Shown on "POV" on public television, Brooklyn filmmaker Jake Price's poetic nonfiction feature is a followup to his 2013 Unknown Spring. That film concerned the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan that caused the nuclear reactor at Fukushima to melt down. The resulting radiation and flooding made the area an environmental disaster, one whose fallout may last literally billions of years.
Unknown Spring primarily addressed the tsunami, but with a broader time frame (eons, one might argue), The Invisible Season examines, in haunting and lyrical cinéma vérité form, the evacuated villages and cities of Namie and Odaka, and the small number of residents (only two percent at the time of the filming) who dared return.
The resilient former evacuees carry on with a sense of mission. Keisyu Wada, a mountain-dwelling artist, maintains a gallery-cum-performance space previously devoted to honoring casualties of Japan's wartime past, especially children. Now he recalls the 2011 catastrophe he and his pet poodle endured. Terumi Kawakami, a young woman, was saved from walls of water that came more than a mile inland. Now she, her rescuer, and volunteers do a grassroots cleanup effort that Terumi herself says is partially PTSD therapy. Tomoko Kobayashi, an innkeeper in Odaka, watches the very tentative recovery of her community and its resumption of an annual cultural festival (an unintentional parallel to the world's long, slow climb from the COVID lockdown that was to come).
Viewers may be surprised that anger against the nuclear-power industry is not even louder, but one speaker vents that Japanese government initiatives at rehabilitation have been inefficient and illogical. A final warning is actually an exhortation about climate change - that rising sea levels and superstorms threaten to spread the haphazardly contained debris, including accumulated and bagged tainted soil with deadly contents of uranium radwaste, not intended to withstand extreme weather.
What public or academic library shelves would this title be on?
The educational documentary registers strongly on the Geiger counter for public policy and science-oriented sections in public or academic libraries. Pacific-rim studies and Japanese-specific concentrations are a natural habitat.
What academic subjects would this film be suitable for?
With the Fukushima disaster a dozen years past—but the fallout fated to last much longer—the material is still ripe for current-affairs classes, especially one's dealing with energy policy and ecology. Asian history and culture are also obvious themes.
What type of classroom would this documentary be an educational resource for?
Though its style is contemplative rather than fast-paced (and reading subtitles is necessary) film would be viewable for students in junior high and up.