“Asia is One” Film Screening

Asia is One
Directed by Nihon Documentarist Union
Japan, 1973, 16mm transferred to digital format, 96 minutes

Friday June 6 2025, 6:30 pm
Dodd 147
Open to the Public

In Japanese, Chinese, and Atayal with English Subtitles by Keung Yoon Bae, Kimberley Sanders, and Mayako Liu

Filmed just prior to Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese control in 1972 the student film collective Nihon Documentarist Union (1968-73) produced Asia is One (1973) as their final collaborative film in a trajectory that took them from the streets of Tokyo during the height of student protests to the islands south of mainland Japan. NDU was formed by students at Waseda University and sought a radical mode of filmmaking based on horizontal relations between members that lent their works an amateur quality opposed to the hierarchies that structured the cinema verité works by contemporaneous film collective Ogawa Productions. Their works are radical thematically, too, addressing the lasting effects of Japanese imperialism during the height of the postwar Japanese state’s collusion with the American Cold War political and economic order. In their own words, “We are not just criticizing ‘nationalism’ or ‘xenophobia,’ we must introduce and make our own ‘cosmopolitanism’ (sekaisei) by ‘transgressing’ national borders in a real way” (translated by Alexander Zahlten).

In Asia is One, NDU follows migrant workers and marginalized communities across the waters from Okinawa’s Iriomote to Yonaguni and eventually Taiwan, where they encounter the indigenous Atayal tribe. Highlighting moments of mixed belonging and transitional identity—former colonial miners turned fisherman, farmers, and smugglers or the Atayal village’s continued daily broadcast of the Japanese military song Umi ga ukaba at noon—the film troubled nationalism through concrete examples of the flows of labor, capital, culture, and bodies across the islands that had, themselves, been traversed by shifting national borders.

Although NDU was important in its day, its legacy was sidelined for decades and has only been significantly reassessed over the past fifteen years. Just digitized this year with subtitles by film and media historian Alexander Zahlten, this screening of Asia is One is a rare opportunity to see this important but underappreciated independent film from a critical moment in the reassessment of Japan’s colonial legacies in the Pacific.

Organized in conjunction with Art History C151 and 185, the screening will follow a short introduction by Dr. Nina Horisaki-Christens. This event is made possible by the Yanai Initiative and film distributor Kobe Planet Film Archive, and the film was digitized by the Japanese Amateur Film Archive.

For inquiries, contact nhorichris@ucla.edu