Containment

“High dwellings ensure the happiness of our descendants. A terrible tsunami reached this place. Never build your homes any lower than this.” 

- Stone monument warning to the future.

Professor Fumihiko Imamura at the Tohoku University Tsunami Engineering Laboratory Disaster Control Research Center discusses how these warnings are now often dismissed as archaic.

We were deep into making the film when, in March 2011, the terrible triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi began to unfold. It was very soon clear to us that this accident, through contamination, had essentially brought radioactive waste into the land and buildings of Fukushima Prefecture and its surround. In one sense, that relation to our film is clear: the Japanese were working all-out to re-contain the waste that had escaped. This was a scenario of loss of enclosure, come to life. But other connections emerged as well. Monuments, some hundreds of years old, dot the spine of Japan, warning their futures not to build below the markers that indicated the high-water mark of an earlier tsunami. Like the American scenarists, the Japanese too experimented with handed-down stories as a way around stone markers.

We were less interested in re-tracing one more time the myriad decisions that affected the accident than we were in how people were coping with the waste. We followed parents and their children, plant cleanup workers, fish testers, fishermen, and many others. It was sadly only possible to bring a handful into the final film, for example, a cattle farmer high in the radioactive hills who refused to kill his cows and flee. We came to know Mr. S, an older landowner, who drove every other day to his now semi-condemned ancestral home in the radioactive hills. Mr. S. made clear to us many things not so apparent in headline-grabbing news stories: without hospitals or grocery stores, living in the affected areas became impossible.

The graphic novel, with its sort of punctiform glimpses and almost stroboscopic image of the future, might better capture what the future is like in these scenarios than an attempt to make a kind of continuous motion, three-dimensional, real-life science-fiction film. For one thing, I wanted to get a kind of retro-futuristic view, like looking from now back at 1980 or 1990 when they were planning this, and to see backwards how the future looked. It seemed to me that graphic novels could better capture that than science fiction could. Working with a great graphic novelist like Peter Kuper, I thought we might be able to get at it.

The U.S. federal government demanded, as a condition for opening the WIPP site, that plans were filed for a gigantic monument to prevent inadvertent intrusion into the waste. Roughly fifteen years after the publication of this film, when the WIPP closes, its buildings will be bulldozed and the monuments constructed. David Lobser designed animation built on the proposed monuments—which visualize the actual marker designs that the DOE panels sketched.