Land and Sea
“If power oppresses farmers, and if policemen beat farmers, then our camera will be on the frontline to receive that beating, so that the ‘message’ of power can be directly conveyed to the audience through the screen.”
—Ogawa Shinsuke on Narita: Summer in Sanrizuka (1968)
“We filmed every day and after nearly 140 days of shooting our memory of each single day is vivid and precise. What we filmed was not a daily journal, but the climax of problems that accumulated while waiting for a solution.”
—Tsuchimoto Noriaki on Minamata: The Victims and Their World (1972)
It is no coincidence that Japan’s two greatest documentarians, Tsuchimoto Noriaki (1928-2008) and Ogawa Shinsuke (1935-1992), 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
