Japan Sinks: 2020

Episodes 1-2

I am somewhat dumbfounded that Japan Sinks: 2020 exists. Not because it has questionable source material; Sakyo Komatsu's original 1973 novel has inspired multiple live-action adaptations, including a television series by frequent Hideaki Anno collaborator Shinji Higuchi. No, what gives me pause is how a work of fiction, likely multiple years in the making, managed to land at precisely the most effective moment. Japan Sinks is a natural disaster story, and while hypothetical massive disaster films are not rare, Masaaki Yuasa's latest series felt like reading Monday's headlines.

Updated for the modern day, Science SARU's take centers on the Mutoh family. Mari Mutoh is flying home to Japan from a trip abroad, her daughter Ayumu is training with her high school track team for an upcoming competition, her son Go is at home playing video games, and her husband Koichiro is hard at work constructing scaffolding at a sports arena. Suddenly, an earthquake hits that startles everyone on the ground. The tremors are long but not as intense in Tokyo as other areas, like Okinawa. When the shaking stops, Ayumu's coach urges the teens to head to the locker room to get dressed and contact their guardians.

Consider this the end of anything resembling truly organized leadership because it turns out the earlier quake was just a taste of what would follow. An intense, devastating earthquake strikes and the opening episode erupts into destructive violence. School girls are thrown and trapped under falling furniture. Go is tossed like a ragdoll across the dining room where a falling chair slices open his face. Mari's plane suffers damage and makes an emergency landing in a river. At the arena, Koichiro is suspended by a safety cable among the debris while many of his coworkers are crushed below. Somehow they'll have to reunite despite their respective dangerous surroundings.

The Mutoh's are immediately framed as a healthy, loving family unit. It's implied early on that Mari has a multicultural background. Both she and Go speak both Japanese and English fluently. Go actually seems to prefer English over Japanese and I would assume that Ayumu is also fluent, but she isn't shown speaking English and seems to be resistant about being compared to her mother. This is interesting because it seems like Ayumu has some commonalities with her mom, namely a shared athleticism. Ayumu is the ace runner for her track team and Mari is shown to be an adept swimmer. Even with their shared interests, Ayumu favors her father and as a child hoped to "marry" him because she loved the way he cooked yams.

More on yams in a minute.

Some of the sting of the opening episode is lessened because I knew what I was signing up for when I pushed 'play.' What I didn't expect was an immediate rehash of DEVILMAN crybaby's episode nine. One of the ways Yuasa made that bloodbath so emotionally draining was setting scenes of violence against the voice over of Miki Makimura reading her Instagram post where she desperately asks the world to be a more accepting, loving place. That same trick is used again here while Ayumu searches for her family. She sees her favorite shops and eventually her home in ruins while the voice over sounds like she's giving a school presentation about her favorite things, or writing a diary entry. She talks about the home her father built, rather ostentatious by Japanese standards, while the camera shows only rubble and a broken sign identifying it as her home.

Her sorrow is lessened as the family is able to reconvene safely in the courtyard of a shrine. The shrine is located on higher ground and other familiar faces start to gather there, including Ayumu's upperclassman Koga. Koga is a shut-in who had some kind of "falling from social grace" but it isn't elaborated on yet. The individuals taking shelter at the shrine begin hunting for information about the quakes the moment that cell service returns. WIth the immediate hurdle out of the way, Japan Sinks starts to lay more groundwork for its overarching themes. Background characters begin asking one another if they can read news coverage from outside of Japan, as everyone seems naturally skeptical of whatever story is coming from inside the country itself. It's at this point I noticed that there's been no government response to the disaster. There are no military vehicles shown or organized services like The Red Cross. Amenities are being handed out by a shop owner and the social fabric is immediately upended to create an "us vs them" environment. Background characters snip at one another over "their space" on the ground, their cellphones, their share of food, their place in line, etc. It's obvious that the Mutoh's optimism and hospitality are not the norm, if not an outright disadvantage.

The small group at the shrine discuss whether Japan is sinking after a YouTuber known as "KITE" uploads a video of Okinawa disappearing into the ocean. The water level is also continuing to rise even though the tsunami should have passed by now. The small community decides to leave the shrine in order to restock on food and move further inland away from rising waters. The majority of the group decide to head east toward a food distribution center but the Mutoh family, their neighbor Nanami, and Koga head west after one of Go's online friends in Estonia says that birds eye view footage showed functional electrical power in that direction.

This is a risk, but the Mutoh family core is by and large Koiichiro and as long as he stays in good spirits and can articulate a plan, his family can carry on.

So, now we get back to the yams.

Episode two shows the Mutoh's traveling through the hillside, locating fresh water, and scouring the remains of a demolished village. Ever the survivalist, Koiichiro finds evidence of wild yams behind a fence that specifically tells him not to dig for yams. So he climbs over and sets out digging, remarking to his son that the best way go about getting yams is to dig the entire plant up at once.

I cannot articulate to you how full of dread I was during this scene. You see, around where I live (and perhaps you too), there are these large signs on the side of road with cartoonish gophers wearing hardhats. The signs list a phone number underneath bright colored text that reads CALL BEFORE YOU DIG. The reason (and I happen to know of a person who met their end this way) is to prevent people doing home projects from striking underground electrical cables and electrocuting themselves.

As Koiichiro kept digging deeper, I could feel the anxiety welling up in my chest. I just knew, given how long this was taking him, that Koiichiro was not going to come out of that field with a yam. Things had been going far too smoothly for the Mutoh's after all with Mari snapping commemorative photographs and the group quickly finding fresh, potable water.

Koiichiro doesn't strike electrical cables. He's hopped over the fence into an abandoned munitions field, ignored the overgrown signage, and left his family without a heart to keep them moving. While the first episode put the devastation front and center, the more the Mutoh's interacted (and succeeded) the more I could feel myself relaxing. Episode two's finale tears away that sense of comfort. No one is immune to the potential horrors of the unfolding chaos and I doubt the Mutoh family will look the same at the end.

Rating:

Lynzee Loveridge is the Executive Editor of Anime News Network, an anime fan over 20 years in the making, and probably a ghost.

Japan Sinks: 2020 is currently streaming on Netflix.