Can you think of a reason why you might want to just disappear?
To be able to just pick up a few possessions, leave in the middle of the night and start a new life somewhere else? Maybe you have crippling business debts, loan sharks are at the door, you have stalkers or an abusive partner who won’t leave you alone? Or maybe, you are just fed up with life and can’t bring yourself to take more… decisive actions.
In Japan, every year around 80,000 people are reported missing. Many are found or return home but others simply vanish, never to be heard from again. These people are known as Johatsu – “The Evaporated”.
In the 1990’s, Japan’s economic bubble collapsed, leading to thousands wishing to flee from their financial worries. As a result, “Night Escape Companies” emerged facilitating this unorthodox approach to debt resolution. Anyone with troubles can call up an organise a time to be secretly picked up and moved to a new location to start a new life, effectively on the run.
Japanese filmmaker Arata Mori and German director Andreas Hartmann team up to explore this bizarre practice. The documentary Johatsu: Into Thin Air comes at the phenomenon of voluntarily “evaporating people” from multiple angles. It shines light on the experiences for many of those who have embarked on this new stage in their lives, why they did it and how they feel now. However, it also shows us the aftermath that this decision has left on family who have been left behind. Tied altogether with an observational ride, along with ‘Saita‘, a woman who operates a so-called night escape company.
Mori and Hartmann choose to view this subculture, providing little to no voice of their own. The subjects are permitted to tell their own stories in their own words as they see things. While there is a degree of emotion behind the film in how it is shown, we as the viewer are allowed to judge for ourselves the virtue or lack thereof in ‘Night Moving’. Like any nature documentary, we simply see things as they are.
We view many anonymous clients of Saita‘s who are fleeing for one reason or another. A young man in a toxic relationship with an obsessively clingy girlfriend opens the film. Saita and her colleagues wait in their vehicles under the dark of night for the client to appear, immediately scooping him up and driving him off to escape his problems.
Other subjects such as a day labourer named ‘Kanda‘ (even the named protagonists use pseudonyms) has been living off the grid for nearly 40 years. Escaping gambling debts which threatened his family and now wishes to return home to whatever may be waiting for him.
There is a young couple now working in a seedy love hotel who fled in tandem with each other to escape the clutches of a violent threatening boss. The man is still haunted by nightmares of his former employer while the woman sobs lamenting her wasted life and her lack of any friends or regular personal connections.
This sadness hangs heavily throughout the documentary, with Hartmann providing haunting imagery of Japan. Lonely rain swept streets, cityscapes, slums and empty hallways fittingly establish the mood in which many of these lost souls exist now. The score by Jana Irmert and Mika Takehara punctuates with steady drumbeats, raising that dread of a depressing, hollow world.
It would have been nice to see someone who was actually HAPPY in their new life but basically nobody seems to be. Everyone is running from their problems and really just ruined their lives by doing so. While some claim to come from unhappy families’, others have caused trauma in the wake of their vanishing. A mother left behind tearfully attempts to find her 26-year-old son hiring private investigators to seek him out. Yet hamstrung by Japan’s data protection act, she literally doesn’t know whether he is living or dead.
Saita is a curious figure herself. As we learn more about her, it is clear that she is also running from something in her past, ready to just pick up and leave at any moment, already signing divorce papers as if the connection with her husband means nothing. She provides no support for the obviously mentally ill, happily discussing the schizophrenic or suicidal customers she has had as clients. People whose lives will not be made better by the service that she has no qualms in providing.
It’s also interesting to see just how many of her colleagues are in fact former clients. When you have picked up your life in an overnight bag and abandoned society, there aren’t many employment opportunities open to you. I guess, it’s lucky people like Saita are always looking for workers, hey?
But that’s just my takeaway from Johatsu: Into Thin Air, an incredibly fascinating and informative documentary. Arata Mori and Andreas Hartmann pull back the veil on a practice which before now was completely alien to me. While they don’t present the concept in all its complexity, they do so in an engaging and effective way which had me curious to learn more. Exactly how a well-crafted documentary should be.
Johatsu: Into Thin Air is now screening as part of the 2025 Antenna Documentary Film Festival.
For more information and ticketing, visit:
https://antennafestival.org
https://antennafestival.org/films/johatsu-into-thin-air