Live Your Dream: The Taylor Anderson Story

Dawn Grimes-MacLellan reviews Live Your Dream: The Taylor Anderson Story, directed by Reggie Life (2012, 85 minutes)

Three years have passed since the devastating Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami that took thousands of lives in the Tohoku region of Japan on March 11, 2011, but the event (“3.11”) remains very much in the public consciousness as Japan continues to mourn its losses, wrestle with recovery plans, and struggle to help people put their lives, families and communities back together again. In many places, there are tangible signs of progress in the form of new infrastructure, business startups and provision of social services that have allowed displaced families to return to their communities and begin to rebuild their lives. Yet many, mostly young, community members have vowed to never return, and three years into the recovery, scars on the landscape remain, such as roped-off railroad tracks where trains no longer run and stretches of cleared land where neighborhoods once stood. The persistence of pre-fabricated buildings providing temporary housing for those displaced by the disaster further highlights the extensive work that continues. Having lived in Kobe following the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 and having worked more recently with university students in Tohoku reconstruction, I can attest to the vastness of the destruction that nature can so suddenly inflict and, by contrast, the long period of time needed to rebuild.

The physical devastation, of course is secondary to the trauma embedded in people’s memories of their former lives and of the devastation borne by the tsunami as they struggle to re-create normalcy in their daily lives. In the past three years, many stories have been told of the chaos and terror that accompanied the disaster, the lives of loved ones lost, and the challenges to recreate home, family, and employment. The emotional stories that locals tell are palpable, but as most of these poignant narratives are told in Japanese and reported within Japan, they are mostly inaccessible to those outside Japan and therefore inappropriate for use in classrooms abroad. Live Your Dream: The Taylor Anderson Story makes an important contribution, not only because it is accessible to English-speaking audiences but also because it relates a journey that many viewers will have taken or aspire to embark on in the future. Like Taylor and many thousand others, I was a young woman just out of college who traveled to Japan to teach in the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program, living out a dream kindled in childhood. Random initial assignments create deep lifelong connections and, as many former JET program participants who watch this film must feel, “it could have been me.”

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