Women of Fukushima, voice of a movement in Japan

In the thirty-minute documentary film, "Women of Fukushima," three unseen filmmakers tell the story of the ongoing nuclear resistance through six women.
 

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On Dec. 1, a Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, said that 42 percent of tested people 18 and younger from Fukushima had thyroid cysts so far this fiscal year, up from 36 percent last fiscal year and that a similar 36 percent of children tested in Tokyo had thyroid cysts. It said experts said that radiation could not be the reason.

Many Japanese, however, are dubious about information coming from the media. Fukushima Voice, a blog started a year ago on the topic, questioned why Asahi Shimbun didn’t report details of the studies, such as how many children were tested before and after the disaster, since the study included test results as far back as 2003. Women featured in "Women of Fukushima" go further and say the government has been lying and covering up the severity of the radiation the whole time.
“The Japanese have been lied to,” says Setsuko Kida, in the trailer for the film.

 

Aki Hashimoto, the film’s website details, stayed in Fukushima with her family for a year because they were “not in a state to move,” and because of her son-in-law’s work. But now, it says, she hopes her granddaughter was not affected by radiation.
Kazue Morizono details in the first few minutes of the film, and the trailer, her immediate illnesses after the Daiichi plant meltdown. “I had all these different symptoms: terrible diarrhea, skin spots, vomiting, joint pain and canker sores in my mouth.”

Yukiko Takahashi connected with activists on Twitter after her parents fled from a city 25 miles from the plant to a city 50 miles away, only to find out radiation levels were higher there due to winds and rain, the film’s website recounts. It says, “The government and media withheld information about radiation levels to prevent panic.”

Setsuko Kida stayed mostly indoors until early 2012, but became extremely extraverted about her concerns of radioactivity in the prefecture, once speaking for three hours into a microphone in front of a train station, Co-Director Jeffrey Jousan said, next to Kida, Skyping from Japan.
On the other side of that Skype chat was a small white room full of some fifty people in Chinatown, New York City. A group of New York-based Japanese antinuclear activists screened the film, which Kida said had been difficult to screen in Japan.
Translating for Kida, Jousan said, “She says Japan is even worse than places like China and Korea. They’re just controlling information. Many places where she’s tried to get the movie shown, she’s been refused.”
Nevertheless, the film’s been screened at seven or eight places in Japan so far (at temples, universities and events) as well as in Taiwan, Australia, London and Norway, Jousan said. The Japanese version of the film is on Vimeo but hasn’t gone viral, and it’s up for two-dollar rent with English or French subtitles.
"Women of Fukushima" is about themes that the women in the film felt have been ignored by mainstream Japanese media: the true severity of radiation and the every day and weekly antinuclear and anti-radiation protests. The Chinatown screening served as an update of how far that movement has come.
The women in the film are part of that protest movement, which has ensued and grown since soon after the March, 2011 events. In September, 2011, six months in, a Radioactivists.org press release said protests related to nuclear power “recently became a daily fact of life in Japan.”

Yuko Tonohira, an antinuclear activist who co-hosted the screening in Chinatown, said the first large-scale
protest was in April, 2011 both in the United States and in Koenki, Tokyo, where 15,000 people took part. (The Japan Times put it even higher at the time, at 17,500). In September of that year a sit-in, organized by the Fukushima 100, a group of women from Fukushima, commenced outside the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry demanding, as Time called it in a title, "better protection for children exposed to radiation," and an end to nuclear power in Japan.
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n November, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper said that Fukushima began a life-long project of thyroid testing for 360,000 people who were 18 and younger during Three-Eleven.
Between Kida and Jousan, it was said that children’s thyroid abnormalities in Japan have not been allowed to be shown on Youtube; it was said out of 360,000 children in Fukushima, only 80,000 have been tested for radiation so far; it was said more than 50 percent had abnormalities and two have thyroid cancer, which, the government said was not related.
Kida said the topic of thyroid cysts is a sensitive one in Japan, that people are trying to make it like a norm.

“Even if you’re pro-nuke or anti-nuke,” Jousan translated for Kida, “you need to be anti-radiation exposure.”
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Setsuko Kida and Jeffrey Jousan on Skype,Documentary film"Women of Fukushima"Screening in NY.
昨年の暮れ、ニューヨークでの「福島の女たち」の上映にスカイプで参加した木田節子さんと監督さんのおはなしを後日まとめたものです。

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Women of Fukushima, voice of a movement in Japan (Photos)

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In the thirty-minute documentary film, "Women of Fukushima," three unseen filmmakers tell the story of the ongoing nuclear resistance through six women. The wom