“The story of this region and this disaster is also a general human story about how human beings can carry on after such a tragedy,” she says. The film is largely about posing the question on everyone’s mind: “How do you get back on your feet when you’ve lost so much and suffered in such a horrible, traumatic way?”
     A major sign that life would go on in the weeks following the catastrophe was when spring arrived in Japan, as it does every year. Even in the hardest hit coastal villages, Japan’s prized cherry trees bloomed as intensely as ever. Ms. Walker, who’s no stranger to stories of the human spirit’s resilience in the face of incredible challenges, having told similarly uplifting stories before in the documentaries “Waste Land” and “Blindsight,” uses the cherry blossom as a symbol of the country’s renewal.
     “To be in that place where there’s so much destruction for miles around, and poking up through this debris of destroyed cars, destroyed homes in the street – poking up through all of this were branches of blossoms, it was so remarkable that they survived,” says Walker. “You felt like if nature could come back, it’s leading us.”
     It didn’t take the filmmaker’s direction for the cherry blossom to reveal itself as a powerful metaphor in the minds of the victims she encountered. She describes how many of those she interviewed would point to the blossom without any prompting and offer it as a sign of the potential for reviving their own lives. The sentiment is in keeping with Buddhist and Shinto conceptions of the natural world as a source of wisdom and a wellspring of valuable lessons.