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ABSTRACT
This essay explores the work of the legendary Japanese documentary film collective Nihon Documentarist Union (NDU) through their writings and their provocative film Asia is One (1973). It interprets NDU’s uncompromising approach to the aesthetics and politics of documentary film as a variation of archipelagic thought – emphasizing flows, interactions, and hybridity over fixed personal and national boundaries. Asia is One maps the radically heterogeneous space of Okinawa just around the time of its ‘reversion’ to Japan. By engaging with former labourers from the horrific wartime coal mines – many of which were born in other parts of East Asia – as well as migrant workers, fishermen, Taiwanese smugglers and Atayal villagers in Taiwan NDU redefines the region as deeply, sometimes disturbingly, but also promisingly networked. Shooting films on Korean victims of the atomic bombs in Busan, or in later incarnations travelling to Micronesia or Palestine, NDU searched for a new kind of cosmopolitanism through an emphasis on ‘fluidity’ and ‘place’. Highly influential in their time, NDU was nearly erased from Japanese documentary history. This essay aims to build on recent attempts in Japan to re-introduce their work and to understand their redefinition of documentary film and of the geopolitical imagination.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Alexander Zahlten is an associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His work focuses on popular film and media in Japan and East Asia from the 1960s to today. Recent publications include his co-edited volume Media Theory in Japan (Duke University Press, 2017, with Marc Steinberg) and his monograph The End of Japanese Cinema (Duke University Press, 2017).
Notes
1 NDU self-published two issues of the magazine Hanhakusho (‘Anti-White Paper’) in 1973 after splitting with their previous preferred publishing outlet, the magazine Eiga Hihyō.
2 The film was screened as part of the ‘Islands – Across and In-Between’ special at the AAS in Asia (Association for Asian Studies in Asia) Conference at Doshisha University.
3 This explanation of the title follows NDU member Inoue Osamu, explained in a Q&A after the screening of Asia is One at the AAS in Asia Conference at Doshisha University, 2016. However, NDU member Nunokawa Tetsurō, in a 1972 discussion printed in the magazine Chūgoku (China) claims that the group wasn’t aware of Okakura’s usage when they chose the title; he confesses embarrassment regarding the group’s ignorance, but also sees this lack of historical knowledge as usefully exposing something about his generation. See Doi et al. Citation1972, 6).
4 Much of what has recently been published on NDU/ Nunokawa is due to the efforts of Yasui Yoshio of the Planet Film Archives in Kobe. See for example the self-published Yasui and Tanaka Citation2012.
5 For more on Nunokawa’s career, see Yasui Citation2012.
6 See for example an essay composed from a symposium including members of NDU, Underground Center, and Pōrie Kikaku, in NDU Citation1971.
7 This sentence is quoted, as part of a longer section, by an article critical of NDU in the Meiji Daigaku Shinbun (Meiji University Newspaper); NDU in turn quotes the critique, and replies in NDU, Pōrie Kikaku, Underground Center Citation1971, 79.
8 Nunokawa had co-produced the film Document: The Student Movement at Waseda University in 1967, released in 1968, which became the touchstone for the founding of NDU.
9 See Yasui Citation2012, 37.
10 Writers such as Suga Hidemi or Tsumura Takashi trace this back to the so-called ‘7.7. Incident’ of 1970, in which an activist group of Chinese exchange students accused the Japanese New Left of not considering minority viewpoints / subjectivities. According to Suga and Tsumura’s histories this ushered in a major shift in the New Left’s self-understanding. See Suga Citation2006.
11 Ota was a central activist for Ainu rights, and later one of the early proponents of animal rights and ecological thought. He also eventually became notorious for his anti-Semitic writings.
12 My translation from:
Minzoku to wa jinshū gainen de wa nai. Minzoku to wa, “seikatsuken” de ari, “ryūdō” suru, “kakutoku” suru “kūkan” de aru. Katsute no nihon teikokushugi no seiei ga, subete no hiyokuatsu jinmin, minzoku no jōshō shikō kara seiritsu shitayō ni, jinshū gainen toshite no “minzoku” wa teikoku shugi no senpei de aru. Genzai no nichijō wa, futatabi no “Ajia” gainen no teishutsu ni yori, haigai ideorogii o kakutoku shiyō to shite iru. Bokura wa “kokkashugi”, “haigaishugi” no hihan dake de wa naku, genjitsuteki ni kokkyō o “ekkyō” suru koto o tsūjite, “sekaisei” o dōnyū, kakutoku shinakereba naranai.
13 Mori was the previous chief editor of Shisō no Kagaku (Science of Thought), a central intellectual journal of the 1950s and 1960s.
14 My translation from: ‘Taisho ni tai suru usui kankei to wa, Okinawa wa akumademo Okinawa-jin no mono de atte Yamato-jin wa kakawari o motanai, to iu kankei de aru.’
15 For NDU‘s call to dissolve the borders between production and exhibition, and between ‘amateurs’ and ‘professionals’, see Domenig Citation2012.
16 Interesting for this parallel as well is how Mori tends to gravitate around what NDU would criticize as a racialized conception of minzoku. His 1963 book on Okinawa sets the stage for this by employing blackness – and painful racial stereotypes – in its opening chapter ‘Harlem in Okinawa’ (Mori Citation1963).
17 There are other ironies in the contentious relationship to Ogawa Productions as well, one being that Ogawa as well at one point embarked on a documentary on a coal mine but eventually disbanded the project.
18 At times Nunokawa’s film activities in the 1970s and 1980s have been counted as extensions of NDU’s activities, however Nunokawa himself also regarded them as separate. For a description of that history from the perspective of another member, see for example Inoue Citation2013.
19 For a more extensive if still compact outline of Nunokawa’s career see Yasui Citation2012.
20 My translation from the German original:
Die Ausbreitung des Menschen in eine physiognomisch einheitliche, planetare Landschaft und die Verwandlung der heutigen Weltozeane in seelisch beherrschbare “Binnenmeere” wird, für den gegenwärtigen Menschen schwer vorstellbar, grundlegende Strukturveränderungen in der Seele des Einzelnen sowohl wie im Gesamtbewußtsein der Rasse mit sich bringen.
21 Kadobayashi Takeshi, conference presentation ‘Galápagos Media: Japanese Media Ecology in the Age of Global Capitalism’, East Asian Media Studies Conference, 6 & 7 May 2017.