In 1967, Associated Press foreign correspondent John Roderick and a young university student named Yoshihiro Takishita transported a ‘minka,’ a type of traditional farmhouse, from the Japanese Alps to the forested Tokyo suburb of Kamakura. The massive timber structure came to define both their lives. Filmed just following Roderick’s death at 93, Minka uses the house to investigate the nature of love and memory, and what it means to make a home.
A Japanese student and an American journalist rescue an ancient farmhouse
Director: Davina Pardo
Producer: Andrew Blum

videoNature and landscape
Take a serene hike through an ancient forest, inspired by a Miyazaki masterpiece
6 minutes

videoDemography and migration
Ad executive, diligent father, caring son – manhood as a balancing act in modern Japan
17 minutes

videoBeauty and aesthetics
Komorebi: ‘a dance of shadows emerging when sunlight filters through trees’
4 minutes

videoAgeing and death
Dolls replace former residents in a remote, depopulating Japanese village
7 minutes

videoFamily life
‘Space to grow’: on being young, anxious and American in a Zen Buddhist family
12 minutes

videoLove and friendship
A decade after his wife was swept away in a tsunami, Yasuo still searches the sea
9 minutes

videoCities
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2 minutes

videoCities
Bright nights, lonely crowds – a Tokyo train speeds through urban contradictions
3 minutes

videoMeaning and the good life
Coffer traded his condo for a log cabin decades ago, and he hasn’t looked back
6 minutes