Visualizing War with Digital Tools: Watanave Hidenori / Professor, The University of Tokyo

"Direct Talk"

Our guest today is Watanave Hidenori,

a professor at the University of Tokyo.

He's an information design specialist

who's created the "Satellite Images Map of Ukraine."

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022,

he's been mapping out the war damage for all the world to see.

He takes the images you won't see on the news

and reproduces them in 3D on a digital map, which is updated daily.

Watanave is exploring how we can use digital tools

to keep the memories of disaster and war from fading.

He hopes his work will help bring about peace.

Our memory of a disaster fades over time.

This is true for war as well as natural disasters.

Each time a new one occurs, it overwrites our memories.

In order to prevent this from happening,

each generation revives memories of past wars and disasters

using whatever method of expression will resonate with their contemporaries.

Society continues to repeat this process.

Watanave compiles open-source satellite images

and 3D images captured by people on the ground

in order to show the world the reality of what's going on in Ukraine.

Here's a satellite image of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant,

which is currently under Russian control.

Watanave says this view of the location reveals many things.

You can see damage caused by shelling on this roof,

which is about 140 meters from the nuclear reactor.

If Ukraine were to launch an attack and ended up causing a meltdown,

a wide area around the plant would be contaminated.

This is about 400 kilometers from Kyiv. It's not that far away.

Russia claims that Ukraine has been attacking the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

But there's no reason Ukraine would launch shells so close to this area

or do something that might cause a fire.

When you zoom into the image,

we can see there are Russian army vehicles hidden,

stationed under this bridge.

The fact that these vehicles are positioned in such an orderly fashion

implies the plant is under their complete control.

If they were preparing to be attacked, they wouldn't be hiding them.

You'd expect them to be scattered around the entire area.

This suggests we should be skeptical of what the Russian side is claiming.

This satellite image itself is not direct evidence,

but it is very useful for helping us verify what is actually going on.

Watanave has also created 3D images out of photos and footage

captured by people on the ground using cameras and drones.

It makes it possible to show the reality of a situation

in a way that a satellite cannot.

This is from the town of Bucha, which people now know because of the Bucha Massacre.

A local artist painted sunflowers for peace

on these cars destroyed by Russian troops.

Sunflowers are the national flower of Ukraine.

These are images of an elementary school in Chernihiv,

a town that was under Russian control.

Dozens of children, and even infants,

were confined inside of this school for a long time.

If you look at this hallway,

you can see that the people were keeping track of the days after the Russians took control.

The children were forced to live in this space for a long time

with the fear of not knowing when they would be set free.

In the end, the bodies of many children were discovered here.

I have a daughter who's in kindergarten.

I thought about how I would feel if this happened to her school,

and I was at a total loss for words.

This all took place in the basement of the school,

so it doesn't show up in satellite images.

Ukrainian civilians are rigorously documenting all of this

because they want people to know that this place that is near and dear to them

has been affected by war.

They are putting their own lives on the line,

as they're at risk of being attacked by Russian soldiers.

And yet they're desperately documenting what's going on.

It's because of their contributions that we can make an archive of images like this.

Watanave searches the internet almost every day

for images and footage that citizens have uploaded.

After identifying the location, he publishes the images on a digital map.

Whether it's a satellite image or 3D data,

very rarely does it come with info that tells you the exact location

and what direction the camera is facing.

So all you'll know is that it was taken in Mariupol, for example.

So what we have to do is find a location that matches the photo.

We'll collect photos of the area taken from ground level and try to find it.

Or we'll look at the angle of the sunlight and the shape of the shadows to figure it out.

You have to get creative.

The original images and 3D data are not enough

to determine the location and positioning of buildings.

So Watanave contacts the original posters

and asks them where the images were taken.

He then explores the area on a digital map, looking for similar building shapes.

When he finds a match,

he adjusts the angle and size of the image as he maps it to the location.

It's a time-intensive, painstaking process.

If it's a single building, you don't know anything about its surroundings.

Figuring that out can take an hour or even half a day.

I might post it to Twitter, asking if anyone knows the location.

Sometimes someone will be able to tell me where it is.

Other times someone will correct me and suggest that it's actually another location.

In that sense, this project is a collective effort.

This is the Russian cruiser Moskva,

the flagship that led the naval attack on Ukraine.

On April 14th, 2022,

Russia acknowledged that Moskva had sunk,

attributing its fate to stormy seas.

Ukraine, however, claimed that it had sunk the ship with cruise missiles.

It wasn't immediately clear what had been the cause.

The sky was overcast on the day in question,

which meant satellite images were not of much help.

So Watanave began analyzing images

taken by Synthetic Aperture Radar or SAR,

which is able to see through clouds to the water's surface.

It allowed him to find inconsistencies in Russia's story.

I was searching through SAR data and sure enough, it had captured images of Moskva.

This is about 190 meters long, which is the size of the warship.

There were no other objects that size.

There's strong evidence that this is Moskva.

This is a photo that they say was leaked from a Russian source.

It shows the sinking ship, taken from another ship that was right in front of it.

The SAR has also detected it.

Here's the smaller ship right here.

If it were stormy conditions,

there's no way these two ships would be so close to each other.

Russia continues to claim that it sunk in a storm.

But this has been exposed as a lie thanks to SAR,

which can penetrate the clouds and capture what's happening on the sea surface.

Watanave's fascination with digital technology began with video games,

which became popular in the 80s as he was growing up.

I loved the type of games that put you in an imaginary world,

where you went on quests and got into battles on your way to an end goal.

There were rivers and roads and even deserts.

The idea that there was this virtual world inside the console

and that you could go on these journeys was so thrilling to me.

For the longest time, I wanted to be someone who designed those worlds.

Watanave enrolled in the architecture department at a university

in order to study spatial design.

While in school, he also worked for a major game developer.

He designed cities and buildings for video games.

After graduating, he started his own video game development company.

But success evaded him.

My skills were useful for designing backgrounds and spaces.

But when you're making a video game,

you have to think about ways to get the player immersed and playing for many hours.

And I wasn't very good at that.

That's a fatal flaw for a game developer.

A video game company run by someone with little interest in entertainment

isn't going to work out.

So my business was unprofitable. It was not a success.

Around that time, Watanave came across a call for university lecturers,

and began his career as a teacher specializing in digital media.

He started a project in which he took video testimonies

of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki

and archived them on a digital map.

Through the power of digital technology,

he hoped to pass on their stories to future generations.

In the near future, the generation that experienced World War II directly

will no longer be with us.

There are many people out there who want to keep the memory of war alive

for future generations.

They just don't know exactly how they can do that.

A-bomb survivors know their time is limited.

But in their daily lives, they're not suddenly going to find themselves in a situation

where they have to talk about their experience.

Through creating digital archives like these,

I feel like I've been able to show one example of how digital technology

can be used for the betterment of society.

In August 2022,

the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference was being held in New York City.

Watanave's research lab was in town exhibiting their digital archives nearby.

They invited atomic bomb survivors

to talk about the state of nuclear weapons and the need for peace.

There was one graduate student

who was studying nuclear disarmament at an American university.

They were watching with great interest.

It was their first time hearing from a survivor in person.

They told me that the experience gave them an emotional understanding

of the need for nuclear abolition.

I was glad to hear that.

Humankind has repeatedly, endlessly been at war.

Human beings themselves do not want to die in a war.

But regardless of who instigates it, the victims are ordinary citizens.

To me, it's important to convey just how tragic these experiences were

in as tangible a way as possible.

So that people feel that they don't want it to happen to them.

Or maybe they'll feel like they don't want it to happen to their family.

To that end, we have to make as many people as we can fed up with war.

(Do you have any words to live by?)

"Connect the past to the present."

The moment we feel like the past has nothing to do with our current lives, we forget.

That's especially true of memories of disaster.

To help ensure that people don't forget,

as someone who specializes in designing spaces,

I've tried to find ways to connect the events of the past to our present reality.

By showing how the past borders on the present,

by showing how they're contiguous, I want to prevent wars from happening in the future.

That's the goal of my work.