Post by Ex_Nuke_Troop on Mar 11, 2014 17:38:38 GMT
Japanese film director turns his camera on Fukushima fallout
By Jonathan Soble in Tokyo
There is a scene part way through Nao Kubota’s Homeland, the first Japanese feature film set in post-nuclear Fukushima, when a grandmother is cooking rice for her weary, fractured family.
“Where is the rice from?” asks her daughter-in-law, who has turned to prostitution to make ends meet after the meltdown at the atomic power plant three years ago drove them from their farm and wrecked the local economy.
“Hokkaido, I think,” replies the grandmother, her expression equal parts bewilderment – how did we come to rely on outsiders to feed us? – and despair.
Fukushima is part of Japan’s agricultural heartland, and the film, which opened on March 1, is pervaded by a sense of wrenching dislocation: farmers torn from their fields, husbands and wives torn from each other. The family’s elder son rages impotently in the bland, prefab shelter where they have been stuck since the disaster began on March 11 2011.
Yet the film is not simply a victim’s tale. Three years after the accident, and with Japan still agonising over the future of nuclear power, Mr Kubota, whose background is in documentaries, has made a film that is more sociological than political. Like the nuclear debate itself, it delivers no easy answers.
“The people of Fukushima are victims, but on one level they’re also perpetrators, and they understand that,” Mr Kubota said in an interview with the Financial Times. “My experience has taught me that people are actually quite aware of their own faults.”
Making a film set in Fukushima remains a controversial endeavour. Homeland, which Mr Kubota’s own small film company produced, has a few big corporate sponsors, including SoftBank, the telecoms group whose billionaire founder, Masayoshi Son, is an opponent of nuclear power. But some investors were reluctant to get involved.
“I had many experiences where people said, ‘This is a movie about Fukushima? Sorry, I’ll pass this time,’” Mr Kubota recalls.
Almost all the scenes were shot in Fukushima, including several inside the 20km-radius evacuation zone surrounding the plant. Mr Kubota and his crew needed special permission to enter one deserted, weed-choked town for a few hours’ filming.
The problems of Mr Kubota’s fictional family – like those of Japan itself – are complicated and began well before the accident, which is portrayed as both a cause of their suffering and a consequence of their greed. The family’s deceased patriarch had lobbied to have the nuclear plant built, promising an economic windfall.
Homeland shows a community whose existing cracks are widened by the disaster, an approach that he said helped him win over local people, some of whom appear as extras, and the officials whose co-operation he needed to film.
“Many people said, ‘This is my story. The older brother is me, or the younger brother is me.’”
Mr Kubota describes himself as “if anything, anti-nuclear” but acknowledges that breaking with the technology that supplied 30 per cent of Japan’s electricity before the accident will not be easy. It is an ambivalence that is felt by many across Japan: in surveys, most people express antipathy to nuclear power, yet voters have not made it a decisive issue when choosing their leaders.
Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, supports turning some of Japan’s 50 idled nuclear reactors back on after new safety inspections are completed, a position he reiterated at a news conference on Monday, a day ahead of the anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that precipitated the accident.
Mr Kubota says he has received complaints from some in the anti-nuclear movement that the film is not strident enough. The younger of the family’s two brothers sneaks back to the off-limits homestead and starts to work the land; though a friend warns of the potential radiation dangers, his situation is presented as redemptive rather than life-threatening.
The ruined nuclear plant is never shown in the film, nor are their any flashbacks to the quake, the killer waves or the chaotic evacuation. “Post-Fukushima” is simply the characters’ – and Japan’s – new and numbing reality. The frustrated elder brother, in one scene, claims not even to remember the evacuation. “I just woke up, and I was here.”
www.ft.com/cms/s/0/877266ca-a82e-11e3-8ce1-00144feab7de.html
By Jonathan Soble in Tokyo
There is a scene part way through Nao Kubota’s Homeland, the first Japanese feature film set in post-nuclear Fukushima, when a grandmother is cooking rice for her weary, fractured family.
“Where is the rice from?” asks her daughter-in-law, who has turned to prostitution to make ends meet after the meltdown at the atomic power plant three years ago drove them from their farm and wrecked the local economy.
“Hokkaido, I think,” replies the grandmother, her expression equal parts bewilderment – how did we come to rely on outsiders to feed us? – and despair.
Fukushima is part of Japan’s agricultural heartland, and the film, which opened on March 1, is pervaded by a sense of wrenching dislocation: farmers torn from their fields, husbands and wives torn from each other. The family’s elder son rages impotently in the bland, prefab shelter where they have been stuck since the disaster began on March 11 2011.
Yet the film is not simply a victim’s tale. Three years after the accident, and with Japan still agonising over the future of nuclear power, Mr Kubota, whose background is in documentaries, has made a film that is more sociological than political. Like the nuclear debate itself, it delivers no easy answers.
“The people of Fukushima are victims, but on one level they’re also perpetrators, and they understand that,” Mr Kubota said in an interview with the Financial Times. “My experience has taught me that people are actually quite aware of their own faults.”
Making a film set in Fukushima remains a controversial endeavour. Homeland, which Mr Kubota’s own small film company produced, has a few big corporate sponsors, including SoftBank, the telecoms group whose billionaire founder, Masayoshi Son, is an opponent of nuclear power. But some investors were reluctant to get involved.
“I had many experiences where people said, ‘This is a movie about Fukushima? Sorry, I’ll pass this time,’” Mr Kubota recalls.
Almost all the scenes were shot in Fukushima, including several inside the 20km-radius evacuation zone surrounding the plant. Mr Kubota and his crew needed special permission to enter one deserted, weed-choked town for a few hours’ filming.
The problems of Mr Kubota’s fictional family – like those of Japan itself – are complicated and began well before the accident, which is portrayed as both a cause of their suffering and a consequence of their greed. The family’s deceased patriarch had lobbied to have the nuclear plant built, promising an economic windfall.
Homeland shows a community whose existing cracks are widened by the disaster, an approach that he said helped him win over local people, some of whom appear as extras, and the officials whose co-operation he needed to film.
“Many people said, ‘This is my story. The older brother is me, or the younger brother is me.’”
Mr Kubota describes himself as “if anything, anti-nuclear” but acknowledges that breaking with the technology that supplied 30 per cent of Japan’s electricity before the accident will not be easy. It is an ambivalence that is felt by many across Japan: in surveys, most people express antipathy to nuclear power, yet voters have not made it a decisive issue when choosing their leaders.
Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, supports turning some of Japan’s 50 idled nuclear reactors back on after new safety inspections are completed, a position he reiterated at a news conference on Monday, a day ahead of the anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that precipitated the accident.
Mr Kubota says he has received complaints from some in the anti-nuclear movement that the film is not strident enough. The younger of the family’s two brothers sneaks back to the off-limits homestead and starts to work the land; though a friend warns of the potential radiation dangers, his situation is presented as redemptive rather than life-threatening.
The ruined nuclear plant is never shown in the film, nor are their any flashbacks to the quake, the killer waves or the chaotic evacuation. “Post-Fukushima” is simply the characters’ – and Japan’s – new and numbing reality. The frustrated elder brother, in one scene, claims not even to remember the evacuation. “I just woke up, and I was here.”
www.ft.com/cms/s/0/877266ca-a82e-11e3-8ce1-00144feab7de.html
so whats happening in the Solomons, is haarp missing its mark?