The Sound of Waves

Photographs and films cannot show you that the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake was “the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan” nor say outright that the tsunami that followed killed nearly 20,000 people.¹ Captions and titles cards perform that role. While photography and film can help prove that the tsunami was over 12 metres tall, those in a position to capture what might be considered the most convincing footage – those who lived through it – are often least equipped for the job. 

Usually, a documentarian arrives a little later and films the events from a remove. Their camera adds another layer of distance. As film scholar Tom Gunning writes, “we don’t just experience film as a presentation of a place, an event or a process, but also as the mimesis of the act of observing. The camera literally acts as a tourist.”² It observes but cannot become the thing that it observes. 

Sound, however, goes where the camera cannot. The sheafs of vibrations created by the seismic activity of the sea floor reverberate and transmit the tsunami indexically into the ear canal, as if a piece of it had broken off and lodged itself there. Sound arrives with a delay, which is perhaps why people say tsunamis do not sound like themselves: the distant booms and sporadic whooshing of the waves do not map cleanly onto its visual choreography. When events scale up, sight and sound have a way of coming apart. These sonic delays, which can often mislead in a moment of crisis (it is far easier to run from the thing you can see), can be utilised to great cinematic effect.

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Hamaguchi Ryūsuke had just finished his graduate program at Tokyo University of the Arts when he and several other filmmakers were invited by the government-run Wasuren program to document the trifold disaster of the Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear fallout six months after they had taken place. Clint Eastwood’s supernatural thriller Hereafter (2010) had just been pulled from cinemas in Japan for reasons of sensitivity. In its opening sequence, a tsunami ravages a seaside town and at one point, Eastwood lowers the camera inside of the waves to create a totally immersive experience. Hamaguchi caught the film before it was pulled, and said after that he felt compelled “to place a camera in the middle of a tsunami in a way that was different.”³

In Nami no oto (The Sound of Waves, 2012), the first of the three films in their Tōhoku Documentary Trilogy,⁴ Hamaguchi and Sakai spare the audience a first-hand sight of the tsunami and chase instead its slower “sound”: the way survivors remembered that day. It is helpful to think of memory as a kind of ‘sound’: both are forged from the tsunami, but neither represents it head-on. They are more like impressions of the tsunami that have passed through the body and lodged themselves there; they do not re-create the original experience so much as the feeling of what it was like.

There are six interviews in The Sound of Waves, and in each one there is a moment where the disaster suddenly arrives. “And then the big quake came,” Abe Shimako says halfway through the film after she and her husband, Abe Jun, have both introduced themselves and shared a little about their life in the area. The tsunami is what they are there to talk about, but it is not the main point of interest. Their conversation affords as much time to their reactions to the tsunami as it does the tsunami itself.

Abe Jun begins:
I was back at my house when the earth rumbled. It was a strange sound. I wondered if it was real. I called my wife down the front door to listen. We stepped outside and saw the road through our front gate.

Then the tsunami appears:
The mouth of the river had swollen five metres higher. We saw it come in and smash into a house.

Then they respond to it:
That’s when we really started to evacuate. We started running with the tsunami just 80 metres away…

The tsunami reappears:
I caught the tsunami smashing into the backyard. I heard a small window breaking . . . [it] washes in, sweeps cars away.

They respond again:
So I run upstairs. The water rises up to the second floor. I felt the building come loose from the foundation. I wasn’t aware of motion though. I looked out the window and saw a wave above me. I knew it would wash me away.

Their conversation with each other unfolds in parallel and owes its prosaic pace to the medium of language itself, which must build up its sentences word by word. The ‘image’ of the tsunami comes into being slowly, flanked by this heavy edifice of description. Speaking at a Kyoto University workshop four years after the film was released, Hamaguchi makes it clear that, as a filmmaker, his task “becomes a losing battle as soon as [I] think [I am] making it look like it’s real.”⁵ Reality is one thing, films that “reach the dimension of being believable” are another.⁶ His preference for what can give audiences the sense “in [their] gut… that these disasters could happen to you” elides “the fact [we] are fully aware that it is absolutely made up, that it cannot be real.”⁷ His aim is to “shoot a drama, regardless of what contradictions that may entail.”⁸

In practice, Hamaguchi and Sakai filmed with 60-minute tapes and when the interviews ran long, they swapped out the rolls and repositioned the cameras. Later, when editing, they cut between these two angles. They show Jun, for instance, first from behind Shimako’s shoulder, then in direct address, facing the lens.⁹  While it is obvious that these two clips are discontinuous, it is still possible to appreciate that everything has been told in one go. In a documentary (barring the constraints of that label), clips are bound together by their correspondence to the real world as opposed to the sense of reality produced by the film’s continuity editing. What feels real therefore need not be real nor appear like it. In the same Kyoto University workshop, Hamaguchi suggests that a film like The Sound of Waves needs only to contain something real – a piece of it – to be believable in full. He and Sakai chose to use close-ups for this film, and when Jun speaks directly into the lens, every detail on his face maps onto a thought he may have, or a feeling that may arise within him. His face delivers himself to us completely; it is itself in spite of itself, and in these close-ups, its presence is absolute.

In certain shots, we see how Hamaguchi and Sakai react to the interviewees. With eyes locked and elbows on knees, they are likely going through what Hamaguchi said he felt when speaking with a resident of the region prior to the shoot: “[it] was so vivid that it stimulated my imagination. I was seeing the waves rushing into the room in my mind’s eye.”¹⁰ Can the theatre put us in Hamaguchi and Sakai’s place? Is it a meaningful substitute for physically being there in the room? Since the film has rarely been shown, the verdict is still out. Each screening will deliver its own.

Even if the film falls short on that count, it succeeds on others, for it delivers more than just drama. The Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival has screened The Sound of Waves several times under this pretense:

As the natural environment and society undergo drastic change, some have swept the memory away to the back corners of their minds. The generations who don’t have first-hand recollection consider the events as something to “study.” However, are they really bygone?¹¹

The festival’s statement draws out a useful discrepancy between knowledge – that which we learn – and recognition – that which Amitav Ghosh writes, in his seminal climate-change text The Great Derangement, “harks back to something prior, an already existing awareness that makes possible the passage from ignorance to knowledge.”¹² This prior awareness “flashes before us” but, as Ghosh says, “[it] cannot appear spontaneously… [it] is not of the same kind as the discovery of something new: it arises rather from a renewed reckoning with a potentiality that lies within oneself.”¹³ The fact that Ghosh opts for the word “potentiality” here instead of the more predictable “past experience” suggests that common sense – that which lies within our schema of reality – is furnished not just by real life, but by the imagination. It may be the oldest cliché in film theory, but films are a form of transubstantiation that place us within another world, asking us to suspend our judgment for those few hours and make a temporary home for ourselves in what we receive from the screen. In that time, they can extend the boundaries of what we in the audience are primed to consider ‘real’.

In the Tōhoku Trilogy, the interviewees treat the tsunami with a normal amount of composure and respect, for they have seen tsunamis before and have lived for years with the threat. They are habituated to it – and after watching, so are we. At one point in the film Hamaguchi asks: why would these people continue to live in the area, knowing there will be a tsunami? His film doesn’t necessarily give us an answer, but if we can understand what gives the interviewees a reason to stay, we do not need one. In all likelihood, their reasons have nothing to do with the tsunami at all.

Nami no oto/The Sound of Waves (2012 Japan 142 mins)

Prod Co: Graduate School of Film and New Media Prod: Horikoshi Kenzo, Fujihata Masaki Dir: Hamaguchi Ryūsuke, Sakai Kō Phot: Kitagawa Yoshio Sound: Hwang Young-Chang

Endnotes