| Yama—Attack to Attack | |
| Director: | Mitsuo Sato, Kyoichi Yamaoka |
| Runtime: | 110 minutes |
| Country: | Japan |
| Language: | Japanese |
is a 1985 color documentary film produced about day laborers in Japan. The two directors were murdered by the yakuza.[1]
Most of the documentary shows the living and hiring conditions of day laborers in San'ya, a neighbourhood of Tokyo. It also includes protests, confrontation with yakuza, and celebrations.
The last part shows the situation of day laborers in other Japanese cities (Kotobuki-cho in Yokohama, Sasajima in Nagoya, Kamagasaki in Osaka, Chikko in Hakata) and the history of a former day labour area where many Korean workers lived.
Mitsuo Sato spent a few weeks in San'ya before starting to record in December 1984. Day laborers just happened to have a confrontation with yakuza who wanted to control the labour market, so Sato recorded both sides of the events. On December 22 of the same year, Sato was murdered by a member of the yakuza group and right-wing organization Kokusui-kai Kanamachi-ikka Nishido-gumi (国粋会金町一家西戸組).[2]
After the murder of Sato, Kyoichi Yamaoka took over and the documentary was completed in November 1985, then premièred a month later.
Yamaoka in turn was murdered by a member of the Kokusui-kai-kei Kanamachi-ikka Kinryu-gumi (国粋会系金町一家金竜組) on January 13, 1986.
The film has been the focus of a "screening movement" to present the film in Japan and abroad.[3] Among other places, it has been screened at the 1997 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival,[4] as well as in New York[5] and Kraków.[6] The film is not available on DVD (except for backup purposes) or commercialized in any format, the only way to watch it is to attend a screening.
Yamaoka's notes and essays were published as a book in 1996.[7]