Iwanami Productions

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

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 world.

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 discovered by humans when it had cooled and solidified. Iron transforms into knives and machines, and civilization develops... When the can boy wakes up, he is taken to a steelworks and reborn as a new steel material.

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

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.

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, the entire town is working to improve the sanitary environment. The short was filmed with the cooperation of Mizukaido Elementary School in Joso City and is the first film in the "Social Studies Teaching Film System" by Iwanami Film Productions.

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 Japan, and contains the oldest surviving wooden buildings in the world, dating from the seventh century.

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

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 their imaginative and expressive paintings. Experimenting with color as an intimate expression of the children’s inner worlds, a tool for deeper psychological investigation, Hani allows his camera to roam freely across the drawings, “de-framing’” and enagaging the artwork in a manner reminiscent of Alain Resnais.

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 small but managed water supply is installed. The first film directed by Susumu Hani, produced under the auspices of the Ministry of Health.

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 most staggering sensory experiences in Japanese documentary.

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 domestic labour, but its central focus, as with many of Iwanami’s early films, is on education.

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

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 degrees. People have to live to the rythm of the seasons and to the pace of the water cycles. Whatever happens, their hearts are inextricably linked to the mountains.

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 of high economic growth, was interviewed after 1970. Pick up the voices of the residents. We interviewed mountain villages and remote islands in Hokkaido, Tohoku, China, and Kyushu. The aging of villages and the rapid decrease of households affect all the lives of residents such as school consolidation, agriculture and forestry, and living road management, and the decline in village (community) functions is further accelerating remote villages.

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 National Museum’s collection of art from the earliest eras of Japan’s (pre)history, including earthenware pottery and the striking terracotta figurines known as haniwa.