Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Last night in my quest for entertainment I came across a movie online called Nihon Chinbotsu (Sinking of Japan) and watched it in some amazement. Whoever has posted it online appears to have found a “sign” that it foretells the earthquake and tsunami from last year. But I was just shocked to realize that I had no idea of something that probably affected so many people, in an experience I shared.

I really know nothing of Japan, my twenty years has not supplied me with the tools to read the culture in any depth. I don’t know what’s cool, what’s new, what’s big. So it doesn’t surprise me that I never heard of this film before. Even though it came from a bestselling book, is the second movie version since 1973, has pulled in $43 million in the box office since it opened in 2006, has some of the most desirable celebrity talent in its lineup, has had parodies made of it. I think the movie I watched just before it was Rollerball, so there was nothing at all insightful about my stumbling across it.

It’s a movie about the almost complete downfall of Japan, which falls victim to a series of natural disasters. The plate on which the islands rest is getting sucked down, and the islands experience a string of horrific disasters, calculated to entirely submerge them in less than a year. The people who are not killed are being shipped off to foreign countries, all of which are reluctant to take them,  to spend the rest of their lives, and the remaining people are going to die terrible deaths. Only the vision of one scientist can save them.

So I watched as town after town exploded and washed away, and eventually I saw the giant wave encompass the red brick warehouses and the old ship crane of Hakodate. Bricks flying everywhere, people all washed away. And I thought: oh my god, how many people in Hakodate were standing braced in the doorways of their houses on March 11 last year, thinking of that scene. Because after an earthquake in a coastal town people always have to take action against a possible tsunami. How many of the shop owners in those red brick warehouses, in that 30 minute or so wait for the wave that did hit, were thinking of that movie? How many people in Tokyo, when the power went out and the trains shut down and the earth moved, thought about those skyscrapers crumbling. And in the regions that didn’t have time for thinking, how many recognized what was happening?

Imagine yourself, having watched this film, turning on the television to the kind of live footage we saw last year. And in the days and months after, as the battle with the nuclear power stations continued, like a kind of cultural deja-vu.

What must people have been thinking?