Recording with Mother 'Working Hands'

My mother has been an occasional subject for me ever since I first started making films.

Because she is my mother, she is the person I feel closest to. But when I'm filming her, I see sides of her that I didn't know existed. I've learned that while she is my mother, she is also another, unknowable, human being.

My mother had a karaoke café for a few years. Most of her customers were elderly and they never returned after the Covid-19 pandemic, so she closed the café just before spring this year. While she was running her business on a shoestring during the pandemic, I enlisted the help of her and some regulars at her café to make the short film Karaoke Cafe BOSA. It was a commissioned work for the 60th anniversary of the Goethe-Institut Tokyo, so I did some basic interviews with my mother and her regulars, asking them to name things they "wanted to preserve for the next 60 years." But everyone's answers were sincere and earnest, expressing the importance of everyday life and peace.

Russia had invaded Ukraine and the war had begun some time before I started working on that short film.

There was a lot about my mother's life that I didn't know. She was the second youngest of 10 siblings. She lost her father (my grandfather) when she was 5 years old, and because they weren't well to do, she went to work at a woolen mill in Aichi Prefecture at the age of 15 to pay her way through high school. She graduated while working, and then worked part time for one of her older brothers in Kyoto while studying to become a telephone operator. She got a job as a telephone operator at a company in Osaka. When the company's telephone system was automated, she was transferred to the computer room, but when she heard that the town hall in her hometown of Takashima (Nagasaki Prefecture) was looking for a telephone operator, she returned to Takashima. But the telephone operator she was to replace, who had been planning to take a leave of absence, ended up staying, and my mother was assigned to the traffic department instead. She became pregnant with my older sister at the age of 23 and married my father.

These days, my mother says her daily routine consists of watching Chinese dramas on TV and going to karaoke lessons to use her voice. I wanted to make a small film that captures the parts of my mother's life that I don't know about, as well as her daily life now