Ab‚ Mark Nornes - Forest of Pressure ~ Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary

Forest of Pressure

V I S I B L E E V I D E N C E

Edited by Michael Renov, Faye Ginsburg, and Jane Gaines

Volume 18 :: Ab Mark NornesForest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary

Volume 17 :: Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, EditorsF Is for Phony: Fake Documentaries and Truths Undoing

Volume 16 :: Michael RenovThe Subject of Documentary

Volume 15 :: Ab Mark NornesJapanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima

Volume 14 :: John MrazNacho Lpez, Mexican Photographer

Volume 13 :: Jean RouchCin-Ethnography

Volume 12 :: James M. MoranTheres No Place Like Home Video

Volume 11 :: Jeffrey RuoffAn American Family: A Televised Life

Volume 10 :: Beverly R. SingerWiping the War Paint off the Lens: Native American Film and Video

Volume 9 :: Alexandra Juhasz, EditorWomen of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video

Volume 8 :: Douglas Kellner and Dan Streible, EditorsEmile de Antonio: A Reader

Volume 7 :: Patricia R. ZimmermannStates of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies

Volume 6 :: Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov, EditorsCollecting Visible Evidence

Volume 5 :: Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, EditorsFeminism and Documentary

Volume 4 :: Michelle CitronHome Movies and Other Necessary Fictions

Volume 3 :: Andrea LissTrespassing through Shadows:Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust

Volume 2 :: Toby MillerTechnologies of Truth:Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media

Volume 1 :: Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs, EditorsBetween the Sheets, In the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary

Forest of Pressure

Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary

Ab Mark Nornes

VISIBLE EVIDENCE, VOLUME 18

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London

The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges a grant from the University of Michigan that contributed to the publication of this book.

Portions of the book originally appeared in The Postwar Documentary Trace:Groping in the Dark, in Open to the Public: Studies in Japans Recent Past, ed.Leslie Pincus, a special issue of Positions 10.1 (Spring 2002): 3978; copyrightDuke University Press; reprinted with permission. Portions of chapter 5 wereoriginally published as The Theater of a Thousand Years, Journal of theInternational Institute 4 (2) (1997), a publication of the University of MichiganInternational Institute, www.hti.umich.edu/j/jii/; reprinted with permission.

Yajiri no mura, kai no mura (Village of Spearheads, Village of Shells) isreprinted by kind permission of Kimura Michio.

Toge (A Mountain Pass) is reprinted by kind permission of Makabe Kuniko.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce the photographs inthis book. If any proper acknowledgment has not been noted, we encouragecopyright holders to contact the publisher.

Copyrigh 2007 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior writtenpermission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNornes, Markus.

Forest of pressure : Ogawa Shinsuke and postwar Japanese documentary / Ab Mark Nornes.

p. cm. (Visible evidence ; v. 18)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4907-5 (hc : alk. paper)ISBN-10: 0-8166-4907-3 (hc : alk. paper)ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4908-2 (pb)ISBN-10: 0-8166-4908-1 (pb)1. Ogawa, Shinsuke, 19361992Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series.PN1998.3.O33N67 2007070.1'8dc22

2006015941

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

12 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

for Ogawa-san

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xiii

1 Ogawa as Postwar Documentarist 1

2 Jieiso: Ogawas First Collectivity 36

3 The Sanrizuka Series 54

4 Segue: From Sanrizuka Ogawa Pro to Documentary Cinema Ogawa Pro 128

5 The Magino Village Story 178

6 After Ogawa 221

Postscript 267

Notes 279

Filmography 289

Distribution Resources 301

Index 305

Acknowledgments

This book was many years in the making. My starting point was a series ofstays at the Ogawa Productions apartment in Ogikubo, Tokyo. The apart-ment was a short walk from the postproduction studio (itself a small apart-ment with an ofce, editing room, projection booth, and screening roomfor sound mixing crammed into what was otherwise a typical Tokyo rabbithutch). On my visits, Ogawa Shinsuke was generous enough to let me staywhile I nished my business. It was especially kind of Iizuka Toshio; thiswas his home whenever he was in Tokyo, which was most of the time. Mybest memories of those stays are not the charged talks with Ogawa but thequiet chats with Iizuka at the end of each day. We would often go to thenearby public bath (the apartments bathroom was being used as a storagecloset) and later end the day by pulling out beers from the tiny refrigeratorin the apartment.

My evenings with Iizuka-san were eye-opening. The little I knew aboutOgawa Productions came from English-language books by David Desser,Joan Mellon, and Nol Burch. Their relatively short passages concentratedon the lms. What I learned from Iizuka was the unique circumstances oftheir production. I found his stories fascinating, even spellbinding. Theresa book in there, I thought.

However, my inclination was to understand the larger context ofJapanese documentary before attempting to describe the role of OgawaProductions in it all. This little diversion resulted in many years of researchand my rst book, also published by the University of Minnesota Press inthe Visible Evidence series. Along the way, I had countless discussions withmembers of Ogawa Productions about their life and work. I am particularlyindebted to Iizuka Toshio, Shiraishi Yoko, Nosaka Haruo, Fuseya Hiro,and, of course, Ogawa Shinsuke. Over the years, they have gone far outof their way to help my research; more important, their friendship is very

ix

precious to me. I also received gracious help from Hatanaka Hiroko,Fukuda Katsuhiko, Tanaka Nobuko, Kawada Yumiko, Honma Shusuke,Kato Takanobu, Otsu Koshiro, and Tamura Masaki. I thank these peoplefor the documents, pamphlets, and other ephemera they have lent andgiven me. It is not often that the historians subjects simply hand over keypieces of the archive.

As for the more formal archives, such as they are, Shiraishi Yoko al-lowed me to rummage through the boxes stored in Furuyashiki Village.Nosaka Haruo showed me the Jieiso boxes (and even let me borrow one).He was also instrumental in helping me achieve access to the Sanrizukamaterials. For the latter, Hatano Yukie and the rest of the members of theRekishi Densho Iinkai were unusually obliging in granting me access to theas-yet uncataloged boxes of papers in the airport. Their guidance includedconversations over soba during our pleasant lunch breaks. Hatano tookme on powerful tours of the Sanrizuka area, pointing out the spots wherethe lms were, giving me a sense of the lay of the land, and introducingme to the Uriu and Ishii families. I received help with materials fromKageyama Satoshi and Erikawa Ken (both editors of Eiga Shinbun) andPatricia Steinhoff and the Takezawa Collection at the University of Hawaii.

I enjoyed many public events and retrospectives that discussed thecollective after Ogawas death, and over the years many serendipitous bardiscussions took on the heady feel of good symposia. The opinions, specu-lations, and stories I heard are woven into every page of this book. Col-leagues who read the manuscript in part or whole include Aaron Gerow,Livia Monnet, Leslie Pincus, and Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto; most of this helphas been received through casual conversations. The most inuentialpeople on my thinking have been Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Yano Kazuyuki,Sato Makoto, Suzuki Shiroyasu, Hara Kazuo, Yomota Inuhiko, MakinoMamoru, Kogawa Tetsuo, Ishizaka Kenji, Ikui Eiko, Adachi Masao,Nakajima Yo, and Ueno Toshiya. There are so many more I could nameitseems as though I meet people with Ogawa connections whenever I go out,whether to hotspots of the independent-lm world like Shinjukus Jute andGingakei or to restaurants just about anywhere in Japan.

My trips to Japan were possible thanks to generous grants from Ful-bright, the Japan Foundation, and the University of Michigans Center forJapanese Studies. Kim Dong-won and PURN supported my trip to Korea,and Nick Deocampo brought me to the Philippines with the help of theU.S. State Department.

Above and beyond this, my work with Yano Kazuyuki and the Yama-gata International Documentary Film Festival has always been a constantsource of encouragement and material support. On my many trips to

x A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Yamagata, I relied on, and thoroughly enjoyed, the kindness of people suchas Kato Itaru, Masuya Shuichi, Miyazawa Hikaru, and so many others as-sociated with the festival. The ever-resourceful Yasui Yoshio of Planet Bib-liothque de Cinma shared much of his library and saved me in more thanone tight spot.

Writing this book has been a humbling experience.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S xi

Ogawa and friend, shot in Takashima, Yamagata, June 1975.

Introduction

The creation of beauty thus begins with an act of publicity. . . .The duplicity of the artist, the grandeur as well as the mis-ery of his calling, is a recurrent theme closely linked withthe theme of infamy. . . . The poetic impulse in all its per-verse duplicity belongs to man alone, marks him as essen-tially human.:: Paul de Man

Sometimes I wonder if this Ogawa Shinsuke really existed.:: Shiraishi Yoko, Ogawas wife, 1999

This book is about one of the most astonishing lmographies in Japanesecinema, the work of Ogawa Shinsuke. To be more specic, if somewhat ob-scure, this is a critical biography of his collective, Ogawa Productions (orOgawa Pro, as it is known in Japan). The book takes its title, Forest ofPressure, from a mistranslation of one of the collectives lm titles from1967. The original Japanese title literally means the forest that crushesone to death and was initially rendered in English as The Oppressed Stu-dents. This language exemplies the breathless, over-the-top rhetoric of theday, but the image of a forest of pressure offers a better t for the condi-tions within which Ogawa Pro worked. I will look closely at the many pres-sures that bore down on the collective, the political, economic, aesthetic,institutional, and interpersonal conditions of their practice. And inspiredby the method of history writing forged by Ogawa Pro in its last lms, Iwill play with multiple avenues of approach, shifting between conventionalnarrative, close analysis, rst-person narration, poetry, historical contextu-alization, and tall tales.

Ogawa Shinsuke began his career in high school in the 1950s as themember of a lm study group and joined one of the largest PR lm compa-nies after graduating from college. As it happened, this company was the

xiii

breeding ground for some of the nest political lmmakers of the 1960sand 1970s. Ogawa left it in the early 1960s and electried the studentmovement with a series of documentaries made among the students, behindthe barricades. When he formed his own production company, he moved toa village outside Tokyo that the central government had designated as thesite for Narita International Airport. The farmers there were just startingwhat would be one of the most traumatic social struggles in modern Japa-nese history. In the course of eight lms shot over nine years, Ogawa andhis production company documented what was, for all practical purposes,a small-scale civil war. Ogawas Sanrizuka Series remains one of the monu-ments of Japanese cinema history.

In the midst of the turbulent 1970s, Ogawa Pro made the unlikely de-cision to leave Sanrizuka and resettle in a small village, Magino, in thenorthern Japanese mountains. The lmmakers lived collectively in a bor-rowed farmhouse, making rice and another series of lms for sixteen years.As in the Sanrizuka Series, the lms of the Magino Village Story1 weremade with a commitment to develop deep relationships with their subjects

xiv I N T R O D U C T I O N

The sweeping view at the entrance to Heta Village, where Ogawa Pro set up shop. By the turn ofthe century, the families living in the foreground all sold their property, and airport authorities de-stroyed the homes and removed every scrap of wood. Photograph by Naito Masatoshi.

and with a patient leisure that few lmmakers besides Flaherty have in-dulged in. It is difcult to imagine any future lmmakers with the ambition(or insanity) to match the scale of Ogawa Pros conception of documentarypractice, particularly now that video has transformed the economics ofindependent production.

Toward the end of his life, Ogawa helped establish the Yamagata In-ternational Documentary Film Festival. He was shooting footage for a newlm, and had ideas for many, many others. He was also reaching out tononction lm and video artists across Asia to share experiences and lmsand to begin collaborations that would jump-start a new era committed todocumentary in Asia. However, at the height of his powers as a lmmaker,Ogawa died of cancer at a youthful age of fty-ve on February 7, 1992.With his passing, the collective that bore his name quickly dissolved.

Aside from Eric Barnouw, few historians have considered the docu-mentary outside of Europe and North America. Thus, a recent lm oncinema verit could portend to offer an authoritative and comprehensivehistory without acknowledging the work of Ogawa or other Japanese

I N T R O D U C T I O N xv

Yamagata, where Ogawa Pro shot seven lms during its sixteen-year stay. This is FuruyashikiVillage in the middle of winter. The collective lived in Magino Village, a ten-minute ride downthe mountain at the edge of a broad valley.

lmmakers, which in some cases precede verits Western appearance. Bycontrast, all histories of Japanese cinemaincluding those by Westernscholars like Donald Richienever fail to cover the contribution of Ogawa.Although overlooked by too many scholars, lm festivals, and colleagues,the people that did come into contact with the man have strong memories.Ogawa exuded extraordinary energy. His gregariousness was matched byhis love of food, drink, and most of all discussion. He loved to talk, over-owed with ideas, and was fascinated with everything within his magneticreach. He possessed a kind of mesmerizing charisma that charmed most ofthe people who came close to him, most especially the people who joinedhis collective. Even the foreigners who struggled to communicate throughhis broken English never failed to be touched by his passion. Joris Ivens,who visited the Sanrizuka house back in the late 1960s, told Ogawa, Youare my youngest son.2

In undertaking the telling of this biography, I nd myself compelled torepeat what so many of the former members insisted whenever we talked:Ogawa Pro was no typical organization. There was something inexplicablyunique about it. What exactly was so out of the ordinary is extremely hardfor me to nail down and communicate, but anyone who came in contactwith it over the years understands my quandary. Perhaps by the end of thisbook, I can give the reader a sense of what sets Ogawa Pro apart from allthe other collectives in lm history.

In a rst attempt at this, and to nd an emotional center for this his-tory, I offer the following anecdotal evidence for Ogawa Pros peculiarcharacter. Over the years, more than one hundred men and women enteredand left Ogawa Pro. Some spent a short period of time without makingmuch of a mark on the group. Others stayed for twenty years. Incredibly,none of them received proper salaries; budgets left in the archives revealthey spent more on lm screenings than daily life necessities! They commit-ted themselves to Ogawa Pro for other reasons, usually political ones, andthey left for as many other reasons. However, the typical way they quit isrevealing. As former member Nosaka Haruo explains:

Ogawa Pro had some 125 people in it, and when it folded there were onlythree or four left. Most of these people did not announce they were leaving.One night you would go to sleep next to someone, and in the morning youdwake up and they were no longer there. They would just disappear withoutsaying, I quit, let alone Sayonara. It is like certain love relationships; theonly way out is to run away. Some stayed only a few days or weeks before dis-appearing. Others stayed for decades. It was a crazy, unusual group. Impos-sible to describe!3

xvi I N T R O D U C T I O N

During the shooting of Winter in Sanrizuka, even Ogawa disappeared with-out telling anyone his whereabouts. It drove the staff insane; however, cine-matographer Tamura Masaki, who was never a member of Ogawa Pro,found it all entertaining. After a long while, Yoshida Tsukasa, HonmaShusuke, Fukuda Katsuhiko, and several other core members decided toleave, in the middle of night as usual. They got as far as a coffee shop inChiba before they settled down and decided to return to Sanrizuka. Ogawahimself returned after more than a month, offering no explanation.

This hints at how Ogawa Pro was no ordinary lm production com-pany. The inability of these core members to abandon the group intimatesthe degree to which Ogawa entered into the core of their existence. Theirexperience working with Ogawa left all of them with powerfully compli-cated memories, especially in the context of the movements failure.Although I was not a member of Ogawa Pro, I came to know him wellenough to sympathize with the contradictory feelings of the formermembers.

I rst met Ogawa at the 1988 Hawaii International Film Festival,where he was showing The Sundial Carved with a Thousand Years ofNotches: The Magino Village Story (Sennen kizami no hidokeiMagino-mura monogatari, 1986). The lm had impressed me, and I wrote a shortpiece Id rather forget for the festival catalog. Ogawa liked the essay, andwe immediately struck up a friendship. When I nished my masters degree,he helped me take some time off from school by introducing me to theYamagata International Documentary Film Festival, where I have workedas a coordinator ever since. In my many trips to Japan, I often stayed atOgawa Pros apartments in Ogikubo, Tokyo, or in Magino Village inYamagata. My relationship to Ogawa feltand feelsso intense that I amshocked when I consider that it was only for four short years. This bookwas a deathbed promise.

I write this introductionon the eighth anniversary of Ogawasdeathin a town not far from the village of Magino. I am nding it difcultto sort out what I can and cannot write. Although nearly a decade haspassed, the intensity of peoples feelings has not necessarily weakened.What has changed with the passing of time is their willingness to expressthem. In many cases, these feelings were inamed by the revelation afterOgawas death that most of his public biography was a fabulous construc-tion having little to do with reality. Everyone knew that Ogawa was a bull-shitter, but even his best friends were surprised by what they found out. Atypical biography starts something like the one in Tayama Rikiyas refer-ence book on Japanese lm directors:

I N T R O D U C T I O N xvii

Ogawa Shinsuke was born on June 25, 1935, in Gifu Prefecture. His familyowned land and were well-off. However, at the dividing line of the wars end,they were dispossessed of most privileges as landlords. Furthermore, his fathermoved to Yamanashi Prefecture after the war because of trouble within thefamily, and Shinsuke accompanied him. After that he returned to Gifu, andafter studying at Ena High School, went to the capital. Entering KokugakuinUniversity, he studied ethnology under Yanagita Kunio. However, he wavedthe ag of the left wing there, and for this was expelled from the university atthe beginning of his third year.4

Some of the lies were petty. For example, he told people he was born in1935 instead of 1936, making him slightly older than all of his best friends.Other fabrications radicalize what was otherwise a fairly conservativelooking prole. He claimed he studied ethnology at this major center offolklore studies, when he actually was in the department of economics. Andhe told people that he never graduated, a badge of honor in the days of thestudent movement, although he did in fact receive a diploma. Ogawas laterreputation for hands-on farming while lmmaking, for example, was alsohalf-ction; he spent most of his time home reading while the staff did thefarm work.

Ogawa told neighbor Kimura Michio that he studied at Kokugakuinbecause he wanted to major in ethnology with the famous anthropologistOriguchi Shinobu. Once Kimura happened upon the scholars prole andnoticed that Origuchi had retired by the time that Ogawa got there. Unlikemany of Ogawas other friends, Kimura did not feel as though he had beentricked or lied to when he discovered that he was actually older than the di-rector, or that Ogawa hadnt studied ethnology but the decidedly conserva-tive eld of economics. Instead, he saw it as Ogawas way of engagingsomeone in discussion, of energizing the give-and-take of human interac-tion. As an example, Kimura recalls the rst time they talked about theirchildhoods. Ogawas experience resonated against his own: terrible, ruralpoverty at the end of the war, eating only potatoes and pumpkins. AfterOgawas death, Kimura learned that the directors father was actually adrugstore ownerin Tokyos city centerand that the family led a rela-tively comfortable life until the end of the war. To Kimura, this was a wayOgawa built intensity and sympathetic feelings into his friendships. Like-wise, producer Fuseya Hiro (Hiroo) asserts that this tendency to elaboratemundane reality is what made him a great documentary lmmaker. Manyof Ogawas friends, however, found the lies unforgivable.

This forces me, in too many cases, to consider stories tinged witheverything from glowing happiness to dark bitterness, from hazy confusionto seething anger. Where does one draw the line between gossip and legiti-

xviii I N T R O D U C T I O N

mate history? Perhaps all biographers are confronted with this problem,but in the case of Ogawa Pro, the emotional affect of peoples contact withOgawa was particularly potent.

In the course of their lmmaking, they had to strike a balance betweenwhat stories to include in the lms, and what was best left in the ura (back-story). In Sanrizuka, for example, Tamura shot the cruelty of the farmersagainst their neighbors who sold out to the government. These sequencesnever made it into the lms. The true complexity of the relationships be-tween those who sold and those who fought is one of the structured ab-sences of the lm. It is hinted at, but never explored with the dedicatedintensity of other aspects of the struggle.

In the case of their time in Furuyashiki, the backstory included the

I N T R O D U C T I O N xix

Ogawa celebrates his rice harvest in Magino.

suicide of one young woman who, excited by her contact with the collec-tive, wanted to move to the big city against her fathers wishes. Anotherfamily we do not learn about sold their daughter into prostitution duringthe war. Both Sanrizuka and Magino had back stages lled with such sto-ries and very much engaged with the themes of the lms. However, deter-mining what their lms needed, and what would break them and the peoplethey described, was a difcult task. I nd myself in the same position as ahistorian approaching Ogawa and Ogawa Pro.

The house they lived in at Magino is now gone. Some members (fromhere on I shall drop the adjective former, as emotionally no one everseemed to leave Ogawa Pro) wanted to preserve the house, which was asmuch a sakuhin (work) as any of the lms. They envisioned a memo-rial housing Ogawa Pros traces, an archive to stop the experience from re-ceding into the past. Others wanted to tear down the house as soon as pos-sible, sell the prints, pay off long-standing debts, and attempt to mark amaterial ending. They desperately wanted to put the prints, stills, rushes,posters, graphs, clippings, notes, diaries, receipts, scripts, everything, insomeone elses archives and relegate Ogawa Pro to the past once and forall. Ogawa died so young and left so little, leaving some clinging to memo-ries others would just as soon purge.

The collective left a prodigious amount of primary material. In theproduction of just the Sanrizuka Series, it accumulated over sixteen hun-dred hours of audio tape, two hundred hours of lm, and some thirty boxesof paper materials. Today, thanks to the complicated relationships left inOgawas wake, the notebooks, diaries, photographs, and lms have beensplit into four pots. The student movement era materials are in the garageof one members family in Yamagata City. The Sanrizuka era materials arecarefully preserved, ironically enough, in an archive inside Narita Airport.The Magino era materials are in an old barn in the mountain village ofFuruyashiki. The lms themselvesthe rights, prints, and negativeshavebeen sold to a lm school in Tokyo. I am deeply indebted to all the peoplewho have worked hard to allow me access to these materials.

While searching through these yet-to-be-cataloged boxes, I cameacross traces of my own encounter with Ogawa. Aside from carefullylogged receipts of every expense incurred by the collective on my account,there was a photo album with snapshots from Ogawas trip to the HawaiiInternational Film Festival in 1988. There I was, an intern at the festivaland ten years younger, with this intense little man I found almost magnetic.Last night, at a bar with friends who were volunteers on the rst YamagataInternational Documentary Film Festival in 1989, I was given a photographtaken at that same bar with the same people on my rst trip to Magino

xx I N T R O D U C T I O N

nearly ten years ago to the day; Ogawa sat in the front row, arms crossed,looking very pleased. Along with this photograph, they told me what theycalled a famous story. Before I arrived in Yamagata, Ogawa told the vol-unteers who I was and why I was going to participate in the next lm festi-val. When we met in Hawaii, Ogawa felt a strong sense of connection withme. We quickly developed a friendship, but what really cemented things forOgawa was that he couldnt believe he met an American who didnt own asingle credit card! This was someone he could really work with, he thought.From that point on he considered us good friends.

In retrospect, I knew Ogawa for an incredibly short time, but it feelsquite long, involved, even intense. What must it have been like for thepeople who worked and lived with him? No wonder they all have suchcomplicated and present feelings so many years after his passing from thisworld. His magnetism is still strong, which is exactly why some membersare trying hard to establish new lives independent from that vortex of mem-ories while others are so willing to give in.

While this is ostensibly the biography of Ogawa, it is just as muchabout the lm collective that bears his name. At the same time, it is the

I N T R O D U C T I O N xxi

In 1990, Ogawa took me to Yamagata to meet the network of festival volunteers, people whowould soon become good friends. My main memories are the humbling hospitality of Ogawa Pro,the enthusiasm of the volunteers, the giddy nonstop talk of Ogawa, and the utter cold.

story of postwar Japanese documentary and is ultimately a slice of the so-cial history of postwar Japan. The stance this project takes requires an ac-counting of the larger context in which the lms were imagined, produced,and watched. Kitakoji Takashi has suggested two broad reasons whypeople like Ogawas lms.5 Some spectators are keen on the lms politicsof resisting power by standing rmly on the side of protesting students andfarmers. Others sidestep or ignore the politics to assert that they are simplygood movies; for them the lms signicance lies in their rejection of theshackles of objectivity, which brought a new creativity to documentarylm. In other words, they try to apprehend the lms primarily as cinema,downplaying whatever politics might have informed their production andconsumption.

However, I work under the assumption that even these two basic re-sponses are products of a certain moment in the history of Japanese societyand its relationship to politics and art. Both readings are available today,and are certainly supplementary to each other, but this does not mean thatthey were always or evenly available over the course of the past severaldecades. The lms themselves are not equally political, or aesthetically oremotionally pleasing, and that is part of our concern here. Something mo-mentous happens in the midst of Ogawas career. It is marked by the collec-tives move from Sanrizuka to Magino, but has everything to do with oneof the most difcult problems facing historians of postwar Japan.

Something happened in the early to mid-1970s.Something happened in the larger frame of history, something that I

can only take rudimentary steps toward unpacking. In the end, I can onlyexpect that my explanation will be circumscribed to the subject of postwarcinema. We start our initial approach to this problem by considering a fas-cinating discussion at the 1998 Yamagata International Documentary FilmFestival. The occasion was a major retrospective of Japanese documentarylms from the 1980s and 1990s. This was the last installment in a biennialseries that painstakingly covered the one-hundred-year history of nonc-tion lmmaking in Japan. Previous retrospectives condently displayed anational heritage and its sure but steady growth, but the title of the 1995edition suggested a less than optimistic attitude: The Groping in theDarkJapanese Documentary in the 1980s and Beyond (Nihon Dokyu-mentarii no Mosaku1980 Nendai Iko). Nowhere was the cautious un-certainty more evident than in the accompanying symposium.

On the stage were four lmmakers representing various generationsin Japanese lm history. In the middle sat Kanai Katsu (who started lmingin the 1960s) and Ise Shinichi (from the 1980s). On either end were IizukaToshio (1960s) and Kawase Naomi (1990s).6 Iizuka joined Ogawa Pro

xxii I N T R O D U C T I O N

in the 1960s and served as his assistant director from the late 1970suntil Ogawas death in 1992. He has since become a director in his ownright. Kawase had recently returned from the Cannes International FilmFestival, where her rst feature (shot, incidentally, by Ogawas cameramanTamura Masaki) surprised everyone by taking a special jury prize. Themediaof which a sizable contingent sat at Kawases feet in Yamagatawas calling the Cannes coup an indication that a new generation of lm-makers had attained international recognition and that Japanese cinemahad entered a new era. This claim has far more to do with Japans anxietyabout its place in global cultural production than with any sense for lmhistory. However, as I hope to demonstrate, it is right on the mark . . . froma certain perspective.

The seating arrangement at Yamagata was a piece of history writing inand of itself. It did not take long before the generational structure bared it-self onstage. Any groping that evening would be between those on eitherend of the platform. Iizuka and Kawase would have it out over the questionposed by moderator Yamane Sadao, one of Japans best critics. Taking a

I N T R O D U C T I O N xxiii

The Groping in the Dark panel at the 1998 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festi-val. The seating arrangement expressed the historical structure of postwar Japanese documentary.From left to right: Yamane Sadao (critic), Kawase Naomi, Kanai Katsu, Ise Shinichi, IizukaToshio. Photograph courtesy of Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.

cue from audience member Fukuda Katsuhiko (an exOgawa Pro memberwho stayed in Sanrizuka after the collective left), Yamane suggested that inthe mid-1970s, something happened that transformed Japanese documen-tary, leaving it in its present, seemingly precarious, state.

As in any serious discussion of documentary in Japan, the wordsshutai (subject) and taisho (object) constantly came up. They are rarely, ifever, dened, yet are repeated like the mantra of postwar documentary;functionally, they generally serve to demarcate historical articulations ofdifference, usually to the end of constructing a periodization. The artists onstage quickly staked out the territory. Iizuka laid out the generally acceptedview that the lmmakers of the 1960s and early 1970s had a political com-mitment and took their engagement with the world seriously. They as-sumed a lmmaker subject (shutai) that was thoroughly social, one that re-quired visible expression on the lm and at the same time acknowledged itsdelicate relationship to the object (taisho) acting before the camera.Younger lmmakers, argued Iizuka (in an obvious critical swipe atKawase), are too wrapped up in their own little world. They either focus onthemselves or their family without reference to society, without engagingany political position or social stance. Kawase responded defensively thather own documentaries about her aunt and the search for her lost fatherhad the kind of social resonance Iizuka claimed for his own work. In theend, the two offered only implicit criticism of each other. For all the grop-ing, which included contributions from the oor by Tsuchimoto Noriaki(director of the famous Minamata Series) and Fukuda, almost everyone feltthey had been left in the dark, especially on that question, What happenedto the exciting Japanese documentary world of the 1960s?

This book provisionally accepts Fukudas periodization. Following thelmmaking of the 1960s and early 1970s, which was spectacular in bothquality and quantity, something did happen, and the Japanese documentarywent into a steady, sure decline. At the very least, all historians accept thatthe sheer number of stirring, creative documentaries in that earlier periodwas unprecedented, that the present situation pales in comparison. Andhow ironic that of all the art forms to experience decay in the bubble econ-omy of the 1980sin the age of johoshihonshugi (information capitalism)documentary would lose its condence and end up groping in the criticaldarkness for a toehold in Yamagata at the close of the 1990s. Few lmstoday are as compelling or as daring as the prodigious work straddling theyear 1970. Todays lms and videos in Japan represent a turn to the self,a movement that appears strikingly similar to developments in Euro-American lm and video making. However, where the latter is rigorouslypolitical and theoretically informed, its Japanese counterpart documents

xxiv I N T R O D U C T I O N

the self from a vaguely apolitical place. The intertwining histories of docu-mentary and its conceptualization largely took their own course in Japan.They developed with relative autonomy vis--vis Euro-American nonctionlm. Japanese writers and directors were aware of verit, direct cinema,third cinema, and developments in the Western avant-garde, but remainedresistant to slavish imitation. As will soon become clear, this independencewas a correlate of the pre-1980s vigor of debates in the eld, the innova-tions of the lmmakers, and the perception that the local social and politi-cal stakes were high.

Thus, tracking the twists and turns in Ogawas career and the transfor-mations in debates over shutaisei (subjectivity), this book will grope for thesomething that did happen, the thing that seems to divide the lmmakingcollective shooting other groups and the camera-toting individual docu-menting the self, the public and the private, the shutai and its taishothe1960s and the present day.

I N T R O D U C T I O N xxv

Ogawa as Postwar Documentarist

PrologueThe Occupation (19451952)

With this chapter, I begin by sketching out the history of the Japanese docu-mentary form from the end of World War II to the point at which OgawaShinsuke started making lms. The student of Euro-American lm will ndmany interesting points of synchronicity, convergence, and divergencewithin this story. With little or no exposure to foreign documentaries, thelm culture the youthful Ogawa grew up in centered upon educationallms (kyoiku eiga). This undoubtedly shaped Ogawas understanding ofdocumentary. It was the lmmaking that he absorbed rst as a spectator,then learned formally in an institutional setting, and then critiqued throughthe aggressively independent form he helped pioneer. One cannot under-stand where Ogawa came from without considering this broader institu-tional and theoretical context. There are three broad periods in this prehis-tory to Ogawa Pro: the Occupations propaganda documentary, the PR andeducational lm dominated by the Communist Party, and the challengethrown up by Ogawas emergent, New Left generation.

As a form of lmmaking, documentary has been attractive to those atboth ends of the political spectrum since the 1920s. This is arguably be-cause of several qualities specic to the medium. First, by the interwar era,the infrastructure for the movies had developed sufciently to allowfor quick replication and distribution of images to masses of people scat-tered across vast distances. This gave cinema an easy national, even inter-national (if too often colonial), reach. A further reason lies in the indexicalquality of cinematic representation. The onscreen image is an index in thePeircian sense, like a ngerprint or a thermometer. It possesses a strikingspatial and temporal immediacy in relation to its indexed object, a qualitythat documentary lmmaking uses to set itself far apart from the ctivelm. Exploiting this seemingly privileged link to reality, lmmakers with a

1

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sense of social commitment developed an arsenal of rhetorical devices tomove those newly formed masses of moviegoers. These special qualitieswere initially evident to lmmakers involved in primary education and theproletarian culture movement in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and stylis-tic artifacts of their early efforts survive in the conventions of todays docu-mentaries.

These two tendencies in the documentarypedagogy and sociopoliti-cal enlightenmentconverged as Japan went to war in the 1930s. At thevery same time, differences between the Japanese Left and Right became in-creasingly ambiguous as the government cracked down on all forms of dis-sent, and lmmakers either jumped on the military bandwagon or slippedinto obscurity in other professions. However, with the end of World War IIin 1945, independence for lmmakers meant new possibilities for deploy-ing cinema as an oppositional force in society. Leftist activists gravitatedtoward the documentary form, particularly those aligned with the JapanCommunist Party (JCP), which became a powerful force behind the organi-zations devoted to lm. Like their predecessors in the prewar and wartimeeras, these leftist lmmakers were strongly attracted to the possibility of amedium based on an indexical representation of the public arena.

Through this newly democratized apparatus, they intended to con-struct an alternative space of the nation, one capable of moving people inevery sense. The resulting lms from the late 1940s and the 1950s generallylook pedestrian today, but that was partly the point. This new attitudeabout moving peoples passionsalthough it can easily be seen as a contin-uation of wartime practiceseemed to demand a straightforward realism.Nevertheless, Ogawas generation of lmmakers would come to assert thatthis documentation of democratic reality also required the suppression ofindividual expression in favor of larger categories, such as people, citizen,and class.

The immediate transitional period after the end of the war is markedby controversies over two lms, The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hi-roshima and Nagasaki (Hiroshima, Nagasaki ni okeru genshibakudan nokoka, 1946) and Kamei Fumios The Tragedy of Japan (Nihon no higeki,1946). Both of these extraordinary lms slipped through the bureaucraticux of the new government just as the American Occupation was preparingan elaborate system of regulation and censorship. And both lms saw onlyglimpses of the projectors light before being suppressed to unknown lmvaults in America. The Effects of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Na-gasaki endured a complicated set of transfers, conscations, suppres-sions, and secessions before nal repatriation by a citizens movementin the 1970s and 1980s.1 Kameis The Tragedy of Japan was shelved at the

2 O G A W A A S P O S T W A R D O C U M E N T A R I S T

request of none other than Prime Minister Yoshida.2 Aside from its strin-gent attack on those responsible for the war and its full-frontal Marxist cri-tique of the wartime system, the lms infamous climax drew particular at-tention: after panning over the photographs of the Japanese leadersdoomed to capital punishment at the war crimes trials, Kamei shows a pho-tograph of Hirohito in full military regalia and slowly dissolves to a post-war photograph of a hunchbacked emperor in a business suit.

The incidents and circumstances surrounding these two postwar pro-ductions point to the way one censorship system was simply displaced byanother. However, these two lms also belong specically to the short,chaotic transition period at the beginning of the American Occupation.More typical are two aspects of the Occupation that provided foundationsfor the postwar documentary movements from which Ogawa Productions(Ogawa Pro) emerged: the lm program of the Civil Information and Edu-cation section of the Occupation (CIE) and the eventual dominance of thenonction lm world by left-wing lmmakers.

After World War II and during the American Occupation of Japan,most documentaries were produced with one thing in mind: the democrati-zation of Japan or the de-fascistization of the citizenry by enlightening thepopulace to the benecence of Western democracy. To this end, the Ameri-cans sprinkled 16mm projectors across the country and distributed docu-mentaries through a variety of new and old routes. It was estimated that by1948, the CIE had given away more than 1,300 Natco (National Com-pany) projectors, all stamped with the white lettering Property of the U.S.Army. They also established CIE lm libraries across Japan, a continuationof prewar lm libraries except for the new ideological agenda driving theirselection process. The Americans aim was to spread democracy to the hin-terlands, where the realities of the Occupation and the driving forces be-hind the transformations in the nation were only weakly felt. This was par-ticularly true in the regions that had yet to be penetrated by the electricalgrid, so the CIE served these citizens their rst glimpses of MacArthur andthe postwar version of Hirohito through traveling outdoor lm shows.

Bilingual study-discussion guides accompanying these CIE prints hintat the kind of reception context they aimed to create. These guides alwaysstart with a list of seven steps for a successful meeting:

Preview the picture. Study your materials before the meeting. Have several people in the audience ready to start discussion when

the picture ends. Have everything ready in advance. Start on time. Introduce the picture and give reasons for showing it.

O G A W A A S P O S T W A R D O C U M E N T A R I S T 3

Encourage the bashful. Dont let one or two people dominate themeeting.

Stop the discussion while it is still interesting. Summarize briey the main points of discussion.

This comes from the study-discussion guide for Childrens Guardian(1950), a typical educational documentary of the time.3 The lm tells thestory of a corrupt member of the Board of Education who used his positionto prot from wartime to the present day. A small movement led by theschool janitorwho lost his son in the wardeposes the scoundrel throughdemocratic election. Like most documentaries of the Occupation era, ituses largely ctional narrative embedded in actual settings to argue a point.In this case, the objectives are, in the language of the guide itself, To focustrue understanding of the functions of the Board of Education and the im-portant role it plays in the sound development of democratic education. Toemphasize that the members of the Board of Education must be persons ofvirtue, sincerely dedicated to the public interest. To show that the future ofeducation and culture lies in the hands of the people who elect the membersof the Board of Education.4 This forty-minute morality tale hints at manyof the themes through its use of ction, leaving the more complicated ex-planations of Occupation policy to the after-lm discussion.

Information about Occupation educational reforms is supplied ingreat detail in the study guide, which explains the letter of the law, the func-tions and structure of the board, its relationship to the local polity, andeven describes several case studies. With this information in hand, anyonecould lead a reasonably intelligent discussion of the lm and supply therhetorical arguments for a decentralized educational system as the basis ofa democratic and cultural nation. The lm leaves its ideology mostly im-plicit, but the guide constantly drives home the contrast between the cen-tralized, corrupt system of the war years and the current educationalagenda. The guide, and presumably the after-lm discussions, particularlyemphasize that the success of the peoples franchise depends upon a consci-entious stewardship that protects itself from abuse and dedicates itself to aneducation responsive to individual and local needs. In its most baldly ideo-logical moment, the guide concludes, We the people must live up to theideal of democracy, sovereignty by the people, when the long-awaited peacetreaty has been signed. We the people should exercise our franchise and doour utmost to fulll our responsibilities and duties to prevent our educa-tional reform from becoming a supercial one.5

The discussions were also accompanied by other materials, sugges-tions for which are provided by the guide. They included other lms or


lmstrips, books, pamphlets, posters, photographic models, and the like. Ifa local exhibitor did not have such materials, the CIE would provide themupon request. The guides also provided newspaper stories and radio spotscenarios for PR purposes. All organizers had to do was ll in the time andplace. In these texts the articulation between locality and national space ismost pronounced; by lling in the blanks with ones hometown, the lmscreening becomes thoroughly interpolated by the Occupation project.

While hardly the kind of master lmmaking memorialized in lm his-tories, the CIE documentaries came to take a signicant place in the movieculture of the Occupation period. According to the CIEs own gures, theirlms were seen by 13,017,973 Japanese spectators in 1947; 92,847,545 in1948; 280,910,727 in 1949; 342,211,521 in 1950; and reached472,341,919 viewers by the end of the Occupation.6 One of the largest au-diences for the lms was children. A major study by the Ministry of Educa-tion revealed that in 1951, 78.6 percent of schools were showing CIE lmsin the classroom, and 95.2 percent borrowed them for special activities andrecreation.7 The lms have survived to the present day, deposited alongwith the paper records of prefectures as part of their localitys historicalarchive (in Tokushima, a rural city in Shikoku, the prefectural archive holdsover two hundred prints from the U.S. government). This system continueduntil recent years under the management of the USIS, but became utterly in-signicant compared to its role during the U.S. Occupation of Japan, whereit introduced young students like Ogawa to democracy while laying the in-frastructure for the distribution of Japanese documentaries with quite dif-ferent politics.

It is rather ironic that this massive project, instituted by an occupyingforeign power, eventually became dominated by the Communist Left. Ini-tially, the Americans restricted their new distribution system to CIE andDepartment of Education productions, however, this resulted in immediateshortages, and they opened it up to smaller Japanese companies. By the endof the Occupation, the CIE shortage of productions constituted a crucialniche market for Japanese documentary lm and lmstrip companies likeNichiei Shinsha, Riken, and Sakura-Koga.8 As one might imagine, it wasnot an entirely smooth relationship. One gauge of this is the 1948 strike atToho studios, which shook the foundations of the Japanese lm world. Theaftershocks of this event contributed several factors to the development ofJapanese documentary. First, a new distribution route opened up with thecreation of a nongovernmental, noncommercial network in the form ofcine-clubs. And second, an independent lm production sector emerged asleft-leaning lmmakers were purged from the studio system and begancarving out their own independent space in the industry.


The strike was seen as a serious threat to the lm culture of Japan, andin response to the unions call for help, support spread among student andlabor groups.9 This support became formalized with the creation of theAssociation to Protect Japanese Culture (Nihon Bunka o Mamoru Kai) onApril 22, 1948. It continued to grow, leading to the formation of the TokyoFilm Circle Council (Tokyo Eiga Sakuru Kyogikai) in August, a group thatwas nationalized in October 1949 as the National Film Circle Council(Zenkoku Eiga Sakuru Kyogikai, or Zenkokueisa). This was the rst leftistlm appreciation organization since the Proletarian Film League of Japan(or Prokino, for short) in the early 1930s and was many times larger. In themidst of these developments, the Toho strike reached its notorious climaxwith the deployment of over seven hundred police in military garb, bull-dozers converted into barricade-busting machines, as well as military air-craft, four Sherman tanks, and fty soldiers borrowed from the Americanseverything but the battleships, as actress Akagi Ranko so famously putit. The strikers left the studio grounds singing labor songs, and by October,at least twenty of the most talented people at Toho had quit.

This talent formed the core of a new independent sector in the lm in-dustry. The model came from Kamei Fumios A Womans Life (Onna noissho, 1949), which funneled prots into the production of the next project,City of Violence (Boryoku no machi, 1950) and the establishment of therst of the independent production companies, Shinsei Eigasha. This be-came the prototype for the independent lm movement of the 1950s. Onecannot minimize the contributions of lmmakers like Imai Tadashi, KameiFumio, Shindo Kaneto, and Yamamoto Satsuo. Despite the fact that theywere only releasing a couple lms a year, the quality of their works and theinnovations of their production methods often stood out from the studiopractices of the 1950s. Instead of owning their own theaters, they creatednew organizations and networked old and emerging groups. A synergy de-veloped as a range of new organizations related to lm appeared in the1950s, such as the Kyoto Society for Viewing Documentary Cinema (KyotoKiroku Eiga o Miru Kai), Society for Japanese Film Art (Nihon Eiga Gei-jutsu Kyokai), Japan Film Directors Guild (Nihon Eiga Kantoku Kyokai),Union of Education Film Producers (Kyoiku Eiga Seisakusha Renmei),Tokyo Association of Film Lovers (Tokyo Eiga Aiko Kai Rengo), KyotoCouncil of Film Workers (Kyoto Kinrosha Eiga Kyogikai), not to mentionthe resurgence of student lm study groups on campuses across Japan. TheNational Council of Film Circles experienced explosive growth after mid-1954 when an entertainment tax system went into place giving members aone-third discount at the box ofce window. By the late 1950s, theychanged this name to the Tokyo Association of Film Lovers and had over


100,000 members at the end of the decade. The system broke down around1959, just when young directors like Nakahira Ko, Masumura Yasuzo, andOshima Nagisa were shaking up the Japanese feature lm world. By thistime, lm circles, independent production routes, and the idea of independ-ent exhibition (jishu joei) were in place; and the option of working withinor without the mainstream industryction or documentaryhad becomea real, if difcult, choice.

Simultaneously, an independent documentary cinema emerged, and,once again, the Red Purge and events at Toho played a decisive role. Thisnew independent documentary scene was being forged by some of the samefeature directors, most notably Kamei Fumio. They used many of the samestrategies for production, distribution, exhibition, and organizational net-works as the independent feature lm. One of the typical ways they raisedproduction monies was through labor unions. Examples include The WhistleWont Stop Blowing (Go fue nariyamazu, 1949, directed by Asano Tatsuo)by the national railways union, We Are Electric Industry Workers (Warerawa denki sangyo rodosha, 1948, directed by Takeuchi Shinji) by their ownunion, and The Statements of Young Women (Shojo no hatsugen, 1948, di-rected by Kyogoku Takahide, screenplay by Atsugi Taka) by the union forthe textiles industry. One of the best of these lms is Living on the Sea (Umini ikiru, 1949, directed by Yanagisawa Hisao and Kabashima Seiichi). Itwas funded by a union for people working in shing and records the life ofmen shing on the open ocean. It is somewhat reminiscent of GriersonsDrifters (1929), but has a far more dramatic treatment of the rough seasthese people work in. The same groups often sponsored newsreel-like lmsabout actions, incidents, and events they were involved in.

There was also a strain of science lms that largely escaped the politicsof the Occupation. These include Ota Nikichis Life of Rice (Ine no issho,1950), and Buttery (Agehacho, 1948), and Okayama Dairokuros LivingBread (Ikiteiru pan, 1948). They were among the most visually interestinglms made before the 1960s, mostly for their creative use of time-lapsephotography and photomicroscopy. However, they did not escape the stan-dard conventions of the CIE education lms in any signicant sense. Theirbeautiful photography not withstanding, they are mostly interesting as ex-amples of the possibilities and limits of the days documentary.

In general, the style of the American documentaries distributed by theCIE was closely attuned to Japanese modes of documentary. The logic ofthe narration was dictated primarily by the temporal order of the eventsrecorded or the enlightening voice-over. Because of this, the lms aredominated by matter-of-fact description and rarely take advantage of theresources available in the lmmakers toolkit, from editing to other kinds of


logic for construction. One lmmaker referred to the style as movingkamishibai.10 This practice was propped up by theoretical writings on re-alism that relied on a rather instrumentalist conception of the apparatus.

Despite the prestige of Imamuras writing, the ultimate frame of refer-ence for documentary style during the Occupation must be traced back tothe 1930s. Most of the Occupation lmmakers started their careers duringor just before the war. When Ogawas generation took the stage in the late1950s, they harshly criticized these Occupation lmmakers by drawing aline of stylistic continuity between the older generations wartime and Oc-cupation work. This was theoretically informed critique, in which we shallengage at the end of this chapter; however, the key plank of the platformwas simple: the generation lming through war to Occupation performedan ideological about-face (tenko) in 1945 without undergoing any seriousself-criticism. Without a thoughtful self-reection about their role in WorldWar II, it was a matter of course that they would reproduce the approachto lming reality that they deployed to wage war. The agenda they prosely-tized simply shifted from the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere toAmerican-style democracy and capitalism. At a nuts and bolts level, this iscertainly understandable, considering Occupation lmmakers were literallylming under the gunpunishment for going against American policycould be as severe as imprisonment or banishment to Okinawa. However,despite the continuity in style, the subject matter of independent docu-mentaries substantially, sometimes radically, changed with the end ofAmerican rule.

The New Documentary of Subjective Assertion

Near the very end of the Occupation in 1952, left-wing lmmakers startedmaking documentaries with increasingly oppositional politics. Initially,these lms tended to be simple documents of events. They were made withthe assumption that one would capture the actions of the day directly, re-producing them later for far-ung audiences. Some of the rst efforts werefrom a group called the Youth Culture Association (Seinen Bunka Kyokai),which made 8mm shorts as part of their activities. Its most important lmsare Mitsukoshi Strike (Mitsukoshi sutoraiki, 1951) and the ironically titledSightseeing in Tokyo (Tokyo kengaku ryoko, 1951) about conditions sur-rounding the American military bases.

This short period also saw a few May Day lms, shot for the rst timesince the early 1930s before police crackdowns destroyed the Left. Markedby parades and demonstrations, this labor celebration was rst outlawed


by the Japanese government during the Fifteen Years War and then againby the Americans in 1945. The rst postwar May Day lm was shot in1951. At Tokyo University a student club called Free Cinema ResearchGroup (Jiyu Eiga Kenkyukai) shot May Festival Record (Gogatsu sai nokiroku, 1951). This group simultaneously set the stage for the reinvigora-tion of another tradition that was interrupted by the war: the amateur pro-ductions by student lm clubs from which Ogawa would emerge at the endof the decade. Another example of May Day documentary comes from thecameramen, directors, and scenarists who lost their jobs at the Kyoto stu-dios during the Red Purge. They formed the Kyoto Filmmakers Group(Kyoto Eigajin Shudan) and shot the local May Day in 1951. They latershot lms about a local rail strike, an incident in which hard questions wereasked of the emperor on his trip to Kyoto, and Kyotos 1952 May Day.

A similar group of purged lmmakers shot the violent police riot at the1952 May Day events in Tokyo, and the lm they made sparked a move-ment that constituted the core of the documentary cinema for the nextdecade. This was the rst large-scale May Day celebration since the early1930s. It ended up on the grounds of the Imperial Palace, where riot policesuddenly attacked protestors with vicious force. The demonstration wasbeing shot with multiple cameras by the professional cinematographers leftunemployed by the political events at the studios. The lm they created hasthe rough quality of the Prokino parade lms from twenty years before, butit also features the brutal spectacle of police attacking demonstrators thatwould ll the lms of Ogawa Pro twenty years later. The lm about theevent was a simple record of the incident, but featured shocking police vio-lence that had been kept from Japanese movie screens through the censor-ship apparatus. It was screened all across Japan in independent theatersand met enormous success. The lmmakers began to think that they haddiscovered a route to engage the passions of the Japanese masses andstarted nurturing their discovery. To this end, they created the Documen-tary and Education Film Production Council (Kiroku Kyoiku Eiga SeisakuKyogikai) in 1952, which itself was constituted by the membership of theAssociation of Japanese Filmmakers (from the Nichiei purge) and the NewFilmmakers Association (from Toho Kyoiku Eiga).

The lms of the Production Council were usually funded by labor-related organizations and invariably toed the ideological line of the JapanCommunist Party (its feature lm analogs were being produced by directorslike Yamamoto Satsuo). One could split the lms into two broad groups:those that centered on political incidents and those that focused on every-day life through a narrative movement from the particularized local to thegeneralized national. The former lms would take an action, incident, or


event and record it on lm. The Production Council documented strikes,rallies, and demonstrations, faithfully including the latest slogans of theJCP. The solutions to the problems would inevitably involve the forming ofsolidarity between proletarian groups, especially farmers and workers.

The other group of lms has come to constitute the Production Coun-cils historical legacy, a reputation attributable in part to its own writing ofdocumentary history. Ironically, these lms are different from the organiza-tions starting point on that Bloody May Day of 1952. The most famousof the lms is Tsuki no Wa Tombs (Tsuki no Wa kofun, 1954), its rst pro-duction after formation. It is ostensibly the simple documentary record ofa citizens group in Okayama Prefecture that organizes to conduct its ownexcavation of an ancient tomb. The lm is free of ag-waving and heavy-handed rhetoric, but it essentially boils down to a social education lmmeant to enlighten the moviegoing masses to democratic ideals and thepower of people who form into mass efforts.

Iwanamis Record of a Single Mother (Hitori no haha no kiroku,1956, directed by Kyogoku Takahide, screenplay by Iwasa Hisaya) wasmade by a number of Production Council members and is a far more inter-esting lm, particularly for the rousing debate it ignited over the role ofreenactment in documentary. For this reason, the lm also reveals sharptensions in the Production Councils politics of representation. Films likeTsuki no Wa Tombs and Record of a Single Mother make signicantchoices of subject matter. They focus on a single locality, or in the latter lma single individual, to make an argument about the nation or about capital-ism. This movement between the particular and the general is tricky fordocumentarists, especially those operating under the assumption that theircameras can directly transmit reality. For the producers of Record of aSingle Mother, the answer was to resort to ction.

The lm deals with the potential destruction of Japans villagesthrough urban ight. It approaches this theme in a roundabout fashion,using the potent trope of the suffering single mother, presumably alone be-cause her husband lost his life in the war. Set in a village in the mountainsof Nagano Prefecture, it describes the daily life of a peasant family cultivat-ing silk worms and rice. The Miyazawas are posed as a typical family fromthe countryside. Of their ve children, the eldest daughter left the village towork in a factory in the city. The remaining children help out on the farm.Silk production is considered womens work, and the mother is constantlyworried about her worms. In addition to these duties, she also cleans,cooks, and helps in the elds. The difculty of her position is shown in apoignant scene where the family sleeps while the mother works into thenight. Following the cycle of the seasons and the harvest, the lm ends with


the sale of her cocoons. At the end, the lm drives home its point when oneson goes off to work as a day laborer on a road crew while a daughter takesan exam to work at a factory. Life for the mother is already difcult; if herchildren leave, her life will be unbearable, and ultimately the village itselfwill die.

As Noda Shinkichi points out, Record of a Single Mother implicitly ar-gues that the contradictions of society are shifted onto the points of weak-ness and least resistancein this case village Japanand that they would bemost concentrated on the weakest people there, thus, the choice of a singlemother. By zeroing in on the suffering of this woman, the lmmakers as-sumed they could uncover the reality of present-day Japan. However,Noda suggests,

When moving to an ordinary individual as material one must express thatpersons inner aspects; otherwise, the sense of a social totality within the indi-vidual will not come out. There is no way to do this with a simplistic docu-mentarism. So they season their lm with various techniques from the ctioncinema, and end up making a documentary-like ction lm.11

Many other critics aired similar complaints, especially regarding the pro-lmic familys constitution. Basically, the lmmakers entered the villagewith script in hand, sought out farmers who matched their preconceptions,and built their family from these nonactors. While it was shot entirely onlocation, it is clear that every scene was carefully staged. It is essentially action lm shot in a manner strongly reminiscent of neorealism. Despite(or perhaps because of) the controversy that the lm stirred up over reen-actment, it met with some success. Kyogokus handling of the melodramawas obviously effective enough to garner the top award on the KinemaJunpo best-ten list for nonction lms, and it is now considered one of thenest documentaries of the 1950s.

Other prominent lms using ctional modes of narration followed,most notably Yokota Keitas The Children of Kujuku Ri Beach (Kujukuri hama no kodomotachi, 1956) and The Children of a Town of Soot andSmoke (Baien no machi no kodomotachi, 1957). This is the kind of lm-making the Production Council is remembered for, not the more newsreel-like lms following the agitprop call to arms of their Bloody May Day doc-umentary. This set the stage for a generational confrontation led bylmmaker Matsumoto Toshio that would tear the group apart and shakeup the documentary world. Before this would happen, however, the energyof all nonction lmmakersincluding the Communist artistswas drawninto a close collaboration with the industries of Japans high-growth econ-omy, which was enjoying booming growth after the Korean War.


In the latter half of the 1950s, the independent lm movement reachedthe peak of its prestige, in both ction and documentary. At this very mo-ment, a boom in nonction production occurred when large companiesthrew their weight behind PR lms. They thought this would be the bestmethod for representing themselves to the nation and the world. Televisionhad yet to reach into enough homes to compete with celluloid for thispurpose. As a result, the PR lm reached epic proportions, more ambitiousand expensive than similar lms in any other national context with which Iam familiar. Films like Takamura Takejis three-part Sakuma Dam (SakumaDamu, 19541957) were exhibited in major theaters for feature lms,where they were discovered by a lmgoing audience open to somethingnew and different. The country was pulling out of the desperate poverty leftin the wake of World War II, and spectators were content to fulll their de-sires to know the unknown, to see things they had never experienced be-fore. Sakuma Dam and Nishio Zensukes Kurobe Valley (Kurobe keikoku,1957) thrilled people with their twist on the man against nature theme.Rather than a Japanese Nanook battling a seal, they pitched constructionworkers and their machines against natural formations being transformedby massive public works projects. The war receded to the past in these lmslled with images of prosperity and growth. Ise Chonosukes Karakoram(1956) even removed spectators from Japan by following a Japanese re-search team to the Himalayas. It was followed by lms like People of theMekon River (Minzoku no kawa Mekon, 1956), Beyond the Andes (An-desu o koete, 1957), Hayashida Shigeos Antarctica Adventure (Nankyokutanken, 1957), Unexplored Himalayas (Hikyo Himaraya, 1957), andKuwano Shigerus Mesopotamia (1956). In a related vein, the successful release of Disneys Living Desert (1953) led to domestic attempts at similar nature lms like the controversial White Mountains (Shiroisanmyaku, 1957).12

Two lmmakers stand out in the documentary world of the 1950s,Kamei Fumio and Hani Susumu. The most important director in the his-tory of Japanese documentary is unquestionably Kamei Fumio.13 Duringthe war, he was one of the few directors to take daring chances with thelms he produced. Kamei was a brilliant editor, and he regularly subvertedthe overt politics of his documentaries to include subtle critiques ofwartime ideology. In the end, he was not subtle enough as he was nallyimprisoned on the eve of World War II. As noted earlier in this chapter,Kamei found the American Occupation less than libratory, and after itended, he directed some of the nest lms of the 1950s in both ction anddocumentary. Kameis rst documentaries dealt directly with subjects thathad been placed off-limits since his immediate postwar brushes with the


Americans, most notably atomic warfare (Still Its Good to Live [Ikite iteyokatta, 1956] and The World is TerriedThe Reality of the Ash ofDeath [Sekai wa kyofu suru, 1957]). In 1953, he directed the rst of twodocumentaries on the problems that inevitably follow the American mili-tary wherever it sets down roots. Immediately after the Americans handedthe country back to Japanese control, movements sprouted up to protestthe situation surrounding all the military bases. Poverty, violence, and pros-titution were endemic. The bases were restricted subject matter during theOccupation, and in the spirit of the red scare, Eirin established the FourRegulations Concerning the Evaluation of Base Films (Kichi Eiga ShinsaYon Gensoku) on July 24, 1953, which stipulated in part, The treatmentof the base problem as a special political problem shall be avoided.14

However, this was the same year that Kamei directed Children of the Bases(Kichi no kotachi, 1953), which reveals the shocking conditions outsideof the base fences in Hokkaido, Yamagata, Ishikawa, Yokosuka, andTachikawa.


Kamei Fumios The People of Sunagawa (1956) presages the struggle and the lms of Sanrizuka.Photograph courtesy of Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival and Japan Document Film.

Kameis 1955 lm is even more important in the landscape of the post-war documentary. The People of SunagawaA Record of the Anti-BaseStruggle (Sunagawa no hitobitoKichi hantai toso no kiroku, 1955) wasthe rst entry of his Sunagawa Series. The American Air Force asked theJapanese government for help in expanding one of its runways becausetheir new jets required more space for take-off and landing. Prime MinisterHatoyama accommodated the Americans request and then proceeded totake the necessary land by force, ordering the farmers working outside thefences to vacate their land. They resisted, and were quickly lent the supportof various anti-American organizations and networks of activists. Soonthere were large demonstrations around the base involving thousands onboth sides of the fence. Kamei was on the scene to record the violence thatensued when survey teams staked out farmland with the protection ofthousands of riot police. He stayed with the local farmers and continued todocument the evolving struggle in The People of Sunagawa: Wheat WillNever Fail (Sunagawa no hitobito: Mugi shinazu, 1955) and Record ofBlood: Sunagawa (Ryuketsu no kiroku: Sunagawa, 1956). The struggle wasperceived to have national importance, and Kameis third lm was blownup to 35 mm and distributed to regular theaters across the country. Whenthe farmers began rising against the governments plans for Narita Airporta decade later, delegations moved between Sanrizuka and Sunagawa toshare information and learn from the earlier experience. Kameis series notonly set an important precedent for the connection of lm projects to tu-multuous social movements, but it foreshadows Ogawa Shinsukes San-rizuka Series, even if its production method and style was conventional bycomparison.

Kameis other lms tackle controversial subjects, such as survivors ofthe atomic bombing, nuclear proliferation, the plight of minorities, and en-vironmental pollution. He was relatively inactive starting in the 1960s,making a few PR lms and then a couple lms on environmentalist just be-fore his death in 1987. It is uncertain why Kamei basically quit lmmakingin his later years and retired to run an antique store. There is speculation inthe lm world that as punishment for making lms that did not necessarilytow the party line, he was purged in the late 1950s. Since his major spon-sors were all tied to the party, he simply could not raise enough money tomount expensive productions. In the end, he left a legacy that appears one step removed from the mainstream movement of Japanese documen-tary history.

By way of contrast, the other major gure of 1950s nonction lm,Hani Susumu, contributed documentaries that set the lm world off-balance. These were the kind of seismographic lm events that Bazin de-


scribes, where the river of cinema begins carving new routes after the equi-librium of their bed is upset. Although Hani is best known for featureslms like Bad Boys (Furyo shonen, 1961), He and She (Kare to kanojo,1963), and Nanami: The Inferno of First Love (Hatsukoi: Jigokuhen,1968), he started his lm career with documentaries that decisively revealedthe conventional rigidity of the dominant style. He made his rst lm in1954, and it was entitled Children of the Classroom (Kyoshitsu nokodomotachi). This was a Monbusho-funded education lm designed forpeople who were interested in becoming teachers. The initial idea was tomake a documentary in the usual ctive educational lm manner, using achild actor to play a problem student. However, this presented an ex-tremely difcult role for a child so Hani began to consider using a realschool and real children. Everyone thought it was impossible, but he wentto a school to nd out. In the rst half hour of observation, his presence ag-itated the students, but after two or three hours, they forgot about him.15

Audiences were stunned by the spontaneity captured in Children ofthe Classroom. Close to direct cinema,16 which it predates, this was actu-ally much smarter lmmaking. While American lmmakers like RichardLeacock and the Maysles brothers initially clothed their work in the rheto-ric of objectivity, Hani used observation to approach the subjectivities ofthe individuals he lmed. This is the decisive difference between the post-war conception of documentary in Japan and that of the Euro-Americantraditions. It was this core difference that Tsuchimoto and Ogawa wouldelaborate in their subsequent work, and which was embodied in Hanisrst lms.

For example, Hanis sequel, Children Who Draw (E o kaku kodomo-tachi, 1955), simply shows children interacting in an art class. As we beginto recognize different personalities, Hani cuts to the paintings they are inthe process of creating. This jump from apparently objective, observed phe-nomenon to vivid representations of the childrens inner worlds is accom-panied by an astounding shift from black and white to brilliant color. Farfrom the stodgy realism of his contemporaries, Hanis lms won interna-tional awards and were distributed across Japan through Toho Studio.17

Other Iwanami lmmakers followed with impressive projects, particularlyTokieda Toshies Town PoliticsMothers Who Study (Machi no seijiBenkyo suru okaa-san, 1957), Haneda Sumikos School for Village Women(Mura no fujin gakkyu, 1957), and others. These were the rst rumblingsof massive change. Hanis stunning work attracted the attention of a num-ber of young lmmakers, who joined Iwanami and would make it one ofthe epicenters for change in the era of the New Wave. A typical example isTsuchimoto Noriaki, who recalls, I had never entertained a thought about


becoming a lmmaker, but when I saw Hanis lms I was amazedso thiskind of thing is possible in documentary!and I went to Iwanami.18

Iwanami is a prestigious publishing house, and it formed its lm divi-sion in 1950 with an eye on the considerable amount of money owing intoPR lm companies. Its lm unit became one of the most successful docu-mentary lm companies in the postwar era.19 There are a number of factorsin its success. First, Iwanami had strong ties to the Japan Communist Party,and when the lm unit was created it became a haven for intelligent, left-leaning lmmakers, young and old, who had been recently purged fromother sectors of the lm industry. Another was that Iwanamis audiencegrew up on its paperbacks in the lean war years, so they were predisposedto admire, purchase, and rent Iwanamis lms.

Probably one of the most crucial factors in Iwanamis success wasthe leadership of veterans like Yoshino Keiji and Kobayashi Isamu.Tokieda Toshie felt that Kobayashis creativity had something to do withhis wartime experience as a documentary lmmaker:

Only later did I start to understand why Kobayashi said we shouldnt call ourlms culture lms or science lms, but simply documentary lms in-stead. Before Japan lost the war, Kobayashi was caught and arrested throughthe Maintenance of Public Order Act because of his publications, in what wascalled the Yokohama Incident. From that experience he learned that booksand text could be censored or crossed out, but you can still nd a way to com-municate even if you say less . . . in other words he believed that there wereways to express what needed to be said without getting censored. I think thatwas accomplished in some of the Iwanami lms and Iwanami PhotographicPublications books.20

The Iwanami management was keen on nurturing new talent across theboard and making good lms. To that end, they created a work atmospherethat was among the more egalitarian and nonsexist spaces in the Japaneselm world, particularly when compared to the rigidly hierarchical and au-thoritarian structures propping up the mainstream feature lm. The lmdepartment quickly became a hotbed of creative lmmaking. Buildingroom to maneuver within the structure of what was essentially a PR rm,the managers allowed their lmmakers the (relative) freedom to stretch thelimits of the PR lm. Ironically enough, however, Iwanamis biggest contri-bution to postwar cinema came from when its best lmmakers quit to makemany of the great independent lms of the 1960s, both ction and docu-mentary. Ogawa was among this group.

A key factor in this scenario was one of the most unusual researchgroups in the history of documentary, Iwanamis Blue Group (Ao no Kai).It formed spontaneously in 1961 after censorship problems with two of


Tsuchimotos lms, issues of an Iwanami series on the geography of variousprefectures of Japan. Tsuchimotos contributions to the series tended to bemore gritty than glossy, and upon completion, the television network thatordered them demanded revisions that the company was prepared to acqui-esce to. Tsuchimoto stood by his original versions and arranged in-housescreenings to show the other Iwanami lmmakers and discuss the merits ofeach side. A heady debate ensued, and it was clear that other lmmakerswere having similar problems. The discussion naturally enlarged to includeother issues and transformed into regular meetings. An identity formedaround these meetings, and they started calling themselves Blue Group.

They met about once a month. Its membership reads like a rosterof the best directors and cinematographers in Japan: Ogawa Shinsuke,Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Kuroki Kazuo, Higashi Yoichi, Tamura Masaki,Iwasa Hisaya, Suzuki Tatsuo, and a couple dozen more. They met formallyand informally at barsparticularly the tiny Shinjuku snack calledNarcisseracking up enormous tabs and holding raucous discussions thatlasted four, ve hours, even through the night. Kuroki Kazuo recalls,

At rst, Tsuchimoto Noriaki, then an assistant director, was brought thereby cameraman Segawa Junichi. Then, one after another, Higashi Yoichi,Suzuki Tatsuo, Otsu Koshiro, Iwasa Hisaya, Ogawa Shinsuke, and I trickledinto the bar. It was as if wed set up camp in the bar every night after nishingwork in Tokyos Jinbocho district. The beautiful, determined proprietress hadopened shop amidst the ruins immediately after the end of the war. It wasknown for as the favorite meeting place of young literati like Noma Hiroshi,Inoue Mitsuharu, and Haniya Yutaka. We lmmakers were newcomers raisinga commotion in the crannies of this narrow space, and thinking about it, Imimpressed that such impoverished young lmmakers were able to drink at sucha place. It would have been unthinkable without the kind and generous heartof the proprietress, who put aside her business mentality for use . . . Even afterits members retired from Iwanami Productions, the Blue Group continued tomeet with this bar as our headquarters. On some days, wed rent out thewhole bar and have meetings from morning to night. Even Miyajima Yoshio,Kamei Fumio, Matsukawa Yasuo and Matsumoto Toshio showed up fromtime to time. Its no exaggeration to say that the ideas for lms such as SilenceHas No Wings (Tobenai chinmoku, 1965), Forest of OppressionA Recordof the Struggle at Takasaki City University of Economics (Assatsu no moriTakasaki Keizai Daigaku toso no kiroku, 1967), and the Minamata serieswere born at Narcisse.21

Aside from their meeting style, their agenda was also highly unique. Insteadof discussing famous lms, they would use the time as a laboratory for theirown life as lmmakers. Members would present projects that were still onthe drawing board, the stage where anything is possible because it is mostly


in peoples heads. They wrestled with the merits, problems, and possibilitiesof these ideas. They would look at rushes or rough cuts, analyzing whatthey saw and debating in highly technical terms. What was the cameramanthinking when he made that shot? Why use that lens? What kinds of mean-ings are produced by the cameramans pan at that particular moment? Howcould a certain scene be re-edited? What would happen if the editor putthese two shots together? The discussions were spirited, contentious, andalcohol-driven. In an interview with Kato Takanobu, also known asthe Last Ogawa Pro Member, cameraman Otsu Koshiro describedthe atmosphere:

We would draw on topics like Eisensteins collision montage theory for ourdiscussions. For example, what was the best way to connect a long shot withanother long shot, we asked. Back then long shot/medium/bust/close-up was aking of orthodoxy, but why cant you just go from a long shot to a close up? Itmight be cool to skip the mid range and go straight from a close-up to a longshot too. We were still very green, but we had free discussions about all sortsof things. The effect of ideology on the feel of a lm, the relationship betweenart and politics, abstract issues like that. It got very theoretical when westarted debating what made a movie like [Kamei Fumios] Kobayashi Issa(1941) interesting. What in [Alain Resnais] Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard,1955) is interesting and why? . . . It was a very free atmosphere . . . I supposewe grew up a bit and we kept doing lm research under Ogawas leadershiplike always, but we could always discuss things ranging from one persons spe-cic production problems to politics and lm, lm and art. We had our handsfull of things to debate seriously.22

Today, everyone who participated in these gatherings looks back at BlueGroup with fond nostalgia as a formative moment in their careers. They as-sert that the experience made them better lmmakers, and there is evidencethat they might be right. When these lmmakers quit Iwanami, they scat-tered into various parts of the documentary and feature lm industries andhad a deep impact on Japanese cinema of the 1960s and beyondan inu-ence that has yet to be adequately charted and accounted for.

The efforts of these young Iwanami lmmakers brought the PR lm tounusually spectacular levels, deploying interesting montage, narration, andeven stunning 35mm cinemascope color photography. Nevertheless, theirsubject matter was restricted to steel factories and construction sitesalimit on their ambitions that would soon intersect with other pressures.Working within an industrial context forced the lmmakers to aestheticizethe human-made, industrial spaces created by the high-growth economy.Riding the coattails of Japans spectacular rise of economic power provedproblematic for this group of lmmakers because of their sympathies withthose social elements bringing capital and government under critique.


While Iwanami lmmakers made industrial strength commercials for someof the most corrupt, polluting corporations in Japan, social movements ofevery sort were taking to the streets. Chang under the weight of these con-tradictions, the members of the Blue Group abandoned Iwanami for apoliticized, independent documentary.

On the Subject of Documentary

The Blue Group members individual decisions to quit Iwanami and strikeout on an independent path cannot be understood outside of the contextof the decisive push coming from an audacious young lmmaker namedMatsumoto Toshio, whose contributions to the critical sphere were as inu-ential as his lmmaking. In the late 1950s, Matsumoto started publishingnumerous missives and manifestos, contributing to a critical turbulencethat would shake the foundations of the lm world in the next decade.Matsumoto and others critiqued the approaches of old and renovated doc-umentary practice by turning the term shutai (subject) against the grain. Wemust approach the translation of this word with considerable caution. Itsmeaning varies depending on the context of the utterance or inscription.Every eld treats it differently, making any easy correspondence to theEnglish word subject, a tricky word itself, an impossibility. The term shutaiappeared in lm theory of the prewar period in various essays by philoso-phers like Nakai Masakazu and in debates over the scientic or artisticmerits of the nonction lm. However, it was during the Occupation that itentered lm discourse in an engaged way, and apparently then towed theJapan Communist Party line. Film critics basically borrowed the terms ofthe debate over war responsibility raging within the Left and transportedthem to the lm world.23 Much of this discussion occurred in the Associa-tion of Education Filmmakers (Kyoiku Eiga Sakka Kyokai), the primaryorganization of nonction lmmakers that was decidedly leftist. This grouphad formed in 1955, shortly after the dissolution of the Production Coun-cil. From 1958, they began publishing Kiroku Eiga (Documentary Film)as their monthly journal, their movement magazine where the concep-tualization of documentarys future would be worked out. Many of thekey writings debating the issue of authorship and subjectivity were pub-lished here.

The controversies started shortly before this in the December 1957issue of Kaiho, the newsletter that preceded Kiroku Eiga. In this issue,Matsumoto Toshio published On the Subject of the Filmmaker (Sakkano Shutai to Iu Koto). This was the rst essay in a decade-long series of


political and aesthetic critiques by Matsumoto. It also stood as a declara-tion of generational difference. He began this initial dispatch with the fol-lowing words:

During the war, (documentary lmmake

Ab‚ Mark Nornes - Forest of Pressure ~ Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary

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Transcript of Ab‚ Mark Nornes - Forest of Pressure ~ Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary