Sennan Asbestos Disaster

Organizing in the face of imminent death.

I must apologize for my absence. My intention was to be consistent with updating this blog, but between the holidays and pervasive job anxiety, I’ve found that maintaining it is quite an expensive hobby (if you are able to pay for a subscription in the new year, I’d appreciate it). Nevertheless, all it takes is one great movie to remember why I put myself in this position.

I was initially going to write about Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, which I watched, not expecting much, on a flight. I also saw a mediocre comedy, a René Clair picture, in one of those crumbling cinemas in Paris’s Latin Quarter. Then there were some 2022 catchups: the latest Albert Serra and Alice Diop’s legal tragedy. But what I’ve chosen to start 2023 off with now feels like an inevitable choice.

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Sennan Asbestos Disaster is not the most inviting title for a film with the greatest sense of urgency. Directed by Kazuo Hara, Sennan Asbestos Disaster chronicles the journey of asbestos victims as they seek reparations from the Japanese government. It is a bleak tale of a group of people as they face an inevitable death at the hands of an epic negligence.

Asbestos, in my mind, has been as abstract as something like the Spice in Frank Herbert’s novels. I possessed a brief, obvious knowledge of the mineral — it’s dangerous, it may exist in the walls of an over-priced, pre-war New York rental, it hasn’t impacted anyone I know. What I didn’t know is that it’s durable, fire-resistant, an essential insulator, and that it’s still used in construction in some parts of the world.

Asbestos as construction material has been banned in Japan for many decades now, and the crime at play has only revealed itself in the past few years. Asbestos is a pressure cooker. It can take several decades for its dangers to materialize. Lung Cancer, asbestosis, mesothelioma — it’s what laborers who worked in asbestos factories from the 1950s through the 1970s began to face in their 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Sennan Asbestos Disaster sees several of the plaintiffs as they seek justice from the Japanese government, who have been long aware of asbestos’s dangers but failed to take action when it mattered. The plaintiffs are full of rage, especially the ones who, throughout the film, hope they can survive long enough to see Japan take accountability.

Hara doesn’t shy away from their illnesses. He presents us with a woman, in the bathtub, in the middle of a coughing fit, her lungs failing to produce oxygen. We see deterioration over years and generations of families torn apart. We also see people in oxygen masks, their skin paled from years of bad blood circulation on their deathbeds. And then the empty pale faces of the deceased at their funerals. There’s no place to hide, which is exactly the point of Hara’s project.

His film is relentless, which mirrors the attitudes of his plaintiffs, who are just about the bravest people I’ve seen, not only in how they give such intimate access to their lives. We see these survivors try to break into government buildings. We see them refuse the placating of low-level bureaucrats. We see them demanding the ridiculous, a face to face with the prime minister, for example. And we see them get exactly what they want through diligent, impassioned organizing.

Like all masterpieces, Hara’s documentary is also more than its subject matter. It exposes other wrongs. Some of the main victims of these asbestos factories are Korean immigrants, who came to Japan in search of menial jobs and were at the bottom of a social order. It is no coincidence that the more vulnerable, the more likely one was to be found in these places, breathing in the fatal substance. A lot of the workers were women with abusive, lazy husbands — some who brought their babies to work, unaware that they were poisoning them.

And with all of this, what I found most remarking is the attitude of the plaintiffs as they confront an impending death. There are no illusions about asbestos being a death sentence. Some of them were days or weeks away from dying in their interviews, and throughout the film we are exposed to a vigor, a humor, and a spirit unlike anything I’ve seen before.

I keep thinking about one older man who is at the forefront of every effort to confront the government. He’s stubborn and his fellow organizers warmly refer to him as moody. With a signature trench and cute hat, he's superhero, walking past barricades and security with no care for the traditional ways of appealing to ones representatives. He wants to storm in, and he refuses to wait. Nothing is more insulting than having to fill out paperwork when you and your community don’t have time on your side. Sennan Asbestos Disaster shows that the best course of action is always defiance.

Sennan Asbestos Disaster is available to stream on the Criterion Channel.