SHORT DESCRIPTION OF ‘TOHOKU NO SHINGETSU’

 

  We cannot see the heavenly stars in the bright daylight,

  Or the thoughts, heart and soul in someone.

  The colors of the shakuhachi[1] sounds are like that too---

  They cannot be seen or written on paper.

  We ought to cherish those things we cannot see.[2]

 

 

 

‘Shingetsu’ is the Japanese word for ‘new moon’, or ‘no moon’.

 

Like the stars in the daylight, or the colors of the shakuhachi sound, although we cannot see the shingetsu, the moon is still there. For me, this shingetsu is like Tohoku[3] today. Much of Tohoku can no longer be seen, but we ought to cherish and understand those things we cannot see. This is ‘Tohoku no Shingetsu’.

                           

Before the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear triple disaster in Japan, the coastline of Tohoku closely resembled my own West Coast of Canada.

 

The clusters of beautiful pristine islands, the quiet coves and inlets, the forested mountains rising up from the sea, the stretches of sandy beaches, the miles of rugged rocky shoreline, the tranquil farming and fishing villages, the green abundance of nature, the salmon runs in the fall, the strong indigenous peoples’ roots…all of this, and more we shared, along with the underlying geology that places both B.C. and Tohoku on major fault lines susceptible to earthquakes.

 

It is shocking that these abundant similarities could vanish in less than 24 hours.

 

On March 11th, 2011, the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami destroyed a 670 km. strip along the Tohoku coast with black waves towering 20-125 feet high. The following day, March 12th, the first of three explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant threatened communities in the area, and Japan declared a nuclear state of emergency.[4]

 

 

I went into Tohoku three months after the disaster on June 7, 2011, not as a filmmaker at first, but as a Canadian volunteer.

 

Walking through all the broken remains of what was once a vibrant fishing town or a close-knit farming village, I could still feel the people that lived, or died there. Sometimes I could even hear their voices, laughter or cries in the eerie emptiness and smells of decay. 

 

The ghosts of traditional dancers in bright cloth dancing through the streets, and of young children laughing and running with their kites high in the sky for oshogatsu[5].  The presence of strange sounds of old kagura[6] music, or the kiai[7] cry of a fierce samurai [8] in full armor as he leads five hundred warriors on horseback over ancestral grounds.

 

These phantoms are deeply infused into the space and local history of Tohoku. Because it is a remote and isolated area of Japan, old traditions and daily customs and foods, have changed very little over the centuries. One can feel the ‘ghosts’ in the tsunami ruins and see them in the faces of the people, experience them in the local foods and hear it in the survivors’ voices and song. In some locations, my sense of these ‘ghosts’ was very strong.

 

This is Tohoku today.

 

During the second year of location filming, we recreated and filmed some of these ‘ghost’ scenes together with the local people.

Set in the ruins of their flattened villages in early winter, or on the hillsides lined with pink sakura[9] trees gently blooming in springtime, or in the soft green shadows of a contaminated bamboo forest deep in the mountains on a summer evening.

 

Scenes with beautiful young costumed ‘Torikomai’[10] performers dancing through their town that has been reduced to nothingness, except for all the concrete rubble left behind. The bright yellow, red and turquoise colors of their kimono cloth flutter in the wind like carefree butterflies that bring some life force to all the grey gloominess.

 

“As we perform, we are carrying on a living story. The music is satisfying to our souls and fills us with deep feelings and tears. I think our cultures are the ones that can cleanse us, so we can rise up again!”[11]

 

Or the scene of an 86 year-old samurai gunshi[12] in heavy armor, walking alone down the center of a deserted main street…in a ghost town less than 10 km. away from the nuclear accident site. At first his posture is stooped and tired, and his gait limping. But, gradually he stands tall and erect, and walks with strong even steps. His gaze becomes possessed with a fierce mysterious fire that fills his eyes, right in front of our camera lens.

 

“When I put this armor on, my spirit is tightened and I am filled with extraordinary emotion that can’t be expressed. I feel like samurai again…the samurai power…yes…ready to fight…only the battle is different now.”[13]

 

The summer of 2011 was unbearably hot and humid with extreme temperatures that never dropped below the high thirties. One scorching day while helping cleanup debris in a community leveled by the tsunami, I saw a single blue iris sticking out of the concrete ruins.

 

At first I thought this was a cut flower that someone had bought at a store, and left it here in prayer. When I walked closer, I saw that it was growing rooted in the earth that used to be its garden.

 

This iris had lost its springtime on March 11th, but it had the will power to survive and create its own springtime in the middle of the hot summer. This one iris made me see beauty in a place where I was seeing none, and it inspired me to see the poetry for this film work.

 

Tohoku is full of contrasts that are powerful, poignant and very moving. The people have nothing to loose and everything to loose. Their affluent, comfortable lives have been reduced to bare necessities, and not by choice. Much of their lives now reflect their learned zen-like (Hannyashingyou[14]) simplicity and inner strength as they try to revive their lives and communities.

 

‘Tohoku no Shingetsu’ is a film composed of these recreated scenes, the Tohoku voices, the real characters, the location footage, stills and archival materials carefully layered together.

 

The three chapters of our film take place in three communities in three different prefectures[15] of Tohoku. Their issues, challenges, traditions, environment and stages of recovery vary depending on the locale, the level of destruction and the condition of the people. (more details on the locations on pages 9-10)

 

In Iwate and Miyagi prefectures, your hear people say, ‘We hit rock bottom when the earthquake and tsunami hit. Since then, we are working hard to move upwards.’ Whereas the Fukushima people say, ‘But in Fukushima, it is different.  We haven’t hit rock bottom yet, and worry about the things we can’t see and all the unknowns. You can’t see radiation.’

 

“Japan has much experience with radiation: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Daigo Fuyuryu Maru off the Bikini Islands. Japanese people got imprinted with the fear of radiation many times. Simply speaking, ‘Godzilla’ the monster from the sea was born from radiation. The fear of radiation and Godzilla are imprinted in our collective memory.”[16]

 

In 2012, Kenji san explained: “These fields have been abandoned for over one year and the weeds have taken over. The farmers who grew rice, food and flowers on this land were ordered to evacuate and abandon their homes.

People ask, ‘Why don’t you just leave here because of the high radiation? Why do people want to come back here again?’

Because…these fields represent their blood, sweat and tears. The people older than me were raised by the pioneers who cleared this land and made these fields. Their ancestors worked hard here, held them as babies here, and died and are buried here in the family ohaka[17]. People simply can’t throw this all away like garbage.

Sometimes they come back to check on their homes. If they see their fields full of weeds, it will hurt them and make them feel more sadness. But if they see flowers blooming instead, it might give them some hope to keep hanging on. I want to try and give them that power. So I began planting these sunflowers.”[18]

 

That summer, it was sunflowers to raise people’s hopes. The following year, others joined him and they started planting fields of canola and lavender. The University of Tohoku agricultural research department began to study his fields in Minamisoma (Odaka).

 

In December 2013, he says, “I felt I wanted to try and restore the fields.

You see…there are two lines, but they are really of the same spirit. When you give life back to these dying fields, then you are also giving life back to yourself. Here in Odaka, the canola has been proved to do the same thing.

The canola does not need much care after planting and it helps to remove cesium from the soil. You can take the oil from the seeds because there is no cesium in the seeds. In Japan, experts have already begun studying canola and their research data shows that canola reduces the contamination level.”[19]

 

The Minamisoma mayor and organic farmer says, ”My work is not the same as the normal citizen. Immediately after the disaster, I wasn’t thinking about the past. I had to think about how to meet the challenges of creating a new way of thinking for the victims, and motivate them to a new beginning.

One of the most important things in life is to keep a balance between your physical body and spiritual heart. Every morning when I wake up, I go jogging for 40 minutes. My bad feelings are released when I sweat. My mind and body are refreshed and become positive. In the beginning, I jogged to reflect on the people who lost their lives, but now it has turned around and I receive power from them to keep running.

We have to face the difficult challenges one at a time. If we fail, we have to try again and again. The nuclear plant accident and the tsunami have presented two big challenges here.

If you have to face some difficulties or disaster, you feel you are a victim. That feeling is strong. But a victim of who? By dwelling on the negative blaming too much, your energy gets sucked out and it is harder to move forward. We have to think, how can we make things even better than before and make Minamisoma an fine example of the ‘little place that could’.’”[20]

 

In February, 2014, Kenji san died near the condemned sunflower-canola fields in Minamisoma (Odaka) during a freak snowstorm that blanketed most of Japan that day.

 

A week before that, the local Mayor Sakurai was re-elected for another term in a landslide vote. Now Minamisoma has been the test site for several large-scale innovative solar energy and agricultural projects, which other towns and municipalities in Fukushima and Tohoku are following.

 

The lives of all these survivors represent the breadth of our human experience: the universal story of loss, death, and struggle…and of beauty, birth, change and renewal as human beings.

 

There are many important things and changes that can be realized from their tragedy and recovery. These are the valuable legacies left by the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident 3.11 disaster.

 

The extended time spent following life in Tohoku is the groundwork that helps create this film where an audience can share a full spectrum of these real characters’ emotions, and come to understand their lives more deeply…understand the things we cannot see, but feel. This is what I propose to create in ‘Tohoku no Shingetsu’, the feature length documentary film.

 

As director Kurosawa said of film characters in a good film, “When we see them happy, we’re happy, when we see them suffer, we suffer.”[21]

 

 

 

 

[1] shakuhachi: traditional Japanese bamboo flute

 

[2] translated from Japanese, poem by Nobuaki Ohashi, shakuhachi master from Sendai, Tohoku

 

[3] The ‘Tohoku’ region is located in the north-eastern part of the large island of Honshu in Japan, and includes the prefectures (provinces) of Fukushima, Iwate, and Miyagi.

 

[4] http://www.janic.org/en/earthquake/appeal/Fukushima_fact_sheet_122011.pdf

 

[5] oshogatsu: traditional Japanese New Year

 

[6] kagura: ancient spiritual ritual from Shinto roots often tied to agricultural calendar

 

[7] kiai: battle cry expressing the fighting spirit. Today used in taiko drumming and martial arts

 

[8] samurai: warriors of pre-modern Japan. The samurai trace their origins to the Heian Period (710-1185) campaigns to subdue the native Emishi in theTohoku region.

 

[9] sakura: Japanese cherry tree

 

[10] Torikomai: ancient spiritual kagura bird dance

 

[11] Interview with Chieko Shyouji, traditional dancer, Arahama, Miyagi prefecture

 

[12] gunshi: authentic through bloodline samurai leader

 

[13] from interview with M. Monma, 86 year old samurai head

 

[14] Hannyashingyo, the heart sutra, often chanted by the Japanese. It recognizes that ‘everything is nothing, and nothing is everything’.

 

[15] prefectures: provinces, also called kens in Japanese. There are 47 prefectures in Japan

 

[16] from interview with Kenji Yamashiro, Minamisoma, Fukushima

 

[17] ohaka: family ancestral gravesite

 

[18] from initial interview with Kenji Yamashiro, Minamisoma, Fukushima

 

[19] from final interview with Kenji Yamashiro, Minamisoma, Fukushima

 

[20] Interview with Mayor Sakurai, mayor and former organic farmer, Minamisoma, Fukushima

 

[21] Akira Kurosawa, ‘The Seven Samurai’ DVD, conversations with the director, Toho Studios, 1954