A certain protocol exists for Japanese documentary screenings: When the lights come back on, audience members are handed a survey sheet to politely fill in. Director Saburo Hasegawa will have none of that. He wants people who see his movies to leave the theater and actively, if not aggressively, engage their world.
A certain protocol exists for Japanese documentary screenings: When the lights come back on, audience members are handed a survey sheet to politely fill in. Director Saburo Hasegawa will have none of that. He wants people who see his movies to leave the theater and actively, if not aggressively, engage their world.
After all, that’s what the old man who is the subject of Hasegawa’s latest work, “Japan Lies: The Photojournalism of Kikujiro Fukushima, Age 90,” has been doing for decades.
The documentary will appear in Japanese theaters from Aug. 4.
“I think I received the most moving feedback even before the film was finished,” Hasegawa says. It came from Masaharu Yoshioka, a film editor of nearly five decades who worked beside Hasegawa.
“Japan would be a very different place today,” Yoshioka said, “if only there were five or six more Kikujiro Fukushimas around.”
Photographer Fukushima, with his trademark beard and beret, made his name covering nearly every social conflict in postwar Japan. In Hiroshima, soon after the atomic bombing, he created one of the most agonizing portraits of radiation poisoning--by following a victim, a fisherman, for years until his scarred life came to a painful close.
Fukushima also depicted the discrimination against residents of Korean ancestry, the violent protests against the Japan-U.S. security alliance and the arming of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, as well as the ousting of farmers from their land to build power plants and airports.
Hasegawa’s 114-minute documentary, however, does not merely sum up Fukushima’s six-decade career.
Last summer, the director led the venerable photographer, who can barely walk, to farming communities in Fukushima Prefecture that were evacuated soon after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant following the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami of March 11.
For many in Japan, the Fukushima nuclear accident is the nation’s great debacle. For the photojournalist, however, it’s just one of three great “defeats” he’s lived through.
The first “defeat” was the unchecked militarism that led Japan into World War II and brought about the atomic bombings. Next came the folly of the high growth decades, bringing wealth but also complacency. And lastly came the events of last year in the Tohoku region.
As the photojournalist wanders through the abandoned Fukushima countryside, the video camera rolling behind him, it’s clear he’s making a curtain call.
Much like Fukushima, the 42-year-old director invests time in his subject. One of his earliest works, “Time of Life,” follows the uneasy connection he develops with a 22-year-old right-wing extremist he happens to spot in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. Another portrait of adolescent life and ambition began in 1999 and continued for 10 years.
Three years ago, Hasegawa began looking into the work of the aging photographer--and was surprised by what he found.
“If you ask the photographer himself about his images, he will say one thing,” explains Hasegawa. “His photos prove that Japan lies. That is, the country is built on lies.”
Hasegawa tracked down Fukushima to a small apartment in a remote town near Japan’s Inland Sea. Previously, Fukushima lived practically alone on a small island nearby.
Everyone who watches “Japan Lies: The Photojournalism of Kikujiro Fukushima, Age 90,” will likely walk away with a different interpretation of what means. It could be the smooth shell of order, plated over unresolved conflicts and injustices. Or it could be about photojournalism and the idea that an image itself can be truth. Even if it were, there’s the question of whether it can change the world.
“Fukushima has lived through difficult times that we can only imagine,” Hasegawa says. “But in one sense he and his contemporaries were fortunate in that the social battles fought before were out in the open-- there was always a stage for history to play out before their cameras.”
Today’s protests against invisible dangers, he adds, start on social media sites and end there as well.