Tokyo Reels: The Solidarity Image

Five rows and four columns of perfectly aligned photographs containing film reels cover the landing page of the Tokyo Reels website. Each photograph is similar: each reel is laid on top of graph paper onto which it casts a slight shadow; on the top left of each photograph, we see the title of the film that the reel contains written in English, with the production country and year listed underneath; on the top right, the same information written in Arabic; on the bottom left, in Japanese. Upon closer inspection, the uniqueness of each photograph reveals itself: while the circular reel gives a graphical match between all the photographs, the support structure of each one of them offer variations on the familiar pattern; some of the films have warped with age and hang slightly loose on the reel; a few of the reels have notes taped onto them, yellowed with age and written in different languages; and several have notes directly written onto them with marker pen. Beyond what the films contain, the page seems to suggest the very existence of these reels is of paramount importance for their evidentiary quality as objects, which in themselves hold a history. The precision and uniformity of their display is almost military: is this a militant image, perhaps of an archival, distribution or screening operation?

The twenty reels are a collection of films that were handed to Brussels-based Gaza-raised Palestinian artist and researcher Mohanad Yaqubi by Aoe Tanami, Associate Professor of Middle East Studies at Hiroshima City University. She first approached Yaqubi at the theatre Image Forum in Shibuya, Tokyo, in 2016 where his film Off Frame aka Revolution Until Victory (2015) was being screened. She suggested they meet before he left Japan, and handed him a piece of paper, which included a list of films related to the Palestinian struggle. It turned out that Tanami was a guardian of these films, whose reels were stored in a small one-room archive inside a home on the outskirts of Tokyo. This encounter sowed the seeds of a multifaceted project including: the multi-year research projects ‘For an Imperfect Archive: Tokyo Reels’ and ‘Transnational Solidarity’ at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent, Belgium; the project Tokyo Reels, presented as a ten-hour looped installation at Hübner areal, as part of documenta fifteen, Kassel, an artistic contribution by the film research and production collective Subversive Film based between Ramallah and Brussels; the Tokyo Reels Film Festival, a weekly cinema screening of the reels in Kassel over one hundred days during documenta fifteen, which culminated in a screening and discussion series from 15 to 19 June 2022; and Yaqubi’s feature documentary film R21 aka Restoring Solidarity (2022), which had its world premiere at the documentary festival IDFA in Amsterdam, in November of that same year. What these projects and the collection at their centre share with the world is a story of transnational solidarity between Palestine, the broader Arab region, and Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, supported and activated in part by the circulation of these films. While relatively small, the collection is a precious resource not only for the films themselves – all of which were digitally scanned at the Film Lab in KASK – but also for providing an entry point into a reflection on the shapes that solidarity between Palestine and Japan formed through cinema in this period. In this text, I hope to situate this collection within a broader context of political struggle and radical film production in Japan and reflect on how the films, both those made in Japan and the ones made abroad but edited or adjusted for Japanese circulation, give insights into strategies and methods of Japan’s Palestine solidarity movement. Discussing not only the content of the films but what the markings on the reels might reveal about their circulation, I identify the photographs of the reels as a ‘solidarity image’, which exists alongside the militant image, as they evidence a longstanding commitment to the Palestinian cause.

Japan – Palestine: The Transnational Shift in Japan’s Political Struggle

Mohanad Yaqubi’s R21 aka Restoring Solidarity opens with
a reference to the 1960 Anpo protests (Anpo tōsō) in Japan, which is presented in parallel to the developing story of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and aligns them together in their struggle against American imperialism. After Japan’s own Imperial Army was defeated in World War II, the Allied Forces, led by the United States, occupied Japan from 1945 to 1952. While the occupation ended, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, also known as Anpo jōyaku, was signed between the two countries, which led to the United States establishing their military bases on Japanese land, thereby implicating Japan in their Cold War foreign policy across the continent including the Korean War, and later, the Vietnam War. Leading up to the revision and resigning of the Anpo treaty in 1960, widespread mass protests – the largest of their kind in the modern history of Japan – took place around Japan’s National Diet Building, which resulted in violent clashes with the police and the death of student protestor Michiko Kanba, sparking civilian outrage and sympathy. In advance of the security treaty’s renewal in 1970, the Anpo protests re-emerged in the late 1960s during what was called the ‘season of politics’ (Seiji no kisetsu) due to the density of popular protest activity: the 1968–69 ‘university struggles’ (Daigaku tōsō) saw students occupying university buildings across the country, variously protesting against corruption within university management and their boards; the Sanrizuka Struggle (Sanrizuka tōsō) by farmers and leftist groups against the construction of Narita International Airport; and the 1969 Shinjuku riots (Shinjuku sōran) that saw the occupation of Shinjuku Station on International Anti-War Day when people had gathered in protest against the Vietnam War.

While Yaqubi is correct in pointing to the 1960 Anpo protests as part of the lineage of Japan’s political activism of this period, the alignment of these comparatively localised struggles with the Palestinian struggle would take shape later. Amid this ‘season of politics’, the militant communist organisation Red Army Faction (Sekigunha), which spawned from the New Left student organisation the Communist League (Kyōsanshugisha Dōmei), emerged calling for an armed proletarian revolution with a global purview. Active from 1968 to 1971, the Red Army Faction committed themselves to armed struggle and began training for a worldwide revolution, which they believed could be initiated with Japan as a headquarters. After incidents with other university political factions and the police, the Red Army Faction went underground, eventually deciding to take their training abroad to Cuba. On 30 March 1970, members hijacked a plane, in an event known as the Yodo-gō Hijacking, and diverted it to North Korea where they were granted political asylum. The remaining members in Japan continued their armed struggle but the group split into two in 1971. Staying in Japan, the United Red Army (Rengō Sekigun) engaged in guerrilla training in a mountain camp in Nagano prefecture, northern Japan, where they conducted violent ‘self-criticism’ sessions that led to the death of half their members, followed by the Asama-Sansō incident where they took a woman hostage in a mountain lodge during an attempted escape from the police. The Japanese Red Army (Nihon Sekigun, hereafter JRA), the other splinter group led by Fusako Shigenobu, left Japan and relocated to Lebanon to join the armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine. In Palestine, they hoped to launch a global revolution that would eventually reach Japan.⁰¹ In close alliance with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), members of the JRA committed various terrorist acts including the Lod Airport shootings in May 1972 and the 1977 hijacking of the Japan Airlines flight JAL 472, taking all passengers hostage on an airport runway in Bangladesh.⁰² The Red Army Faction’s global vision and the JRA’s global actions are a testament to the international expansion of guerrilla activity by Japanese activists of the period.

Cinema-as-Activism, Cinema-as-Document

Between the Anpo protests and the armed struggle in alignment with Palestinian resistance, cinema actively contributed to activism in Japan, not only as a tool for documentation but also to recruit support for various causes and even agitate. After joining Nagisa Oshima to screen their films at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, film-makers Koji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi travelled to Lebanon to make a film in support of the Palestinian resistance. The resulting film, Sekigun-P.F.L.P: Sekai sensô sengen (Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, 1971), is a militant propaganda newsreel film that documents the training that the JRA and PFLP were undergoing in preparation for armed struggle. The training footage is interspersed with shots of dusty roads and other landscape shots infused with Adachi’s ‘landscape theory’ (fūkeiron), while conversations and speeches advocating for revolution can be heard on the soundtrack.⁰³ After returning to Japan, Wakamatsu’s team toured the film around the country on a red-coloured ‘Revolution Bus’ in order to spread information and recruit others to join.

While this film is the most overtly militant of his surviving work, Adachi’s cinema has been entangled with activism since its outset and he has explicitly called for ‘a cinema for the revolution’.⁰⁴ As a student, in 1960, he co-founded the VAN Film Science Research Centre together with film-maker Motoharu Jonouchi and others, which became a gathering place for activists, artists and film-makers. To mark the one-year anniversary of Michiko Kanba’s death, the All-Japan Federation of Students’ Self-Governing Associations (Zengakuren) commissioned VAN to make a film, which resulted in Document 6.15 (1961–62). While the Zengakuren likely expected a film to commemorate Kanba and spur the viewers into communal action, VAN provided something entirely different, resulting in a work that goes against what a political film might entail for most. At the anniversary demonstration, VAN not only screened the film – which included documentation of the protest and re-enactments of scenes of violence committed by the riot police against the protestors – but overlapped its projection with 35mm slides alternating between a portrait of Kanba and paintings of the devil. The projection was further accompanied by a discordant soundtrack of political speeches by opposing factions, all deliberately brought together to incite confusion, anger and further protest.⁰⁵ Here, cinema was utilised as a tool to activate. After joining Wakamatsu Production, Adachi became the screenwriter of many of Wakamatsu’s most political films made in the genre of pink films, wrote or featured in a number of Oshima’s independent productions in the late 1960s, and directed his own films.⁰⁶ In 1974, he joined the JRA in Lebanon where he would stay until he was extradited back to Japan in 2000, during which time he committed himself to the liberation of Palestine. Haruo Wakō, who worked at Wakamatsu Production as an assistant cinematographer on Tenshi no kōkotsu (Ecstasy of Angels, 1972), written by Adachi, and assisted the ‘Revolution Bus’ screening tour of Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, joined the JRA even earlier than Adachi in 1973. After being extradited to Japan together with Adachi and two other JRA members in 2000, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the 1974 seizing of the French Embassy in The Hague in the Netherlands, and died in prison late 2023.

With the JRA controversial activities intensifying on a global scale in the early 1970s, it is no surprise that The Road to a Palestinian State (1974), one of the films of the Tokyo Reels collection, takes on a different character to the propagandistic position of Adachi and Wakamatsu’s Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, especially as it was made for Japanese national televisual broadcast. By the early 1970s, Japanese civilian support for political activism had dwindled. The automatic renewal of the Anpo security treaty taking place despite mass protests brought about a pervasive sense of hopelessness, accentuated by the Asama-Sansō incident. The latter was broadcasted live on television for ten consecutive hours accruing a record number of viewers, many of whom watched in disbelief where student activism, which once existed with widespread support, had ended up. Made as the first episode of the television series ‘Overseas Reporting: Middle East Today’ (Kaigai shuzai: konnichi no chūtō) for Japan’s national broadcaster NHK, Palestine kokka eno michi (The Road to a Palestinian State) arrived at a time of national uncertainty concerning the viability of political action and, perhaps as such, takes on a comparatively observational stance. This is particularly noticeable in its segment featuring the PFLP, which not only emphasises their militaristic position noting they are armed despite Lebanon’s prohibition against guns, but also mentions their departure from the PLO’s executive committee in 1974, positioning them as outliers rather than representatives of the Palestinian cause.⁰⁷ In general, the television episode takes on an educational tone as it features scenes from the Marka refugee camp (also called Schneller camp locally) in Amman and the aftermath of a recent Israeli bombing campaign at the Nabatieh refugee camp in Lebanon, where many of its inhabitants were murdered or dispersed thereafter. The footage is accompanied by an explanatory voice-over by the narrator Akira Ishino, delivered in a calm monotone, familiar in the evocation of neutrality we are used to hearing in news reporting.

The educational and observational character of The Road to a Palestinian State is typical of many of the films in the Tokyo Reels collection, which can likely be attributed to the fact that the collection originated from the PLO’s Tokyo office. Japan did not recognise Palestine as a sovereign state at this time. However, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s invitation to Farouk Qaddoumi, head of the PLO’s Political Department, for a visit in June 1976, and the subsequent opening of a PLO Tokyo office in February 1977, signals Japan’s recognition of the organisation as legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. It also signals a shift in Japan’s official position regarding foreign policy in the Middle East, despite pressures from the United States with whom they remain mostly diligently aligned since their post-war occupation.⁰⁸ Indeed, Japan was certainly not the only country to do so, as the United Nations recognised the PLO as a representative of the Palestinian people and granted them observer status in the General Assembly in 1974. Yasser Arafat’s historic speech at the United Nations that same year, in fact, features on many of the reels in the collection. Amongst them, The Urgent Call (1973) was produced by the PLO itself. The Japanese versions of Why? (1982), which was retitled for Japanese audiences as Lebanon sensō, why? (Lebanon War, Why?), and Land Day (1983), both in the Tokyo Reels collection, were produced instead by the ‘PLO Representative Office of Japan’, indicating they played an active role in facilitating the adjustment of the films in the collection for Japanese audiences. The Japanese version of War in Lebanon (1976) was handled by Palestinian Cinema Pro. For Solidarity, Japan and Wakamatsu Production, presumably due to its circulation in Japan before the opening of the PLO office the following year, and was distributed by Wakamatsu Production.⁰⁹ As the PLO Tokyo office temporarily closed in 1995 – reopening in 2003 as the Permanent General Mission of Palestine – it is likely that the film reels ended up being safeguarded by their caretakers during this gap in time. As always with archival collections, in regards to the Tokyo Reels collection, one should ask what isn’t there, and why might that be, as much as what is there.¹⁰

Nevertheless, what the collection contains offers insight into some of the methods Japan’s Palestine solidarity movement took in their attempts to support the Palestinian struggle both locally and internationally. The films in the collection that were made outside of Japan feature Japanese subtitles or a Japanese voice-over, indicating at least the intent for the films to receive local Japanese distribution.¹¹ Palestine and Japan (1979) features a Japanese woman reading an English voice-over script that shares information on the various solidarity activities taking place within the country, demonstrating an intent for the film to reach beyond national borders and to connect with other transnational solidarity movements. The film was distributed by Cinesell Japan, Inc., who produced educational science films and Japanese language learning videotapes, presumably indicating they had networks between Japan and abroad that could be utilised for international distribution.

Tracing in such ways the credits and film data in the reels and on the notes taped or scribbled on them provides further insights into how these films came into being and circulation within Japan. Although it’s difficult to ascertain to what extent they were involved, local film societies appear to have taken on an active role in not only the screening of some films but also their production. For instance, the Hiroshima Screening Committee (Hiroshima jōei suishin iinkai) are listed as having provided production support for the Japanese version of Why? (1982) and Ogawamachi Cine Club supported the making of the Japanese version of Land Day (1983), which adds a ten-minute introduction by Yuzo Itagaki, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history, to the 1978 film by Palestinian film-maker Ghaleb Shaath. The Japanese version of the United Nations Information Centre production Beyond the War (1977) was produced by Iwanami Productions, a documentary production company for educational, science and public relation films with a rich history of launching the careers of Noriaki Tsuchimoto, Shinsuke Ogawa, Susumu Hani, Kazuo Kuroki and Sumiko Haneda.¹² Beirut 1982 (1982) was produced by NUNOKAWA Productions and shot by director Ryuichi Hirokawa and the company’s founder Tetsuo Nunokawa, who was also a founding member of the documentary collective Nihon Documentarist Union (NDU).¹³ As Alexander Zahlten notes in his article on the collective, NDU turned to ‘internationalism’ at a time when Japanese documentary film-making made an ‘inward turn away from explicit politics’, as epitomised by Shinsuke Ogawa’s shift to rural rice farming and Kazuo Hara’s personal documentary film-making in the 1970s.¹⁴ In what Zahlten calls an ‘archipelagic thought’ for its emphasis on ‘various levels of connectivity, flow, and in-between-ness over rigid national boundaries’, NDU were drawn to the establishment of networked relations beyond Japan. NDU, within the Japanese documentary landscape, is therefore emblematic of the shift away from local struggles to an international ethos in Japanese political activism of this period.¹⁵This ethos was continued by Nunokawa in his exploration of the Palestinian struggle in the early 1980s as seen in Beirut 1982 and Palestine 1976–1983 (1983), also produced by NUNOKAWA Productions, and with Mineo Mitsui, who led Yaqubi to the Tokyo Reels collection, listed as a member of staff. Between NHK, Iwanami Productions and NDU, the various links established within the Japanese documentary community map the widespread and variegated nature of forms of solidarity with Palestine which were then expressed and explored.¹⁶

Incomplete Struggle, Ongoing Dialogue

Japanese iterations of existing works, together with the layers of subtitles and dubbing in several of the films in the Tokyo Reels collection, give material presence to transnational solidarity as an ongoing dialogue, particularly as it pertains to the Palestinian struggle that remains in progress. While film archives may give off the impression of being the guardians of complete works, it is more often the case that they contain traces, records and versions of films that together resist the notion of a final, complete work. Yaqubi embraces this archival incompleteness: ‘The idea that archives are a source of facts and histories is a deceiving one, archives can only provide us with traces, fragments of evidence, abstract images, text, and sounds, which allow us to construct a narrative, a story.’¹⁷ Rather than cleaning up the material degradation of the films in the digitisation process, Subversive Film scanned the reels as they were, giving material presence to the history of the films’ existence and their circulation. This was further exemplified in the installation of Tokyo Reels at documenta fifteen where the entire scan, including the sprocket holes and optical soundtracks, were left intact and visible. In subsequent exhibitions, such as the group show ‘Everything worthwhile is done with other people’ at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, in 2023, the digital scans were screened continuously alongside a study space, an important addition as Subversive Film considers studying, in line with their interpretation of archives, ‘[as] a process, something that is not yet finished’.¹⁸

In his film R21, Yaqubi approaches Tokyo Reels as an open-ended collection and his film-making as a conversation with it. The title announces the film as the latest and twenty-first addition to the collection of twenty reels.¹⁹The documentary is primarily a ‘found footage’ documentary comprising the existing footage from the Tokyo Reels collection framed with some context as to how the reels arrived into the film-maker’s hands and interspersed with shots of Yaqubi viewing, scanning and checking the conditions of the reels. As he resists dictating how to look at the collection and the images it contains, Yaqubi’s approach to the film can be seen as similar to the ethos in which the study space was set up. The latter was presented as a ‘place where things are connected. We do not provide a narrative’.²⁰ Nevertheless, Yaqubi isn’t a passive recipient of the images. Much in the same way that the Japanese filmic iterations converse with their originals, his editing, and his choices of where to provide context and not, set up a dialogue. This is most striking in his inclusion of sections of Beirut 1982, a Japanese film that captures the immediate aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre of mostly Palestinian and Lebanese Shia Muslim civilians, from 16 to 18 September 1982, perpetrated by the Lebanese Forces, one of the main Christian militias in Lebanon, and supported by the Israel Defense Forces, following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June the same year and only weeks after the withdrawal of the PLO. Beirut 1982 is the closest a work in the Tokyo Reels collection gets to Direct Cinema, as it involves first-person camerawork walking around the surrounding area of the refugee camp. As the film-maker encounters one dead body after another laying on the ground, a voice-over by the director Ryuichi Hirokawa, spoken in English, recalls his thought process as he came to recognise the scale and deliberate nature of the killings while facing warning shots from soldiers. In the film, the camera is unflinching as it records the deceased, refusing to look away. When Yaqubi invokes these scenes in the film, the image blinks and cuts away as soon as we can recognise a lifeless body onscreen. The brief interruption of the black screen stages a momentary conversation between the two film-makers on the function of the image. Shooting footage in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, Hirokawa’s camera appears to be motivated by the sense of responsibility to share what he is witnessing first-hand with the rest of the world, and the image is preoccupied by its evidentiary status. Yaqubi, on the other hand, approaches the scenes with a distance in time of 40 years, at a moment when knowledge on and images of the massacre are widespread and readily accessible. Therefore, it seems that his decision to cut away is driven by a sense of ethics that resists exploiting the images of the dead. Not only as a rallying call but also with the knowledge that such images from the Palestinian struggle have only proliferated since, questioning the extent to which they have instigated political change. Still, both decisions by Hirakawa and Yaqubi are motivated by a desire for solidarity with the victims of the massacre and the Palestinian struggle more broadly. The blink of the image that Yaqubi inserted in Hirakawa’s original footage is a moment of active participation in a dialogue with the footage, made possible by the existence of the Tokyo Reels.

Although impressive in scope and scale, the installation of Tokyo Reels was tucked in the back of Hübner areal in documenta fifteen. Its location, and its ten-hour duration, might be why it initially eluded the criticism and predatory attacks the artistic directors, ruangrupa and participating artists of documenta received before and after the exhibition’s opening when alleged anti-Semitic images were discovered on a banner, an older work called People’s Justice (2002) by Indonesian artist collective Taring Padi. But just weeks before the closure of the exhibition, Subversive Film was embroiled into the controversies when the New Scientific Advisory Panel for the exhibition, which involved ‘seven cultural experts appointed to oversee works alleged to contain anti-Semitic leanings,’ declared that the most urgent task was to terminate the Tokyo Reels screenings.²¹ The advisory report characterised Tokyo Reels as ‘anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist pieces’ and criticised the involvement of Masao Adachi, listed as ‘invited participant’ of Subversive Film on the documenta fifteen website, leading to the misunderstanding that Adachi was the one who collected the reels.²² Such misguided finger-pointing has only been exasperated since the events of 7 October 2023. Decades since the works in the Tokyo Reels collection were made, we’re now at a time when digital cameras can record events with little preparation and distribute them at an accelerated pace. Now, despite the access, we’re confronted with how powerless we feel in the face of these atrocities. Even so, we can learn from the ‘solidarity image’ of the Tokyo Reels that our demonstrations of solidarity – from translations, petitions, campaigns and, of course, demonstrations and actions – will also be remembered alongside the photo and video documents in years to come.²³