ASIA / PACIFIC
Page 4 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
August 17, 2015
As A-bomb survivors age,
Japanese pass storytelling to young
By Mari Yamaguchi
The Associated Press
K
ANIMATED EXPERIENCE. Director Ronnie del Carmen, right,
poses for a photo with, from left: chief creative officer at Pixar John Las-
seter, director Pete Docter, and producer Jonas Rivera upon their arrival
for the screening of the film Inside Out at the 68th international film festi-
val in Cannes, southern France. The Filipino-American co-director of the
highly successful animated movie said it’s a dream come true for him to
share with Filipinos a film he helped create. (AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau)
Inside Out co-director
thrilled to bring
film to Filipinos
By Teresa Cerojano
The Associated Press
M
ANILA, The Philippines — The Filipino-
American co-director of the box-office hit Inside
Out says it’s a dream come true for him to share
with Filipinos the animated film he helped create.
“It’s kind of a surreal experience because I just watched
movies here growing up,” said Ronnie del Carmen, a
former advertising art director who moved to the U.S. in
1989 at age 29. He said he loved movies but never expected
to be doing films.
He joined Pixar in 2000, and before that worked as a
storyboard artist for Batman: The Animated Series and
for DreamWorks as a story supervisor.
“It’s an amazing experience because I’m not just coming
home, there’s a movie I helped make that’s opening here,”
he said. “It’s a dream come true.”
He and director Peter Docter spoke to journalists in
Manila, the last leg of their Asian tour to promote Inside
Out. The movie, which opens in the Philippines on August
19, has earned $630 million at the box office so far.
The two directors, who also collaborated on Up with del
Carmen as story supervisor, said they drew from some of
their childhood experiences as well as their children’s for
the movie they also co-wrote.
Docter said it was a challenge to create characters to
illustrate the emotions and gaggle of voices in the mind of
11-year-old Riley, who moves with her family from the
Minnesota of her childhood to a run-down townhouse in
San Francisco.
Sadness begins creeping into Riley’s core memories,
where bubbly Joy earlier reigned supreme. Anger, Fear,
and Disgust complete the five emotions in the
“headquarters” of her mind.
Docter said they had to consult psychologists and had to
pare to five what some experts claim to be as many as 27
emotions. They also had to find the right look for each
emotion to remind filmgoers that the characters are the
personification of feelings and are not little people.
“I think it’s simultaneously the most sort of realistic
film we’ve ever done and completely fantasy at the same
time,” Docter said. They used San Francisco and
Minnesota as settings aside from Riley’s mind.
He said it was a real challenge “because we decided to
set it not in the brain but in the mind, so it’s not blood
vessels ... its consciousness, personality, so we talk about
these very abstract things.” They also used moving as a
metaphor for growing up, he added.
Director del Carmen said in the end it’s a movie about
family, not just Riley and her emotions.
New Owners
Newly remodeled
All new equipment.
Belmont Eco Laundry has large capacity washers and dryers,
perfect for those comforters, sleeping bags, big family loads,
work clothes, and more!
You’ll get your laundry done in record time, leaving you time
to spend with family and friends.
Visit us at Belmontecolaundry.com for more details.
4725 SE Belmont St.
Open daily 8 to 10
UNITACHI, Japan — On a recent weekend, an
84-year-old survivor of the Nagasaki atomic
bombing retraced his movements on a map: the
inferno during his 12-mile walk home, the “black rain” of
falling radioactive particles, and how he felt sick days
later.
His audience of eight listened intently, some asking
questions and taking notes. They hope to tell his story to
future generations after he is gone, to take their listeners
to the scene on August 9, 1945, the way Shigeyuki
Katsura saw and felt it.
As part of a government-organized program in the
western Tokyo suburb of Kunitachi, 20 trainees ranging
from their 20s to their 70s are studying wartime history,
taking public-speech lessons from a television anchor, and
hearing stories from Katsura and another Kunitachi
resident who survived Hiroshima.
“It’s been 70 years since the bombings, and we survivors
are getting old. Time is limited and we must hurry,” said
Terumi Tanaka, the 83-year-old head of a national group,
the Tokyo-based Japan Confederation of A and H Bomb
Sufferers’ Organizations.
In a way, they are going backward in this digital age,
learning face-to-face from their elders in order to carry on
a storytelling tradition. It is not unlike kabuki actors
inheriting their seniors’ stage names and performing
their signature pieces.
The same stories may be in video and text on the
internet, but organizers feel that in-person storytelling
adds an invaluable human touch.
The August 6, 1945 atomic bombing in Hiroshima killed
about 140,000 people from injuries and immediate effects
of radiation within five months, and another one dropped
on Nagasaki three days later killed 73,000. The death toll
linked to the attacks and their radiation effects has since
risen to 460,000, with the number of survivors declining to
some 183,000, according to the latest government
statistics.
Most survivors live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Katsura said about 20 survivors live in Kunitachi, but
only a few, including himself, are healthy enough to make
public appearances.
Tanaka, a retired engineering professor, survived
Nagasaki but lost five relatives there when he was 13
years old. He said it would be almost impossible for
storytellers to describe the horrors as vividly as the
survivors, but hopes their imagination, compassion, and
commitment to peace will make up for any shortfall.
Mika Shimizu, a 32-year-old high school teacher, hopes
to do just that, by putting a survivor’s experience in
language her peers and others as young as her students
can relate to.
“Even if we hear the same story, the way each of us
WARTIME WITNESS. Shigeyuki Katsura, right, an 84-year-old
atomic-bomb survivor, speaks about his experience 70 years ago, in the
western Tokyo suburb of Kunitachi. In a government-organized program,
20 trainees ranging from their 20s to their 70s are studying wartime his-
tory, taking public-speech lessons from a television anchor, and hearing
stories from Katsura and another Kunitachi resident who survived the
bombings. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)
retell it would be different, because we all have different
sensibilities,” she said.
Another trainee, Sachiko Matsushita, missed her
chance to find out directly from her father, who hid his
exposure in Nagasaki for most of his life, and largely kept
the story to himself. Initially she wanted to revisit her
father’s path, but now is devoted to passing on Katsura’s.
“I’d much rather hear the stories directly from people,
and pass them on to people,” the 47-year-old company
worker said.
Katsura was 14 years old when he and his schoolmates,
put to work for the war effort, were delivering a cartful of
weapon parts from school to a factory when the “Fat Man”
plutonium bomb exploded over Nagasaki.
“Having witnessed what the manmade nuclear weapon
did to humans, I must condemn it as absolutely wrong,
and the mistake should never be repeated,” he said.
“That’s what drives me to tell my story, and I’ll continue to
do so as long as I live.”
The course in Kunitachi is modelled on one started in
Hiroshima in 2012. The first group of 50 Hiroshima
storytellers debuted this year, with some 150 others
underway.
Kunitachi official Mamiko Ogawa said storytelling
requires a deep understanding of both the historical
background and the survivors’ emotions, along with a
touch of the teller’s personality. That’s what makes it
different from digital archives.
“I think the stories are best conveyed when told by real
people,” she said. “I hope the trainees would fully absorb
the survivors’ experience and feelings, so they can tell the
stories using their own sensibilities.”
North Korea pushes clocks back as a snub to Japan
By Hyung-jin Kim
The Associated Press
S
EOUL, South Korea — North Korea has no time for
Japan. Not anymore, at least.
The country has established its own time zone by
pulling back by 30 minutes its current standard time, a
legacy of Japanese colonial rule.
The new time zone took effect August 15 — the 70th
anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule at
the end of World War II, the North’s official Korean
Central News Agency (KCNA) said. The establishment of
“Pyongyang time” is meant to root out that legacy, it said.
Local time in North and South Korea and Japan was the
same — nine hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time
(GMT). It was set during Japan’s rule over what was a
single Korea from 1910 to 1945.
“The wicked Japanese imperialists committed such
unpardonable crimes as depriving Korea of even its
standard time while mercilessly trampling down its land
with 5,000-year-long history and culture and pursuing the
unheard-of policy of obliterating the Korean nation,” the
KCNA dispatch said.
The North’s move appears to be aimed at bolstering the
leadership of young leader Kim Jong Un with anti-Japan,
nationalistic sentiments, said Yang Moo-jin, a professor
at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. Kim
took power upon the death of his dictator father, Kim Jong
Il, in late 2011.
Many Koreans, especially the elderly, on both sides of
the border still harbor deep resentment against Japan
over its colonial occupation. Hundreds of thousands of
TIME OUT. A clock is visible on top of a train station in Pyongyang,
North Korea. North Korea has established its own time zone by pulling
back its current standard time by 30 minutes. Local time in North and
South Korea and Japan was the same — nine hours ahead of Greenwich
Mean Time (GMT). It was set during Japan’s rule over what was a single
Korea from 1910 to 1945. The establishment of “Pyongyang time” is
meant to root out the legacy of the Japanese colonial period, according
to the North’s official Korean Central News Agency. (AP Photo/Wong
Maye-E, File)
Koreans were forced to fight as frontline soldiers, work in
slave-labor conditions, or serve as prostitutes in brothels
operated by the Japanese military during the war.
South Korea says it uses the same time zone as Japan
because it’s more practical and conforms to international
practice.
Seoul’s Unification Ministry said the North’s action
could bring minor disruption at a jointly-run industrial
Continued on page 8