Mori Tatsuya’s 311

Anyway, on with the post…

A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the American debut of Mori Tatsuya’s new documentary about the Tohoku tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi crisis, titled simply “311.”  Prof. Aaron Gerow at Yale asked me if I would make the trip down to new Haven to view the film and say a few things about it from my own perspective.  He told me that the film was controversial; at the two film festivals at which it has been screened thus far – in Pusan and Yamagata – it received strong criticism from some for the way it violates the privacy of survivors who appear in it, as well as for a fascination with recording glimpses of human misfortune that could be called voyeuristic.

That’s pretty much what Aaron told me about the content of the film before I made the trip to New Haven.  He also told me that we would have an opportunity to ask the director questions after the screening, since Mori had agreed to talk to us via Skype from his home in Tokyo (the next best option to actually having him with us in New Haven, which didn’t work out due to scheduling conflicts).

I really had no idea what to expect from this film as I headed down.  From what Aaron had told me, I knew that this documentary was not the work of Mori alone, but the result of the combined efforts of he and three other filmmakers (Matsubayashi Yojū, Watai Takeharu, and Yasuoka Takaharu) who had set out for Tohoku together about two weeks after the disaster.  What could be the point of this film?  Were they trying to draw attention to the dire circumstances in Tohoku, but somehow crossed the line between sensitivity and sensationalism in the process?  Was this “crusader journalism” run amuck?  (And if so, what possible reason could there be to “crusade” in such a situation – unless they were hunting down TEPCO executives and putting them on the spot?)  Or was it an attempt to draw attention to the pitfalls of any sort of journalistic endeavor that puts the suffering of some on display for the consumption of those far removed from it?

Aaron and his colleague in film studies at Yale, Prof. Charles Musser, had much more enlightening things to say on 311 as a piece of documentary filmmaking than I even could have managed, being as they are two scholars who know an awful lot about the critical theory involved.  My role as a panelist was simply to respond to the film as one who knows nothing about film, but a bit about the situation in Tohoku from a first-hand perspective, and also as an historian who is still struggling to understand what this catastrophe might mean for Japan, and whether it even makes sense to speak of a history of disasters such as this.  That, in any case, is what I decided my role would have to be.  What follows are my thoughts on 311 from just such a vantage point.

To call 311 a “documentary,” however, probably requires an expansion of what that term usually means.  The film doesn’t make a particular argument, nor does it even present a specific point of view for the viewer to contemplate.  It does “document,” in a very stripped-down way, a trip north through eastern Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate Prefectures.  We see a series of episodes, shot from the cameras and hand-held camcorders that Mori and his colleagues brought along, as the group makes its way northward from Tokyo.  The four filmmakers are as much the subjects of their film as they are the eyes behind the camera’s lens.  This is particularly true of the earlier portion of the film, although we are conscious of their presence in almost every scene throughout, even when none of them appear on screen.

311 seemed to me to be two very different films in one.  The first portion of the film features Mori and his colleagues traveling in a van equipped with a Geiger counter and a hand-held dosimeter, as they head toward the failing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility.  It becomes increasingly clear that they are out of their element.  As the readings on the Geiger counter surge upward, we hear their expressions of shock, but they don’t seem to know whether the levels they are detecting are safe or not – all they can determine is that radiation levels are x number of times higher than they were in Tokyo.  In many ways the reactions of the crew almost seem comedic (although it is clear from the tension in their voices that they are in actuality quite concerned for their own safety).  In one scene, after Mori gets out of the van in the midst of a steady rain to find out if there are any people inside a neighborhood meeting hall they come upon (there aren’t, since by this point the crew are already inside of the mandatory evacuation zone established 20km out from the plant) we see him and the others debating whether he should get back into the van with his shoes and raincoat on, or whether he should discard them before boarding the van again, since they are probably contaminated with radioactive particles in the rain.  He chooses the latter course of action, only to get wet anyway as he returns to the van without them.  Later, they stop at a painting supply store to equip themselves with thick, hooded vinyl jackets and pants, respirator masks, and goggles – all of which they duct tape to themselves in an attempt to make their outfits as airtight as possible.  The reason why they are doing this is clear enough, but the effect – like a bad Halloween costume or an alien from a 1950s low-budget sci-fi flick – is still somehow farcical.  The last straw comes when they reach a point just a few kilometers away from the reactors (after promising the police at a couple of checkpoints that they would turn back before getting so close) only to blow a tire.  A steady rain is pouring down, their portable dosimeter crackles frantically, and it becomes obvious that no one in the party has had much experience with changing a flat tire.  The next day, they decide to change course and head further north, into the devastated coastal areas of Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures.

It is from this point that 311 becomes a very different kind of film.  The camera shoots debris-strewn vistas from the van window as they roll by.  All we hear is the persistent groan of the tires on the pavement and, smothered beneath it, occasional expressions of awe from the filmmakers when the come upon an especially striking example of the tsunami’s destructive power.  They stop at one point to observe teams of rescue workers and SDF soldiers picking their way through a vast landscape of shattered buildings, crushed cars and trucks, and debris of unrecognizable origin, all caked in sand, sludge, and seaweed carried inland from the coast – which is not even in sight.  One of the rescue workers they talk to admits that there is no hope left of finding anyone alive in the rubble by this point; they are simply trying to find bodies.  Even that is no easy task.  Debris lies everywhere and a body might be covered by any piece of it, making it hard even to move about.  Near Matsushima they come across an SDF soldier who watches from the edge of a still flooded field as other soldiers turn over a large piece of partially submerged debris – apparently part of a roof – to check underneath for bodies.  He is young, probably no older than 25, but has already been on the job for nearly two weeks by this point.  I believe that it is in his conversation with this soldier that Mori first asks a question that he will ask almost everyone he encounters in the hisaichi from this point on in some form or another: you are obviously here searching for bodies, but isn’t there a part of you that hopes you won’t find any?  The soldier agrees, but says there is no hope for that.   In any case, the sooner they can recover the bodies of the victims, the sooner people can move on with their lives.

The filmmakers reach Rikuzentakata.  There is a scene of them making their way up the stairwell of the remains of a hotel that stood close to the coast, shooting the damage on each floor as they ascend.  The camera finally reaches a floor on which there is relatively little damage.  A shot out of a nearby window reveals how high off the ground the crew has come; workers below appear in miniature within a plain of tsunami debris around them.  Soon after, as Mori and the others survey the destruction from ground level, they come upon a man in his sixties.  He is searching for his wife, whom he has not seen since March 11^th.  Mori asks him a variation of the same question he put to the young SDF soldier: is there part of you that hopes you don’t find her?  The man’s response comes much sooner than I expected, and is much more matter-of-fact in tone: yes, perhaps, but he knows there is no way she could have survived at her age and physical condition.  The man moves on with his solitary search.

Two things struck me as particularly noteworthy about the scenes from Rikuzentakata in 311.  The first is the surprising willingness of the people they encounter, who had every right to keep to themselves under the circumstances, to talk as openly as they did with a complete stranger, and one who fairly obviously had a camera trained on them.  Another example of Japanese civility, or perhaps gaman?  Or maybe, in light of the timing (a mere two weeks after the disaster), this was just shock, as Hariu-san suggested to me during roughly the same time period in which this film was shot.  I have no idea which, but I was impressed – and perhaps a bit dismayed – by how well this man took the presence of a camera and the rather personal (while at the same time, in its own way glib) question from an outsider in such stride.

Which in a way leads me to the second impression I took away from this particular portion of the film.  I do not know whether the various scenes in Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures appear in the order that the crew actually encountered them.  The flow of the film seems to suggest that they it did, but for the filmmakers to make it to Rikuzentakata prior to the final scenes of the film in Ōkawa (just northeast of central Ishinomaki) would require them to head north first, and then move southward along the Sanriku coast from Rikuzenakata.  In any case, if this is the route they took and the film is a straightforward document of the scenes they shot in the order they shot them, then in Rikuzentakata the crew seemed to find some sort of sense of purpose in what they were doing: chronicling the destruction and loss that confronted them.  I do not know for certain whether this was the case or not – it’s something that I regret not asking Mori when I had the chance (I didn’t manage to articulate the impression in this way until after the event at Yale) – but there is something in the way they begin to approach the survivors they encounter at this point in the film that suggests they now see a more important meaning in what they are doing than simply seeing how close they can get to a damaged nuclear reactor (and failing under the weight of the danger and uncertainty involved) or shooting landscapes of debris.

If this is what happened, perhaps this is where they crossed the line from seeing themselves as observers to thinking of themselves as “participants” in the disaster (although not necessarily survivors or volunteers).  I’ve written in earlier posts about my uneasiness over engaging in “disaster tourism” or “gawking” when I first arrived in the hisaichi.  As soon as I began volunteer work with JEN in Ishinomaki, however, this feeling left me completely.  Although it was not part of the job of volunteer work, I felt no compunction about touring the devastated neighborhoods of Watanoha by bicycle during the day or walking around in them at night.  The difference was that now I had a reason for being in the area: as I saw it, I wasn’t an outsider anymore, because I was there doing something.  I was a participant.  At the risk of attributing motivations that they may not have had to the crew, my guess is that Mori and his fellow filmmakers may have felt a similar sense of belonging in the situations they filmed.

If this is what led them on through the hisaichi and influenced the way they came to interact with the survivors they encounter, however, 311 exposes the pitfalls of doing so in a striking manner.

The final scenes are shot in the community of Ōkawa, at the site of the badly damaged Ōkawa Elementary School.  Ōkawa, administratively part of Ishinomaki, lies along the banks of the Kitakami River, which runs into the Pacific on the other side of the Oshika Peninsula from Ishinomaki.  What happened here on March 11^th requires a bit of an explanation in order to fully grasp the tragic situation that Mori’s team found themselves in just two weeks later, so bear with me while I digress from discussing 311 for a moment.

The Oshika Peninsula area of Miyagi Prefecture.  The small, red “A” marker designates the position of Ōkawa Elementary School, along the Kitakami River. (Click on the image twice to see a larger version of it.)

The geography of the area added to the disaster: as the tsunami surged straight into the mouth of the Kitakami River, so much water channeled into the riverbed at once amplified the height of the wave.  Also, the river itself acted as a conduit, making it possible for the water to reach much further inland than anyone, apparently, had ever expected.

The area before the tsunami…

…and after…

Ōkawa Elementary School stood on the southern bank of the river, at a point roughly five kilometers inland and halfway up the side of the valley; a position that would have led most people to believe that it was well out of harm’s way in the event of a flood or tsunami.  The town’s own disaster maps, compiled from data on previous floods and tsunamis, did not put the school in a danger zone.   After the initial earthquake subsided on March 11^th, teachers followed the established protocols for what to do in such a situation and led their classes out into the school ground.  At this point, the tsunami was still about 50 minutes away from the school.

What happened next, however, revealed the limits of the school’s disaster preparedness measures.  A tsunami warning was issued for the entire Pacific coast of Tohoku, but there was disagreement among the teachers about whether this required a different plan of action than the established protocol already being followed.  The school was not in a danger zone, after all, so perhaps it would be out of reach of the tsunami if and when it came.  If they were to seek refuge elsewhere, furthermore, there was the problem of where that should be and how to handle the logistics of marching over 100 schoolchildren of various ages to that point.  There was nothing in the school’s disaster manual on where to go or how to get the kids there.  Some teachers argued that the children should climb the hill behind the school to higher ground, but others questioned whether the younger kids would be able to make it up the steep incline.  Others argued for a piece of higher ground nearby accessible by road, but this would involved leading the children even closer to the river (and into what would have been certain death, under the circumstances).  As the staff debated the best course of action precious time passed.  Around 27 minutes before the tsunami hit, parents on their way to pick up their children noticed that the water level of the Kitakami River had dropped drastically.  When they arrived at the school to pick up their kids, they found the teaching staff completely unaware of this telltale sign that a major tsunami was on its way.  From the school ground where the teachers stood, the school building itself obstructed their view of the river.  The parents were also surprised to be told that they couldn’t take their children home until a final roll call had been taken and all students were accounted for – the protocol required this.  Meanwhile the tsunami bore down on the school mercilessly.  As late as two minutes before it came over the top of the school building and poured into the playground, the students were still lined up by class, waiting for their teachers to decide upon a course of action. (『クロスアップ現代:　巨大津波が小学校を襲った〜石巻・大川小学校の６ヶ月』NHK企画、２０１１年９月１４日放送)

Out of 108 students at Ōkawa Elementary, 70 died, and four remained missing as of September 23^rd.  The 34 who survived either managed outrun the water and climb the hill behind the school to safety, or else had broken rank and left with their parents prior to the wave’s arrival.  The teachers fared just as badly: of the 13 in the school at the time of the quake, 9 were found dead and one remained missing as of September 23^rd.

The filmmakers arrive on location in the midst of the early days of the search for the bodies.  At first, they are not quite certain who the people before their lens actual are; they are a mixed crew of SDF soldiers, police, fire and rescue personnel, and others whom the filmmakers initially take to be either people mobilized by the town’s disaster response headquarters, or else volunteers from somewhere else entirely.  It turns out that these latter workers are actually the parents of missing children, there not only to help in searching through the rubble (which, in any case, they are hardly equipped to do, as the search has progressed to the point where heavy machinery is needed to move the remaining debris in the school yard), but more importantly to try to identify the bodies that are recovered.  The filmmakers discover this as they begin interviewing people.  One man tells them that he is here looking for two children.  Although the bodies of children are being recovered, they are hard to identify, because their faces are typically swollen to the point of being unrecognizable.  He tells one of the filmmakers this in a way that hardly suggests the gravity of his situation, much like the elderly man in Rikuzentakata did.  This time, however, there is a subtle difference.  As another filmmaker records this interview from a vantage point slightly elevated above the place where this bereaved father and his interviewer stand, the father notices the camera pointed toward him and makes a quick waving gesture to signal that he does not want to be filmed.  Whoever is behind the camera complies, and the camera sweeps rapidly away.

What could be called the climax of 311 comes soon after this, in two consecutive scenes that seem to capture many of the issues that Mori and his colleagues may be trying to raise in this film (if I sound tentative here, it is only because, even after viewing the film and hearing Mori’s own comments on it, I still don’t see a “take home” message in this documentary – either because the directors themselves haven’t agreed upon one, or because the whole point is to avoid providing a pre-digested interpretation for the viewer).

In the first, Mori is following a group of parents (although he does not realize that is who they are at first) as they trek through the field of debris that was once the schoolyard and athletic grounds.  At first they ignore his question about who they are and why they are there.  Mori finally approaches two who have come to a stop.  Debris surrounds them on all sides; here and there cranes with mechanical claws are moving it as gingerly as possible in the search for bodies underneath.  The two are women in their early 30s, mothers of children still missing.  Mori seems  to shoot the scene from mid-chest as he attempts to talk to them, as if he is trying to hide the camera.  They acknowledge him but seem to be talking more to each other than to him, even when they respond to his questions.  There is an uneasiness in his questions – perhaps because he realizes the enormity of their situation, and with it the pointlessness of his being there?  He asks them if there is a part of them that hopes they don’t find their children’s bodies here.  Both acknowledge it, but agree that it is better to know for certain than to be left wondering forever.  The women move on to expressing their inner feelings – again, more to each other than to Mori.  One of them admits feeling a great deal of anger at the school and teachers – why didn’t they tell the children to head up the hill behind the school, or let them leave as soon as their parents arrived to pick them up?  But, she says, there is no place for her to vent this anger now.  The scene ends with Mori telling her that she can vent that anger on him – that’s what he’s there for.

In the next, we see a group of men – probably mostly fathers of missing children – gathering near the back of a dump truck from which SDF troops are unloading recently found bodies.  Each body is wrapped in a blue, plastic tarp, in such a way that the face is partially visible.  It becomes clear what we are witnessing: these men are here to identify the newly recovered.  As the unloading begins, one of the men present glances at the camera with what appears to be a trace of annoyance in his eyes (although it is hard get the full expression, due to the surgical mask covering the lower half of his face).  Oblivious or undaunted, the cameraman swings his lens in low, apparently angling for a shot of one of the partially concealed faces.   Seeing this, the same man picks up a piece of wood from among the scattered debris and flings it at the camera, forcing its operator to back off.  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?  What have you come here for?”  he demands.

Mori enters the shot at this point and takes up the defense of his crew and their actions.  The other men have now gathered around the one who first called the filmmakers out.  Still, from their demeanor, they don’t seem set on violence.  They are upset, though, and want and answer to their questions: what have you come here for?  Why do you need to film this?  Mori seems resolute, but his only response is to repeat that this is important – there needs to be some sort of record of what happened here.

So we have three scenes in which the camera becomes – or almost becomes – a part of the action itself.  In the first, the gaze of the lens is waved off as an intrusion, although the interview continues; in the second, the women are perhaps unaware that the camera is rolling, but probably saw it just the same, and this may have affected their reactions to Mori’s presence; in the third, it clearly becomes something which complicates the filmmakers’ position as “participants.”  To jump ahead a bit, in the discussion of the documentary that we had with Mori after the screening, the director touched upon the idea that documentary film itself inflicts a kind of violence on it subjects, and that in a certain sense the camera is the instrument of that violence.  This observation raises the question, though, of what kind of violence is being inflicted, and how.  An obvious answer is that the camera robs people of their privacy in a moment of suffering and vulnerability.  This is certainly the case, but it raises another question of its own: since the filmmakers stumbled upon this scene as outsiders (even though they may or may not have thought of themselves as participants in the aftermath of the tsunami), wouldn’t their mere presence at the scene of so much loss and pain for the surviving parents have produced the same sense of vulnerability and violation, even without the cameras rolling?  What is it about the presence of the camera specifically in such a situation that produces such feelings?

I have no firm answers to any of these questions, but here is my best guess: the filmmakers’ presence on the scene is tolerated (if not entirely welcomed) because they are actually there witnessing all of this with their own eyes.  Presumably they are being forced to feel sympathy for the victims and their parents, but at the very least, any display of a lack of sympathy would not be tolerated.  Even Mori’s awkward attempt at “feeling their pain” is tolerated because he seemed to mean no harm in it.  But the cameras pose a threat: the threat that others, far away from Ōkawa in time and place may be observing these scenes in a way that the bereaved parents have no control over.  They, and even more so their deceased children, might then become mere spectacles – objects of the voyeurism of individuals who may or may not be sympathetic and whose intentions in viewing these images are unknown.  In the argument that Mori has with the fathers, the most vocal of them (the one who first noticed the camera) raises the issue of the internet, and how easy it is to find lurid images of death and destruction on it.  This observation may strike at the heart of their concern, and of the violence that the camera is capable of: it opens a window of uncontrollable access to our most vulnerable moments, or the most defenseless states of those we love, but it is not a two-way window; the subject cannot see the person who peers at these scenes or how they react to them.  The subject becomes a mere object.  For the parents of children who met their deaths so violently, while probably wishing only to be home in the arms of their mothers and fathers, the thought that their own suffering and worse yet the bodies of their children might become mere objects of interest for others would be understandably distressing.

After the screening, Mori joined us via Skype to talk about the film.  He began with a detailed description of how he came to be involved with this project in the first place.  On March 11^th, he was scheduled to take part as a commentator in an amateur documentary film festival in Tokyo.  Just as the event got underway, the earthquake hit.  Since the facility lost power immediately and there was no easy way to return home for many of the participants, they decided to make the best of a bad situation: there was plenty of beer, sake, and food on hand for the party to be held after the event, after all, and without refrigeration it would only go to waste if someone didn’t consume it.  It wasn’t until many hours later, after Mori walked home with an acquaintance who lived fairly nearby, that they learned what had happened: while they were in the midst of their party, thousands of people in Tohoku were dying.

Mori said he became extremely depressed about this.  His eyes were glued to the TV screen, which showed uninterrupted images of carnage and loss.  What he felt more than anything was guilt: guilt for enjoying himself while others suffered so horribly, guilt for not even being aware of the fact.  When one of the other filmmakers in the project eventually contacted him about making the trip up to Tohoku and shooting film, he initially refused.  After some thought, however, he decided that this might provide him with a way to assuage some of the guilt he felt.

This all made sense to me. My wife and I felt a different but related kind of “survivors’ guilt” in the days after March 11^th as we watched the same images from the other side of the earth.  I wondered if the kind of “drive” that I had sensed in Mori and his colleagues from the scenes shot in Rikuzen Takata onward, the feeling of somehow becoming a participant in the disaster area that I myself had felt soon after the beginning of my volunteer work with JEN in Ishinomaki, might somehow form a bridge from this sense of guilt to the kind of actions we see Mori taking in the last two scenes described above: asking the bereaved women to use him as a scapegoat for their anger, but then defending the actions of his crew in the face of criticism from the men gathered for the unloading of the bodies.

I asked Mori if he could explain his actions in these two scenes in relation to the guilt he felt prior to setting out on the trip – the guilt he thought he might be able to rid himself of by making this trip and documenting what he saw.  I asked if by the final scenes of the film he had come to some sort of sense of conviction about why he was there, since he seemed so resolute in his final comment to the mothers and in his argument with the men by the truck.  Although I don’t think he was trying to dodge the question, he didn’t exactly answer it, either.  In regard to the first scene, he said that he himself wanted to cut that particular portion from the film, because he felt that his comment to the women reeked of a cheap kind of humanism, but that the other filmmakers had overruled his decision and kept it in the version we saw (he did not explain what their reasons for doing so were, however).  As to the second scene, he emphatically denied that he felt any sense of conviction in what he was saying – evidenced by that fact that he couldn’t come up with anything to say aside from repeating that it was important for his crew to be there to document such scenes.  He simply felt it would not do to back down.

After the discussion, Aaron shared an observation with me that seems to support Mori’s explanation.  The final scene of the documentary shows the filmmakers walking over a small bridge in the middle of yet another debris-strewn landscape as the sun rides low in the sky.  It is a beautiful early spring sunset, made all the more incongruous by the reminders of the tsunami’s destructive force that lie everywhere.  In the version that I saw, there is no commentary provided for this scene, but in an earlier version of the film, which Aaron saw in Tokyo, the accusing question that the man at the truck put to Mori – “what have you come here for?” – appears on screen as the shot fades out.  Why they took this out of the version we screened, he had no idea.

311 is a challenging and in some ways disturbing film.  It raises questions about the ethics of documentary film making and leaves things at that, without suggesting what the answers one should draw are.  Consider, for example, that fact that the directors did not obtain the permission of the various people who appear in the film before putting them in it.  Mori’s defense of this in the course of the discussion was that at the editing stage there was simply no way to locate all of these people and obtain their consent.  The logistics aside, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling that these people have had their privacy violated somehow, and that I had participated in that act of violation by viewing the film.

Questions like this aside, I’m left with three thoughts on the film and the situation in the early aftermath that it reveals.  The first is the incredible fortitude and forbearance of the people the filmmakers come across in the hisaichi.  Whether this is due to gaman or shock, or something else, I have no idea, but their ability to keep from breaking down entirely is moving, and lends them a quiet dignity that perhaps even raises them above the violation of their privacy and vulnerability inflicted by the filmmakers’ cameras.  Even in the argument by the truck, rather than setting upon Mori and his friends and pummeling them or running them out of town, the men simply ask them to justify themselves – and let them off easy despite their inability to do so.

The second is this: in the months since the tsunami struck, I have watched hours and hours of human interest stories and documentaries on NHK about the disaster and its human toll, but none yet has matched 311 for the raw intensity with which it presents its subject.  This is not to put fault on NHK; I don’t think that documentaries produced by any other media outlet would be much different on this score in comparison to 311.  I also don’t mean to suggest that the NHK programs have lacked an emotional resonance.  Many of them have been very moving, even heart-breaking at times.  One point of difference lies in the fact that these programs have been put together to get a specific set of points across, whereas in 311 Mori and his co-filmmakers don’t give the viewer the reassurance of a theme or point of view on which to rely.  Also, because 311 is as much about the presence of the filmmakers themselves as it is about the scenes they are filming, the viewer almost feels forced into the situation on screen, with all of the moral ambiguity involved.  In contrast, made-for-TV documentaries and human interest segments tend to present their subjects in a way that is too polished; all of the interpretive labor has been done for the viewer, who thus knows what she or he should feel about the story before it is even finished.

And in connection to that, one last observation, from a historian’s perspective:  311 raises ethical questions, as I said.  Many people will walk away from the film seeing it as an exercise in adventurism, with little consideration for the feelings of the survivors who appear in it or the victims they are searching for.  For future students of the March 11^th disaster and its social and psychological impacts, however, films like this will probably be viewed quite differently.  Our understanding of past human tragedies – whether inflicted upon people by nature or by other people – have been powerfully shaped by images of the carnage that probably would have struck survivors as insensitive at the time, had they been asked; at the very least, they probably would not have been comfortable with the thought that images of themselves or their deceased loved ones would be viewed by people far removed from the time and place in question.  For the student of these events, however – or for the teacher who wishes to get his or her students to comprehend something of the suffering involved in them – these images are indispensable.  311 may become just such a document of the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami for a future generation of students of Japanese society and culture.