Movies: Iwanami Productions

A teaching film for social studies, which was developed as a new educational subject in 1947. At an elementary school in Hokkaido, children have started a fly extermination campaign to improve school hygiene. In order to eliminate the causes of flies...

This celebrated documentary, filmed in colour, depicts one of the most famous of all Japanese temples. Horyu-ji, in the small town of Ikaruga outside Japan’s ancient capital of Nara, was one of the first Buddhist places of worship established in Japa...

A short documentary about the behaviour of Japanese primary school students....

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As her husband Eiichi becomes more entangled in his life as businessman, Naoko looks for ways to expand her own life even as her husband's life shrinks in scope and intimacy. She finds new interests, new love, and a greater sense of her place in the ...

Children Who Draw explores the delicate chemistry of school children interacting in an art class through a constant juxtaposition of observational black-and-white portraits of the young children with lyrical passages shot in vivid color exploring the...

A young delinquent takes part in a robbery and is sentenced to a juvenile detention center, where he clashes with other youths and reflects on his life experiences....

One day, Kandume's can boy, who lived happily with his friends in the kitchen, becomes an empty can and is thrown away. Eventually, the can boy has a dream about the history of iron and humanity. Iron that melted and flowed out in a forest fire was d...

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A college graduate falls in love with a woman during a business trip in Hokkaido...

From the opening sequence, combining underwater and aerial footage, this masterpiece about the construction of a steam-power plant in Kurihama (south of Tokyo) far surpasses the limitations of the promotional film genre, and emerges as one of the mos...

An educative film about the water supply and watersystems in small towns and villages in Japan. It captures the unsanitary and inconvenient lifestyles without water supply through examples from various places, and shows how life can be brighter if a ...

Haneda’s debut as full director, made after four years spent as an assistant, is set in a farming village in Shiga Prefecture (east of Kyoto). The film depicts the traditional architecture, lifestyles and customs of the village, its agricultural and ...

Commissioned by the Tokyo National Museum, this film, regarded in some quarters as the masterpiece of Haneda’s Iwanami period, is one of several in which she documented Japan’s ancient and classical artistic treasures. Here she focuses on the Tokyo N...

TV documentary about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and its safety concerns in 1976....

The clear record of a zoo's daily workings and the hardships of zookeepers....

An examination of a specialist school for twin siblings and the theme of heredity and environment on human development...

Marine biological documentary...

A film documenting the Matsuri and the life of the farmers in Nagano Prefecture. In the bosom of the mountain, people cultivate wasabi, rice, practice sericulture, forestry, mulberry picking. Some even cultivate barley in fields with a slope of 40 de...

The outflow of population, mainly young people, from agricultural, mountain and fishing villages in Japan to urban areas became remarkable from around 1960, but the actual situation of Japan's depopulation, which is rapidly progressing in the shadow ...