nuclear-news

Famous Japanese photographer motivated by Japan’s lies about Hiroshima and Fukushima

Photographer: After seeing conditions in Fukushima, it feels like Hiroshima is happening again -Japan Times http://enenews.com/photographer-after-seeing-conditions-in-fukushima-it-feels-like-hiroshima-is-happening-again-japan-times     By ENENews  Title: Hasegawa gets the perfect portrait Source: The Japan Times Online By MARK SCHILLING Date: Aug. 3, 2012
Making a documentary on a crusading 90-year-old photojournalist who is famously fearless and uncompromising is not for the timid. Saburo Hasegawa, who has been directing television documentaries on a range of social issues since the 1990s, was initially afraid that his subject, Kikujiro Fukushima, might be as formidable as his body of work: 250,000 photographs taken over the course of six decades…..

What has not mellowed, however, is Fukushima’s distrust of Japanese officialdom, whose evasions, falsehoods and coverups have served, says Hasegawa, as his prime motivating force over the decades. “What are all these photographs about?’ I asked him. His answer was, ‘Japan’s lies.’ “

His battle against those lies began with his early post-World War II photographs of the Hiroshima atomic bombing victims and continued with his trip last fall to Fukushima Prefecture to record the aftermath of the nuclear reactor meltdown.

“For Fukushima, “nuclear explosion” (genbaku) and “nuclear power”
(genpatsu) are synonyms,” Hasegawa says. “The victims of both were
harmed by radiation human beings couldn’t control. The state has a
fundamental obligation to support those victims, but instead they were
left to fend for themselves.”

[…]

“He told me that, when he saw conditions in Fukushima (Prefecture), he
had the feeling that the same thing (that happened in Hiroshima) would
happen again,” Hasegawa says. “That’s the kind of connection that only
he could make. For people of my generation, the (Fukushima reactor
meltdown) was our first encounter with nuclear disaster.”

August 4, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general