Caring too much can be an occupational hazard for journalists in disaster or war zones. The mantra of big media is objectivity, not advocacy. Also, the media spotlight keeps shifting, while victims are still suffering. You either move with it — or get left behind.
Photojournalist Kikujiro Fukushima has been un-objectively caring and staying all six decades of his professional life, as well as relentlessly exposing what he calls "Japan's lies" in nearly 250,000 photographs, many shot in dangerous places, with some resulting in violent consequences for their taker.
In Saburo Hasegawa's engaging and hard-hitting documentary "Nippon no Uso: Hodo Shashinka Fukushima Kikujiro 90-sai (Japan Lies)," the 90-year-old Fukushima is still alert, still spry — and still confronting authority. At the 20-km exclusion zone surrounding the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, he snaps off shots of the security guards and their barriers with the rapid-fire intensity of someone decades younger. Photography for him is an act of witnessing, an act as deeply imbedded as the sense of sight itself.