What animals, women, children, and foreigners can tell us about Fukushima

Abstract

ABSTRACTWith a death toll surpassing 18,000, the events of 3.11 stand as an unprecedented disaster in post-World War II Japan. Yet we have not actually witnessed people dying, in Japanese mass media, due to self-censorship practices within the industry. Animals, however, are another story. The media have used animals’ corpses as a stand-in for what is otherwise impossible to make visible. In this article, I will carefully listen to the animals who have been forced to become the apparatus by which human death and suffering is rendered visible, or to stand in for disadvantaged groups – including women, children and foreigners – who tend to be overlooked in society. By paying careful attention to these ‘silent’ groups, this article will shed light on the problems immanent to contemporary Japanese mass media and society, as well as the counter-discourses – specifically documentary films – which have responded to this media landscape. The focus will be on three documentaries: Fukushima: Record of Living Things series (2013–2017), by Iwasaki Masanori, Little Voices from Fukushima (2015), by Kamanaka Hitomi, and A2-B-C (2013), by Ian Thomas Ash, an American filmmaker living in Tokyo. I will investigate the discriminatory post-nuclear disaster system governing discussion of Fukushima and the many ways it suppresses unprivileged voices such as the ones in these documentaries.