A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors. Alexander Jacoby

in its concerns, tracing the roots of an adolescent boy’s impotence to the trauma of childhood sexual abuse. Adolescent psychology was likewise the subject of Morning Schedule (Gozenchū no jikanwari, 1972), an incoherent experimental film whose failure marked the end of Hani’s regular feature film production.

      Hani is a rare case of a Japanese director who has worked successfully abroad: Bride of the Andes (Andesu no hanayome, 1966) was shot in Peru, Mio (Yōsei no uta, 1971) in Sardinia, and The Song of Bwana Toshi (Buwana Toshi no uta, 1965) and Africa Story (Afurika monogatari, 1980) in Kenya. Of these, Bwana Toshi and Bride of the Andes were intriguing studies of culture clash: in the former, the Japanese hero, posted to Africa, learns gradually to cooperate with the locals in building a house, while the latter was about a mail-order bride who goes to marry an archaeologist stationed in a tribal village. Both films explored the way in which the experience of being an expatriate impels people to self-definition and also implicitly criticized Japan’s insular mentality.

      Although Inferno of First Love expressed its hero’s psychological traumas through visual pyrotechnics typical of the New Wave, Hani’s style was generally more restrained than those of such contemporaries as Nagisa Ōshima, Shōhei Imamura, and Masahiro Shinoda. His gently probing, often handheld camera observed his characters with sympathetic detachment: Bad Boys neither condemned, nor approved of, the actions of its juvenile delinquents, while The Song of Bwana Toshi extended the same placid curiosity to the Japanese hero, his African colleagues, and the animals of the savannah. Often, Hani’s actors improvised scenes, a method taken to its extreme in Morning Schedule, where the actors themselves collaborated on shooting 8mm footage which was incorporated into the final film. With his semi-documentary approach, it was not surprising that Hani eventually came to specialize in wildlife documentaries for television. The curtailment of his career in feature filmmaking is to be regretted, for his sixties films rank among the most humanly engaging products of the Japanese New Wave.

      1952 Seikatsu to mizu / Life and Water (short)

      1953 Yuki matsuri / Snow Festival (short)

      Machi to gesui / The Town and Its Drains (short)

      1955 Kyōshitsu no kodomotachi / Children in Class (short)

      1956 E o kaku kodomotachi / Children Who Draw (short)

      Sōseiji gakkyū / Twin School (short)

      1957 Dōbutsuen nikki / Zoo Diary (short)

      1958 Umi wa ikiteiru / The Sea Is Alive (short)

      Hōryū-ji / Horyu-ji (short)

      1960 Furyō shōnen / Bad Boys

      1962 Mitasareta seikatsu / A Full Life

      1963 Kanojo to kare / She and He

      1964 Te o tsunagu kora / Children Hand in Hand

      1965 Bwana Toshi no uta / The Song of Bwana Toshi

      1966 Andesu no hanayome / Bride of the Andes

      1968 Hatsukoi: Jigoku hen / Inferno of First Love / Nanami: First Love

      1969 Aido / Aido: Slave of Love

      1970 Koi no daibōken / Love’s Great Adventure

      1971 Yōsei no uta / Mio (lit. The Fairy’s Song)

      1972 Gozenchū no jikanwari / Morning Schedule

      1980 Afurika monogatari / Africa Story

      1982 Yogen / Prophecy

      1983 Rekishi = Kakukyōran no jidai / History: Age of Nuclear Madness

      HARA Kazuo

      (b. June 8, 1945)

      原一男

      Hara’s small body of work—six features in thirty-five years—has earned him a reputation as one of the most creative and challenging Japanese documentarists. From the beginning, he tackled controversial subject matter. His remarkable debut, Goodbye CP (Sayōnara CP, 1972), focused on sufferers of cerebral palsy at a time when people with disabilities were virtually ostracized from Japanese society. Moreover, Hara probed aspects of the lives of the disabled, such as their sexuality, which even today are not often publicly acknowledged. His credo, stated in interview, is that “a documentary should explore things that people don’t want explored, bring things out of the closet, to examine why people want to hide certain things [….] These personal taboos and limitations reflect societal taboos and limitations. I want to get at just the things they don’t want to talk about, their privacy.” His second film, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (Kyokushiteki Erosu: Renka 1974, 1974), was a frank examination of Hara’s own personal life: depicting his relationships with two women, it explored alternatives to traditional family structures and, obliquely, examined U.S.-Japan relations through its setting on Okinawa, the site of a considerable American military presence.

      The goal of investigating taboos acquired more explicitly political dimensions in Hara’s most famous film, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (Yuki yukite shingun, 1987), an account of the one-man crusade by war veteran Kenzō Okuzaki to expose the responsibility of the Emperor and the Japanese people for wartime atrocities. Here, Hara probed a national taboo, and showed how history is shaped or concealed by personal testimony with personal motivations. A Dedicated Life (Zenshin shōsetsu­ka, 1994) combined a study of a man facing death with another investigation of the fallibility of individual testimony: its subject was the cancer-stricken writer Mitsuharu Inoue, who had not only created fictions, but also fictionalized his personal history.

      Despite the individuality of Hara’s style, his approach is necessarily collaborative: he has consistently allowed his subjects considerable input into the content of his documentaries, and the power of his work depends on the responses of people to the act of being filmed. He has stated that “when one is in front of the camera, one cannot help being conscious of the camera”; indeed, the sophistication of his films lies in their awareness that a situation is changed by the act of recording it. Consequently, his work seems to call into question the morality of the documentary form: the viewer watches the birth of a child in Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 wanting the filmmaker to assist, or an assault by Okuzaki on an elderly man unwilling to admit his guilt in The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On feeling that he should intervene.

      Given Hara’s collaborative method, it was appropriate that he should make My Mishima (Watashi no Mishima, 1999), a study of the daily life and customs in a remote island off Western Japan, in cooperation with the members of Cinema Juku, a discussion group for young aspiring filmmakers. Hara’s most recent film, Days of Chika (Mata no hi no Chika, 2005), examined four stages in the life of a woman as seen through the eyes of four men. Though, as his first fiction feature, it marked a new departure in his work, it nevertheless sustained his abiding concern with the inescapable interrelation of the personal and the political.

      1972 Sayōnara CP / Goodbye CP

      1974 Kyokushiteki Erosu: Renka 1974 / Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

      1987 Yuki yukite shingun / The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On

      1994 Zenshin shōsetsuka / A Dedicated Life

      1999 Watashi no Mishima / My Mishima (co-director)

      2005 Mata no hi no Chika / Days of Chika / The Many Faces of Chika

      HARADA Masato

      (b. July 3, 1949)

      原田真人

      If Ozu has sometimes been called “the most Japanese of Japanese directors,” then Harada, by common consent, is the most American. During the seventies, he reported from Hollywood for Japanese publications and while there met veteran director Howard Hawks, whose work significantly influenced his own. Harada has set several of his own films in America and elsewhere outside Japan; some have been co-productions, including the German-Japanese Windy (Uindī, 1984), about a racing driver. The U.S.-Japanese co-production Painted Desert (1993) was