Personal background

I was born in Fukui, Japan, 54 years ago. I live with my wife and my two children in Uji, in the Kyoto area. For my day job, I work as a male nurse in a psychiatric clinic that I also manage, but I have been in close touch with the world of film for 30 years.

My father was a great movie fan, and I started watching movies on his lap at the age of four. So I grew up watching dozens of movies, and then, at 16, I began shooting "movies" with an 8 mm camera. My father, who was very strict, strongly opposed my desire to take a job in the Toei Kyoto studios after finishing high school. In the end, I became a male nurse, as he wished, and went to work in a public hospital, but I kept on shooting films with my 8 mm camera.

When I was 28, I finally completed an 80-minute film, and I looked around for an opportunity to have it shown commercially. By chance I met the manager of what is now called the Metro Theater (a commercial film theater) in a cafe in Fukui where I had shot one of the scenes in my film. "I'll give you a chance to show this movie commercially in my theater," he told me. All the local media took up the story of how an amateur was having his first film shown in a commercial movie theater. Thanks to all the media coverage, about 700 people came to see my movie, and the story was picked up on a local TV station as well, so I was in seventh heaven for the moment. But then the human resources department of Fukui Prefecture decided that I did not have the right to show a film commercially since I was a public employee. I was devastated. However, with the help and support of some acquaintances of mine, I was able to go on showing one film a year at the Metro Theater. I even succeeded in having my films shown at the "Pia Film Festival", at the Ikebukuro Theater in Tokyo, and at the Umeda Theater in Osaka.

At 33, I moved to Kyoto to take a job as a male nurse in a private hospital, all the while continuing to make films. Ten years ago I began managing a clinic with a doctor I had become acquainted with. The staff is very understanding, and always encourages me to keep on making movies.

Movies

Nowadays, I still enjoy watching movies, whether they're Japanese or Western. But watching recent movies really grieves me. I can't find my kind of movie. The cinema is infested with movies that have no personality and whose only purpose is to make money. Both Japanese and Western movies are truly Americanized: shallow plots with ever more "action" and computer-generated images. It seems to me that audiences are numbed by these floods of images childishly hurled in all directions. Viewers are adrift today in a society without bearings, and they need to be put on the right track.

My own opinion is that these kinds of "movies" are not movies at all but just a "circus" for the emotions, like a roller coaster or a haunted house in an amusement park. I would like to introduce into the cinema "Japanesque" works created with my own "hands". But this idea is just something that grows out of a logic from within. I, who have nothing, would like to create works that function like a control mechanism for the magma that boils within me.

"Making something"--movies, music, creative works, is a "craft", and the happiness derived from it is the pleasure we experience in the process of creation. Until recently, my film-making has been without major objectives, and I have only shown my films to a close circle of friends. However, the audience's reaction to the showing of my film "Six Jizo" as the last show of the evening at the Kyoto Asahi Cinema on June 8 and 9, 2002, gave me renewed hope. The second night it was shown, the Japan versus Russia World Cup soccer game started at the same time as my film, but in spite of this, a lot of people came to see the movie. It made me feel that there are many who, like me, don't think soccer is everything, and that there truly are people who are looking for real movies.

Since that time, I've made three movies: "Snow in Spring", "It Will Be Heaven Tomorrow", and "September Steps".

Directing

Finally, I would like to explain my basic attitude toward directing. The camera is nearly always fixed, I never use any zoom shots, and I only use tracking and panning when necessary. I try not to use flashbacks or inserts on characters or elements. As for the sound, it is generally recorded simultaneously. I use a minimum of dialogue and music in order to make the audience experience the emotions in the movie without relying on explanations. This is my vision of film-making.

After each showing of one of my films, some of the viewers always pose questions and ask my views. But I make movies to express what I can't say in words. So even if people ask me, as they always do, what is the concept behind a movie, I simply answer: "Just let yourself feel what you feel when you're watching the images. What each individual feels inside is everything. I can't express my films in words." Rather than attempting to create a masterpiece for the ages (which actually cannot be done), my directing seeks to create works that give a feeling of living through a real experience.