British director Catherine Round films taxi drivers of Kamaishi, a city hit by the 2011 tsunami
The Briton Katharine Round has made a documentary about Kamaishi, a town on the Pacific coast of Iwate Prefecture that was engulfed by the tsunami in March 2011.
Round set up cameras in the cabs of taxis and left them running. In the frame are four drivers, Toru Konno, Yoshiji Iwasaki, Fumio Goto and Masaaki Koike, and their passengers. She herself does not interfere in the conversations. Among the passengers appears the journalist Shiori Ito, author and heroine of "Black Box Diaries".
They talk chiefly about that day. One of the drivers describes the wave as a black wall. After that come premonitions, chance escapes and dreams. Ghosts turn up in these conversations as a matter of course: some of the drivers are sceptical about dreams, others say they have given lifts to passengers who were not in the car. Stories of phantom fares in Tohoku have been collected before, chiefly in neighbouring Ishinomaki, so Round is working with an already described phenomenon, but she takes it not as a plot but as part of the ordinary chatter of the road. Between journeys the frame picks up deer wandering about the town and an empty telephone box.
As for Kamaishi itself, the following is worth knowing. It is an old steelmaking town; the first blast furnace of the modern type in Japan went into operation here on 1 December 1857. In 1988 the steelworks was closed, and the town lost almost half its inhabitants before any tsunami. In March 2009, two years before the catastrophe, a protective breakwater was completed here, which had taken thirty years to build and cost one and a half billion dollars. The wave passed over it. About 1,250 residents were killed or went missing. Today the town has some 32 thousand inhabitants, against its peak in the early sixties. In 2019 a stadium seating 16 thousand was built here for matches of the Rugby World Cup.
