Ashio kara Kita Onna (2014)

It is 1906, near the end of the Meiji period. The government has tried to let the pollutants produced from the Ashio Copper Mine deposit in the pond of Yanaka Village which is in the lower reaches of the Watarase River in Tochigi Prefecture in order to protect the mine’s operations. As a result, the fields of the village are contaminated by pollution from the mine. Through the mediation of her older brother Nobuyoshi, Nitta Sachi, the daughter of a poor farming family that lives in Yanaka Village, is asked by the politician Tanaka Shozo if she can leave for Tokyo to work as the housekeeper of female social activist Fukuda Hideko who heads the magazine ‘Women of the World’. Sachi is introduced to Kusakabe Jotaro, a man who identifies himself as a government official, by Nobuyoshi. Kusakabe accompanies her to Tokyo and she is instructed to report what she sees and hears in the Fukuda household. Social activists representative of the period such as Kotoko Shusui and Osugi Sakae frequent the Fukuda residence. Sachi starts to work diligently but inwardly feels inferior to be the only one who cannot read a character in the house of an intellectual. Meanwhile, the labourers at the Ashio Copper Mine strike. Seizing the chance to overthrow the government, Ishikawa Sanshiro and other social activists supportive of the struggle for a wage increase, express their views in an attempt at solidarity. However, even Ishikawa is put behind bars in a police crackdown. Sachi, who feels guilty for his arrest, runs away from the Fukuda household. She arrives back at her birthplace to see that her house has been destroyed by the country’s forced seizure. Furthermore, her brother Nobuyoshi was at the centre of this exercise... Edit Translation

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