Noriaki Tsuchimoto

• Name — Noriaki Tsuchimoto • Born — 11 December 1928 • Birthplace — Gifu Prefecture • Died — 24 June 2008 • Known for — Minamata: The Victims and Their World • Occupation — Documentary film director

Tsuchimoto was born in Gifu Prefecture, but raised in Tokyo. Angered by the emperor system that led Japan into war, he participated in radical student groups like Zengakuren when he entered Waseda University and joined the Japanese Communist Party. For a time he was even involved in the JCP's plan for armed revolt in the mountains and also was arrested for participating in protests. Expelled from Waseda in 1953, he could initially only find work at the Japan-China Friendship Society until he ran into Keiji Yoshino, a filmmaker and executive at Iwanami Productions (Iwanami Eiga), a branch of Iwanami Shoten devoted to making educational and public relations (PR) documentaries. Inspired by Susumu Hani's film Children of the Classroom, he accepted Yoshino's offer to join Iwanami in 1956. He left the JCP in 1957.

Tsuchimoto was only an employee at Iwanami Productions for a year (after that, he worked there as a hired freelancer), but he made films alongside other important directors such as Hani, Shinsuke Ogawa, Kazuo Kuroki, and Yōichi Higashi, and cameramen like Jun'ichi Segawa, Tatsuo Suzuki, and Masaki Tamura. The works he made were primarily sponsored by Japanese corporations celebrating their achievements in a period of high economic growth, but the intellectually liberal Iwanami was "a hot bed of experimentation," in the words of film scholar Mark Nornes; a place where, according to Tsuchimoto, people wanted to do "their own individual shots that could only be done in images not in words." Tsuchimoto's most famous work for Iwanami was An Engineer's Assistant (1963), a film made for the Japanese National Railways about train engineers working hard to keep on time. Conflicts with sponsors and the company inevitably resulted at Iwanami, and it was in particular one controversy over two of Tsuchimoto's contributions to a series of documentaries on Japan's prefectures that led the filmmakers to form the "Blue Group" (Ao no Kai), an informal organization in which members discussed each other's films and advocated for a new documentary. Many in the Blue Group later left Iwanami to begin producing documentaries independently. One other film Tsuchimoto directed during this period was On the Road: A Document (1963), a film commissioned by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police to promote traffic safety just before the Tokyo Olympics. Tsuchimoto, however, worked with a cab driver's union to produce a strong condemnation of urban Japan seen through the eyes of a taxi driver. The film won several awards, but the Police refused to show it and it remained on the shelf for years.

• An Engineer's Assistant 3=Aru kikan joshi (1963) • On the Road: A Document 3=Dokyumento rojō (1964) • Exchange Student Chua Swee Lin 3=Ryûgakusei Chua Sui Rin (1965) • The World of the Siberians 3=Shiberiya-jin no sekai (1968) • Prehistory of the Partisans Paruchizan zenshi (1969) • Minamata: The Victims and Their World 3=Minamata: Kanjasan to sono sekai (1971) • Minamata Disease: A Trilogy Igaku to shite no Minamata-byō: Sanbusaku (1974–1975) • The Shiranui Sea 3=Shiranuikai (1975) • Remembering Nakano Shigeharu 3=Shinobu Nakano Shigeharu (1979) • Tsuchimoto Noriaki's Nuclear Scrapbook 3=Genpatsu kirinukichō (1982) • Afghan Spring 3=Yomigaere Karēzu (1989) • Another Afghanistan: Kabul Diary 1985 3=Mō hitotsu no Afuganisutan: Kāburu nikki 1985-nen (2003) • Traces: The Kabul Museum 1988 3=Arishihi no Kāburu Hakubutsukan 1988-nen (2003)