A defining experience in Emma Ryan Yamazaki's childhood left her with a severe scrape on her knee and a classmate with a broken bone.
When Yamazaki, now a 34-year-old documentary filmmaker, was in sixth grade in Osaka, he spent weeks practicing building a seven-level human pyramid with his classmates for the annual school sports day. . The sense of accomplishment she felt when her group didn't collapse her pyramid, despite the blood and tears shed by her children to make it work, was “what makes me feel resilient and hardworking.” It became a light.”
Ms. Yamazaki, who is half British and half Japanese, is now chronicling with a documentary eye the moments she believes form the essence of Japanese character, for better or worse.
To foreigners, Japan tends to be seen as an orderly society where trains run on time, streets are perfectly clean, and people are generally polite and cooperative. Mr. Yamazaki captures on camera the educational practices and strict discipline that are instilled in children from childhood, and believes that this creates such a society.
Her films present nuanced, non-judgmental portraits that attempt to explain why Japan is the way it is, while also showing the potential costs of those practices. By showing both the strengths and weaknesses of Japan's commonplace rituals, especially in education, she also encourages insiders to ask questions about their long-standing practices.
Her latest film, Making of a Japanese, which premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival last fall, chronicles a year at an elementary school in western Tokyo, where students straighten shoes in storage. He prepares the classrooms, cleans the classrooms, and serves the meals. Lunch to her classmates.
In a previous documentary, “Koshien: Japan's Field of Dreams,” Yamazaki portrayed high school baseball players who are pushed to their physical limits and often break down in tears in order to compete in Japan's annual summer tournament. I showed it.
In the schools Yamazaki features, both films show what can sometimes seem like an almost militaristic dedication to order, teamwork, and self-sacrifice. But the documentary also depicts teachers and coaches trying to preserve the best of Japanese culture, while recognizing that certain traditions can be harmful to participants.
“If we can figure out what good things to keep and what to change, then of course that's the million dollar question,” Yamazaki said.
“I think that if we didn't have what we consider to be the 'extreme' parts of society — or, realistically, if the 'extreme' parts of society decreased, then that's what would actually happen,” Yamazaki said. wrote in a follow-up email. Japan will be late from now on. ”
Her movies feature some extreme scenes. For example, in How to Be Japanese, a first-grade teacher strongly reprimands her first-grader and makes her cry in front of her classmates. But the film also depicts this young student overcoming her own shortcomings and proudly performing in front of her school.
Mr. Yamazaki “showed reality as it was,'' said Hiroshi Sugita, a professor at Kokugakuin University's Faculty of Education, who appears briefly in the film giving a lecture to the school's faculty.
Raised in Japan and trained as a filmmaker at New York University, Yamazaki has a one-foot-in, one-foot-out perspective.
Basil Tsiokos, senior programmer for nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival, which selected two of Yamazaki's films, said, “As opposed to being a complete outsider who exoticizes things, she is more respected.'' I think I can bring a believable perspective to the table.” Films for documentary showcases on Nantucket and New York.
The daughter of a British university professor and a Japanese schoolteacher, Ms. Yamazaki grew up near Osaka and spent her summers in England. She says that when she transferred from a Japanese school to the International Academy in Kobe during her junior high and high school years, she was surprised to find that janitors, not students, were cleaning her classroom. Enjoying the freedom of choosing her electives, she enrolled in a video film class.
She decided to leave Japan to attend university partly because she was tired of being treated as a foreigner, given her multiracial heritage.
When she arrived at New York University, most of her classmates wanted to direct feature films. Mr. Yamazaki took a documentary class taught by Sam Pollard, a film director who worked as an editor for Spike Lee and others, and embraced the documentary medium.
Mr. Pollard recognized her talent right away. “She has to put herself to work to understand what her story is,” he said. “She had it.”
While she was still an undergraduate, Pollard offered Yamazaki an editing job. After her graduation, she said: “A lot of my friends smoked pot and were artistic dreamers with big ideas.” But she took multiple editorial jobs to support her passion projects. I accepted. Editing still supports her documentary work.
She attributed her work ethic to her days in elementary school in Japan. “People would say, 'You're so responsible, you're such a good team player, you work so hard,'” she recalled. She deemed her efforts “below average by Japanese standards.”
She met her future husband, Eric Nyari, while interviewing for a job editing a documentary Nyari was producing about Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. Although she didn't get the job, the two became friends. Nyali, who describes her as a “dictator in the best sense of the word,” is now the lead producer of all of her documentaries.
Yamazaki made the leap from editing to professional directing with Al Jazeera's short film “Monk by Blood,” which examined the complex family and gender dynamics at a Buddhist temple in Kyoto.
Next, she chose a theme that had nothing to do with Japan. “Monkey Business: The Adventures of the Creators of Curious George” screened at film festivals in Los Angeles and Nantucket, further raising her profile.
Mr. Yamazaki and Mr. Nyari rented an apartment in Tokyo seven years ago, and Mr. Yamazaki began work on “Koshien.''
One of the high schools she wanted to use in the film was the one where Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani practiced, but his former coach, Hiroshi Sasaki, was asked to do so after years of media requests. I was very careful.
Sasaki was relieved to see how Yamazaki showed up with his staff in the morning before the players arrived, and stayed late into the night to film the team cleaning the field.
One afternoon, after he shut her out of a particularly dramatic rehearsal and berated her for not filming it, she burst into tears of frustration because the camera had missed a great scene. He said he did.
“I was very impressed because I thought this guy was really taking his work seriously,” Coach Sasaki said in a video interview with The New York Times. The morning after her practice, he invited her to turn on her camera while he watered the bonsai in his collection and answered her questions about his coaching philosophy. That episode became a pivotal scene in the documentary.
Yamazaki spends hundreds of hours photographing her subjects, capturing vulnerable moments that reveal as much to her subjects as they do to her audience.
In one scene in “Koshien,” the wife of another high school baseball coach says she resents her husband's career because it often takes him away from their three children.
“I realized that feeling for the first time when I watched the movie,'' says coach Tetsuya Mizutani, who emphasizes his old, hard driving style.
Asako Fujioka, former artistic director of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, said such perplexing moments set Yamazaki's storytelling apart from most Japanese documentary filmmakers. While Japanese filmmakers try to treat their subjects “gently, like a caring mother or a friend,” Yamazaki is “very bold in the way he creates drama.”
Some viewers criticize Seita Enomoto, a teacher who disciplines his students in “How to Become Japanese.'' The film teaches children that they should “work hard, and He said he appreciated the fact that it also showed that he was learning “how the company changed and became successful.” ” Yamazaki and Nyari next want to make a documentary about new employees at large Japanese companies. There, young staff members begin with training that allows them to continue working at the same company for the rest of their lives.
The couple are currently raising their young son in Tokyo and sending him to a Japanese nursery school. Although the Human Pyramid has been banned at schools due to parental complaints, Yamazaki hopes her son will absorb the values the exercise taught him.
“It was a strange personal experience,” she says, “and I look back on it fondly.”
Kiko Notoya Contributed to the report.
