November 2013
A Cameraman Who Documented the “Time Passing Through Individual Lives”
Hitoshi Sakurai / Kiyoshi Nanasawa
The series “Research on TV Producers” focuses on individuals involved in TV productions to explore the inner process behind the making of outstanding TV programs. Following the previous year’s series that featured TV producers in the pioneer days of television (from the 1950s to the 1960s), the FY 2013 series will delve into five documentary producers who flourished particularly in the 1970s, which is the “vernal days” of television when TV sets spread into every corner of the country and appealing programs of various kinds became available.
Those years saw the emergence of the second generation TV producers, who entered the world of television without experiencing any movie or radio productions; they always pursued the realization of the “expression unique to television” and ardently worked their ways to make out-of-the-box documentaries by creating their own styles, and, as a result, a number of highly innovative and thought-provoking TV programs were produced.
The first part of the series features Kenji Yoshino (1935-1985), an NHK cameraman who portrayed individuals with his bold approach to the subject on the filming site and with his tenacious observation, which opened up a new horizon of the expression and made an enormous impact on younger camerapersons. The author of this month, Hitoshi Sakurai (Media Research, NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute), used to accompany Yoshino on location when Sakurai was a young TV director. He describes Yoshino as a “portrait” artist who documented the “time passing through individual lives” of the people who lived through Japan’s high economic growth period and as the very first TV cameraman who infiltrated into the subject’s special time and place in order to grasp the “invisible” reality of the moment. Sakurai reviews Yoshino’s masterpieces including “Japan Unmasked” (Nihon no sugao) and “A Life” (Aru jinsei) to examine what the legendary cameraman encountered and explored through the finder.