Sophia Magazine vol.7 / SUMMER 2018

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The rst plan submitted to Professor Mizushima proposed to describe the whole incident. However, he rejected it. Kurihara was still wondering what to do when the rst day of interview-ing came around. Tsuda recalls they were so nervous they could not sleep the night before, and when the day came the three made their way to the location of the meeting with Takahashi. But in a moment, the tension was broken. As one, the students agree, “Shizue was just a ‘normal woman’ with a smiley face wearing cute, uffy clothes.” They wanted “to know her better, to hear her story.” None of them knew much, but they met Takahashi, listened to her and rolled the camera.Even though the three students knew little of the incident, Takahashi grinned and said, “This is a documentary isn’t it.” Reects Mukojima, “Shizue probably felt a mismatch with the picture painted of her in the media as a ‘tragic character.’ She answered our questions as a normal, real-life person.”However, they did make a big mistake during lming. They were in Kita-Senju, Tokyo, where Takahashi and her husband had once made their home. The main camera microphone failed to record. “We went pale. We were so depressed we thought we might as well quit university.” Pro-fessor Mizushima also had harsh words, telling them they had “missed an important moment.” Recalls Mukojima, “We were gutted. So when we returned to interview Shizue again, we resolved to go deeper in our questions. The result was that we captured what would become the last scene in our 18-minute lm: Shizue talking about Kita-Senju.” Once lming was completed, they began the work of edit-The Tokyo subway sarin gas attack took place on March 20, 1995, and deeply shocked Japanese society. Members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway, killing 13 people and injuring over 6,000 others. A quarter of a century later there is little reporting on the incident anymore, but survivors continue to suffer from se-quelae, and bereaved families bear deep scars to this day.Kyo mo Anata to Issho ni is the story of Shizue Takahashi whose husband, a deputy stationmaster, died in the attack. She has headed the Tokyo Subway Sarin Incident Victims’ Association for many years. The lm’s producers are Depart-ment of Journalism second-year students (at the time) Miyu Kurihara, Mayuko Tsuda, and Sakura Mukojima. The three studied about the sarin attack in a seminar under Professor Hiroaki Mizushima.Professor Mizushima, who has taught at Sophia Univer-sity since 2016, was previously a journalist and documen-tary maker at a television network. The three students were drawn to his seminar because of the practical instruction he could provide, but they harbored no particular ambition to be journalists. So why did these students choose as their subject an incident that occurred before they were born? Kurihara, who came up with the original proposal, explains, “I rst met Shizue at a meeting to mark the 22nd anniversary of the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack. I got the idea because, as someone with little life experience who might be unable to comprehend the pain involved in a tragedy like this, I wanted to listen to the story of someone who did.”Idea Came from Students’ Incomprehension of the Pain Caused by the AttackProduction Started out with Desire to “Hear Her Story”1MayukoTsudaSakuraMukojima26Student