Noriaki Tsuchimoto

Japanese documentary from 1964 directed by Noriaki Tsuchimoto. The film focuses on the taxi drivers of Tokyo in the year before the Tokyo Olympics and the difficulties they face: construction obstructing traffic, poor working conditions, numerous accidents, and bad pay. It becomes a critique of a changing and modernizing urban Japan.

This film documents student preparations for the final phases of the 1969 protests against the renewal of the security treaty.

The Kabul National Museum, once known as the "face of Afghanistan," was destroyed in 1993. We filmed the most important cultural treasures of the still-intact museum in 1988: ancient Greco-Roman art and antiquitied of Hellenistic civilization, as well as Buddhist sculpture that was said to have mythology--the art of Gandhara, Bamiyan, and Shotorak among them. After the fall of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1992, some seventy percent of the contents of the museum was destroyed, stolen, or smuggled overseas to Japan and other countries. The movement to return these items is also touched upon. The footage in this video represents that only film documentation of the Kabul Museum ever made.

As her husband Eiichi becomes more entangled in his life as businessman, Naoko looks for ways to expand her own life even as her husband's life shrinks in scope and intimacy. She finds new interests, new love, and a greater sense of her place in the world.

A young delinquent takes part in a robbery and is sentenced to a juvenile detention center, where he clashes with other youths and reflects on his life experiences.

"In my filmography, An Engineer’s Assistant (1963) is called my “first film.” This PR film on the safety of the Japanese National Railways was designed to be “self-criticism” after the big accident on the Joban line at Mikawashima Station, which had occurred in 1962. Right after the events back then, the responsibility for the accident was considered to be negligence of the engineer and the engineer’s assistant. The topic of this project was the promotion of a new device to avoid accidents. However, I had seen that the true cause of the accident was a congested service schedule, and I consciously placed emphasis on the depiction of the actual work of the engineer and his assistant, and of those who had chosen the route and were responsible for safety on the line on which the accident took place."

The first in a series of independent documentaries that Tsuchimoto made of the mercury poisoning incident in Minamata, Japan.

Japanese fishery instructor Akira is attracted to beautiful Cuban young girl Martia. Though initially rejected, Akira still returns with Martia to her homeland. On the way he sees a post-revolution Cuba, cultivating fields, relics from the revolution, armies in training, and Castro in a political rally.

A film essay about nuclear energy in Japan, composed of newspaper clippings collected in scrapbooks

Video version of the picture book 'Hiroshima no pika', based on the art pieces known as The Hiroshima Panels by Iri and Maruki Toshi

Documentary about the great Japanese documentary maker Tsuchimoto Noriaki made a couple of years before his death.

The daily life of the citizens of Kabul during the civil war: the bazaar, mosques, the literacy movement awarded honors by UNESCO, women's education, and English school. Scenes of live and self-defense in nearby farm villages. The lives of war orphans. And a new holiday-the anniversary of the revolution, seen in the faces of the 200,000 people gathered to celebrate. This is a document of the only "democratic republic" in the West.

The sea around Minamata was heavily polluted with mercury during the 1950s and 1960s from the Chisso Corporation's chemical factory. This highly toxic chemical bioaccumulated in shellfish and fish in the Yatsushiro Sea which, when eaten by the local populace, gave rise to Minamata disease. The disease was responsible for the deaths and disabling of thousands of residents, all around the Yatsushiro Sea. The marine ecosystem was also extensively damaged.

Second film in Tsuchimoto's series on Minamata disease - the victims of Minamata disease negotiate directly with Chisso Corporation (responsible for dumping toxic water into Minamata Bay) for life-long medical care and compensation.

My Town, My Youth is an inspiring film shot twenty years after the official recognition of the 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 popular enka singer Ishikawa Sayuri.

Documentary on Chua Swee­-Lin, a Malaysian exchange student who was threatened with deportation over his protest against the separation and inde­pendence of Singapore.

Since Minamata: The Victims and Their World (1971), director Tsuchimoto Noriaki has made numerous works depicting people living in Minamata. This work for children is a visual fantasy poetically depicting the moon that governs the ocean’s tides, the fishermen and the various fish living there.

Umitori takes place in Shimokita Peninsula on the northern edge of the mainland, which was becoming a “nuclear energy peninsula”, undergoing tremendous development and serving as the home port for Mutsu, a nuclear­-powered ship. Focusing on the fishermen and their stories, Tsuchimoto and his crew made their subject matter the “theft of the sea” perpetrated by giant business conglomerates. While the fishermen of Minamata were obvious victims of the mercury­-poisoning tragedy, the fishermen in Shimokita were inadvertently becoming the permanent victims of another announced trag­edy. Tsuchimoto interviews the fishermen, especially focusing on a stage play actor and his boat­-owner family, establishing, as it became his practice, a complex reflection about the threat brought to small communities by the forces of “progress”.

Having spent her childhood in Dalian and Harbin in the former state of Manchukuo, Taeko Tomiyama carried within her the conviction: “As an Asian, as a woman, I will begin from the margins of beauty.” Noriaki Tsuchimoto, on the other hand, directed numerous films related to Minamata disease. He confronted the suffering of pollution victims head-on, continuing to convey the harshness of life with unflinching clarity. In an interview, Tsuchimoto once remarked: “Within Tomiyama’s narrative world lies something that could be called her eros, her utopia, her aesthetics of liberation. Why does she persist in creating such dark lithographs on the themes of Chikuho and Korea? And how is it that, while doing so, she can also simultaneously depict a world of such beauty?” This film not only reveals the allure of the lithographs themselves, but also centers on the dialogue between Tsuchimoto and Tomiyama. It is a portrait of two comrades, earnestly pursuing the meaning of artistic expression.

A record of the stories of patients suffering from Minamata disease, 30 years after its discovery

Documentary on the life of Teruo Kawamoto, a leader of Minamata disease activism

A medical perspective of Minamata disease in three parts - 1) Progress of Research; 2) Pathology and Symptoms; 3) Clinical Field Trials

After a handful of groundbreaking films detailing the tragedy and suffering of the mercury-poisoned Japanese town of Minamata, documentary master Noriaki Tsuchimoto revisits the subject of Minamata through the eyes of the celebrated husband-and-wife painting duo Iri and Toshi Maruki. Tsuchimoto follows the Marukis from their quaint homestead studio, where they paint slews of ghastly, psychotropic mural panels depicting the effects of Minamata disease, to the streets of Minamata, where they meet and paint portraits of several victims of mercury poisoning.

An update to the story of Minamata disease, going up to 1976