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Stephen McCarty

Ema Ryan Yamazaki has covered all manner of bases on her way to becoming a documentary maker. And not just any documentary maker.
Time and audience taste will tell, but arguably, Japan’s foremost meta-modernist chronicler is emerging.
It is a development that few would have predicted for a half-Japanese, half-British adopted New Yorker who “grew up watching Coronation Street, The Bill and EastEnders”.
Exactly how much Britain’s two favourite TV soap operas and a much loved police procedural series might have influenced Yamazaki’s latest feature-length documentary, The Making of a Japanese (2023), is debatable.

The film, which traces a year in the lives of Tokyo junior school pupils, will be available to stream in Hong Kong on Now TV’s documentary channel, Now True.
The Making of a Japanese, Yamazaki’s third major documentary, received its world premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival last autumn and is now on a world tour, with screenings everywhere from Thailand to the United States.
It did not have to travel far for its impact to register. The audience reaction at the premiere “was overwhelming and surprisingly emotional”, says Yamazaki from her home in Tokyo.


“People were crying at various points, feeling nostalgic for their childhoods and the education system they grew up with,” she says. “It was emotional for me, too. It’s been a long journey: I had the idea for the film 10 years ago.
“The Japanese school system is one of those things you take for granted and it gets a bad rap. There’s a lot of negativity around Japanese education and I understand its issues.
“But it’s the only system where we clean our own classrooms and serve each other lunch. These kids are learning responsibility at a young age – that’s something we should acknowledge and other countries can learn from.
“There’s also what could be changed, especially in modern times. People got what I was trying to do, which was a great feeling.”
Born in Kobe and raised by her Japanese mother and English father in Osaka, Yamazaki, 35, was exposed to the delights of British television “during many summers and Christmases in Bury, Greater Manchester, with my grandparents” as well as its classrooms.
“I went to school in Bury at five,” she says. “I was in [local newspaper] the Bury Times as ‘the Asian girl’.”

Yamazaki’s early education continued in Japan – and its importance would become clear when she left home to study documentary making and editing at New York University.
Not looking “like a traditional Japanese”, she says, she left Japan “at 19, thinking I might never live here again because I was so frustrated”.
“I wasn’t comfortably Japanese. I wanted to be, but it felt like no one was treating me that way, so I had a negative view and it took the next decade and a half to get here.
“I lived in New York for almost 10 years and came of age there, [but] now I’m comfortable with my relationship with Japan,” she says.
“I get that people won’t always see me as Japanese, especially with an American husband and a very white-looking child. But I’m enjoying redefining that and playing with expectations.
“That’s why the films I make about Japan are done in a way that maybe only I can: I know what it’s like to be in Japan but also how the outside world sees it, and what it takes to tell nuanced stories that aren’t about sushi and samurai.
“It took leaving here to appreciate day-to-day things: the trains being on time all the time, things being so clean and us having some sort of harmonious community, for better or worse. Japan took me on that journey; I’m so glad I have that.
“And looking back, the foundation of every part of me as a Japanese person was taught in those six years in elementary school.”

Yamazaki, who has worked extensively with national broadcaster NHK, is now researching her third Japan-centric documentary, which will star “the adults of Japan”.
“I want to feature a traditional company and explore its inner workings and generational shifts, using it to think about what’s happening in society,” she says.
“Japan is going through a reckoning of what traditions we keep and what we update as times change. Exploring that with people in different positions is what I’m interested in.”
That will make a trio of big-ticket documentaries about Yamazaki’s homeland: her first, Koshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams (2019), is an examination of Japaneseness filtered through the national obsession with baseball – which, for Yamazaki, curiously, is where it all began.
“I grew up a ridiculously intense fan of Ichiro Suzuki, the best player in Japan, who joined the Seattle Mariners in 2001. He was a pioneer. I read a book about him when I was at a very impressionable age,” she says, “and through him I learned about working hard and becoming the best at what you do.
“When he went to the US it gave me the idea to leave one day and pursue something – and ultimately I decided on film. I decided that was going to be my baseball.”


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Profile

Redefining what it means to be Japanese: filmmaker Ema Ryan Yamazaki on her life and work

A scene from The Making of a Japanese, which traces a year in the lives of Tokyo school pupils. It is filmmaker Ema Ryan Yamazaki’s third major documentary. Photo: Cineric Creative

Ema Ryan Yamazaki grew up watching British TV soap operas Coronation Street and EastEnders and police procedural series The Bill. Photo: Ema Ryan Yamazaki/Cineric Creative

Yamazaki on location. The Making of a Japanese received its world premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival last autumn. Photo: Eric Nyari/Cineric Creative

A scene from Koshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams. Photo: Cineric Creative

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Filmmaker Ines Sothea in Nepal, where she is working on a co-produced feature film. One of eight winners of funding at a recent film workshop in Macau, Ines Sothea has been used to self-funding her short films, which include Rice, about children under the Khmer Rouge. Photo: Deepenedra Gauchan

A still from Rice, Ines Sothea’s short film about boys in a Khmer Rouge camp who steal rice. Photo: YouTube/Tropfest SEA

A still from Life. Love. Bliss, a short film written and directed by Ines Sothea. Photo: Come together Films

A still from Life. Love. Bliss. Photo: Come together Films

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Hong Kong filmmaker Jo Chim in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. Photo: Antony Dickson

Hong Kong-born actress and filmmaker Jo Chim talks about hiding her Chinese side from school friends, being mean in Mean Girls and why she got invited to Nasa. Photo: Antony Dickson

Jo Chim and her mum in Ghana, West Africa. Her memories of the five years in Ghana are from the Super 8mm films her father shot. Photo: Jo Chim

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Chim visiting Beijing on her first trip. Photo: Jo Chim

A still from the short film One Small Visit, directed by Chim. Photo: Guy Bertrand

Chim in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. She moved back to Hong Kong in 2009 after living in Toronto with her husband, Guy Bertrand, from 2001. Photo: Antony Dickson

Chim wrote, directed and produced One Small Visit. Photo: Jo Chim

Salesman in China, which is being put on by Canada’s Stratford Festival, is a play about the historic staging of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in Beijing in 1983. Photo: Jo Chim

Her debut feature was a film festival darling. Mongolian director uses money from Macau win to make short film about home

Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir on the red carpet at the 20th Marrakech International Film Festival in Morocco. Photo: Getty Images

Shaman Ze (Tergel Bold-Erdene) in City Of Wind, directed by Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir. As one of eight directors chosen to receive US$38,400 each at a recent film camp in Macau, the Portugal-based Mongolian director is returning home to make a short film.

Shaman Ze (Tergel Bold-Erdene) in City Of Wind, directed by Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir, which won two awards at the 2023 Hong Kong Asian Film Festival and was Mongolia’s pick for the 2024 Oscars.

Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir on the red carpet at the 20th Marrakech International Film Festival in November 2023, where her film City of Wind was screened. Photo: Getty Images

Shaman Ze (Tergel Bold-Erdene) in City Of Wind, directed by Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir.

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Indian writer, actor and director Saurabh Shukla. Photo: Saurabh Shukla

Indian writer, actor and director Saurabh Shukla (left) performs in Barff, which he will bring to Hong Kong in June. He talks about being typecast for his large frame, and still feeling 22 at 60. Photo: Saurabh Shukla

Writer, and director Saurabh Shukla as a child. He was born in 1963 in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. Photo: Saurabh Shukla

Shukla (second right) in Delhi with friends. Photo: Saurabh Shukla

Shukla (right) in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1988. Photo: Saurabh Shukla

Shukla (right) performing in Barff. Photo: Saurabh Shukla

Last year, Shukla wrote and directed a feature film which is on Amazon. Photo: Saurabh Shukla

Shukla (left) will be in Hong Kong June 2024 with Barff. Photo: Saurabh Shukla

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Journalist, author and podcaster Hedley Thomas talks about his life and career. Photo: Justine Walpole

Journalist and author Hedley Thomas, whose investigations of cold-case murders of Australian women have delivered belated justice, tells Post Magazine about the power of podcasts for journalism. Photo: Justine Walpole

Hedley Thomas pins a medal onto his father, circa 1977. Photo: Hedley Robert Thomas

Thomas in 1987 at a murder scene when he was a reporter at the Gold Coast Bulletin. Photo: Hedley Thomas

Thomas and his wife-to-be Ruth Mathewson at the Hong Kong Press Club Ball in 1993. Photo: Hedley Thomas

Thomas and Mathewson getting married in 1995. Photo: Hedley Thomas

Thomas and his wife in Hong Kong in early 1999. Photo: Hedley Thomas

Thomas with his wife in 2007 in Queensland, Australia. Photo: Hedley Thomas

Thomas speaks to the media in Sydney, Australia on August 30, 2022, after Chris Dawson was found guilty of murdering his first wife in 1982. Photo: Getty Images

Thomas in Australia in 2023. He is working on a new podcast series called Bronwyn. Photo: Hedley Thomas

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Eurasian filmmaker Ema Ryan Yamazaki reveals how her outsider perspective on Japan informs her poignant, emotional documentaries


Eurasian filmmaker Ema Ryan Yamazaki reveals how her outsider perspective on Japan informs her poignant, emotional documentaries, and how baseball’s Ichiro Suzuki inspired her.


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.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}Eurasian filmmaker Ema Ryan Yamazaki reveals how her outsider perspective on Japan informs her poignant, emotional documentaries

Eurasian filmmaker Ema Ryan Yamazaki reveals how her outsider perspective on Japan informs her poignant, emotional documentaries