‘Okinawa Saudade’ Director Matsubayashi Yoju on a 10-Year Journey Tracing Brazilian Dancers’ Island Roots

Exploring the relationship between people and place, new documentary “Okinawa Saudade,” playing at the 39th Tokyo International Film Festival as part of its Nippon Cinema Now selection, was born from director Matsubayashi Yoju’s time with a Brazilian community of Okinawan immigrants some 10 years ago.

The film zooms in on the latest generation of Okinawan immigrant families: Yumi, a young dancer of Ryukyu Buyo, Okinawa’s classical dance, and Everton, who teaches Eisa, the island’s drum-led festival dance, in Brazil. The two travel to Okinawa on an exchange trip to learn about the island’s history and culture.

“In 2016 I had the opportunity to live 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.,” Matsubayashi says. “That’s when I actually found out about the forced relocation of Japanese Brazilians in Santos in Brazil.”

That wartime relocation, in which some 60% of the Japanese immigrants forced out were from Okinawa, became the focus of Matsubayashi’s 2020 documentary “Okinawa/Santos.”

“After that, I was exposed to the Urizunkai,” he says. “This is the Brazilian Okinawa community there, and so I happened to get to know them, and then I found out that they are sending Okinawa Brazilians to Okinawa for training and scholarship. So that’s actually the starting point of the project.”

The Bunkyo, a cultural facility in São Paulo’s Liberdade district, a neighborhood with a particularly high concentration of Japanese immigrants, kept a vast and detailed library of immigrant documents in Portuguese and Japanese. It was an invaluable resource for Matsubayashi’s research, but the director also found inspiration in the sheer quantity of material, rather than just the data itself.

“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 that the Okinawans left a lot of records of themselves. I was really amazed at that vast amount of information that the Okinawans wanted to keep.”

While making the 2020 film, Matsubayashi says, he was still an outsider, not being from Okinawa himself, but he became embedded in the community while filming interviews, and those interviews led to a deeper connection.

“‘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,” the director 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,’” he says. “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.”

The Okinawan Brazilians treated him as one of their own, he adds.

By 2024, Matsubayashi had heard that the Brazilian government would give the victims of the forced relocation a form of official apology that July, and that Okinawan Brazilians might receive scholarships for an exchange program, with training in September. The timing worked out. Brazil’s Amnesty Commission formally apologized that July for the state’s post-World War II persecution of Japanese immigrants.

Matsubayashi built the film around a search for one’s roots, and chose to tell it through Okinawan dance. He draws a distinction between the dance in its “traditional” forms in Okinawa and the “Creative” forms that emerged later.

“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. “One difference between the traditional and the Creative Eisa is that [in] traditional Eisa you would use the sanshin musical instrument, and you would sing as well as dance. But with Creative Eisa, you don’t need to have the sanshin.”

“I think this is a film that’s done in a first person perspective: of Yumi, Everton, and myself. I am also in the film asking [myself], ‘Who am I, what kind of person am I?’ So it’s three people trying to ask that question in the film,” the director says.

It’s a rather intimate point of view for following his subjects as they navigate these cultural nuances.

“In my other films too, you can hear my voice or you can maybe see one or two shots of myself, but not too many,” he says.

“This film, ‘Okinawa Saudade,’ it’s more of a film about dancing – dancing means that there’s more emotion involved. I think ‘Okinawa/Santos,’ that one was more about putting together different testimonials, and so that’s a big difference there,” Matsubayashi says.

He suggests the subject let him lean further into a more subjective kind of filmmaking.

Matsubayashi says that with “Okinawa/Santos,” he was able to work on TV programs for NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster. “Once you do that, you get about JPY10 million [$63,000] for that, and then I would use that money to create my next film, so that would have been my cycle,” he says. “However, I guess because of the weak currency and because they don’t have a big budget anymore, [NHK is] struggling as well.”

That has hit his own finances.

“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,’” he says. “So I can say that Japanese documentaries, we’re going through a lot of difficult circumstances right now.”