A brave Japanese-American filmmaker, Ryo Murakami died of malaria after putting together a documentary about the exploitation and blatant cruelty of Firestone Tire and Rubber Company against its poor workers in Liberia.
Liberia, a small country located in West Africa, was embroiled in a brutal Civil War for more than 15 years which killed and displaced many people. As the country is trying to start afresh, multinational corporations are also busy looting and exploiting the natural and human resources available.
Filmmaker Murakami secretly traveled to a small village in the country called Harbel where Firestone gets the raw material for the production of our automobil-tires. He and his team undertook one of the dangerous and difficult assignments in journalism.
In the village, under the cover of darkness, Ryo trespassed onto the plantation grounds and entered a scarcely seen world, where coercive living conditions and labor practices have changed alarmingly little since the plantation opened in 1926. Journalistic access to the plantation is tightly controlled and monitored by the company. And Murakami’s footage is a rare independent version of the lives of plantation workers that stood outside of the official Firestone account.
The country (Liberia) he found was lush with natural beauty yet bleak in its harsh realities of life, a place where inhumane working conditions and environmental negligence is the norm. But beyond the hardship, he also found rare moments of defiance against a system of exploitation that has been in place for nearly a century.
Murakami’s patient and probing camera illuminated the harsh and enduring legacies of colonialism in Liberia, from the ex-child soldiers he encountered on the country’s capital, Monrovia beach to the rubber workers enduring excessive hours and low wages on the Firestone’s plantation. His work will later be known as the Notes From Liberia, detailing his journey from the capital to the village where Firestone Tire and Rubber Plantation is located.
The film taught many lessons including the disturbing exploitation by Firestone’s million-acre rubber plantation that sprawl across the West African country.
However, after showing this story to the world, Murakami returned to the country to see what has changed since his exposé but not knowing that it was going to be his last visit to the country where he has touched many lives, hearts and minds.
A few weeks later, after returning to his home in New York, he became sick with malaria. Despite intensive hospital treatment he passed away. He was 33 at the time of his death.
According to statistics, every day, nearly 2,000 people die from malaria, with 90 percent of these deaths in the African region alone.
Murakami was a young and talented filmmaker who was gradually making a name for himself and was getting closer to filming major Hollywood productions with each day.
According to those who knew him personally, Murakami had very diverse interests. He liked to shoot stories about the real world and about how to make it better. And this is certainly true because we can at least see that from Notes From Liberia which earned him many praises and brought the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company to close scrutiny from environmentalists and human rights activists.
His memory lives on especially on the shores of Liberia and many places where corporations are exploiting the masses for their selfish parochial interest.
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