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Oscar and Emmy nominated short film. Survivors in the areas hardest hit by Japan's recent tsunami find the courage to revive and rebuild as cherry blossom season begins. A stunning visual poem about the ephemeral nature of life and the healing power of Japan's most beloved flower. Winner of the Non-Fiction Short Film Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
Here’s the trailer:
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
The first questions I’m asked are usually how this film came to be, and how I came to be in Japan so soon after the tragic events of March 11th, 2011. There’s no quick answer. This is a classic story of how a documentary comes together by evolving with real events and creatively responding to the stories that were unfolding.
I was already planning to be in Japan. I had been invited to a press junket in Tokyo last March to promote the release of my film Countdown to Zero, about nuclear weapons, and I had accepted the invitation because I took very seriously the responsibility of presenting the film in Japan, given the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was planning to take a personal detour to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, which was something of a pilgrimage for me, and I thought might be a sort of personal closure for my work regarding nuclear weapons. I was also hoping to fulfill my lifelong dream of seeing the sakura, the cherry blossom, and going to hanami, cherry blossom viewing parties. I was contemplating shooting some blossoms, making a 5-minute “visual haiku”, and I brought in my friend Kira Carstensen to produce this with me. Kira was as smitten with cherry blossom as I was, and had been making commercials but had always wanted to get back to documentaries.
There are a few roots to my appreciation of cherry blossom. I’ve always been struck by both the visual and the symbolic image of the blossom. I started photographing blossom when I started studying photography the spring that I turned 15. There were some breathtaking cherry trees in my school’s back garden, and I experimented with how to frame and develop the photographs. From then on I noticed that the blossoms were so brief and so sumptuous, I wanted to drop everything to enjoy every second of them. I couldn’t understand why people didn’t make more of it, write poems about it, paint pictures of it, and just go all out reveling in it.
It was only later when I visited Japan that I realized that here was a whole country full of people as obsessed with the blossom as I was. I visited Japan twice in my early 20s, both times in mid-winter, and found it such an aesthetically and visually thrilling place that I couldn’t stop taking photographs and shooting video, with shrines and trees and street scenes stunning red lanterns and white snow. I walked around alone falling in love with woodblock prints and brush calligraphy and ceramics and architecture and manga… I found the whole place visually electrifying: even the Tokyo subway map, or a trip to a supermarket where I couldn’t understand any labels. I shot people dozing on subways and kids playing videogames and I rewatched Tokyo-ga and Sans Soleil and Kurosawa, Ozu, Teshigahara and Mizoguchi movies. And then I finally learned about the Japanese love of sakura, or cherry blossom: that everybody drops everything to go to “hanami” parties, sitting on blankets underneath the trees, drinking sake and gazing up at the flowers and reflecting on the fleetingness and preciousness of the blossoms, and of our own lives. The “sakura zensen” (the blossom progression front) was as closely followed in Japan as the football scores in Britain – the nightly news reports on it like the weather, complete with an elaborate technical vocabulary to indicate the precise percentage of bud opening.
I longed to visit Japan during cherry blossom season, as the years of my own short life were passing by.
Then a few years ago I was taking care of my mother when she was ill with cancer, and it was March when we realized that her disease was incurable, terminal. We looked out of the window, and it was a startling spring day in England, and the trees were in full bloom like psychedelic fluffy popcorn against an abyss of blue sky. English springtime is stunning with blossom. The payoff for such long dreary wet winters are the most intensely green fecund fragrant springs. My mother was saying that she wouldn’t see the blossom again, and she told me a story that she’d told me before, but never so poignantly. When she had been taking care of her mother (my grandmother) who had then been dying of cancer, my grandmother had similarly looked out of the window and told my mother that she wouldn’t see the blossom again, to which my 20-year-old mother had found herself replying “don’t worry, of course you’ll get better soon and see the blossom again”. But my grandmother was right, she never did get to see any more blossom, and my mother always regretted not being able to talk directly with her about life and death, to look their mortality directly in the eye, so to speak, and at least to share an honest moment about the sadness to be felt. And now, when my mother looked out of the window, it was the last time that she saw the blossom. She died at dawn that July 4th.
Soon after my mother died, my father suddenly died also, and we buried him under an olive tree and that gives us comfort. As I was grieving I visited Washington, DC during the cherry blossom season, and the blossoms brightened my heart. I took the train up to New York and the “sakura zensen” blossom front followed me there. I bought some fake blossom boughs in a Japanese store – fake but nicely-made and rather beautiful nonetheless. I decorated my house with the branches to cheer myself up, and it worked. I read Japanese death poetry as I mourned. And I still have those blossom boughs in my house.
Ever since then I wanted to make a film about the cherry blossom, to ask how human beings can find hope after loss, and how to carry on in the face of suffering and shortness of life. I’ve wanted to go to hanami (cherry blossom viewing parties) and read haiku and drink sake and get high on life and talk openly about death. I was so happy that a whole culture in Japan saw what I did in the brief flings of the sakura (cherry blossom).
By March 3rd, 2011, Kira and I were all set for a modest shoot, backed up by her wonderful partners in Supply and Demand Integrated, Tim Case and Charles V. Salice. Then on March 11th, 2011, when the Great East Japan, aka Tōhoku earthquake struck, I was online in New York, finalizing the plans for the press junket. The publicist in LA noticed the earthquake news reported on the wires, and asked if everyone in Tokyo was okay. They paused slightly before saying that they were fine, and they were asking me for my frequent flier number. I assumed it must have been a very small earthquake and that the publicist was being polite. Then I clicked and read online that that this had been the largest earthquake – magnitude 9.0 – in Japanese history. I asked everyone, wait, it sounds like it was a bad earthquake? They said that it was the worst they could remember. I begged everyone to please not worry about something so silly as frequent flier miles, and to please take care of themselves first of all.
Then over the next few days the news kept getting worse, as news of the tsunami and nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi plant unfolded. I couldn’t stop watching the 24-hour news about it. I felt scared to go to Japan, it seemed too tragic and also frightening, with the contamination and blackouts reaching even Tokyo. My friends living there were quietly evacuating. First the press junket for Countdown to Zero was cancelled, then the release was postponed, due to the understandable need for sensitivity and wish to avoid nuclear panic. So I didn’t need to do this trip to Japan at all. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The ideas were playing in my head. I couldn’t help thinking that maybe this was the most important time of all to go to Japan, that this cherry blossom season – with its spirit of renewal, and its symbolism of the fragility of life – would be the most important one ever. I wondered if I should make a film about Japan right now, to express our solidarity with Japanese people in their most challenging time, to offer our appreciation and understanding of their culture and character, and to find out what actually happened to the people who were suffering because of the tsunami. What would the cherry blossoms feel like this year, when there was nothing pretty and fluffy about life at all, when the fragility of life was so horrifically painful and present.
I organized to fly to Japan with my longterm collaborator Aaron Phillips, a genius DP with whom I’d been working since NYU film school. I got cold feet the night before we were scheduled to fly, and Aaron reminded me that our project was an important one, and convinced me not to cancel. We found a third team member in James MacWhyte, a young American who had been living in Japan for seven years, who would translate for us. I recorded the sound myself, and between the three of us we did everything, including drive and carry the equipment.
When we landed in Tokyo the immigration officers at the airport were very surprised to see us, since foreigners were all leaving Japan, and we seemed to be the only ones arriving. In the city there were rolling blackouts, with all the big stores, the street lights, and the buildings weirdly unlit at night — it wasn’t the familiar Tokyo at all. There were radiation contamination alerts, and the shelves were empty of bottled water and drinks. For me the most difficult thing were the aftershocks, which were hitting every couple of hours, some of them pretty major earthquakes, which would wake us up several times a night. We began by heading south and making the pilgrimage to Hiroshima, and we followed the sakura zensen north as spring advanced, stopping in Kyoto where the blossoms are perhaps the most beautiful. But everyone I spoke to was wondering what was happening in the Tōhoku region. I kept thinking that the film was asking me to go to that area and meet the people there and find out what they were experiencing. Fortunately Kira agreed with me and we doubled down and planned to shoot for another ten days. An old friend of mine, a very smart writer named Richard Lloyd-Parry, was the correspondent in Tokyo for the London Times, and he had excellent information about how to get around, how to rent a car, how to be safe. So we drove the narrow road to the great north, following in Basho’s footsteps, to the Tōhoku region where the tsunami had hit.
Nothing prepared us for being in that landscape. Photos aren’t three-dimensional. The area of devastation was so immense, and so little work was going on yet to clean up. I guess I was expecting a smaller disaster zone with more people. Instead the damage stretched for miles around, and there were only very occasionally other lone human beings climbing around over the debris in this post-apocalyptic dystopia. To my surprise many people would approach us, and were very happy to share their story. That was the best part. There were too many worst parts: seeing blasted vehicles with keys in the ignition, or seeing that someone had been inside, the signs painted on cars and houses to say that bodies had been found inside, the terrible smells that emanated here and there. The radiation was a big concern: I was well-informed about the risks thanks to my work on Countdown to Zero, but every time we ate, or every time it rained, or every time we washed, we were thinking about how not to be contaminated. The film doesn’t really delve too deeply into the radiation and nuclear story, since that’s a long film in itself, but it disturbed me how confused and ill-informed people were. Many people believed that the simple white cotton masks, generally used to help prevent spreading colds, could guard against radiation. At night our accommodations got rougher, and we saw more injured and bandaged and displaced people as we drove north. For the last few days we were staying at an extremely rustic mountain inn which was packed with rescue workers. Aaron and James shared a room. Since I was the only female in the whole place, I had my own room, but if I wanted to wash at night (and I’ve never in my life wanted more to be clean, given what we had been walking through during the day) then I had to wait for all the men to come out of the female side of the baths, and then I would have that side to myself.
Back home, I was determined to find a Japanese editor and I couldn’t have been luckier than to find Aki Mizutani. Coincidentally, she had been flying to Tokyo on March 11th, landing about an hour after the earthquake, and she wanted to do something to help so she was keen to come on board. I had known I wanted to use a lengthy shot of the entire tsunami to begin the film, and I had seen a few shots which had a very powerful build to them – the shot I originally had in mind for the opening started with a normal town and the water kept rising and kept rising and kept rising and then kept rising some more, until the tsunami was unimaginable in its magnitude. I wanted to structure the edit around the idea of moving from the tsunami and the initial shock through the stages of denial, grief, acceptance, to moving on – which was reflected in the seasonal shift from winter to spring, and the transition from tsunami to cherry blossom. Aki found the opening shot and we recognized that it was the exact same spot from where we had been filming with the young woman with the camera. I wanted to use this footage in its entirety, just letting it play, without adding effects, just leaving it as is, other than adding subtitles. I couldn’t imagine anything more powerful than just using it as it was, and I couldn’t imagine any worse disaster than what I saw. It made every horror movie look weak, for not being as horrifying as this real event. I wanted to use Moby’s music because of its lyrical emotional feeling, which helped me absorb these most upsetting of all images.
And most of all I was moved and impressed by the people we met, as well as the people we heard about. Like the heroic young woman Miki Endo, an employee of the municipality of Minami-Sanriku in Miyagi Prefecture, who did not move from her post in order to warn people of the impending tsunami, and saved many many lives by keeping at her work until the tsunami killed her. The stories are legion of wallets and possessions having been returned to their owners. It was like the opposite of looting and chaos. In one school, even though there was no food or water or heat for three days following the disaster, when food finally came it was shared equally and even saved to avoid unfair distribution. This was community cooperation and selflessness to an extent I’m not sure I would have believed possible. I’ve never seen such clean bathrooms as at the refugee centers. It was hugely impressive and inspiring.
There is a Japanese concept of “wabi-sabi” which I love and is at the core of my aesthetic practice, and especially in making this film. I thought it was imperative that this film should be wabi-sabi. A bit simple. Personal, direct, humble, not too slick or fancy or over-the-top. Letting it be what it is – modest, unique, human, and from-the-heart. A definition of wabi-sabi is a little elusive but it is something of an aesthetic based on transience and modesty. According to wikipedia, wabi-sabi is beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”, with characteristics that include asymmetry, asperity (roughness or irregularity), simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes. Both on the shoot and in the editing room and as we worked on the graphic design I kept using this concept of wabi-sabi as a guiding principle to describe how we wanted every aspect of the film to be. It would have been inappropriate if we’d had a giant slick credit sequence, or fancy ways of editing between different people speaking in the film.
Another Japanese concept which I’ve thought about a lot is “mono no aware”, which cherry blossom epitomizes. ‘Mono no aware’ means something like “the pathos of things”, “an empathy toward things”, “a sensitivity to ephemera”, and is a term used to describe awareness of impermanence and the transience of things, and a gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing. The word is derived from the Japanese word “mono”, meaning “things”, and “aware”, which was a Heian period expression of measured surprise, similar to “ah” or “oh”, translating roughly into “pathos”, “poignancy”, “deep feeling”, or “sensitivity”. Thus “mono no aware” has been translated as “the ahh-ness of things”, life, and love. Awareness of the transience of all things heightens appreciation of their beauty, and evokes a gentle sadness at their passing, and is associated with Japanese cultural tradition including sakura.
I am also very inspired by the ideas of the spiritual beliefs that the cherry blossom represents. We were extremely fortunate to be granted an unprecedented interview with Sano Toemon XVI, the sixteenth generation “keeper of the cherries” or “cherry master”, whose personal nursery outside Kyoto was perhaps the most beautiful place we had ever visited, and was lit by flaming torches at night to keep the frost away from the blossoms. As Mr. Sano explains, Buddhism and Shinto meet in Japanese culture, and that meeting is expressed perfectly by the cherry blossom. As followers of Shinto — which holds that gods dwell in every feature of the natural world, from tall old trees to sacred mountain rocks — the Japanese have revered nature since ancient times. Then from the continent came Buddhism and the notion that all things are in flux and nothing is permanent. Eventually the two belief systems fused and spread through the population, giving rise to a spiritual acceptance and appreciation of the constantly changing and regenerating natural world as it is, in all its glory and evanescence. This philosophy still applies today whenever we encounter cherry blossom. Cherry trees bloom throughout Japan in a single burst of color, flowering in a fleeting beauty, and are shed as quickly as they emerged. In the purity of cherry blossom the Japanese sense impermanence, and in its limited life, they perceive the unlimited beauty of nature. This very sensitivity is part of the culture. The blossoms also reflect so many emotions, memories, and facets of Japanese character (such as the beauty of many small flowers blooming together rather than solo, and the fact that most schools have cherry trees outside, and the spring coincides with the start and end of the school year, and so is full of associations of first meetings and final farewells).
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the gift of the cherry trees from Japan to Washington, DC. I am honored to have made the film in time to screen as part of the festivities to celebrate such a thoughtful gift.
Our goal is simply that the film will be shared in positive ways to promote understanding, healing, and positive action. Our website also has details on how to provide assistance to the survivors. And although I had non-Japanese audiences in mind when I was making the film, nothing makes us happier than hearing from Japanese audiences that they have found the film meaningful.
There is no celebration to be had when over 15,000 people died and so many more thousands are missing or displaced. The film is steeped in so much sorrow as it progresses through the stages of shock, loss, grieving through to perseverance and courage and hope, as human beings and nature alike – as expressed by the cherry trees – dig deep and find the way to continue. The film is a testament to the people who had the fortitude and courage to share their stories and their grace, and to our collaborators who worked so hard and so brilliantly to let the voices of these reserved, dignified, resilient people be heard around the world as the first anniversary of March 11th, 2011 approaches. I could not have been more impressed and inspired by the way the survivors in the Tōhoku region are moving forward. This film is dedicated to them.
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HAIKU AND POEMS
Some haiku and poems that have been on my mind as we made and shared the film.
Even more wonderful as they fall, the cherry blossoms.
Does anything last in this grievous world?
- Anonymous, Tales of Ise
The owner of the cherry blossoms
turns to compost
for the trees.
- Utsu’s death poem
At cherry blossom parties in this keep
Old pines caught the new light of the moon
And cast it glittering over the sake cup;
How can such brilliance have passed so soon?
- Doi Bansui
a lovely spring night
suddenly vanished while we
viewed cherry blossoms
- Basho
As we turn the corners of the narrow road to the deep north, we may soar with exhilaration, or we may fall flat on our faces, doubled up by the suffering in our hearts.
- from the epilog to “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” by Basho
Even if the cherry blossoms bloom,
ours is a world of suffering.
- Issa
our two lives:
between them has lived
this blossoming cherry
- Basho
Joyous things happen
Sad things happen
Grass grows
- Santoka
I want to do to you what spring does with the cherry trees
- Pablo Neruda
They can cut all the flowers but they can’t hold back the spring
- Pablo Neruda
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
- Dylan Thomas
AWARDS & HONORS
• Nominee, Best Documentary Short, The 84th Annual Academy Awards 2012
• Nominee, Emmy Award for Best Documentary, 34th Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards
• Nominee, Emmy Award for Best Continuing Coverage of a News Story, Long Form, 34th Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards
• Winner, Non-Fiction Short Film Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival 2012
• Winner, Women In Film National Geographic All Roads Award, Sundance Film Festival 2012
• Winner, Polly Krakora Award for Artistry in Film, DC Environmental Film Festival 2012
• Winner, Laurissilva Award for Best Film, Madeira Film Festival 2012
• Winner, Audience Award for Best Short Film, Florida Film Festival 2012
• Winner, Best Documentary, Nevada City Film Festival 2012
• Winner, Best of the Fest, Nevada City Film Festival 2012
• Winner, Audience Award for Best Film, Dominican Republic Environmental Film Festival 2013
• Premiered at Toronto International Film Festival Documentary Conference 2011 (out of competition)
PRESS QUOTES
“Because they are so difficult to see elsewhere, Sundance has always extended its welcome to shorts, and one of the most memorable this year, winner of a jury prize as well as an Oscar nomination, is Lucy Walker’s unforgettable “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom,” a look at the aftermath of the 2011 Japanese disaster that emphasizes the way “beauty and terror always exist in nature.” A festival with room for a film like this has to be given the benefit of the doubt.”
-Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times
“It’s a well-deserved [Oscar] nod. The 38-minute film captures the Japanese experience of the March 11, 2011, tsunami with a quiet beauty, power, and dignity.”
-onEarth
“Lucy Walker’s skillful and sincere direction allows her to illicit from her inteview subjects, genuine emotions on how the Cherry Blossoms have affected the Japanese people and how they now look to them for emotional reassurance.”
-DIALMFORMOVIES
“This film is considered a short, it runs for 40 minutes which is a bit long for a short film. It is actually just the right amount of time. There is no dwelling on the horror of March 11th and the following months. There is a lot of video of the Tsunami hitting the coastal communities, but the majority of the film deals with rebirth.
The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom is a beautiful film that shows, once again, how gracious and strong Japanese people are in the face of great tragedy.”
-examiner.com
Here’s the trailer:
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
The first questions I’m asked are usually how this film came to be, and how I came to be in Japan so soon after the tragic events of March 11th, 2011. There’s no quick answer. This is a classic story of how a documentary comes together by evolving with real events and creatively responding to the stories that were unfolding.
I was already planning to be in Japan. I had been invited to a press junket in Tokyo last March to promote the release of my film Countdown to Zero, about nuclear weapons, and I had accepted the invitation because I took very seriously the responsibility of presenting the film in Japan, given the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was planning to take a personal detour to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, which was something of a pilgrimage for me, and I thought might be a sort of personal closure for my work regarding nuclear weapons. I was also hoping to fulfill my lifelong dream of seeing the sakura, the cherry blossom, and going to hanami, cherry blossom viewing parties. I was contemplating shooting some blossoms, making a 5-minute “visual haiku”, and I brought in my friend Kira Carstensen to produce this with me. Kira was as smitten with cherry blossom as I was, and had been making commercials but had always wanted to get back to documentaries.
There are a few roots to my appreciation of cherry blossom. I’ve always been struck by both the visual and the symbolic image of the blossom. I started photographing blossom when I started studying photography the spring that I turned 15. There were some breathtaking cherry trees in my school’s back garden, and I experimented with how to frame and develop the photographs. From then on I noticed that the blossoms were so brief and so sumptuous, I wanted to drop everything to enjoy every second of them. I couldn’t understand why people didn’t make more of it, write poems about it, paint pictures of it, and just go all out reveling in it.
It was only later when I visited Japan that I realized that here was a whole country full of people as obsessed with the blossom as I was. I visited Japan twice in my early 20s, both times in mid-winter, and found it such an aesthetically and visually thrilling place that I couldn’t stop taking photographs and shooting video, with shrines and trees and street scenes stunning red lanterns and white snow. I walked around alone falling in love with woodblock prints and brush calligraphy and ceramics and architecture and manga… I found the whole place visually electrifying: even the Tokyo subway map, or a trip to a supermarket where I couldn’t understand any labels. I shot people dozing on subways and kids playing videogames and I rewatched Tokyo-ga and Sans Soleil and Kurosawa, Ozu, Teshigahara and Mizoguchi movies. And then I finally learned about the Japanese love of sakura, or cherry blossom: that everybody drops everything to go to “hanami” parties, sitting on blankets underneath the trees, drinking sake and gazing up at the flowers and reflecting on the fleetingness and preciousness of the blossoms, and of our own lives. The “sakura zensen” (the blossom progression front) was as closely followed in Japan as the football scores in Britain – the nightly news reports on it like the weather, complete with an elaborate technical vocabulary to indicate the precise percentage of bud opening.
I longed to visit Japan during cherry blossom season, as the years of my own short life were passing by.
Then a few years ago I was taking care of my mother when she was ill with cancer, and it was March when we realized that her disease was incurable, terminal. We looked out of the window, and it was a startling spring day in England, and the trees were in full bloom like psychedelic fluffy popcorn against an abyss of blue sky. English springtime is stunning with blossom. The payoff for such long dreary wet winters are the most intensely green fecund fragrant springs. My mother was saying that she wouldn’t see the blossom again, and she told me a story that she’d told me before, but never so poignantly. When she had been taking care of her mother (my grandmother) who had then been dying of cancer, my grandmother had similarly looked out of the window and told my mother that she wouldn’t see the blossom again, to which my 20-year-old mother had found herself replying “don’t worry, of course you’ll get better soon and see the blossom again”. But my grandmother was right, she never did get to see any more blossom, and my mother always regretted not being able to talk directly with her about life and death, to look their mortality directly in the eye, so to speak, and at least to share an honest moment about the sadness to be felt. And now, when my mother looked out of the window, it was the last time that she saw the blossom. She died at dawn that July 4th.
Soon after my mother died, my father suddenly died also, and we buried him under an olive tree and that gives us comfort. As I was grieving I visited Washington, DC during the cherry blossom season, and the blossoms brightened my heart. I took the train up to New York and the “sakura zensen” blossom front followed me there. I bought some fake blossom boughs in a Japanese store – fake but nicely-made and rather beautiful nonetheless. I decorated my house with the branches to cheer myself up, and it worked. I read Japanese death poetry as I mourned. And I still have those blossom boughs in my house.
Ever since then I wanted to make a film about the cherry blossom, to ask how human beings can find hope after loss, and how to carry on in the face of suffering and shortness of life. I’ve wanted to go to hanami (cherry blossom viewing parties) and read haiku and drink sake and get high on life and talk openly about death. I was so happy that a whole culture in Japan saw what I did in the brief flings of the sakura (cherry blossom).
By March 3rd, 2011, Kira and I were all set for a modest shoot, backed up by her wonderful partners in Supply and Demand Integrated, Tim Case and Charles V. Salice. Then on March 11th, 2011, when the Great East Japan, aka Tōhoku earthquake struck, I was online in New York, finalizing the plans for the press junket. The publicist in LA noticed the earthquake news reported on the wires, and asked if everyone in Tokyo was okay. They paused slightly before saying that they were fine, and they were asking me for my frequent flier number. I assumed it must have been a very small earthquake and that the publicist was being polite. Then I clicked and read online that that this had been the largest earthquake – magnitude 9.0 – in Japanese history. I asked everyone, wait, it sounds like it was a bad earthquake? They said that it was the worst they could remember. I begged everyone to please not worry about something so silly as frequent flier miles, and to please take care of themselves first of all.
Then over the next few days the news kept getting worse, as news of the tsunami and nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi plant unfolded. I couldn’t stop watching the 24-hour news about it. I felt scared to go to Japan, it seemed too tragic and also frightening, with the contamination and blackouts reaching even Tokyo. My friends living there were quietly evacuating. First the press junket for Countdown to Zero was cancelled, then the release was postponed, due to the understandable need for sensitivity and wish to avoid nuclear panic. So I didn’t need to do this trip to Japan at all. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The ideas were playing in my head. I couldn’t help thinking that maybe this was the most important time of all to go to Japan, that this cherry blossom season – with its spirit of renewal, and its symbolism of the fragility of life – would be the most important one ever. I wondered if I should make a film about Japan right now, to express our solidarity with Japanese people in their most challenging time, to offer our appreciation and understanding of their culture and character, and to find out what actually happened to the people who were suffering because of the tsunami. What would the cherry blossoms feel like this year, when there was nothing pretty and fluffy about life at all, when the fragility of life was so horrifically painful and present.
I organized to fly to Japan with my longterm collaborator Aaron Phillips, a genius DP with whom I’d been working since NYU film school. I got cold feet the night before we were scheduled to fly, and Aaron reminded me that our project was an important one, and convinced me not to cancel. We found a third team member in James MacWhyte, a young American who had been living in Japan for seven years, who would translate for us. I recorded the sound myself, and between the three of us we did everything, including drive and carry the equipment.
When we landed in Tokyo the immigration officers at the airport were very surprised to see us, since foreigners were all leaving Japan, and we seemed to be the only ones arriving. In the city there were rolling blackouts, with all the big stores, the street lights, and the buildings weirdly unlit at night — it wasn’t the familiar Tokyo at all. There were radiation contamination alerts, and the shelves were empty of bottled water and drinks. For me the most difficult thing were the aftershocks, which were hitting every couple of hours, some of them pretty major earthquakes, which would wake us up several times a night. We began by heading south and making the pilgrimage to Hiroshima, and we followed the sakura zensen north as spring advanced, stopping in Kyoto where the blossoms are perhaps the most beautiful. But everyone I spoke to was wondering what was happening in the Tōhoku region. I kept thinking that the film was asking me to go to that area and meet the people there and find out what they were experiencing. Fortunately Kira agreed with me and we doubled down and planned to shoot for another ten days. An old friend of mine, a very smart writer named Richard Lloyd-Parry, was the correspondent in Tokyo for the London Times, and he had excellent information about how to get around, how to rent a car, how to be safe. So we drove the narrow road to the great north, following in Basho’s footsteps, to the Tōhoku region where the tsunami had hit.
Nothing prepared us for being in that landscape. Photos aren’t three-dimensional. The area of devastation was so immense, and so little work was going on yet to clean up. I guess I was expecting a smaller disaster zone with more people. Instead the damage stretched for miles around, and there were only very occasionally other lone human beings climbing around over the debris in this post-apocalyptic dystopia. To my surprise many people would approach us, and were very happy to share their story. That was the best part. There were too many worst parts: seeing blasted vehicles with keys in the ignition, or seeing that someone had been inside, the signs painted on cars and houses to say that bodies had been found inside, the terrible smells that emanated here and there. The radiation was a big concern: I was well-informed about the risks thanks to my work on Countdown to Zero, but every time we ate, or every time it rained, or every time we washed, we were thinking about how not to be contaminated. The film doesn’t really delve too deeply into the radiation and nuclear story, since that’s a long film in itself, but it disturbed me how confused and ill-informed people were. Many people believed that the simple white cotton masks, generally used to help prevent spreading colds, could guard against radiation. At night our accommodations got rougher, and we saw more injured and bandaged and displaced people as we drove north. For the last few days we were staying at an extremely rustic mountain inn which was packed with rescue workers. Aaron and James shared a room. Since I was the only female in the whole place, I had my own room, but if I wanted to wash at night (and I’ve never in my life wanted more to be clean, given what we had been walking through during the day) then I had to wait for all the men to come out of the female side of the baths, and then I would have that side to myself.
Back home, I was determined to find a Japanese editor and I couldn’t have been luckier than to find Aki Mizutani. Coincidentally, she had been flying to Tokyo on March 11th, landing about an hour after the earthquake, and she wanted to do something to help so she was keen to come on board. I had known I wanted to use a lengthy shot of the entire tsunami to begin the film, and I had seen a few shots which had a very powerful build to them – the shot I originally had in mind for the opening started with a normal town and the water kept rising and kept rising and kept rising and then kept rising some more, until the tsunami was unimaginable in its magnitude. I wanted to structure the edit around the idea of moving from the tsunami and the initial shock through the stages of denial, grief, acceptance, to moving on – which was reflected in the seasonal shift from winter to spring, and the transition from tsunami to cherry blossom. Aki found the opening shot and we recognized that it was the exact same spot from where we had been filming with the young woman with the camera. I wanted to use this footage in its entirety, just letting it play, without adding effects, just leaving it as is, other than adding subtitles. I couldn’t imagine anything more powerful than just using it as it was, and I couldn’t imagine any worse disaster than what I saw. It made every horror movie look weak, for not being as horrifying as this real event. I wanted to use Moby’s music because of its lyrical emotional feeling, which helped me absorb these most upsetting of all images.
And most of all I was moved and impressed by the people we met, as well as the people we heard about. Like the heroic young woman Miki Endo, an employee of the municipality of Minami-Sanriku in Miyagi Prefecture, who did not move from her post in order to warn people of the impending tsunami, and saved many many lives by keeping at her work until the tsunami killed her. The stories are legion of wallets and possessions having been returned to their owners. It was like the opposite of looting and chaos. In one school, even though there was no food or water or heat for three days following the disaster, when food finally came it was shared equally and even saved to avoid unfair distribution. This was community cooperation and selflessness to an extent I’m not sure I would have believed possible. I’ve never seen such clean bathrooms as at the refugee centers. It was hugely impressive and inspiring.
There is a Japanese concept of “wabi-sabi” which I love and is at the core of my aesthetic practice, and especially in making this film. I thought it was imperative that this film should be wabi-sabi. A bit simple. Personal, direct, humble, not too slick or fancy or over-the-top. Letting it be what it is – modest, unique, human, and from-the-heart. A definition of wabi-sabi is a little elusive but it is something of an aesthetic based on transience and modesty. According to wikipedia, wabi-sabi is beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”, with characteristics that include asymmetry, asperity (roughness or irregularity), simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes. Both on the shoot and in the editing room and as we worked on the graphic design I kept using this concept of wabi-sabi as a guiding principle to describe how we wanted every aspect of the film to be. It would have been inappropriate if we’d had a giant slick credit sequence, or fancy ways of editing between different people speaking in the film.
Another Japanese concept which I’ve thought about a lot is “mono no aware”, which cherry blossom epitomizes. ‘Mono no aware’ means something like “the pathos of things”, “an empathy toward things”, “a sensitivity to ephemera”, and is a term used to describe awareness of impermanence and the transience of things, and a gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing. The word is derived from the Japanese word “mono”, meaning “things”, and “aware”, which was a Heian period expression of measured surprise, similar to “ah” or “oh”, translating roughly into “pathos”, “poignancy”, “deep feeling”, or “sensitivity”. Thus “mono no aware” has been translated as “the ahh-ness of things”, life, and love. Awareness of the transience of all things heightens appreciation of their beauty, and evokes a gentle sadness at their passing, and is associated with Japanese cultural tradition including sakura.
I am also very inspired by the ideas of the spiritual beliefs that the cherry blossom represents. We were extremely fortunate to be granted an unprecedented interview with Sano Toemon XVI, the sixteenth generation “keeper of the cherries” or “cherry master”, whose personal nursery outside Kyoto was perhaps the most beautiful place we had ever visited, and was lit by flaming torches at night to keep the frost away from the blossoms. As Mr. Sano explains, Buddhism and Shinto meet in Japanese culture, and that meeting is expressed perfectly by the cherry blossom. As followers of Shinto — which holds that gods dwell in every feature of the natural world, from tall old trees to sacred mountain rocks — the Japanese have revered nature since ancient times. Then from the continent came Buddhism and the notion that all things are in flux and nothing is permanent. Eventually the two belief systems fused and spread through the population, giving rise to a spiritual acceptance and appreciation of the constantly changing and regenerating natural world as it is, in all its glory and evanescence. This philosophy still applies today whenever we encounter cherry blossom. Cherry trees bloom throughout Japan in a single burst of color, flowering in a fleeting beauty, and are shed as quickly as they emerged. In the purity of cherry blossom the Japanese sense impermanence, and in its limited life, they perceive the unlimited beauty of nature. This very sensitivity is part of the culture. The blossoms also reflect so many emotions, memories, and facets of Japanese character (such as the beauty of many small flowers blooming together rather than solo, and the fact that most schools have cherry trees outside, and the spring coincides with the start and end of the school year, and so is full of associations of first meetings and final farewells).
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the gift of the cherry trees from Japan to Washington, DC. I am honored to have made the film in time to screen as part of the festivities to celebrate such a thoughtful gift.
Our goal is simply that the film will be shared in positive ways to promote understanding, healing, and positive action. Our website also has details on how to provide assistance to the survivors. And although I had non-Japanese audiences in mind when I was making the film, nothing makes us happier than hearing from Japanese audiences that they have found the film meaningful.
There is no celebration to be had when over 15,000 people died and so many more thousands are missing or displaced. The film is steeped in so much sorrow as it progresses through the stages of shock, loss, grieving through to perseverance and courage and hope, as human beings and nature alike – as expressed by the cherry trees – dig deep and find the way to continue. The film is a testament to the people who had the fortitude and courage to share their stories and their grace, and to our collaborators who worked so hard and so brilliantly to let the voices of these reserved, dignified, resilient people be heard around the world as the first anniversary of March 11th, 2011 approaches. I could not have been more impressed and inspired by the way the survivors in the Tōhoku region are moving forward. This film is dedicated to them.
HAIKU AND POEMS
Some haiku and poems that have been on my mind as we made and shared the film.
Even more wonderful as they fall, the cherry blossoms.
Does anything last in this grievous world?
- Anonymous, Tales of Ise
The owner of the cherry blossoms
turns to compost
for the trees.
- Utsu’s death poem
At cherry blossom parties in this keep
Old pines caught the new light of the moon
And cast it glittering over the sake cup;
How can such brilliance have passed so soon?
- Doi Bansui
a lovely spring night
suddenly vanished while we
viewed cherry blossoms
- Basho
As we turn the corners of the narrow road to the deep north, we may soar with exhilaration, or we may fall flat on our faces, doubled up by the suffering in our hearts.
- from the epilog to “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” by Basho
Even if the cherry blossoms bloom,
ours is a world of suffering.
- Issa
our two lives:
between them has lived
this blossoming cherry
- Basho
Joyous things happen
Sad things happen
Grass grows
- Santoka
I want to do to you what spring does with the cherry trees
- Pablo Neruda
They can cut all the flowers but they can’t hold back the spring
- Pablo Neruda
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
- Dylan Thomas
AWARDS & HONORS
• Nominee, Best Documentary Short, The 84th Annual Academy Awards 2012
• Nominee, Emmy Award for Best Documentary, 34th Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards
• Nominee, Emmy Award for Best Continuing Coverage of a News Story, Long Form, 34th Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards
• Winner, Non-Fiction Short Film Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival 2012
• Winner, Women In Film National Geographic All Roads Award, Sundance Film Festival 2012
• Winner, Polly Krakora Award for Artistry in Film, DC Environmental Film Festival 2012
• Winner, Laurissilva Award for Best Film, Madeira Film Festival 2012
• Winner, Audience Award for Best Short Film, Florida Film Festival 2012
• Winner, Best Documentary, Nevada City Film Festival 2012
• Winner, Best of the Fest, Nevada City Film Festival 2012
• Winner, Audience Award for Best Film, Dominican Republic Environmental Film Festival 2013
• Premiered at Toronto International Film Festival Documentary Conference 2011 (out of competition)
PRESS QUOTES
“Because they are so difficult to see elsewhere, Sundance has always extended its welcome to shorts, and one of the most memorable this year, winner of a jury prize as well as an Oscar nomination, is Lucy Walker’s unforgettable “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom,” a look at the aftermath of the 2011 Japanese disaster that emphasizes the way “beauty and terror always exist in nature.” A festival with room for a film like this has to be given the benefit of the doubt.”
-Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times
“It’s a well-deserved [Oscar] nod. The 38-minute film captures the Japanese experience of the March 11, 2011, tsunami with a quiet beauty, power, and dignity.”
-onEarth
“Lucy Walker’s skillful and sincere direction allows her to illicit from her inteview subjects, genuine emotions on how the Cherry Blossoms have affected the Japanese people and how they now look to them for emotional reassurance.”
-DIALMFORMOVIES
“This film is considered a short, it runs for 40 minutes which is a bit long for a short film. It is actually just the right amount of time. There is no dwelling on the horror of March 11th and the following months. There is a lot of video of the Tsunami hitting the coastal communities, but the majority of the film deals with rebirth.
The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom is a beautiful film that shows, once again, how gracious and strong Japanese people are in the face of great tragedy.”
-examiner.com