The remarkable and provocative documentary filmmaking collective NDU (Nihon Documentarist Union) was active between 1968 and 1973, born from Japan’s radical student movement and the “season of politics.” NDU fought out very public and contentious debates with established intellectuals and filmmakers—documentary legend Ogawa Shinsuke among them—and their films generated great attention and controversy, yet they were for a long time not included in canonical film histories, partially due having burned too many bridges with the leftist orthodoxy at the time. Yet at a 1970s moment when Japanese documentary cinema was seen as turning inward towards the highly personal self-documentary or rural self-examination, NDU and its most prominent member Nunokawa Tetsuro went to Okinawa, Taiwan, South Korea, Southeast Asia and Palestine, intent on facing the world as much as Japan’s role within it.

The astonishing journey in Asia is One begins with former colonial subjects that worked in Okinawan coal mines and remained there after the war, but eventually follows a group of smugglers to Taiwan and a perplexing discovery among the Atayal indigenous tribe in the Taiwanese mountains. Conceiving of Asia not as a set of discrete nations but a profoundly entangled space of flows—geographically as much as between the past and the present—the film maps the deeply complex and often sensationally contradictory legacies of Japan’s colonial history. Shooting began just before the “reversion” of Okinawa to Japan and several NDU members had to enter Okinawa illegally, as their leftist activism would have barred them from obtaining visas.