Okinawa Saudade Director Traces a Decade of Dance and Diaspora

Director Matsubayashi Yoju spent 10 years building the relationships behind "Okinawa Saudade," a documentary screening at the 39th Tokyo International Film Festival in its Nippon Cinema Now section. The film follows Yumi, a young performer of Ryukyu Buyo — Okinawa's classical dance — and Everton, who teaches Eisa, the island's drum-led festival dance, in Brazil, as the two travel to Okinawa on a community exchange trip to study the island's history and culture.

Where did the film begin?

Matsubayashi traces the project to 2016, when he lived in Brazil for one year. "At the time I was trying to work on this other project about Fukushima, but it wasn't going well so I just decided to, you know, lay back and just have beers in the morning, etc.," he says. "That's when I actually found out about the forced relocation of Japanese Brazilians in Santos in Brazil."

That wartime relocation shaped his 2020 documentary "Okinawa/Santos." Some 60% of the Japanese immigrants forced out were from Okinawa. The Urizunkai, the Brazilian Okinawa community he encountered next, sends Okinawan Brazilians to Okinawa for training and scholarships — the starting point of the new film.

Research took him to the Bunkyo, a cultural facility in São Paulo's Liberdade district, a neighborhood with a high concentration of Japanese immigrants. Its library holds immigrant documents in Portuguese and Japanese. "There's a lot of documents for [immigrants] from the [other] 46 prefectures," Matsubayashi says. The Okinawan records, he adds, came to almost the same volume — meaning Okinawans, from a single prefecture, left nearly as many records as the rest of Japan combined. "I was really amazed at that vast amount of information that the Okinawans wanted to keep."

How did trust change the filmmaking?

While making "Okinawa/Santos," Matsubayashi was an outsider; he is not from Okinawa. Interviews changed that. "'Ichariba choodee,' that's a [saying] in Okinawan dialect that means that [you are like] brother and sister, which [is how] they considered me once I interviewed them," he says.

The community reciprocated practically. "When you're there shooting you would need to get a coordinator, you need to get a driver, but I didn't have to do that because they all arranged everything for me, and they worked as volunteers," he says. "I think that if I hadn't developed 'Okinawa/Santos' as a film, I wouldn't be able to have this film 'Okinawa Saudade.'"

What changed in 2024?

By 2024, Matsubayashi heard the Brazilian government would formally apologize that July to victims of the forced relocation, and that Okinawan Brazilians might receive exchange-program scholarships with training in September. Brazil's Amnesty Commission delivered the official apology in July 2024 for the state's post-World War II persecution of Japanese immigrants. The timing shaped the film's structure.

Why tell the story through dance?

Matsubayashi distinguishes "traditional" Eisa from "Creative" Eisa. "What we call the 'Creative Eisa' in Brazil, that started about 45 years ago, so I would think that they can say theirs is a tradition as well," he says. Traditional Eisa uses the sanshin instrument and involves singing as well as dancing; Creative Eisa requires neither.

The film uses a first-person structure. "It's three people trying to ask that question in the film," the director says — Yumi, Everton and himself. "I am also in the film asking [myself], 'Who am I, what kind of person am I?'" His earlier films kept him mostly offscreen; here dance pushed him toward emotion and subjectivity, unlike "Okinawa/Santos," which he describes as "more about putting together different testimonials."

Who pays for Japanese documentaries?

Funding has become precarious. Work on "Okinawa/Santos" led to NHK television programs, which paid about JPY10 million ($63,000) each — enough to finance his next film. "However, I guess because of the weak currency and because they don't have a big budget anymore, [NHK is] struggling as well," he says. "And if I didn't have a grant from the Okinawa Prefecture, I wouldn't be able to have done post-pro on 'Okinawa Saudade.' So I can say that Japanese documentaries, we're going through a lot of difficult circumstances right now."

The takeaway in plain words: regional grants, not broadcasters, now keep independent Japanese documentary alive — and "Okinawa Saudade" owes its existence to a decade of earned trust.