Photography – Deadly Traces | nd-aktuell.de

The news that this year’s… Nobel Peace Prize to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo founded by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who are committed to nuclear disarmament will certainly have pleased the author. This topic has occupied him since his studies in Hiroshima. In particular, an island in the bay in front of the city that was wiped out with an atomic bomb in 1945.

On Okunoshima, the island of the rabbits – so called because of the huge numbers of long-eared rabbits hopping around there – there is now a vacationer’s paradise that is known beyond Japan’s borders. And until 1945 there was a plant for producing poison gas and a production facility in which forced-recruited schoolgirls made balloons out of rice paper. Containers with poison gas were hung on these, which were supposed to cross the Pacific on the trade winds and kill people in the USA. Many balloons didn’t get there, thank God.

In occupied China, however, the poison gas was used on ground level. The number of people murdered in this way is not known, only that around 35 million Chinese lost their lives in this barbaric war of conquest. And that people still die in China today when toxic gas containers are exposed during construction work. There are no maps of where the Japanese hastily buried the dirty stuff during their retreat so that it could be systematically dug up and disposed of.

Fritz Schumann repeatedly visited the island with the ruins now haunted by nature, the history of which no holidaymaker knows, otherwise he probably wouldn’t be here. It is just one place out of a total of 15 that he visited in the past years in the Empire. Abandoned settlements, lonely valleys, snow-covered mountains with monks, areas that don’t necessarily attract tourists – who travels to Fukushima, where a tsunami caused a disaster at the nuclear power plant there in 2011? The waves also reached Europe at that time and led to the decision to shut down the nuclear power plants in Germany.

Schumann was later among the volunteers who distributed food among people who had been evacuated from the contaminated 20-kilometer zone. The young ones had moved on, the old ones remained in the container camps. “Yes, the German-Japanese friendship, we always help each other, don’t we,” a woman said to him. Schumann remained silent. The poison gas on Okunoshima had been produced with German know-how, not to mention the Anti-Comintern Pact that the fascists in Berlin and Tokyo had forged in 1936… But that was certainly not what the old woman had in mind, but only, friendly to potatoes, vegetables, Want to thank fruit and water. »The camp lies next to a rice field ripe for harvest, whose lush greenery forms a cynical contrast to the colorless barracks. As tempting as the rice looks, people don’t want to eat it,” writes Schumann.

55,000 people are still living in the temporary facilities years later, when Schumann was there again. The reactor accident did not cause any “direct deaths,” but the Japanese government estimates that there were more than 2,000 “indirect fatalities from the disaster” – some died of heart attacks because of the stress, others died of alcohol because of hopelessness.

The studied photographer, born in 1987, has traveled to the four main Japanese islands. The occasions: various, the journalistic returns: considerable. They are now in the Berliner under the title “Japan, who are you?” Travel Dispatches Publishing House appeared. The book is, as might be expected from the publisher’s name, explicitly not a travel guide, nor a collection of classic travel reports. Schumann writes primarily about people he met more or less by chance.

Their fates are of course initially personal stories. But at the same time they tell a lot about the Far Eastern country with its ancient traditions and peculiarities. You also learn that Japan has been in crisis for more than thirty years. After a brilliant economic rise, which was possible, among other things, because after the World War, people saved on arms spending and stayed out of all armed conflicts, the trend reversal came.

When the Soviet Union collapsed and the USA demanded greater military commitment from Japan, the “Self-Defense Forces” were massively expanded. In 1992, Japan took part in a UN mission for the first time to monitor elections in Cambodia, and in 2004 it went to war alongside the USA for the first time without a UN mandate. In 2011 – when the USA completed its “pivot to Asia” – Japan also switched to a more offensive military structure. In terms of expenditure, the empire is now the third largest military power in the world; Tokyo now has a quarter of a million soldiers under arms.

What does this do to ordinary people? How does it change your life? Fritz Schumann observes, asks reserved questions, politics seemingly remains outside the box. So he (and therefore the reader) learns a lot about this country, more than is reported in the daily press. The publisher and author have created a readable, very enlightening, but also visually beautiful book. One received the German Publishing Prize at the book fair in Frankfurt am Main, the other will have to wait a while before he receives a comparable, well-deserved honor.

They say traveling makes you smarter. Definitely through Japan. Schumann clearly acquired patience, forbearance and politeness there. What a treasure in this stressful Germany!

Fritz Schumann: Japan, who are you? Hidden places and untold stories. Reisedepeschen-Verlag, 350 pages, hardcover, €26.