Nearly a quarter of those who died of illness or stress linked to the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in the hardest-hit prefectures were people with disabilities, a Kyodo News survey released Sunday showed.
Disabled people accounted for 24.6 percent of total “disaster-related deaths” in Fukushima, Iwate and Miyagi prefectures, far above their 7 percent representation among the population as a whole as estimated by the health ministry.
It is also much higher than the around 14 percent who were aged over 65, many of whom died after the disaster on March 11, 2011, because of deteriorating health and living conditions in shelters and other evacuation facilities.
The survey, which targeted 42 municipalities in the prefectures affected by the quake, tsunami and ensuing nuclear crisis, was carried out ahead of the ninth anniversary of the disaster.
The number of people who died of indirectly related causes totaled 1,500 in the 32 municipalities that responded to the survey.
Of the total, 370 were people with disabilities, of whom 352 had a physical disability.
“Some couldn’t go to crowded evacuation centers and lived in physically challenging conditions, inside large vehicles or on the second floor of inundated houses, for example,” said Kazuhiko Abe, a Tohoku Fukushi University professor.
“Temporary housing was highly stressful, too,” Abe said, noting that many such facilities were not designed to accommodate people with physical disabilities.
The survey showed the lasting impact of the ordeal on such communities.
“We need to set up a framework so that disabled people won’t be left without assistance,” the professor said.
As of Sept. 30 last year, there had been 3,739 deaths in total across the country caused by stress or illness that was worsened due to the disaster, according to the Reconstruction Agency. About 60 percent of them were reported in Fukushima Prefecture, which was at the center of the nuclear crisis.
Today in my Documenting Japan class the students are starting their Two-Frame Photo Story Presentations. The assignment was inspired by my participation in a visual literacy workshop run by John Condon and Miguel Gandert at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication Workshop in 2009 and the film Life Through a Lens about photographer Annie Liebovitz. The experimentation of experience with photography combining image and text remains important and relevant. See announcement below:
Writing with Light is an initiative to bolster the place of the photo-essay—and, by extension, formal experimentation—within international anthropological scholarship. As a collaboration between two journals published by the American Anthropological Association (AAA), Cultural Anthropology and Visual Anthropology Review, Writing with Light is led by a curatorial collective that aims to address urgent and important concerns about the sustained prominence of multimodal scholarship. Anthropological projects based in video, installation, performance, etc. take as a given that multimodality changes what anthropologists can and should see as productive knowledge. Such projects compel anthropologists to begin rethinking our intellectual endeavors through an engagement with various media, addressing the particular affordances and insights that each new form of scholarship offers. How, for example, does photography produce different types of knowledge than text and/or film? What criteria might we need to interrogate and evaluate each of these forms of multimodal scholarship? As part of a broader set of questions about the relationship between forms of scholarly work and knowledge production, we explore the ongoing relevance of the photo-essay.
The Writing with Light collective focuses on the photo-essay in the belief that multimodal (or visual) forms are not a singular paradigm and that a consideration of a singular research form might help us to rethink a broader array of anthropological questions. How does the photo-essay configure our engagement through its unique form of mediation and composition? We believe that the photo-essay provides a critical opportunity for reevaluating the word–image relationship. Conventionally known for its narrative qualities, the photo-essay is especially useful in reconsidering the relationship between words and images in photographic storytelling, as well as efforts to generate innovative anthropological knowledge with the capacity to go beyond storytelling. For example, we are especially interested in the photo-essay’s potential to generate insights focused on issues of mediation and representation, as well as methodological questions with the potential to shift how anthropologists conceive of the discipline itself.
This initiative is unique in that it draws on Cultural Anthropology’s wider view of emerging trends in anthropology, while foregrounding the particular concerns of Visual Anthropology Review as far as theorizing and critiquing practice-based modes of ethnographic scholarship. By relaunching the existing Cultural Anthropology Photo Essays section as a collaboration with Visual Anthropology Review, the initiative aims to open new spaces for interaction between sections of the AAA and corners of the discipline. By merging the literary and epistemological critiques of an earlier generation with the formal and aesthetic critiques driving visual anthropology today, we draw on the etymology of the word photograph for inspiration: thus, writing with light.
For more information: https://culanth.org/photo_essays
I am cheating on my own two-frame story today by borrowing two photos from Japan Today both published today to examine and ponder current housing conditions in Japan.
I am not suggesting that these housing types are representative of Japan by any means. But it is mighty sad and one wonders about the priorities of the Japanese government as it increases its military budget and pledges aid for developing countries (aid = business opportunities). What about the people in Japan that need assistance? These are urgent and important concerns that need exploring...
Documentary filmmaker Yoshitaka Nitta has made a movie based on a question he has asked himself since the nuclear meltdown at Tokyo Electric Power’s Fukushima Daiichi plant in March 2011.
The question is “Why does Japan insist on reactivating nuclear power plants despite the worst nuclear accident in its history?”
In the movie titled “Atom and Peace—Ruiko, Nagasaki Prayer,” Ruiko Matsunaga, a 24-year-old elementary school teacher in the city of Nagasaki in southwestern Japan, travels from Aomori to Fukushima Prefecture in northeastern Japan and then back to Nagasaki, visiting places where there is “peaceful use of nuclear energy.”
She hopes to find answers to how the Fukushima Daiichi accident occurred and why Japan, as the world’s only atomic-bombed country, is still eager to continue nuclear power generation.
Matsunaga, whose grandmother is a survivor of the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, “was the only person” who could play the leading role in the movie, said Nitta.
Through her trip, Matsunaga learns that Japan has plenty of plutonium, a radioactive chemical element used to produce the “Fat Man” atomic bomb detonated over Nagasaki.
Nitta, 46, joined public broadcaster NHK in 1992 after graduating from Keio University and was involved in the production of documentary films covering the Middle East and Asia.
He became an independent documentary film director in 2009 and released his first production “Utae Machiguwa” in 2012, showing the struggles of people in the Sakaemachi Market area in Naha, Okinawa Prefecture, to revive local economic activities through music.
Okinawa is the foundation of his activities as a freelance film director because people there have “accepted me like a family member,” Nitta said.
“Things unacceptable in Tokyo, such as U.S. military bases and nuclear power plants in Fukushima, are put to the poorest and weakest places,” Nitta said.
Nitta continues to visit Okinawa and plans to produce a film about Mabuni Hill, now the site of a peace park, where the fiercely fought Battle Okinawa in World War II finally came to an end when the Japanese commander committed suicide.
Image and text borrowed from Japan Focus (see full citation below).
Caption reads: Taishō 12.9.1 Actual Conditions of the Great Tokyo Earthquake: Twelve Stories.
Disaster is an ever-present, and ever-timely, issue both in Japan and around the world. The triple disaster of 3.11 and its extensive media coverage are a vivid reminder not only of disaster’s critical and catalytic role in history, but the dynamic agency of images in mediating our experiences of natural or man-made events to produce that history. The 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, which devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures, was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Having marked the 91th anniversary of the quake on September 1st, we have an opportunity to learn anew from the media scale of this catastrophe, how different media produce modes of seeing, understanding, and, eventually, remembering. Only by analyzing contending visual responses within disaster communities and how they are codified into collective memory to form a national narrative can we ultimately understand how major events like the Great Kantō Earthquake—or 3.11—become history.
Disaster is an ever-present, and ever-timely, issue both in Japan and around the world. The triple disaster of 3.11 and its extensive media coverage are a vivid reminder not only of disaster’s critical and catalytic role in history, but the dynamic agency of images in mediating our experiences of natural or man-made events to produce that history. The 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, which devastated the major cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, as well as five other surrounding prefectures, was one of the world’s worst natural disasters of the early twentieth century. In terms of loss of life and material damage, with an estimated 140,000 deaths and countless homeless, it is still Japan’s worst national disaster. Having marked the 91th anniversary of the quake on September 1st, we have an opportunity to learn anew from the media scale of this catastrophe, how different media produce modes of seeing, understanding, and, eventually, remembering. Only by analyzing contending visual responses within disaster communities and how they are codified into collective memory to form a national narrative can we ultimately understand how major events like the Great Kantō Earthquake—or 3.11—become history.
Read and see more at the source: "On Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923", The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 6, No. 2, February 9, 2015. http://japanfocus.org/-Gennifer-Weisenfeld/4270
The Digital Archive of Japan's 2011 Disasters has launched a new front page, along with new content and features that enhance the
usefulness and accessibility of the archive.
The front page now includes:
Links to an overview of the archive, a list of partner organizations, and navigational help, available in both English and Japanese.
A stream of recently uploaded "Collections," or user-curated exhibitions of archived items.
New content includes:
A "Translate" button that allows users to add their own translations of item descriptions, in any preferred language.
Images and full-text news articles from the Asahi Newspaper Company’s English-language “Asia & Japan Watch” website.
Japanese headlines from a variety of other news sources such as the Jiji Press and the Mainichi, Yomiuri, and Sankei newspapers.
Japanese news broadcast videos from NHK.
New website content updated almost daily.
In addition, two upcoming features will be available in the early fall:
A bookmarklet that can be dragged to the browser toolbar to add content to the archive from any web page.
A presentation editor that will allow users to build interactive multimedia presentations out of materials in the archive.
We hope these updates enhance the content, design, and interactivity of the JDA. If you have any feedback or examples of how you have used the archive,
please feel free to contact us.
The Digital Archive of Japan's 2011 Disasters project is an initiative of the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University in collaboration with several partners. We aim to collect, preserve, and make accessible as much of the digital record of the disasters as possible, to enable scholarly research and analysis of the events and their effect.
3.11 continues to influence and impact Japanese society and culture. This semester in Contemporary Japanese Culture and Globalization class we spent a whole week (two class sessions) on the subject. The complexity of the subject can be illustrated by the sheer amount of research and articles dealing with the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster. Here are a list of sources that we were only able to scratch the surface of:
In the first class sessions students presented a timeline of the 3.11 events and discussed details of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster from the sources above. One student talked about his friend's experiences during the disasters and another student talked about his volunteer activities in the Tohoku.
The first class session covered a lot of information and set the scene for the second class session featuring a guest lecture from my former student, Ryoko Higashi, who experienced 3.11 in Ibaraki prefecture. Ms. Higashi talked about the earthquake itself and the damage it caused to her work place and home. She talked about her lack of food and water and her eventual evacuation from the area. This was the first time we had an actual 3.11 survivor speak in class and Ms. Higashi's presentation provided a whole new perspective on the subject and was very much appreciated by all. Today for the first time we were able to move beyond questions of how and why to what we can learn from the experiences and how we can live our lives to the fullest from now on. Many thanks to Ms. Higashi and all of my students.
Nobuko Kikuchi, a 72-year-old resident of Iwanuma, Miyagi
Prefecture, couldn’t hear the emergency sirens that followed the
9.0-magnitude earthquake that struck on March 11, 2011.
Nor could she hear the public announcement urging people to evacuate
to higher ground as a massive tsunami approached the coast of
northeastern Japan’s Tohoku region.
Kikuchi is deaf. She owes her life to a neighbor who came to alert
her. Kikuchi narrowly escaped the monster wave, which uprooted and
washed away her house.
In another part of the city, a deaf couple who ran a beauty salon
survived — though nobody came knocking on their door. After the quake,
they smelled a “strange odor” and ran up to the second floor of their
house. But after the tsunami swept through their house, destroying all
the equipment in their salon on the first floor, the couple spent a
lonely night alone. They had no information about the scale of the
disaster or where they could go to get help.
Such horrific experiences of the Great East Japan Earthquake fill
“3.11 Without Sound — There Were Deaf People in the Disaster Area, Too,”
a 23-minute documentary recently released by deaf filmmaker Ayako
Imamura.
Nagoya-based Imamura, 33, has made seven visits to Miyagi, Fukushima
and Iwate prefectures since the disaster, meeting and interviewing
victims there.
Her film is a bitter reminder of how people with disabilities are
neglected during disasters and denied access to the kind of information
that can literally mean the difference between life and death.
Statistics on the number of deaf and hearing-impaired people affected
by the disaster are hard to come by. The Health, Labor and Welfare
Ministry, which has a department serving people with disabilities, will
only say that as of May 2011, 14 deaf and hard-of-hearing people in
Miyagi Prefecture were killed by the tsunami/quake. A total of 736
others were confirmed to have survived.
The ministry has no data for
such casualties in Iwate and Fukushima prefectures.
In the film, Imamura cites a report by public broadcaster NHK that
puts the number of fatalities among deaf and hard-of-hearing people in
the three prefectures at 75.
Imamura, who has shot numerous documentaries on Japan’s deaf
community, met and interviewed several deaf and hearing-impaired people
in Tohoku, including Kikuchi, who the film focuses on.
In an interview filmed in an evacuation shelter one month after the
disaster, Kikuchi breaks down as she explains she can’t hear any of the
announcements on food rationing and other assistance — no one has
thought to take her special needs into consideration.
She and her husband, Tokichi (who is also deaf), had no other way of
keeping track of new developments than by watching hearing evacuees.
“If they see other people lining up, they would follow suit, assuming
some aid item would be handed out,” Imamura says in the film. “It’s a
huge form of stress for her, and she has no time to relax all day.”
Kikuchi regains some semblance of normalcy over time. She looks much
better in August 2011, when Imamura visits her at an apartment-style
temporary housing facility, into which the couple moved that May. Nicely
coiffed and made-up, Kikuchi smiles as she teaches her granddaughter
how to make key chains with colorful plastic beads. The temporary
dwelling has the basic necessities — a TV set, air-conditioning and a
yellow light to let the couple know when they have visitors. But then a
hearing film crew member notices that a fishmonger has just passed —
without bothering to tell the Kikuchis.
Imamura visits her again on Dec. 25, 2011. Kikuchi looks pleasantly
surprised, showing off many donated sweaters that she was given at a
Christmas charity event. But her expression clouds again — conveying to
the filmmaker through sign language her feelings of insecurity about her
future. Kikuchi says she doesn’t know how much longer the situation
will continue. She tells Imamura she is alone now, because Tokichi was
hospitalized the previous month.
Now that she’s finished the movie, which is subtitled in English,
Korean and Portuguese, Imamura says everyone living in Japan should have
equal access to vital information, regardless of disability or
nationality. Tsunami warnings should be sent to all mobile phone users,
she says, using handsets’ vibration setting to send emergency alerts to
both deaf and blind people. Imamura says all public announcements should
be made in simple Japanese and in various languages.
“There are many people in society — hearing people, hard-of-hearing
people, blind people, people in wheelchairs and foreigners,” Imamura
says in an email. “The message I want to get across in all of my films
is that a society where all these people are able to live the life they
want to live is a very rich one.”
It wasn’t just the earthquake or tsunami of March 11, 2011 that
shattered the town of Namie in Fukushima Prefecture; it was the
subsequent radiation. Slowly creeping across the once fertile land, it
ripped families from their homes and banished them to evacuation centers
elsewhere. Today, nearly two years after the worse nuclear disaster
since Chernobyl, the entire 86 square miles of Namie have been declared
uninhabitable due to high levels of radioactive cesium. Even if families
wanted to return, they can’t.
Amid this tragic loss, Google Street View is giving the people of Namie a chance to visit the town they were forced to flee.
The Street View project was requested by Tamotsu Baba, the mayor of
Namie town. Baba explains in the video below, “By photographing the town
and making those photographs publicly available, we can show the
townspeople the condition of the streets. In addition, I want to show
the world the true state of Namie.”
Photographing will take several weeks and Google hopes to make the
images available to the public in the coming months. It seems that
Namie, formerly described as “the forgotten town” in popular Japanese
magazine, Bungei ShunjuI, will no longer be forgotten thanks to the
efforts of Google and Mayor Baba.
Date: Wednesday, November 28th, at 18:30 Place: University of Tokyo, Collaboration Room 3 (4F), Building 18, Komaba Campus. Film Length: 96 minutes. Subtitles: English. Trailer Language: English | No registration required Director: Funahashi Atsushi, Documentary Japan
Discussant: Sato Yoshiaki
Description
While the Japanese government announced that the Tohoku nuclear crisis
has been "stabilized" in November of 2011, the 20 km no-entry zone
around the leaking plant in Fukushima remains in effect. Today, over a
year after the disaster, there are as yet no plans for the thousands of
evacuated residents to return home.
Director Funahashi Atsushi's film Nuclear Nation tells the
story of Futaba, a small town inside the Fukushima no-entry zone.
Located just 4 km from the nuclear plant, Futaba was evacuated in the
early days of the crisis, as the plant operator struggled to bring the
triple meltdown under control. Over 1,400 residents were relocated to an
unused high school in Saitama, where they faced an unknown future.
Nuclear Nation patiently explores the lives of the town's
refugees, in their search for both justice and a way forward. Through
extensive interviews with former residents and local officials, the film
gives a history of the invisible nuclear economy in Japan that is both
lucid and highly revealing.
In the tradition of the best of Japanese documentary cinema,
Funahashi has gone to extraordinary lengths to depict the situation of
the Fukushima refugees, to communicate their voices, and to interrogate
the promises and contradictions of the government's energy policy at the
level of everyday life.
We are pleased invite you to join us for this special screening, to be followed by a discussion and Q & A with the director.
Funahashi Atsushi is an independent filmmaker working in both dramatic and documentary modes. His first films — Echoes (2001) and Big River (2006) — were produced while Funahashi lived in the United States. After returning to Japan in 2007, he has directed Deep in the Valley (2009), Nuclear Nation (2012), and Cold Bloom (2012). Funahashi's work has received wide critical attention and screenings at numerous international film festivals.
Prof. Sato Yoshiaki has taught American Literature
and Popular Music in the Department of Culture and Representation at the
University of Tokyo, Komaba. His publications include The Evolution of J-POP (1999) and What Was the Beatles? (2006). A distinguished translator, Prof. Sato has translated Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature and Steps to an Ecology of Mind into Japanese. At present, he is translating the completed novels of Thomas Pynchon.
We had our 3/11 class last week and here I want to give a report of what we did. Four students offered presentations and had different topics within the very broad theme of the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear accident disasters. I began the class with a brief overview of the disaster – the usual facts and statistics. I then recalled my own surreal experience of feeling the quake, seeing the tsunami on live TV but not really being directly affected in Osaka. Other students who were here on 3/11 gave similar accounts. The disaster was far away and didn’t really impact our lives at the moment other than people recalling their experiences with the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake and empathizing with the people of Tohoku.
MS gave his presentation on the media portrayal of the disasters in Japan and abroad. He had examples of perpetuations of Japanese stereotypes and reporting errors that made it difficult for viewers to have an understanding of the actual situation at the sites of the disasters and in other areas of Japan. The effect here at our university was exchange students being forced to leave Japan whether they wanted to or not.
We then turned to the Fukushima nuclear situation with a discussion of the Murakami speech questioning how Japan became so dependent on nuclear energy resulting in the current crisis, which he referred to as “our second massive nuclear disaster.”
JM, a former member of the U.S. Navy who worked for 4 years on a nuclear powered submarine, was able to explain how the nuclear power plant works and questioned the extreme and scientifically unfounded concerns of the dangers of Fukushima. For him, the Nuclear Boy anime could not be more true.
JR gave an overview of the tsunami-affected area at the time of the disaster and how things have changed/improved in the last 7 months. DB discussed the disaster in terms of globalization – how a local area of 561 square kilometers resulted in the support and assistance of individuals, corporations and countries from all over the world.
I presented a sampling of the news from the previous 3 days: stories of nuclear decontamination, changing elections methods in Fukushima, donations for reconstruction, searching for missing victims, volunteer efforts in the affected areas, cesium detection on food, tsunami safety drills, protests of nuclear energy... The majority of Prime Minister Noda’s policy speech dealt with 3/11. So it seems as time goes on, the effect of 3/11 resonate all over Japan as well as abroad.
I was extremely happy with the presentations and the discussions they generated. What was missing, I feel, were personal and ethnographic accounts of victims and eye-witnesses. We were able to read about such experiences but to actually hear from people who were directly affected would have added so much more. We did what we could with our distanced experiences. 3/11 is a major influence in the changing Japanese society and culture. I congratulate my students for their desire to study this subject and their efforts to make sense of the disasters and the repercussions that follow.
Next week in the Globalization and Contemporary Issues course we will devote an entire class period to the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster of 3/11. That is not to say we have not been discussing the topic yet. 3/11 has impacted almost every subject we have taken up. Even the topic of Japanese baseball we covered today (the season was postponed - out of necessity and respect - and eventually modified - more day games to save power).
How will we try to take on 3/11 in the classroom? This is the concern of many teachers and anthropologists. David Slater at Sophia University has been active in organizing a workshop in Tokyo or Sendai next summer tentatively titled "Teaching the Crisis: Materials, Pedagogy and Research for 3.11." Announcements for this have been posted on many Japan-related listservs.
There is also a blog set up to assist in teaching 3/11 materials. From its own description:
Teach 3.11 is a participatory resource to help teachers and scholars locate and share educational resources about the historical contexts of scientific and technical issues related to the triple earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters in Japan.
There is also the massive Harvard's Japan Disaster Archive. Its own description:
The Digital Archive of Japan's 2011 Disasters project is an initiative of the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University in collaboration with several partners. We aim to collect, preserve, and make accessible as much of the digital record of the disasters as possible, to enable scholarly research and analysis of the events and their effect. We hope that the records preserved will be useful both in the near term as a source of direct information about the disasters, as well as long into the future as scholars seek to understand the events of March 11, 2011 and their impact on Japan and on the world.
This post is a haphazard attempt to organize some of the material on 3/11. In doing so I find myself keep adding more and more. I fear I have lost any sense of structure. So I am going to stop with what I have now (even at the expense of mentioning the increase in sign language interpretation and news sources for the deaf as a result of 3/11 - remember seeing the sign language interpreter at the early press conferences? I'll save this for a future post...)
Here are sources that include photos, videos, first hand accounts, blogs, articles, etc. Please feel free to add more sources and/or comments/advice about the upcoming class session.
Japan Focus' Guide to Resources on Japan’s 3.11 Earthquake, Tsunami, Atomic Meltdown
Japan Focus has several articles on the 3/11 conveniently organized at the following link.
Here's an update as to how things have progresses in the last 6 months from The Frame at The Sacramento Bee.
This combo image, the initial destruction and progress of cleanup after the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami is seen in Higashimatsushima, Miyagi Prefecture, in northeast Japan. The top photo, taken March 14, 2011, shows Japan Self-Defense Force personnel search for victims near stranded fishing boats and damage from the tsunami. The middle photo, taken June 3, 2011, shows a temporary dump set up in the same area, while the bottom photo taken Sept. 1, 2011 shows a stranded ship still sits in the area after the debris were removed. AP / Kyodo News
Colin Tyner's blog posts on The Great East Japan Disaster
[The posts] exhibit my series of posts on the Great East Japan Disaster (Higashi Nihon Daishinsai). I pasted together as one electronic document. All of the links to the articles and pictures appear as on the day that I wrote the piece.
A Japanese tsunami survivor stands in front of messages displayed on the wall of a relief center in Rikuzentakata, in Iwate prefecture on March 22. The twin quake and tsunami disaster, Japan's worst crisis since World War II, has now left at least 9,079 people dead and 12,645 missing, with entire communities along the northeast coast swept away.
Associated Press photographer David Guttenfelder lives in Japan and was able to capture some great shots to document the 311 disaster and after effects.
Japan Quake Shakes TV: The Media Response to Catastrophe
By Philip J Cunningham at Japan Focus: A discussion and description of the Japanese media coverage of the earthquake. Includes several interesting YouTube clips.
Bringing Photography Into Life-- After 311 Japan Quake
Documentary: 311
Announcement from H-Japan:
311, Directed by Mori Tatsuya, Watai Takeharu, Matsubayashi Yojuu, and
Yasuoka Takaharu, 2011 / Japan / HD / 94 Minutes
311 is one of the first documentaries completed about the March 2011
disaster in Japan and focuses not just on the destruction and human toll,
but also, in a self-reflexive fashion, on the fundamental problems of
media attempting to report on such suffering.
See more information in the flyer below (click to expand):
It seems we have more than enough to get started. I am looking forward with great anticipation to our class and how we will organize and discuss 3/11. Again, I beg for comments and advice.
Image and text borrowed from Japan Today Picture of the Day (10 October 2011). Caption reads: "This photo, released on Saturday by Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), shows the damaged No. 3 reactor building at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture. Officials said Sunday the plant is now relatively stable."
Sometimes a picture says more than it was intended to...
Posters that feature devastated residents of Kamaishi and Otsuchicho in Iwate Prefecture and carry messages of hope, inspiration and determination to recover have attracted people's attention.
The posters, produced by a 32-year-old advertising company employee in Morioka and others, have drawn reaction from overseas after they were introduced via the Internet.
On a visit to Kamaishi at the end of March, the 32-year-old man was moved by his encounters with people who had not abandoned their hope for the future even after losing everything. He decided to start the "'A Beacon of Rebirth' Poster Project" to inform people in other parts of Iwate Prefecture of their positive attitudes.
He asked his cameraman friend to take photos of the devastated people in Kamaishi and Otsuchicho against a background of debris. Based on interviews with the victims of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the man and his company colleague came up with slogans and included messages from victims to accompany the photos.
At first, the posters were displayed only at izakaya pubs and other locations in the prefecture. However, when the friend publicized the project on his Twitter account, messages from Internet users flooded in, including many from those who said they were moved by the project.
The man and his friend started a Web site at once and began to sell posters featuring the people of Kamaishi in sets of 13 at a price of 3,675 yen. They received more than 500 orders for the B-3 size posters by e-mail not only from within Japan, but also from overseas, including China and the United States.
The pair have also decided to translate the messages into English by August and sell the posters overseas. All of the profits will be donated to disaster relief funds.
Takeichi Kimigahora, 33, who works for a marine products company in Kamaishi and aims to revive scallop fishing in the coastal Sanriku district in the prefecture, appears in a poster with his message of hope: "Don't give up! My scallops call out to me."
Kimigahora said, "I want to promote scallops in Sanriku for people I knew in the fishing industry who were killed in the disaster."
The message carried with a photo of Ryoichi Sasaki, 44, who clears rubble for a building maintenance company in Kamaishi, says, "Making memories, even out of mud and dust."
"All I wanna do is play ball, please...god." This message comes from Yuta Furusaki, 14, a third-year student at Kamaishi Higashi Middle School. He lost his baseball glove in the tsunami, then later received one as a donation. "My school was destroyed, but I'm glad if my message conveyed to people overseas how much I enjoy playing baseball," he said.
It has been fascinating/disturbing to follow the media coverage of the 3.11 events in Japan. Here are some suggestions for related interesting resources to check out.
MSNBC's Photoblog: High quality images of the disasters and the outcomes. Includes some panoramic shots. Continually being updated.
Japan Quake Shakes TV: The Media Response to Catastrophe by Philip J Cunningham at Japan Focus: A discussion and description of the Japanese media coverage of the earthquake. Includes several interesting YouTube clips.
JPQuake: Journalist Wall of Shame: Lots of examples of how the foreign/western media has provided "sensationalist, overly speculative, and just plain bad reporting" of the events.
Here is an attempt to record and archive many reports from anthropologists and academics on various listservs. This announcement appeared on H-Japan:
The Reischauer Institute is part of a growing effort to record and archive the communications after, and responses to, the disaster. We are working quickly to set up a data archiving project that will capture and store the numerous forms of electronic communication that occurred in the immediate aftermath as well as the longer term.
As a first step to archiving social media and other possibly ephemeral documents, we have established the email address "_daishinsai-archive@fas.harvard.edu_" which will collect relevant email correspondence (such as reports circulated by people in affected areas of Japan), web links, videos, or digital images. If you would like contribute materials to this archive, please email them to _daishinsai-archive@fas.harvard.edu_, and include as much contextual information as possible (e.g., who created the record, when, where, and so forth).
Due to the high volume of submissions, we cannot respond to these contributions individually.
We will be working to make as much of this information available to the scholarly community, for immediate and longer-term analysis of the disasters and their aftermaths.
As soon as possible, we will be distributing more information about the archiving efforts on which we are embarking. If you know of any other similar efforts, please let us know so that we can coordinate with other organizations, rather than duplicate efforts.
Please feel free to suggest more resources on these topics via comments to this post.
P.S. As of Friday, 121 international exchange students have left my university to return home, either permanently withdrawing or as a temporary evacuation. However, we remain fine in the Kansai area...
Sometimes it’s a fast-moving ooze: A street becomes a stream, grows into a river and then a raging mountain of moving debris. Sometimes, it’s a wet curtain of water crashing over a shoreline, tossing trees, ships and cars casually aside as a child would a stack of Legos.
Until a week ago, a tsunami was one of the most mysterious of natural events, its devastating power usually evident only in the aftermath. Yet from the first moments the earth started to shudder on March 11, Japan’s tsunami was one of the most recorded disasters ever to be captured on film, lending a visual power to story-telling unmatched since the Sept 11 terrorist attacks almost a decade ago.
Quake footage was available almost instantly: Office workers running outside as building chunks slam to the ground; skyscrapers swaying like evergreens in a windstorm; pictures falling off walls; store stock spilling to the floor. One man kept recording as his living room seemed to fall apart around him. His camera caught his shaky steps as he finally rushed outside.
But as dramatic as the earthquake images were, the tsunami video — some of it live — was breathtaking. A handful of tourists captured the Indonesian tsunami in 2004, but there was much less variety and inferior film quality. Technology — particularly cell-phone cameras — was not what it has become today.
Japan, too, is unique — a nation that not only produces electronics but also focuses on technology, camera phones, handheld video and digital cameras. And it may also be the most well-wired country for recording such disasters. With its geologic history, seismic monitors and robotic cameras are mounted throughout the archipelago.
News crews quickly took to the streets and skies after the earthquake, leaving them well-positioned to capture the tsunami.
At times, they were too well-positioned: A video that surfaced late last week showed a local news crew abandoning a car with the tsunami approaching and rushing into a building as water began swirling around their feet.
What, though, do these images do? Do they change how we perceive the event? Do more higher-quality images of catastrophe make it seem more real or more movielike? Will we remember the 2011 Japan tsunami differently than its calamitous predecessors because we saw so much of it so quickly?
In the days that followed the earthquake, CNN producers constantly monitored social media sites to find newly posted material, and dozens of Japanese citizens sent footage directly to CNN, said Parisa Khosravi, senior vice president for CNN news-gathering worldwide.
“In this case, it certainly captured images that no one expected to see,” she said. The story gave CNN its best ratings since President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, the Nielsen Co. said.
Viewers couldn’t get enough — even those who were personally touched by it.
“I tried, but couldn’t stop watching,” said Maisararam from Banda Aceh, Indonesia, who lost her husband and three daughters in Indonesia’s 2004 tsunami. “It was exactly the same, except they have this horrible footage, events unfolding right before your eyes.”
One particularly arresting video showed water and debris rapidly rising as a group of people struggled to make it up a path to higher ground; CNN stopped rolling the shot — the fate of the crew unknown. In another instance, men who had raced to the top of a parking garage kept recording the tsunami even as one openly wondered whether he would survive or not.
The wealth of visual material stood in contrast to events at the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex where six reactor units have had fires, explosions or partial meltdowns. As the water receded and attention turned to the crippled nuclear plant, the story became one of those events that television is poorly equipped to tell.
Images are elusive. Except for a handful of aerial shots, the drama at the plant has largely been seen in fuzzy video taken from many miles away. Occasionally, water is dumped on damaged nuclear reactors from the air, yet it’s so difficult to see that it must be highlighted by editors in the pictures.
Evacuation zones have also led American TV networks to pull many of their teams out of the immediate area for safety reasons over radiation poisoning.
But no one knows what is really happening at the plant, or what will happen, and how much radiation is being exposed to how many people. That leads to less-than-illuminating reports, such as Lester Holt revealing on the “Today” show that his shoes tested positive for radiation.
Other than lost footwear, what did the incident really teach us?
Television frequently returned to old-fashioned and visually dull habits out of necessity, bringing a succession of experts before cameras to report the nuclear threat.
The uncertain aspects of the story quickly led to on-air debates over whether television was “hyping” the nuclear danger. NBC’s “Nightly News” pointed a finger at the media in a report that minimized any danger to the United States. Fox News Channel’s Shepard Smith labeled “sad and pathetic” Americans who bought anti-radiation pills in large numbers.
Yet his own network showed this headline Friday: “Growing Concern Over Radiation Plume Drifting Over Western United States.”
But radiation is not a television event; it is, for the most part, something you cannot see — ambiguous, invisible, diffuse.
There was nothing ambiguous about the tsunami footage. In an era of unremitting visuals, it was imagery like none other — another example, in a time of technological change, of how we can watch the world unfold, even in its saddest, most frightening moments.
