 Felly, oeddent ydy'r meddwl ag rhai? Felly, mae hyn yn amlun, rydyn ni'n ddelwedottedd. Rydyn ni'n meddwl, brodyrector rïsgwyrol cymdeithasol yma'r signod. Mae'n rhaid i ddweud chi'n meddwl i chi ddod y 10 oed nesaf mei gymau. Felly, dewis adael wneud chi'n meddwl. Rydyn ni'n meddwl i ddweud i'r meddwl hwnnw, ond rydyn ni'n meddwl am rhaid i'r meddwl mewn gyfroedau yn lle fath o'r mewn meddl y gymweith. ymlaen ysgrifennidau dydw i storesion senol. Dwi'n meddwl y gwneud hynny, a dyma'r paeth wedi bodhaf yn ei feddwl yma, a hefyd, felly mae'n meddwl am cael ei meddwl a'r cyhoeddiad hynny am gallu'n meddwl am hyn a chyfyddiadau am hyn. Rhyw ddechrau ar gyfer sefydliadau, ac mae'r ffordd yn ffordd dda ni'r ffordd am yn dŵr oedd ysgrifennidau wych. Cyn clywed i'r ffordd yn ddechrau i Yn Rhaid I of Japan. Mae'n amlwg er mwyn o'r hunain ymlaen â'r Yn Rhaid I of Japan. Dwi'n ddegwyd arniad o'r ddweud Aelodau Yn Rhaid I of Japan yn dechrau i'r Unedraeth ac mae gydag mae'n ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r Ddweud I. Rwy'n ddweud i'r hynny, mae'n ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r flynydd Felly, mae'n unrhyw gydig i gydig i'r newid ysgol, o, ddim yn ddysgu'r ffwrdd o'r uniondeisio, o'r rhan o'r syniadau a'r llangwch i ddweud. Felly mae'n meddwl i'n ddweud o ymwybodol am wneud o'r angen, lle mae'r angen i'r ysgol cerdyn, oeddeni'n meddwl i'r feme i'r olygiau o'r olygwylliannol i'r olygwylliannol i'r Ysgol Parol, y gallwn y gallwn y bwysig fwyaf o Japan a'r ysgolwyddiadau ar gyfer ysgolwyddiadau yma yn y hwnnw. Felly, mae'n dweud yn fawr, ond rydym wedi'u gwneud o'r tynnu'r ysgolwyddiadau a rhan oedd i Helen. Mae'n ddweud i chi'n ddweud i chi'n gweithio i chi'n ddweud i chi'n ddweud i chi'n ddweud i chi'n ddweud i chi'n ddweud. Dwi'n ddweud i chi'n ddweud i chi, yn fawr i chi'n ddweud i chi. I'm Helen MacNaughton, chair of the Japan Research Centre here at SOAS. Before I introduce our guest speaker, I just want to say a few words about the lecture series. I don't want to repeat what Richard has said, but I want to emphasise that the Meiji Jingu Intercultural Research Institute has now been supporting the work of the Japan Research Centre for 10 years now. This is our 10th Meiji Jingu lecture. It's a wonderful highlight for us every year. With the start of our academic series, we have events every Wednesday evening, but this really starts us off on a great note. As Richard said, they also fund postgraduate scholarships, research studentships, this lecture, and they visit us every year. I'm really delighted that Director Sato is here again. He comes every year to see us. This year he's brought his colleague Mr Aoyama, a Shinto priest from Meiji Jingu as well. We're delighted to have them here again. Once again, thank them for welcoming them to SOAS again, and thank them for all the generous support that they give to the Japan Research Centre. Now I want to introduce our guest speaker for this evening, Dr Christopher Hood. Chris is a reader in Japanese studies at Cardiff University, and his research interests revolve around issues relating to transportation in Japan, particularly the Shinkansen, the bullet train, and aviation. He's heavily into trains, planes, and not so much automobiles, I don't think. He's the author of Japan, The Basics, and that's a great text introduction to Japan. If you're just starting your Japanese studies, study here at SOAS, that's a good one to start with. Many other publications include Oshitaka, Chronicle of Loss, and the world's largest single plane crash, which obviously relates to tonight's lecture, dealing with disaster in Japan, Shinkansen from bullet train to symbol of modern Japan, and he's also recently published a novel, his first novel. I believe it's available on Kindle, and iBooks, and eBooks or whatever. You can download it basically, and it's called Hijacking Japan, and I don't want to give away the plot, but I'm going to, so the hijacking of a bullet train, written in real time, so obviously I'm giving him a little plug for his novel, but if you'd like to download that, I'm surprised he's not on the watch list now for how he knows how the hijacker Shinkansen is, so he is. He's also currently the president of the British Association for Japanese Studies, and also last Sunday he ran his first half-marathon, so frankly I'm amazed he can even make it here and walk up onto the stage tonight. Last but not least, he's a fantastic Japanese studies colleague, and a good friend of mine, and many of you here tonight, but actually I personally have never bothered to go along and heard him give a lecture, so I'm delighted that I'm finally going to hear him speak tonight, so welcome, Chris, to the stage. Good evening everybody, thank you very much for coming. Thank you to Helen for inviting me to give this talk, and to so has, and obviously thank you to Meiji Jingu for their support. I'd also like to thank the people at the beginning here who have helped with my research, both in terms of funding, organisations such as the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee, Great Britain-Sasakawa, Daiwa, Japan Foundation, and even my own university, but also those who have contributed to my research by answering my various questions and so on. At this point I'd like to give a special mention to Peter Matthews, whose son Kim was on board the plane crash which I'll be talking about today. His experiences, which included a diary and photographs, helped enormously when I started researching this topic back in 2007, 10 years ago. This is why I'm talking about this today. Helen said, I could choose any of my topics about research. I said, oh great, I could talk about my novel. She goes, no, not so much about the novel. I thought well, this is the 10th anniversary lecture for Meiji Jingu, so I thought go with the one where I started the research 10 years ago. I'd also like to give a special mention to Keith Haynes, who in 1985 was working at JAL and helped support to the Matthews family at that time and throughout and without whose friendship I would almost certainly never have embarked on this research. In fact it's worth mentioning this friendship started essentially on this very stage a few years ago, we don't need to put a number on it, where I was the winner of the Sir Peter Parker rewards and part of the prize was a Japan Airlines ticket to Japan and our friendship went from there and then I discovered about Keith's relationship with the crash and so on. So today I will be talking about a plane crash, the Japan Airlines crash of 1985 flight JAL-123, which today still remains the world's biggest single plane crash, the official death toll being 520, but there were also four survivors. And that is about all I'm going to tell you in relation to the plane crash itself. I'm going to be focusing on other things today. If you would like to ask me questions about the plane crash, you are welcome to do so at the end, but the presentation itself is more on the focus of the aftermath of the crash and what has happened over the last 32 years. We'll be looking at three different issues and puzzles, although different and the people involved may have different experiences and motivations. As we will see there are times where these complement each other, but not necessarily always. First a warning. Helen asked me to try and make this presentation interesting, entertaining, visual and not too harrowing. Given the subject, this is a little bit difficult. It's inevitable as a consequence that some people may find some of the contents at times a bit disturbing. I've toned it down compared to what I have done sometimes with some of my students who go funny colours sometimes during my classes. If you feel it's getting too much for you, I really will not be offended if you leave. Don't worry about it, but hopefully you'll get something out of it. This quote I'm going to just park up on the screen. I'm not going to say too much about it. We will come back to it twice more during the lecture. The quote is from a novel which has been dramatised, and this is from the NHK dramatisation. As I said later on, we will be discussing the full implications of this quote. To start off with, and to give a little bit of context, I just want to say a little bit about the crash site itself in terms of its location and what it's like getting there, because it is quite remote. A few years ago I gave another paper here at SOAS, and I thought I got a really good idea to try and help transport my audience from SOAS to Japan and Uwenomura. I'll go onto Google Earth, I'll create a video where we start at SOAS and we get transported over. I went onto Google Earth, typed in SOAS on Google Earth, and it brought up this image. You'll notice the aeroplane is missing a bit of its tail fin. This is going to get as close as we get to entertaining and not harrowing, I suspect, this evening. I'm not doing a video this time. I'm going to keep it simple and just show you a map. This is Uwenomura. You can just about hopefully see the lines marking the border. What you might be able to get from that is how mountainous it is. What you won't be able to get from that is the sheer scale of Uwenomura. The area of Uwenomura is almost exactly the same as Kawasaki City. Kawasaki City has a population of 1.4 million. Today, Uwenomura has a population of 1,283. The main part of the village is up here. Stretch is for almost 5, 10 kilometres left to right, east-west, as I discovered when I tried to do a practice run there not that long ago. It was very tiring. It's not flat. The crash site, however, is actually down here. As the crow flies 10 kilometres from the centre of the village, today with the new roads that have been built and improved over the years because there's a brand new dam in here, it's 20 kilometres. It takes 40 minutes to drive, and then you've still got to climb up to the crash site after that. It is very, very remote even now. It was even more remote back in 1985, and there was lots of problems finding the crash site during the night, which again, if you want to know more about, feel free to ask me about. Having provided this context, let's get on to the first of the three themes I want to talk about. The first one is to do with the media. Naturally, back in 1985, there was great interest in this crash straight away. We have the pictures of the media in Fogyorka where the families went to gathering, trying to find out more, but there was world news, partly because there was one British victim, but this was the world's biggest plane crash. It was one of the first times. In fact, at the time it was considered to be the only time that a Boeing 747 plane had crashed where it wasn't clearly due to pilot error or terrorism. Was there actually some reason why this plane had dropped out of the sky due to a technical fault with the design? So people wanted to know what was going on, but it was more than that. There's famous people on board. There were actually survivors, a huge death toll, a whole range of different things. The media were amongst the first to get to the crash site. This picture was taken by a photographer called Naunori Kohira who was actually about, as far as we can tell, the first person on the site. He came across it almost by chance. He'd been scouring the mountains during the night, struggling, and was almost on a point of giving up when he got this view looking down from a mountaintop and could see the helicopter below and then spotted the crash site. His photographs appeared in weekly magazines in the weeks that followed the crash. But he also went on to publish a book, quite unusually. Largely, just a collection of his photographs or a selection of his photographs. Hardly any writing in his tool, and most of the writing that is in it is actually in English. An updated version has come out recently as an e-book with more detail about his experiences. But the book contains almost a selection of pictures from what it was like at the crash site and getting to the crash site. So one of the first things he discovered when he got closer to the site was actually, if you can just see it in the middle here, the Ace of Spades, which I'm sure any of you who have tried any gambling or anything is known as the death card, which he thought was particularly symbolic. He was there. In fact, he was one of the ones who helped to find one of the first survivors. And this photograph is one of the most iconic photographs of the survivors other than when they got winched away from the sites and was actually used by Nagano police for a while as a recruitment drive to try and get more people to join the police forces and so on. The book itself does not cover the full extent of everything he saw. It gives you a slight feel for it, the wreckage, the damage. You can see a few dead bodies here and so on. I'm not going to tell you or show you the most harrowing of the pictures that are taken. They're not even in his book. He didn't feel it was necessary for the book. But if you see the pictures, you begin to appreciate why when you read Japanese books about the crash, the crash site is referred to as being like a war zone or being like something from hell. Too easy, I think, when we talk about plane crashes, to lose that human side, that we focus on the plane crash rather than thinking it was a human crash. But what was the impact on the journalists, the photographers themselves? I came across an article not that long ago which said that compared to their American, British, French counterparts, Japanese, a smaller percentage of Japanese journalists suffer from trauma. Only about 6% of journalists in Japan are thought to suffer from any form of trauma. Now, I'm not in a position to challenge this figure. What I'm interested in is what happens to them if they do have trauma. One of the things that struck me through doing my research is that Japan is very bad at providing support, particularly mental support anyway. The families who lost loved ones received no counselling. In fact, this is one of the reasons why these families went on to create a support network so they could help each other out because the medical services and so on do not do this. The people from Japan Airlines, the self-defence forces received no counselling at all. So naturally, of course, the people from the media also received no counselling. But they suffered. They saw terrible things. What do they do with these? Do they just get on with their lies? What happens? And this is part of why this research is still relevant now because some of this is only starting to become clear now. Some of these journalists are now starting to express what they went through where they can. I've come across one journalist who can tell me everything he was doing up to a roundabout midnight on the 12th of August. He remembers the crash happening, seeing it on the news, remembers being dispatched to go up to Oenomura. His next memory happens in the middle of September. He says for two weeks his mind is completely blank. Absolutely nothing. Others remember almost everything they see but wish that they couldn't. Some journalists have just continued to be journalists, got on with it, battled on. Some, it appears to have steered the direction in terms of the sort of articles and work they like to do. One journalist called Hagiel, who works at the Mainichi Shimbun, has done a lot of subsequent articles and also books relating to the importance of human interaction, Kizuna. He's written books related to the 311 disaster and so on and won prizes. It looks as though his experience in 1985 helped to steer him. One journalist who covered the crash is this man, Hideo Yokoyama. He was working at a local newspaper in 1985, local to the crash site. He subsequently stopped being a journalist a few years later and became a novelist. In due course, in 2003, he published the novel Climbless High. Now, this book has been turned into two dramatisations, one by NHK in 2005, a movie version in 2008, and next year, an English translation will be coming out under the title of 17. I'll explain the likely reason for this title in due course. So, this is Yokoyama writing a story related to the plane crash. Talk about journalists. He's written a little bit like a autobiography, maybe. Well, not quite, but here is surely a chance for him to talk about the issues of trauma, talk about the experience in different ways. In the end, he doesn't do it as much as perhaps he could have done, but we see little clues and hints to the way in which the crash may have impacted him. Now, one of the things that's interesting about this book, given its length and its about journalism, is actually very few examples of any journalism in the book in terms of a natural article. The only real example comes a few chapters into the book, and I'm going to play you the NHK dramatisation version of it. So, it's in Japanese, so if you can understand Japanese, you'll find. If you don't understand Japanese, try and watch the bottom of the screen. I've included subtitles. In the book, it's only about eight in lines long. Now, when I asked Yokoyama about the book, but specifically about this article, his words were, this is the article he wished he could have written in 1985. But it took 17 years for him to get to a point, there's the 17, the English title, I suspect, 17 years before he could get to a point where he could actually express the trauma what he experienced in words. The only thing I would add to that is, if he'd written this in 1985, as well as being a genius, because it had been incredible to get those thoughts down into text like this at that point, my guess is it would not have been published by his newspaper because it comes across more as poetry than a newspaper article. And this is, of course, the extra thing about novels, the extra flexibility you have. Now, although it's tempting to suggest that Yokoyama puts his own experiences and so on into the novel, in fact, they're not really there. Certain characters look as though they could be partly based on him, but not totally. And although this article, which was being read, is written by one journalist called Sayama, he never really actually demonstrates any trauma himself during the novel or during any of the dramatisations. But one of his colleagues does. For this bit, I will play another clip. The top left-hand video we'll play in a second. This is from the 2008 version. And again, the reason I'm showing this is to give a little bit of a flavour of what it is some of these journalists might have actually seen and experienced. So the character Kanzawa really starts to show the signs of trauma. I think through this we can start to appreciate what it must have been like for these journalists. You can see him standing zombie-like in the top right-hand corner, but in the movie version, completely different to the novel, Kanzawa runs out and gets hit and killed in a hit-and-run accident. Why did this happen in the movie but not in the novel? It was actually due to the actor himself. He had a word with the director and said, this guy is suffering too much. He would want to be released from this. Can we find a way of doing this? And so this is how they wrote that scene in. And in the end, it led to the only nod to the novel of one of the key storylines of the novel. If you go on to any of the discussion forums and reviews about the film, one of the biggest single criticisms that fans and the novel make about the movie version is that it drops the so-called mochi-zuki storyline, which relates to that very first video I saw you about the importance of different lives. And one of the characters at the wake for Kanzawa says, couldn't we at least run an article about him? Showing that here they are spending pages and pages talking about the Japan Airlines crash, but one of their own journalist dies, and he's ignored the different values of different lives. And this critique is an issue I'll come back to in later times. So journalists suffer as well. Plain crashes are inherently interesting to many people. The BBC website tends to almost crash when people go to get the stories. It freezes up because of this interest. There's something about plane crashes that interests people. But do we stop to think about what the journalists themselves are seeing? War zones and so on are similar in that respect. And in relation to JL123, this is a story which is still playing out. And these journalists are still trying to come to terms with their experiences and think about what to do with them. But the case of Climers High is also useful because it can lead us onto a second area to explore. I'm thinking about the influence of novels, documentaries, movies and so on. In relation to the JAL crash, there have been well over 80. We're probably getting close to now 90 books in Japanese related to the crash, as well as a number of documentaries, dramatisation of the two novels and movie versions of the two novels. Now, I'm not going to dwell here on the difference between the English-speaking world's version of events and the Japanese version of events. But again, I'm happy to answer any questions you may have on that. Trying to think about what impacts the novels and dramatisations have on people's understanding of events of course is very difficult. I've even come across people who've seen a dramatisation and actually thought it was just pure fiction and were quite surprised in one of my lectures to discover it was based on a real event. We can also think a little bit about what these dramatisations do in terms of people's desire to connect with the crash and I'll come back to that in the final section. But of course, Japan is not alone in having disaster movies. This is a very popular genre. One of the first Hollywood movies to set a fictional story within a real disaster was A Night to Remember. Indeed, it was probably this movie that not only helped establish disaster movies as a popular genre, but also firmly engrained the story of the Titanic within popular social memory around the world. This ultimately led to many other movies, programmes and so on about the Titanic and of course James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster. But there have been other movies of this type. For example, USS Indianapolis, World Trade Centre and Alive. One thing that appears to unite many of these is that the focus tends to be on the survivors. That even when something bad happens, there is hope. But the stories sometimes do this to the extent that the dead seem to be largely ignored. There have been some notable exceptions to this, such as The Perfect Storm, United 93 and its TV version Flight 93. You note here in relation to airplanes and so on, I'm not going to include the movie Sully not a Disaster nor a Crash. It was a forced water landing, as Sully himself calls it, and there was no fatalities or significant injuries. If we consider Japanese films, there have certainly been some where the story considers the survivors, such as Documentary Hakora Yama. However, given that one of the most incredible aspects of the JL123 Crash was that there were a few survivors and this led to iconic shots of them being taken from the site, and it's perhaps surprising that the novels and their dramatisations do not focus upon them. In fact, largely ignores them altogether. Indeed, whilst the NHK version of Climbers High shows the airlift of one of the survivors on a TV in the newspaper company, the bigger budget movie version, which actually went as far as recreating part of the Crash site, merely shows people apparently watching a survivor being lifted from the site. You can't actually see it happening themselves. Whilst in the real world of 1985, reporters went to extreme lengths to try and interview or photograph the survivors, the journalists in Climbers High barely mentioned them at all and do not try to interview the survivors. The other novel, which relates to the JL123 Crash, is She's a Manutayo by Toyoko Yamasaki, which was turned into a movie in 2009 and then a 20-episode TV drama by the broadcaster Wawao's 25th anniversary in 2016. The story is not merely about the plane crash. In fact, like the novel, the main theme is about the management of a company, National Airlines, can't imagine who that was based on, following the life of one of its employees, Onchi, who is also based on a real person. Again, the story of She's a Manutayo largely ignores the survivors, which I find interesting, because when I speak to English-speaking people about my research, generally speaking, one of the first questions I get asked after, why did you do this research, is what happened to the survivors? Have you met the survivors? Have you interviewed them? In all the time that I've spoken to Japanese people about my research, I think only once have I been asked anything about the survivors. Usually, the conversations revolve around how that person can connect themselves in some way to somebody who was on the plane. So, how did Climers High and She's a Manutayo end up with the storylines that they did? I think there are six main influences that may be at play here, which have almost in a formulaic type way ended up shaping the story in the way that they were. First of all, thinking of the main characters of Yuki in Climers High and Onchi in She's a Manutayo, I believe that here we see it fitting with the idea of the tragic hero, which Standish has described as being typical within Japanese stories, such as Chushengura, about the 47 Ronin, and also in popular cinema as Abishiri Bangaichi. When I've been reading commentaries on the internet in English about She's a Manutayo and Climers High, one of the most common questions which I see people asking is, why didn't these guys just quit? Why did they continue to work at such dreadful companies? And I think those of us who are used to Japan just know because you just keep your head down and battle on it's the way it is. And the characters tend to reflect this, the tragic hero in that respect. Another factor playing apart is readability. Of course, readability is very subjective, as is watchability when these things get turned into dramatisations and movies. What one person thinks makes a book easy to read and other person may find very tedious. In relation to Climers High, one of the aspects to consider is how Yokoyama himself attempted to make the book more readable. In this respect, a key point to be aware of with Climers High is it actually contains two timelines. One set in 1985, another one set 17 years later, again the reason for the English title. The 1985 story line, as I said before, centres around this character Yuki working at a local newspaper covering the crash. The latter story line features Yuki's attempt to climb Mount Tanigawa on the anniversary of the crash 17 years later to remember a friend with whom Yuki was supposed to climb the mountain in August 1985. The friend was actually hospitalised while Yuki was busy covering the crash and the friend subsequently died due to Karoshi, death from overwork. Now Climers High was originally written with only the 1985 timeline, but Yokoyama considered it to be too dark and was concerned that people would not want to read it. So he then interlaced the other story line. Now whilst the use of time slips is very commonplace in works relating to memory and may make the book more readable and powerful in some respects, it is questionable the degree to which it reduces the darkness of the book. Shizu Manutayo, on the other hand, is actually five books and three volumes. It's a huge work. The crash is just one of these books. It has a lot of conversation and drama. It's very easy to read in that respect. But of course we need to keep in mind Yamasaki would not have been present at these conversations. So there is fiction. The movie and the dramatisation plays down certain things which appear in the novel, such as question marks about what happened with the plane, was it shot down, for example. And this probably has some impact in terms of the watchability and the story line as well, which the movie put together. If we turn to truth and realism and think first of climate's high, Yokoyama is very keen to stress that it is a work of fiction. It's tempting to suggest this is based on his experiences. No, he says it's not. Far from it. But it contains pillars of truth, certain things which are accurate to what happened in 1985 and certain other universal truths help to make the overall story believable. And so we see certain things relating to the headline, that first night, trying to figure out where the crash site was. Is it Nagano? Is it Gunma? Generally speaking, the accuracy within climate's high isn't too bad. It even spots and points out that Mainichi had a scoop on the cause of the crash very early on. But it doesn't go into much detail about the crash itself. The portrayal of the newspaper, ironically, the one thing that Yokoyama should have been the expert on and know so much about, is not accurate at all. There's a whole load of power relationships developed which just did not exist at the time. But these helped to develop the tragic hero story line. Shizu Manatayo is fiction based on fact, like climate's high. When the movie was finally announced that it was going to be made, there have been previous attempts, but for one reason or another, that hadn't happened. When it was finally announced this was going to happen, one of the biggest budget Japanese movies ever, I contacted the movie company and said, I'm doing my research about the Japan Airlines crash. You're making Shizu Manatayo. When I next visit Japan, would it be possible to come and meet somebody and interview you? To which the response was, this is a fictional movie based on a fictional novel. It has no relationship to this plane crash. Okay. And that was the end of conversation. Any other attempts at communication with them failed. The novel contains a lot of fact. It even contains real names of victims of the plane crash. Something which one of the mothers now kind of regrets. But in the movies, they change the names. But just by coincidence, this plane, which happens to have the same flight number as a Japan Airlines plane, just happens to also crash on the same mountain as an actual thing. So it doesn't seem quite so fictional at times. Also, they recreated a lot of scenes in places like Fujioka, such as the temporary morgue where the bodies were brought together. They also recreated the crash site, as it had also been done for 2008 version of Climbers High. For a lot of the families, these scenes would have been sending a chill down their spine. They would have looked all too familiar what happened. This is very close to being realistic. But there are little things which they change. You may have glimped the mother holding a baseball cap for Hanschen Tigers. Hanschen Tigers also features heavily in Climbers High dramatisations. Because this was the year when Hanschen Tigers remarkably went on to win their very first ever baseball championship. It's one of the things Japanese people remember of 1985. A whole of Japan wanted Hanschen Tigers to win, maybe not giant fans, but most people did. Why? Because Japan Airlines flight was predominantly Osaka people and also one of the passengers was the president of Hanschen Tigers. But the little boy, which this scene was referring to, whose real name appears in the novel, was actually a kintetsu buffalo fan, not Hanschen Tigers. The movie version of Climbers High is much more about the crash than either the novel or the NHK version. And finished us off with this text, which shocked even families. They were not expecting this. But it points out that there are still question marks about what happened. This would also shock most people if they've only read English versions and documentaries about the crash because the English-speaking world thinks they know what happened. The Japanese-speaking world is not so shocked. Another part of the equation, driving the storyline, the concerns for the Izoku families. This appears in the 2005 version of Climbers High. A letter, written by the lady who we saw in that very first clip and which will keep coming up, gets published in the newspaper where she basically is arguing that these deaths on the plane crash seem to be more important than others and how she can't cry for these families because nobody cried for her and her family when her uncle and cousin were killed in separate accidents. The letter gets published, there's an outcry. But critically, the key character, the main character, all he's really concerned about is how do the families feel, the Jal families themselves, to which the answer is zero complaints. It's a nice moment in the novel. It's a nice moment in the dramatisation. What struck me was when I met Yokoyama and I was interviewing him. One of the first things he was talking about is he was still so worried about what the Izoku think. It was such a parallel with this concern from the main character in the novel. The families actually don't mind his novel. Of course, as much as he may say he's worried about what they think, it didn't stop him from actually writing those particular hard-hitting storylines in the first place. Yamasaki showed her concern in different ways for the family by doing in-depth research. She went to meet the families. She read through their newsletters of the association that had been created to get a feel for what they were going through. She brought that into the style of writing and into how some of the families are portrayed. The Izoku concerns are there in that respect. We then have the critique of the system. We're back to this quote again. This Machizuki storyline is one of the key storylines in the Climus High novel. As I said, it appears in the NHK version. It's dropped almost completely from the movie version. In fact, this quote is not half as hard-hitting as some of the other things that are included in the book. I was thinking of including one, but it includes a slightly rude word, so I'm going to pass that by, but if you want to ask about it individually afterwards, I'll tell you what the particular sentence is. Is this critique of the system, this critique of journalism, and in the case of Shizu Manatayo, rather than the critique of journalism, is critique of the system, how an airline behaved, how the government behaved. Is this actually also part of the trauma process, how it's playing out, the frustration of going through and being forced to report things which maybe didn't need to be reported in the way that they did? So trauma is part of the final equation. I've already talked about the trauma and how it relates to Climbers High. It's primarily the trauma of the journalists where it appears at all. There's actually not a huge amount talked about the families or even the passengers. This little hints. Shizu Manatayo, on the other hand, gives us the trauma of both the families and those who are on the flight. We see the scenes in the cockpit. We see the scenes in the cabin. We see people writing messages to their loved ones. As I said, Yamasaki herself, no direct connection to this flight and the people, but did the research and wanted to get that side over. So, in the end, when you put these various things together, the stories almost look as though they could have almost richened themselves. These pressures are pointing the stories to go in a particular way. There are very different stories, but actually they end up doing very similar kind of things. Now, we turn to the third and final part of the presentation and another puzzle. This is Ostataka no Onee, the actual crash site, as it looks. This photo was actually taken a couple of years ago now. Doesn't look hugely different today. Now, one of the things that's always struck me from going to this crash site, I've been, whatever it is now, six times, I think, something like that over the last 10 years, is how the site continues to evolve. This was one of the things that piqued my research interests. So, we see that trees have grown back. There were no trees on the 13th of August. We see how there's a range of memorials, which you can see within this picture. Not all these memorials went up in the first year. They've been added over the years. There are individual marker posts for individual victims or groups of families. These memorial posts may be updated and changed from time to time. I was at the crash site about three weeks ago and it was very interesting to see yet again in the three or four years since I'd last been how many had changed yet again. Keep in mind, we are 32 years on. But another extra puzzle relates to this place. This is ire no sono. This is in the centre of the village in terms of close to where the population, what population there is, is established soon after the crash, ready for the first anniversary, got memorial tower, and also off to the side, this building. It's bigger than it used to be. The footprint's the same, but you might be able to tell this looks quite clean new. It used to have a little display of things related to the crash, and other than that, just a seating area. Then, two years ago, it was upgraded to look like this. It is now a museum by any other name. Before, if you went to have a look what was inside, if you knew about the crash, some of the exhibits kind of made sense, but there's no explanation. Now it's got a very detailed explanation about the crash itself, about the site. It's got some of the belongings of people who died in the crash, and so on. But the question is, why? Why did this happen so long after the crash? How did it happen? What's going on here? What's at play? Now part of my thinking here is that bereavement goes on longer in Japan. In Britain, we might mark certain anniversaries, but, to put it bluntly, there's a time where people think you should just get over it, disclosure, move on. That, of course, is true in Japan as well, but this period is quite fixed due to Buddhist memorialisation. It goes up to at least the 33rd anniversary, because of the Buddhist year counting years. The 33rd anniversary actually happens 32 years after the event, so this August was the 33rd Buddhist anniversary of the Jal Crash. If you look at key Buddhist anniversaries, you see the number of people going to the crash site for the memorialisation and so on. It goes up compared to the previous year. The fact that people are doing these things and are expected to do it to make sure that their loved one passes on to become a Buddha helps with the ancestral worship and so on, it's fixed, it's meant to continue for, depending on your sex, either this 32, 33 years, or possibly 50. Bereavement goes on for a long time in Japan. Of course, that doesn't explain the whole story. Why not? I've been to lots of different crash sites in Japan. Many of the ones on this slide I went to during a trip to Japan in September. Now, going to these sites, I can see certain parallels with what I see at the Japan Airlines crash site. There's an evolution happening, but at most of them, there's no museum. Certainly no sign of any upgrade after a number of years. So bereavement theory can't explain everything. So what's going on at these places, what's happening, why is it that with the case of the JAL crash site and Irenosono, we've seen this change so many years later. Similarly, Japan Airlines itself has a safety promotion centre, which is a JL123 museum by any other name, was established 21 years after the crash and has subsequently been expanded and changed twice. What's going on here? Is this merely about scale? I mean, this crash is huge compared to most of the ones on this slide. Well, it is, but it's still bigger. The Toyomaru sinking is nearly three times the size, but we don't see the same thing happening there. In the case of the Shizukishi plane crash, which at the time was the world's biggest plane crash, there is a memorial hall very similar to what used to exist at Irenosono, but it hasn't been upgraded. It's still the same as it was back in the early 1970s. And it certainly couldn't be described as a museum. Like JAL, A&A does have a safety promotion centre, which contains information about the crash site, but like the JAL one, most people won't have heard of it and although the public can access it, it's not that easy. In terms of the Mikawa train accident, there's nothing. It's just a simple memorial at a local temple. JR East also has a training centre and also has a section dedicated to learning the mistakes of what happened with that train crash, but that one's even harder to get to than the JAL and A&A ones. Of course at one level, the fact that employees of these organisations can get to them is the key thing. Employees learn about the significance of safety and what happens if mistakes are made. But there's also a public demand for these things, which so far isn't being fully addressed. Is one of the forces at work here, dark tourism? Dark tourism is this idea where people who have no direct connection to the event themselves want to go to it. As a concept, it's actually quite new in Japan, and if anything is taking on a slightly negative nuance. More broadly, it has a very long history, even if the term itself has only been around for about 20 years, and it includes people who go to places such as the Hiroshima A-bondome, Auschwitz and Frankshaus, World War I war graves, sites connected to the Titanic, battlefields and such like. What drives people varies. Sometimes it's historical significance. Sometimes it's because people were involved in some way or the fact that famous people were on board. Sometimes it is actually simply because some people have a macabre interest and want to go to where people died. Sometimes it's got nothing to do with the original event itself. They've seen a dramatisation, and they actually want to go to the place related to the dramatisation. They become a fan of the movie, and that makes them want to go to these places. And this is also referred to as content tourism. Now, in a way no murder itself, as I discovered when I was doing my little jog recently, this is I think the only sign which actually has a sign pointing to both Ireno sono, which is the one to the left, and Osutako no onee going straight on. That would be a really long route to go straight on from there to get to the crash site. But unless you know what these terms mean, I suspect they are meaningless to the average Japanese person. Ireno sono, there is nothing about that term which says Japan Airlines Flight 123. Osutako no onee, again, would be lost on most people. Most Japanese people refer to the crash site as being Osutaka or Osutaka Yama. Mount Osutaka. Osutako no onee means the ridge of Osutaka. Why is it given this name? Because actually the plane crash on a completely different mountain. But the name Osutaka has got so ingrained in the public memory that the mayor decreed that the crash site is called the ridge of Osutaka brackets which is on Mount Takamagahara. But Uenomura does not promote these sites. If you go onto the Uenomura tourist site, their web page, you will not find a mention of Osutaka no onee. I think they have one picture of Ireno sono, but it's very low down on the list of places to visit. For a village which only has 1,200 people, they have six different printed tourist maps which you can pick up at the village hall and so on. Only one of these shows at Ireno sono and Osutaka no onee. This is a village which is desperate for money. It's desperate for tourists and yet they are largely ignoring the one thing which could bring in a lot of people and is already bringing a lot of people. The number of visitors going up to both of these sites is rocketing up in recent years, but the village itself is not doing anything to encourage it. The updated Ireno sono has no information to aid somebody with their visit to Osutaka no onee. It tells you there's some pretty flowers up there and the different flowers you'll see at different seasons, but it doesn't actually explain how to get to the site, what happens when you park at the car park, how much further it is to walk and most importantly how to get around the site. The only information you get about that is in this map here which you get partway up the mountain. Now I've been there a lot of times. I've walked around it in the light, in the dark and still when I look at that map I go, not a hope. I would get lost using that map. What chance does somebody who has driven, I mean if you go from Tokyo, the quickest route you can get there from Tokyo if you drive door to door, it will take you about three and a half hours and then you've got another 30 minutes to an hour walk up to the crash site itself depending on your fitness. What chance have people got of finding their way around with a map like that? When you get up there, there's no explanation about this, the U-shaped cutting. Still visible, this photograph was taken three weeks ago, still visible 32 years later. This is on a different ridge with a right wing of the plane sliced through a mountain, ripping the engines off the plane. Still visible today. Less visible than it used to be. It's been gradually shrinking as trees grow up. There's no explanation about it. If you know to look for it, you'll see it. Well, most people won't. When you get up to the site there's a sign that points out that this is almost a religious place now. So please behave appropriately with the correct manners. What does that mean? What's good manners for one person? Isn't that very good manners for another person? What does that really mean, that phrase? You can leave Tanzaku. Leave a message. But the number of visitors to the site is so great now that this box down here, which contains the Tanzaku for you to write on, is now frequently empty. You have to now take your own. Of course there's no website telling you to do that because there's no one promoting to go to the site. There's no mention about what sort of things would be appropriate to write on your own Tanzaku other than before you write yours. Look at what everybody else is writing and use that as a hint. And the other thing that I've seen and experienced many times, the number of times that people go up there where their connection, the reason they're gone there is because their favourite singer, Kyu Sakamoto, famous for the Tsukiaki song as it's known in English, died in the plane crash. I don't want to see where he died. The number, at least once or twice now, I have had to actually stop people from leaving the crash site. I've heard them talking. They say, oh, we're going to go off and find the borehill for Sakamoto. And they come back half an hour later. I can see they're about to leave. And it's just like, hold on. They get freaked out because there's strange foreigners talking to them in Japanese. Where have you come from? I come from Hiroshima. How long did it take you to get here? So you've come all the way from Hiroshima and you wanted to see Sakamoto's borehill. Yes, yes. Did you find it? No. And you're leaving? Yes. Come with me. And I'll show them where it is. Part of the problem is that it uses his real name. It doesn't say Sakamoto Kyu. It says Oshima Hisashi. But imagine, if I've seen those two examples, imagine how many other people have failed to find what they're looking for. 100 people a day during the six months of the year in the crash site are open are visiting this crash site. And yet they're not getting the full experience. But the point here is that ire no sono may have been upgraded, but it's done nothing for the dark tourists. They're not part of the consideration here. They may be now, because thanks to some British researcher who keeps on asking the families about why they're doing what they're doing are now aware of the fact that dark tourists might actually find this sort of information useful. It's not my fault, and that's going to mess up my research completely. So if it's not dark tourism that's driving this and it's not completely bereavement theory, what else is going on? I think time and money are critical. In relation to time, I mean the time for people to vote themselves, the memorialisation and support for others connected to the crash. In this respect, two things are important in relation to JL123. First, the scale of the crash meant there was critical mass for having volunteers to establish and continue to run a support mechanism. In this case, the 812, Ren Rakhukai. Second, I believe that given the significant force in volunteering in Japan which comes from women, I think it's insignificant that so many women lost husbands and children in the crash. And this helped to lead to the process continuing for so long. In terms of money, Japan Airlines established the Irenosono Foundation following the crash. This foundation still has money. Which means that if someone such as the Ren Rakhukai or the foundation itself because they're sitting around wondering what can we do comes up with an idea for an improvement that money is there to do something. And so it can happen. I do not believe that these two factors exist in most other accidents. But this then relates to one final significant point that has to be made. It's this quote again. Whilst this was meant to be a scathing attack on the media, I actually think there's a broader point here. The victims of JL123 were not just extremely important lies for the media, but for Japan and perhaps beyond more broadly. That this is the case can be seen by reading through the Osaka newsletter of the 812 Ren Rakhukai or being seeing one of the lanterns at the annual Toro Nagashi on the night before the anniversary. Whilst the main focus of the JL123 crash at the time of the anniversary is that crash, other accidents are also remembered. Families who lost loved ones in those accidents also travelled to Uenomura for the JL123 anniversary. JL123 is bigger than this single crash. It is the representative for all of them. This brings huge responsibility for the 812 Ren Rakhukai. Their activities and the memorialisation that takes place, it is likely to shape some of the memorialisation at other sites. But it is also likely to drive further changes and developments to memorialisation related to JL123 itself. The challenge going forward may be balancing the complimentary and conflicting demands of the families and increasing numbers of visitors unconnected to the crash. Thank you for listening.