Film about the tsunami tragedy is released, despite the initial rejection of the victims

Film director Kazuhiro Terada’s latest work is once again trying to give a voice to people who challenge authority, but those he supported wanted nothing to do with the project. After all, they had experienced the worst imaginable in their lives, followed by additional and unwarranted misery. But Terada persisted and eventually won over some of them.

His documentary, “Ikiru: Okawa Shogakko Tsunami Saiban wo Tatakatta Hitotachi” (To Live: People Who Fight a Lawsuit Over the Tsunami Deaths), opened in theaters on February 18 with a limited release.

The 124-minute film portrays the families of 23 children who died in the 2011 tsunami disaster and the legal actions they took to find out why their loved ones died. A total of 74 children and 10 teachers died at Okawa Elementary School in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, in the tsunami generated by the magnitude 9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011.

Twenty-four primary and secondary schools in the city were hit by the tsunami. Okawa Elementary School was the only one where children died under the supervision of teachers. The school is located about 3.7 km from the coast and was not considered in immediate danger. But the tsunami moved upstream near the school. Fifty minutes after the earthquake, a wave approximately 8.6 meters high hit the school and washed away the children on the school grounds.

A mountain that the children climb during a class is located just behind the school. A school bus was parked nearby. The community wireless system and the local radio station continued to urge people to evacuate to higher ground. But the children stayed on the lower school grounds, awaiting instructions from their teachers.

The Sendai High Court in 2018 handed down a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, acknowledging that both the Miyagi Prefectural Government and Ishinomaki City authorities were responsible for the tragedy through negligence. The court said that officials should have implemented workable evacuation plans and conducted evacuation drills during normal times. It ordered them to pay a combined 1.44 billion yen ($11 million) to the plaintiffs. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling in 2019, ending the legal battle that began in 2014.

Although the plaintiffs won the lawsuit, they suffered an emotional cost in the fight against the authorities. Some critics said the lawsuit was filed just to make money. Others threatened to kill the grieving parents.

Terada proposed making the documentary about the plaintiffs in the summer of 2020 as their lawyers were looking for ways to keep alive the lessons learned from the disaster, the memories of the victims, and the struggles of family members during the legal action.

The 51-year-old director firmly believed that his story had to be told to prevent a repeat of the tragedy. His conviction was based largely on his remorse for not having spoken out earlier in his life.

He did not raise his voice

Terada graduated from Kobe Takatsuka High School in Kobe in 1990. Four months after his graduation, tragedy struck.

It was common practice at the school for teachers on duty to slam the steel door at the entrance to keep late students out. But one day, the door crushed the skull of a student, killing her. It was later learned that the force of the door closing could destroy even a helmet.

Even today, Terada remembers the terrifying sound of the door closing. He recalled that although many students feared the gate would be quickly closed, no one urged school authorities to stop the dangerous practice. “His life would have been saved if we had spoken,” he said. “The incident made me realize that remaining silent is tantamount to helping a guilty party.”

After becoming involved in producing news programs at age 25, Terada felt her mission was to give a voice to marginalized people. His projects covered topics such as freedom of expression for people arrested after handing out flyers and the indigenous rights of the Ainu people. But his proposal for the documentary on the tsunami tragedy was rejected by all the applicants.

‘FIGHT TO LIVE’

Undeterred, Terada traveled to Ishinomaki to attend all the sessions the plaintiffs had to discuss and prepare for the court proceedings. He listened as they brought it all out from the bottom of their hearts.

Slowly some of the parents began to accept Terada’s plan. In the end, eight families gave their consent to be filmed.

Terada initially planned to use only original footage for the documentary. But bereaved families offered him more than 200 hours of their own footage. His recordings showed the school left in rubble, the account of a teacher who survived the tsunami, relatives retracing the mountain route their children might have taken, teary-eyed press conferences and local officials defending their response to the disaster.

He also recorded family members 10 years after the disaster to show how they were doing. “Some viewers may find it difficult to understand the film, but I felt that I should avoid making the story deliberately dramatic,” he said. “I hope the public realizes the cruelty of our society, where people who speak up are attacked and take the experiences of families as their own.

In one scene from the documentary, the parents whisper a message to their dead daughter while using a finger to gently trace her nameplate in the school hallway. “Our daughter’s life would not be in vain if the school were transformed into a place where everyone could express themselves freely,” said one parent.

In the last scene of the film, a father who lost a son described the changes he went through over the years. “I thought about committing suicide many times to follow my son,” he told a gathering of high school students. “Today I fight to live.”

The father repeated the words said by a judge in the sentence: “The school should not be a place where children’s lives end.”