TOKYO REELS, collection of twenty 16 mm films made by an international group of filmmakers and journalists commissioned by various political bodies, TV stations, and United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from the 1960s through the early 1980s. The films document the solidarity of anti-imperialist Japanese activists with the Palestinian cause. The collection consists of Land Day (1983); Beirut 1982 (1982); Lebanon 1982: UNRWA Emergency Operation (1982); Why? (1982); Palestine and Japan (1979); Beyond the War (1977); The Field (1977); War in Lebanon (1976); Kufr Shuba (1975); Kuneitra: Death of a City (1974); The Road to a Palestinian State (1974); Cowboy (1973); The Game (1973); Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza (1973); The Urgent Call (1973); Blown by the Wind (1971); Palestine: The Path to Tragedy (1970); Stages of Hope (1969); Temptation to Return (1966); and Welcome to Jordan (1964).
For over three decades the collection was in the care of activists Mineo Mitsui and Aoe Tanami, who kept a small archive on the outskirts of Tokyo of the film reels, U-matic tapes, photographs, books, posters, and ephemera sent to Japan between 1967 and 1982. The collection is now held by Subversive Film, a cinema research and production collective formed by Nick Denes, Reem Shilleh, and Mohanad Yaqubi in 2011 with the aim of casting new light on overlooked historical works related to Palestine.
After a screening of Mohanad Yaqubi’s Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory in Tokyo in 2018, Mitsui and Tanami invited members of Subversive Film to see their collection. A year later, they entrusted Subversive Film with the collection and the films were transported to the Film Lab of KASK, School of the Arts, in Gent, where Yaqubi and his colleagues began the project of researching, digitizing, and restoring the films. From information on film canisters, packaging labels, credits, and captions, the team at Subversive Film was able to piece together important information on Japanese political mobilization and solidarity efforts with Palestine during the 1970s and 1980s.
The connections between militant leftist Japanese resistance groups, such as the Japanese Red Army (JRA), and Palestinian resistance organizations were especially strong in the 1970s and 1980s when many members of the Japanese radical factions trained at Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) military camps and ran terrorist operations against the Israeli state. In May 1972 members of the JRA who had been recruited by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–External Operations (PFLP-EO) attacked Lod Airport (now Ben Gurion International Airport) near Tel Aviv, killing twenty-six civilians and injuring eighty others. The Japanese government took aggressive measures to repress Japanese leftist groups, especially those with ties to Palestine.
The Palestinian-solidarity movement in Japan had no ties to the JRA, but all solidarity with Palestine was designated as terrorist activity by the state. For example, Takako Nobuhara, a Japanese doctor who was volunteering at Palestinian clinics in Beirut during the Israeli invasion in 1982, was denied a new passport by the Japanese authorities on the grounds of alleged ties to the JRA after her passport had been burned in an Israeli air raid. These claims were never proven, yet she was stranded in Lebanon for over a decade. Such repressive responses to Palestinian solidarity in Japan help explain why the Tokyo Reels were quietly preserved for decades, unknown to the public.
While the majority of the films in the collection are of Japanese origin, others were produced by the Palestinian Cinema Institute, the Cultural Art Section of the Unified Media, Al-Sakhra Studios, and other state-run film institutes in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Kuwait. The films were housed at the PLO office in Tokyo, a hub of transnational solidarity for the Palestinian cause. The exact history of the collection remains uncertain as many of the people at the PLO office in Tokyo have died and anonymity for those involved in solidarity networks remains imperative. In this way the films reject formal institutional archival processes and instead act as a living archive.
Since 2018 Subversive Film has presented the films internationally at documenta 15, the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, and at international film festivals in Berlin, Rotterdam, Toronto, Tunis, and Vienna, among other cities.