Shōhei Imamura continues his search for the “unreturned soldiers” of his earlier documentaries in a different form, looking for the female sex workers who had been deliberately forced to become “Japanese products at the front of Japan’s overseas development” in the late 1800s and mid-1900s across Asia, before prostitution was outlawed in Japan. 

The notoriously affronting 1987 documentary, originally initiated by Imamura, is as much a portrait of Kenzo Okazaki – an ageing veteran who had survived the desperate battles in Papua New Guinea towards the end of the Second World War – as an investigative pursuit that seeks to uncover the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army. Hara’s landmark film observes Okazaki’s relentless – and increasingly violent and ethically dubious – pursuit of his former comrades.