Many directors hit everything from the books to the streets in preparation for their next film, but for his second feature, "Tabidachi no Shima Uta — Jugo no Haru (Leaving on the 15th Spring)," Yasuhiro Yoshida went far further than most — to one of Japan's most remote locations in fact — in traveling to tiny Minamidaito Island in Okinawa Prefecture. There he found the real-life models for the film he was planning about a teenage girl's last, momentous year before leaving the island for high school in Naha.
His inspiration, however, was a TV documentary spotlighting the island girls belonging a traditional music circle called Borojino.
"The documentary gave me a number of good moments that I constructed into a new film," Yoshida tells The Japan Times. "At the same time, I didn't feel that I was in some sort of competition with it and had to somehow surpass it."