Asia Is One

Opening with the Japanese national anthem, the film traces Taiwanese labourers in Okinawa, mass student labour in the Sakishima Islands, and Shōwa-era (1926–1989) coal mining on Iriomote. Travelling from Yonaguni to Taiwan, it reaches a Tayal village shaped by the Musha Incident (1930), where the noontime bell was replaced by the Imperial Japanese military song, 'Umi Yukaba'.

'This documentary, which has no official title or production credits — Asia Is One, as it has come to be called — is a record or document of what we, as members of the NDU [Nihon Documentarist Union] movement, encountered during our offensive south from the "main island" of Okinawa in 1972.

At that time, the course of diplomatic relations was changing rapidly: the "Okinawa Reversion Agreement" had been reached through a joint proclamation by Japan and the United States in 1970 [signed in 1971; Okinawa reverted to Japan in 1972]; the People's Republic of China had rejoined the United Nations in 1971; Taiwan had left the United Nations in 1972 [1971]; "Kimigayo" greeted the Japanese Prime Minister during a state visit to China; and Japan normalised diplomatic relations with China but broke off relations with Taiwan. The maritime borders surrounding Japan were shifting, exposing the faces of different ethnic groups.

Until the postwar period, the "East China Sea" had been a highly fluid space of human life; but as national borders became more sharply demarcated, the people who crossed these boundaries became "others", creating distinctions between zainichi Okinawans, fishermen, Japanese in Okinawa, Koreans, Taiwanese and Taiwanese aborigines. This film documents the various ethnic groups living amidst this sea of people and moving back and forth across East Asia — the same Asia Okakura Tenshin (Kakuzō) had in mind when he wrote, "For the down-trodden Orient, the glory of Europe is the humiliation of Asia" and "Asia is one."

After the Pacific War, and once the rupture between the prewar and postwar periods had passed, the postwar nation-state of Japan was severed from this fertile Asia, with its spiritual climate of diversity and homogeneity, by American imperialism. According to Takeuchi Yoshimi (in an article on this film in the monthly journal Chūgoku [China]), "Without going through the experience of war and without knowing the lives of the people, one cannot mobilise the people, no matter what the approach…" although "one still cannot solve imperialism by recourse to imperialism." This film raises many questions, both about the grounds for anti-Japanese responses of solidarity across East Asia and about the history with which Japan has been burdened during its postwar isolation.’

– Excerpted and adapted from Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2005 Special Programme, ‘BORDERS WITHIN — What It Means to Live in Japan’