> Interviews

Tsushima: Fukushima Speaks Part 2
Doi Toshikuni (Director)

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From Palestine to Fukushima

Oshita Yumi (OY): I’d like to ask you about meeting with people in Tsushima (in the town of Namie in Fukushima Prefecture) and what led you to the idea of filming them and making a documentary.

Doi Toshikuni (DT): There are a lot of journalists in my network who have followed Chernobyl, for example, and they all got together and formed a team and went into Fukushima right after the 2011 disaster. They were thinking first and foremost of the harm caused by the radiation from the nuclear accident. I have been doing stories on the Palestinian people for thirty-four years. As someone with this background, I did not really understand why I personally should go north to Tohoku, despite the fact that the disasters there had become a global event. When everyone else went to Tohoku, I went in the opposite direction, south to Okinawa. On the island of Iejima in Okinawa, there are farmers who lost their land and have been putting up a fight. I had decided from before the March 2011 disasters to do a story on this “Palestine within Japan.” But after the disasters, whenever I looked at the television or the newspaper, it was mostly all about Tohoku. After the power plant meltdowns in particular, the news was all about the nuclear power plant. I felt that I probably needed to go, but I didn’t understand why, and I really struggled.

You know this, of course, but the Palestinians lost their land with the founding of the state of Israel. People affected by the disasters in Japan were driven from their land by the tsunami and lost their homes. I thought that if this loss of land, of homeland, was a connection then there might be meaning in my going to Tohoku. That was when I first went.

I went to Rikuzentakata with a photographer friend and what we saw there was so terrible that we were really left speechless. I filmed, of course. But I realized that this was different, different because the destruction caused there by the tsunami was natural. It was a natural disaster. But the disaster in Palestine is not natural. It’s manmade. People have been artificially driven out by other people. Being driven from one’s home by a nuclear power plant failure is also a manmade disaster. Once I felt that Fukushima was probably closer to Palestine, I headed there for the first time, from around the middle of April.

At the time, there were still people remaining in the village of Iitate in Fukushima. Evacuation orders had not been given there, even though the radiation levels were really very high. So I was able to see the lives of the people of the village prior to evacuation. Dairy farmers milking cows, for example. If they didn’t milk them, the cows would become sick. But because of the high radiation levels they couldn’t send the milk out for delivery, so instead they would dig holes in the field and dispose of all the milk there. A portion of the cows were also sent to the slaughterhouse. I filmed the grief of the dairy farmers as they confronted these things. My first film about Fukushima, and my first Iitate film, was titled The Town of Iitate: No Longer Home (2012). Here I started to overlay what it means to be driven from one’s home with a consciousness of the people of Palestine. This was the first film where Fukushima and Palestine overlapped somewhat in my mind.

In spite of this relationship, Fukushima is really inextricable from the problem of radiation. Decontamination efforts were beginning at the time, and I next decided to take up the theme of whether with decontamination people would really be able to go on living in Iitate, of whether they would return or not return. This was the subject of the second Iitate film The Town of Iitate: Radiation and the Return Home. That one was released theatrically in 2013.

After that, I thought I wanted to do something. In 2014, the Fukushima Genpatsu Kokusodan (Fukushima Power Plant Legal Action Group) held a gathering in Tokyo to collect testimony from the victims of the disaster. They filled a large public hall in Ikebukuro with a capacity of around 800 people. Listening to them speak, I thought that their voices should not stop with just these 800 people. I thought that this was something people throughout Japan, people throughout the world needed to hear. If that was going to happen, I thought that maybe it was my role, as someone with the so-called means of documenting, to gather the voices and record the testimony of the victims, of the people who had lost their farms and their livelihoods, their homes, and their land.

From there I started the process of gathering testimonies. A four-year effort resulted in the film Fukushima Speaks. It was released in 2018 and received the Documentary Award from the Japanese government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs. I filmed interviews with as many as ninety people and constructed the film using the voices of fourteen selected from among them. The film was theatrically released and very well received. I was told by people not from Fukushima that this was the first time they had heard the voices of disaster victims directly. I think it was shocking for them.

Meeting the people of Tsushima

DT: My first encounter with Tsushima was a documentary show called Akougi made in 2016 by my friend Omori Junro, who was a director for NHK at the time.

OY: Akougi being the name of a village in Tsushima . . .

DT: I was really moved. The main figure is Konno Yoshito, the village head (who, in a regular newsletter, continues to send the results of radiation measurements taken at points around the village to former residents who have evacuated). Konno came across as a really appealing person, and I thought that I wanted to meet him myself and hear his stories. At the time I had no intention of making a film about Tsushima. Omori introduced us and I interviewed him for the first time in the fall of 2018. That was also the start of the film, in part because I was really drawn in by Yoshihito. Afterwards, someone said to me that there was a group bringing Tsushima lawsuits and that I might want to meet the person in charge. So I met with Konno Hidenori, who sheds tears in the film’s fourth section on Traditional Culture. At first I was not thinking of making a film only focused on Tsushima. But a couple of cameramen who were covering Tsushima ahead of me said, “Doi, Tsushima is different, the people are different, the lawyers fighting for them are different.” When I met people in Tsushima and talked to them, I also felt that they were different.

OY: You’ve met a lot of people from Fukushima. Are they really that different?

DT: When you interview them, there’s a different kind of human warmth. What is it? I guess that they have lived in very difficult circumstances, in an environment where they have had to help each other to get by. It’s human warmth.

As for why I made a Tsushima film, there was a kind of “source book” for it. Lawyers for a group of Tsushima disaster victim plaintiffs compiled all the statements of opinion from public hearings into a pamphlet titled “Plaintiffs’ Statements of Opinion.” When I read that, I thought, this is really great, it would be great to do interviews in conjunction with this. I pored over the testimonies of about thirty people and planned things out: here we see bullying, this person tells us about how families were destroyed. I started this coverage in earnest in 2021. I think I was probably able to make a film as quickly as I did because these plaintiffs’ statements existed.

Fukushima Speaks took three or four years. I interviewed about ninety people without knowing what I was going to hear from them when I met them. That’s why there were really only a handful that I thought I really wanted to put in a film. But in the case of Tsushima, I found people to listen to and themes to pursue. It was very efficient from my perspective as the person doing the interviewing. So I consulted with the head of the advocacy group and said I wanted to make a film, and the group head contacted people one by one. As a result of this I was able to interview about thirty people, each one for two to two-and-a-half hours. Some of them told me things beyond what they had written in their statements of opinion. The main figure in this film is probably Sudo Kano, who at one point thought of committing suicide with her children, but who pulled through thanks to the people of Tsushima. When I met her, I was convinced that her story was material for a film. This was on our first meeting.

OY: Your first meeting?

DT: Yes, the first one (laughs). At first she didn’t want her face to be shown. I persuaded her. When she started talking, there was something that really drew you in, about how she had worked so hard to bring up her children in real poverty.

I thought I could make this person a centerpiece of the film. Then, at the beginning of February, I brought everyone from Tsushima together and held a screening of things I had assembled in Fukushima. But right before this happened, I got a sudden phone call from Kano-san saying, “I’m embarrassed about what I told you, or at least I don’t know what people will think of it, so I’d like you to cut my whole interview from the film.” I was shocked. I said to her, “Kano-san, let’s hold the screening and if everyone says ‘this is too much’ we’ll cut it. But let’s have a look at it first.” I worked hard to persuade her, and she reluctantly gave the okay. After everyone had seen the footage, I said, “Kano-san has such and such reservations, but what do you all think?” Then, everyone persuaded her, saying, “Kano-san, this is essential.” She said, “if you say so, I guess it’s okay” (laughs). So that scene survived. In this regard, Kano-san’s story was a very important testimony for me.

Not only a film about the problems in Fukushima, but a universal film reflecting Japanese history

OY: This film gave me the impression of being an epic documentary of Tsushima, with material on the traditional Taue Odori dance (to pray for a successful rice harvest) and on the settlement and cultivation of the land for agriculture.

DT: Actually, at the time of our first advance screening in February, the Taue Odori scene was already included but not the part about the cultivation of the land. Tsushima had been a village of about three hundred households. About four hundred more arrived later to settle and cultivate the land. So in a sense, the story of this village cannot really be told without the history of its cultivation. I was told this by the pros who saw the rough cut, including my friend Omori who use to work at NHK: “if you don’t tell the story of the settlement and cultivation, the part where it comes up in the second half of the film will not resonate.” So the final cut ended up including this material.

OY: About how people struggled to cultivate land that was ultimately taken from them by the nuclear accident.

DT: The settlers were very poor. I heard that in the beginning there was discrimination against them, with people saying, “don’t play with their children.” But later, there were people among them who worked really hard and became very successful. They overcame poverty, only to have the rug swept out from under them by the nuclear accident.

OY: The village head Konno Hidenori is also impressive when he expresses understanding for critical points of view, when he says, “there are some who question whether the government should invest huge sums of money for decontamination on behalf of at best seven hundred plaintiffs, or who think it would be best, from the perspective of economic efficiency, to only compensate the people who do return to the land.” At the same time, he also asserts that “to disregard harms and turn a blind eye to a portion of those affected reflects a way of thinking that discards people” and is something he cannot accept.

DT: Kano-san’s words were also very strong, but what I actually most wanted to drive home in the film was what Konno Hidenori said here. There was a lot of universality to the points he made, that the classic example of minorities who became victims of Japan’s headlong high economic growth were the people of Minamata, for example. That it was inevitable that there would be some victims in small places like that, and that for the prosperity of the majority, there should be reparations for the victims in the minority. Today, it’s Okinawa. The burden of maintaining Japan’s national security has been totally shifted onto Okinawa. It’s as if we take this for granted. Many people think this way, not only the government, even if we don’t say it. That’s why there’s no movement. What Konno-san was saying is that it is strange to think that giving just a little compensation to seven hundred people could resolve the situation. These words are the key to the film, in a sense.

OY: That’s why they’ve gone to court and fought.

DT: Their legal action is a way of continuing to say no to such ways of thinking. It’s not enough to say, “just take your compensation payment and build a new house.” The people of Tsushima are fervently telling us about the sense of loss that comes from being deprived of one’s home, about what it means to lose one’s community. They ask us, “do you really think money can substitute for the community that we had built over the years?” On a deeper level, they are asking us to consider what human happiness is. Human happiness lies in connections with other people, in the natural surroundings where one was born and raised, in culture, that kind of thing. This is what I wanted to show in the film. In this sense, it’s a very universal film. It’s not just about Fukushima or Tsushima problems. I believe it’s a film in which you glimpse Japan’s history, in a sense.

A documentary policy of not “depicting problems”

DT: One thing I’ve decided in making documentary films is not to “depict problems,” not to make people talk about problems. I don’t think it’s my role to depict the nuclear power plant problem, the contamination problem, the problem of exposure to radiation. This was true when I was making Fukushima Speaks and it has also been true when I’ve filmed in Palestine. If you depict the “problems” of Palestine, people will dismiss them as faraway difficulties and not really watch. But if you depict the way someone lives, really focusing on their humanness—people are strange, they’ll actually make a mirror of the people appearing in the film, their way of life, their way of thinking, and end up seeing themselves. That’s how you move people.

I cut out all of the parts where I interview someone and they say, “this is how nuclear power plants work.” When they start to talk about their own lives instead, I think, “this is what people will relate to.” This is my policy, so to speak, one of my principles. And when we enter into their lives, the importance of community comes into view, from the perspective of each individual person. In this sense, when Kano-san says, “I was brought up in Tsushima,” you can clearly see through to the community that lies behind her words. I would add that it would be good for people to view the nuclear power plant problem by asking themselves why others should have to go through such a thing.

I think the reason Fukushima Speaks was so well received by everyone is probably because the film does not go on about the nuclear power plant but instead narrates the lives of individual people. It’s only about the people, people who have confronted this huge problem, this disaster. In this sense, I felt confident that this Tsushima documentary was a good film. Not because of my own powers, but because of the power of the people recounting their stories, the power of their words. Their words have strength. They speak straight to the heart.

Why a documentary of testimonies?

DT: I’m often asked why this is a documentary of testimonies. There’s a book that inspired me in this approach called Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (1997), by Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2015. The book was first published ten years after the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster.

In the first part of the book, we hear from the wife of a firefighter. As a firefighter, her husband was there at the very start, putting out fires at the nuclear plant, and was exposed to heavy radiation. This caused his body to deteriorate. His wife recounts this in a detached kind of way. What she narrates is not so much the problem of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl as her love for her husband. It’s a really very moving passage. It struck me that testimony really had the potential to be something very moving.

I can’t capture testimonies in writing like Svetlana Alexievich, but I thought that if she could do it in writing, I could do it in images. Her way of choosing words brought out so much interiority that it made me wonder about how she conducted her interviews. This made me feel that if I could draw out stories that would resonate with people, I could definitely put together a film consisting only of a series of testimonies. Fukushima Speaks was my first attempt. It was actually a nearly five-hour feature originally. In 2019, I released a three-hour version theatrically, which was very well received, so the following year the almost five-hour complete version also got theatrical screenings. Even there it shows—that is to say that, if you really draw out deep reflections, you can have a film that consists mostly of speech.

But in the Tsushima film, there is both the testimony and another central feature: nature, or the natural surroundings of Tsushima.

OY: Oh yes, you’re right. There are insert shots of various kinds of scenery.

DT: I shot the interviews in 2021. In 2022, I filmed the natural scenery across the four seasons, over the course of the year. I thought that if I could draw out the natural beauty of Tsushima alongside the power of the testimonies, a film would come together from the combination of the two.

Drawing out the interview subjects

OY: You said that to an extent you were able to select your interview subjects from the compiled statements of opinion, with the group leader Konno-san securing their permission. Were you basically meeting everyone for the first time when you interviewed them? Everyone opens up and speaks so freely about their inner feelings that it really doesn’t seem that way.

DT: The Tsushima interviews were mostly conducted on first meeting. I’m often asked how I was able to draw out such deep feelings from them.

I think this is because I also have worries of my own. I don’t have confidence in my own way of living. I’m already 70 years old [at the time of this interview in 2023]. From the time that I was in elementary school I wanted to be a doctor, but that didn’t work out and I became someone who scraped by in life, flying low, so to speak. I tried to get on the corporate career path, but by then I was too old. It took me three years to get into college. My journey has been the exact opposite of that of the so-called elites, and even now I have doubts about my way of living. I think that because I have these wounds and distresses of my own, it’s probably easy for others to open up to me. If there’s anything special about me, that’s probably it (laughs). I feel like the fact that I’ve led a life of frustrations has helped me as an interviewer, and that it wasn’t all in vain.

That’s why I think it’s not enough for journalists only to be good at writing or shooting images. It’s about laying bare how you try to live, laying bare your life. It’s really important to convey to your interview subjects that you are putting yourself on the line. I feel that facing others as an interviewer entails a real challenge between two people. If you’re too clever or superficial as an interviewer, it comes across right away—the way you ask questions, the look in your eyes, your facial expressions. People being interviewed are sensitive to these things, to the intentions of the interviewer confronting them.

My role is to record and convey testimonies

DT: Tsushima: Fukushima Speaks Part 2 will be theatrically released in March of next year [2024], starting with screenings in Tokyo from March 2nd. English subtitles have already been prepared, so its reach will not be limited to Japan but will extend overseas. With Fukushima Speaks, a Japanese person living in the U.S. volunteered to do the English subtitles, then spread the word. Several campuses in the University of California system as well as Stanford expressed interest, and screenings took place. The fact that Americans watched this film of over two hours with subtitles really gave me a sense of hope.

One thing I would like to convey to those watching abroad is the sense of why I have kept going to Fukushima over the course of twelve years. Recently, they have started releasing contaminated water from the power plant, but the authorities have shown the intention of putting Fukushima in the past, and the rest of Japanese society is starting to accept this attitude as well.

As a journalist in the midst of this, I think it is my role to say, “no, Fukushima is not in the past,” and to show how the people most affected by the disasters, how their spirits and their lives have been destroyed to such an extent, how they’ve lost their homes and how their families have been torn apart.

I’ve gathered some money through crowdfunding and am now starting to collect material to make one more Fukushima documentary. From here it is up to us—a big theme confronting us—to record the voices and testimonies of those affected, of the disaster victims, and to preserve these for future generations. Three of the people who appeared in Fukushima Speaks have already passed on. Many people are dying of cancer.

The written word is of course a means of its own, but I think that it is my role to leave a record in images. It would be possible, for example, to put what Kano-san says into writing. But the sound of her voice as she speaks in Fukushima dialect and her tears show the power of film. That’s why I will keep recording testimonies, even if they don’t become a film. As the disaster victims pass on, their memory also fades away. This is a contest against time, one that will probably become a major part of my life’s work.

Compiled by Oshita Yumi
Translated by Ryan Cook

Photography: Hamanaka Ai / Video: Kusunose Kaori / 2023-10-06