USU Japan Club has poor attendance at tsunami documentary showing

“Protecting Today: A Documentary on the Aftermath of the 3/11 Tsunami” was shown Thursday by the Utah State University Japan Club.

The turn out was disappointing according to club president Hsin-Fang Wang.

“We were hoping for many more people,” Wang said. “Over the summer we had about 200 people come, tonight we had less than 20.”

The Japan Club held a showing for students and the Cache Valley community in July, because of the documentary’s connection to Utah State University.

“When the documentary was being made the author wanted it to be more global,” said Kaytlin Talbot, vice president of the club. “USU got a portion of the documentary and translated it.”

Talbot said the club felt it necessary to bring the documentary back during the school year so that more students had the opportunity to see it.

“We feel it’s important for students to know what is going on in other parts of the world,” Talbot said. “Our world is becoming more globalized, so why not educate people with things that are going on?”

Talbot said she had hoped more students would come to the documentary showing.

“I wish more students were more informed about what was going on there,” Talbot said. “We wanted to get the word out to more students about what it was really like right after the tsunami.”

Wang said he was discouraged by the lack of student attendance.

“One of the reasons we wanted to show this documentary is to spread the culture of Japan,” Wang said. “It’s more than samurais and castles and weird TV shows.”

Despite the low attendance rate at the event, Wang said he still has hope that the Japan Club will be able to make USU students more aware of the Japanese culture.

“We have a lot of events planned that we want to do when the club gets bigger,” Wang said. “We will just keep trying to do fundraisers to build it up.”