**1. Introduction**

An already established screenwriter, Shindo Kaneto (1912–2012) spent most of the 1950s struggling ¯ to make his name as a film director. After debuting with the autobiographical *Story of a Beloved Wife* (Aisai monogatari, 1951), he mostly worked as an independent, with brief stints of being hired by major studios. An amalgam of melodrama and social realism that soon became a defining feature of his works puzzled critics and it was not until the experimental semi-documentary, *The Naked Island* (Hadaka no shima, 1960), that he was able to gain a reputation for directing. Although this trend became clearer in his later work, from early on, Shindo sought ways to mix fiction and documentary ¯ styles, recording as well as reenacting, especially when making films based on true events.

In his influential study on 1950s Japan, Toba Koji characterized it as the age of ¯ *kiroku* (record, document). Toba (2010, p. 9) points out five closely related cultural phenomena that were part of the 'kiroku boom': amateur writing about everyday life, news reportage, documentary film, photography and *kamishibai* shows. This was also when young filmmakers such as Hani Susumu (1928) and Tsuchimoto Noriaki (1928–2008) joined Iwanami Productions (Iwanami Eiga), a major vessel for subsequent developments in Japanese documentary film. It is against this background that Shindo¯ began his long directing career that comprises both fiction and non-fiction works. The aim of this paper is to examine how and why Shindo employed a variety of documentary styles in his films, whether ¯ it was for attaining heightened realism, forging and reusing images of historical events, or pursuing a (self-)critique of the act of recording and reporting in visual media.
