Kazuo Hara became famous — some would say notorious — for the documentaries he made about individuals who defied Japanese social norms and laws.
One such individual was Kenzo Okuzaki, the subject of Hara's 1987 film "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On." A veteran of the Imperial Japanese Army's disastrous New Guinea campaign in World War II, Okuzaki relentlessly tracked down fellow survivors with information about the executions of two privates, ostensibly for desertion, shortly after Japan's surrender. In the film's climax, Okuzaki violently attacks a former sergeant who, as Hara's camera records every punch, kick and groan, confesses that he and others killed and ate fellow soldiers.
Speaking to The Japan Times, the 72-year-old Hara says that he stopped making documentaries for nearly 14 years after the release of "A Dedicated Life," his 1994 film about iconoclastic novelist Mitsuharu Inoue, because he had basically run out of material.
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