Writing in 1984 about the film Umitori-Robbing the Sea at the Shimokita Peninsula, the critic Hasumi Shigehiko called Tsuchimoto Noriaki the great filmmaker of the sea in Japan. Contrasting his films with those of another Japanese documentary filmmaker, Ogawa Shinsuke, whom he calls the "filmmaker of the land", Hasumi wrote that when Tsuchimoto turned his camera to the sea, he was able to bring the audience closer to understanding the realities he was filming.[1] The ocean – a source of life, subsistence, and culture, but also under constant threat, exploited for its resources and polluted – is one of the major themes in his work. In a live appearance on an NHK programme in the 1980s, Tsuchimoto said: "If the sea dies, the land dies too".
Questions of environmental injustice and the violence of capitalism, industrialisation and pollution against people and nature are central to Tsuchimoto's filmography. They are already present in his portraits of Tokyo in the 1960s, a city affected by air and noise pollution. They were developed in the seventeen films and videos he made from the late 1960s to the 2000s, painstakingly documenting the lives and struggles of generations affected by the industrial mercury pollution in the Minamata Bay and the Shiranui Sea. In the 1980s, Tsuchimoto became active in the global anti-nuclear movement, focusing on the threat of nuclear power in Japan and the sea pollution in the far north by military bases on the Shimokita Peninsula in Aomori Prefecture. (Umitori-Robbing the Sea at Shimokita Peninsula, 海盗り－ 下北半島・浜関根－, 1984). In 1995 he published the book Nevertheless, Okhotsk Sea of Destiny (され ど、海存亡のオホーツク), which was subsequently made into a two-part TV documentary (The Sea of Destiny - An 8mm record, 1997), documenting, among other things, his research into the assimilation of industrial and agricultural pollutants in seawater along the coast of the northern island of Hokkaido and the coast of Siberia.
The contamination of Minamata was one of the worst environmental tragedies of the 20th century. From 1932 to 1956, the Chisso industrial complex dumped methylmercury into the waters of the Shiranui Sea in southwest Japan, contaminating thousands of people who have had to fight for recognition of their illness and, throughout the years have received little compensation for this environmental injustice.[2] The question of Minamata and the history of ecological struggle in Japan has resurfaced in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.[3] As the scholar Yoneyama Shoko remarks, both tragedies have brought about a "breakdown of connectedness" at various levels, breaking up families through illness and death, depriving people of their essential means of subsistence, altering the relationship with nature, and destroying traditional and local ways of life.[4] Tsuchimoto's films, as well as the work of other artists who have documented Minamata, denounce this rupture, the marginalisation and invisibility of the Minamata patients in their struggle for compensation against the violence of industry and government while trying to find ways of restoring the lost links between people and nature, between past and present.
Tsuchimoto's work is part of a rich and complex ecology of activism and artistic production that emerged around the Minamata environmental tragedy, and it is better best understood when read with the history of national and transnational environmentalist struggles in Japan and around the world since the 1970s. Tsuchimoto's films were part of a more significant movement around Minamata, which combined civic engagement, science, activism, literature, photography and art.[5] In a media-saturated landscape, these works offered a counter-image of the events and people in Minamata. For years, he made films collaborating with activists and patients to keep their plight alive and participated in their protests for recognition of the disease and compensation. He produced a series of films showing how the dumping of mercury into the water by the chemical company Chisso had affected patients, their families and livelihoods (Minamata - The World and Its Victims, 水俣－患者さんとその世界, 1971), how they fought fiercely against bureaucracy and the collusion between industry and government (The Minamata Revolt—A Peoples’ Quest for Life, 水俣一揆－一生を問う人々, 1973), and how these communities continued to live after the certification of their illness, living from a contaminated sea that was also their source of life and income (The Shiranui Sea, 不知火海, 1975) while listening to the concerns of a new generation of patients.[6] Working closely with medical experts, he made scientific films to fight misinformation and the manipulation of data and to explain the effects of mercury on the human body and its impact on animals and marine life (see Minamata Disease—A Trilogy also from 1975, 医学としての 水俣病). Furthermore, he organised screenings all over Japan and took his films to Asia, Europe and North America to raise awareness and build solidarity networks. He often discussed films with the participation of patients and activists and organised photo exhibitions to keep the history of Minamata alive.
From early on and over the years, in his writings and, consequently, in his practice, he was concerned about the ethical issues mediating the relationship between filmmaking and the people and situations he filmed. He wrote: “Documentary film steals people, cuts out and shoots portraits, and collects their words… As long as I singlehandedly monopolise such physical weapons as lenses, film and tapes and possess them as power, my ‘subjects’ (hishatai) and I would never be equal.”[7] This concern with the role and position of the filmmaker, and with the representation and participation of those he films, is reflected in the different approaches he sought to take in his work.
In the period following The Shiranui Sea, Tsuchimoto diversified his practice, making very different types of films about Minamata. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, as Tsuchimoto looked back on the previous decades of struggle for the Minamata patients and his work, his films took a different form, focusing on the ethics and possibilities of representation of fact but also historical memory. This diversity of approaches corresponds to the idea of cinema as part of a broader social activist network as one of the different elements playing a role in the struggle. Films such as Minamata and the Canadians (1975) or The Message from Minamata to the World (1976), for example, were destined for audiences abroad in an attempt to establish global solidarity links. My Town, My Youth (わが街わが青春－石川さゆり水俣熱唱, 1978) is an inspiring film shot twenty years after the official recognition of the Minamata disease and focuses on a group of young people (many born with the disease) as they mobilise to keep their cause visible by organising a concert by the famous enka singer Ishikawa Sayuri.
From that moment on, his work reflected on how to film the slow recovery of Minamata's natural ecosystem, the revival of the sea, as he calls it while keeping relevant the needs and ongoing pleas of the different generations of patients and how they must endure and live with the disease. The symbiotic relationship between 'all living things' and their environment, as well as his desire to preserve an image of Minamata, is further explored in films such as The Sea and the Moon (also known as The Fishing Moon, 海とお月さまたら, 1980), a work made for children that examines with a delicate eye the relationship between the phases of the moon and the fishermen who read the tides, documenting the beauty of the sea creatures and traditional fishing in the Shiranui Sea. Tsuchimoto said this was one of his most famous films with the Minamata fishermen because "it shows the Minamata Sea before the outbreak of the disease."
This juxtaposition of different temporalities, before and after the contamination, and how to represent them in the context of the beauty and the suffering caused by the sea is also the central theme of The Minamata Mural (水俣の図・物語, 1981). Possibly more than any other of Tsuchimoto's works, this film explores this desire to understand how different forms of artistic expression can represent the tragedy of Minamata in its past and present implications. He began work on the film in 1980, focusing on a mural about Minamata disease by renowned social artists Maruki Iri and Akamatsu Toshiko. Maruki and Akamatsu were a couple of engaged artists, famous for their series of 15 panels, painted from 1950 until 1982, depicting the suffering caused by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also by their work depicting other tragedies, such as the killings in Nanking or Auschwitz. This attempt to paint Minamata presented a different challenge to the painters, who found themselves conflicted about depicting the 'bright side' of Minamata. The beauty of the landscape concealed years of suffering, leading to the question: "How can you represent Minamata disease through the landscape alone?" This is at the heart of the film, as the artists (and Tsuchimoto) try to find an answer to their approach to the spiritual question of Minamata. We see the painters in their studio, drawing and painting the panels and discussing their work, filmed with extraordinary precision and inventiveness, focusing on their characteristic blend of traditional and modern painting techniques. We also see how the Maruki return to Minamata, revisit the locations, meet the writer and activist Ishimure Michiko, whose poetry is a running thread throughout the film, and meet some young residents, like Sakamoto Shinobu or Kagata Kiyoku, who express their feelings and have their portraits painted.
The Minamata Mural raises this question of representation on several levels. It is a truly collaborative work, depicting the people and landscape of Minamata through the words of the patients, the work of the painters Akamatsu Toshiko and Iri Maruki, the writing of Ishimure Michiko, a string and shakuhachi score by Takemitsu Toru, and the creative cinematography of Segawa Jun'ichi, who had a significant influence on Tsuchimoto since his early days as a filmmaker. Tsuchimoto's practice at this time further embodied the ideas of Ishimure Michiko, a Minamata disease patient who greatly influenced his work. Ishimure's ecocritical writings emphasised the relationship between all living beings and the environment and the importance of blending the past and the present, preserving tradition and culture to counter the aggression of modernity. She wrote about the extreme fragility of nature with a symbolic understanding of reality in which the world is folded into different layers of time, in which a world before the environmental destruction of Minamata coexists with the present. Her landmark book Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, published in serial form from 1970 to 1973, inaugurated a new form of ecological writing, factual and literary, integrating patients' oral histories, reportage and government records, folklore and myth.
In one of the film's most powerful sequences, Ishimure looks at the seascape of the Shiranui Sea as she recalls her memories and says: "Although the Shiranui Sea area has been through so much, the view is unaffected by the mercury.” The question of visibility and description animates the film as it moves from the surface (the screen, the canvas, the landscape) to the inner expression of the lives of the people of Minamata that the Maruki encounter on their journey. The film seeks to express what Ishimure calls in her book "the vibrant soul of all things around us," exploring the combination of the expressive elements of cinema, music and painting to reveal what is visible and invisible in the image in a work of great empathy.
Tsuchimoto went on to make other works about the work of the Maruki, including slide shows.[8] The question of memory and the representation of history and trauma would continue to appear in his work. In 1984, after The Minamata Mural, he made the film The Jewelweed is Ripe (はじけ鳳仙花-わが筑豊わが 朝鮮-), which features a series of lithographs and collages by Tomiyama Taeko, the poems of Yun Dong-ju, that inspired them, and a conversation between the artist and the filmmaker on the issue of Korean people conscripted into forced labor in Japan’s wartime mines. . Like the art of the Maruki, Tomiyama's activist work also reflected on social responsibility and the need to acknowledge and expose
the silenced crimes of the past in her paintings by evoking the ghosts of the dead, echoing the words of Ishimure Michiko.
As a native of Minamata, I know that the language of the victims of Minamata Disease—both that of the spirits of the dead who are unable to die, and that of the survivors who are little more than líving ghosts—represents the pristine form of poetry before our societies were divided into classes. In order to preserve for posterity this language in which the historical significance of the Mercury Poisoning Incident is crudely branded, I must drink my infusion of my animism and “pre-animism” and become a sorceress cursing modern times forever. Ishimure Michiko[9]
Ricardo Matos Cabo
[1] Hasumi, Shigehiko, in Brutus, Tokyo, 15 June 1984, translated into German in the catalogue of the 15. Internationales forum des jungen films, Berlin, 1985 (35. Internationale filmfestspiele Berlin)
[2] The longevity of the Minamata patients' legal battles and struggles for justice, which continue to this day, is documented, for example, in Hara Kazuo's film Minamata Mandala (水俣曼荼羅, 2020). The film was shot over fifteen years.
[3] See, for example, the works by Kohso, Sabu, and Kōso, Iwasaburō. Radiation and Revolution. United States, Duke University Press, 2020 or Matsumoto, Mari, et al. Fukushima et ses invisibles: cahiers d'enquêtes politiques. France, Les éditions des Mondes à faire, 2018.
[4] Yoneyama, Shoko. Animism in Contemporary Japan: Voices for the Anthropocene from Post-Fukushima Japan. 1 edition. London; New York: Routledge, 2018.
[5] For example, photographers such as Kuwabara Shisei, the All-Japan Students Photographer's League, and the North American photographers W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M. Smith developed an essential body of work documenting Minamata.
[6] The film is open-ended, and its pace is slower and more reflective than the previous films of the trilogy. Tsuchimoto was trying to convey a spiritual problem with which the people live. Filmmaker Satō Makoto said about the film: “The Shiranui Sea is a film about the winter period that followed the Minamata Disease trial, or rather, about the various agonies of adolescence of embryonic patients, the suffering in their lives after receiving the government's compensation. It is about the pain from the disease but also originating in our great dark problems, which are not solved even if we receive the money.”
[7] Tsuchimoto, quoted in Miyo Inoue in the essay The Ethics of Representation in Light of Minamata Disease Tsuchimoto Noriaki and His Minamata Documentaries, in Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode. Switzerland, MDPI AG, 2021
[8] There are several other films about the work of Akamatsu and Maruki, including an excellent documentary shot in 1952 by Aoyama Michiharu and Imai Tadashi, showing the painting of the first Hiroshima panels and the reception to their work. Tsuchimoto continued to make other works related to their work, including the slide shows They Who Saw Hiroshima and Hiroshima—Testimony Through Paintings, made for the Maruki Gallery in 1985, or the video work, Hiroshima no Pika, from 1987, based on a book for children painted by the Maruki. In 1986, a filmmaker close to Tsuchimoto, John Junkerman, also directed a film about the collaborative work of the same artists, Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima (1986).
[9] Ishimure, Michiko. Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease. Translated by Livia Monnet. Centre for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003, pages 60-61
