Kato and the people who stayed behind

September 23, 2012

Documentary filmmaker Tetsu Kato portrays those who stayed after nuclear disaster

Film director and Aomori Prefecture resident Tetsu Kato. (Mainichi)

拡大写真 

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20120923p2a00m0na003000c.html

There's the old man who walks the hills picking wild grasses, making medicine out of them. There's also the man living deep in the mountains alone after his wife's death, making local rice wine, and the couple staying in a hippie village from the 1970s, raising chickens.

It's these people who remained in the Fukushima villages of Iitate and Kawauchi -- both designated as no-go zones by the national government after the onset of a nuclear disaster triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami -- on whom 60-year-old director Tetsu Kato chose to shine the spotlight in the first installment of his documentary film "Fukushima kara no Kaze" (Winds from Fukushima).

"I wanted to portray who these appealing people were in reality without thinking about a dramatic component," he says.

The stars of the film, who were as natural in front of the camera as they were elsewhere, had an uncommon take on the nuclear disaster.

"We aren't victims. From nature's standpoint, we (humans) are all perpetrators," one said.

"We have to stop complaining and learn that this is the real nature of a national government," another said.

In the last few moments of the film, a deserted forest and fields appear against the backdrop of the Spanish classical guitar piece "Recuerdos de la Alhambra" (Memories of Alhambra). Says Kato, "I superimposed my wish for the world to return to one in which people can live in onto the song."

When Kato arrived in Tokyo from the Shizuoka Prefecture city of Numazu at the age of 19 to attend Hosei University, the school was in the clutches of leftist student violence. "I just couldn't deal with it, so I left to travel alone on my bicycle," he recalls.

He spent two years visiting agricultural communities including Atarashiki-mura, an intentional community in Saitama Prefecture. Through his travels, Kato says, "I realized I wanted to create a world that was not limited by money or time, by changing the way we live our lives, not through student activism."

After portraying farmers in his 2002 film "Denshin yugaku" about farmers living near the Rokkasho nuclear reprocessing plant in Aomori Prefecture, Kato himself took up farming. Prefacing with the disclaimer that "raising consciousness" might sound presumptuous, Kato explains the reason he, now a farmer, still continues to make films as this: "I want to leave behind an opportunity for the next generation to think about how they live."

Kato is now working on a sequel based in the disaster areas during the winter.