WIT Life #265: NY Peace Film Festival
Events, Film, Translating/Interpreting, WIT Life, Writers 
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WIT Life is a periodic series written by professional Writer/Interpreter/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei’s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends along with her own observations.
This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend the NY Peace Film Festival co-hosted by my lovely friend Yumi Tanaka. This year highlighted 11 films over the course of the weekend, many with Q&As with their directors following the screenings. I was lucky enough to be able to interpret for two of the Japanese filmmakers who were Skyped in from Japan for their Q&As (a first for me!). Saturday night featured the documentaries The Targeted Village by Chie Mikami and X Years Later by Hideki Itoh.
The first film focuses on a small village in Okinawa called Takae, which happens to be situated between two American military bases. Residents are fighting against the construction of new helipads in Takae, being installed in preparation for the deployment of Osprey. Their story embodies U.S. military strategy dating back to the Vietnam War, the blocking of the gates to the Futenma base, and their town’s rage against their state.
Depicted here is one of the main characters profiled in the film, a local farmer and father of 4 who just wants to ensure that his children can continue to live their quiet lives. In one scene his young son asks how they will be able to study at school with all the noise from the Osprey flying overhead. The farmer takes part in protests again the helipad construction, and unbelievably the Japanese government brings a case of “traffic obstruction” against not only him and several other peaceful protesters but his 7-year old daughter who was nowhere near the scene. Both of their charges eventually get dropped, but another defendant is still awaiting a final verdict from the Supreme Court. Mikami commented that she was surprised that her film was widely screened domestically, and that most people had never heard of the struggles in Takae.
The second film
addresses the American government’s hydrogen bomb testing at the Bikini Atoll in 1954, and the bad luck of the Japanese fishing boat that happened to be in the area at that time. It follows a former social studies teacher who now devotes his life to finding out the true extent of the health impacts and helping victims to receive compensation. The majority of the crew members have long passed away from some form of cancer, and one widow’s eerie description of how brittle her husband’s bones were when they cremated him is haunting. The details of this are not very well known, and the project that Itoh is currently working on is looking at the effects on Okinawa at the time.
Kudos to Yumi and colleagues for putting together such a fabulous festival!
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