earticle

영어

The Tohoku region suffered the most significant damage from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. This paper critically examines the cinematic representation of the Tohoku region in “Suzume,” focusing on the themes of memory and forgetting of disasters, and the loss of place and homeland caused by such calamities. Director Makoto Shinkai, through this film, counters the forgetting of the Great East Japan Earthquake, suggesting a resistance to oblivion. However, the memories portrayed in the film can be considered selective. Despite the disaster being a complex event that involved an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident occurring simultaneously, the film notably avoids mentioning the nuclear accident. For this reason, the question remains as to what message director Shinkai included in this film about the dangers of nuclear power. Furthermore, the Tohoku region is depicted as a space lacking meaningful place-ness. The Tohoku represented in the film emerges as a space of loss, where the memories of places before the massive earthquake are erased due to the damage and subsequent reconstruction efforts. ‘Oya Coast service area’ and ‘Orikasa Station’ that appear in the movie are new spaces that were relocated from their existing locations. The film fails to show the original landscapes of these two spaces, and newly constructed areas exist merely as simple backgrounds, devoid of any real context. Through this, it can be seen that this film places greater significance on the issue of mourning for the ruins that are fading away from people's attention and memories, rather than on the area damaged by the Great East Japan Earthquake. The results of this study are expected to provide useful implications for animation film research on ‘place and hometown loss.’