Impersonal Presence: Kazuo Hara’s Sennan Asbestos Disaster and Minamata Mandala

Abstract

This review essay discusses the function of documentary in the field of hazard exposure and health effect by closely examining Kazuo Hara’s two films: Sennan Asbestos Disaster and Minamata Mandala. The author first historicizes the ways environmental hazards, such as radioactive pollutants, have been documented on film from both fictional and non-fictional perspectives in Japan. Realizing the limitations of science for establishing causal relations between hazard exposure and disease, efforts to visualize harm are therefore important in these sites to conduct previously “undone science.” The author particularly focuses on the concept of “environmental publics” as the infrastructure of such cross-disciplinary works. In the second part of the essay, the author examines in detail the style and production of Kazuo Hara’s documentaries, arguing about the active role the director’s camera plays in facilitating the act of speaking by his interviewees, indirectly enabling their witness to the atrocious exposure that was causing their poor health.