of 3/11, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 11:1, 68-84, DOI: 10.1080/17564905.2019.1600699

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2019.1600699

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The Ethics of Japanese Social Documentary in the Wake of 3/11 M. Downing Roberts

University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy (UTCP), Meguro-ku, Japan

ABSTRACT Over the past eight years, independent documentary filmmakers in Japan have produced over one hundred works concerning the 3/11 disaster in Tōhoku. Since the controversy over Mori Tatsuya’s film 311, the issue of documentary ethics has loomed large in the discussion of these films. Specifically: how may we understand the filmmaker’s social and ethical responsibility in documenting a disaster such as 3/11? Despite the importance of this sensitive issue for audiences, it has received little scholarly attention. In this article, I analyse three exemplary films which are directly concerned with 3/11: Ōmiya Kōichi’s The Sketch of Mujō, Fujiwara Toshi’s No Man’s Zone, and Funahashi Atsushi’s Nuclear Nation. While all three films focus on the survivors of the disaster, each takes a distinctive approach: Ōmiya reflects on the interplay between impermanence [mujō] and collective memory; Fujiwara queries our presuppositions and place as spectators of disaster; and Funahashi explores the system of power that maintains the nuclear village. I propose an axiographic analysis of these films as a contribution to our understanding of the disaster, shedding light on not only the ethical stance of the filmmakers, but also on the mechanisms of the larger, mass-mediated image regime in contemporary Japan.

KEYWORDS 3/11; disaster; documentary film; documentary ethics; axiographics; Mori, Tatsuya; Ōmiya, Kōichi; Fujiwara, Toshi; Funahashi, Atsushi

Introduction

In the eight years since the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, the aftermath of the triple disaster in Tōhoku has been the subject of a large body of films. Among these, the non-fiction works have rekindled a larger discussion about the ethics of documentary. Most notably, this surfaced in the controversy around 311 (2011), co-directed by Mori Tatsuya, Yasuoka Takaharu, Watai Takeharu, and Matsubayashi Yōju. Filming just fifteen days after the disaster, the four directors briefly visited the radioactive vicinity of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant and the devastated coastal regions of Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures. By using several cameras and including themselves in the film, they focused on the search for victims and the broader effects of the disaster in an interactive mode. 311 was the first documentary on the disaster to screen at international film festi- vals (i.e. Busan and Yamagata in early October, 2011) where it provoked audience hostility

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CONTACT M. Downing Roberts [email protected] University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy (UTCP), Komaba 3-8-1-101 2F, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-8902, Japan

JOURNAL OF JAPANESE AND KOREAN CINEMA 2019, VOL. 11, NO. 1, 68–84 https://doi.org/10.1080/17564905.2019.1600699

over accusations of ‘disaster tourism’ and disregard for individual privacy, especially regarding the directors’ decision to forego consent in filming survivors engaged in search- ing for the dead (Morris 2011).1 Speaking at Busan, Mori openly acknowledged his deep ambivalence about their directorial choices and struggle with his own conscience, while Yasuoka added further complications, stating that he wanted audiences to feel the same sense of anger and unease as the people they filmed, ‘to question why we made this movie, why we were there’ (as quoted in ‘Grief of Japan’ 2011). In a symposium at Yamagata, Mori recounted: ‘when we shot, we were aware of our position as the aggres- sors’; Yasuoka used a more disturbing metaphor: ‘I felt like a hyena, waiting for bodies to shoot’ (as quoted in Morris 2011). In part, 311 seems to unsettle audiences not only as it becomes clear the directors are prowling for images of the dead, but also through its lack of a clearly-expressed purpose or argument. As Jeffrey Bayliss (2011) notes, by virtue of the film’s interactive mode, ‘the viewer almost feels forced into the situation on screen, with all of the moral ambiguity involved’. Part of the difficulty of 311 is that while the directors’ statements point towards a reflexive mode of documentary, they also express considerable ambivalence about the project and the film itself doesn’t articu- late a clear sense of reflexivity to the audience (Bayliss 2011). In this way, the controversy around 311 brought a number of issues concerning the ethics of documentary filmmaking into contact with social questions about the post-disaster situation in Tōhoku. What, for example, is the filmmaker’s social responsibility in documenting and depicting a disaster such as 3/11? Upon what basis is s/he entitled to film and then use images of the land- scapes and victims of the disaster? How do filmmakers see their work in relation to that of journalists and the images circulated via the mass media? Although over one hundred documentary films on 3/11 have been produced to date,2 it seems fair to say that our task of understanding these films and their approaches to the disaster has only begun. In this essay, I would like to explore a specific, recurring issue in post-3/11 docu- mentary, which concerns the ethical stance of the filmmaker.3 Rather than making a cursory survey of many films, I will instead give deeper consideration to the few films which have received greater attention both inside and outside of Japan – Ōmiya Kōichi’s The Sketch of Mujō (Mujō sobyō, 2011), Fujiwara Toshi’s No Man’s Zone (Mujin chitai, 2011), and Funahashi Atsushi’s Nuclear Nation (Futaba kara tōkuhanarete, 2012) – and analyze the ethical stance these films articulate vis-à-vis disaster.

The ethical space of documentary

As a way to approach some of these questions, Vivian Sobchack’s analysis of ‘Inscribing Ethical Space’ (2004) seems pertinent. Sobchack argues that the ethical stance of the docu- mentary filmmaker may be interpreted by analyzing how s/he interacts with and depicts the subjects of the film, how the camera is handled (legible through an analysis ofmise-en- scène), how the sound is handled, and the techniques of montage. She proposes that just as we traverse and negotiate ethically-charged situations in the historical world by follow- ing certain social codes, so too a documentary filmmaker follows certain codes or modal- ities of gazing to convey his/her ethical stance vis-à-vis the subjects being filmed. By reading these audio-visual modes from the film, spectators make inferences about the filmmaker’s ethical stance: ‘we watch the filmmaker watching and judge the nature and quality of his or her interest’ (243). Sobchack’s argument is relevant to a film like 311, as

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her concern at this moment is to explore the problem of representing death and dying in documentary. On her account, the visual representation of death in Western culture became subject to certain prohibitions in the nineteenth century,4 and insofar as docu- mentary cinema observes this social taboo against representing death, it is only sanc- tioned under certain circumstances. If the taboo is violated, if the camera gazes at death without sanction, this transgression must be justified, and this must be communi- cated to the audience, in order for the filmmaker to avoid censure, i.e. accusations of pruri- ence, unethical behaviour, or ‘pornographic’ intent. (It could be argued that a failure to respect this taboo and/or provide a satisfactory justification was the point at issue for audi- ences of Mori’s 311.) By following certain codes, certain modalities of the gaze, the film may be inscribed in a normatively ‘ethical space’ that extends from the filmmaker to the spectator, i.e. the filmmaker’s ethical stance becomes a sort of guarantor of the audi- ence’s own ethical stance. As a way of understanding the complex relationship between subject, camera, and viewer, Sobchack outlines five modalities of the gaze – the accidental gaze, the helpless gaze, the endangered gaze, the interventional gaze, and the humane gaze – which in effect allow for a film to be inscribed in an ethical space. A sixth mode, ‘more ethically ambiguous and suspect than the others’ (249), is the professional gaze, typi- cally associated with journalistic reportage. Subsequently, the film theorist Bill Nichols (1991) has elaborated Sobchack’s argument using the neologism axiographics. Following Sobchack, Nichols asserts that our relationship with documentary entails an ‘indexical bond’ that ties the image to an ethics of its production. Nichols proposes that the classical concerns of documentary ethics – consent, the right to know versus the right to privacy, the responsibilities of the filmmaker, etc. – may be extended to a consideration of the mode of representation itself, i.e. to the modality of the gaze. On his account, axiographics is an interrogation of how the documentary gaze intersects political and ideological con- cerns. He asks: ‘Where does the filmmaker stand? What space does he or she occupy and what politics or ethics attach themselves to it?’ (79). The question of the filmmaker’s accountability to the documentary subject has also been explored in the writings of the filmmaker Satō Makoto (2004), whose project is especially informative as both an engage- ment with and a reflection on documentary film practices in Heisei-era Japan. Drawing on the arguments of Sobchack, Nichols, and Satō, I would now like to consider the three afore- mentioned documentaries, and to explore the extent to which a ‘hermeneutics of the gaze’ can help us to understand the concerns in these films. Further, I would like to suggest that this mode of analysis is revealing not only of the filmmaker’s ethical stance vis-à-vis the documentary subject (i.e. the 3/11 disaster), but also his/her perspective on the larger system of power governing the circulation of images in contemporary Japan.

The Sketch of Mujō

The first documentary in theatrical release to take a ground-level view of life in Tōhoku following the disaster was Ōmiya Kōichi’s The Sketch of Mujō.5 Filmed in just four days between April 28th and May 8th, 2011, Ōmiya brings together short interviews with sur- vivors and astonishing views of the devastated communities that bore the brunt of the tsunami. Following an itinerary from Ōtsuchi Town, Iwate Prefecture, before moving south towards Miyako City in Miyagi, the film’s focus is primarily on the effects of the tsunami on the coastal regions; there are no images of the unfolding nuclear catastrophe

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in Fukushima. By posing questions such as ‘what does “recovery” mean?’ and ‘where are we going?’, the film thematises the problems of acceptance, memory, and finding courage for the future (Ōmiya 2011). As a meditation on the medieval concept of mujō – the tran- sience of all things – the film invites us to reimagine the process of recovery as part of a collective task of coming to terms with disaster. Writing for Eiga geijutsu, the film critic Kanda Akira (2011) has argued that The Sketch of Mujō should be distinguished from both ‘mere documentation’ and journalistic ‘information’ on the disaster, to convey a deeper sense of the temporality of ‘frozen time’ [ jikan no teishi] in the lives of the victims. As a way to approach this, I will attempt to delineate the axiographic space of this film.

Although Ōmiya grew up in Tōhoku and has deep ties to the region, he chose to open and close The Sketch of Mujō with sequences filmed from a vehicle arriving and then departing the region by highway, in this manner drawing attention to a detached, visitor’s perspective. A considerable portion of the film is devoted to simply looking at the effects of the disaster: static shots of destroyed landscapes littered with debris, boats and vehicles laying inert, their metal skins crushed, and fragments of buildings. These are punctuated by walking shots and close-ups on lost possessions: children’s toys and family photos covered with mud – once-cherished possessions now scattered across a wasteland of wreckage. These close-up shots in particular establish a humane gaze, a feeling of melan- choly and empathy for the traces of fragmented relationships and life departed. We see teams combing the debris, evidently searching for the dead, but whereas Mori engages directly with these searchers in 311, Ōmiya gives them a wide berth. A series of long track- ing shots from moving vehicles and boats take in the sheer expanse of the devastation, transforming our sense of its scope. Slower tracking shots direct our gaze into wrecked homes, all ruined. Tracking shots grant us time to reflect, but their use has also proven a matter of controversy in documentaries on the 3/11 disaster, an issue to which we shall return shortly.

A series of views on obliterated landscapes, often stretching as far as the eye can resolve, convey the overwhelming scale of the disaster. One way to think about these images of destruction would be in relation to the concept of the sublime. The Burkean sublime, for example, concerns the sense of terror or astonishment in the face of violent phenomena that exceed our comprehension. For Kant, the sublime describes an experience whose magnitude or force exceeds our understanding. In more recent criti- cism, there is also the so-called ‘nuclear sublime’ of atomic destruction (Ferguson 1984). Yet, as the philosopher Kobayashi Yasuo (2015) points out, if there is an aesthetic of sub- limity in the spectacle of catastrophe – here, in the horrifying images of the ruined land- scapes of Tōhoku –, it is not akin to the Kantian sublime, for these images do not end in an equilibrium of the human faculties. For Kobayashi, there is nothing in this experience that allows us to find within ourselves, as Kant says in The Critique of Judgement, that ‘we can become conscious of our superiority to nature within us, and thereby also to nature outside us’ (Kant 1987, 123).

Ōmiya is conspicuously absent from these views, choosing to remain silently behind the camera. Aside from a single intertitle at the beginning of the film to signal the dates of the shoot, there is neither a voice over, nor any overt directorial presence in this film. Occasion- ally, Ōmiya’s travel companion appears in a scene, but the film is narrated directly by the survivors of the disaster: farmers and fishermen, retirees, and doctors. Uncertainty and a

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sense of shock weigh heavily in every interview. In this fashion, Ōmiya establishes a certain distance with the survivors, a feeling of cordial anonymity. His interlocutors are never introduced or named as characters in a ‘story’ of this tragedy. Yet, this distance is also see- mingly his way of protecting them, of gently listening as they find the words to express their experiences. Their anonymity establishes a sense of empathy or charity, one of the signifiers of the humane gaze. In one interview, an elderly woman reflects on the disaster: ‘This will happen again, so I don’t want live here.’ Nevertheless, she agrees with her cheer- ful granddaughter on a love for living near the ocean. The camera’s gaze moves to linger on the girl’s face, half covered by a paper mask, as her expression slowly passes from enthusiasm to a gentle sadness. Cutting from this interview to a shot of toppled break- waters protruding from the ocean, Ōmiya highlights what the girl has lost. In filming the landscape of disaster, Ōmiya refuses a facile optimism of green shoots, fragments of the beauty or poetry of seaside life, though at the end of the film, before we return to the ‘other’ Japan, seemingly unaffected by the disaster, there is a departing shot of this girl who loves the sea. She stands silently, framed in medium close-up outside the house, as the sun momentarily brightens on her face.

When queried about his approach to filming the survivors, Ōmiya notes that as a record of the immediate post-disaster situation, their words should be preserved as the ‘voice on the fiftieth day’ (as quoted in Okamoto 2011).6 In this way, the film is conceived as part of a ritual to facilitate a bond between the living and the dead, to help support both on their paths through the transient realms of being that make up our world. Concerning his role in mediating their voices, Ōmiya notes that the survivors often spoke in a monologue, and he would just let them speak, holding the camera on their expression for a long moment after they had finished. This expression, he suggests, communicates a meaning that may be different from that of the words spoken, and his formal choice of lingering shots is intended to explore this. Rather than intervening as an interviewer, to construct a dialogue which is in turn shown to the film spectators,Ōmiya’s decision to preserve the monological structure of their testimony is intended to bring the film spectators closer to the people he filmed. This priority given to the discourse of those speaking may also be interpreted as a signifier of the humane gaze.

As its title indicates, Ōmiya’s film is also a meditation on mujō as a term of reconcilia- tion.7 The concept is elaborated through an interview with the monk Gen’yū Sōkyū, who speculates that once new buildings are constructed on the coasts of Iwate and Miyagi, we will have already forgotten the disaster. For his part, Gen’yū expresses a deter- mination not to forget, and muses that we need to invent new urban plans that preserve a fear of disaster. By posing questions from the philosophical standpoint of mujō, the film opens a space of reflection on the future. Indeed, if ‘all realms of being are transient’, then perhaps we also need to reconsider the function of memory. Ōmiya’s camera draws attention to practices of memory through numerous lingering close-up shots of family photographs. Early in the film, for example, we join an elderly couple as they look through a photo album recovered from their wrecked home, the camera angling over their shoulders. The fragility of these snapshot memories is emphasized later in an overwhelming sequence that explores a High School gym (Figure 1), converted into a vast warehouse for lost photos. Through these views of family photos – some rescued, many lost –, Ōmiya questions how memory can be preserved in the face of disaster, and through the oblivion that follows. As Kanda points out, the temporality of news

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reportage, with its repetitive, shallow cycles of information, also serves this oblivion, trans- forming the broken or frozen time of disaster into an eternal present of ‘what’s happening now’. Filming in the first weeks after the disaster, Ōmiya’s haste to quickly ‘sketch’ the fleeting experience and images of destruction was animated by a recognition that the his- torical rupture of the disaster would quickly be submerged under waves of journalistic reportage. This speaks to a larger question posed by the film, concerning how the disaster might be committed to a deeper, collective memory. How can we come to terms with dis- aster, but without forgetting its fundamental experience of fear? As an exploration of this dilemma, though, The Sketch of Mujō ultimately sides with the work of memory more than an acceptance of transience.

No Man’s Zone

The question of our collective memory of disaster is also thematised by Fujiwara Toshi’s No Man’s Zone (2012). Filming forty-one days after the disaster, Fujiwara begins by looking at the effects of the tsunami in Namie Township, before traveling inland to Iwaki City and Iitate Village, where he explores towns both contaminated and unscathed by nuclear fallout from the hydrogen explosions. Filmed on the eve of the government decree to close the twenty-kilometer exclusion zone (22 April 2011), the first section of the film cap- tures twilight images of an unpeopled land (Figure 2). In the second section, recorded three months after the disaster, Fujiwara interviews local residents, mostly farmers, a fisherman, and a ward mayor in Iitate; a number of them had also worked as sub-contrac- tors for the nuclear plant. Significantly, the film is narrated in English by the actress Arsinée Khanjian. In an interview, Fujiwara notes that he chose English to abstract the disaster for a domestic audience, and convey that the issues it poses are global in scope (as quoted in Saitō 2011). Beyond simply describing the film’s itinerary through Tōhoku, the narration serves as a channel for reflective meta-commentary on images of disaster. To what

Figure 1. Warehouse of photographs recovered from the disaster. The Sketch of Mujō (2011).

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extent is our interest in these images driven by a desire for the security of established meanings? To what extent can we understand disaster through images? This questioning is evoked directly through the film’s voice over, interrogating our place as spectators of disaster, and how our ways of seeing it have been conditioned through the systems of mass and social media.

No Man’s Zone makes use of several different modes of documentary representation. Nearly the first twenty minutes of the film show images of ruined landscapes, alternately narrated in voice over, or mixed with non-diegetic conversations of evacuees. While we are given the voices of local residents, who describe the tsunami and, in happier times, their lives before the disaster, the disjunction between sound and image increases our aware- ness of the difficulty of understanding what we see. Images of ravaged landscapes are cross-cut with inland views showing pristine nature in springtime, beyond the reach of the tsunami. Seemingly nothing has changed, yet the beautiful Sakura trees in these evac- uated, irradiated valleys bloom for nobody. The narration draws attention to this conun- drum, to the invisibility of the disaster of radiation: ‘Images were supposedly the ultimate means for our civilization to comprehend, to control, to conquer, to exploit the universe. But at the end, everything that we have seen seems to have lost meaning, when facing images of a disaster we cannot see.’ In this way, the film begins by addressing us in a familiar expository mode, but Fujiwara’s text proposes an engagement with images of disaster, asking us to reflect on how and why we ascribe meaning to an event through images, and what it means when images cannot capture the event.

The film raises several axiographic issues concerning the modalities of its gaze. One of the first scenes to include people shows Fujiwara meeting the ‘ghosts’ of Fukushima – pre- fectural police officers dressed in white hazmat suits – at a wrecked train station. In con- trast to the police, Fujiwara wears only ordinary clothes and a simple paper mask. As the encounter is captured using a telephoto lens, the dialog is reported by the narrator. The police ask Fujiwara to cease filming, and to ‘imagine what the families of the people

Figure 2. Landscape at Ukedo Port, Namie Township. No Man’s Zone (2011).

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here would feel’ if they saw him. He withdraws, but continues filming elsewhere in the eva- cuation zone, despite this warning and the risk of radiation exposure. Here, we are alerted to the interdiction on filming in the zone, but the police communicate this in moral terms. The distance of the camera from Fujiwara’s encounter with the police underscores the helplessness of the gaze in this film, signalling an inability to act or affect the events being recorded (Nichols 1991, 83). Fujiwara is of course helpless to alter the unfolding dis- aster, but nonetheless there are ethical considerations. His cameraman, for example, wants to avoid walking over debris out of fear that bodies may be buried beneath. This intro- duces another kind of distance in the filming. The helpless gaze is legitimized by ‘an ethic of sympathy’ with the situation and events being filmed, but it may nevertheless convey a sense of challenge to the agency which controls the situation (in this case, the Japanese government). Fujiwara’s evident willingness to risk radiation exposure in this scene, and in others filmed at close proximity to the Fukushima nuclear plant (e.g. the framed views of the reactor’s exhaust stacks), also testifies to an endangered gaze. In prin- ciple, such a risk is undertaken in the interest of a greater good, i.e. to bring the images to a public audience, and in this sense the endangered gaze is legitimized by an ethic of courage. While the moral concern raised by the police is understandable, as spectators of an endangered gaze, we tend to sanction Fujiwara’s decision to continue filming and, by extension, our own willingness to continue watching. Like the ethic of sympathy that is evoked by the helpless gaze, the courage implied by this mode of looking (i.e. filming in a radioactive area) draws us closer to Fujiwara’s perspective on the scene.

For the interviews with evacuees, No Man’s Zone shifts into an interactive mode. Like Ōmiya, Fujiwara chooses not to introduce or name the people he interviews. Yet whereas Ōmiya never appears before the camera or grants himself a voice in his film, letting the people he meets speak for themselves, Fujiwara not only steps in front of the lens, but enters some of the interviews and engages in direct commentary. The inter- active mode raises a broader axiographic issue of the filmmaker’s accountability to his/her interviewees, by foregrounding and drawing attention to the interaction between director, subject, and camera. Speaking about No Man’s Zone with a festival audience, Fujiwara noted that he felt it was his responsibility as a Japanese national to speak directly in front of the camera for certain scenes, since one of the points at issue in the disaster is the relationship between citizens and government (as quoted in Ichinokura 2011). The interactive and reflexive modes show the filmmaker present in the scene and question his/her presence. Why is Fujiwara there, and what responsibility does he have as a partici- pant? As the narration makes clear at several points in the film, his motivation for being there stems in large part from his concerns about how the disaster was being depicted by the mass media.

The titular ‘no man’s zone’ evokes a physical place, but it also becomes a figure for that which the establishment – i.e. the nuclear village, the state, and the mass media – wishes to conceal and pass over in silence. Concerning the survivors of the tsunami who were left to die, for example, Fujiwara notes that the mass media was largely silent. As the camera tracks over a landscape of debris, local residents speak in voice over, recounting their search for survivors on the evening of March 11th, how they could hear voices calling for help from beneath the rubble. With the declaration of the nuclear emergency, Fukush- ima prefecture ordered the evacuation of some 5,800 people. The next morning, the resi- dents recount, the district chief of Ukedo conveyed the order, adding: ‘Countless lives

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could be saved if rescuers could go back.’ Similarly, the media wouldn’t visit or speak of towns such as Iwaki City, located just outside of the exclusion zone. They were shunned, the film’s narrator observes, out of fear of radiation. Speaking in voice over, Fuji- wara acknowledges that filmmakers (he includes himself) bear a certain responsibility, as they knowingly ignored the government policy on the evacuated zone. Part of his inten- tion in filming there, he admits, was to join others in ridiculing the authorities. He ascribes many of the blanket denials issued by politicians and bureaucrats to the fact that they were made to lose face by this ridicule. By mid-April of 2011, a number of issues with the coverage in the mass media had become evident: the victims looked too beautiful; journalists were often disconnected from the situation; and, above all, criticism of the gov- ernment’s handling of the disaster and its victims was not heard (as quoted in Ichinokura 2011). For Fujiwara, his documentary method may be readily distinguished from that of the mass media, in so far as he assumed a ‘serious attitude’ [majimena shisei] towards the victims, and took care to create images that he felt would not anger them; on his account, the approach taken by the Japanese media was reprehensible (literally: ‘ugly’) [shūaku]. In axiographic terms, it may be argued that the responsibility which Fujiwara invokes and the approach against which he positions himself, is the clinical gaze of pro- fessional journalists. As I shall explore momentarily, this distinction may be found in all three of the films under consideration here. For his part, Fujiwara questions our relation- ship with images mediated by the professional modality of gazing at disaster. ‘Today’, the film’s narrator observes, ‘perhaps we have become simply addicted to all images of destruction.’ Yet, without images of this disaster, such as those in this film, what memory could we preserve of it? Wouldn’t an absence of images be a greater disaster? Like Ōmiya, Fujiwara also sees it as part of his mission – almost a sense of duty – to record and remember this landscape in a critical light.

Nuclear Nation

Funahashi Atsushi’s Nuclear Nation (2012) is the first documentary to explore the social effects of 3/11 in a more situated, observational mode. Rather than trying to depict the broad effects of the disaster across Tōhoku, Funahashi takes a more concentrated approach, examining the consequences of the nuclear crisis for the residents of a single community. Nuclear Nation explores the lives of a group of refugees from Futaba, one of the towns directly adjacent to the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex. In April 2011, the town residents (over 6,000 people) were evacuated, with one large group – about 1,400 people – relocated to an abandoned high school in Saitama prefecture (Figure 3). In 2014, Funahashi released a sequel – Nuclear Nation II – which offers an updated view of the unfolding social catastrophe. Of the various documentaries about the disaster, these two films are the most politically engaged, and have to date received the greatest atten- tion outside of Japan.8 (For the purposes of this article, I shall focus only on the first film.) Nuclear Nation is organized around the lives of the refugees, showing their living con- ditions at the repurposed Kisai High School, while focusing on the experiences of two different families and the town mayor. The Japanese government promised that the refu- gees would eventually return home, although it could not – and still cannot, for that matter – say when this might be possible. One of the two refugee families (the Nakais) awaits this return, while the other (the Yokoyamas) has already given up. A third

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perspective in the film is that of town mayor, Idogawa Katsutaka, who gives a lucid history of Futaba, and how it joined the nuclear village. Nuclear Nation explores not only the specific failures of the government’s response to the disaster and the human conse- quences of these failures, but the broader socio-political conflict between urban and rural Japan.

Essentially, Funahashi establishes two focal points on a larger problem: the first con- cerns the situation of the nuclear refugees, their experiences and concerns about the future. Where will they go? Can they return home? If so, when? At stake here is whether their sense of community can survive the disaster. This is explored through a combination of observational filming at the high school, and interviews with the refugees, which com- prise the first fifty minutes (i.e. over two thirds) of the film. This is followed by a brief visit to Futaba, during which a group of residents, now dressed in hazmat suits, are permitted to return home for just two hours.9 They pay their respects to the dead, and fetch belongings. As they return to the high school via bus, the camera lingers on their faces, capturing their sense of being stranded between past and future. In a brief interlude that shows the situ- ation of those few who refused to evacuate, Funahashi visits a dairy farm within the exclu- sion zone; out of conscience, the farmer says, he couldn’t leave his irradiated herd of three hundred cows to die. The second focal point of the film is the historical and economic situ- ation of Futaba town. For this, Funahashi interviews Mayor Idogawa, and follows him to Tokyo, where his appeals to the government are met with callous disregard. In 1978, Idogawa recounts, the town agreed to host the nuclear plant out of economic necessity, but by the mid-2000s they were facing bankruptcy. Years before the disaster in 2011, then, the nuclear village had already failed on its promise to the town. In this respect, Funahashi depicts Futaba Town as a metonym, a litmus for the broader relationship between the nuclear village, the state, and rural Japan.

At the level of socio-political analysis, Nuclear Nation illuminates the nexus of exploita- tion, through which the economically fragile areas of rural Japan were bought off by the

Figure 3. Kisai High School, Saitama Prefecture. Nuclear Nation (2012).

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nuclear village.10 As the sociologist Oguma Eiji (2011) points out, the nuclear economy became important for attracting government subsidies when rural Japan entered a state of economic decline. It is worth noting that the vision of Japan as a futuristic infor- mation society [ jōhō shakai] – what Tessa Morris-Suzuki (1988) has called ‘information capitalism’ – was in part born of this same contradiction; that is, of an acute crisis of pro- ductivity in the rural economy. In this respect, it is logical that the largest industry lobby to support the nuclear village – the Keidanren – represents the older industries in Japan. Oguma describes them as ‘dinosaurs’: large, strong, dominant, but nevertheless in a state of inexorable decline. Under the conditions of state capture that govern domestic politics in Japan, there is little impetus for reform or transformation of the old industrial policies. Since the 1980s, several economists and historians – e.g. Okada Tomohiro and Iwamoto Yoshiteru – have argued that Tōhoku may be understood as an ‘internal colony’ created during the Meiji period (Okada 2012, 23; Iwamoto 1998, 244–246). Follow- ing the 3/11 disaster, this critique has been extended by the historian Kawanishi Hidemichi and philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya, to describe Tōhoku and Okinawa as ‘national sacrifice zones’ (Kawanishi 2011, 20), in a larger ‘system of sacrifice’ (Takahashi 2012). As Nathan Hopson has argued, these should not be seen merely as specifically Japanese colonies, but as nodes in a global system of internal colonization, in which the metropoles subju- gate the rural periphery, to bear the ‘externalities’ of economic growth, such as the radio- active destruction of farmland (Hopson 2013; Lerup, Watkin, and Arnoldussen 2005). What Nuclear Nation sets into stark relief, then, is precisely the social consequences of this form of political economy.

Funahashi’s approach is primarily in the mode of observational documentary, avoiding overt narration, though he does use intertitles to introduce situations, or to establish time and place. He has expressed a keen interest in Frederick Wiseman’s methods of documen- tary filmmaking. ‘Wiseman always focuses on one institution’, Funahashi notes, ‘I had this approach in mind of course when I made Nuclear Nation in Kisai High School’ (as quoted in Domenach 2015, 82). Here, the institution serves as a microcosm that opens onto a larger world, a window which serves to frame and organize a larger set of power relations (Derrick 2014). A number of scenes in Nuclear Nation are filmed in a ‘masked interview’ format, breaking with a purely observational mode, but Funahashi’s own voice is largely absent, and he never appears in front of the camera. The principal evacuees interviewed are introduced by name using text superimposed on the image, but a number remain anonymous. At times, images of daily life are shown with non-diegetic voice over of the evacuees. In axiographic terms, the observational mode implies that the filmmaker is excluded from the frame, but still present in the scene. Although the filmmaker is ‘present, but absent’, there is nevertheless a political question of representation. Just as the interactive mode poses an axiographic issue of the filmmaker’s accountability to those s/he interviews, so too the observational mode raises the political question of docu- mentary authority; that is, what legitimates a particular type of gaze? As Nichols summar- izes it: ‘who is empowered to represent whom and with the authority of what specific discursive regime (what set of documentary conventions) shall he or she do so?’ (1991, 99). In an interview, Funahashi poses this question explicitly: ‘how can I be entitled to shoot these devastation images?’ (as quoted in Domenach 2015, 84). He concludes: ‘if I was shooting the film from the point of view of the victims, then I would be entitled to these images.’ This would exclude, he asserts, ‘the sightseeing point of view’ captured

78 M. DOWNING ROBERTS

via tracking shots, invoking J.-L. Godard’s well-known statement: ‘le travelling est affaire de morale’ [‘tracking shots are a question of morality’] (Lim 2012; Saxton 2009). Here, it is worth noting the axiographic dimension of the tracking shot, for its use in documentaries on 3/11 was questioned early on. Regarding films on the disaster screened at the 2011 Yamagata Film Festival, Jamie Morris (2011) notes: ‘these [tracking] shots reinforce the gross disjuncture between the perspectives of the out-of-town observer and of the local victim’. Funahashi also filmed in the devastated areas of Tōhoku in April 2011, before the exclusion zone was decreed, but ultimately, he felt he was not entitled to use the footage. Unlike both The Sketch of Mujō and No Man’s Zone, then, Nuclear Nation conspicu- ously avoids tracking shots or sustained views of the afflicted areas.

The axiographic question concerning the use of tracking shots may be considered as part of a broader issue concerning how these documentaries approach questions of vic- timhood and complicity. It is often noted that the nuclear village provided employment in rural Japan, the implication being that the refugees were not purely victims of the dis- aster, but that they, too, had directly profited from nuclear power. This is a logic of equiv- alence, in which both perpetrators and victims of disaster are said to have partaken of Japan’s postwar prosperity. Funahashi refuses this logic, noting in an interview: ‘The elec- tricity from the Fukushima power plant powered people like me in Tokyo. […] And now they have lost their homes over it. It’s not enough to feel sorry for them. I’m on the side of the perpetrators, using electricity that is risking other people’s lives’ (as quoted in Kelts 2014). Both Funahashi and Fujiwara approach this ethical concern through a broader exploration of the history of modern Japan, and bring to bear an awareness of the long-standing debate concerning ‘victims’ consciousness’ [higaisha-ishiki]. As Ōshima Nagisa (1963) articulated it, the issue with constructing a film around the victims’ perspective is that it can serve to ignore forms of complicity, or disavow guilt. How should a film broach issues of justice and responsibility, such that the audience understands these are shared? Funahashi’s approach is to depict both the refugees of the disaster and the perspective from Tokyo, the exclusive consumer of the power gener- ated at Fukushima Dai-ichi. Through this juxtaposition, and by examining how the rural economy was exploited by the nuclear village, we come to see how this system had already failed on its own terms, years before the disaster.

Representing disaster

All three of these films raise questions about the representation of the disaster by the mass media, and its failure to both interrogate government policies and to bring the public into contact with the underlying issues. Implicitly and explicitly, they draw atten- tion to the distinction between documentary and mass-mediated images of the disaster. How should we speak to this distinction? Here, I would suggest that we can identify at least two clear axes of differentiation: content and narration. At the level of content, each film seeks to show us images the mass media would not, or to refuse the types of images often found in TV documentaries. For example, as Funahashi points out, the Japanese government only granted the big media corporations access to the exclusion zone, refus- ing freelance media or filmmakers; but the media corporations wouldn’t send people there out of fear of bearing responsibility for their exposure to radiation (Derrick 2014). A situation emerged in which no professional journalists were filming inside the

JOURNAL OF JAPANESE AND KOREAN CINEMA 79

exclusion zone. The second axis of differentiation concerns how these films address us as spectators, for it can be said that each consciously avoids the modes of narration or address found in TV documentaries. They either refuse an expository voice over, to bring the voices of the refugees closer to the audience, or use voice over not simply as exposition, but to enjoin us to question our relationship with the documentary image, to reflect on our motivations for consuming images of disaster, and on the difficulty or even impossibility of subsuming events into images. The latter recalls the well-known opening dialogue of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour, which concludes with the statement: ‘Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima’ [‘You saw nothing at Hiroshima’]. For here, perhaps we could say that the role of the mass media has been to produce too many images, that is, to make us believe that we have seen everything – ‘J’ai tout vu’ – and in this way, we are sanctioned to forget these images. In both of these dimen- sions, then, the relations of power circulated through mass-mediated images are the invisible adversaries of these documentaries.

If we consider these three documentaries through the lens of axiographics, the follow- ing general points emerge. First, while images of disaster unquestionably evoke a sense of helplessness (i.e. the helpless gaze), the films of Funahashi and Fujiwara are also con- cerned with our sense of human agency vis-à-vis the ongoing nuclear crisis. Taking the camera into a forbidden, radioactive zone, they employ an active, endangered gaze. However, they avoid the professional gaze of the mass media, and the clinical, even voyeuristic gaze of Mori’s 311. Next, as Nichols emphasizes, the representation of disaster places the filmmaker in a conflicted position, for the guarantor of the authenticity of the journalistic perspective is precisely its distanced, ‘professional’ view on the human suffering that follows a disaster. The clinical or professional gaze may be understood as an expression of the journalistic code of detached observation. Like the helpless gaze, it does not intercede, yet neither does it convey a sense of powerlessness. Rather, it testifies to a ‘special form of empowerment’ (Nichols 1991, 87), which rests on a certain conception of ‘objectivity’ and the public’s ‘right to know’. Regarding the bearers of this gaze, Nichols notes: ‘the reporters’ presence only gains credibility to the extent that it marks the place of ethical absence, of distance and nonintervention on behalf of an insti- tutional discourse’ (91). This ‘place of ethical absence’ is surfaced in the tension between the professional code of detached observation with its injunction of non-involvement, and an ethical code of human responsibility. Insofar as it locates itself at the border of an ethical space that subtends the gazes of both filmmaker and spectator, the professional gaze is ‘marked by ethical ambiguity’ (Sobchack 2004, 255). Above all, the professional gaze is both empowered by and operates as a proxy for an institutional discourse (e.g. the dispositif of the mass media, such as that of NHK in Japan). In axiographic terms, the crucial distinguishing feature of the three documentaries under consideration here is that they all refuse this clinical gaze. While Funahashi, for example, points out that ‘citizens have the right to know what’s going on’, he nevertheless does not see his work as journal- istic or in any way aligned with the prerogatives of the mass media (as quoted in Derrick 2014). Documentary cinema, he asserts, has a role that is very different from that of jour- nalism (Domenach 2015, 86). Here, I submit that one of the important characteristics of these three films is their use of the humane gaze, with its emphasis on establishing an empathetic bond between the spectator and the subject who stands before the camera. This mode of gazing operates as ‘an extended subjective response to the

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moment or process’ which, like the interventional gaze, disrupts ‘the fixed, mechanical recording process to emphasize the human agency behind the camera’ (Nichols 1991, 86). In this fashion, the humane gaze communicates an ethic of human responsibility through empathy rather than via intervention. While it superficially resembles the pro- fessional gaze in drawing motivation from a commitment to ‘the greater good’ (typically, this is rooted in a self-understanding of documentary practice as a means to facilitate broader understanding of specific social or political issues), the humane gaze testifies to a rapport between camera and subject that goes beyond what is dictated by the pro- fessional code of journalistic observation.

The relationship between the humane gaze and ethic of human responsibility may be brought into relief through a consideration of Satō Makoto’s (2004) concept of documen- tary as ‘a new way of seeing the world’ [atarashii sekai no mikata].11 Satō argues for three principles of documentary filmmaking: ‘love for the documentary subject’ [kiroku taishō e no ai]; ‘long duration documenting’ [chōkikan no kiroku]; and ‘responsibility towards the subject’ [taishō e no sekinin] (171). The first two principles – an affection or feeling of love for the documentary subject and, second, filming as long as possible – are adopted from Ōshima Nagisa (1978), while the third principle is drawn from Satō’s own experience as a filmmaker. Insofar as the camera is a ‘device of violence’, he submits that it should not be directed towards others if the filmmaker is not willing to bear respon- sibility towards the documentary subject (Satō 2004, 171). Here, it may be argued that the humane gaze is motivated by something resembling love for the documentary subject, combined with a sense of responsibility for its representation. The duration of the shoot may be constrained, but the filmmaker should endeavour to film as long as possible. There is an open question about how we should understand the interrelationship between love and responsibility here, for Satō points out that the filmmaker cannot bear all possible responsibilities entailed in filming. Nevertheless, this sense of responsibil- ity should not be abandoned. This is, on Satō’s account, a practice of documentary which allows for both the filmmaker and audience to see the world critically, to self-reflectively capture the subject matter and, in this way, to perhaps move our consciousness.

Conclusion

The independent documentary films explored in these pages take different approaches to locating themselves with respect to an ‘ethical space’, but in large part they refuse the institutional modalities of the professional gaze (Mori’s 311might be considered an excep- tion). Sobchack’s proposition is that through an attentive reading of cinematic signs, we may distinguish modalities of the gaze which inscribe themselves within a normatively ethical space, from those which subordinate themselves and surrender their agency to an ethically ambiguous institutional discourse. Nichols, however, ultimately draws atten- tion to the fact that while ethical claims can free us from the endless discursivity of post- structuralist hermeneutics, they tend to present themselves as universals. ‘Ethics is,’ he notes, ‘finally, an arrested form of logic’ (102). On this basis, he argues, the ethical moment in the axiographic space of cinema should be reinscribed within the horizons of politics and ideology. Reconceptualised in these terms, the films under consideration here share an underlying concern with demystifying the ideology of ‘objectivity’ that sus- tains institutional journalism. In political terms, it could further be said that these films

JOURNAL OF JAPANESE AND KOREAN CINEMA 81

break with the logic of the ‘private film’ that has been an important tendency in Japanese documentary since the 1970s (Nornes 2002), to re-engage with the more socio-political con- cerns of the ‘movement cinema’ of the 1960s (e.g. the ‘Blue group’ directors such as Ogawa Shinsuke, Tsuchimoto Noriaki, and Kuroki Kazuo). In this regard, 3/11 marks a significant turning point in the history of Japanese documentary. Here, however, we must confront a broader question about the audience for independent cinema in Japan. At its peak, the movement cinema of the 1960s enjoyed a large audience, especially among young people. In part, this was due to the overlap between the concerns of the filmmakers and the student movement. Today, of course, there is nothing comparable in Japan, and Fujiwara, for example, focuses on the older generations as his primary audience. The problem of audi- ence remains one of the major challenges for independent documentary cinema.

Notes

1. 311 premiered at the Busan International Film Festival on 7 October 2011; two days later, a slightly longer version (105 vs. 94 min) was screened at the Yamagata International Documen- tary Film Festival. A shorter 92-minute version opened in Japanese theatres on 3 March 2012.

2. This figure is based on the number of films in the YIDFF 311 Documentary Film Archive, which is still growing.

3. In 2013, the Yamagata Film Festival included a special section on the ethics of documentary film. While none of the programmed films concerned 3/11, the panel discussion proposed consideration of post-3/11 documentary. Although not present for that discussion, I assume it addressed some aspects of the approach that I propose here (‘The Ethics Machine’ 2013).

4. While Sobchack confines her analysis to Western culture, and while the historical account of the taboo that she offers is almost certainly different in other cultures, similar prohibitions con- cerning contact with death do exist in Japanese society, such as its status as kegare (i.e., pol- lution, uncleanliness) requiring various purification rituals [misogiharae].

5. The Sketch of Mujō opened at the Auditorium Shibuya on 18 June 2011 Japan (i.e., before Mori Tatsuya’s 311 screened at Busan), 99 days after the disaster; that is, on the eve of the day for the traditional Buddhist service known as hyakkanichi hōyō, to support the deceased souls who have already passed to the pure land.

6. The Buddhist ritual of shijūkunichi hōyō, performed on the forty-ninth day after the death of loved ones, is intended to help the living pass beyond mourning.

7. A longstanding theme in Japanese letters and art, the classical expressions of mujō appear in the opening passages of Kamo no Chōmei’s The Ten Foot Square Hut [Hōjōki] and the epic Tale of the Heike [Heike monogatari]. Indeed, the title of the film — Mujō Sobyō — rhymes with shogyō mujō (’all realms of being are transient’), the first of the ’three marks of existence’ in Buddhist scripture.

8. Nuclear Nation screened at film festivals in Berlin, Hong Kong, and Zurich, and Nuclear Nation II screened at Berlin and Cinéma du Réel in France.

9. This sequence was filmed by some of the Futaba residents, as the Japanese government would not grant Funahashi permission to join them.

10. The politico-economic structure of the nuclear village is explored in greater detail by the lawyer Kawai Hiroyuki, in his documentary film Nihon to genpatsu (2015).

11. Satō’s thought is also significant in this context, for he and Funahashi worked together at Uni- versity of Tokyo, and discussed documentary practices at length.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano for her encouragement and support during the pub- lication of this article, Atsushi Funahashi and Toshi Fujiwara for their patience answering my

82 M. DOWNING ROBERTS

questions about their work, Max Ward for his thoughtful comments and suggestions, and especially Junko Satō for her discussion of the text and generous help with translation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

M. Downing Roberts is a Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy (UTCP). His research interests include: East Asian and European cinema, theories of film, media, and aesthetics, visual and literary studies.

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