Ayukawa carver Chijimatsu Masayuki's family has crafted pieces from sperm whale teeth for three generations. Photo / Supplied
Film-maker Tu Neill talks to Joanna Wane about his sensitive portrait of the decline of a remote whaling community in Japan
There's an extraordinary sequence in Tu Neill's debut documentary where a Baird's beaked whale caught off the coast of Japan is hauled from the boat and into a factory for processing. First, the thick layer of blubber is removed, then the meat is sliced away, piece by piece, from the steaming carcass.
For five minutes — an eternity in film-making — there is no dialogue and no commentary as the men go about their business with skill, efficiency and what can only be described as respect. "It took about an hour to flense the whole thing," says Neill. "There was little to no waste. I think they used everything."
The observational approach taken by Neill and co-director Jim Speers in those scenes is typical of this quietly restrained and surprisingly moving documentary, Ayukawa: The Weight of a Life, which screens next week at the New Zealand International Film Festival. While the hunting and butchering of a whale is uncomfortable to watch, it's not designed to provoke disgust or outrage.
That lack of condemnation won't please some conservationists and animal-rights activists, although it should be noted that the Baird's beaked whale is officially rated as a species of "least concern". Only a handful of small commercial whaling companies still operate in Japan, which withdrew from the International Whaling Commission in 2019 after a 30-year moratorium.
"I don't condone whaling, but my opinion doesn't hold a lot of weight," says Neill. "It's easy for me to take that position because I have no connection to it. It's not part of my livelihood or my culture. It's not something I grew up with. Once I got there, I realised how little I knew about something I'd felt so strongly about.
"In many ways, this is a global story about small towns built around industries the world doesn't want anymore. The environmental win [through the moratorium] obviously takes precedence and it's important, but there's still a human cost and some empathy should be shown for those people."
A remote coastal community in the northeast of Japan, Ayukawa flourished in the early 1900s when Norwegian whale gunners began plundering its waters. The Japanese proved to be quick learners. By the 50s and 60s, the town's population had grown to 12,000.
Today, it is almost abandoned. About 150 people remain, many of them elderly — poignantly stoic in the face of both an economic collapse and the devastating 2011 tsunami that destroyed hundreds of homes here and took 11 lives. Among those who share their story in the documentary is a local carver, Chijimatsu Masayuki, whose family has been making hanko (personal seals) and other precious items from sperm-whale teeth for three generations. He lost both his house and his studio to the floodwater.
Based in London for the past 10 years, Neill is a graduate of Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts, where Jim Speers, an associate professor, was one of his tutors. His father, Michael Neill, is an emeritus professor of English at the university, and his mother, Makere Rapana (Ngāpuhi), is a retired high-school teacher.
When we talk via Zoom, he's nursing a couple of cracked ribs at his home in Highbury after falling off his bike (he ran into a kerb) and had recently caught up with his uncle, actor Sam Neill, for dinner. After a long lockdown in London and the constraints of New Zealand's MIQ requirements, he says it was good to spend time with family. Professionally, though, the two inhabit separate worlds. "I think Sam's proud of what I'm doing, but he's just in a different league."
To prepare for our interview, I'd stalked Neill on Vimeo, spotting a young Clarke Gayford in an early shoot for George FM. It's an eclectic portfolio, ranging from a music video for English indie band The Veils conceived as a B-grade horror film (lead singer Finn Andrews composed the music for Ayukawa) to a series of mini-docs portraying contemporary Africa.
His first experience filming in Japan was in 2014 for a series called Diggin' in the Carts on Japanese video game music. For Ayukawa, he brought on board a close friend from Elam, Kentaro Yamada, who moved to New Zealand from Japan as a teenager; now based in London too, he co-wrote and co-produced the documentary, with Neill's wife, Jenna Bowden, joining the team as editor.
"We ran out of money about two weeks into the edit, but she'll get paid eventually," says Neill, who supplemented his own income during lockdown by collaborating with Yamada on his unisex perfume brand, Neandertal.
Despite some initial hostility from those suspicious of the documentary's intentions, the project was backed by Japan's Ministry of Fisheries and the residents themselves were open and welcoming. The film's subtitle, "the weight of a life", is drawn from an observation made on-screen by a Buddhist priest, referring to the relative value humans give to other species.
Neill says Japan views its condemnation by the world as hypocritical when the whaling industry was exploited by so many other countries, including New Zealand, and modern farming practices leave much to be desired. Modern tastes may have changed but after World War II, a severe food shortage in Japan meant much of the population relied on whale meat to survive. "In the West, we were basically killing them to render their fat to make oil."
Interestingly, he sees similarities between the Japanese and the Māori worldview, which share a nuanced relationship with the natural world. A word commonly used in Japan, "itadakimasu", means to give thanks for the life taken. "It may be a moral grey zone but a lot of the people we talked to genuinely love whales as creatures," says Neill. "But they love eating them too."
Okumi Ryouetsu has been flensing whales in Ayukawa for almost six decades, a trade he describes as an art form. At his kitchen table, he dips a slice of minke sashimi into some soy sauce with his chopsticks and pops it into his mouth. "Delicious," he says.
Ayukawa: The Weight of a Life (Japanese with English subtitles) had its world premiere at the Vancouver Film Festival last month and screens in Wellington on November 19 and 21 (nziff.co.nz).
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