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| No images from this docudrama exist, but I don't like to make posts without images, so here's an entirely unrelated book about the same subject. |
Intro
A while ago, I spent a very long time assembling what I believe is the most comprehensive list of every single one of Hirata's film, television and stage credits, which ended up amounting to somewhere around 350 titles (the actual list is slightly less, but I usually say "around 350" to account for anything I might have missed due to obscurity). People generally like stories about the strange and unusual, so let's ask the question: out of that number, what is the weirdest thing he was in?
Well, that depends on what we consider "weird". First off, I want to absolutely avoid the pitfall of calling something weird just because it's from Japan. His The Sound of Music or Gone With the Wind aren't "weird" just because they're Japanese productions of English-language works. None of the game shows or variety shows Hirata was on1 in the late '70s and early '80s qualify as "weird" just because we've never heard of them. Okage wa Waga kokoro ni ari - a docudrama about the founder of a specific Shintō sect - is a bit surprising, but I'm not going to call something "weird" because it involves a religion that I don't subscribe to. And I'm not talking about movies that are "weird" in a narrative or conceptual sense. The H-Man is objectively pretty weird, but it's science fiction, so that's to be expected.
So with all of those qualifiers, I think the one thing I can say for certain is actually pretty weird is the TV docudrama about what would happen if Japan suddenly stopped importing food. Maybe "weird" is not the most precisely accurate term here, but it's the sort of thing that's just a bit unusual to see in an actor's filmography - and it would be for any actor. You could imagine your favorite British soap opera star in something like this and it would still be weird. In any event, here is everything I can tell you about Yunyū shokuryō zero no hi.
Who made this thing
Despite not having a Wikipedia article, the director of the docudrama, Sakae Okazaki, has been a part of NHK's history (and the history of television as a whole) since 1953, which is essentially when television broadcasting began within Japan. Okazaki's main interest when he began working for NHK was producing media related to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Okazaki's home had been burned down by an American air raid, and when he was stationed at the Hiroshima branch of NHK, he created radio dramas on the subject of the atomic bomb. Okazaki was initially very reluctant to move from radio to television, but he found success in the mid-1960s when he produced what is considered to be Japan's first docudrama, Sōnan ["Disaster"], about the search for thirteen students from a mountaineering club who were lost on Mount Yakushi. After that, he also produced Japan's first color taiga drama, Ten to chi to. In the late 1970s Okazaki was in charge of "NHK Special", the series that Yunyū shokuryō zero no hi belongs to more broadly. Okazaki is still alive at 95 years old and was interviewed by Yahoo! News about his long career in March of this year.
I can find virtually no information about the docudrama's main screenwriter, Mamoru Tanabe. His name appears as a credit on a plethora of NHK programs dating back to, as far as I can tell, the mid-1950s. I'm not sure where he is now or when he stopped working, if he has.
As for the rest of the cast: Momoko Kōchi's in it, I just want to say that before I get to anybody else. There are a few other fairly well-known actors in the cast as well, including Gin Maeda, Toshiaki Nishizawa, Toei "hey it's that guy" Fumio Watanabe, and prolific voice actor Akira Kume. I have no idea what Hirata's role in this was, but I think "miscellaneous scientist" is a fairly safe bet. It usually is.
What is this thing
The general idea of the docudrama is summed up in its title. At least as of 1978, Japan was importing 60-70% of all its food product, and the docudrama takes place in the year "19XX", after Japan's government, acting on top-secret information regarding the upcoming sudden stoppage of all imports, begins to assess the country's capacity for food production, an endeavor mainly undertaken by the Ministry of Agriculture. The production capacity of rural agricultural areas is analyzed by computer and the answer given is apparently not reassuring: with its current production capacity, one-third of the population would starve within the year if food imports were to cease. The docudrama - which took more than a year to produce and involved real-world experiments in food production using underutilized land such as golf courses - features actual staff of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, and reporting by Ryōjū Katsube, a real-life NHK reporter who was, among other things, in charge of local reports for the world's first television broadcast from Japan's Showa base in Antarctica.
Please see Hiroshi Makita's thread on the docudrama. I am clowning on it a little, but this scenario is an important thing to consider; it's very concerning knowing your country may not be able to adequately feed its own population in a time of crisis, and from what Makita says, this problem has not been fully solved even today.
This was not the only speculative docudrama that NHK produced. Within the "Hypothetical Document" series, two other scenarios were explored: an earthquake warning and a large-scale blackout in Tokyo. There is a little footage and some stills from the other two docudramas, but as far as I know not a single image from the one we're looking at today is available online.
Can we watch it
No.
Well, not unless you're affiliated with a university in Japan and/or can get special permission to view it for educational purposes.
There are more NHK TV specials that are lost to time and to Japan's draconian copyright laws forcing tapes to be destroyed following television stations restructuring than there are grains of sand on a beach. Fortunately, this is not one of them: it is held in Yokohama's Broadcast Library, which is the only facility in Japan that collects and archives television programs, radio programs, commercials, and related material and provides free-of-charge viewing. I promise you from the bottom of my heart that if I am ever in Yokohama, I will find a way to watch it there. I will tell you all about it.
That's not the only place where the docudrama is held, though. As it was released to VHS in 1990, numerous universities now have a copy: CiNii, Japan's equivalent of WorldCat, a website that allows you to search for any book in any library anywhere, lists 29 universities that have a tape. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the tape seems to be unavailable for general consumption: academic institutions are the only places that got a copy, as far as I know, and I'm not even sure what the tape looks like. If I do ever find a copy, you will know about it.
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1 Okay, the Beat Takeshi thing was probably weird. I will eventually write something about that.
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