* 2021 Openbook Award
Documentary filmmaker Huang Yin-Yu beautifully narrates the behind-the-scenes story of the seven years spent planning, coordinating, filming, and producing the documentary Green Jail. Follow the author’s journey in bringing this compelling, little-known corner of history from drawing table to finished documentary film.
Iriomote in Japan’s southern Okinawa Island chain is covered in dense Amazon-esque forest. Few remember now, but, before the war, this island was home to a notorious mining operation where laborers from Kyushu, other Okinawa islands, and the then-Japanese-colonies of Taiwan and Chosen (Korea) were sent by the thousands to work the mines, living precarious and wretched lives. Documentary filmmaker Huang Yin-Yu invests his highly honed curiosity to this filmmaking odyssey and consummate professional skill in connecting each step in the post-production process. Huang’s eponymously titled book Green Jail narrates the author’s unfolding thoughts and emotions while making this important work.
As in many of his previous films, Director Huang centers Green Jail’ s expansive narrative on a central figure, in this case Granny Hashima. Born in Taiwan, she was brought to Iriomote by her stepfather and mine-labor recruiter Yang Tien-Fu when just ten years old as a future wife for his young son. Illiterate, rarely seeing other island residents, and her children now long gone, Granny Hashima holds to her lonely post, watching over the family home and the graves of her adoptive parents. As she reflects on her long life, emotions difficult to put to words clutter her mind. It is when memories of her adoptive father take the fore that the history and stories of the miners of Iriomote begin to emerge in vivid relief.
Granny Hashima is a firsthand witness to and survivor of Iriomote’s mining heritage. Her memories of banal, everyday events, inadvertently remembered as oral history, provide a sturdy throughline that, together with other historical information and interviews, fills a gap in our historical understanding and awareness. We can now appreciate that this island, today overrun with trees and vegetation, was once home to many who sacrificed their youth, and for some their lives, in involuntary service to those intent on extracting the island’s subterranean riches. For countless workers, Iriomote was indeed their green prison.