5 - Learning about Fukushima from the Margins

Summary

Abstract: Chapter 5 focuses attention on the voices of ordinary people and the perspective of animals, both of which tend to be marginalized by society and rarely have a voice in the mass media. The reported number of deaths in the Great Tohoku Earthquake was 15,899 and the missing, 2,529 (March 1, 2020), but due to the self-censorship of the media, viewers did not see the people who died. In place of visible human deaths, we saw the deaths of livestock and pets left behind and the wild animals that roamed freely in the Difficult-to-Return Zone. The depiction of animals in documentary films made after the Fukushima disaster made viewers contemplate the mistaken perceptions of the environment inherent in modern society.

Keywords: animals; mothers; children; foreigners; anti-anthropocentrism

The victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake numbered 15,899 dead as of March 1, 2020, but in actuality, we are unable to witness any of these deaths on screen. Animals, however, are another story. From the livestock and pets that were left behind and starved after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, to the wild animals freely roaming in the Difficult-to-Return Zones, to the irradiated swallows whose feathers are now unnaturally white-speckled, it is possible to use the abnormal and dead bodies of animals as stand-ins for what is otherwise impossible to make visible: the diseases and deaths afflicting human beings (see Figure 5.1). After the Fukushima meltdowns, it seems clear that the mass media, particularly in Japan, began using footage of animals as a device to render all of that death visible. Even amidst this media climate, there is one series of documentaries that deserves special mention: Fukushima: A Record of Living Things 1–5 (Fukushima: Ikimono no kiroku 1–5) by director Iwasaki Masanori, who painstakingly recorded the daily lives of irradiated animals and released a new film on this subject every year from 2013 to 2017 (see Figure 5.2). Film scholar Fujiki Hideaki has described this film series as “signifying an ecological intermediary” and also highly praises the series for avoiding an anthropocentric viewpoint, instead “foregrounding this place and the ontological problem of animal awareness as caused by human activity.”