When Japan Made Volleyball Magic

The film merges strikingly vivid, crisp archive footage (Faraut works at the Institut National du Sport, de l’Expertise et de la Performance in Paris, where he supervises a collection of 16mm films) with 2019 documentation of the director’s trip to Japan to meet the women, now in their seventies and eighties; as well as snippets of the many anime cartoons they inspired. “I really like to learn from the archives, rather than using footage to illustrate what I have in mind or already know,” says Faraut. “The intensity of their training was very unusual back in the ’60s in women’s sport.” He adds, “These are not ordinary women: they are superheroes.”

The ambiguity arises in how the women speak of such a regime: they emphasise that they made the decision to stay and train – captain Masae Kasai chose the team over the man she was engaged to. In a telling segment of the film, one of the players reveals that only two of the team members had both parents, and describes their view of Daimatsu as both father figure and the sort of man they wanted to marry.

The women often refer to their gratitude to Daimatsu, narrating his techniques as observers rather than critics. Faraut hints that the Witches’ methods likely felt uncomfortable to supposedly “progressive” Westerners, since it was likely the first time they’d been aware of female athletes training in such a way, “like men did,” he says. “It was interesting to discover that in Japan, which was a very misogynistic and patriarchal society, there was a man with a military background who just said, ‘Okay, I will train those women like men, because I know that women are capable.’”

Such cultural assumptions are perhaps another reason – aside from the obvious racist undertones – that they were dubbed “witches”, rather than a more celebratory nickname that underscored their prowess. In the historical contexts the film depicts, Daimatsu could be seen to be as much a product of his time as his team. He served in the Second World War under reportedly horrific conditions, leading a platoon of 40 men across treacherous, mountainous territory with no food and with many suffering fevers, malaria and/or amoebic dysentery. In short, he was tough. But his divisive methods worked: the team achieved 175 consecutive wins under Daimatsu’s training.

The team’s factory-based roots hint at the theme of class that gently bubbles beneath the prevailing narratives of awe-inspiring athletic and mental feats and female camaraderie. As Faraut was keen for the film to spell out, the women are not from wealthy backgrounds (they list their parents’ jobs as milk sellers, farm workers and labourers). Their hiring by Nichibo wasn’t just an opportunity sports-wise, it also offered a significant promotion from their former jobs for most of the women: rather than working the machines, they took on more supervisory, less manual roles. “Volleyball was valuable, it was the reason they were promoted,” says Faraut.

Their initial reaction to Faraut’s interest in them as a non-Japanese filmmaker was surprise, replaced by relief and then pride as they realised that this piece would go deeper into the women themselves as subjects. This is the first film for which Faraut opted to meet his subjects. His 2018 John McEnroe feature, for instance, focused solely on McEnroe’s sporting prowess. This time his interest lay in the people, as much as the performance. “When I started to read articles from journalists in the ’60s and also from more recent academics, I really felt that they lacked their testimony,” he says. “I didn’t like the way people were writing about them. I was upset – these writers were pretending to speak in the name of women’s dignity and emancipation, but they were just placing them in the context of the home or as mothers. I wanted to give them the opportunity to tell their story by themselves.”