Kazuo Hara’s Dedicated Lives

Finding himself increasingly frustrated by the youthful filmmakers around him, he began turning away from charismatic individuals to collectives. The year after they finished A Dedicated Life, Hara and Kobayashi gathered some of these young aspirant filmmakers and created Cinema Juku (literally “Cinema Cram School”), a workshop at the Hagi International Festival of Art, in a rural city at the far western tip of Honshu Island. Hara invited some of the most famous filmmakers of the day to talk to his students, including Imamura and Tsuchimoto. In 1999, Hara and his students codirected a film about a nearby island entitled My Mishima (1999). Both the islanders and the students desired to leave rural homes for big-city life, so the film is as autobiographical as it is ethnographic. We may consider this film the result of one group photographing another group, a segue to Hara 2.

Hara dedicated one of Cinema Juku’s early sessions to Ogawa Productions. Ogawa himself had died tragically young in 1992, and his passing seemed to mark the end of an era of social-movement documentary and the prestigious collective mode of production for which his films were paradigmatic. It was not yet evident, but at precisely this time Hara was actually continuing what the previous titans had started. Hara himself signaled this in Cinema Juku’s November 15, 1996, “textbook” for its Ogawa Pro session, acknowledging that the collective “provoked my energies in an ‘anti’ matter.” By then he had come to recognize that when you react strongly against something, you take on a supplemental relationship to what you are not. It’s inside you one way or another. As Hara absorbed these lessons, his own filmmaking practice reached its turning point, seeking out new subjects in groups under duress. His productive method came to involve more staff, including young people brought in from Cinema Juku or his university teaching.

Over the next two decades, he dove into complex topics that required years of overlapping productions. In 2001, Hara and Kobayashi started shooting a film on the continuing legal battles over Minamata disease as the victims were dying one by one. He shot for fifteen years and edited for another five, and the formidable result was the six-hour Minamata Mandala, finally finished in 2021. Tsuchimoto made the final installment of his Minamata series in 1999, and Hara has said that, in a way, he inherited what Tsuchimoto started.

Hara also shares Ogawa’s interest in collectives of regular citizens engaged in righteous fights against industry and government cruelty. Shortly before finishing his Minamata film, he swiftly shot, edited, and released the four-hour Reiwa Uprising during the 2019 election. This film also focuses on a group, the candidates for the newly formed political party Reiwa Shinsengumi. This progressive party came out of nowhere to challenge everything about Japan’s ossified political system, starting with its soul-crushingly boring elections. Reiwa Shinsengumi presented a menagerie of the spectacular characters we associate with Hara 1: a television comedian turned politician, a working-class single mother with a gift for oratory, a man with ALS incapable of movement, a wheelchair-bound woman with CP, and a transgender Tokyo University professor who campaigns with a horse. Hara follows the campaign to the end, when the two disabled candidates enter the Diet (Japan’s legislature)—which literally has to be reconstructed to accommodate their wheelchairs.

The film that epitomizes Hara 2 is Sennan Asbestos Disaster, which also follows the legal battles of a group of citizens, here poisoned by asbestos factories in their Osaka neighborhood. Released in 2017, it was the fruit of nine years of labor and weighed in at three and a half hours. The one example of Hara’s later work included in the Criterion Channel series, the film gives a sense of the scale and tone of the films of Hara 2. Sennan was home to a collection of factories that wove asbestos into cotton fabric starting in the Meiji Era. The film begins with a history of the factories, the government’s knowledge of asbestos’s peril since the prewar era, and the wave of illnesses that finally provoked a lawsuit.

After this swift historical overview, however, the focus of this lengthy film is on the victims. Hara introduces them one by one as the lawsuit works its way through the courts at a most painful pace, and as some of them pass away. These are the weak and downtrodden people whom Kirio Urayama encouraged Hara to support. One can feel their bonds strengthen over the span of the film. From time to time, Hara 1 occasionally appears, frustrated at the victims’ timidity and goading them on to act before the camera and in the face of the government’s cruel indifference to their suffering. The Japanese title of the film is literally “The Nation of Japan vs. the Sennan Asbestos Villages.”

All three of these later films take the time needed to attend to the various members of the groups before the cameras. At the same time, charismatic individuals come to the fore in each film. In his intimate epics of this century, Hara 1 and Hara 2 are finally bound together in a braided structure. And in this sense, Hara embodies the complex entirety of Japan’s long documentary tradition.