In group-oriented Japan, where it has long been said the nail that sticks out is hammered down, mass protests involving people of all ages no longer come across as unusual.
In group-oriented Japan, where it has long been said the nail that sticks out is hammered down, mass protests involving people of all ages no longer come across as unusual.
Huge gatherings involving the elderly, mothers with children, salaried workers and students now feature regularly in front of the prime minister’s office, the Diet building and other prominent venues.
The catharsis for this was the nation’s worst nuclear accident in 2011, when the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant went into triple meltdown following the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.
In the aftermath of the disaster, activists and citizens began hitting the streets to drum up support for a nuclear-free Japan.
What started as a trickle became a flood after a wave of rallies swept Japanese cities to become one of the nation's largest popular movements in decades.
A documentary on the phenomenon titled “Shusho Kantei no Mae de” (Tell the Prime Minister) will open in Tokyo and elsewhere from Sept. 19.
The 109-minute film focuses on rallies in 2011 and 2012, many of them in front of the prime minister’s office. It also zooms in on the climax of those protests, a meeting between representatives of the Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes, a group of anti-nuclear organizations, and then Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda of the Democratic Party of Japan in August 2012.
The film was funded and directed by Eiji Oguma, a professor of historical sociology at Tokyo's Keio University, who began taking part in anti-nuclear protest rallies a month after the Fukushima disaster unfolded.
Oguma realized that a new way of making a political statement had taken root in Japan, one that was almost nonexistent before.
“Protesters who assembled on their own created, after groping for a way to have their voices heard, a new political culture in which they stand on a sidewalk in front of the prime minister’s office and shout out what is on their mind,” said Oguma, 53. “People’s intrinsic power was exposed in a crisis that leaves them feeling helpless with the traditional order.”
Shunichi Ishizaki, 31, shot and edited the film.
The pair also used footage of demonstrations released on the Internet by participants.
The documentary contains scenes of a nervous-looking woman before a microphone giving her first speech in public in a quavering voice as well as the agitated expressions of other demonstrators who cannot contain anger despite their best efforts to do so. These powerful scenes convey the seriousness with which the protesters are making their demands.
It also features interviews with eight people, whose ages and social status differ.
Among them are a key figure who led massive rallies, a man who has a clerical job at a hospital, a Dutch woman who has lived in Japan for many years and a woman from Fukushima who was forced to flee her home and live as an evacuee due to high radiation levels in her community.
The documentary depicts how they felt after the nuclear accident and what drove them to participate in the mass protests.
Oguma directed the film out of a desire to leave a record on mass movements for future generations and audiences abroad.
The film screens with English subtitles.
The mass protests against nuclear power segued into civic demonstrations opposing legislation on protecting state secrets and national security.
Aki Okuda, a core member of Tokyo-based Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy-s, or SEALDs, hailed the participants of the anti-nuclear rallies for paving the way for his group to stage its own demonstrations after being given a sneak preview of the documentary.
SEALDs, set up in May, has been staging protest rallies against the security legislation on Fridays.
“Because we saw those mass protests, we are staging ours weekly in front of the Diet building,” said Okuda, a 23-year-old student at Meiji Gakuin University. “The younger generation who see our demonstrations may start something on their own and take theirs to the next stage of mass protests.”
The film will screen at the theater of Uplink Co., a film distributor in Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward, starting from 10:30 a.m. between Sept. 19 and Sept. 25.
Show schedules from Sept. 26 at the Uplink theater and other venues will be available at (