{"id":100,"date":"2021-08-23T18:52:50","date_gmt":"2021-08-23T18:52:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/mori-tatsuyas-311\/"},"modified":"2021-08-23T20:17:40","modified_gmt":"2021-08-23T20:17:40","slug":"mori-tatsuyas-311","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/migrated-posts\/mori-tatsuyas-311\/","title":{"rendered":"Mori Tatsuya\u2019s 311"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Late as usual with this \u2013 although this time I have a bit of an excuse: Winter storm Alfred and \u2013 more to the point \u2013 the 9 days and counting without electricity that our neighborhood has suffered since it hit on October 29th<\/sup>.\u00a0 Times like this make you realize just how fragile that state we call \u201cnormality\u201d truly is.\u00a0 Even though we haven\u2019t had to seek shelter away from our home (the basement is warmer than the rest of the house now, and we have to be down there anyway to keep vigil over the sump pump well to prevent it from overflowing), I\u2019ve noticed some of the signs of the <\/em>hinanjo mentality I spoke about in a previous post taking hold within our family and among our friends and neighbors who are still without electricity.\u00a0 As bad as it is, though, it\u2019s nothing compared to the situation in Tohoku \u2013 even as it stands now in many <\/em>hisaichi areas.<\/em><\/div>\n
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Anyway, on with the post\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the American debut of Mori Tatsuya\u2019s new documentary about the Tohoku tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi crisis, titled simply \u201c311<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He told me that the film was controversial; at the two film festivals at which it has been screened thus far \u2013 in Pusan and Yamagata \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s pretty much what Aaron told me about the content of the film before I made the trip to New Haven.\u00a0 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\u2019t work out due to scheduling conflicts).<\/p>\n

I really had no idea what to expect from this film as I headed down.\u00a0 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 Yoj\u016b, Watai Takeharu, and Yasuoka Takaharu) who had set out for Tohoku together about two weeks after the disaster.\u00a0 What could be the point of this film?\u00a0 Were they trying to draw attention to the dire circumstances in Tohoku, but somehow crossed the line between sensitivity and sensationalism in the process?\u00a0 Was this \u201ccrusader journalism\u201d run amuck?\u00a0 (And if so, what possible reason could there be to \u201ccrusade\u201d in such a situation \u2013 unless they were hunting down TEPCO executives and putting them on the spot?)\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n

Aaron and his colleague in film studies at Yale, Prof. Charles Musser, had much more enlightening things to say on 311<\/em> 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That, in any case, is what I decided my role would have to be.\u00a0 What follows are my thoughts on 311<\/em> from just such a vantage point.<\/p>\n

To call 311<\/em> a \u201cdocumentary,\u201d however, probably requires an expansion of what that term usually means.\u00a0 The film doesn\u2019t make a particular argument, nor does it even present a specific point of view for the viewer to contemplate.\u00a0 It does \u201cdocument,\u201d in a very stripped-down way, a trip north through eastern Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate Prefectures.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The four filmmakers are as much the subjects of their film as they are the eyes behind the camera\u2019s lens.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

311<\/em> seemed to me to be two very different films in one.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It becomes increasingly clear that they are out of their element.\u00a0 As the readings on the Geiger counter surge upward, we hear their expressions of shock, but they don\u2019t seem to know whether the levels they are detecting are safe or not \u2013 all they can determine is that radiation levels are x<\/em> number of times higher than they were in Tokyo.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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\u2019t, 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.\u00a0 He chooses the latter course of action, only to get wet anyway as he returns to the van without them.\u00a0 Later, they stop at a painting supply store to equip themselves with thick, hooded vinyl jackets and pants, respirator masks, and goggles \u2013 all of which they duct tape to themselves in an attempt to make their outfits as airtight as possible.\u00a0 The reason why they are doing this is clear enough, but the effect \u2013 like a bad Halloween costume or an alien from a 1950s low-budget sci-fi flick \u2013 is still somehow farcical.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The next day, they decide to change course and head further north, into the devastated coastal areas of Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures.<\/p>\n

It is from this point that 311<\/em> becomes a very different kind of film.\u00a0 The camera shoots debris-strewn vistas from the van window as they roll by.\u00a0 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\u2019s destructive power.\u00a0 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 \u2013 which is not even in sight.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Even that is no easy task.\u00a0 Debris lies everywhere and a body might be covered by any piece of it, making it hard even to move about.\u00a0 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 \u2013 apparently part of a roof \u2013 to check underneath for bodies.\u00a0 He is young, probably no older than 25, but has already been on the job for nearly two weeks by this point.\u00a0 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<\/em> from this point on in some form or another: you are obviously here searching for bodies, but isn\u2019t there a part of you that hopes you won\u2019t find any?\u00a0 The soldier agrees, but says there is no hope for that.\u00a0 \u00a0In any case, the sooner they can recover the bodies of the victims, the sooner people can move on with their lives.<\/p>\n

The filmmakers reach Rikuzentakata.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The camera finally reaches a floor on which there is relatively little damage.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Soon after, as Mori and the others survey the destruction from ground level, they come upon a man in his sixties.\u00a0 He is searching for his wife, whom he has not seen since March 11th<\/sup>.\u00a0 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\u2019t find her?\u00a0 The man\u2019s 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.\u00a0 The man moves on with his solitary search.<\/p>\n

Two things struck me as particularly noteworthy about the scenes from Rikuzentakata in 311<\/em>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Another example of Japanese civility, or perhaps gaman<\/em>?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I have no idea which, but I was impressed \u2013 and perhaps a bit dismayed \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Which in a way leads me to the second impression I took away from this particular portion of the film.\u00a0 I do not know whether the various scenes in Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures appear in the order that the crew actually encountered them.\u00a0 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 \u014ckawa (just northeast of central Ishinomaki) would require them to head north first, and then move southward along the Sanriku coast from Rikuzenakata.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I do not know for certain whether this was the case or not \u2013 it\u2019s something that I regret not asking Mori when I had the chance (I didn\u2019t manage to articulate the impression in this way until after the event at Yale) \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

If this is what happened, perhaps this is where they crossed the line from seeing themselves as observers to thinking of themselves as \u201cparticipants\u201d in the disaster (although not necessarily survivors or volunteers).\u00a0 I\u2019ve written in earlier posts about my uneasiness over engaging in \u201cdisaster tourism\u201d or \u201cgawking\u201d when I first arrived in the hisaichi<\/em>.\u00a0 As soon as I began volunteer work with JEN in Ishinomaki, however, this feeling left me completely.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The difference was that now I had a reason for being in the area: as I saw it, I wasn\u2019t an outsider anymore, because I was there doing<\/em> something.\u00a0 I was a participant<\/em>.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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

The final scenes are shot in the community of \u014ckawa, at the site of the badly damaged \u014ckawa Elementary School.\u00a0 \u014ckawa, 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.\u00a0 What happened here on March 11th<\/sup> requires a bit of an explanation in order to fully grasp the tragic situation that Mori\u2019s team found themselves in just two weeks later, so bear with me while I digress from discussing 311<\/em> for a moment.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Oshika Peninsula area of Miyagi Prefecture.\u00a0 The small, red \u201cA\u201d marker designates the position of \u014ckawa Elementary School, along the Kitakami River. (Click on the image twice to see a larger version of it.)
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

The area before the tsunami\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u2026and after\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\u014ckawa 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\u2019s way in the event of a flood or tsunami.\u00a0 The town\u2019s own disaster maps, compiled from data on previous floods and tsunamis, did not put the school in a danger zone.\u00a0\u00a0 After the initial earthquake subsided on March 11th<\/sup>, teachers followed the established protocols for what to do in such a situation and led their classes out into the school ground.\u00a0 At this point, the tsunami was still about 50 minutes away from the school.<\/p>\n

What happened next, however, revealed the limits of the school\u2019s disaster preparedness measures.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There was nothing in the school\u2019s disaster manual on where to go or how to get the kids there.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 As the staff debated the best course of action precious time passed.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 From the school ground where the teachers stood, the school building itself obstructed their view of the river.\u00a0 The parents were also surprised to be told that they couldn\u2019t take their children home until a final roll call had been taken and all students were accounted for \u2013 the protocol required this.\u00a0 Meanwhile the tsunami bore down on the school mercilessly.\u00a0 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. (\u300e\u30af\u30ed\u30b9\u30a2\u30c3\u30d7\u73fe\u4ee3:\u3000\u5de8\u5927\u6d25\u6ce2\u304c\u5c0f\u5b66\u6821\u3092\u8972\u3063\u305f\u301c\u77f3\u5dfb\u30fb\u5927\u5ddd\u5c0f\u5b66\u6821\u306e\uff16\u30f6\u6708\u300fNHK\u4f01\u753b\u3001\uff12\uff10\uff11\uff11\u5e74\uff19\u6708\uff11\uff14\u65e5\u653e\u9001)<\/p>\n

Out of 108 students at \u014ckawa Elementary, 70 died, and four remained missing as of September 23rd<\/sup>.\u00a0 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\u2019s arrival.\u00a0 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 23rd<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

The filmmakers arrive on location in the midst of the early days of the search for the bodies.\u00a0 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\u2019s disaster response headquarters, or else volunteers from somewhere else entirely.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The filmmakers discover this as they begin interviewing people.\u00a0 One man tells them that he is here looking for two children.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This time, however, there is a subtle difference.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Whoever is behind the camera complies, and the camera sweeps rapidly away.<\/p>\n

What could be called the climax of 311<\/em> 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\u2019s own comments on it, I still don\u2019t see a \u201ctake home\u201d message in this documentary \u2013 either because the directors themselves haven\u2019t agreed upon one, or because the whole point is to avoid providing a pre-digested interpretation for the viewer).<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 At first they ignore his question about who they are and why they are there.\u00a0 Mori finally approaches two who have come to a stop.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The two are women in their early 30s, mothers of children still missing.\u00a0 Mori seems \u00a0to shoot the scene from mid-chest as he attempts to talk to them, as if he is trying to hide the camera.\u00a0 They acknowledge him but seem to be talking more to each other than to him, even when they respond to his questions.\u00a0 There is an uneasiness in his questions \u2013 perhaps because he realizes the enormity of their situation, and with it the pointlessness of his being there?\u00a0 He asks them if there is a part of them that hopes they don\u2019t find their children\u2019s bodies here.\u00a0 Both acknowledge it, but agree that it is better to know for certain than to be left wondering forever.\u00a0 The women move on to expressing their inner feelings \u2013 again, more to each other than to Mori.\u00a0 One of them admits feeling a great deal of anger at the school and teachers \u2013 why didn\u2019t 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?\u00a0 But, she says, there is no place for her to vent this anger now.\u00a0 The scene ends with Mori telling her that she can vent that anger on him \u2013 that\u2019s what he\u2019s there for.<\/p>\n

In the next, we see a group of men \u2013 probably mostly fathers of missing children \u2013 gathering near the back of a dump truck from which SDF troops are unloading recently found bodies.\u00a0 Each body is wrapped in a blue, plastic tarp, in such a way that the face is partially visible.\u00a0 It becomes clear what we are witnessing: these men are here to identify the newly recovered.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 Oblivious or undaunted, the cameraman swings his lens in low, apparently angling for a shot of one of the partially concealed faces. \u00a0\u00a0Seeing 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.\u00a0 \u201cWhat the hell do you think you\u2019re doing?\u00a0 What have you come here for?\u201d\u00a0 he demands.<\/p>\n

Mori enters the shot at this point and takes up the defense of his crew and their actions.\u00a0 The other men have now gathered around the one who first called the filmmakers out.\u00a0 Still, from their demeanor, they don\u2019t seem set on violence.\u00a0 They are upset, though, and want and answer to their questions: what have you come here for?\u00a0 Why do you need to film this<\/em>?\u00a0 Mori seems resolute, but his only response is to repeat that this is important \u2013 there needs to be some sort of record of what happened here.<\/p>\n

So we have three scenes in which the camera becomes \u2013 or almost becomes \u2013 a part of the action itself.\u00a0 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\u2019s presence; in the third, it clearly becomes something which complicates the filmmakers\u2019 position as \u201cparticipants.\u201d\u00a0 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. \u00a0This observation raises the question, though, of what kind of violence is being inflicted, and how.\u00a0 An obvious answer is that the camera robs people of their privacy in a moment of suffering and vulnerability.\u00a0 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\u2019t 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?\u00a0 What is it about the presence of the camera specifically in such a situation that produces such feelings?<\/p>\n

I have no firm answers to any of these questions, but here is my best guess: the filmmakers\u2019 presence on the scene is tolerated (if not entirely welcomed) because they are actually there<\/em> witnessing all of this with their own eyes.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Even Mori\u2019s awkward attempt at \u201cfeeling their pain\u201d is tolerated because he seemed to mean no harm in it.\u00a0 But the cameras pose a threat: the threat that others, far away from \u014ckawa in time and place may be observing these scenes in a way that the bereaved parents have no control over.\u00a0 They, and even more so their deceased children, might then become mere spectacles \u2013 objects of the voyeurism of individuals who may or may not be sympathetic and whose intentions in viewing these images are unknown.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The subject becomes a mere object.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

After the screening, Mori joined us via Skype to talk about the film.\u00a0 He began with a detailed description of how he came to be involved with this project in the first place.\u00a0 On March 11th<\/sup>, he was scheduled to take part as a commentator in an amateur documentary film festival in Tokyo.\u00a0 Just as the event got underway, the earthquake hit.\u00a0 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\u2019t consume it.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Mori said he became extremely depressed about this.\u00a0 His eyes were glued to the TV screen, which showed uninterrupted images of carnage and loss.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 After some thought, however, he decided that this might provide him with a way to assuage some of the guilt he felt.<\/p>\n

This all made sense to me. My wife and I felt a different but related kind of \u201csurvivors\u2019 guilt\u201d in the days after March 11th<\/sup> as we watched the same images from the other side of the earth.\u00a0 I wondered if the kind of \u201cdrive\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 the guilt he thought he might be able to rid himself of by making this trip and documenting what he saw.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Although I don\u2019t think he was trying to dodge the question, he didn\u2019t exactly answer it, either.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 As to the second scene, he emphatically denied that he felt any sense of conviction in what he was saying \u2013 evidenced by that fact that he couldn\u2019t come up with anything to say aside from repeating that it was important for his crew to be there to document such scenes.\u00a0 He simply felt it would not do to back down.<\/p>\n

After the discussion, Aaron shared an observation with me that seems to support Mori\u2019s explanation.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It is a beautiful early spring sunset, made all the more incongruous by the reminders of the tsunami\u2019s destructive force that lie everywhere.\u00a0 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 \u2013 \u201cwhat have you come here for?\u201d \u2013 appears on screen as the shot fades out.\u00a0 Why they took this out of the version we screened, he had no idea.<\/p>\n

311<\/em> is a challenging and in some ways disturbing film.\u00a0 It raises questions about the ethics of documentary film making and leaves things at that, without suggesting what the answers one should draw are.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Mori\u2019s 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.\u00a0 The logistics aside, though, I couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Questions like this aside, I\u2019m left with three thoughts on the film and the situation in the early aftermath that it reveals.\u00a0 The first is the incredible fortitude and forbearance of the people the filmmakers come across in the hisaichi<\/em>.\u00a0 Whether this is due to gaman<\/em> 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\u2019 cameras.\u00a0 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 \u2013 and let them off easy despite their inability to do so.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> for the raw intensity with which it presents its subject.\u00a0 This is not to put fault on NHK; I don\u2019t think that documentaries produced by any other media outlet would be much different on this score in comparison to 311<\/em>. \u00a0I also don\u2019t mean to suggest that the NHK programs have lacked an emotional resonance.\u00a0 Many of them have been very moving, even heart-breaking at times.\u00a0 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<\/em> Mori and his co-filmmakers don\u2019t give the viewer the reassurance of a theme or point of view on which to rely.\u00a0 Also, because 311<\/em> 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

And in connection to that, one last observation, from a historian\u2019s perspective:\u00a0 311<\/em> raises ethical questions, as I said.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 For future students of the March 11th<\/sup> disaster and its social and psychological impacts, however, films like this will probably be viewed quite differently.\u00a0 Our understanding of past human tragedies \u2013 whether inflicted upon people by nature or by other people \u2013 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.\u00a0 For the student of these events, however \u2013 or for the teacher who wishes to get his or her students to comprehend something of the suffering involved in them \u2013 these images are indispensable.\u00a0 311<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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