Five Radical Documentaries by Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi: Restlessness Refusing Resolution

At the request of the author, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first.

“I make bitter films. I hate mainstream society.”
Hara Kazuo

This collection represents the finest work to come from the partnership between director Hara Kazuo and producer Kobayashi Sachiko. Together, they have created a diverse body of films that marks a turning point in post–World War II Japanese documentary. Indeed, their work helped drive this transformation, while also influencing documentarians around the world. The five films gathered here span the breadth of what I think of as two Hara Kazuos: Hara 1 and Hara 2. They have an interdependent relationship—one is unthinkable without the other. Each is always secreted inside the other. Hara 1 centers on spectacular, edgy personalities, and Hara 2 is embedded in collectives under duress.

Interestingly, these two phases can be seen as corresponding to two fiction filmmakers in Hara’s life; he served as an assistant director for both, and they deeply impacted his thinking about the world and cinema. In a 2017 interview, Hara told Joel Neville Anderson about these two mentors, Imamura Shohei and Urayama Kirio. Both encouraged him to concentrate on people and to elevate their humanity, but in seemingly incompatible ways. Imamura told him that people are “cowardly, they’re lecherous, they’re cheap, they’re immoral—and that’s what makes them interesting.” By contrast, Urayama told Hara to focus on the proletariat in order “to make the lives of the downtrodden and the weak better, and bring happiness to them.” This conflicting advice is at the heart of the two Haras.

The director’s reputation, particularly outside of Japan, is almost entirely built around his first handful of films—what I am calling Hara 1: Goodbye CP (1972), Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974), The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987), and A Dedicated Life (1994). These are works that are profoundly inflected by Imamura’s earthy anthropology or, as the fiction filmmaker famously put it, “the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure.” Each of the above films pivots around a charismatic individual’s body. And to one degree or another, each involves a struggle over directorial control.

In contrast to this, there is the more challenging Hara 2, who emerges in his works of the new century. Here he embeds himself—and the viewer—in groups of regular folks engaged in struggles and in need of advocacy: the weak and downtrodden people that Urayama encouraged Hara to support. This mode is epitomized by Sennan Asbestos Disaster (2016).

This arc is fascinating in relation to the larger backdrop of Japanese cinema. Postwar documentary was dominated by filmmakers allied to massive social movements, such as those protesting American military bases, nuclear weapons, industrial pollution, and the Vietnam War. This trend is best represented by Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s Minamata series (on mercury poisoning caused by chemical-factory wastewater) and Ogawa Productions’ Sanrizuka series (on the epochal protests against the construction of Narita Airport). Around the turn of the century, this kind of collective, politicized 16 mm filmmaking was eclipsed by essayistic, personal films that were often made by single directors with consumer camcorders and without crews. Amid these historical developments, Hara always chose to push against the prevailing currents.

Hara had initially aspired to a career in still photography, and to that end entered the Tokyo College of Photography. He decided to leave that path for motion pictures because “photography only allowed me to get to know people on a superficial level.” This was his starting point, in the wake of the failed 1970 protests against the security treaty that kept Japan under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and amid the newly extreme militancy of the Japanese Red Army. However, he rejected radical collectivity to embark on profoundly personal films as a lone, maverick, independent director. Decades later, as those political collectives gave way to young filmmakers making private documentaries, Hara, always the contrarian, turned to collectivities, traversing the historical arc backward.

He navigated this path with his life partner, Kobayashi Sachiko. When they met, he took the role of director and she producer, and their practice formed around a deep collaboration that has spanned more than half a century. The Hara I’ve known over the decades is a funny and charming figure. Possessing an almost aggressive curiosity, he is both an incessant talker and a listener who leans into every conversation with total concentration. He’s also a mess. “I’m a ball of complexes,” he told critic Nicolás Carrasco, and indeed he is. By contrast, Kobayashi is self-deprecating and strikes one as anxious and flighty at first glance. In fact, I’ve found she has nerves of steel, and her steady brilliance is what has ultimately made Hara’s films possible. It is a partnership of strange and wonderful complementarity.

Getting Personal

Hara Kazuo and Kobayashi Sachiko’s first work depicted people living with cerebral palsy (CP). From a certain perspective, this places it among the movement documentaries of disability activism, such as the powerful films of Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Yanagisawa Hisao, which elevate their subjects in an aura of purity and innocence. However, Goodbye CP was something entirely new: an unsentimental portrait of the daily life of a poet with the disease, Yokota Hiroshi, his body and voice cruelly distorted as if trapped in eternal agony. He argues with his wife, gets drunk with his disabled friends. In a society going to great lengths to hide the disabled, he crawls across city streets buck naked. The film offers a frank visual and aural representation of the damage the disease wreaks on the human body. Scholar Phil Kaffen has pointed out that this film forces spectators to think about their own bodies in relation to the bodies on-screen. He argues that Hara is not “building easy bridges or . . . erecting insurmountable barriers. Instead, the various excesses of the film push viewers into an uncomfortable in-between space, a deep chasm without rope or ladder in which we must wade through the muck of their own sensibilities, knowledge, perception of their own bodies, and understanding of film and documentary.” Faced with not only the struggles of the physical handicap but also the indignity of being disregarded by the “normal” people surrounding them, Yokota and his friends are shown in a new, taboo-breaking light.

Two years later, Hara again sent a shock wave through the Japanese film community with Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974. The documentary chronicles something of a love triangle between Hara, Kobayashi, and Hara’s ex-wife, Takeda Miyuki. It’s an unlikely situation. Kobayashi was, at the time, both the director’s lover and producer. As for Takeda, she proves to be a force of nature—a feminist activist interested in both men and women, and not only Hara’s former lover but also the mother of his child. The film centers on the spectacular life and personality of Takeda, but it is really about her tangled, three-way relationship with Hara and Kobayashi.

Extreme Private Eros’s most powerful setting is the environment where Takeda is living, near a military base on the island of Okinawa, so the film skirts the edges of the anti-American base movement as well as contemporary feminism. However, the focus is singular, or perhaps I should say triangular. The film is, as the title announces, extremely personal. Takeda allows the other two to enter the deepest, most private spaces of her life, but she is no mere object of scrutiny. Hara appears entranced by Takeda’s mercurial and unpredictable behavior as she throws herself into life, berates this filmmaker from her past, and cajoles Kobayashi into her world. The relationship between the three comes to a head during the most intimate of moments, the home birth. Hara had long promised to shoot Takeda’s home birth and fulfills his promise halfway through the film. The delivery is without complications, but Hara’s nervousness is registered in the camera’s lack of focus. Takeda then encourages Kobayashi, who is also pregnant, to follow her lead and give birth on the kitchen floor. Shot long before the age of home video, this extraordinary scene is the culmination of their complex, intersubjective relationship—with Hara’s camera work, Takeda’s instructions, and Kobayashi’s cries. It is with this film that the individualized stance of Hara 1 comes into sharp focus: a director turning his camera on a charismatic individual while revealing his own messy individuality, all orchestrated by an equally strong, if quiet, woman in the background.

Truth and Violence

In Hara Kazuo’s third feature, the award-winning The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, he and Kobayashi Sachiko take a back seat while his subject essentially commandeers the film. This remains the best documentary about the Second World War in the Pacific, and the best exploration of documentary’s relationship to violence and ethics. Five years in the making, the film traces a quest for truth by Okuzaki Kenzo, a survivor of the battlefields of New Guinea who is now on a crusade to abolish Japan’s emperor system. The veteran had initially approached Imamura Shohei, who was unnerved by Okuzaki’s behavior and passed the project on to Hara and Kobayashi. Okuzaki had a vendetta against Emperor Hirohito and any vets who harbored no regrets about fighting for the imperial cause. He proudly admitted that he had shot pachinko balls at the royal family, distributed pornographic images of the emperor, and once killed a man who tried to swindle him. When Hara and Kobayashi embarked on the film, they doubtless knew that they were in for some drama.

Although generally understood as an antiwar film, The Emperor’s Naked Army is profitably seen as a struggle over the souls of the war dead. The film centers on Okuzaki’s determination to reveal the truth behind an incident involving his old unit: twenty-three days after the war ended, two low-ranking Japanese soldiers were executed for “desertion” under very mysterious circumstances while Okuzaki was away in a prison camp. Visiting the surviving members of his unit one by one, the vet slowly uncovers what happened. Along the way, his interview tactics escalate from verbal abuse to physical violence. Okuzaki is motivated by a desire to soothe the souls of the two victims, and while he is encouraged by their surviving family members, his search is stymied by fellow veterans who tell him to stop for the sake of the two men’s spirits. The Emperor’s Naked Army is thus a pragmatic antiwar film that takes on a surprising metaphysical dimension.

This film in particular casts new light on Hara’s previous work by demonstrating how all the profound issues in documentary cinema pivot around the human body. Actual human bodies racked by disease, giving birth, fighting each other, undergoing surgery—different sets of ethical quandaries spin around these bodies and their representations on film. Hara has thought deeply about this:

I like action films, so I often use the phrase action documentary. What I mean is this: Let’s say I begin by initiating things . . . Those who are provoked take in my words and filter them through their bodies, then take action. I believe that to take action with your body means to see things that you would otherwise not be able to see—and to see things is better than not to see things. The flip side is I also want to be provoked. All the time . . . I need to be stirred up . . . I want to take action with my body, because a body that takes action is a wonderful thing . . . Therefore, our films are not action movies: they are action itself.

A Dedicated Life is thus not only the final but one of the key films of Hara 1, a group of works that are ultimately defined by this concentration on individual bodies moving through the world. These films are portraits of individual passion set against grand sociopolitical backdrops. The lives of these exceptionally captivating figures are shambolic and vulgar, and, like Hara, we cannot help but find them frightening, frustrating, and seductive all at once.

A Commitment to Confrontation

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, young filmmakers like Kawase Naomi hit the scene, following Hara Kazuo’s example of the extremely personal documentary by working in a form often called the “self-documentary” or “private film.” These filmmakers shared Hara’s lack of interest in radical political movements, but they did not have the older director’s curiosity about the messiness of the world and its people. Their films were divorced from, or ignorant of, politics. While Hara was seen by many as this movement’s progenitor, it’s a terribly thin comparison, as the young filmmakers tended to focus on the personal because it was a safe space. In contrast, Hara’s “personal” was always raked by the social, the political, and the historical. And Hara was deeply attracted to risk.

Finding himself increasingly frustrated by these young filmmakers, he and Kobayashi Sachiko began turning away from charismatic individuals to collectives. They started to follow and simultaneously shoot three groups of regular citizens engaged in righteous fights against industry and government cruelty. Their Reiwa Uprising (2019) is about a newly formed political party with a menagerie of spectacular characters, while their epic Minamata Mandala (2020) tracks the ongoing legal battles over Minamata disease.

However, the film that best represents their new approach, and the scale and tone of Hara 2, is Sennan Asbestos Disaster. This also follows the legal battles of a group of citizens, in this case poisoned by asbestos factories in their Osaka neighborhood. Kobayashi and Hara participated in their struggle for almost ten years, but the film’s purview reaches back to the industrialization of the country after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The setting is Sennan, whose economy had come to revolve around the spinning of asbestos into fireproof fabric. Most families were involved in this work in one way or another, but no one was left untouched because of the dangerous nature of asbestos.

The film makes clear that the government long knew about the perils of these factories, but it looked the other way while protecting the factory owners. Waves of illnesses finally provoked the lawsuit that Hara and Kobayashi follow. After its swift historical overview, this lengthy film focuses on the victims. Hara introduces them one by one as the lawsuit moves through the courts at a most painful pace, and follows them as some pass away. From time to time, the action-film approach of Hara 1 appears, as we see him frustrated at the victims’ timidity, goading them on to act before the camera and in the face of the government’s cruel indifference to their suffering.

In this sense, the apparent divide between Hara 1 and Hara 2 ultimately resolves into a single, evolving practice—one that moves from the volatile singular body to the fragile, embattled collective without ever relinquishing the tensions that define either mode. The later films do not abandon the provocations of the earlier work; rather, they redistribute them across a wider social field, where individual bodies remain the irreducible sites through which history, violence, and responsibility are felt. What emerges is not a softening but an expansion: a cinema that insists on the inseparability of the personal and the political, the singular and the communal. If Hara’s films continue to unsettle, it is because they are driven by a restlessness that refuses resolution, a commitment to confrontation that is directed as much inward as outward. As he has reflected, “In my case, my sustenance is my own question mark about myself. There is the unknown within me that would lead me somewhere that I don’t know, and I’m perhaps afraid of that . . . Therefore, although I am shooting my subjects with my camera, I am also carrying the camera toward the inside of myself, and going further and deeper within.” It is this recursive movement—between others and the self, between action and reflection—that binds this body of work together, and that ensures its enduring urgency.