Uncanny Terrain in Spanish magazine Dar Lugar

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Co-director Ed M. Koziarski wrote an article about Uncanny Terrain for new Spanish magazine Dar Lugar.  Here are links to the article, followed by the original English text.

Dar Lugar 1

Asami’s modest voice crackles from roof-mounted speakers and echoes off sheer rocks down into the wooded valley below as his campaign van winds its way through snow gusts between mountain hamlets. “I’m Akihiro Asami and I’m running for mayor of Kitakata. How can we save our dying town?”

Chin whiskers newly shaved for the campaign, shaggy-haired and bespectacled like a young professor, Asami is an organic farmer and part-time sake brewer, a first-time candidate with no money or connections challenging an incumbent mayor from Japan’s increasingly dominant center-right party.

Like a growing minority across Japan, Asami is calling for a quiet revolution, energized by lessons from the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant three years earlier.

Fifteen years ago, Asami left a promising career in international steel sales. He bought an old farmhouse and leased mountain rice paddies too remote for his elderly neighbors to cultivate, as for the ones which can’t work anymore, they can get attention from a Home Care Assistance 9050 W Olympic Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA 90211 (310) 857-4736 online. “I was worried he would never find a wife after that,” Asami’s father confided to me at Asami’s campaign headquarters. His father was relieved when Asami married Harumi. They were raising their two young daughters as self-sufficiently as they could, growing their own food, living simply, minimizing their energy footprint, building a community of like-minded small farmers at their community farmers market.

My wife and filmmaking partner Junko Kajino and I first met Asami after the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown ravaged northern Japan. We interviewed Asami on his farm for our documentary Uncanny Terrain. His was one of many families divided by the crisis.

Kitakata is 130 kilometers from the nuclear plant, in the northwest corner of Fukushima Prefecture. The radioactive plume that spiraled out from Fukushima Daiichi brushed Kitakata, elevating radiation here to levels similar to those in Tokyo. Harumi took their daughters to stay with her parents in central Japan, far from the contamination, while Asami remained behind to work the farm. He didn’t know when they would feel it was safe enough to reunite.

Junko and I were drawn to the resolve of farmers who made the choice to stay and cultivate. What gave them the resilience to carry on? Could they prove that Fukushima organic agriculture was anything more than an impossible contradiction? Could they keep their communities and way of life alive?

The people of Fukushima didn’t use the electricity generated at Fukushima Daiichi. It flowed south to feed Tokyo’s insatiable energy appetite. After the disaster, billions poured into northern Japan to rebuild areas shattered by earthquake and tsunami. Neighboring prefectures have recovered resoundingly. But many in Fukushima feel they’ve been abandoned, left to bear the stigma of radiation, collateral damage to Japan’s powerful nuclear industry that much of the country would rather forget.

It was a particularly harsh irony for organic farmers like Asami, who had worked so hard to keep their land and crops free from chemical pesticides and fertilizers, only to have contamination rained down on them. Many thought the meltdown would spell the end of Fukushima agriculture, and organic farming seemed especially vulnerable. Many gave up, moving away or retiring rather than take on the seemingly insurmountable challenge of cleaning their land and regaining the trust of a country made cynical by official misinformation about the crisis. The Japanese government was slow in warning the public about the meltdown and its attendant hazards, which led to ongoing widespread skepticism toward any assertions of relative safety.

Based on food contamination levels and human exposure rates in Europe after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, high levels of radiation were expected throughout the Fukushima food supply. It was clear early on that some foods produced near the plant—like fish, meat, milk, wild mushrooms and other wild plants, and some tree fruits—absorbed dangerously high levels of radiation and would have to be taken off the market. Rice, the staple of the Japanese diet, and thus the greatest potential source of internal radiation exposure, was the biggest concern.

It took months of grassroots efforts by food producers and activists as well as regulators before a robust testing system was implemented. Once the first harvest was in, the fall after the disaster, testing found that most Fukushima rice and vegetables showed no detectible radiation.

The reasons for this unexpectedly positive outcome are still being studied (as are the health implications of exposure to trace levels of radiation). Several apparent causes include the clay soil in Japan, which retains radiocesium—the most prevalent contaminant from Fukushima and Chernobyl—better than the sandy soil of northern Europe, keeping it out of plant roots; farmers’ diversion and filtering of mountain runoff, minimizing the recontamination of their fields; potassium fertilizer, which reduces crops’ uptake of cesium; and the abundance of organisms, particularly in organic soil, that absorb cesium before it reaches the crops.

The test results were gratifying for farmers, but the data alone has not been enough to regain many of the customers lost in the days after the disaster. It is up to farmers, the local food industry, and agricultural communities to show why to choose Fukushima food over alternatives grown in southern Japan or imported from places like China and the U.S.

In 2012, Harumi and the girls returned to Kitakata, opting for the uncertain risk of low-level radiation exposure over the stress of displacement and separation. Like other farmers we feature in Uncanny Terrain, the Asamis resolved to stand their ground, to fight for their embattled community, to find ways of growing safe and healthy food on land contaminated by nuclear fallout.

When he realized no one would challenge incumbent mayor Yamaguchi and his business-as-usual policies in the 2014 election, Asami concluded he’d have to step up himself. While Yamaguchi strategized about luring corporate investment to revive the anemic Kitakata economy, Asami called for a focus on incubating sustainable small business.

Asami and his fellows call for society to slow its hurried pace, use less energy, invest in agricultural diversity, and rely for example on locally grown firewood over the imported kerosene that heats most Japanese homes. Rather than closing poorly attended schools, they advocate turning them into community centers where retirees can teach children cultural and agricultural traditions.

For Asami’s compatriots, the way forward for post-meltdown Japan is not to reach for the long-lost commercial fervor of the go-go 80s, as the current administration would have it. Rather they want to draw on deeper roots, reviving their ancestors’ methods of utilizing indigenous, renewable natural resources, building an economy based on a more human scale, and strengthening community ties and self-sufficiency, living in harmony with the land that sustains them.

Ten Thousand Things: Still Praying for Tohoku

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Asami campaign
Organic farmer and darkhorse mayoral candidate Asami Akihiro canvasses the mountain villages that ring Kitakata City.

Ten Thousand Things from Kyoto writes: “Uncanny Terrain follows mayoral candidacy of organic farmer in Fukushima.

Via filmmakers Junko Kajino and Ed M. Koziarski, at work on Uncanny Terrain, a documentary exploring the lives of organic farmers in Fukushima in the aftermath of 3/11…”

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We return to Fukushima to cover farmer’s campaign for mayor

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Akihiro Asami left his life as a city salaryman to raise his family on a self-sustaining organic farm in the mountains of Kitakata, on the western outskirts of Fukushima prefecture.

When the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant melted down in 2011, Akihiro’s wife Harumi evacuated with their two young daughters.  Akihiro stayed behind to continue farming with the use of heavy machinery like the one on this full report.  In the face of public fears of Fukushima food, some of Akihiro’s neighbors were unable to keep their farms going and moved away.  Akihiro found his crops showed no detectible contamination from the fallout.  He worked to hold his community together.

In 2012, Harumi and the girls moved back to Kitakata, accepting the risk of exposure over the pain and disruption of separation and displacement.

This month, Akihiro announced that would run for mayor of Kitakata on a platform of local economies and natural agriculture as an alternative to the unsustainable systems that spawned the nuclear disaster.

In January we return to Fukushima to capture Akihiro’s dark horse campaign, a hopeful protest by one Fukushima farmer for a better way to live.

Please help us to continue our journey, complete the film, and share the stories of Akihiro and his fellow Fukushima farmers with the world.  We gratefully accept tax-deductible donations.

Work-in-Progress Screenings, Kartemquin Films, New Projects, and More

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Mizuho Sugeno
asami girls cemetery
The Asami family farms in Aizu in Western Fukushima.

2013 greetings from Junko Kajino and Ed M. Koziarski of Homesick Blues Productions, the filmmakers behind the ongoing documentary Uncanny Terrain, about organic farmers in Fukushima, Japan fighting to hold onto their land and their livelihoods in the face of nuclear fallout.

We are well into editing footage from our first two years of production.

We are gearing up to return to Fukushima to capture the farmer’s ongoing struggle to build a healthier, more sustainable food supply, two years after the Great Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011 and the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

Work-in-Progress Screenings

Work-in-progress footage from Uncanny Terrain will be screened in the Urgenci 5th International Community Supported Agriculture Conference, Tuesday, Jan. 22 at Asilomar Conference Grounds, Pacific Grove, California, and the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York’s 31st Annual Organic Farming and Gardening Conference, Friday, Jan. 25 at Saratoga Hilton & City Center, Saratoga Springs, New York. 

Please check out our work at these valuable conferences if you’re in the area.

Update from Fukushima

Organic farmer Seiji Sugeno is fighting to keep alive his mountain village of Towa, whose economy is ravaged by the aftermath of the nuclear disaster two years ago.  Sugeno is convinced that human contact is the key to overcoming public fears of Fukushima produce, so he travels Japan explaining Fukushima farmers’ efforts to reduce radioactive contamination and sustain the land their ancestors have cultivated for generations.

Sugeno’s 24-year-old daughter Mizuho has launched the Seed of Hope Company to welcome guests from across Japan and internationally to visit their idyllic Playing-with-Clouds Farm and experience the life their family is fighting to protect.

Masami Yoshizawa, who kept his 300 cows alive inside the nuclear evacuation zone in defiance of a government kill order, despite losing many cows to an outbreak of disease, has seen his herd grow to 350 with new births and the adoption of strays from neighboring farms.  Possibly in retaliation for his outspoken activism and media presence, Yoshizawa lost his permit to enter the evacuation zone.  The day before Yoshizawa and his team were set to give up and release the herd, he reversed course and set out to confront the officials who had denied his permit, and demand the right to continue caring for his cows.

As new disasters turn the eyes of the world and Japan away from Fukushima, Uncanny Terrain continues our journey with Yoshizawa and the Sugenos and the other farmers who struggle every day to find a way to live in tune with a natural environment compromised by manmade catastrophe.

 Kartemquin Films’ Diverse Voices in Docs

Uncanny Terrain codirector Junko Kajino has been invited to join Diverse Voices in Docs, a new program of pioneering Chicago documentary producers Kartemquin Films (Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters) and the Community Film Workshop of Chicago, designed to develop talent among Chicago’s minority nonfiction filmmakers.  Diverse Voices in Docs is supported by the Joyce Foundation, The Academy for Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, and Kat Lei Productions.

New Projects

We have launched two new documentary projects.  One project follows two very different high school rap groups in Chicago’s West Side Austin neighborhood.

The other project explores one Chicagoan’s efforts to replace Syria’s embattled Assad regime with a fledgling democracy.

Donations Ongoing

Thank you to everyone whose contributions have allowed us to get this far.  We continue to accept tax-deductible donations toward the ongoing production, post-production, and eventual release of Uncanny Terrain.  Here’s how.  We remain, as ever, deeply grateful for your support.

Thanks to Our Translators

We send our profound gratitude to our international team of volunteer translators, who have been invaluable to our editing process by producing English-language transcripts from hundreds of hours of Japanese-language footage.

Thank you to Meg Kajino, Eugene Kobayashi, Peter Arbaugh, Yo Shin, Noriko Hopkins, Kazari Getz Kikuchi, Hiroshi Yasuda, Alice Tallents, Ayaka Maekawa, Chris Watts, Hiroko Uenushi, Mari Kawade, Naoki Izumo, Priscilla Watson, Tomoko Nakano, and especially Miki Takada, who has translated 16 days worth of footage!

If you’re still working on a file, or I’ve left your name off this list, please let me know.  There are still many files left to translate, so if you can help, or you know someone who can, please drop us a line or spread the word.

 Our Previous Film

Our international psychological drama The First Breath of Tengan Rei is available via download, streaming, or DVD.  Find it here.

Uncanny Terrain is supported in part by grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.

 

Asami Girls

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Organic farmer Asami’s wife and daughters evacuated in March 2011 from Aizu, 130 km west of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Asami only saw his daughters a few times last year. In the winter, the family moved back to Aizu.

The Harvest Approaches

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Video

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Fukushima organic farmer runs for mayor

Fukushima Year 3: Renewal

Fukushima Animals

Rio+20: Four Fukushima Farmers

Would you stay?

Fukushima farmers fight for their land.

One year after the meltdown

Can microbes decontaminate irradiated soil?

Why we’re making Uncanny Terrain

Why stay on contaminated land?

Citizens protecting themselves

How to deal with the results

Numbers are weapons

The real value of the radiation

How to protect themselves

The official radiation limit

Counseling for parents

A tool to evaluate by themselves

Living with the Fallout

Ginray Bread Company

Natural, traditional ingredients

Coexisting with radiation

Bread for disaster victims

Promoting cooperation

Work sharing for people with disabilities

No radiation detected in Watanabe’s Fukushima City fruit

Sugeno fights for his Fukushima farm

Building a more sustainable future

Strengthening Fukushima pride

Safecast radiation monitoring

The goal of our documentary

Finding solutions to the nuclear crisis

Through the autumn harvest

The uncertainty of low-level contamination

Remembering Hiroshima bombing after Fukushima disaster

Ganbatte 365

Positive stories of post-disaster Japan

Carry on Fukushima

Evacuated farmer promises to fight

Yoshizawa refuses to kill his cows

Fukushima City Nuclear Protest

He can’t sell his rice, but he still has to grow it

Lone nuclear opponent won’t sell his rice

Farmers flee agricultural community

Hanawa farmers face uncertainty of low-level contamination


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