Japan ranks 120th among 156 countries in the 2021 gender gap report, while gender and economic inequalities have become increasingly acute, under the essentially permanent ruling of the Liberal Democratic Party. Takashi Nishihara, who has been following the youth protests in Japan, notices that there is one party talking about these issues, the country's oldest actually, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP). As such, he decided to follow a number of the party's members during their political campaign, in order to shed light on the proceedings, the history and the goals of the party as a whole and the particular individuals.
One Hundred Years and Hope is screening at International Film Festival Rotterdam
The result is quite thorough, if a bit dry due to the fact that interviews take the bulk of the movie's duration, documentary, which achieves both the aforementioned goal and highlighting a number of the issues Japan faces nowadays. The consequences of the holding of the Olympics during the pandemic, the fact that voters who go to the ballots become less and less, the lack of women in decision-making bodies, the exploitation of young girls who abandon their house and end up in various levels of prostitution, the fact that women still cannot hold to their family name when they marry, are just some of the issues presented here, championed by the members of JCP.
Furthermore, NIshihara also interviews veteran member Tsutomu Kimura, who sheds much light to the history of the Party while trying to move beyond the misconception that their main goal is still armed resistance, which seems to be one of the main reasons conservative voters do not vote for JCP. Another focus is Shimbun Akahata, the daily newspaper of the JCP and one of its main sources of income, with the introduction of new employees being one of the most interesting parts of the film, also due to showing how a newspaper in Japan works.
Also of note is the fact that, apart from the campaigns of the particular members, Nishihara reserves some space on how LDP candidates work in that regard, while a young activist who supports a female member of JCP, also comments on how even they, are still male-oriented, at least in their higher echelons. The approach is quite welcome, as it allows the movie to unfold as something very different than an eulogy.
Furthermore, there is also a rather dramatic hypostasis to the whole movie. As we watch a member campaigning under heavy snow when no one is around, a female member failing to get elected one more time and trying to be strong for the people who voted her (Saori Ikeuchi, who emerges as the “protagonist”), and finally, the stats that show how few of the party's candidates manage to get elected in the end, their efforts emerge somewhere among the dramatic, the futile, and the heroic, in one of the most appealing aspects of the documentary.
As such, in the end, and despite the aforementioned “dryness” and the fact that the documentary could have been a bit briefer than the 107 minutes of its duration, “One Hundred Years and Hope” emerges as a rather appealing documentary that sheds a very thorough and very objective light to both JCP, and the sociopolitical environment of current Japan.
