NIIGATA--Driven from their homes by the Oct. 23 Niigata Chuetsu Earthquake, Yamakoshi villagers are taking heart in a movie depicting their greatest triumph: a 16-year struggle to hack a tunnel through a mountain using only pickaxes.

The movie, ``Horumaika-Tebori Nakayama Zuido no Kiroku'' (A record of the hand-excavated Nakayama Tunnel), is now showing on screens throughout the country.

The residents of Yamakoshi village worked for 16 years, from 1933 to 1949, to construct the 877-meter tunnel. Their goal was to keep open a winter passage from their isolated village to neighboring Hirokami village (now part of Uonuma city).

The tunnel they built was the longest hand-hewn passageway in Japan.

The film's director, Shinichi Hashimoto, began shooting the movie in 1998, when a replacement tunnel was completed.

Hashimoto said he wanted to make a record for future generations of the villagers' indomitable spirit and energy in building the old tunnel.

Released last year, the movie re-created, with current residents playing the roles, the villagers' hard lives in the isolated community in those distant days.

Before the tunnel was built, it took the villagers more than four hours to complete the wintertime trek over the mountain, with the snow piled as high as 4 meters.

``Usually, when we tried to carry out someone who had fallen seriously ill, they died on the mountain pass and we had to turn back,'' recalled Hiroshi Masuda, 68.

Building the tunnel proved much harder than the villagers had anticipated. Without heavy machinery, they had to dig into the earth and rocks with only pickaxes. The rails laid down as tracks for the carts that carried off the earth and rock were fashioned from wooden poles used in raising silkworms, the community's main industry.

So strong was the tunnel they built that it survived intact the Oct. 23 killer earthquake and its aftershocks.

After the earthquake, on Nov. 6, Hashimoto went to see the villagers, who were being housed in a gymnasium in Nagaoka.

One of the evacuees, who had acted in the movie, said to Hashimoto, ``Thank you for recording Yamakoshi's finest days.''

Hashimoto said, ``I want the movie to encourage the exhausted people of the village, which shows the strong spirit of the villagers in the past.''

More than 60 civic groups and universities have asked him to screen his film in their municipalities.

For more information about the movie, contact Ryoji Imaoka of the ``Horumaika'' screening promotion committee at < horumaika@yahoo.co.jp >.(IHT/Asahi: December 7,2004)