Since March 11, 2011, a great many moving images—from professional images such as TV programs to amateur videos shot with smartphones and uploaded to the Internet—of the multiple disasters of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami and the meltdown of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant have emerged in Japan. These include documentary films by professional filmmakers, narrative films representing the victims’ predicament and despair, endless television reports on the day-by-day damage control measures, and a multitude of videos shot with smartphones and uploaded to social media and YouTube. The moving image was the first medium capable of engaging with post-3/11 Japan. In the aftermath, the Internet and television were awash with stunning live images and sounds, produced with consumer-level digital media tools (DV cameras, cellphones, smartphones, PC editing applications, and YouTube). This was a defining feature of the post-3/11 mediascape, as compared with other catastrophes in earlier decades—e.g., the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake or the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster—that predated the popularization of affordable and portable personal digital media technologies.

How did portable personal digital media help shape the post-3/11 image? I will address this question by analyzing Ashes to Honey (Mitsubachi no haoto to chikyu no kaiten, 2010, Kamanaka Hitomi) in terms of both its documentary form and its distribution. The quality and attributes of documentary films have changed over the last ten years.