FILM: Ashes to Honey (2010)

Kamanaka, Hitomi. 2010. Ashes to Honey. Group Gendai.

“What is the best course of development for humankind?” director Hitomi Kamanaka asks in her 2010 film, Ashes to Honey. This documentary builds an argument for the necessity of a sustainable future by portraying a local struggle to preserve fishing and farming on the small island of Iwaishima, on the Pacific side of southwestern Japan, against a nuclear power plant proposed to be built across the bay. Filmed over the course of three years, Kamanaka and her crew gradually gained the trust of the islanders as a voice to adequately represent their concerns to a larger audience. Although completed before the Fukushima disaster, this film helps further historical understandings of ongoing debates related to nuclear power that have swept Japan and much of the world.

The trajectory of the film spans across local, global, and national arenas, and begins with one of the younger residents of Iwaishima, a man in his 30s named Takashi. Like most young residents, he had left the island for higher education. Uniquely, Takashi, who is son to the outspoken representative of the 27-year long struggle against the local power company, Chugoku Denryoku (“Chuden”), had also returned to the island to make his own life: a struggle at best since he began his endeavor with no knowledge of how to live off the land. Through Takashi and Chuden, the film presents its central problematic: both argue that development must take place but each have vastly different ideas about what a path to the future entitles.

The film expands its perspective on this issue by shifting its focus from Iwaishima to rural Sweden. Interviews with people involved in sustainability projects of small and large scales show how national administrators embraced a variety of renewable energy projects implemented by grass-roots efforts, ultimately ushering in a new era for national energy policy. This section serves as a counterpoint to Japan’s policies, which do little to discourage energy market monopolization, and offers a concrete model for the kind of change that Kamanaka advocates.

The emotionally evocative final third of Ashes to Honey depicts the actual practices of protest as the villagers’ fishing boats face off with Chuden’s ships in rain and rough seas. These sequences are especially potent for viewers familiar with Japan’s deep history of non-violent protest, such as the similar actions of the fishing collectives of Ominato against the government’s experimental, nuclear-powered ship the Mutsu. In contrast to the use of violence to resolve differences, Kamanaka’s film nods to the visual style of Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s “Minamata” films and stands as an example to students of how conflict can be politically charged yet non-violent.

Just as it effectively uses Swedish points of view to expand its perspective, educators can use Ashes to Honey to expand students’ perspectives on Fukushima and nuclear power in general. Kamanaka’s documentation of a complicated human story presents a starkly simple choice between two distinct paths of development: one sustainable and one dependent upon nuclear power, with all of the risks that it brings.

- Kenneth Masaki Shima

BOOK: Local Environmental Movements: A Comparative Study of the United States and Japan (2008)

Karan, Pradyumna and Unryu Suganuma, eds. 2008. Local Environmental Movements: A Comparative Study of the United States and Japan. University Press of Kentucky.

This edited volume consists of a number of interesting essays covering a wide range of issues and topics including industrial sites, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, conservation, resource management, preservation, protests, and nuclear power. The fifth chapter by Nathalie Cavasin deserves particular attention: “Citizen Activism and the Nuclear Industry in Japan: After the Tokai Village Disaster” details how the people of Tokaimura reevaluated nuclear power after the Tokaimura nuclear accident of 1999. This case profiles poorly trained workers who mixed uranium oxide with the wrong type of acid, resulting in an accidental chain reaction that released large amounts of radiation that killed three people and exposed dozens to above normal levels of radiation. Tokaimura plays host a number of important research centers for the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (formerly the Japanese Atomic Energy Research Institute) and is the site of a number of nuclear reactors and fuel processing centers. The article is regrettably short, but provides some interesting parallels to the accident at Fukushima.

Also worthy of mention is the second chapter, “A Comparative History of U.S. and Japanese Environmental Movements” by Richard Forrest, Miranda Schreurs, and Rachel Penrod, which offers an informative comparative overview of the environmental movements in the U.S. and Japan, describing the history, development and intellectual underpinnings of those movements. The fourth chapter by Kim Reimann, “Going Global: The Use of International Politics and Norms in Local Environmental Protest Movements in Japan,” poses relevance because it discusses how Japanese protesters have moved to using international standards and norms to persuade people of the necessity of change to conform to global standards.

– Craig Nelson

FILM: Various British Pathé Newsreels (1952 – 1962)

Footage from the following three short newsreels were selected in order to show the prevailing anti-nuclear sentiment in parts of the Japanese public during the 1950s and 1960s. At the height of the protests against the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (anpo jōyaku) in 1960, hundreds of thousands of Japanese took their anger to the streets in front of the National Diet. Considering such background, it may be hard to grasp at first why relatively few protesters have rallied against nuclear energy during the height of the Fukushima nuclear crisis so far. To put things into perspective, in the period of time immediately preceding Fukushima, fewer than 50 people would have typically demonstrated at any given time; the demonstrations of 10 April 2011, in which approximately 17,500 people marched in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan, thus marks a dramatic increase. However, comparing contemporary demonstrations with those seen in the newsreel footage shown here, or with concurrent demonstrations in Germany this spring that have attracted 250,000 protesters, Japan’s protest movement remains comparatively small. How did what seems a largely uncritical acceptance of nuclear energy in Japan come to the fore?  –Christian Dimmer

British Pathé. 1957. Atom Fear Stirs Japan. Video, from British Pathé video film archive, http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=66625

Opening with the remarkable line, “radioactive rain brings new fears to atom-conscious Japan,” this snippet shows the strong public concern over British and Russian nuclear tests that have caused radioactive rain in Japan. Over 15,000 protest in front of the British embassy and umbrellas become a sales hit.

British Pathé. 1957. Jap Protest. Video, from British Pathé video film archive, http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=32824

“Stop the tests,” demonstrators in Tokyo demand in the aftermath of American and Russian nuclear tests. The strong anti-nuclear sentiment is further heightened by Britain’s announcement to also begin with hydrogen bomb tests. Subsequently, protests by “Japs,” as the announcer describes (a term that gained a derogatory connotation during World War II, now considered an ethnic slur), are staged in front of the American, Russian and British embassies in Tokyo.

British Pathé. 1962. Ban The Bomb Demonstration in Tokyo. Video, from British Pathé video film archive, http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=62269

Various scenes show a small group of students who protest the United State’s plan to resume nuclear tests in the atmosphere. The political bias of this Cold War newsreel is noted by the caricature of the demonstrators in which “leftists protest atom tests,” resisting the police with ”fanatical left-wing zeal.”