So before we start talk, I'd like to make a couple of comments about your presentation. I'd like to just make the point clear that discrimination is a big issue for the locals, but also discrimination is big toward the self-voluntary evacuees. In both ways it goes. That's what I want to say, one thing. people who try to move away from Fukushima or like a irradiated zone. So that's the point I'd like to make clear. And also the number issue is very important. It's very obscure, you know, it's very unknown. But finally, the question is which way it goes.
You know, both apocalypse or obscure things can go either way. Whether we say everything is okay, you know, let's just keep on going the way it is. or we try to change something. That's the two things I want to say. Yeah, yeah. And also, I want to say, I myself saw a lot of films made after Fukushima. And they are very good. It's very serious. Many films made about informing what's exactly happening. I saw quite a few in New York. And we did a lot of screenings in New York for the informative sessions and stuff. But I'm beginning to think that is great, that is great.
I'm not saying they are not good or anything. They should keep on going. But also, I wanted to see something that questions the representation of Fukushima and representation about information itself. So I pretty much, I was very happy to see your film for the first time. It's, you know, like, try to, it seems to me, try to talk about what's everything, what's happening in Japan in various aspect. And even like including this apparatus, physical apparatus, visualization of physical apparatus of nuclear, and also, like, I like very much that you show the beautiful green that I sort of related to my article
that the fun is hiding in the green. And so I wanna, you know, maybe I should ask you a very general question, but what made you dare go in there and make this film? And you know, also another question is your idea of like representing something like that by that kind of language or like assemblage or how can I say, sometimes quotations, sometimes, you know, maybe a question may be very general. I mean, I think, well, we were very actually obviously shocked when the event happened on March the 11th,
all that two years ago, because for us it was a question of how can Japan have 54 nuclear power plants after having had such a terrible experience of being bombed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And so the question for us was what got Japan to this state and why? And then as we began to research this and actually meeting you at 16 Beaver and reading your texts was a great learning process for us because it made us realize that we are all part of it. We are all
affected by it. So the idea of the here and elsewhere and the kind of logic of why do we go to Japan and make a film about this as outsiders is collapsed. The idea of the outsider in this situation is a kind of was for us the film is about our own kind of research in a way into how this affects all of us politically. And yeah, I mean that's kind of quite general but maybe Kojo wants to say something. I mean, your notion of the global nuclear regime really helped us. It helped us to give a vocabulary to the frustration that we felt,
but also the implication. So you sit in London and you watch the news, and it comes and it goes, and the news narrates the crisis in terms of the struggle of the brave Japanese people to overcome this terrible disaster. And this narration is correct, but it doesn't seem to go far enough. And the more the British press fixated on this narrative of heroic struggle against terrible odds, the more frustrated we became. and eventually we needed to find a vocabulary for this kind of frustration and it's true that more information
and more facts and more numbers didn't satisfy this frustration, it actually added to it and we had a yearning for a kind of vocabulary that was as abstract as the horror itself, we wanted images that were as abstract as the horror that was being faced. It became clear to us that Fukushima is something quite different than Chernobyl, and it's different from Hiroshima, and it's different from Nagasaki. In a paradoxical way, and this is something we return to, in a paradoxical way, the destruction and the ruination of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gives one a kind of a visible quantity.
In a certain sense, we're comfortable with ruins ever since the kind of the rise and fall of Rome, of the Roman Empire, the destruction of the Roman Empire as this visual iconography of ruin. But as you saw from Minato's image that Mia showed you, when you go to Fukushima, you don't see ruination. what you see is on the contrary this world which is something like Rilke's Duino Elegy where beauty and the terror are combined and you can't separate one from the other you see a world that's closer to Tarkovsky's stalker zona the moment where the philosopher and the
novelist and the stalker, they're on their rail car and Tarkovsky is close in on their faces and they're travelling in the rail car and the image, it starts out sepia and Toskowski holds tight on their faces and the rail car travels and goes on and on and on and then at some point it switches to colour and the rail car stops and they're in the zone and remember the zone is extremely lush remember this scene, it's just lush and the stalker gets off the rail car and throws himself backwards into the grass and he's in the zone and so this mixture of beauty, terror and somehow banality as well the everyday nature of Fukushima this meant that there was this abstract horror
it's not simply that radiation is invisible it's that it's abstracted, it hides so when Kurosawa, for example in his final film Dreams, Kurosawa tries to depict Kurosawa's final film is Dreams, it's nine dreams and one of the dreams is about a radiation it's about a meltdown and so there were all these people on the beach and they've been driven to the beach by this disaster and Kurosawa colours the radiation so that people can identify it so you know red gas travels across and one character says that's cesium then there's orange and another character says that's strontium and so you can see that Kurosawa one of the greatest directors of the post-haw era,
was forced to come up with these kinds of solutions. So part of us was attracted to these kinds of problems because we sensed that if you're making a documentary, then your main emphasis is on access to people that can give you the facts on the ground. If you're making social media, then your point is to be as fast as possible. And so the role that art can play is to precisely analyse what role images play in constructing the understanding that we have. And this means we had to clear out a lot of other things in order to make space for this reflection
on the role of analysis and on the role of invisibility, which also meant this analysis of the limits of the camera. the impotence of documentary and the productive impotence. Because the productive impotence of documentary doesn't mean you give up on camera. It doesn't mean you give up on filming. It means you integrate this into your work. And so for us, these formal questions had political implications. and so we decided that this is what our artistic intervention could do. And as Anjali says, we gave ourselves permission to go as outsiders
because in Britain, Britain is just as implicated in the global nuclear regime as any other country. TEPCO, the monopoly that runs the Fukushima power plants, has a branch in London and a branch in America as well as in Japan. So the geography of the nuclear regime implicates us as well. So we felt, we decided to authorize ourselves to go. I think one of the things, maybe I could ask you, one of the things that I was confronted by in Japan was this sense of a kind of patriotism. I couldn't figure out whether it was a kind of patriotism
more political apathy. When we're talking about the stigma related to the people from Fukushima and the whole politics around food and how the shops in Tokyo, they're encouraging the elderly to buy food and the elderly are willingly buying it in order to support Fukushima. And then this whole kind of machismo, even when we were there with the people who were helping us shoot the film producing, they were very like, oh, the people in Fukushima have to eat this, so you shouldn't be so scared about eating this or that. There's these kinds of ridiculous normalizations, in a way, of the whole situation. So I was constantly thinking about this idea of patriotism
or political apathy. And then you kind of, of course, begin to think about Japan in relation to the animation and the kind of, and the animation of the infantilite, and it's kind of related to this infantilization where everything becomes cute and soft and friendly and, you know, touchable and tactile. And, you know, there's this sense that this, the kind of sensory, the sensations that one would normally apply to a kind of more, a kind of greater sort of political, more kind of thoughtful response to what's going on is kind of ameliorated by this kind of tactile, animated, infantilized zone that people inhabit.
So I'm just curious as to what you think. Yeah, I basically live in New York, but I've been sort of communicating with the Japanese social movements of sort of anti-authoritarian vein for many years. So I go there a lot and I'm in constant communication with a lot of them. So I cannot represent whole Japan, but some of my ideas is that first of all global nuclear regime in terms of Japan is very much closely associated with the influence of the United States after the war. I mean, Korea and Japan, very close, both US bases everywhere. And post-war Japanese regime is very much built by the United States.
It may not be too much to say that. First of all, MacArthur was largely responsible to secure the place of the emperor. If it were not for him, he could have been executed by an evolutionary force that was growing at the time. So a lot of things sort of like manipulated by the US. And also, you know, like in the 50s, there were 40s and 50s, there were a lot of social sort of instability. But beginning from the, first of all, 1957 there was this like Five Dragon Incident Which was like a US
Nuclear weapon test in the Pacific Ocean that affected Japanese fishing boats And that like that was Just like after like A very short time Only several years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki And people got Was really enraged and there's a huge surge of anti-nuke movement in the 57 was it? Maybe you know more than I do. 57, right? So that was a huge movement and a lot, many women involved not just macho, you know, lefty guys but a lot of women involved and this impetus was very, very important to prepare the famous 1960s anti-US-Japan security treaty uprising
And all these things scared Japan and the ruling class, ruling power of Japan and the U.S. And a lot of information manipulation start afterward. You know, like a famous talk by Eisenhower, like nukes for peace, you know, trickle this, and try to sort of divide anti-nuke movement in Japan between sort of like, you know, anti-nuclear weaponry movement and saying, okay, like peaceful use for the civilian use was okay. And that kind of manipulation and a lot of media and event commercialization and also, unfortunately, I cannot decide,
but, you know, economic growth began to happen around the 60s. and that also made Japan into a commercial very much commercial commodity, culture-oriented society with this patriarchy, traditional patriarchy attached to it somehow and as you mentioned, machismo in Japan still exists and today, especially after Fukushima, I heard this story in the household, there's a big sort of like a division. Like the husband tend to say, oh, everything is okay. Let's, you know, everything is fine. And I have to go to work. So, you know, and wives who,
or especially mothers of young children, they really, really serious. And they are the, many people say that they are the main force today of anti-nuke movement in Japan. Anti-nuke movement doesn't mean just protesting. but some already mentioned a lot of radiation measurement movement, like measuring the playground in the local communities. She showed graphs before, but the radiation movement is very, very unpredictable. It's not like what you call a square diameter expansion. the so-called hotspots create hotspots in different spots.
And it also moves around. And also what we are dealing with the so-called nano activity, it's not like something like a poisonous object, if you put it into the ocean, it's thinned down. It's nano-objects, nano-activities exist different dimensions. Like there's a logic, for instance, like a certain amount of cesium was discovered in a school lunch. But this amount is if you divide it into 50 kids, it's going to be okay. But this logic of thinning it down, if it's chopped, you know, like a mushroom into like 50 pieces, it doesn't work.
because the nano activity exists in certain tiny parts of one mushroom. So more like certain kids get tremendous amount of radioactivity and other kids don't get anything. So this is the logic I want to point out with the eating of that soup too. Who knows? This is unknown. We are facing the unknown thing and then that's why it's representation, information, strange psychological war. And we have to prepare for that. And it's also important to say that children, because their thyroids are still developing, it affects them much more if they're eating contaminated food in any way or so. So how was...
I want to know more practicality of you when you were in Japan. How did you feel? Who you met? How long did it take? Was it hard? or what that kind of more like a you know practical your experience you know it was um it was extremely difficult shoot usually we work with the same people we work with the same cameraman for a number of years now and we couldn't work with this cameraman but you know for a number of reasons so so So we worked with a newcomer man and we worked with two producers, one American, one Japanese.
And so they were helping us and supporting us. And I think we really, we used, we researched as much as we could when we got there. And we had, you know, a list of people we wanted to meet, locations we wanted to go to. But we tried to learn from every shoot we did. So we tried to turn the shoot into a learning experience, almost literally, which meant just admitting to how little you know and understanding yourself as an amateur. you know we're not physicists
but we're not scholars of Japanese history nor of Japanese culture so we are really in a certain sense at the limits of our ignorance and we had to be really quite humble and quite clear about what we didn't know and not try to pretend to any more knowledge that we had and to integrate that to integrate that limit into the work. And so this openness whereby everybody we met would suggest more material to us, would point us to more leads and we would then make a decision on where on whether to follow up or not. So for example
in a couple of times in the film I don't know how many people were here this morning but if you did manage to see it, there's two or three times where there is this performance which just appears in the film with no explanation. And it's this performer called Atsuhiro Ito who records under the name Optron. And he's part of the Japanese noise music scene. And he's worked out a way of taking an ordinary neon tube and connecting it to a guitar pedal and making noise from it. So he has this neon light and he makes this excruciating noise. extremely I mean real noise terror and and you know people pointed us towards him and we met him and talked to him and he had a real analysis of of what he was
doing his argument was that you know after Fukushima there was a kind of there was a kind of national campaign in which people were asked to conserve electricity and to conserve light and this campaign had a moral dimension to and a patriotic dimension. So for the good of the nation, people had to save electricity and save light. And he objected to this moralizing and psychologizing of this situation. And so when you see him moving this light around and making this extreme noise, this is his form of protest music. But it's not protest music in the Bob Dylan sense. It's not protest music in a public enemy sense. It's protest music against the morality, the moral economy of light, using light, and using noise as protest.
And so in the film, he appears, yeah, using electricity as a form of protest, and using electricity as it shows up as light, as illumination. And so he appears in the film, and he disappears throughout the film. And that's also because we realized how much, and you pointed out this, and we didn't realize how much it's naive but we didn't understand how much Fukushima and Tokyo were twinned that Tokyo is the twin Tokyo is the dark evil twin of Fukushima the dependency that you talked about, the way in which Fukushima and Tokyo are coupled together such that and this is why the question of light, electricity
and power is crucial to the whole film. It's why we shoot in infrared many times. Because when you shoot in infrared at night, then light jumps. It pops out and it takes on a presence and a drama. Because in a certain sense, we thought of light as an agent, as an entity in an assemblage that we wanted to point to and then implicate ourselves. Because of course, when we show up with our cameras, we're plugging into that same power source. So we kind of wanted to implicate ourselves. We filmed ourselves plugging everything in just to drive home the point. But in the end, we didn't use those shots. It didn't seem we had to be that illustrative about what we were doing.
But these kinds of questions, they became really clear to us once we were there. So we had to let ourselves be led a lot by the people we met. And we had to trust that they clearly knew more than we did because they were inhabiting the context. So we listened all the time. We said as little as we could and listened as much as possible and then made decisions based on who said what and how they said it and what they said. Yeah, I mean, we conducted a lot of interviews. I mean, of course, there was so much that people were telling us and we conducted some long interviews and filmed them. But in the editing process, we decided to kind of reduce it to these three main characters.
This is Chihiro Minato talking about the invisible landscape and the divinity and the kind of weather radiation will be absorbed and normalized as a kind of divinity within the culture of the future, the religion, or the spiritual landscape of the future. and then the farmer, you know, who's this old 75-year-old farmer living in Itatemura who used to be a businessman and then he decided to retire in Itatemura and grow pure rice and live and invite all his friends and they could all eat some of the best rice that he had produced, organic rice. And then when the plume went over Itatemura and it rained,
actually his farm was completely contaminated so you know you're getting 150 micro sieverts an hour just under the drains and it's a very highly contaminated area but he has willingly decided to stay there you know and let it he's a willing guinea pig you know and it's just very if we found that very interesting in comparison to what may shiganobu was saying about how Japan is being you know turned into a kind of guinea pig is going to become a guinea pig for the effects of nuclear radiation by the way that those who maybe do you know she and of do you know any of you who she is or they sugar nation of you okay you know okay so generally just just so that you know she's a I mean
daughter of a very known person who's one of the leaders of Japan Red Army who went to Palestine in solidarity in the 70s but she herself is a journalist now right yeah I mean she yeah she's journalists and you know really incredibly knowledgeable about the about the catastrophe and the nuclear power regime and the media you know because TEPCO also owns the media a lot of the media in Japan yes that's of the one of the power that electric company has in Japan it's media that's why media
campaign go along a lot of media campaigns go along with the government information tactic to normalize the radiation but again in the film we didn't we didn't want to start going into who make it may shigen over is I mean that would have that would have that would have been too much just to bring the Japanese Red Army it is I mean that that would have been like a three hour but the good taste yes yeah I mean the Japanese Red Army the Japanese Red army they're clearly the equivalent of they were kind of parallel to the Red Army faction in Germany and the Red Brigade in Italy Rossi Brigatti so these
were some of the most important revolutionary groups of the era say Fusaka Shigenobu is an important figure who was underground for many years and so me Shigenobu has a has an important status both as somebody who inherits this legacy but somebody who's carved out her own life as a respected journalist and who works between the arab world and the japanese world and who is equally at home reporting on the conflict in palestine as she is on as she is reporting about japan what's interesting in this moment is is that you'll notice when she starts speaking, she says, some people have said that.
And then she goes into this interpretation of the government's policy of moving rubble around. So she's not claiming that she believes it. She's saying this is how people understand this process which is going on all around them. And we have to take this popular understanding seriously because we're in a state in which people have gained a suspicion, an automatic suspicion of what the government is saying. And people are right to be suspicious. And in these conditions, popular reinterpretations circulate all the time. And the more the government tries to reassure people, the more anxious people become.
and certainly what we found in our brief time there we were only shooting for about 20 days what we found was that there was almost two within Turkey there was almost two worlds there was a world of people who who through different processes of normalisation were attempting to reconstruct their lives and to carry on as normal and working to somehow minimise and play down the psychic anguish of being kind of continually trying to block out this kind of ongoing quotidian horror. And then on the other hand, there were people who lived more online.
People who were more into what people call citizenship science. People who were doing their own testing. People who were building their own Geiger counters. And these people were online and they were searching for, almost searching for the bad news that could confirm how truly bad things were. In other words, the worse the news, the more it clarified the conditions that they were facing. And these felt like two types of citizens. Yes, I'd like to add one more thing. That's true, but also their success would be because of their sort of like almost hysterical warning, they know that, you know,
they sort of like try to, their direction is to try to prove something is dangerous, but most of them are doing for free, right? They are not necessarily wealthy, right? So they are almost, to my understanding, sacrifice. If, you know, if they are proven in the future to be useless, that's their goal. that's what I heard from some of them but tactically they have to make hysteria because that hysteria is another language that Japanese male machoist government officials call housewives who are like claiming like you know danger everyday they call them like mass women hysteria but they they sort of affirm the term hysteria they will be hysteric
more as they are all I think this is very important what you're saying and what Angelica also hints, I feel, is in fact that anything that would come from these subjects who make a point of this individual's life value, they are either infantilized, the attitude is either infantilized or historicized or even worse than that, suddenly adopted to become a moral of government
and then to lose all efficiency. because if we talk about the moral it's morally like this or like that then we really stab it in the middle because some of those attitudes can only work between people so first stage is the paranoia from the institution and the next thing will be the people will be paranoid from one another if we don't deconstruct this mechanism and see that this is all the time, you know, infantilized and marginalized or appropriated for the service of institutions. Thank you for your comment.
Yeah, are there any more thoughts or responses or questions either to Sabu or to Angelica or myself about anything you've seen? Well, I just want to say one thing. I think the hysteric and the infantile are kind of two different poles, and they're not, for me, it's important, right? That distinction, because in a way, I think the disturbance of eating this kind of radish and all of that, and the laughter that it produced also among everybody, and, you know, when people were trying to sort of raise some concerns, whether it was Irene or Sabu, was sort of seen as hysteric.
And then I think the other pole is, to me, infantile, which is this reaction of not taking it seriously, as if everything is just like a play, but in the worst way, not a kind of frivolity that takes place in confrontation to this kind of horror, but a frivolity that actually just chooses to be ignorant, you know? And I think it's a major, for me, it's really important to say it because there is something really disturbing about this thing because it is very connected to a kind of nationalist and patriarchal kind of ideology and order, really,
that's happening in Japan, which is like saying, eat this food, you know, and be part of the kind of patriotic national kind of reconstruction. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm finding it hard to put into words because I don't want to generalize about Japan and culture and Japanese design and animation and, you know, the visitor centers in the nuclear power plants where there's Atom Boy or Nuclear Boy and, you know, all of this. but I think the performance earlier kind of is, and the way that the film that we were being shown wasn't subtitled, it's just this kind of, somehow this sense of a kind of playful, cute, joyful somehow action
that, you know, makes this lovely soup. Everyone is eating it, but hidden within it is like this deadly substance. I mean, that's Japan, right? I don't know. I don't know Japan, actually. I know only certain aspects of Japan. I know only certain aspects of Japan. The time is often. But I wonder whether any of you like to respond? about your performance or the laughter that we shared considered to be as fun times.
Please respond. Yes. Yes. Well, it feels quite uncomfortable to have this here. It smells all over and we all know where it's from. I was myself thinking about if I want to have chips and what will happen if I eat this. Is it like, is it harmful? Well, I don't know. Now I tried it anyway.
But, um... So... If it's playful, then... Yes, it's playful, but it's... This whole day is all serious. Well, I mean, I wouldn't give people contaminated food to make a point. you know it's not a joke so people people are eating if people are
negotiating a relationship to contamination and the stigma of discrimination of people who from Fukushima this is all highly sensitive stuff to kind of perform it in a Dutch art school whatever I think is a frivolous I'm not judging his piece at all I'm just pointing out I mean this like eating or not is part of the everyday politics in Japan in a very serious way. That's what I was saying. I don't even understand, you know, like so much of his work. So I'm not entitled to judge. And this is artwork, right? So it almost exists in a different domain from what I'm doing.
And I don't necessarily want to judge it. But I have to say, I have to point out, this is the kind of politics that's happening there, in a very seriously radical way. And I want you to be aware of it, but I'm not judging his piece. I'm also here, not promoting, like, you know, eating, like, you can, like, eat or not. and I think I don't know I try to want to avoid the sort of prioritize voice of
What is the people who live and suffer there? Living there, living their lives and suffering there. I mean, that's what you want to say, right? Yeah, but I shouldn't rely on too much about that as well. Like I tried to... how do you say... I wasn't really explaining everything but next section of performance was a little bit of this... maybe you might read as a patronization of audience here because we are dancing
some dance that is originally created by state. The Yuriki city created in 1981. And we are kind of kind of appropriating this city created dance. That city tried to give you a false communal identity. And this dance we practiced last two days with students. So students will dance I mean it's not the answer what you ask but... I think one of the points of food is to switch the terms of discourse and response.
To switch it from a discursive response to what you might call a gut reaction. A gut, a corporeal reaction. reaction to switch it to a question of incorporation and risk so that I think the playfulness is not in the work itself, it's in how people try to diffuse the act which is actually both a gift and a poison. It's a pharmacological experiment in incorporation and digestion And I think the laughter, which strikes me as kind of slightly, slightly, you know, kind of a panic-tinged laughter,
I think indicates that the work hits its target. So it tries to, it either tries to avoid the head or tries to collapse the stomach and the brain together so that you can't immediately go for a discursive response or rather discourse has to travel through the stomach. And so when you do that, then you get corporeal responses. You get uneasy laughter, but you also get some anger. And I think that's quite important.