This review essay discusses the function of documentary in the field of hazard exposure and health effect by closely examining Kazuo Hara’s two films: Sennan Asbestos Disaster and Minamata Mandala. The author first historicizes the ways environmental hazards, such as radioactive pollutants, have been documented on film from both fictional and non-fictional perspectives in Japan. Realizing the limitations of science for establishing causal relations between hazard exposure and disease, efforts to visualize harm are therefore important in these sites to conduct previously “undone science.” The author particularly focuses on the concept of “environmental publics” as the infrastructure of such cross-disciplinary works. In the second part of the essay, the author examines in detail the style and production of Kazuo Hara’s documentaries, arguing about the active role the director’s camera plays in facilitating the act of speaking by his interviewees, indirectly enabling their witness to the atrocious exposure that was causing their poor health.
Keywords:
In interpreting the effects of exposure to invisible hazards, from either human-built environments or disasters, much has been written about scientific experts’ opinions and victims’ voices in various mediated forms. Among the various art forms, literature and film are the most common ways to document causal relations and victimhood. Early documentation works emphasized the horrors of events and the dark side of life in noxious environments. For example, as a survivor of the atomic bombings in Japan, Hiroshima-born Tamiki Hara (1905–1951) was one of the first writers to create novels and poems about life under the shadow of atomic radiation between 1947 and 1949 (Treat Citation1988). In his dramatic film I Live in Fear (1955), Akira Kurosawa depicted how a rational but paranoid physician strived to persuade his reluctant family to move to Brazil. Among manga series, Mighty Atom (1968) by Osamu Tezuka and Barefoot Gen (1973) by Keiji Nakazawa were animated and eventually became motion pictures. Narratives about atomic energy transformed from new hope to tragedy and lamentation within three decades.
