In 2011 70-year-old Iwasaki Masanori was ready to retire from three decades as a wildlife documentarist. Because he cared about the effects of radiation on horses, boars, monkeys, mice, moles, herons, and frogs, he kept working. Between 2013 and 2017 he made five full-length films titled Fukushima: Record of Living Things. Now the first three have been subtitled in English. How should we teach them? Undergraduates in Japan and the US often say the success of cleanup in Fukushima in comparison to Chernobyl proves a) Japan’s technological superiority over the USSR, and b) the wisdom of nuclear power as a non-carbon energy source. In such a context, two controversies surrounding Iwasaki’s documentaries make for lively debate. The first concerns the status of science in the neoliberal state. Why, after providing funding for the first three films, did the Japan Arts Council withdraw its support for films four and five? I consider parallel problems in the careers of Swiss scientific illustrator Cornelia Hesse-Honegger (Chernobyl), and American Biologist Timothy Mousseau (Chernobyl and Fukushima). The second concerns the status of feminism for environmental criticism. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, for instance, writes that the scientific rationalism in Iwasaki’s films is compatible with misogyny. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick’s insight that pedagogy is a “touching feeling” I argue that Iwasaki's eco-documentaries and our teaching of these films is less about “the information” (they present) than about “how to care.”
