The archipelagic thought of Asia is One (1973) and the documentary film collective NDU

Abstract

This essay explores the work of the legendary Japanese documentary film collective Nihon Documentarist Union (NDU) through their writings and their provocative film Asia is One (1973). It interprets NDU’s uncompromising approach to the aesthetics and politics of documentary film as a variation of archipelagic thought – emphasizing flows, interactions, and hybridity over fixed personal and national boundaries. Asia is One maps the radically heterogeneous space of Okinawa just around the time of its ‘reversion’ to Japan. By engaging with former labourers from the horrific wartime coal mines – many of which were born in other parts of East Asia – as well as migrant workers, fishermen, Taiwanese smugglers and Atayal villagers in Taiwan NDU redefines the region as deeply, sometimes disturbingly, but also promisingly networked. Shooting films on Korean victims of the atomic bombs in Busan, or in later incarnations travelling to Micronesia or Palestine, NDU searched for a new kind of cosmopolitanism through an emphasis on ‘fluidity’ and ‘place’. Highly influential in their time, NDU was nearly erased from Japanese documentary history. This essay aims to build on recent attempts in Japan to re-introduce their work and to understand their redefinition of documentary film and of the geopolitical imagination.

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