One year after March 11, Kojima remained distressed by the earthquake and radioactive contamination: he feared that Japan could disappear as a nation and that he could lose his sense of belonging as a Japanese person. That anxiety led him back to Ágota Kristóf’s trilogy to ask what it means to lose one’s homeland.
After the Tohoku earthquake, fans and associates from around the world advised Kojima to leave Japan and use his life and resources to create elsewhere rather than spend them rebuilding the past. Kojima did not leave: he realized he could not separate his own purpose from Japan’s reconstruction and that, despite considering himself cosmopolitan, his substance was innately Japanese. Satori helped him out of the standstill with a further conclusion: he should not confine himself to Eastern, Western, or national labels, but create and share his own world—the world of Hideo Kojima.
In October 2011, Kojima interpreted the chain of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident in Tohoku as more than a natural disaster: a human failure born of scorn for nature. He maintained that a true resurrection must not simply rebuild the previous world, but choose a new, untrodden course that does not reproduce the memes of envy, hatred, and vengeance.
Kojima had planned to dedicate his essay to a different Minato Shukawa story, but the Tohoku earthquake of March 11, 2011 changed his choice. While looking through the heap of books that had fallen from his bookshelves he found Orgel and read it, wondering how survivors should respond and go on living after the disaster.
Through Orgel’s journey to sites tied to earthquakes, accidents, and war, Kojima argued that some losses must be seen, remembered, and listened to so the dead are not consigned to the past. After Tohoku he presented that listening as an individual responsibility: even if a meme reaches only one person, that person should receive it and pass it on to help build a bridge to the future.
North Face made Kojima want to look away and run because of the physical weight of the tragedy, but he felt he had to keep watching because it had really happened. Still, he saw that the film prepared a traverse beyond the disaster: the account of a deadly ascent ultimately became a work about love and about the person one promises to return to.