What Should We Have Done? was one of the most commercially successful independent documentaries released in Japanese theaters last year, earning more than 180 million yen after its initial release in December 2024, and remaining in cinemas for almost a year. The film directed by Fujino Tomoaki was also included in Kinema Junpo’s Best Bunka Eiga list for 2025, where it ranked second. Now What Should We Have Done? is again being screened in selected mini-theaters across the archipelago, giving me the chance to revisit it.
Produced by Fujino’s Zou-Shima, distributed in Japan by Tofoo Films, and completed with the support of Yamagata Dojo, a residency program for documentary filmmakers working on projects in progress, the film is built from video material—mostly shot digitally by the director himself over more than twenty years within his own family. These visual footage was recorded intermittently during his visits to the parents house, and traces the story of the director’s older sister, nicknamed Mako-chan or Mako, who suffered from mental illness, and of parents who, for almost her entire life, denied her condition and attempted to deal with it while almost never consulting a doctor.
Watching it for the second time gave me the chance to notice and appreciate things that, the first time around, were somewhat drowned out by the raw intensity of the experience. It was still a painful, heavy watch—perhaps even more piercing in some ways. As Fujino has stated on various occasions, What Should We Have Done? is, from its very title, a document of a failure: the failure of an entire family—director included—toward his sister Mako, who began showing symptoms of schizophrenia in 1983, when she was 24. After allegedly consulting a specialist, the parents came to the conclusion that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her, and the family was discouraged from seeking psychiatric care for their daughter.
The film begins on a black screen, with the sister’s voice out of control, recorded by her brother on a Walkman in 1992. The video recordings started almost ten years later, in 2001, during the visits the director—now living in Kanagawa—made back home in Sapporo, Hokkaido. He began documenting his sister’s life and her relationship with their parents as a way of opposing and criticizing their treatment and decisions regarding her.
The use of low-resolution video feels absolutely right for conveying Mako’s miserable experience and, secondarily, that of the entire family. The rough texture of the images almost mirrors the emotional conditions in which everyone is trapped. On a filmmaking level, the documentary works largely thanks to the editing, which naturally shapes what the film ultimately becomes: a partial but real point of view on the tragic reality of the family. It must have been a near-Promethean task for Fujino and Asano Yumiko, who edited the film with the support of Hata Takeshi, to decide what to include, and especially when to cut away from some of the most distressing moments.
The structure, in this regard, is exemplary. The first part briefly sketches Mako’s life and that of her parents using photographs and home movies shot by the father in the early 1960s during their trip, for business, around the world. The couple was highly educated, both were researchers, and made the whole situation even more astonishing. The film then moves forward chronologically, covering more than a decade beginning in 2001 and documenting the steady deterioration of Mako’s condition—and, alongside it, that of her parents. One day the director returns home and finds a padlock on the front door, installed by the parents so that Mako cannot escape. We learn, together with an appalled brother, that his sister has not left the house for almost a year.
The emotional peak of the documentary—and what must have been the lowest point in the relationship between daughter and parents, at least the one kept in the film—comes in a nighttime scene in which we realize that the mother, too, is beginning to show signs of dementia, while Mako’s piercing, bone-chilling screams fill the house.
The following scene—a black screen with written text—tells us that the parents finally gave up, and that Mako was hospitalized and given the appropriate medication. The contrast between those unbearable screams and the later scene in which she calmly speaks, cooks, and washes the dishes is both astonishing and heartbreaking. It points toward what might have been—and that makes it all the more painful. The final part of the film is filled with tender, almost peaceful moments between the father, Mako, and her brother—and then with the inevitable ending, which I will not spoil. An interesting layer is added when Fujino speaks with his father—now frail and in a wheelchair in a hospital—telling him about his wish to assemble all the footage shot over the past two decades and essentially asking, on camera, for his consent to do so.
Of the many satellite events organized during last October’s Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival that I was unable to attend, one in particular caught my attention: “Cinematographer Segawa Jun’ichi: Tracing Japanese Documentary Cinema through His Works.” This was an event organized to revisit the legacy of Segawa as a cameraman 30 years since his passing, and to kick off a retrospective that was held last December at the Athénée Français Cultural Center in Tokyo before traveling to Osaka’s Cinema Nouveau this February.
Although I had previously seen several documentaries in which Segawa worked as cinematographer, I only became fully aware of the real scope of his contribution to Japanese cinema about five years ago, while researching Haneda Sumiko’s Ode to Mt. Hayachine (1982). In Hayachine no fu (1984), her book on the film—part reflection on its genesis, part production diary—Haneda emphasizes several times the importance of having Segawa behind the camera. In what is arguably her masterpiece, Haneda organized the shooting into two units. One group, led by Nishio Kiyoshi, focused primarily on filming the villages of Take and Ōtsugunai, while the other, lead by Segawa, concentrated on the alpine landscapes and the scenes shot near or at the summit of Mt. Hayachine, although for major sequences, such as the summer festival, the entire crew worked together. Haneda repeatedly stresses how decisive Segawa’s prior experience filming at high altitudes—and the fact that he was himself from Iwate Prefecture, where the mountain is located—proved to be for the success of the documentary.
Once I realized how central Segawa had been to the making of Ode to Mt. Hayachine, I began to look more closely at his career and discovered his involvement in several other landmark works in the history of Japanese documentary cinema such as Kamei Fumio’s Fighting Soldiers (1939) or Yanagisawa Hisao’s Children Before the Dawn (1968). The retrospective moves precisely in this direction, offering a cartography of the evolution of Japanese nonfiction cinema, but also fiction films, through the major works in which Segawa played a key role. 24 works were screened in Tokyo and Osaka, here the list of the films in chronological order:
戦ふ兵隊 Fighting Soldiers (Kamei Fumio, 1939) 銀嶺の果て Snow Trail (Taniguchi Senkichi, 1947) ジャコ萬と鉄 Jakoman and Tetsu (Taniguchi Senkichi, 1949) 新しい鉄 Atarashii tetsu (Ise Chōnosuke, 1956) 法隆寺 Hōryū-ji (Hani Susumu, 1958) 新しい製鉄所 Atarashī seitetsusho (Ise Chōnosuke, 1959) 留学生チュアスイリン Chua Swee Lin, Exchange Student (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1965) 夜明け前の子どもたち Children Before the Dawn (Yanagisawa Hisao, 1968) 仕事＝重サ×距離 三菱長崎造船所からのレポート Work = Weight x Distance Report from Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard (Matsukawa Yasuo, 1971) 風 The Wind (Segawa Jun’ichi, 1977) 遠い一本の道 The Far Road (Hidari Sachiko, 1977) 不安な質問 Anxious Questions (Matsukawa Yasuo, 1979) 海とお月さまたち Fishing Moon (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1980) 水俣の図・物語 The Minamata Mural (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1981) 早池峰の賦 Ode to Mt. Hayachine (Haneda Sumiko, 1982) アントニー・ガウディー Antonio Gaudì (Teshigahara Hiroshi, 1984) 奈緒ちゃん Nao-chan (Ise Shin’ichi, 1995) ルーペ カメラマン瀬川順一の眼 Magnifying Glass: The Eyes of Photographer Jun’ichi Segawa (Ise Shin’ichi, 1997) 回想・瀬川順一 土本典昭、2003年3月13日 (Tsutsui Takefumi, 2025)
Unfortunately, I was able to spend only one day in each city, but I managed nonetheless to see or revisit some milestones of Japanese documentary cinema. In Tokyo, I attended a screening of Ode to Mt. Hayachine. Although I had watched it multiple times for my research, this was my first experience seeing it on 16mm and in a theatrical setting—and it was a revelation. The more lyrical sequences were, as expected, awe-inspiring, yet what stayed with me most after this viewing was Haneda and her team’s remarkable ability to weave an intricate and expansive audiovisual tapestry, in which people, history, folkloric practices, economic realities, non-human forces, and the mountain itself are all delicately embroidered into an ever-changing, open-ended whole.
My day in Osaka was more densely packed, with screenings of Jakoman and Tetsu—one of the few fiction films included in the retrospective, and perhaps the most handsome Mifune Toshirō has ever looked on screen—The Minamata Mural, one of the most powerful works Tsuchimoto Noriaki directed on the Minamata disaster (I wrote more about it here), and Hani Susumu’s Hōryū-ji, which left such a deep impression on me that I decided to write about it separately. Like Hōryū-ji, Antonio Gaudí (1975)—the fourth film I saw in Osaka—engages with art, though of a different kind from the Buddhist sculpture housed at the temple in Nara. The way Segawa Jun’ichi’s camera and Teshigahara’s Hiroshi’s direction capture Gaudí’s sinuous buildings and imagination—enhanced by the music by Takemitsu Tōru—is hypnotic. For my part, the film could easily have lasted six hours.
I’m not sure whether the retrospective will travel to other Japanese cities, I suspect it will not, but I secretly hope it might eventually make its way to the Chūbu region region, where I live. The event was planned and organized by Tsutsui Takefumi, Tanaka Shinpei, Nakamura Daigo, and Okada Hidenori, and was accompanied by an excellent catalogue (in Japanese), featuring essays by film historians, scholars, and directors — including a contribution by Hamaguchi Ryūsuke.
Kobayashi Shigeru is an important figure in Japanese documentary cinema, he was mentored by Yanagisawa Hisao—with whom he worked as an assistant director in his last two films, そっちゃないこっちゃ コミュニティ・ケアーへの道（1982) and 風とゆききし（1989)—but is probably best known for his long-standing collaboration with Satō Makoto. Kobayashi was behind the camera and an integral part of the creative process on both Living on the River Agano (Aga ni ikiru, 1992) and Memories of Agano (Aga no kioku, 2004), and in more recent years he has also been a key force in preserving and reviving the legacy of the latter film, as well as Satō’s work more broadly. Their collaboration extended also in the opposite direction with Satō editing Kobayashi’s And Life Goes On (Watashi no kisetsu, 2004). Unfortunately, of the films directed by Kobayashi I have so far seen only Dryads in a Snow Valley (Kaze no hamon, 2015), a beautiful documentary set in a mountain area between Niigata and Nagano Prefecture, which also functions as a kind of homage to Satō’s cinema.
Kobayashi was born in Niigata Prefecture and, from a young age, became involved in groups supporting the victims of Minamata disease. One of the close friends he made during this period began, some thirty years later, to experience violent flashbacks related to the sexual abuse she had suffered as a child. Around the same time, Kobayashi met a female photographer—also a survivor—who was using her photographs to support others who had endured similar experiences. These encounters prompted Kobayashi to confront his own past, suffering and growing up in an abusive family. It was at this point that he decided to make a documentary film, with the aim of helping audiences understand the reality of sexual abuse from the survivors’ point of view.
In Their Traces (Tamashii no kiseki) was presented last year in Yamagata and later on at the Tokyo International Film Festival. I missed the film during my stay in Yamagata, so I was very eager to catch up with it, and I’m glad I finally did.
The film opens with a phone call in which Kobayashi’s elderly friend tells him, matter-of-factly, that she tried to hang herself the previous night, unable to bear the recurring memories of the repeated abuse she suffered as an elementary school student. The rawness of the subject matter, combined with the gentleness and respect with which the film is constructed, is one of the elements that makes In Their Traces such a remarkable and powerful viewing experience. A crucial decision in achieving this balance was Kobayashi’s choice to include himself as one of the film’s subjects. By foregrounding the violence he experienced—without lingering on it or allowing it to dominate the narrative—Kobayashi establishes a bond of trust with the viewer, while also underscoring the trust he built with the women who appear in the film.
It is this transparency and proximity to the other subjects that allows Kobayashi to build, on screen, resonances and parallels between the three women and their traumatic experiences. This transparency—and the trust it engenders—becomes even more powerful when the documentary, through the words of his friend (“you shouldn’t make the documentary” I’m paraphrasing), turns back on itself, questioning the very premise of the project.
The formal strategy of positioning the camera (operated by Oda Kaori), Kobayashi as director, and Kobayashi as participant as three active agents within the film’s reality enables to create a dialogic structure through which the women’s testimonies emerge in a touching and heart-wrenching manner, without ever feeling exploitative or overly dramatic. On the contrary, it is precisely the matter-of-fact quality of some of the exchanges we hear—regarding suicidal thoughts and experiences of sexual violence—that most deeply affects the viewer, making the film a profoundly empathetic experience. This effect is further achieved by interspersing the highly affecting scenes of conversation with striking black-and-white photographs taken by one of the women, as well as with shots of the countryside and the sea. The ocean, with its vast expanse stretching toward the horizon, has a special meaning, especially for one of the women, who describes it as offering a sense of openness and thus hope.
A fascinating point raised by the film is that in many cases the abusive fathers or male figures were themselves survivors of war or people whose lives were severely affected by war. Kobayashi has commented when talking about the documentary that his own family was reimpatriated from the former Manchuria, bearing the weight of war with them.
In conclusion, while the film loses some of its power, in my view, in the final thirty minutes—essentially from the point at which a workshop discussion about the making of the film is introduced—I found the first hour or so to be among the finest documentary filmmaking I have encountered in recent years.
On March 20, 1995—the day sarin nerve gas was released in several cars of the Tokyo subway—Japan experienced what is often regarded, together with the Great Hanshin earthquake two months earlier, a watershed moment in the recent history of the archipelago. Much has already been written and said about the attack carried out by members of the Aum Shinrikyō cult, which killed 13 people and injured hundreds, about the motivations behind it, and about the figure of Asahara Shōkō, the group’s leader, who was eventually executed in July 2018. Within documentary cinema, it is worth recalling at least Mori Tatsuya’s A (1998) and A2 (2001), two key works exploring the sect’s inner workings after Asahara’s arrest and its relationship with the mass media.
Far less attention, however, has been paid to Asahara’s family and to how the tragedy that unfolded three decades ago also affected his closest relatives. Most of them, understandably, changed their names and had their identities protected—especially the children, who were still minors at the time. The sole exception is Matsumoto Rika, Asahara’s third daughter (his real name being Matsumoto Chizuo), who was twelve years old at the time of the attack and had been designated as her father’s spiritual successor. A few years ago, she chose to reclaim her real name, come forward publicly, and stop hiding.
Though I’m His Daughter, a documentary directed by Nagatsuka Yō and released in Japan last year, investigates the reasons behind this decision and follows Rika’s life over a period of roughly six years, from 2018 to 2024. Although the film was screened in a limited number of cinemas across the archipelago last year, it appears to have maintained a relatively low profile, as addressing Aum Shinrikyō and its members remains a delicate and problematic subject—both for the Japanese state and for public opinion, which often, and rightly, calls for respect toward the victims of the attack.
Significantly, the film opens with a meeting between Rika and the brother of one of the victims of a manslaughter case that occurred in Aichi prefecture in 1979 (the so called Handa Hoken Kinsatsujin Jiken)—an encounter initiated by the latter—which immediately sets the film’s thematic tone. One of the documentary’s central concerns is precisely the way in which the relatives of victims and those of perpetrators come to share—to different degrees, naturally—a common fate: that of carrying an almost unbearable burden for the rest of their lives.
Yet the theme that perhaps emerges most forcefully from the film is the complex and deeply ambivalent relationship between father and daughter. While unequivocally condemning her father’s actions, Rika is shown to retain many positive personal memories of him. She cannot make sense of how the violence carried out by the group could coexist with one of its central tenets—the prohibition against killing, even insects. Moreover, following his arrest, she was never able to speak with him or ask about the true motivations behind his actions—both because officials did not permit such a meeting and because Asahara is said to have descended into a state of mental confusion after his arrest, to the point that he was reportedly no longer able to speak coherent Japanese. The film also shows briefly Tatsuya Mori, director of the aforementioned A and A2, attending a meeting held prior to Asahara’s execution in support of granting him proper medical treatment, so that it might be determined whether he was truly the one who ordered the killings—and why—two of the most significant unresolved questions hanging over both the film and Japanese society.
Rika learned of her father’s execution from a friend who was watching the news on television. At that moment, the director was understandably unable to film her; instead, Rika recorded herself, along with her sister Umi—whose identity is protected by the blurring of her face. The resulting footage shows her sister having an emotional breakdown while riding on a bus or in a car.
The emotional ambivalence towards his father is compounded by the discrimination Rika continues to face as she attempts to navigate Japanese society. Following the execution, Rika became the target of a wave of online harassment, with social media flooded by death threats and messages directing rage toward her. In this section of the film, screenshots of tweets and replies appear on screen, one of which starkly encapsulates the situation: “you have no right to be happy.” Finding employment, opening a bank account, or sustaining a romantic relationship all prove to be nearly insurmountable challenges. As a result, Rika experiences recurring bouts of depression and suicidal thoughts; here again, video footage—this time shot by her sister Umi—is used. The death wish Rika harbored as a teenager after her father’s arrest—she remained in the group for four years following the attacks—painfully resurfaces. Her memories of that period are rendered on screen through harrowing sequences depicted in pencil animation.
As a way of confronting and reconnecting with their past, Umi and Rika travel to their father’s hometown, where his family once ran a tatami shop, reminiscing about a time when they still saw him as a caring figure. During the same trip, they also visit relatives who had disowned them and completely severed ties with the Matsumoto family. It is at this point in the film that Nagatsuka decides to ask Rika what he considers the most important question: “Why did such a happy and fulfilled person come to do those horrible things?” The question remains unanswered, as no one is able to make sense of what happened in his life.
The final thirty minutes of the film focus on Rika’s efforts to break free from the depressive spiral into which she had fallen—exacerbated by the pandemic—and to forge an independent life, partly through her passion for mountaineering and bodybuilding, pursuits she approaches at a semi-professional level.
The film opens with the director’s own narration, and his voice—along with the rationale behind the making of the documentary—serves as the thread connecting the work as a whole. Nagatsuka frequently appears on screen, both during and after the pandemic, including in the inevitable Zoom split-screen sequences, a choice I found visually weak. The film is at its strongest in its first hour or so, concluding with the onset of the pandemic and the visit to Asahara’s hometown, when the editing is tighter and the images are less overtly—and cheaply—emotional. The film’s concluding shot, a drone-filmed image from the top of a mountain, exemplifies the opposite tendency and ultimately feels inappropriate.
Though I’m His Daughter may not be without faults, but it possesses the considerable merit of posing difficult and compelling questions, even for viewers who may not share its underlying premises.
When Collaborative Cataloging Japan, the online platform dedicated to experimental and avant-garde cinema in the archipelago, made available Doi Haruka’s He Was Here, and You Are Here (なかのあなた いまのあなた 1985) a couple of years ago, it was for me a revelation. The short film is an impressive and poetic debut centered on the idea of externalising one’s own memories, wishes, and fantasies as images projected onto walls, plates, or even the filmmaker’s own body. He Was Here, and You Are Here crystallizes the inventiveness of a particular approach to personal cinema in Japan during the 1990s, while at the same time standing as an exception—a singular and highly idiosyncratic experiment within the realm of Japanese “self-documentary” of that period.
For the whole month of December 2025, another work by Doi, My Father, burned (父が、燃えた1994), is available to stream on the platform.
While He Was Here, and You Are Here marked Doi’s debut, My Father, burned represents her final foray into filmmaking, a career that lasted less than a decade. In the following years, Doi has been active in the field of Japanese music under the pseudonym HALUKA.
The short film originated in Doi’s discovery of old photographs of her father, along with home movies he had shot himself. As Collaborative Cataloging Japan notes, My Father, burned—described by the filmmaker as an “anti–home movie” —is a rare example of personal film that
illustrates Doi’s complicated relationship with her deceased father. A distanced fascination replaces the nostalgic or sentimental aspects one might expect in a film of this kind. Yet the sense of the power of the found image to shock and disarm remains — the familiar face that stares out from the rediscovered album; the laughter of a past self, seen through the eyes of one deceased. Through this cinematic reflection, Doi questions the image she had of her father prior to this posthumous mediation, even seeing similarities between his violent tendencies and her own rebellious nature.
The film is not only a reflection on Doi’s difficult relationship with her father after his passing, and on how memories shape who we are and who we become, but also a more subtle contemplation of the latent potential inherent in the reactivation of audiovisual footage—here, personal material. Home movies shot by her father when she was little, together with old photographs of him, resurrect the “shadow” of his physical body, helping to construct a different image of the man and an alternative personal reality once inhabited by the filmmaker. Doi’s efforts here, albeit on a smaller and more personal scale, mirror those at work in the best examples of archival or found footage cinema, which “draw on archival material to breathe new life into it and construct new constellations of meaning—capable of questioning the present through a reconfiguration of the past.” (Cau, 2023)
My Father, burned represents thus a prime—if rare—example of the convergence of personal and archival cinema in Japan during the 1990s. This is particularly evident not only from what has been described above, but also from the film’s formal structure, in which the filmmaker’s thoughts are articulated as a form of commentary or narration accompanying the old photographs and home movies presented on screen.
It is also fascinating that the filmmaker briefly reflects, toward the end of the work, on the ethics of filming a dying person—when her father was ill in the hospital. Although this comment is not further developed, it remains a very relevant topic today and sheds light on Doi’s talent and her acute awareness of everything that surrounds the act of filming and filmmaking itself.
References:
Maurizio Cau, Rifigurare il passato. Il cinema d’archivio di Sergei Loznitsa in “Cinema e Storia 2023. Found footage: il cinema, i media, l’archivio” edited by Alberto Brodesco and Maurizio Cau, Rubettino edizioni, 2023.
The Yoshida Dormitory at Kyoto University is the oldest student dormitory still in use in Japan. It consists of two residential buildings and a cafeteria, and residents can live there at a very affordable rate. Since the 1960s, the dormitory has been engaged in ongoing struggles with the university administration, fighting to preserve its autonomy and the political ideals it represents.
In December 2017, the university announced a new safety policy, citing concerns that the old structure could collapse in the event of an earthquake. The abrupt decision halted new resident admissions and ordered all current occupants of both the old and new buildings to vacate. The students and their supporters vehemently opposed the plan. It was around this time that director Fujikawa Keizō and his crew began filming in and around the dormitory, documenting the students’ daily lives and their fight to maintain their independence.
This question of autonomy lies at the heart of the conflict between the dormitory residents and the university administration. As scholar and writer Andrew Williams acutely observed, “Dorms were once a vital source of income and membership for the on-campus self-governing associations that played a central role in the student movement of the 1960s by affiliating with certain New Left factions and aligning with political causes, to which they directed funds, resources, and members. Concomitant with the decline of those associations,” Williams continues, “due, inter alia, to administrative, legal, and sociocultural changes, is the atomization of the whole student movement in Japan from the 1970s onwards.” (Settlement reached in lawsuit over future of Kyoto University’s Yoshida Dormitory)
The Future of Dialogue: Yoshida Dormitory, Kyoto University is a documentary directed by Fujikawa, presented in the Perspectives Japan program in Yamagata, that follows from the inside the life of some of the students and their struggle to keep the facility open, but at the same time depicts the delicate balance of self-governance that is at the core of the dormitory.
The film starts very strong—both visually and structurally—but loses part of its momentum in the second half. At first, I thought this was because, by shifting its focus from a depiction of the dormitory’s activities and struggles—both past and present, conveyed through a well-integrated use of archival photos and written explanations—the film turns its gaze inward. There are many interviews and scenes centered on internal relationships, while I would have preferred more attention to the dormitory’s broader history.
However, as the documentary progressed, I found my opinion changing drastically. The issue isn’t the number of voices—in fact, the internal discussions are among the film’s most captivating elements. Through these conversations, we gain insight into how the dormitory functions as a self-governing community, providing students with affordable housing and fostering a sense of collective life. The rhythm and editing of the first twenty to thirty minutes, along with the rich color palette and tonal nuances, make the opening section a striking portrayal of a self-organized collective in struggle.
The main issue, I think, is temporal rather than thematic—and partly visual as well, somehow, the visual flair that animated the opening scenes fades away as the film progresses. The documentary should have concluded before the pandemic—since the period of filming during Covid is understandably absent. Instead, it attempts to incorporate every major update from the past two years, including one that occurred just a month or so before the Yamagata screening (the settlement reached on August 25). This leads to a series of codas that stretch the narrative and dilute the focus of the film. As a result, the work feels unfinished, or, rather, like a work in progress still awaiting completion.
As said, the documentary would have been stronger had it ended before the pandemic, or, conversely, if it had extended its scope to include the aftermath and reactions following the August 2025 settlement. However, during the post-screening talk—before a packed audience, not a single seat was empty—Fujikawa mentioned that he considers the project finished and will not continue filming. Another factor that may have affected the final result is the requirement to obtain permission from all dormitory participants before using the footage shot inside, which must have limited what could ultimately be included.
Another compelling point, raised by scholar Aaron Gerow, concerns the students’ anxiety over how television cameras—after a TV station requested permission to film their meetings—might have portrayed their dormitory council sessions, and how the presence of those cameras restricts free expression. “Yet we spectators then have to ask what this means for Fujikawa’s camera, which also attends those meetings,” Gerow observes. “Is cinema different? Is Fujikawa different? Largely shot in a vérité style, the film does not engage in explicit self-reflection on this issue.” (SPUTNIK—YIDFF Reader 2025)
Beyond the explosive opening section mentioned earlier, several evocative scenes extend beyond the direct confrontation between the students and the university administration—and I found these particularly compelling. One such moment depicts a typhoon striking Kyoto and partially damaging the dormitory; another, especially memorable, shows the students deciding to clean up a neglected space—if I’m not mistaken, the old cafeteria. The scene immediately calls to mind From Up on Poppy Hill by Miyazaki Gorō, in which students band together to restore the Quartier Latin building. The same sense of camaraderie and shared purpose that animates Miyazaki’s film (scripted by his father Hayao) comes through vividly here.
While far from perfect, The Future of Dialogue: Yoshida Dormitory, Kyoto University —this is by the way the direct translation of the Japanese 対話のゆくえ 京都大学吉田寮, better in my opinion that the English title used at the festival, The Yoshida-ryo Dormitory—remains a fascinating work worth engaging with, and marked by several powerful and resonant moments. One final note: director Fujikawa mentioned that the version screened at the festival was the “Yamagata cut,” suggesting that future screenings in other venues across Japan may feature a different version of the film.
This is the second article in a series about “The Places of Film Culture in Japan” : cinema archives (big or small, independent or state-funded), film museums, and community cinema centers that foster a love for cinema and emphasize the importance of preserving and studying the history of audiovisual production.
This article is a translation of my piece originally written for the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto. Since it was written for a general audience, the article retains its broad approach.
Since the dawn of cinema, movie theaters have been an integral part of the evolution of urban areas. The Japanese archipelago is no exception: more than one phase of its urbanization coincided with the expansion of movie theaters, places that built the social fabric of an area, whether urban or rural.
During the golden age of Japanese cinema in the 1950s and early 1960s, there were over 7,000 movie theaters in Japan. This number declined sharply when television became a central part of every household. 1964 was a crucial period in this sense; the Tokyo Olympics sparked a significant increase in television purchases that year. Additionally, some of the country’s major film studios went bankrupt in the early 1970s, and in the 1980s, a subsequent metamorphosis of cinematic spaces occurred. The advent of mini-theaters, small cinemas that screened (and still screen) independent or arthouse films from around the world.
The introduction of videocassettes and DVDs, as well as the proliferation of multiplexes in large shopping malls over the last twenty-five to thirty years, have contributed to epochal changes in how people experience cinema and inhabit Japan’s urban fabric. The relocation of cinemas, restaurants, entertainment venues, bars, and shops from historic city centers—which are rare in Japanese cities—to shopping complexes outside the city limits has furthered the emptying of entire urban areas.
This is especially true for small provincial towns, whose shōtengai have turned into ghost towns or hallucinations of a bygone era. Shōtengai refers to pedestrian streets, often covered arcades—as those loved and explored by Walter Benjamin in Paris—where various commercial establishments, small shops, restaurants, bars, cinemas, and small theaters are, or rather were, grouped. Though small commercial streets have existed since time immemorial, especially in front of temples and shrines, these urban areas evolved into covered arcades during the Showa period (1926–1989), especially near train stations.
The shift towards online shopping and the consumption of audiovisual products at home has led to the further decline of the shōtengai, a waning that had already started in the 1980s. In recent years, these places have become known colloquially as shattagai, a portmanteau word that refers to the desolation of these places and a blending of the terms shattaa (shutter) and gai (town or urban area). In these arcades, most shops are now closed, or, if they are still open, they are run by longtime owners who aren’t ready to give up. In large cities, some of these shotengai remain active, or at least afloat, thanks to the growing urban population and tourists seeking places with a bygone Showa-period feel. Others are undergoing gentrification and being demolished to make way for tall residential buildings.
The situation in small provincial towns is more complicated. Many of these towns are depopulating, a problem linked to the influx of younger generations from the countryside to the cities and the aging of the Japanese population more broadly.
Gifu is a city located at the geographic center of Japan’s main island, Honshū, and is halfway between a provincial and a metropolitan area. Although large, Gifu is not a metropolitan city in itself. It is too close to Nagoya, Japan’s third-largest city, and is slowly becoming its suburban area.
One of the town’s covered arcades is home to Japan’s only movie theater that exclusively shows movies on film. The Gifu Royal Gekijō (Gifu Royal Theater) is a repertory theater that shows one movie per week, with screenings three or four times each day, in the morning and afternoon. The theater is located in an area of the arcade known as Gekijō Dōri, or Theater Street, which, as the name suggests, once housed numerous theaters and cinemas.
Only vestiges remain of its glorious past. In addition to the Royal Gekijō, there is a small theater that shows contemporary films, Cinex, owned by the same company that manages the repertory cinema, and a theater for live performances.
Royal Gekijō evolved from numerous theaters and cinemas that opened and closed over the decades. The first venue was first opened in 1926 and later on, in 1955, became a large theater managed by the Tōei studio. Then, it changed hands over the following decades until its closure in the early 2000s. In 2009, the theater began hosting occasional events dedicated to Showa-era cinema. Given their relative success, these events later became a regular feature.
The entrance of the cinema, on the first floor, is decorated with large figures of stars from the golden age of Japanese cinema. These figures include Takakura Ken, Kiyoshi Atsumi, Asaoka Ruriko, Mifune Toshirō, and Hara Setsuko. The decorations serve as a sort of portal and conceptual introduction to the venue. This time machine effect, as it were, continues with the songs played in the theater before each screening. Mainly songs that were popular in Japan during the 1950s and 1960s.
The film program is varied, but only Japanese feature films are shown nowadays—when the Showa program was launched, it also screened movies from the U.S. or Europe. These include melodramas produced by Shōchiku, jidaigeki by Tōei and Tōhō, comedies and satires that are still little known outside the archipelago, and mini-retrospectives dedicated to actors, directors, and sometimes even the locations where the films were shot – with a particular attention to films shot in Gifu prefecture.
Every summer, to commemorate the end of the Pacific War and the tragedy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the theater showcases films with strong anti war content or powerful pacifist messages. This year, the program is particularly significant, as it marks the 80th anniversary of the war’s end. In July and August, films such as Kinoshita Keisuke’s Army (1944) and Twenty-Four Eyes, as well as the trilogy Men and War—directed by Yamamoto Satsuo for Nikkatsu between 1970 and 1973—are being screened.
In my ten years of going to the theater, I have been struck and impressed more than once by the sheer power of the viewing experience itself, regardless of the movie’s quality. Needless to say, seeing a movie—especially a 35mm film in TōhōScope or one of the other large-format experiments the studios tried in the 1950s and 1960s—is a different experience than watching a DCP screening. This is true even though many of the films are not in optimal condition.
As for the type of audience that usually attends the screenings at the Royal Gekijō, most viewers are over seventy. Through the movies, they can relive their youth or perhaps seek a couple of hours of relief from the heat in summer and the cold in winter. In this sense, the experience is almost like visiting a museum, or perhaps more akin to going to a Shōwa-kan or a Taishō-kan, places that recreate or preserve the atmosphere of bygone eras and evoke a strong sense of nostalgia.
As we have seen, the history and future of cinematic exhibition is linked to and depends on the evolution of urban spaces and, therefore, on how its inhabitants experience the city. It will be interesting to see if and how cinema—here considered as a collective experience—will endure or transform further, or if it will remain a shared dream that only a few will remember.
Upon discovering the Japan Community Cinema Center and its annual reports on film culture and its diffusion throughout the country, I was inspired to republish this old post. I hope this is the start of a series of articles about “The Places of Film Culture in Japan,” exploring the various cinema archives (big or small, independent or state-funded), film museums, and community cinema centers that foster a love for cinema and emphasize the importance of preserving and studying the history of audiovisual production.
Originally posted in 2018 and re-edited in September 2023 (further re-editing: 2025, June).
There’s a place I’ve wanted to visit since moving to Gifu Prefecture that I discovered by chance while surfing the Internet. It’s a small, movie-related museum located in Hashima City: the Hashima Eiga Shiryō-kan 羽島市映画資料館
Movie museums, archives, and places devoted to preserving and documenting the history of cinema and movies (big spectacles, home movies, and video art alike) are becoming an increasingly interesting field for me to explore. Therefore, even though it is, strictly speaking, not about documentaries, but rather about documenting films and their history, I have decided to start a series of posts about Japan’s few but active film museums and film centers (2025 correction: I was wrong, there are in Japan more facilities dedicated to cinema than I thought. Also I have not continued the series…shame on me).
The most famous are the National Film Archive in Tokyo and the Kobe Planet Film Archive in Hyogo. The latter is a place that has been featured many times on this blog. It is a mini-theater and archive—perhaps an exemple of counter archival practices in the archipelago?—that I have visited many times, and through which I have discovered many important movies. Another museum I visited a couple of years ago is the Toy Film Museum in Kyoto. It was recently in the international news because of the discovery of a film by Ozu Yasujirō that was once believed to be lost, Tokkan Kozo.
The Hashima Eiga Shiryō-kan, located on the outskirts of the “empire” in an old area of the city of Hashima, is housed in a small, two-story building.
Established in 1996, the museum shares the building with the Folk History Museum. However, its appearance (at least from the inside) is more reminiscent of a cinema museum than an ethnographic museum. For instance, at the ground floor entrance, visitors are welcomed by dozens of film posters from different eras.
The main exhibition space is located on the second floor, where one room is filled with old movie cameras, some of which are bulky machines dating back to the 1940s. There are also flatbed editors, speakers, and posters—a real feast for the eyes. As you can see in the photo below, there are even some seats from an old theater. The seats probably belonged to the Takehana Asahi Cinema, a beloved theater that was an important part of the local community. The theater was active between 1934 and 1971, and the museum stands in the same spot as the Takehana Asahi Cinema.
Even after its closure, the old building remained intact and untouched until the end of the 1980s. Around that time, the people of Hashima started pressuring the city to bring a cinema back to their neighborhood. The interest was probably sparked by the advent of mini-theaters during the decade and fueled by the money flowing through the bubble period. Around 1992, an inspection revealed that the building was dilapidated and in danger of collapsing. However, hundreds of movie posters were discovered inside its vaults. This led to the decision to embark on a new project: the establishment of a movie museum. The new building was modeled after the old theater on its south facade and after Takegahana Castle on its west facade.
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(the old Takehana Asahi Cinema and the South facade of the museum, source)
The other room is set up like a screening room, with rows of chairs in the center and a small screen at the far end. Film posters and other memorabilia adorn the walls, mainly from the golden age of Japanese cinema and jidai-geki movies.
For me, the highlights were two very old and beautiful long posters from the 1930s, but unfortunately, I could not take photos of them. According to its website, the museum stores over 50,000 items, including posters and other memorabilia. Only a small portion of these items were on display the day I visited.
On the second Saturday of every month, the main room turns into a screening room where people gather to watch and discuss movies chosen by the museum staff. Films screened this year included I Want to Be a Shellfish (1959), Nobuko Rides on a Cloud (1955), and The Bullet Train (1975).
The museum sets a good example of what local movie theaters outside big cities could become: a place to preserve and celebrate cinema and film culture. They could also function as small repertory theaters or community cinemas.
Something not related to the world of documentary today: I translated my June 2024 interview with the talented stop-motion artist Soejima Shinobu. I met her at an exhibition in Kanazawa, where her latest short, 私の横たわる内臓 My Organs Lying on the Ground, was screened for a week or so. The piece was originally published in Italian in Alias on August 17, 2024.
On a different note, she is pitching her new project, 彼女の話をしよう Talking About Her (currently in production), at the ongoing Annecy International Animation Film Festival, on June 10.
Soejima Shinobu is a Japanese artist who has been active in the world of stop motion animation for the last decade. She creates fascinating short films that blend her interest in Asian and Japanese folklore and religious practices with her passion for sculpture. In these experimental works, which have been presented at various international events, Soejima prioritizes the materiality of the puppets and their environments over the narrative elements.
In 2018, Soejima created The Spirits of Cairn, a story in which a guardian must contend with heads of birds appearing and disappearing in a cemetery. The following year, in House Rattler, she brought the spirits of an old house to life as imagined in Japanese folklore. Her most successful and accomplished work to date is perhaps Blink in the Desert (2021), a short film in which a boy/monk is overcome with guilt after killing a moth.
Her latest work, My Organs Lying on the Ground, was presented last June [2024] in Kanazawa, in a small exhibition that displayed also some of her sculptures. It is a short film that reinterprets a Japanese spiritual practice known as tainai kuguri, a purifying journey through the bowels of the earth. In this piece, which makes extensive use of organic materials such as meat, insects and cereals, Soejima creates a space where the boundaries between earthly life and the afterlife, between organism and inorganic matter, and between inside and outside dissolve I had the opportunity to speak with the artist at the exhibition.
私の横たわる内臓 My Organs Lying on the Ground
How did you get into stop motion animation?
I have always been interested in sculpture ever since I was a child. I continued making sculptures until the end of my bachelor’s program when my professor realized I had a talent to creating stories, then he suggested I combine the two.
Very soon, I quickly realized that I loved stop motion animation. With sculpture, I usually had to keep all my work in my studio, which took up a lot of space. With film, however, I was able to edit and distort my work and film the whole process, which I really enjoy. I am also interested in the idea that, by filming materials decompose and transform into different forms, I can preserve the essence of the sculpture.
Could you talk about your creative process? On your website, you have collected images from your research journeys. Do you start from places, or do you start from a story you want to tell? Or, do the images guide you?
I usually think about the setting first. The environment in which the events take place is crucial to me. For example, in my first film, The Spirits of Cairn, I wanted to depict the story of someone who died very young and I tried to think of the best way to represent a place between life and death. I started with an image of dozens of bird heads in a place with many cavities that must be kept empty by a guardian of some kind.
For my second film, House Rattler, which is set in my grandmother’s old house, I also started with the setting. For my latest work, My Organs Lying on the Ground, I wanted the characters to be even more connected to the environment to reflect ideas from ecology and animism. To bring this concept to life, I decided to use organic materials because, when we consume something, it goes back to the earth. Plants grow back, and we eat again. It’s a repeating cycle.
Since the puppets are literally empty bodies that resemble human beings but have no soul, I thought these organic materials could connect them to their surroundings. This concept is also similar to a Buddhist view of reality: a fish does not exist in and of itself; we call something a fish because it is in the water.
Sticking with the religious theme, your latest work, My Organs Lying on the Ground, but also The Spirits of Cairn is based on the ritual and spiritual practice known as “tainai kuguri” (passing through the womb). What role do religious practices play in your work?
I come from a religious family and so from the time I was born I have something I can believe in, so I think it’s something very real to me, although I’m not very sure I’m as religious as my parents. I was also influenced by my time in Malaysia, where I lived from the time I was twelve years old until I was twenty, I remember for example that there were tropical fruits rotting on the ground and when no one touched them, they would dissolve into. But the Malaysians don’t think this is wasteful because they believe in this cycle, sometimes you eat the fruits, sometimes you let them rot on the ground and from there plants and new fruits grow back. I remember this image very clearly, partly because it goes against what the Japanese usually think, if you see something rotting on the ground, you immediately think of waste and a sense of dirtiness. Hindu culture also influenced me a lot, in my years in Malaysia of course, but also later when I went to Nepal to do research.
The puppets’ eyes in many of your works, especially in Blink in the Desert, have an uncommon expressiveness. Could you talk about how you achieve this effect?
I usually use glass eyes like the ones used for stuffed animals. When light hits them, they seem to move and take on an almost watery appearance. This technique comes from Buddhist and Japanese sculptures, as well as Asian sculptures in general. Special crystals were used for the eyes when making these statues. Long ago, Buddhist temples had no artificial lights, so candles were used. When the flickering candlelight hit the statues’ eyes, they looked very watery and almost alive.
In My Organs Lying on the Ground, the expressions and eyes of your puppets seem kinder to me, and the colors seem warmer and less cold than in your previous short film. Is this just my impression?
In my penultimate work, Blink in the Desert, I tried to portray the main character’s inner confusion and negative feelings, so the film ended up being rather emotionally intense. For this latest work, however, I tried something different, something more related to sculpture that could only be realized through stop motion. I thought a lot about how to make the puppets because combining them with organic material might shock viewers. In the past, dolls were used in Japan to expel sins or evil spirits from people, and then they were thrown into rivers. Perhaps all of this influenced the look of the puppets I used in my short film, as well as my decision to use positive, almost party-like music to accompany it.
It seems to me that your work tends to emphasize the symbolic and allegorical over the purely narrative. There is a story, but it is not linear.
When I create my work, I feel as if I am documenting sculptures and their changes over time. In this sense, I have been influenced by postminimalism, especially Richard Serra’s approach. Stop motion animation and the puppets I use are very real to me. Through them, I can show reality in a tactile way, so to speak, which is what interests me. This approach was also influenced by the pandemic, especially in my last short film. While working on Blink in the Desert, I was confined to my small room for nearly a year. I felt disconnected from the world, communicating solely through screens, and it seemed as if my body and feelings were detached. I needed physical interaction with the environment and to return to a tactile and material level.
This is an essay that grew out of two articles I wrote for this site last year. I submitted it for publication, but it was rejected. It is perhaps too vague and unfocused. Hopefully I will return to the subject in the future with more to say. The essay is available in pdf here.
Found Footage Films, Compilation Documentary and Recycled Cinema in Japan: a preliminary study
The practice of making found footage films and compilation documentaries from archival material has been widespread in Europe and the USA for some time, but research into these cinematic practices in Japan often leads to a deafening silence and a dead end. This essay constitutes a preliminary exploration into the development, or absence thereof, of this captivating field in Japan, whilst concurrently highlighting two works produced in the archipelago that can be categorised as archival film practices. The term ‘archival film practices’ is employed here as an umbrella term denoting a constellation formed by found footage documentaries, compilation documentaries, recycle cinema and collage films. The present essay is also intended to stimulate new studies and research on the subject.
In 1947, the French filmmaker Nicole Védrès created Paris 1900, a compilation film comprising footage shot between 1900 and 1914. In 1965, the Italian artists Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi experimented with found footage of Hollywood films that were earmarked for destruction in Uncertain Verification; and in 1987, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi reworked the colonialist gaze of footage shot in 1925 into something entirely different in From the Pole to the Equator. These are just some of the most significant examples of compilation or found footage cinema from the last century. The practice of recycling cinema, another term that has emerged within this constellation, has seen a surge in production and quality in recent decades. Technological advances and the availability of archival material have played a significant role in this development, but so too has a willingness to explore the meaning of reassembling images from the past and their impact in the present. A diverse group of filmmakers, including Bill Morrison, Haroun Farocki, Jonas Mekas and Sergej Loznitsa, have extensively explored the possibilities and challenged the limits of archival film practices, resulting in insightful and boundary-pushing works.
The question that arises is: what is the history of these film practices in Japan? A review of the relevant literature suggests that there has been a scarcity of such films, particularly within the documentary and experimental realms, despite these modes of filmmaking being frequently associated with these practices in other regions. Given Japan’s extensive, diverse and heterogeneous history of documentary and experimental cinema, this apparent absence is surprising and warrants further investigation.
There are, of course, exceptions to this, which will be discussed in the second part of this essay, and there are several documentaries made in Japan that do indeed make use of archival footage, especially those dealing with and depicting the Pacific War or the social uprisings of the late 1960s. Daishima Haruhiko’s tetralogy of documentaries (2014-2024) on the Sanrizuka struggle and student movements[1], or Boy Soldiers: The Secret War in Okinawa (2018) by Mikami Chie and Ōya Hanayo are notable examples of this approach, combining interviews, reenactments, newly filmed scenes and narration to create a compelling narrative.
However, these films cannot be included in the cinematic practices discussed here in that they utilise archival material to illustrate a point rather than to provoke a sensation or a reflection on the status of the images.
Alberto Brodesco and Maurizio Cau posit that “in general terms, the expression [archival cinema] describes the operation of reuse, recycling and reappropriation of material shot in the past, which is recomposed to produce new film texts” (2023, Introduction), and according to Eric Thouvenel, “Found footage films are far more than the “documentation” of an era; there is always a critical statement behind the images. Because these films are a special form of archeology (to use a cur-rent and fashionable term), their significance is not located at the level of the represented event, but with the events occurring within the representation itself.” (2008, 98) Moreover, Bill Nichols, writing about Jay Leyda and his seminal volume on the subject, points out that “the core idea of the compilation film revolves not only montage and photomontage, but also ostranenie, the basic tenet of Russian formalism as put forward by Victor Shklovsky: ‘the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are known'” (2014, 149). Furthermore, the quantity and duration of the material employed is also a pertinent factor: the more archival images or found footage are utilised, the closer the films approach a concept of recycle cinema that engenders novel meanings for the assembled images, “in such a way as to produce new knowledge about history that evokes a deeper, more sensual and experiential understanding of the past.” (Russell 2018, 65)
The scarcity of such practices in the archipelago can be attributed, in no small part, to the considerable difficulty and expense of obtaining and using footage, or even stills, from films produced by major Japanese companies. While Japanese Copyright Law does allow for a certain degree of reproduction, the absence of a robust discourse on fair use in the country further exacerbates the issue. However, this cannot be the sole reason, as there are alternatives, such as the use of found footage from home movies and amateur cinema, or other non-commercial sources.
In search for words
To illuminate this subject further, a brief reflection on words and the use, or absence thereof, of specific terminologies in Japanese film studies is necessary. It should be noted that the purpose of this discussion is not to advocate for the superiority of any particular language, whether it be English, French, Italian, or any other, over Japanese. Rather, the objective is to provide an overview of a dynamic and constantly evolving field, one that is open to external influences and is, by its very nature, subject to change and development. It should also be noted that I am not advocating for the absolute correspondence and translatability between languages. Instead, I advocate for the expression of specificities inherent to geographical regions (not necessarily countries) and human groups. The existence of different languages, dialects, political conditions, and cultures gives rise to diverse cinematic expressions and approaches to visual communication.
In Japan, this linguistic peculiarity can be traced back to the early days of cinema and persists to this day. The spectrum of non-fiction films in Japanese has been characterised by a range of terms, including kiroku eiga (record film), senden eiga (propaganda film), bunka eiga (cultural film), and finally, dokyumentarii eiga (Nornes 2003, 2). Bunka eiga continues to be utilised by the prestigious film magazine Kinema Junpo to categorise and award non-fiction films. It is interesting for the discussion to note how the term bunka eiga tends to denote a certain type of non-fiction cinema that deals with historical and, above all, social issues without experimenting too much with cinematic language.
While the absence of a terminology does not necessarily correspond to the absence of a certain way of making cinema, it is interesting to note how the scarcity of certain documentary and experimental practices in the archipelago is reflected in the absence of a terminology, and how these two phenomena are related. As I have previously explained, following the English literature on the subject, I have decided to use the terms archival film practices, found footage documentary and compilation documentary to describe the galaxy of films discussed here. This constellation of terms, in conjunction with recycled cinema and collage film, provides a more comprehensive description of the field under analysis: a set of cinematic practices that utilise found footage and archive images to create works that traverse both the non-fiction and experimental realms.
However, the boundaries between what these practices are and what they are not are often nebulous, and the English terms employed in this field are similarly ambiguous, constituting a less than stable foundation for analysis. Nevertheless, these terms can serve as a point of departure. My research into Japanese terminology reveals a paucity of specific terms, or at least a lack of utilisation. For instance, the English term ‘compilation documentary’ appears to be without an equivalent in Japanese. Instead, the term is more likely to be expressed in phrases such as 映像素材を映画に編集した (edited the footage into a film), or or 映像素材をコラージュした作品 (a work made from a collage of footage), and so on. ‘Recycled cinema’ and ‘collage film’ are definitely two terms that point to a practice more akin to experimental filmmaking. While the former seems to have no equivalent in Japanese, the latter, コラージュ映画 (collage film) or 映像コラージュ (video collage), is a term that has been used in the archipelago for decades[2]. This is probably because the term ‘collage’ came to film studies from and through the visual arts and avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, for instance, Braque and Picasso. The term ‘found-footage documentary’ is even more confusing, since in Japan found-footage horror is a very popular subgenre that often overlaps with mockumentary, and a brief search for ファウンドフッテージドキュメンタリー (found footage documentary) on the Internet resulted in a substantial number of horror films and related works. The only occasion on which the term ファウンドフッテージ was used in a non-fiction context was when the articles were translations of discussions in English. However, a different case can be made for アーカイヴァルドキュメンタリー or アーカイヴァル映画 (archival documentary or archival film). This term appears to have gained currency in recent years in connection with the so-called “archival turn”. This is particularly evident in the films of Sergei Loznitsa, a filmmaker whose works have been screened multiple times in Japanese cinemas and are even available on streaming platforms. It is therefore reasonable to hypothesise that the adoption of this term in Japan may have originated with the diffusion of the Ukrainian auteur’s films. To date, I have found no examples of アーカイブヴァルドキュメンタリー being used to describe a film made in Japan. This is, however, only a preliminary investigation and further research is needed to provide a more comprehensive overview of its usage.
Still from Tokyo Trial
Two compilation documentaries made in Japan
Although there are some examples of collage films and recycled cinema projects in Japanese experimental cinema, often short works derived from installations and primarily produced in the 1960s and early 1970s[3], the focus of this segment is on two longer films that can be categorised as compilation documentaries: A “Toy Film” History of Shōwa: The Second Sino-Japanese War, 1931-1945 (Ōta Yoneo, 2021) and Tokyo Trial (Kobayashi Masaki, 1983). These works are notable for their examination of the Japanese wartime period, encompassing the nation’s military expansion and imperialist endeavours. Each of them offers a distinctive perspective, utilising archival footage to illuminate diverse historical events.
A “Toy Film” History of Shōwa: The Second Sino-Japanese War, 1931-1945 stems from Professor Ōta’s extensive involvement with omocha eiga (toy films), their restoration and preservation[4]. The film begins with intertitles providing the viewer with a definition of toy films: fragments of 35mm theatrical prints created for sale and domestic use, typically projected by hand-cranked toy projectors, and ranging in length from 30 seconds to 3 minutes. These include excerpts from documentaries, propaganda films, newsreels, home movies, and digest versions of theatrical feature films. Ōta, who also served as the film’s writer and editor, assembles these fragments, which were sourced from the collection of the Toy Film Museum, to offer a distinctive viewpoint on a calamitous era in Japanese history, 1931 to 1945, interweaving images from animated propaganda films, “the funeral of Emperor Taishō (Yoshihito, reigned 1912-1926), the enthronement of Emperor Shōwa (Hirohito, reigned 1926-1989), military training drills and field exercises, battlefield scenes in China, and home movie footage of the daily life of Manchukuo’s Japanese colonists.” (Bernardi 2023)
The structure of the film is didactic and content-oriented, with maps, historical dates and explanatory intertitles contextualising the moving images which are essentially militaristic if not propagandistic in nature. By chronologically linking and combining these images, the project is thus, as stated through the intertitles in the opening minutes, an attempt to bring to light a different historical truth and a deeper understanding of a crucial period in the history of the Far East. The music that accompanies the film varies from screening to screening, but the two versions I was able to see[5] were both accompanied by live piano music. This choice lends the entire project a certain sense of “silent film rediscovered”, instilling it with a classical tone and drawing attention to the film’s museum origins and the profession of its creator.
It is also noteworthy that the fragments were selected, restored and digitised by Ōta and his collaborators using the material available at the Toy Film Museum. Consequently, the film is composed entirely of images produced from a Japanese perspective, thus offering a single and one-sided point of view, an observation that was raised during the post-screening Q&A at the Lenfest Center in New York in 2023 (Ipek 2023). While acknowledging that images captured by the colonised would have provided a compelling counterpoint, it is important to recognise that one of the objectives of the project is to showcase the Japanese military propaganda apparatus in operation during the era, in all its might and ramifications, and that a counterbalance to the images is already provided by the addition of explanatory intertitles and maps, inclusions that reveal the real goals of the imperialist state.
Moreover, and more importantly, there is always an excess of meaning inherent in the images that goes beyond the original intent, and there is always the possibility of new meanings emerging from interweaving such diverse visual material within one single work. “The dilemma of images, their resistance to reuse, or, on the contrary, their openness to take on new meanings, remains something unfathomable.” (Bertozzi 2012, Chapter 5) A “Toy Film” History of Shōwa: The Second Sino-Japanese War, 1931-1945 does not represent an overt endeavour to reflect on the status of images and to question the mode of appearance of the ‘real’, but rather a reflection on history through images. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition and combination of images of such divergent styles and textures can also work on the viewer on a more purely aesthetic and perceptual level, raising new questions and pointing to new possible configurations of the past. This is especially true in the animated fragments of propaganda and home movies, where the complexity and richness of the act of representing the ‘real’ is fully revealed.
Tokyo Trial is a 1983 documentary compilation film directed by Kobayashi Masaki, one of the giants of the so-called golden era of classical Japanese cinema[6]. The film runs for a duration of over four and a half hours and was edited over a period of five years from nearly 100 hours of footage acquired from the US Department of Defense, material released 25 years after the conclusion of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (29 April 1946 – 12 December 1948).
The documentary is narrated by the renowned actor Satō Kei and begins with scenes from the Potsdam Conference, followed by archival footage of the Pacific War. It then transitions to Emperor Shōwa’s Imperial Rescript of Surrender on 15 August 1945 and to footage of the rise and fall of Nazi Germany under Hitler. It is not until approximately the 40-minute mark that the film moves to the Tokyo courtroom and the ‘parade’ of war criminals, including Ōkawa Shūmei, a Class A war criminal and nationalist, in one of the most memorable scenes in the entire film, a behaviour which made headlines around the world at the time of the trial. This scene is shown twice: once from a distance at normal speed, and once again in slow motion from a frontal and close angle, showing Ōkawa hitting Tōjō Hideki, the former Prime Minister of Japan, on the head.
Another powerful scene portrays the controversial speech delivered by lawyer Benjamin Bruce Blakeney as a defence, asserting: “If the killing of Admiral Kidd by the bombing of Pearl Harbor is murder, we know the name of the very man who[se] hands loosed the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, we know the chief of staff who planned the act, we know the chief of the responsible state. Is murder on their consciences? We may well doubt it. We may well doubt it, and not because the event of armed conflict has declared their cause just and their enemies unjust, but because the act is not murder. Show us the charge, produce the proof of the killing contrary to the laws and customs of war, name the man whose hand dealt the blow, produce the responsible superior who planned, ordered, permitted or acquiesced in this act, and you have brought a criminal to the bar of justice.” The act of presenting the scene on screen, more than three decades after the event and in a new and evolving geopolitical context, approaches what scholar Marco Bertozzi defines as “the degree zero of archive reuse, an epistemic purity that leaves its mark: sometimes presenting a film (or a series of rediscovered sequences) as it is can be an artistically disruptive gesture that goes far beyond the arrangement of re-edited fragments.” (2012, Chapter 2)
However, Kobayashi also employs the power of editing on multiple occasions, such as when he presents images of the Nanjing Massacre, described as “a revelation of the inhumanity that had put down deep roots and being nurtured within the organization of the Japanese military, (…) a cross that the Japanese people must bear forever”, followed by images of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is a choice that can be criticised as expressing Japanese collective victimhood in the context of the Second World War, but which is more likely, in Kobayashi’s mind, an editing decision that underscores his humanist perspective and the collective tragedy experienced by ordinary people affected by war, irrespective of their nationality.
The documentary ends with the death sentences of seven of the war criminals, who were executed on 23 December 1948, a month after the verdicts were announced. The film then presents a parade celebrating President Truman’s re-election, while concurrently adding subtitles that detail various wars and conflicts that took place globally following the Second World War, including the Korean War in 1950. The film concludes with the poignant image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc (the so-called “Napalm Girl”) fleeing an air raid during the Vietnam War.
Conclusion
In this article, I have attempted to trace a concise cartography of archival film practices, or the absence thereof, in the Japanese archipelago. A study that aspires to stimulate further interest in a field that has yet to be explored. I have briefly focused on the terminology associated with the field, and attempted to suggest reasons for the alleged scarcity of recycled cinema, compilation documentaries and found footage film production in Japan.
In the second part of the article, I have examined two significant ‘exceptions’; that is, two works that embody, albeit differently, the idea of archival film practices in Japanese cinema: A ‘Toy Film’ History of Shōwa: The Second Sino-Japanese War, 1931-1945 and Tokyo Trial. These are compilation documentaries that explore and reconsider Japan’s wartime and imperial past through the use and combination of diverse and varied archival footage. While not overtly experimental, both works illustrate the potential of archival film practices to resonate with contemporary times, thereby generating novel and evolving constellations between the past (the rediscovered images) and the present (the time when the compilation work is assembled and viewed).
References:
Bernardi, Joanne Notes on A ‘Toy Film’ History of Shōwa: The Second Sino-Japanese War, 1931-1945, unpublished, 2023.
Brodesco, Alberto and Cau Maurizio, ed. Found footage. Il cinema, i media, l’archivio. Cinema e Storia. Rivista di studi interdisciplinari n. 2023, Rubbettino, 2023.
Leyda, Jay Films Beget Films: A Study of the Compilation Film, Hill and Wang, 1971.
Nichols, Bill Remaking History: Jay Leyda and the Compilation Film, Film History
Vol. 26, No. 4, Indiana University Press, 2014.
Russel, Catherine Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, Duke University Press, 2018.
Thouvenel, Eric How “Found Footage” Films Made Me Think Twice about Film History, in Cinéma & Cie, Milano University Press, 2008.
Nornes, Markus Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era Through Hiroshima, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
[1] They are: The Wages of Resistance: Narita Stories (2014) co-directed with Ōtsu Kōshirō, The Fall of Icarus: Narita Stories (2017), Whiplash of the Dead (2021), and Gewalto no mori – kare wa Waseda de shinda (2024).
[2] The 1998 edition of the Image Forum Festival presented a programme called FAKE THE TIME, which was dedicated to collage films – コラージュ映画 in the original title – shot on video or 16mm by artists such as Johan Grimonprez, Jay Rosenblatt or Martin Arnold. Kitakōji Takashi, Korāju eiga ― sono kanōsei no tansaku Imēji Fōramu Fesutibaru 1998 “tokushū FAKE THE TIME” https://artscape.jp/museum/nmp/nmp_j/review/0701/movie0701.html (retrieved 23 February 2025)
[3] For instance, On Eye Rape (Iimura Takahiko, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, 1962), Gewaltopia Trailer (Jōnouchi Motoharu, 1968), and Jointed Film (Imai Norio, 1972). I am indebted to Julian Ross for his invaluable input on this matter.
[4] Ōta Yoneo is a Professor of Art, Archivist, Curator, and director of the Toy Film Museum in Kyoto: https://toyfilm-museum.jp/ (retrieved 23 February 2025)
[5] I saw the pilot, about thirty minutes long, during the online edition of the Kyoto Historica International Film Festival in 2022. The screener of what can be considered the final version (97′) was shared with me by Ōta and Joanne Bernardi, Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Rochester, who also provided the English translation of the film’s intertitles. The screener is a recording of a live screening presented at the Columbia’s Lenfest Center for the Arts, New York, on September 17, 2023. I am deeply indebted to both Professor Ōta and Professor Bernardi for their invaluable help and their kindness.
[6]Tokyo Trial is a film that stands in dialogue with the late careers of some of Kobayashi’s contemporaries, such as Kurosawa Akira and Kinoshita Keisuke, who also reflected on Japan’s past and its involvement in the Pacific War through their films released in the 1980s and 1990s. Significantly, in 1983 Kinoshita released Children of Nagasaki, a film that focused on the tragedy that befell the city and its inhabitants on 9 August 1945.
Asian Docs 
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