Three young people take the dance floor in a club. Slightly intoxicated, their gestures are awkward at times but always joyous with a palpable sense of gleeful content. This scene from And Your Bird Can Sing (2018) is one that encapsulates the control Japanese director Sho Miyake is able to hold over the temperature between people who enjoy the company of one another. No other agendas interfere with this shared moment. Tensions percolate later but never reach boiling point. While often criticised for being hopelessly lost, Japanese youth in Miyake’s cinema are tuned into the place and moment they share. Their end goal might be nowhere in sight, but each gesture is effortlessly made in response to one another: a friendship predicated on mutual respect and understanding at its foundation.
Courtesy of SAKKA
Ever since breaking into the international film festival circuit with his sophomore feature Playback (2012), Miyake has shown his peers that the new generation of Japanese indepen-dent cinema need not rely on displays of heightened emotion that curse much of the mainstream in their national cinema. Instead, Miyake shows changes in mood or shifts in relationships often happen over time and almost go unnoticed. Often setting his films in Hokkaido, the northernmost island where he spent his own youth, Miyake also stands apart in his commitment to exploring the potential for drama in everyday quietude. Even his boxing drama Small, Slow but Steady (2022) expresses turmoil with resolute calm, with its Deaf protagonist shaking off her frustrations before she stands in the ring. At a time when bold gestures are overly celebrated in cinema, Miyake’s delicate depictions of relationships are refreshing in their unwavering serenity.
Julian Ross: My impression is that you are more interested in exploring friendships than romantic or family relationships in your films.
Sho Miyake: Unlike other relationships, friendship doesn’t have a clear start or end. Nobody says, ‘let’s be friends now’ or ‘let’s stop being friends now.’ The relationship I have with each person is entirely unique, even though many of these relationships would be referred to as friendships. The appeal of depicting individual relationships that escape such simple framings might be what interests me in friendships.
Julian: Friendships are also less defined in terms of space, which might be another reason they’re explored less in films compared with romantic or familial relationships. Romance and families have clear settings like the bedroom or the dining room, but friendships cut across such defined spaces and can exist in different settings. When you start putting together ideas for your films, do you begin with the setting or a constellation of friends?
Sho: I think the characters’ personalities and the setting are two important aspects of my films. I might be interested in depicting something broader than just friendship, like a community unrelated to family, state or romance. How do such communities come to exist? How are they maintained? And why might they disappear? To portray that, the characters’ personalities and where they live are crucial starting points.
Julian: In your film And Your Bird Can Sing, two young men, who are not a couple, live together in the same apartment. This is still considered a rare living arrangement in Japan, and in the film it becomes a way to show how much at ease these two characters are with each other. And Your Bird Can Sing feels like it begins as a romance but drifts away to become a story of friendship. Was that the reason you were drawn to this story?
Sho: Rather than feelings of jealousy or vanity or lies or games, I wanted to capture the time, pleasure and happiness shared between three individuals.
Julian: All the Long Nights (2024) also becomes a story of friendship that mostly avoids drama. The film offers us the ingredients of potential conflict but ends up exploring a world where such conflicts don’t materialise. Many feature films tend to develop their story around a conflict and, eventually as the story unravels, this problem is resolved. In your films, you avoid this path and focus on depicting happiness.
Sho: There are many problems in the world, and films that address these issues are necessary. But the more urgent and critical the societal problem, the more I wonder whether making a film is the right way to respond to it. I think there is a limit to what cinema can do. Films take time, money and labour, and aren’t immediately useful. In that sense, the problems that films can handle are somewhat limited. Rather than trying to address all these issues in my filmmaking, my focus has been to build relationships through filmmaking despite these problems. Although it might sound a bit stiff, what I’m trying to create is an environment where people, like the actors, can feel at ease with one another and enjoy themselves.
Julian: Friendship seems to exist in a different temporality than other relationships. As you said, it’s unclear when it starts or ends: friendships lack a clear timeline. Do you find this challenging?
Sho: I do think it’s a challenge. As you said, conflicts and relationships falling apart are things that films are good at depicting. Stories about overcoming obstacles are also well suited for films and have been made many times. To put it bluntly, since there are already plenty of those stories that exist, I want to challenge myself to do something different. Also, on an emotional level, we face enough difficulties in our own lives. So, at least in my films, I want to offer something else and a different emotional register.
Julian: In romantic relationships, phys-ical touch clarifies the relationship, but touch doesn’t have the same meaning in friendships. I found this particularly intriguing in And Your Bird Can Sing, where the lines between friendship and romance become blurred.
Sho: The boundary between friendship and love is deliberately kept ambiguous in And Your Bird Can Sing. We didn’t define it ourselves on set either; we focused on making each scene honest and keeping the actors comfortable with their physical presence. In the case of All the Long Nights, it was clear from the beginning that the relationship between the two main characters was not romantic, but instead their relationship was based purely on friendship and respect. This made the use of physical actions in the film more direct without being caught up in meaning. An act like handing over a blanket could be interpreted as romantic, but in this film it is simply an act of generosity with no ulterior motive. It is an act in and of itself; there are no other expectations or desires beyond it. This type of interaction is what makes friendships enjoyable to depict and gives them a special kind of depth. We learned a lot about this during filming.
Julian: In All the Long Nights an unlikely friendship develops between Misa, who has PMS that results in sudden shifts in personality, and Takatoshi, who has an anxiety disorder. Both are unable to control their bodies, but they’re colleagues in a Japanese office, where social rules and unwritten codes of behaviour exist. Although their workplace is an inclusive and warm environment, I still felt tension in moments of their uncontrollable outbursts.
Sho: As you said, especially for the younger generation about to enter the workforce, the societal and institutional constraints in Japan feel very restrictive. The more prestigious the job, the more necessary it becomes to align yourself with a pre-existing system. This internalised belief burdens individuals who aren’t able to control their emotions, such as the characters in All the Long Nights, and they end up blaming themselves. I realised that such individuals apologise on reflex, saying ‘I’m sorry’ even when it’s not their fault. It is not Takatoshi’s fault he has an anxiety disorder, but he can’t help but apologise when he experiences moments of distress. This automatic apology feels distinctly Japanese, like an invisible cage compelling them to say ‘sorry.’
Small, Slow but Steady. Courtesy of ‘Keiko me wo sumasete’ Production Committee & Comme des Cinémas
Julian: It is not exactly a ‘cage,’ but your documentary The Cockpit (2015) is almost entirely set in one small apartment over a few days while hip-hop musicians write a song. In this film you capture something specific to creative collaborations: an exchange of ideas between peers who exist on the same wavelength. The musicians who feature in the film – OMSB and Hi’Spec – are well known in the Japanese hip-hop scene, and they’ve made soundtracks to your films and featured in a number of them, most memorably in the club scene in And Your Bird Can Sing. You’ve also made music videos for them. In The Cockpit they’re in pursuit of one goal, but it feels like a moving target, even though they intuitively know whether they’re going in the right direction. It’s hard to explain in words, but when the music clicks and feels right, the temperature changes in the room and you can see it in their expressions. What led you to make this film about the creative process of writing a song?
Sho: The Aichi Arts Centre makes annual commissions of films on the theme of ‘the body,’ an initiative that has been ongoing since the late 1980s. Initially, I didn’t quite understand the theme of ‘body’ and was simply motivated by wanting to work with my favourite artists. As I was watching their live performances, both rapping and DJing, I began to realise that making music and being creative with your body are rooted in fundamentally the same thing. Before this I was a fan of hip-hop but I had no idea how musicians created their tracks. Nowadays, musicians have the option to make music in software using a mouse and a keyboard. When hip-hop artists use MPC workstations, however, they use their bodies: the motion of their shoulders and neck creates rhythms that are unique to their bodies. In such a way, the music is embodied. So I ended up responding directly to the theme of ‘the body.’ The commission only asked me to make a work of around ten minutes, which is what we were aiming for, but I ended up making a sixty-minute film because I found the physicality so fascinating.
Julian: Although we spend most of the film in the apartment, you end it with scenery shot from the windows of a moving train. This is the moment when we hear the full track for the first time. This moment seems to sharply contrast with the earlier scenes and feels like a moment of release.
Sho: That was somewhat coincidental. Similarly to how they create music with their bodies, I tried matching the footage intuitively, and it just felt right. It was a perfect alignment: the feeling of liberation when listening to the finished music and bursting out of the cramped apartment. It wasn’t a decision I thought through but was rather something that happened instinctually, a bit like how the music was made. We can plan things but ultimately it depends on whether our bodies feel it. When working with actors, for example, each one has a different physical presence, and how they feel and interpret the direction is something we can only discover through working together and trying things out. The editing process on a computer also involves responding to trial and error. Testing things, and really giving something a fair attempt, is crucial for me.
Julian: Many of your films are shot in Hokkaido, the northernmost island in Japan, which is where you grew up. However, you depict different sides of Hokkaido. In Good for Nothing (2010) and Playback (2012) you film in rural areas, but you set And Your Bird Can Sing in Hakodate, which is much more urban. What does filming in Hokkaido mean to you, and is there anything you can capture in Hokkaido that you can’t do elsewhere?
Sho: Being the largest prefecture in Japan, Hokkaido varies greatly from north to south or east to west, making it hard to generalise. Shooting in Hokkaido made me realise how different the light can be in every city. Sapporo and Tokyo are at different latitudes, so the light is different. Even within Hokkaido, the atmosphere and the wind feel different on a flat field or in a port town. This realisation heightened my sensitivity to local climates. The significance of filming in Hokkaido varies depending on the project, but, being from Hokkaido, one thing I can say is that I think I see Tokyo differently. When I visit Honshu, I see an unfamiliar landscape, even though I’m from Japan.
Julian: What were your first impressions of Tokyo, and have they ever influenced your filmmaking?
Sho: What I first noticed was the presence of centuries-old history right in front of my eyes that I had only read about in school textbooks. In Honshu, history still exists in a palpable way, and people are living within and among history, in a way that unfortunately is no longer the case in Hokkaido. It was a new experience for me to stand somewhere and really feel the sense of history that passed through it. Of course, it’s even more the case in Europe where buildings remain intact far longer than in Japan. When I shoot in Tokyo, I am attracted to the tangible experience of history in the present day and landscapes that retain some memory of pre-war or immediate post-war times, rather than the urban developments of the post-bubble era.
Julian: The Courier (2016) is your only period drama (jidaigeki). It is set in the Edo period, during the time of Japan’s isolation from the rest of the world. In this film you seem to feature more sounds of breathing than dialogue or conversation. In period dramas there is usually a distinct style of delivery for lines of dialogue, which I felt you were avoiding. The music is also very contemporary, which shrinks the gap in time between the Edo period and today, giving us a palpable sense of being there despite the unfamiliar setting. What drew you to making a period drama set in the Edo period, and how did you decide on the approach?
Sho: Initially I wasn’t very interested in period dramas. I couldn’t shake the feeling that period dramas told the history of Honshu, and these stories were often of power struggles, which were human relationships I didn’t quite understand. It felt like a world I had nothing to do with. But when a producer challenged me to create a new kind of period drama, I took this prompt seriously. What sparked my imagination was the idea of living in a time without mobile phones and electricity; I was interested in how people lived in and among nature. I was stimulated by imagining their sense of the world. For example, what would a farmer in a remote region be feeling when he was suddenly informed that an ‘enemy’ was arriving from elsewhere? He probably wouldn’t know what to look out for. The history of Japan’s isolation from the rest of the world was also mysterious to me. If I had been born in that time and learned there were other countries, I probably would’ve wanted to know what lay beyond the seas. I would’ve wanted to go out and meet these people. For some reason there aren’t many period dramas dealing with these subjects. For me, the two key themes of this film were the relationship between nature and humans and trying to break out of this feeling of confinement.
Regarding the lack of dialogue, I’ve found films can be interesting without dialogue. I wanted to try that out. Even with a small budget, I saw it as a chance to create a film that tells a story through action. I also challenged myself to step outside of the traditional rules of period dramas.
Julian: In Small, Slow but Steady you feature communication through body language, like sign language and boxing, as the film’s main character Keiko is Deaf. Can you talk about your interest in non-verbal communication and how you prepared for this film?
Sho: I learned a lot about non-verbal communication from my experiences watching films. While working on this film I communicated with sign language users and the Deaf community. Although I don’t use sign language myself, I communicated through interpreters, and I felt that eye contact, gestures and body language helped build trust. The camera is well suited for capturing such interactions. Preparation for this film involved three main things: boxing training with the actors, learning about sign language through communication with and through sign language users, and studying silent films to understand how to tell a story through body language and shots.
Julian: The squeaking sound of shoes in the boxing gym and the sound of a punch against a punching bag create a unique sense of rhythm in this film.
Sho: Yes, the boxing gym is filled with all sorts of sounds, which can be noisy but also rhythmic, and once controlled they become something like a musical. Boxing training, especially with a partner, resembles a dance: the punches are rhythmic, and there’s a sense of trust between the partners. The main character of the film is Deaf, but the majority of people who will watch the film aren’t. Since the main character of the film is Deaf, it was important for me to stimulate a sense of awareness in the hearing audience that they can hear. One way to do this might be to switch off the sound of a film and experience it without it, but that felt too simple to me. I resisted making the film completely silent, as Deafness is not the same as complete silence, so instead I aimed to use strong rhythms and sounds to draw the audience gradually into Keiko’s world.
Julian: Speaking of non-verbal com-munication, you made a video series called Diaries Without Words (2014–18). What prompted you to make this series and continue over the years?
Sho: I was invited by Yasuhito Higuchi, a Japanese film critic who runs an online magazine called boid to create a video diary. I started it quite casually. I never had a habit of making a video diary, and when I started I was never sure why anybody would be interested in seeing it. But I forced myself to continue, and I found out many things along the way. One significant discovery for me was realising how much I normally overlook. While walking I had never paid attention to alleyways or flowers blooming on the street. But through the camera lens I noticed small things that began to fascinate me. Creating something daily also positively impacted my mental health. Making a film is something that happens once a year if you’re lucky. With this video diary, I was creating something more regular, like the musicians in The Cockpit practising their instruments every morning. The video diary method satisfied this urge to create something, even if it’s small, on a daily basis.
…we discovered how deeply memories are tied to the body…
Julian: Watching your film Playback I was thinking about how memories aren’t something that only exists in our head but are also felt in the body. In the film, a man, Haji, returns to his hometown and finds himself, or at least his mind, drifting back to his youth. This embodiment of memory is most directly evoked in the scene where he finds himself and his group of friends in school uniforms but in adult bodies. Your mind may forget but the body remembers, a bit like with cycling and swimming.
Sho: Linking Playback with body memory is a fresh perspective. I’d have to be honest and say it’s not something I was conscious of pursuing before making the film. I was working with professional actors for the first time. Working together on a film dealing with memory, I feel like we discovered how deeply memories are tied to the body through the making of this film. For example, Jun Murakami, who plays Haji, had been an avid skateboarder in his youth but had stopped for twenty years. He picked up a skateboard for the first time in two decades for the film and discovered his body remembered how to skate, which also reawakened his skater mindset. Through working with actors I saw how actions and interactions with objects could reveal new aspects of their personalities.
Julian: The Japanese critic Shigehiko Hasumi has recently received a lot of attention in English-language film circles due to the recent English translation (2024) of his book Directed by Yasujiro Ozu (1983). Seeing that you’ve collaborated with him, I wanted to ask what your relationship with Hasumi is and how it began.
Sho: The first time I saw him in person was when he was in an on-stage conversation with a film director, where he was asking the director about the process of capturing the moment someone starts dancing in a film. This prompt greatly stimulated my imagination. Hasumi was critical of this director for avoiding this moment, and instead cutting into the scene when they’re already dancing. He felt the director had failed to capture the precise moment when a body transitions into dance – which made me want to capture this moment in my films. I was impressed by his observation and wanted to find out what kind of criticism he writes, so I began to read his work, including Directed by Yasujiro Ozu. His film criticism opened the door to the fascinating world of cinema for me. Living in Hokkaido, I couldn’t access many films, so reading his criticism allowed me to imagine the films. Later, I had the privilege of working with him on a sixty-minute video project based on his book on John Ford. Through this collaboration I got to experience his deep love for cinema. He has been a significant influence on me.
Playback. Courtesy of Decade, Pigdom
Julian: Do you feel you have been able to capture this moment of transition into dance?
Sho: In a way, yes. At least I feel I came close to it in And Your Bird Can Sing. But Hasumi’s prompt is relevant to many other things, not just dancing. It can apply to any moment of physical intimacy, like two people moving towards one another for a kiss. I feel like I learned it is a director’s job to collapse this distance between people in a natural way. With other arts, such as painting or still photography, this shift can only be captured if there are two images. But cinema can capture these moments of transition. Hasumi taught me that this is the potential of cinema.