How to remember 3.11? Post-Fukushima documentary and the politics of Tōhoku Documentary Trilogy (2011--2013)

This chapter draws attention to a wide spectrum of documentary-making praxes that have emerged in conjunction with the discourses of remembering and therefore, forgetting, apropos of the triple disaster in post-3.11 Japan. It looks at how some of the independent documentary works by Japanese filmmakers, characterized with their cinema verite style and “on-the-scene” aesthetics, have potentially contested the archiving efforts initiated by, for instance, the public broadcaster Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK). The chapter highlights how the Tohoku Documentary Trilogy has exemplified an alternative mode of filmmaking that intervenes in the common documentary practices around 3.11. NHK launched their “Great East Japan Earthquake Archives” online from 1 March 2012, with part of the web contents regularly broadcast on TV at the time of writing.