This has been an interesting year for political cinema in Japan. First came Miki Dezaki¡¯s controversial documentary ¡°Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women,¡± which caused such a stir that it ended up playing at a Tokyo cinema for over six months.
Then Michihito Fujii scored an unlikely sleeper hit with ¡°The Journalist,¡± a scathing portrait of politics and media manipulation, loosely based on a book by the pugnacious Tokyo Shimbun reporter Isoko Mochizuki.
While the latter film proved there was a surprisingly large audience for broadsides against the current administration, as a depiction of journalism it was pretty flimsy. That¡¯s been rectified by the appearance of this companion documentary, once again produced by Mitsunobu Kawamura, who¡¯s clearly a man with an axe to grind.
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