This issue offers a commemoration of the disaster that struck northeast Japan a little more than three years ago. On 11 March 2011, an earthquake occurred along the ocean floor approximately 72 kilometers off the east coast of the Japanese archipelago. The six-minute earthquake measured 9.0 in magnitude and caused a massive tsunami to surge into the nearby coastline, with waves reaching as high as a twelve-story building (40 meters). At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, a fifteen-meter-high tsunami poured over the plant's protective seawall, inundating emergency power generators and shutting down its cooling system. Within hours, a nuclear catastrophe began to unfold, with radioactive water leaking and explosive releases of radioactive materials into the atmosphere. Altogether, the threefold earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster damaged or destroyed over 200,000 buildings, required the evacuation of 160,000 residents, and took the lives of 15,883 people (with an additional 2,654 still unaccounted for). Officially called "The Great Eastern Japan Earthquake," the triple disaster is frequently referred to in Japan as "3.11," referencing both the date and evoking comparisons to 9/11—a similarly time-warping catastrophe a decade earlier.
This issue presents reviews of seven different films that have been made about various aspects of the disaster. I wish to thank our reviewers for their contributions to this issue. I also want to let our readers know that this will be my last issue as review editor, and I thank the Asian Educational Media Service and the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Illinois for allowing me to serve in this capacity over the past two years.Center for East Asian and Pacific Studie
