Hara Kazuo "I make bitter films. I hate mainstream society." ¨CKazuo Hara Kazuo Hara has been making scandalous films about scandalous people since 1972. He describes his work as "overstepping the boundaries set by society in order to approach my subjects in close-up." Having left the Tokyo Technical Institute of Photography because "photography only allowed me to get to know people on a superficial level," he decided instead to start an independent Born in 1945, Hara Kazuo made his debut with Goodbye CP (Sayonara CP, 1972), which shocked audiences with its frank portrayal of cerebral palsy. Two years later, Hara again sent a shock wave through the Japanese film community with Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974?(Kyokushiteki erosu koiuta 1974, 1974). The film chronicled a love-triangle between Hara, Kobayashi Sachiko (his girlfriend and now wife and producer) and his ex-wife and strident feminist Takeda Miyuki. Hara's third film, the award-winning The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (Yukiyukite shingun, 1987) remains the best documentary about the Pacific War and documentary¡¯s relationship to violence and ethics. Five years in the making, the film traces a crusade for truth by Okuzaki Kenzo, a survivor of the battlefields of New Guinea and anti-Emperor system activist. His other major films include A Dedicated Life (Zenshin shosetsuka, 1994), My Mishima (Watakushi no Mishima, 1999). The Many Faces of Chika (Mata no hi no Chika, 2005), was Hara's first fiction feature film, and was written by partner Kobayashi Sachiko. Hara's work reveals how life stories are constructed across the border between fiction and reality.
Ab¨¦ Mark Nornes is Chair of the Department of Screen Arts & Culture and Professor in Asian Languages and Cultures, University
Sayonara CP Hara's debut work, Sayonara CP (1972), is an unsentimental portrait of the daily life of a poet with cerebral palsy (CP), his body and voice cruelly distorted as if trapped in eternal agony. Questioning Ogawa Productions¡¯ logic of participation, Hara zeros in Yokota and his other friends living with CP. The film engages the bodies of its spectators, forcing them to contemplate their own relationships to the people on screen, though not through building easy bridges or by 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 our own sensibilities, knowledge, perception of their own bodies, as well as our 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, these individuals are shown in a taboo-breaking new light.
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 Near the beginning of Kazuo Hara¡¯s extremely personal documentary, the director admits he made the film to attempt to deal with his feelings for his ex-lover Takeda Miyuki, a bisexual feminist activist and the mother of his child. This confession suggests Hara felt haunted by Miyuki and that he needed to exorcise her. Yet his film proves otherwise: created through collaboration with current lover (and now producer) Kobayashi Sachiko, Hara¡¯s film portrays a unique woman who meets life head-on, unafraid of its complexity. The film doesn¡¯t shy away from messiness; on the contrary, it revels in it. Miyuki grants Hara and his camera an astonishing level of access, stripping herself bare both literally and figuratively. The result is a rich, emotionally raw film that is as much about its director as it is about its ostensible subject. Hara correctly sees part of himself in Miyuki, who seems unconcerned with being portrayed sympathetically. Frequently directing her ire at Hara and the camera, Miyuki comes off as temperamental, angry, stubborn, unpredictable, beautiful, and very much alive. This film is a landmark in the development of Japanese documentaries, as it began a shift in perspective from collective films about social issues, as seen in Ogawa Shinsuke¡¯s early works, to intensely personal works about individuals.
The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On The Emperor¡¯s Naked Army Marches On is a brilliant exploration of memory and war guilt. In this controversial documentary, Hara Kazuo follows Okuzaki Kenzo in his real-life struggle against Emperor Hirohito. He proudly declares that he shot pachinko balls at the royal family, distributed pornographic images of the Emperor in a shopping arcade, and once killed a man. He is also a survivor of the horrifying battles in New Guinea during WWII. The film centers on Okuzaki¡¯s crusade to reveal the truth behind a mystery centering on his old unit where, 23 days after the war ended, two low-ranking Japanese soldiers were executed for ¡°desertion¡± under very mysterious circumstances. He visits all the other surviving members, begging, cajoling, and¡ªincredibly¡ªbeating bits of truth from them. When these old men do break down and talk, their testimonies are some of the most chilling, riveting descriptions of wartime desperation ever committed to film. In his desire to unearth these horrors, Okuzaki's behavior grows increasingly extreme and bizarre. By the film's end, Hara seems to ask whether the terrible nature of this buried incident is worth the brutality of Okuzaki's methods¡ªor indeed Hara¡¯s commitment of Okuzaki¡¯s violence to film. As Errol Morris says, ¡°The Emperor¡¯s Naked Army Marches On makes you think the incredible power of truth-seeking."
A Dedicated Life A Dedicated Life is a hard-edged portrait of novelist Inoue Mitsuharu. Born in 1926 on the southern island of Kyushu, Inoue was a member of the Japanese Communist party while his book People of the Land (Chi no Mure, 1963)was nominated for the highest literary prize in Japan. He was also a maddeningly complex person. On the one hand, he was revered by students and colleagues alike; on the other, he was an unrepentant womanizer and a bald-faced liar. Hara catches him in a number of lies¡ªincluding one memorable story about his first love, a Korean lass who turned into a prostitute¡ªand what looks like a conventional film turns into a complex meditation on truth, documentary, and Life¡all mingling as we peer down into Inoue¡¯s bloody torso while doctors remove several pounds of cancerous tissue. Hara's transgressive ethos remains in effect: The truth hurts.
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career which would bridge the gap between the two great extremes of documentary filmmaking of the last thirty years: the collective documentary of Ogawa Productions and the private films of the90s.
of Michigan. He is a specialist in Japanese documentary film. He is the author of Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary Film (Minnesota UP) and Japanese Documentary Film: From the Meiji Era to Hiroshima (Minnesota UP). He is on the editorial boards of Documentary Box (Japan), International Studies in Documentary, and was also a coordinator for the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival from 1990 to 2005, where he programmed major retrospectives such as Japan-America Film Wars, In Our Own Eyes¡ªIndigenous People's Film and Video Festival, and Den'ei Nana Henge: Seven Transfigurations in Electric Shadows. His other books include the co-written A Research Guide to Japanese Cinema Studies (UM Center for Japanese Studies Publications Program) and Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (Minnesota UP). 
