The Witch­es of the Orient

In an era when only ama­teur ath­letes could com­pete at the Olympics, the Japan­ese women’s vol­ley­ball team of the Nichi­bo Kaizu­ka Tex­tiles Fac­to­ry worked their way to a jaw-drop­ping unde­feat­ed streak of 258 games, pick­ing up the (poor­ly aged) nick­name ​‘Ori­en­tal Witch­es’ after demol­ish­ing the com­pe­ti­tion in their jour­ney to the world cham­pi­onships in Europe.

The name even­tu­al­ly became a point of pride for the ath­letes as they enjoyed the idea of their hav­ing spe­cial pow­ers and mys­tique. In The Witch­es of the Ori­ent, direc­tor Julien Faraut empha­sis­es the effort that brought them glo­ry, dis­man­tling any notion that their skill was as though by magic.

Based on inter­views with sur­viv­ing team mem­bers (spik­er Emiko Miyamo­to is absent, Sata Isobe and their cap­tain Masae Kasai have since passed), the film cap­tures the team in a less for­mal set­ting at a reunion lunch. Viewed through steady obser­va­tion from Yuta­ka Yamaza­ki, the women describe in their own words the dif­fi­cul­ty of being part of the team: their soro­ral bonds; the pres­sure from the gov­ern­ment. The inter­views fur­ther high­light the phys­i­cal real­i­ties behind their super­hu­man rep­u­ta­tion, with details of injuries or train­ing drills over footage of one play­er repeat­ing receives until they collapse.

The aston­ish­ing footage is rhyth­mi­cal­ly edit­ed to the point that its repet­i­tive­ness becomes hyp­not­ic. Some of the most cap­ti­vat­ing moments come from the inter­play between news­reels of fac­to­ry work and the monot­o­nous train­ing drills, pro­pelled by French artist K‑Raw’s musi­cal score; the sequence high­lights the cor­po­rate con­nec­tion between their work and their sport, even as tex­tiles work became less of a focus of their dai­ly lives.

A sim­i­lar sequence mon­tage details the exhaus­tive, almost tor­tur­ous train­ing drills of the teams coach Daimat­su, known by some as ​‘The Demon’, scored (per­haps a lit­tle melo­dra­mat­i­cal­ly) to Portishead’s ​‘Machine Gun’. It’s also a visu­al­ly strik­ing sequence, though per­haps under­mines its own line of ques­tion­ing when it cul­mi­nates with a series of quotes of the play­ers shrug­ging off the bru­tal­i­ty of it in the present.

Their dom­i­na­tion of the sport shaped pop­u­lar cul­ture in Japan, some­thing Faraut notes with a brief acknowl­edge­ment of the boom of man­ga and ani­mé around women’s vol­ley­ball after the team’s his­toric run, start­ing with their por­tray­al in the ​’60s series Attack No.1. The show and its imi­ta­tors all high­light­ed the harsh­ness of train­ing and the need for a unique move (“the rolling receive – Japan’s secret weapon”), tropes that any fans of mod­ern sports ani­mé like Haikyu!! will instant­ly recognise.

As well as con­vey­ing the team’s lega­cy, inter­spers­ing clips from Attack No.1 through­out the film is also sim­ply a delight­ful touch, con­trast­ing the some­times absurd physics of sports ani­mé with a world cham­pi­onship game, the exag­ger­at­ed sound effects con­jured by the women’s actu­al movements.

All these styl­is­tic flour­ish­es dove­tail with the por­tray­al of the vol­ley­ball final at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In a moment that real­ly does feel like witch­craft, the inti­mate 4:4 fram­ing adopt­ed by the film up to this point sud­den­ly breaks free of those con­fines. Those who have watched Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad might recog­nise the bout, though Faraut ups the pace of pro­ceed­ings where Ichikawa slowed them down. His sub­jec­tive edit­ing again cre­ates an atmos­phere of feroc­i­ty, rather than a sim­ple jour­nal­is­tic retelling of the event.

The Witch­es of the Ori­ent at once char­ac­teris­es and decon­structs the mys­tique of the team’s epony­mous nick­name. Not unlike Tokyo Olympiad, it match­es an impres­sion­is­tic vision of ath­leti­cism with a human­ist inter­est in the ath­letes them­selves, show­ing the emo­tion­al and phys­i­cal cost of sport­ing glory.