Noriaki Tsuchimoto papers

As a documentary director whose career spanned nearly fifty years, Noriaki Tsuchimoto (December 11, 1928-June 24, 2008) was renowned for his documentaries about the mercury poisoning incident of the 1950s in Minamata, Japan, one of the world's most notorious cases of industrial pollution. Tsuchimoto began working at Iwanami Productions, a documentary production house that, while mostly making public relations films for Japanese corporations, also cultivated critically acclaimed postwar filmmakers. He started by making contracted public relations documentaries, which he, as with On the Road (1964), could turn into sly critiques of the institutional sponsor. After becoming and independent director, Tsuchimoto made films about the radical student movement, nuclear power, Hiroshima, and major left-wing artists such as Shigeharu Nakano. He remained concerned about environmental degradation, especially of the sea, and made another film on the Okhotsk Sea. He also went abroad and was one of the few filmmakers to document Afghanistan in the 1980s. Tsuchimoto was a student radical in college, even fighting for the Japanese Communist Party in rural villages and spending time in jail (his prison diaries are included in the collection). He worked at the Japan-China Friendship Commission before the Japanese state recognized the People's Republic of China and became an active player in Japan's major environmental movements. Tsuchimoto became a theorist of the documentary film and published many books on film and the environment.