Local Stories, Global Catastrophe: Reconstructing Nation, Asian Cinema, and Asian Eco-consciousness in Japan's 3.11 Films

Abstract

In Asia, as well as other parts of the world, there is a growing trend to tell the inconvenient truth cinematically. From documentaries The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom (Lucy Walker, 2011) and Japan in a Day (Phillip Martin and Gaku Narita, 2011), Sono Sion’s melodrama The Land of Hope (2012), to the short film collection 3.11 A Sense of Home (Naomi Kawase, Jia Zhangke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and others, 2012), this paper focuses on films that confront the powerful Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 and reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, to explore the local incident’s global impacts as represented. Drawing from J Hillis Miller’s notion of “topography,” Heidegger’s “dwelling” and concepts in place attachment, this study examines the manifestation of disaster and space as represented in contemporary Asian films. With specific generic conventions, documentaries such as The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom and Japan in a Day marginalize the eventfulness of history visually through accumulation of the towns’ quotidian moments. The marginalized space of Fukushima serves as resistant spaces against the grand narratives of social progress. The discussion highlights the way ecocritical films question the rationality beneath the modern imagination of Asian capitalist cities by re-presenting the ghostly space and the silence in/of Fukushima. Soon after a happy rural family in a peaceful little town is introduced in Sono Sion’s The Land of Hope, the family, social orders, as well as Ozu Yasujiro’s classical aesthetics in the film, are completely destroyed and subverted by the natural catastrophe. This paper juxtaposes representations of global ecological crisis and the fundamental crisis in contemporary cinema (e.g. disappearing national cinema and classical film aesthetics since Ozu’s time; and social media’s domination over classic film forms), and examines the extent in which “Asian eco-consciousness” can be conceptualized with ecocritical film language and conventions in cinema today. How do personal narratives in documentaries, manipulation of time in slow cinema, long takes, static shots, and specific use of sound, music and silence in Asian cinema today, facilitate depictions of global ecological issues? How does Asian ecocinema differ from its Western counterparts, as conceptualized by Scott Macdonalds, Adrian Ivakhiv and others? From the multiple perspectives and voices these films offer, we are led to ponder: Living in the end times, is there still hope to reconstruct the nation/country from rubbles? And, at the same time, to reconstruct (and reconceptualize) Asian Cinema with classical values?