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Ogawa Shinsuke and Tsuchimoto Noriaki
It is no coincidence that Japan's two greatest documentarians, Tsuchimoto Noriaki (1928-2008) and Ogawa Shinsuke (19351992), have long been paired together. There is, most obviously, their shared biography. In the early '60s, Ogawa and Tsuchimoto cut their teeth producing films at Iwanami Productions, a company specializing in scientific and educational documentaries. Tsuchimoto was one of the first of their directors to go independent in 1965; shortly afterward, Ogawa followed suit and started his own production company, widely known in Japan as Ogawa Pro. In 1969, Tsuchimoto directed Prehistory of the Partisans, a film for Ogawa about student-led opposition to Anpo, the US-Japan Security Treaty, the vestiges of which are still in effect today.
What is most striking about the two men's filmographies when placed side by side-and doubtless the reason they are so often discussed in the same breath-is the material link between the subjects these men repeatedly returned to, and the devotion and engagement that they brought to producing them. In Ogawa's case, his subject was the land-most famously, the decade-long protests catalyzed by the Japanese government's attempted expropriation of peasant land in Sanrizuka, enacted without consultation, in order to construct what would become the Narita International Airport. For Tsuchimoto, it was the sea-or, to be more specific, the poisoning of Minamata Bay and the Shiranui Sea by the fertilizer and chemical corporation Chisso. For three decades, the company dumped methylmercury waste into the surrounding rivers and into the bay; this toxin accumulated in the sea life consumed by citizens of nearby towns and villages. They became the first victims of a devastating neurological syndrome later named Minamata disease, which debilitated at least 2,265 people and ultimately killed 80 percent of them.
Both Ogawa and Tsuchimoto were consumed by these projects for considerable swathes of their working lives. Ogawa produced eight films about the struggle at Sanrizuka, spanning a period of nine years, from the peasant-student coalition's birth to its eventual disintegration and demise at the hands of government forces a decade later. Tsuchimoto produced a dozen Minamata films, of which today only two, Minamata: The Victims and their World (1972) and The Shiranui Sea (1975), are widely available. In these two films alone, Tsuchimoto registers the extent...