documentary – Page 4 – Uncanny Terrain

January 7, 2012January 21, 2012

Fukushima 1 Year After the Meltdown

Fukushima farmers’ rice harvest sits in stockpiles, mostly unsold after radioactive cesium was detected in samples in and outside of the prefecture.

Unable to sell their rice, Fukushima organic farmers have become educators, promoting understanding among their customers about the interconnections of land use, energy consumption, and traditional culture.

Despite staggering odds, most of the farmers remain committed to preserving and recovering their land for future generations.

We return to Fukushima this March to capture the recovery efforts a year after the 3/11 tsunami, earthquake and nuclear disaster.

To support this endeavor, nonprofit arts support organization High Concept Laboratories presents Fukushima: 1 Year After the Meltdown, a benefit reception for Uncanny Terrain, Sunday, Feb. 5, 5-8 p.m. at 1401 W. Wabansia in Chicago.

From 6-7 p.m. we’ll screen a preview video with live accompaniment by our composer Tatsu Aoki and his band The MIYUMI Project, which performs a fusion of jazz and Japanese classical music.

Tatsu is a jazz bassist and a leader of the Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival and Tsukasa Taiko Legacy.

David Tanimura will showcase his digital collages inspired by the nuclear crisis. Refreshments will be served. The reception is free but rsvp is required, and tax-deductible donations to the film are welcome.

Not in Chicago? Can’t make it? Want to help today? We continue to gratefully accept online tax-deductible donations in support of Uncanny Terrain.

October 13, 2011October 13, 2011

Harvest Time in Fukushima

"Yes we can support local produce." A rice field in Iitatemura, uncultivated by government order.
Fukushima City Lantern Festival
Fukushima City Lantern Festival
Fukushima City Lantern Festival
Sugeno's rice harvest team: Serbian volunteer Milo, daughter Mizuho, and Owada and his grandparents, evacuated from Namie.
84-year-old rice farmer Yasukawa is defying a government order to burn his rice harvest.
Yasukawa shows conflicting government orders regarding his rice.
Watanabe turns over his field in hopes of burying radioactive cesium deeper than his vegetables' roots will reach.
Mt. Azuma, Fukushima
Mt. Azuma, Fukushima
Sunset over Mt. Shinobu, Fukushima City.

Just as the U.S. State Department announces that it’s safe to be here, it’s time for us to leave. We conclude our 20 weeks living and working among the organic farmers and food producers of Fukushima, a week after the State Department narrowed its travel advisory against visiting the area around the power plant from 80 kilometers to the Japanese government’s 20-kilometer evacuation zone.

Seven months since the beginning of the crisis, Japan stumbles toward recovery. Evacuated communities are being reopened near the nuclear plant, even as many efforts to decontaminate land are proving ineffective. With a number of notable exceptions, testing of rice and vegetables is showing much less contamination than was expected based on results in Chernobyl. Researchers investigate the reasons for these levels, considering the differing composition of Japanese soil, particularly certain minerals and bacteria that may remove radioactive cesium or prevent plants from absorbing it—bacteria that may thrive in organically cultivated land.

But the food testing regime is still sporadic, and no amount of lower test results will be sufficient to convince much of the public that Fukushima food is safe to eat. The organic farmers here toil to repair their land using natural methods (land that many of their families have tilled since before the U.S. was a country), to grow their food as free as possible of radionuclides, and to accurately communicate the condition of their produce to consumers. Constantly exposed to background radiation and inhaled particles in their fields, as well as from food and water, the farmers rank with cleanup workers in the groups at greatest risk of suffering health damage.

We will edit the film in Chicago through the fall and winter, and return to Japan next March to cover how the farmers weathered the seasons and how they fare as they prepare to plant again, a year after the disaster. In the meantime, we still need your support to cover the costs of postproduction. Please spread the word and if you can please make a tax-deductible donation to the project.

September 21, 2011September 19, 2019

Fukushima farmers keep calm and carry on [VIDEO]

by Ed M. Koziarski
Grist Magazine
9/20/2011

Round, rough-skinned pears fill our Fukushima City apartment. Before the pears it was enormous, impossibly succulent peaches. Apples will be next.

Prior to the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant six months ago, people all across Japan would send seasonal Fukushima-grown fruit to their relatives and neighbors. But now those outside Fukushima are too wary of possible radioactive contamination in produce grown here — and the fruit piles up.

The locals live with the risk. With a surplus of crops growing in the adjacent countryside, the fruits circulate in Fukushima like proverbial American fruitcakes at Christmas. We conspired to regift a box of pears to one neighbor, but they beat us to it and gave us another box. So we eat them all.

Sugeno fights for his Fukushima farm

Seiju Sugeno is an organic farmer in Towa, Nihonmatsu, 50 km from the failed Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The Abukuma Mountains partly shielded his rice fields from contamination, but runoff is an ongoing threat. Chairman of the Fukushima Organic Farmers Network, Sugeno works aggressively to clean his land and prevent his crops from absorbing radioactive cesium. He will work to reduce the contamination year by year, rigorously testing his yield and reporting any contamination he finds. His 23-year-old daughter Mizuho works with him. He hopes she can build a sustainable life for herself here.

Uncanny Terrain is a documentary about organic farmers facing Japan’s nuclear crisis, and an online community fostering dialogue on food safety, sustainable agriculture, alternative energy and disaster response. Please keep the conversation going by making a tax-deductible donation.

September 12, 2011September 12, 2011

The Harvest Approaches

Sugeno relaxes in the grass beside his radish field, Geiger counter in hand.
Junko and Sugeno finish planting radishes in his mountaintop field in Nihonmatsu.
Guests at Sugeno's farm enjoy flowers transplanted from the evacuation zone.
Asami looks out on his rice field in the mountains of Kitakata.
Asami shows Junko his favorite vantage point.
Asami and his intern Ota in the chicken coop.
Watanabe's fruit is showing undetectable radiation levels despite surrounding contamination in Fukushima City.
Masanori Yoshida looks out on his ancestral land, foreseeing big changes ahead.
Yumi and Masanori Yoshida care for their vegetable garden.
Yumi Yoshida displays her sweet potatoes.
Junko digs up a choice bunch of sweet potatoes.
The Yoshidas have been eating a lot of sweet potatoes. Sales of the bumper crop have been slow.

August 29, 2011August 29, 2011

Safecast Radiation Monitoring Seminar

At Tokyo Hacker Space on 6/24/11, members of the NGO Safecast present the goals, methods, and results of their ongoing volunteer project to independently measure and map contamination levels from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant fallout at hundreds of thousands of sites across Japan.

Uncanny Terrain is a documentary about organic farmers facing Japan’s nuclear crisis, and an international online community fostering dialogue on food safety, sustainable agriculture, alternative energy and disaster response. Please keep the conversation going by making a tax-deductible donation.

August 21, 2011August 21, 2011

Positive stories of Japanese recovery from Ganbatte 365

These 15-second videos we produced for the Tokyo nonprofit Ganbatte 365 will appear on electronic billboards in Tokyo and Osaka.

August 16, 2011

Remembering Hiroshima bombing after Fukushima disaster

On Aug. 6 we attended the 66th anniversary of the world’s first nuclear attack in Hiroshima, with Yuji Ohashi, a Fukushima City bread company owner who is committed to rebuilding Fukushima in the face of the nuclear fallout.

But Steven Leeper, the first non-Japanese chairman of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, says Fukushima’s recovery will be much harder than Hiroshima’s was. He’s hopeful that in light of the Fukushima crisis, Japan might overcome the nuclear industry’s dominance of its national politics and lead an international movement for a future free of nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

Uncanny Terrain is a documentary about organic farmers facing Japan’s nuclear crisis, and an online community fostering international dialogue about food safety, sustainable agriculture, alternative energy, and disaster response. Please keep the conversation going by making a tax-deductible donation.

August 16, 2011August 16, 2011

Hiroshima, Soma, Nihonmatsu and Fukushima City

On Aug. 6 we attended the 66th anniversary of the world’s first nuclear attack in Hiroshima, with Yuji Ohashi, a Fukushima City bread company owner who is committed to rebuilding Fukushima in the face of the nuclear fallout.
The Hiroshima victims' memorial
Obon, the August ancestors holiday, is especially poignant this year for those who lost family in the March disaster.
We marked the occasion at a floating lantern ceremony in the ravaged port of Soma, led by fishermen unable to catch their harvest in the irradiated ocean.
The Soma floating lantern ceremony
Monks at the Soma floating lantern ceremony
In Nihonmatsu, 50 km from the still-leaking Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, organic farmer Sugeno planted sunflowers instead of rice on contaminated parts of his land. Sugeno will continue cultivating, growing what he can in greenhouses and otherwise minimizing his customers' exposure. He will work to reduce his land’s contamination each year until he can eventually approach pre-meltdown levels.
Sugeno is sheltering this goat rescued from the evacuation zone.
Ota is the 16th president of his family's 260-year-old premium sake company, Daishichi. Their business is up 70% since the disaster, with more orders from the U.S., less from Europe. But it will be another 2 1/2 years before sake brewed from this year's rice reaches the market.
This wild mushroom on Shinobu Mountain in Fukushima City would normally be edible, if not for the nuclear fallout.

August 3, 2011August 3, 2011

Yoshizawa gets his radiation results and partial compensation

Yoshizawa at evacuated Namie's city hall-in-exile in Nihonmatsu, awaiting the results of his full-body radiation scan.
Yoshizawa displays the results of his radiation scan, which indicate he's been exposed to only .3 millisieverts since March. He's dubious of this figure, considering he was within earshot of the reactor explosion and has been returning to the evacuation zone weekly to care for his cows.
Iwaki hula girls perform at Nihonmatsu Candle Festival.
Giant dragonfly in Nihonmatsu castle park.
Bug in a well at Nihonmatsu castle.
Yoshizawa and Murata throw a barbecue to celebrate receiving half of their substantial compensation claim from Tokyo Electric Power Company for losses due to radioactive contamination of their cattle ranch.
A mother feeds her son at Yoshizawa's compensation party.
Revelers were eating this Wagyu beef raw at Yoshizawa's compensation party.
When the town of Towa was absorbed into Nihonmatsu City, they formed a nonprofit organization to preserve local culture and farming practices. A transplant from Osaka, Ebisawa is director of the group. He's been resurrecting Towa's ancient mulberry industry, and now he's running an active radiation measurement program.
Ebisawa demonstrates Towa's "healthy food" independent organic certification.
A diorama in Ebisawa's grocery store depicts traditional fertilizer production.