This has been an interesting year for political cinema in Japan. First came Miki Dezaki's controversial documentary "Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women," which caused such a stir that it ended up playing at a Tokyo cinema for over six months.

Then Michihito Fujii scored an unlikely sleeper hit with "The Journalist," a scathing portrait of politics and media manipulation, loosely based on a book by the pugnacious Tokyo Shimbun reporter Isoko Mochizuki.

While the latter film proved there was a surprisingly large audience for broadsides against the current administration, as a depiction of journalism it was pretty flimsy. That's been rectified by the appearance of this companion documentary, once again produced by Mitsunobu Kawamura, who's clearly a man with an axe to grind.