The tapes were occasioned by a TV interview Michaelangelo Antonioni gave to the godfather of postwar Italian cinema, Gian Luigi Rondi, in 1985 wherein he mentioned visiting the Sony camera factory in Japan. Little is known about the exact reasons the Italian director travelled to Japan in the mid 80s, aside from some generic research purposes that coalesced in the final edit of Un viaggio in Giappone (1990), then edited down to the shortened version Un pò di Giappone.