Kobayashi Shigeru (Director)
Capturing Life with Pain
The three main people in this film are Morinaga Miyako (Miya below), Ninomiya Saori, and Takahashi Kazue, and yourself. What made you decide to make a film dealing with violence and sexual violence?
Miya has been a friend of mine for some fifty years, going back activism around Minamata disease in our youth. When she was forty, her child reached school age and she moved back to her hometown in Saga to enroll the child in elementary school, but here she started to experience flashbacks of past sexually abused by a teacher. She then suffered from PTSD. I also spent more than thirty years listening to her over the phone saying things like, “I want to die.” In books, I read that sexual abuse is called the “murder of the spirit” and the trauma can last a lifetime.
Around 2011, I read a series of articles by the photographer Nomiya Saori in which she wrote under her real name about her own experience of sexual assault, and I then got to know her thinking that she might be someone Miya could talk to. Ninomiya held an exhibition of her photography once a year at a café in Kunitachi. I had attended several times, so in the fall of 2016 I received an invitation post card. It said that due to various circumstances, this would be her last exhibition. When I saw this, it occurred to me for the first time that I needed to make a film. But then I hesitated. I realized that making a film on this difficult theme would be tough. But also, I shouldn’t dismiss an idea once it had come to me. I decided to give it my best shot and went to ask Ninomiya to take part. I had cinematographer Oda Kaori film her exhibition that December, which remains as the opening scene of the film.
Takahashi Kazue had a history of refusing to attend school and living as a shut-in, and I visited her for the first time in 2001 after reading a newspaper article about her opening Spoonfield, an alternative school in Nagaoka City for people going through similar experiences. Then, in 2017, I happened to bump into her at a movie theater in Niigata that was screening a fiction film dealing with sexual abuse, and when we talked, she told me that she was “also a survivor.” She said she wanted to take part in the film and we started shooting little by little.
You and your crew filmed over a period of eight years, spanning the COVID-19 pandemic. Did your conception of the project change from what you envisioned at the outset?
Miya was central to the production of this film. She suffered from serious and painful trauma and PTSD and repeatedly attempted suicide. She said that she wanted me to “convey her pain,” and at first, I thought that I should give expression to that pain. Ninomiya and Takahashi are also burdened by PTSD. However, in the end, I realized that it would be difficult to represent that suffering concretely in film. In the case of the film Living on the River Agano (1992), for example, I realized that the suffering of people with Minamata disease couldn’t be conveyed just by showing their trembling hands, for instance. The same was true when I was documenting the harms caused by the SMON (Subacute Myelo-Optico-Neuropathy) drug scandal. I was conscious that individual suffering cannot be so easily represented or communicated. And I came to think that the only way forward was to proceed with a degree of detachment when filming people living with the burden of these experiences and this kind of suffering.
Although you yourself are not a survivor of sexual abuse, you are positioned in the film as a survivor of violence in a broader sense.
I decided to appear in the film after hearing about substantial resistance to the idea of a male, veteran documentary filmmaker taking on a topic like this. I went before the camera because people needed to see the relationship between me and Miya in order to understand the film.
I also learned through my own research about the impacts of the war of eighty years ago on postwar life. The violence of the war moved into the household as domestic violence in the postwar period. Sexual violence is one form of domestic violence. Men couldn’t talk about their battlefield experiences and took to drinking and violent behavior. This impacted their children, and even grandchildren. My family was a perfect example of this. I witnessed intense arguments between my parents on a daily basis, which made me very unhappy. A friend of mine who is a pediatrician specialized in trauma therapy told me that being made to bear witness to domestic violence is itself a form of abuse. As I thought about my father in this way, I came to believe that both he and my family were victims of the war.
My crew felt that I should confront this past in the film, and I also thought that I needed to incorporate my own experiences, so I went back to my hometown with a sense of resolve.
In Japan, the majority of perpetrators of sexual violence know their victims. The proportion of incidents that are domestic or that involve acquaintances is very high. I wanted to say through the film that a relationship exists between war and sexual violence.
The presence of photographs was also very striking in the film.
Hata Takeshi incorporated Ninomiya’s photographs in the editing process. Her photographs appear in each section, and when a memory surfaces, the photographs create a kind of pause in which to let become established. I also used to work in photography, so I understand the wonder of watching an image emerge in the developing solution. I think we managed to capture this in the scene of Ninomiya working in the darkroom. She’s developing a picture of her daughter as a child, and this cuts to a scene of the same daughter today, having grown up. I’m really grateful for the level of participation by the family.
Miya’s poetry is also featured in the film. I wanted her to read it aloud in her own voice, and I was happy that we were also able to make that happen.
The scene where Takahashi Kazue speaks publicly also leaves a real impression.
Yes, she bravely speaks for the first time about her experience of sexual violence. At first I didn’t think that she was going to take this on, so I was also really surprised as I listened to her. If it had been up to me, I probably would have filmed her closer up, but Oda’s camera was five or six meters away while she was speaking, so there’s a little distance. I think Oda was probably using her eyes and body to convey her support to Takahashi. I think this sense of distance is one of Oda’s exceptional characteristics.
The songs “Niji” [Rainbow] and “Warabeuta” [Nursery Song], which are featured in the film, were sung by a girl named Yuika. I had heard her sing at a recital and had been really surprised. At the time, Yuika was a second grader. Based on my own experience, I think that early elementary school is a time when children become capable of understanding aspects of adult society without being able to do anything to push back. I wanted that subtle emotional landscape to come across in her voice, but the voice changes quickly at that age, so I called on sound recordist Kawakami Takuya and we recorded Yuika right away, in the living room at her house.
Each of the crew members on this film interacted with the women who appear in front of the camera, this film didn’t come together through relationships with me alone. Throughout the shooting and editing, our subjects also exchanged opinions with us as we worked. In this way, I believe that the survivors gradually built up their resolve to appear in the film.
I feel that I have not yet completely processed everything that the film is conveying. This is the first screening in Yamagata, and I would like to delve deeper into the film’s themes by hearing everyone’s thoughts.
Compiled by Inoue Yoko
Translated by Ryan Cook
Photography: Imaizumi Hideo / Editorial supervisor: Masuya Shoko / 2025-10-10