Educational Media Reviews Online

Oyster Factory concerns the local decline in Japan of the oyster industry and how it tries to deal with it by hiring Chinese labor. Over a four day period the director visits a number of oyster factories on the Japanese coast to illustrate the process and hardships of working the oyster beds. For much of the film there is little if any dialogue, letting the story explain itself. From dawn to dusk the director and his camera follows the process from getting the oysters from the beds all the way through final clean up and closing up the factory at night. It nicely humanizes the process, partly because so much time is spent on seemingly minor issues, like making supper or setting up the new workers quarters. Unfortunately a lot of time is also spent on seemingly random scenes, like tourists taking pictures, a local cat and his adventures and so on which made the documentary drag.

You do not have to have an interest in this industry to be able to relate to it, however. The young Chinese workers imported to work in the factories are filmed awkwardly learning the ropes of gathering the oysters, like any new employee anywhere. The factory owners had to go outside Japan to get help, but that is just the way it is in this kind of industry, meaning too hard for the current generation unless you were born into it. Aside from the slow, slow pace and length, the documentary gives a judgment-free view a vanishing way of life in Japan and lets the viewers to guess what the future will be.