A native of Tochigi Prefecture and a graduate of the University of Tokyo, where he majored in religious studies, Kazuhiro Soda took an early turn off a conventional career path when he went to New York in 1993 to study filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts. After a stab at fiction filmmaking, which won him prizes but not many job offers, he began working on documentaries to pay the rent — and discovered a new vocation.
But this admirer of Frederick Wiseman — a pioneering American documentary filmmaker whose observational style did away with talking heads, voice-over narration and background music — was never going to be happy grinding out documentaries for NHK, for whom such methods were de rigueur. After making more than 40 programs for the public broadcaster, Soda decided to strike out on his own.
He found a subject in a former University of Tokyo classmate named Kazuhiko Yamauchi, who was running for Kawasaki city council under the banner of the Liberal Democratic Party in 2005. Soda followed Yamauchi with his camera for two weeks, recording this coin and stamp dealer with no previous political experience being schooled in the arcane rituals of Japanese politics, including the prescribed way to shout his name to passersby. The resulting documentary, "Senkyo (Campaign)," was both funny (Yamauchi being something of a natural, if not always intentional, comedian) and revealing of the election process here in ways that TV news shows and documentaries, focused on winners and losers, rarely are.