Local Stories, Global Catastrophe: Reconstructing Nation, Asian Cinema, and Asian Eco-consciousness in Japan's 3.11 Films

In Asia, there is a growing trend to tell the inconvenient truth cinematically. Comparing the documentary The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom (dir. Lucy Walker, 2011) with Sono Sion’s melodrama The Land of Hope (2012), this chapter focuses on films that confront the powerful Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 and the reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, to explore the local incident’s global impacts. This chapter juxtaposes representations of global ecological crisis and the fundamental crisis in contemporary cinema (e.g. disappearing national cinema and classical film aesthetics since Ozu’s time; and social media’s domination over classic film forms), and examines the extent in which “Asian eco-consciousness” can be conceptualized with ecocritical film language and conventions in cinema today.