Shinzo Abe has been with us for so long now, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when Japan’s premiership seemed to rotate as frequently as the membership of AKB48.
Junya Ogawa was one young hopeful who thought he had a shot at the top. On paper, he looked like a solid prospect: a fresh-faced idealist who combined big-picture thinking with a strong grasp of detail, borne of his previous vocation as a bureaucrat.
In “Why You Can’t Be Prime Minister,” filmmaker Arata Oshima follows him over a 17-year period that feels like a marathon test of faith. An early scene of Ogawa delivering his stump speech to an empty rice paddy, without any obvious audience within earshot, sets the tone for the purgatory to come.