A bat's echolocation traces WWII balloon bombs across the Pacific—experimental cinema at its weirdest.
During WWII, the Japanese army developed experimental balloons able to cross the Pacific Ocean and reach the West Coast of North America in 3-6 days. Armed with explosives, they were given the code name fu-go, or fusen bakudan (“fire balloons,” or balloon bombs) in an attempt to instill a culture of fear like that caused by the far more deadly American firebombing of Japanese cities. The U.S. responded by enacting a censorship campaign, requesting newspapers avoid reports of fu-go landings or sightings. Living near the remains of a fu-go launch site in Fukushima Prefecture, Takeuchi mimics their flight take-off using a drone camera, and, traveling to North America, follows their arrival across the shoreline and rural landscapes, using a bat’s echolocation as narrative device to place fu-go and Fukushima as echos across history.
Direction
Takeuchi treats history like haunted terrain you can fly through.
Sound
Bat echolocation as narrator—nature turned documentary device.
Cinematography
Drone shots transform launch sites into abstract wounds.
Director
Kota Takeuchi
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Only six Americans died from fu-go balloons—the only WWII enemy combat deaths on the continental U.S.—yet the government buried the story entirely.
Takeuchi's Fukushima proximity matters: both fu-go and the 2011 disaster involved invisible threats, government information control, and rural landscapes marked by technological violence.
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