An Academy Award nomination is a cause for celebration for anyone, but even more so in the Japanese film industry, where such international honors can be few and far between.
This year, Japan has multiple reasons to rejoice, as two Japanese documentary films, Shiori Ito’s “Black Box Diaries” and Ema Ryan Yamazaki’s “Instruments of a Beating Heart,” and one Japan-Korea animated co-production, Daisuke Nishio and Takashi Washio’s ”Magic Candies,” have been nominated for Academy Awards. Also, directors Ito and Yamazaki are the first Japanese to be up for Oscars in their respective categories, best documentary feature film and best documentary short film.
The nominations are particularly exciting for Tokyo-based Eric Nyari, who co-produced Ito’s feature and produced Yamazaki’s short film. Hailing from New York and son of the founder of Cineric, a leader in the field of film restoration and preservation, Nyari came to Japan when he was 21, and at age 28, produced his first film, the Atsushi Ogata comedy “Cast Me If You Can,” in 2009. He has since accumulated 40 producer credits, including Neo Sora’s 2024 sci-fi drama “Happyend,” which premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival, and “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus,” a 2023 documentary also directed by Sora, about the final solo piano performance by the famed musician and composer.
As president of Cineric Creative, Cineric’s international arm, Nyari has built the company into his production base together with wife and business partner Yamazaki, who helmed both “Instruments of a Beating Heart” and the feature documentary on which it is based, “The Making of a Japanese,” which tracks a year at a Tokyo elementary school.
Interviewed the day he was scheduled to fly to California to join Yamazaki on a shoot and then attend the Academy Awards ceremony on March 2, Nyari was in an upbeat mood. This was despite the recent controversy swirling around “Black Box Diaries,” journalist Ito’s personal documentary about her years-long battle to find justice following her sexual assault in a Tokyo hotel by a high-profile broadcast news executive in 2015. Ito won a civil lawsuit against her assailant.
Not long before Nyari and I met, three lawyers — two of whom had represented Ito in the civil lawsuit — appeared at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan (FCCJ) in Tokyo to explain what they viewed as lapses in her journalistic ethics in the making of the film, including the use of hotel security footage without authorization and the inclusion of two interviews without their subjects’ consent. The lawyers’ public criticism of “Black Box Diaries” has been an obstacle in getting the documentary shown in Ito’s home country, even though the film has been distributed in 57 countries and regions, with screenings at over 50 film festivals. A release date in Japan is still unconfirmed.
“I think (Ito) has had a very complicated relationship with (the lawyers) for years,” says Nyari at a coffee shop near his home in Tokyo’s Nezu neighborhood. Ito, he adds, had asked him to board “Black Box Diaries” as producer in 2020 when she was serving as cinematographer on “Temple Family,” a short film Yamazaki was making in Kyoto.
“(Shiori) grew up as an outsider in this society,” Nyari says. “She grew up in Japan, but from a very young age had a desire to go abroad and she was influenced by the world. So even though she's Japanese, her perspective is very international and very different, particularly on the issues that surround the film: sexual violence, the institutions around it, the laws.”
That difference led to her decision, backed by Nyari, to use security footage of her being dragged in a semi-conscious state from a taxi into the hotel by the perpetrator, despite Ito’s earlier assent to the hotel’s demand that it only be used for her court case. “We agreed with that (decision) on the basis of public interest and also fairness,” Nyari says.
“(The lawyers) believe that rules are rules and that the (footage) cannot be used outside the courtroom,” he continues. “But look at the circumstances under which Shiori had to sign a pledge with the hotel and pay them ¥450,000 to access the footage. What does that tell you about the power positionality between a luxury hotel and a young victim who they knew was dragged incapacitated through their lobby?”
When asked whether the controversy would hurt the film’s chances with Academy voters, Nyari answers in the negative. “The arguments of Shiori’s lawyers do not resonate internationally, particularly their arguments around the primary issue for them, which is the CCTV footage from the hotel.”
Ito canceled a scheduled Feb. 20 appearance at the FCCJ to present “Black Box Diaries” and tell her side of the story due to what were described as “health issues.” Ito released a statement, saying, “"I apologize to those whose consent was not obtained for the use of the footage,” and that she would re-edit part of the film so that “individuals cannot be identified.”
“She's been under a lot of stress,” says Nyari. “As you can see in the film, she's a very emotional person and a person who has ups and downs, and this is a particularly fragile period for her. But we are hoping that we'll be able to go back to FCCJ soon.”
Switching to a happier topic, “Instruments of a Beating Heart,” Nyari notes that the film, which is about a first-grader’s struggle to master a cymbal part for a school musical performance — and her triumph through her tears, “is more of a character driven film than ‘Making of a Japanese,’ which is about the institution, that is, the school.”
“I think we always knew the short would be viewed by many more people (than the feature),” he adds. “We knew it was going on the New York Times website and that it's a more accessible film. More so for a general audience, for sure.”
Nyari notes that Yamazaki spent nearly a decade on the entire project, from start to finish. “It took many, many years to get access to a public elementary school,” he explains. “She had been gathering materials for about five years in different ways before I joined the project. Then it took another three or four years, including editing the footage, shooting some additional scenes, doing the post-production and finally bringing the film to the world.”
The episode that inspired “Instruments of a Beating Heart,” Nyari explains, happened 10 months into a year-long shoot at the school featured in “Making of a Japanese.”
”It came out of nowhere, though we had been interested in the girl and had shot with her at times throughout the year,” he says. “Ema knew immediately it would be a standalone film. It was a miracle of this story unfolding and of us being in exactly the right position to capture it.”
Whether or not that miracle leads to an Oscar, Nyari is already onto his next project, a documentary about the diaries of filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, directed by the Academy Award-nominated Daniel Raim.
“I'm interested in a lot of different kinds of films,” Nyari says. “I don't think of it as though I should have a certain number of fiction films and a certain number of documentaries. Basically, if a project interests me and I feel like I can help it as a producer, I will try to find some way to be part of it.”
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