Recently, I watched the 2010 Karen Nakamura documentary “Bethel: Community and Schizophrenia in Northern Japan” with the Anthropology and Sociology club here at Elon. It’s a shorter film, running at only 41 minutes, and tells the story of Bethel, an organization in Urakawa that runs group homes and a working environment for those living with schizophrenia in Japan.
In Japan, 2.6 million people are registered with psychiatric disabilities, with 345,000 of those people institutionalized. In these institutions, as testified to in this film, they were merely isolated, medicated, and released to a world unkind to them. When those people are released, they often find it difficult to adjust, and face discrimination and mistreatment due to their illness. In 1984, the Bethel House Organization was founded to assist these individuals and give them a supportive community.
In the film, we get to meet a handful of people who are either members of Bethel or employees. Hearing their stories and the way that they’ve been helped by the organization is truly heartwarming, but the main focus of the film is the community built and the relationships between members. One of my favorite aspects of the film is that it seems as though Nakamura built relationships with her documentary subjects while filming. Her voice is featured behind the camera while asking questions and joking with those being interviewed, which maintains the personal and intimate relationship between the viewer and the subject throughout the film.
My main takeaway from Bethel is how much we, as humans, rely on one another to get by. One testimonial that intrigued me, in particular, was one of a man named Tsutomu Shimono, a former drug addict who had only ever been secluded from the outside world in mental institutions. Between hospitalizations, his television was his only friend. His inner voices convinced him that everyone around him was saying that he should be arrested and shouldn’t be let out in public. He claims that President Bill Clinton on his television was the only person who made him feel safe, but a week later he was back in the hospital. But when he came to the Bethel house, he was able to garnish a sense of community that he hadn’t experienced before. This is what, in dramatic terms, saved him.
Another man couldn’t even speak when he started at Bethel, but after working with the others to package seaweed, he became so much more comfortable that he now works with their customers.
But not all of these relationships are beautiful landscapes of mutual betterment. The film shows a rather painful scene of an older woman in Bethel reprimanding a younger woman in a support group setting and, with her beratement, becoming rather harsh. Watching this, I found myself confused as to why Nakamura even included the exchange if her goals for the film were to convey the community among members. However, this scene led to a discussion on how best the members can support and communicate with each other. Still, though, the younger woman left the room crying. It seems like it must have been a difficult decision to make as a documentarian close to the subject being portrayed– deciding to show what benefits the group at the expense of showing the woman’s pain. And it makes me wonder how the Bethel members responded to the film once it had been finished.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about hope — the hope for change, hope for the future, hoping for everything to work itself out. And I wonder what it would be like to feel like there is absolutely no hope in the world, tortured by voices in your head or constantly overwhelmed by the notion that you aren’t even worthy of going outside. Here at Elon, there are so many opportunities to connect with others and build that kind of esoteric community. I hope that anyone out there who needs to hear it knows that there are always places here to find people to rely on. Despite their conflicts, Bethel has given people hope by pulling them together, and I trust that with hope, comes peace.
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