[2] Angered by the emperor system that led Japan into war, he participated in radical student groups like Zengakuren when he entered Waseda University and joined the Japanese Communist Party.

[4] Tsuchimoto was only an employee at Iwanami Productions for a year (after that, he worked there as a hired freelancer), but he made films alongside other important directors such as Hani, Shinsuke Ogawa, Kazuo Kuroki, and Yōichi Higashi, and cameramen like Jun'ichi Segawa, Tatsuo Suzuki, and Masaki Tamura.

The network withdrew when problems arose with the Malaysian government, but Tsuchimoto decided to make the film, Exchange Student Chua Swee Lin, anyway.

[5] After making Prehistory of the Partisans, which showed student radicals at Kyoto University from inside the barricades, for Ogawa Productions, Tsuchimoto began his most famous work, a series of documentaries about the mercury poisoning incident in Minamata, Japan.

Disturbed that an earlier effort to film Minamata disease for a television documentary had met with resistance from those afflicted, apparently due to suspicions about the media,[7] Tsuchimoto this time dedicated himself to working with the victims.

A number of his films extended in concerns with pollution, the sea, and the costs of political oppression and modernization by exploring the atomic bomb and nuclear energy.