Title: Sanrizuka 1969 -1971
Photographer(s): Kazuo Kitai
Writer(s): Kazuo Kitai
Designer(s): Osaki Norio
Publisher(s): Nora-sha, Tokyo, Japan
Year: 1971
Print run:
Language(s): Japanese
Pages: 184
Size: 18,5 x 25,5 cm
Binding: Softcover with a cardboard slipcase
Edition:2nd Nora-sha, Tokyo, Japan1975 / 3rd Steidl Gottingen, Germany 2010
Print: Asia Insatsu Ltd. Tokyo, Japan
Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: Japan,1969 -1971
ISBN:
Kitai's photographic account of the Sanrizuka farmer's resistance to the government's plan to built Narita International Airport is curiously his first step away from student radicalism. In many respects it is the opposite of Mitome's work on the same subject, also published in 1971. In his grainy images Kitai shows the soft side of the struggle, the long pauses between the fight, the waiting, the picnics, the harvest, the incongruous Kinen Shashin amongst the barricades, from an insider's perspective. He consciously avoids images of anger and violence. As such it is a superb exercise in subjectivity.