Three Ways of Looking at a Disaster

[rug]

A scene from 'Nuclear Nation,' about evacuees waiting to return home.

FEBRUARY 17, 2012
By MARY M. LANE

Less than a year after the Fukushima tsunami and subsequent nuclear meltdown, three documentaries on the subject are screening at the Berlin Film Festival. Together, they have emerged as some of the festival's most talked-about works.

All three films convey frustration with the Japanese government's response to the disaster while exploring different facets of the aftermath. For his film "Nuclear Nation," director Atsushi Funahashi collected 300 hours of footage from April through December at an abandoned high school in Kisai, where the Japanese government housed 1,400 evacuees from the town of Futaba, home to part of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Five hundred of the evacuees are still living in the cramped classrooms, sleeping on mattresses among piles of their belongings.

"I wanted to depict this waiting time that you easily neglect," Mr. Funahashi said in an interview.

Viewers watch several families in progressive stages of confusion, mourning and boredom, eating the same boxed lunches each day, trying to find employment and waiting with a mixture of anticipation and dread to return to Futaba. Katsutaka Idogawa, the town's mayor, grapples with the problem of running a town that no longer exists. The film should be released in the U.S. this year.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204792404577224452756961224.html

[Art_from_Ark]

1. I am surprised the refugees are still living in such a shelter

Tens of thousands of Fukushima refugees have moved to other parts of Japan, while thousands more have relocated elsewhere in Fukushima Prefecture. My own area is accommodating at least 1500 refugees from Fukushima. I wonder if they are staying put because they want to be close to their old homes? Even so, pre-fab, private housing has been built for refugees in other areas hit by the disasters...