The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Alone Again in Fukushima: A documentary screening and conversation
This spring will mark the tenth anniversary of the triple disaster that on March 11, 2011, brought an earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear meltdown to eastern Japan. To reflect on this anniversary, we present Alone Again in Fukushima, a documentary about Matsumura Naoto, a man who chose to remain behind when his hometown was evacuated along with the rest of the area around the damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. This is the second documentary that filmmaker Nakamura Mayu has made to profile Matsumura’s life in the nuclear zone. While the first film documented Mr. Matsumura’s solitary life with a variety of animals from cats and dogs to livestock, this sequel explores how things have changed (or not) in Mr. Matsumura’s hometown over the course of eight years since the disaster as some residents have begun return.
Article ID 5518
I first met Mori Masahiro in the spring of 1986, when interviewing scientists for my book
Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics, and the Coming Robotopia. Mori’s focus was on robots and Buddhism, which seemed a novel combination to me at the time.
In researching robots Mori had found that he had to understand not only the human body’s individual parts and their functions but their relationship to the entire human body and the universe in which it exists. And this had brought him to Buddhism, which teaches that the Buddha-nature is in all things (not just sentient beings) and is where, according to his interpretation, parts of whole systems are simultaneously independent and connected that a universe and the source of all truth can exist in the single petal of a flower. Only a few years earlier, a book of his essays had been translated and published in English with the provocative title of