Johatsu: Into Thin Air — This investigative portrait follows former johatsu (“evaporated people”), family members, investigators, and social workers who map Japan’s hidden practice of deliberate disappearance.

Through intimate interviews and case studies, the film exposes how debt, shame, domestic pressure, and rigid social expectations push people to sever ties and vanish into networks of safe houses, ghost employment, and clandestine services.

It interrogates legal and moral gray areas that enable vanishing, the emotional toll on those left behind, and what these disappearances reveal about social isolation, stigma, and economic precarity in modern Japan.