Film director Kazuhiro Terada’s latest work is again about giving a voice to people who challenge authority, but those he was supporting wanted nothing to do with the project.

They had, after all, experienced the worst thing imaginable in their lives, followed by additional and unwarranted misery.

But Terada persisted, and he eventually won over a few of them.

His documentary, “Ikiru: Okawa Shogakko Tsunami Saiban wo Tatakatta Hitotachi” (To live: People who fought a lawsuit over tsunami deaths), opened in theaters on Feb. 18 for a limited release.

The 124-minute film portrays the families of 23 children who were killed in the 2011 tsunami disaster and the legal action they took to find out why their loved ones died.

A total of 74 children and 10 teachers died at Okawa Elementary School in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, in the tsunami spawned by the magnitude-9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011.

Twenty-four elementary and junior high schools in the city were hit by the tsunami. Okawa Elementary School was the only one where children died under the oversight of teachers.

The school is located about 3.7 km from the shore and was not considered in immediate danger. But the tsunami moved up a river close to the school.

Fifty minutes after the earthquake struck, an estimated 8.6-meter-tall wave hit the school and swept away the children on the school grounds.

A mountain that children climb during a class is located just behind the school. A school bus was parked nearby. The community wireless system and local radio station kept urging people to evacuate to higher ground.

But the children were kept on the low-lying school grounds, waiting for instructions from their teachers.

The Sendai High Court in 2018 handed down a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, acknowledging authorities from both the Miyagi prefectural government and Ishinomaki city were responsible for the tragedy due to negligence.

The court said the officials should have put in place workable evacuation plans and held evacuation drills during ordinary times. It ordered them to pay a combined 1.44 billion yen ($11 million) to the plaintiffs. 

The Supreme Court upheld the ruling in 2019, ending the legal battle that started in 2014.

Although the plaintiffs won the lawsuit, they suffered an emotional toll in the fight against authorities.

Some critics said the lawsuit was filed just to gain money. Others threatened to kill the grieving parents.

Terada proposed making the documentary on the plaintiffs in the summer of 2020 when their lawyers were looking for ways to keep alive the lessons learned from the disaster, the memories of the victims, and the relatives’ struggles during the legal action.

The director, 51, strongly felt that their story should be told to prevent a repeat of the tragedy. His conviction was based largely on his remorse for not speaking up earlier in his life.

DIDN’T SPEAK UP

Terada graduated from Kobe Takatsuka High School in Kobe in 1990.

Four months after his graduation, tragedy struck.

It was common practice at the school for teachers on lookout duty to slam shut the steel gate at the entrance to keep out tardy students.

But one day, the gate crushed the skull of a female student, killing her.

It was later learned that the force of the gate closing could destroy even a helmet.

Even today, Terada remembers the terrifying sound of the gate being closed. He recalled that although many students feared the rapidly closing gate, nobody urged school authorities to stop the dangerous practice.

“Her life would have been spared if we had spoken up,” he said. “The incident made me realize that remaining silent is equivalent to aiding a culprit.”

After he became involved in producing news programs at 25, Terada felt it was his mission to give a voice to marginalized people.

His projects covered such issues as freedom of speech for people arrested after handing out fliers, and indigenous rights of the Ainu people.

But his proposal for the documentary about the tsunami tragedy was opposed by all of the plaintiffs.

‘FIGHTING TO LIVE’

Undeterred, Terada traveled to Ishinomaki to attend every session the plaintiffs held to discuss and prepare for the court proceedings. He listened as they poured out their hearts.

Slowly, some of the parents began to accept Terada’s plan. In the end, eight families gave consent to being filmed.

Terada initially planned to use only original footage for the documentary. But bereaved families offered him more than 200 hours of their own footage.

Their recordings showed the school left in rubble, the account of a teacher who survived the tsunami, relatives retracing mountain route that their children could have taken, teary-eyed news conferences, and local officials defending their disaster response.

He also recorded the relatives 10 years after the disaster to show how they were faring.

“Some viewers may find it difficult to understand the film, but I felt that I should avoid making the story deliberately dramatic,” he said. “I am hoping audiences will realize the cruelty of our society, where people who raise their voices come under attack and take the families’ experiences as their own.”

In one scene in the documentary, parents whisper a message to their dead daughter while using a finger to gently trace her nameplate in the school hallway.

“Our daughter’s life would not be wasted if the school transformed into a place where everyone could freely express themselves,” one of the parents said.

In the last scene of the film, a father who lost a child described the changes he went through over the years.

“I thought about killing myself many times to follow my child,” he told a gathering of high school students. “Today, I am fighting to live.”

The father repeated the words said by a judge in the ruling: “The school should not be a place where the lives of children end.”

(This article was compiled from reports by Etsuko Akuzawa, Yusuke Noda, Takuya Kitazawa and Issei Yamamoto.)