Japanese Documentary Cinema, Modern Commercialized Media and the Narita Airport Farmer
By KEVIN KEIZUCHI
When farmers in Sanrizuka rose up in the late 1960s to protest the forced seizure of their land for the construction of Narita Airport, filmmakers like Tsuchimoto Noriaki documented the conflict with raw immediacy.
This series of radical documentaries captured not just fortified farmer fortresses, bamboo spears, and Molotov cocktails tossed at police, but also the deeper human struggle against displacement and state power. Even the BBC profiled Takao Shinto, the last descendant of 28 farming households in the region, tending his crops as jets roared overhead.
For Dr. Kenneth Shima, a professor of Japanese Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA, that tradition of filmmaking embodies why cinema matters; it forces us to confront struggle, rather than escape it.
Discovering Japan and Asian America
Raised in suburban Northern California, Shima grew up without a strong Japanese American community. His parents immigrated from Japan in the 1970s, but the family’s environment was more shaped by a vague “California Orientalism,” which consisted of Zen aesthetics and Japanese spiritualism rather than actual Japanese American culture.
“Studying Japanese was never really an option until I went to community college in Seattle,” he recalls. At around age 20, he first encountered both the Japanese language and a visible Asian American community.
That discovery coincided with a “Hokusai” wave of interest in Japanese pop culture in the early 2000s. Anime like “Akira” and “Ghost in the Shell,” which he first saw on VHS tapes in high school, sparked his imagination. But it was cinema, not just animation, that opened a door to the complexity and diversity of Japanese culture. Through film, he saw Japan not as a homogenous society of conformity, but as a place alive with rebels, misfits, and nonconformists.
Cool Japan, Cinema, and Cultural Deviance
By the mid-1990s, Japanese soft power was seeping into California: green tea Häagen-Dazs, Pokémon cards at Frank & Sons, and Suncoast selling two-episode DBZ VHS tapes for $20 apiece. In 2002, journalist Douglas McGray coined the phrase “Japan’s Gross National Cool” in Foreign Policy. Politicians seized on the idea, and by 2010 the government launched the “Cool Japan” initiative to brand anime, manga, fashion, music, and food as global cultural exports.
However, noticeably absent was cinema. While Akira Kurosawa once served as Japan’s cultural ambassador to the West, by the early 2000s Japanese film had slipped into the shadows. That neglect drew Shima in.
“Language classes seemed very conformist, about following the rules,” he explains. “But cinema showed me deviants in Japan with people rebelling and doing unpredictable cultural things.”
At the University of Washington, he even founded a Japanese film club to help feed this otaku obsession.
Cinema as Struggle
For Shima, cinema is not just entertainment but a space of struggle. Postwar documentaries by directors like Tsuchimoto, or Kazuo Hara’s “Goodbye CP” — which chronicled the lives of people with cerebral palsy — forced audiences to confront political and social realities directly.
“These films destabilized easy narratives,” he explains. “Soundtracks deliberately out of sync with images, unflinching depictions of bodies in struggle, or endings that refused resolution. They force the viewer to either step up or disengage.”
Shima calls this the “difficulty of praxis.” Engaging with serious Japanese creators, he argues, means engaging with dense, hard-to-watch work. “Capitalism is always telling us to live in a continual state of pleasure. But art is more than just entertainment.”
His teaching reflects that conviction. Students, he says, are already “experts at reading images,” because they’ve grown up saturated in them. What they lack is critical engagement with how images are produced, circulated, and consumed. Japanese cinema becomes a tool to help them see the “image world” that defines modern life, where commercial imagery and algorithms shape how we see ourselves and reality.
From VHS to TikTok: Shifting Media Landscapes
When Shima received the prestigious Mombusho scholarship in 2006, he spent five years in Asagaya haunting theaters and watching films that were then inaccessible abroad.
“If you wanted to see cool movies, you had to go to New York, Paris, Tokyo, or Berlin,” he recalls. “Now almost everything is online, subtitled, and accessible.”
That accessibility has transformed his classroom. Anime fandom, once niche, is now mainstream.
“By the time I started teaching anime at UCLA around 2016, many students were anime-curious. Now, anime is lingua franca. Students know more than I do about the latest shows, so I let them lead.”
But he warns against the culture of binge consumption. “We’ve lost anticipation and dialogue. Where once audiences wrote letters to directors or spent a week speculating between episodes, today whole seasons drop at once and reaction videos appear within hours.”
Whole seasons are at your fingertips, and reactionary content is posted almost in parallel through Twitch and Tik Tok.
Samurai, Cowboys, and the Desire for Justice
Another focus of his teaching is samurai cinema. While many Americans imagine samurai as historical truth, Shima points out that cinematic samurai, much like Hollywood cowboys, are more fantasy than fact.
“Real samurai were about hierarchy and loyalty to their lord, not individual heroics. But cinema needs individualistic protagonists, so samurai became Eastern cowboys,” which is further confirmed by the “Akane no Mai” episode of HBO’s “Westworld.”
What makes these films resonate, he argues, is their response to injustice. “We see corruption and abuse of power every day in real life, and we feel powerless. In samurai or vigilante films, someone steps outside the system to restore justice. That’s why audiences love John Wick avenging his dog, or [Hiroyuki Sanada standing against the corrupt lord Ishido in ‘Shōgun.’] Storytelling stages circumstances that give us a sense of control over life’s injustices.”
Education Under Pressure
For Shima, these lessons go beyond cinema. They are about education itself. He laments how universities are increasingly run like businesses, prioritizing efficiency and outputs over humanistic growth.
“Education is under a full-frontal assault against critical thinking,” he says. “But learning is more than producing outputs. It’s about learning to learn, to ask why, to see from other perspectives.”
“In our radically mediated age,” he concludes, “engaging with Japanese cinema is more than passive entertainment — it’s a practice of struggle. These films expand our perceptual boundaries and sharpen our ability to decode images, situated culture in history, and communicate interpretations with clarity.”
He hopes that this practice helps with the eternal questions: Is this AI? What is this selling me? What the f*ck am I even looking at?