Tutti coloro che sono coinvolti in una lotta contro le GOII non dovrebbero perdere questi due video che documentano la lotta contro l’aeroporto di Narita, Giappone.
Che fanno le persone quando “le ricompense della resistenza” non riescono a sostenere il movimento?
Il titolo del film “The wages of Resistance” sembra alludere ad una frase della Lettera di San Paolo ai Romani 6.23 : “Il salario del peccato”
For everyone involved in struggle against the UIMP, here two must-see videos about the fight against the Narita Airport, Japan.
What do people do when “the wages of resistance” fail to sustain the movement?
The title of the film “The wages of Resistance” seems to refer to a sentence of the Letter of Saint Paul to the Romans 6.23 : “The wages of sin”
Pour tous/toutes qui sont engagés dans une lutte contre les GPII, deux vidéos saississant de la lutte contre l’Aéroport de Narita, Japon.
Que font les gens quand « les récompenses de la résistance » ne parviennent pas à soutenir le mouvement ?
Le titre du film The wages of Resistance semble se référer à une phrase de l’Épître de Saint Paul aux Romains 6.23: « Le salaire que verse le péché »
1. - NARITA: Japanese Farmers are Battling to Save Their Homes from Airport Developers
VIDEO – Japanese Farmers are Battling to Save Their Homes from Airport Developers (2008)
The Farmers Must Go (2008): Most travellers to Tokyo would be oblivious to the years of conflict surrounding Narita International Airport. But for the local farmers the battle to save their land from becoming a runway is still going on.
Back in the 1960s Japan was growing rapidly and the farmland at Narita, 60 kilometres north of Tokyo, seemed a good choice for a large international airport. But the planners severely underestimated the determination of the farmers.
As the years dragged on students, housewives and anarchists joined the farmers and there have been many battles with the police. Noriko Ishii was a university student drawn into the protests “I felt it was unreasonable for the farmers to be kicked off their land – because they worked very hard growing rice and vegetables.”
Today 60% of Japans international flights use Narita but only one runway can be used for large jets all because 8 landowners refuse to sell.
2. – The Wages of Resistance: Narita Stories
VIDEO : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S_RzCfR2lg
“The Wages of Resistance invites us to consider the profits and losses of all attempts to resist state power, no matter where they are or when they happened.” – Markus Nornes
The site where Tokyo’s major flight hub Narita International Airport lies is in fact the agricultural area Sanrizuka. Narita’s construction was decided by the Japanese government in the 1960s to support a burgeoning economy, selected due to the farmers’ relatively brief generational connection to the land.
While some were bought off, many poor farmers refused, and their resistance gained the attention of the radical student movement. For over a decade they fought divisive land expropriation schemes, physically resisting brutal riot police. Those that remain are the subject of this film, living and farming just outside the gates, looking back on the struggle as planes fly overhead. Shot and co-directed by renowned cinematographer Koshiro Otsu, who filmed Shinsuke Ogawa’s documentaries on Sanrizuka, his stunning early footage appears along with an elegiac score by Otomo Yoshihide.
The Wages of Resistance and the Spiritual Problem of Sanrizuka
by Markus Nornes
We all know the desire to resist the state. Anytime we receive a parking ticket, we feel it stirring in our hearts. Every time we pay taxes on our hard-earned wages, we experience the impulse to resist. Many of us have entertained these desires and taken up causes in a show of resistance to the power of the state. This defiance is never easy, as it is invariably met with a response designed to repel and tamp down the forces of change. Sometimes this response is mere indifference made possible by institutional inertia and the sheer size of government. However, at times, the state responds with its own force, an exertion of power backed up with both legal and martial instruments. When this happens the citizens choosing resistance face a decision: submit to power or fly in its face. The latter choice almost always means escalation.
This is precisely what happened in the fields of Sanrizuka in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It seems the government was unprepared for both the ferocity and scale of the resistance it met. The site was chosen for several reasons of expedience. It was an unusual tableland, which lent itself to airport construction. Much of the area was an Imperial horse pasture, which made for effortless expropriation. But it was also chosen because the farmers there had only pioneered the land in the last generation or two; these were not age-old hamlets, so the farmers’ ties to the earth were presumably weak (or easy to break) and they would be amenable to generous buy-outs.
In fact, many sold immediately and moved on to new lives. However, a core of very obstinate farmers chose resistance. The State elected an aggressive response. The resulting skirmish attracted the attention of the environmental movement, the anti-war movement, the anti-base movement, the student movement and more. They all found powerful affiliations with the farmers’ plight and moved to the construction site en masse to lend support.
The escalation was swift, its scale unprecedented. Within a matter of years, many thousands of protesters from across Japan faced off with many thousands of riot police from across Japan. The farmers built fortresses and burrowed under their fields. The students picked up weapons especially rocks, clubs, long spears and Molotov cocktails. Many farmers joined in, adding bags of excrement to the arsenal. The violence became increasingly intense. And then people started dying.
Before this bloody escalation, and not long after the first signs of resistance, Ogawa Shinsuke moved his filmmaking collective from the streets of Tokyo and halls of academia to Sanrizuka. They sniffed out the most tenacious and committed farmers they could find and set up shop in the hamlet of Heta. Today this sits at the airport border, squarely under the roaring planes leaving the second runway. All of the houses are gone. However, when Ogawa arrived, the farmers were joined by activists from across the country and their protests transformed into an epic struggle, a new and modern episode in Japan’s long history of peasant uprisings.
Ogawa and his collective which initially included cameraman Otsu Koshiro carefully documented this process over nine years and seven films, which constitute an monument in the history of Japanese cinema. The archival footage in The Wages of Resistance comes from their rich collection of outtakes. No doubt the effort of Ogawa Productions culminated in their masterpiece Heta Village. They shot this film in 1973 in the emotional wake left by the murder of three policemen and the subsequent suicide of their young neighbor Sannomiya Fumio. Elsewhere in Japan, the resistance was reaching the extremes of arson, torture and murder. A weariness set in as the Vietnam War wound down, the older generation of activists started families, and Narita Airport began flying planes. Movement politics swiftly deteriorated, resistance all but died, and the cries of demonstrations in Sanrizuka were replaced by the roar of jet engines.
Ogawa’s Heta Village is notable for the manner in which it captures this moment. Their previous films were chockfull of violent spectacle, but here those clashes are pushed off-screen. The filmmakers focus on the spiritual and emotional dilemmas provoked in villagers by the recent deaths. Otsu’s and Daishima’s The Wages of Resistance is a fitting companion piece to Heta Village, for its heart and soul is this very same episode in the story of the struggle. Despite the passing of time, those deaths continue to weigh heavily on people’s souls. Yanagawa Hideo Sannomiya Fumio’s best friend eloquently explains this in what is The Wages of Resistance’s most important line. He is speaking shortly after yet another suicide of another friend, an activist that had married into a farmer’s family and ultimately sold the land. Yanagawa said.
In this, the Sanrizuka Struggle, no matter how much time passes, is still a heavy burden on people. Those who took part in it made a deep commitment. They put their lives on the line and they still carry that with them today. In this sense, the Sanrizuka Struggle has left many unresolved issues at the site. But even more important are the many people who were involved and the feelings they still carry with them. I think of this as the spiritual problem of Sanrizuka.
The Wages of Resistance introduces us to a collection of people who all feel this burden and deal with it in their own individual ways. Indeed, this is precisely what the English title points us to. Those of us who have taken up causes know all too well the sacrifices demanded by political commitments. Anger and passion are powerful drivers, but ultimately not enough. There are those happy times when resistance results in successive revolution. But usually it does not. Usually the successes are modest, and perhaps failure is even more typical. What do people do when the wages of resistance fail to sustain the movement?
This film presents us with a set of fascinating people whose passions led to very different life paths. The most memorable are probably Yanagawa and Koizumi Hidemasa, who continue to resist by tilling the earth of Sanrizuka; Koizumi’s land is literally surrounded by tarmac, and the second runway cannot be extended for jumbo jets until Yanagawa gives in̶ which he won’t. The wages of their resistance are the redemptions of those friends who died for the cause so long ago. Other characters in the documentary finally submitted to state power at different times and in different ways. However, they all reached a point where the wages of defiance no longer sustained their passions, hopes and dreams.
The burden that Yanagawa spoke so eloquently about is also felt by those for whom the low wages of struggle were unattractive, those who took the government’s money from the get go, sold their land and left neighbors to fend for themselves. They are represented here by a single figure in an extraordinary scene. Directors Otsu and Daishima accompany one old mother to the grave of young Sannomiya Fumio. Incredibly, the Ryuzaki girl comes to pay her respects as well. Hers is the family described in the opening scene of Ogawa’s Heta Village, the family that sold out and whose ostricization was so complete they feared for their lives at the hands of their neighbours like the old mother before the grave. Four decades on, Ryuzaki continues to bear the spiritual problem of Sanrizuka, despite not having participated in the Struggle.
The Wages of Resistance invites us to consider the profits and losses of all attempts to resist state power, no matter where they are or when they happened.
The film points us to look for the life choices thrown up to those to take up a cause.
It also inspires its viewers to crane their necks upon landing at Narita Airport, searching for Koizumi’s pumpkin patch and contemplating the spiritual burden felt by all survivors of the Sanrizuka Struggle.
45 years from the violent anti-airport movement, farmers defy Japan’s amnesia by choosing their own lives of resistance.
http://sanrizukaniikiru.com/introduction_en.html
In 1966, the Japanese government abruptly and arbitrarily announced a plan to build an airport in the rural Sanrizuka district of the city of Narita. Local farmers stood up in opposition, and their movement won the support of students and young labor union activists nationwide. Narita became the site of a decade of intense and often violent struggle representing Japan’s era of political activism.
Forty-five years later, The Wages of Resistance: Narita Stories returns to visit those farmers who once rose in resistance against the state. Today a few continue to farm under the deafening roar of jet engines, while others speak tearfully about departures and lost lands and livelihoods. Their lives were forever altered by the building of Narita International Airport – today Tokyo’s hub for international air traffic, with over 600 flights taking off and landing every day.
Co-directed by the 80-year-old cinematographer of the first of Ogawa Production’s acclaimed Sanrizuka Series in 1968, the film contrasts stunning vintage documentary footage and photographs heated with collision and fury, with the serene beauty of Narita’s pastoral landscape today̶serene save for the jet airplanes roaring overhead. With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics approaching, the Japanese government plans to extend the existing runways further into the remaining fields.
The summer grasses Of brave soldiers’ dreams
The aftermath.
Matsuo Bashō After forty-five years, I revisited the Sanrizuka airport land. What did I see there and what prompted me to film?
In the beginning was the Word. Everything was brought out into broad daylight to be scrutinized and dissected by words and reason; to be verbalized and hung out to dry. But the world of images is a world of shadows swaying endlessly. The minute you think you caught it; it slips through your fingers. The mesh of verbalization is too big to capture this world of images in its net. It flees away.
This film recounts the forty-six year struggle of the Sanrizuka farmers opposing the new airport and the government’s authoritative oppression through the sober eyes of present day farmers. The airport has been built, however imperfectly, and the farmers’ defeat is an inevitable conclusion. However, the farmers are still farming on the land while casting side glances at the planes. They continue to live there. No doubt their everyday lives and their minds are swaying conflicting courses. We quietly placed our camera at their side and captured their voices through a serenity of images.
Otsu Koshiro, director / cinematographer
Today, we indulge in the “joys of life,” dislike the “sorrows of life,” and try to pretend sorrow does not exist.
The opening text in The Wages of Resistance states: “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds (John 12:24).” Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov also cites this in its epigraph. The Russian novel and The Wages of Resistance may seem to have nothing in common, but they actually share a particular perspective. Both works depict the “sorrows of life,” while weaving within them stories that are life affirming.
The people of Sanrizuka, who once risked their lives to fight against the state, continued to live the “sorrows of life.” They did not cease to remind themselves what helpless imbeciles human beings are. In the meantime, contemporary Japan enjoys high economic standards and the ordinary Japanese citizen drowns in pursuit of the “joys of life.” That is exactly why the truth inherent in these stories tells us, “People can never truly live positively unless they acknowledge how forsaken they are.”
Daishima Haruhiko, director / editor
A must-see for everyone involved in political struggle, and anyone who has passed through Narita to Japan.
Japan. 2014. 140 min. DCP, in Japanese with English subtitles. Directed by Haruhiko Daishima, Koshiro Otsu.
Opening Film of 2014 Taiwan International Documentary Festival
