The Masters of Cinema Series

Kinoshita and The Post-War Moment

by Joan Mellen, 2006

Twenty-four Eyes, Keisuke Kinoshita’s 1954 masterpiece, and his greatest success, manages to be a three-handkerchief tear-inducing film and, simultaneously, an exquisite work of art free of the taint of sentimentality. The story of elementary school teacher Hisako Oishi (Hideko Takamine) and her first grade class of twelve students, Twenty-four Eyes opens in 1928 and ends in 1946, the ‘year after the war’, as Kinoshita chronicles with epic range not only the fate of the ordinary Japanese citizen, but of Japan itself under wartime militarist domination.

Based closely on Sakae Tsuboi’s 1952 rather pedestrian best-seller, Twenty-four Eyes was Kinoshita’s twenty-fourth film (he would direct forty-two). A marvel of brilliant shot compositions and the ingenious use of montage, it reveals him to be a director of the first rank, although Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, and even Naruse became much better known in the West. Kinema Junpo magazine awarded Twenty-four Eyes its much coveted first place prize for 1954, over Seven Samurai, Sansho dayu (Sansho The Bailiff), Chikamatsu monogatari _ (_The Crucified Lovers), and Late Chrysanthemums. The best young director award for 1943, the year that they both made their first films, went to Kinoshita, rather than to Kurosawa, who had just directed Sanshiro Sugata. “He’s a real film genius�, Masaki Kobayashi was to say of Kinoshita, “the only one in the postwar era.�

Kinoshita’s setting, Shodo Island (‘Shodoshima’) in the Inland Sea, is as much his subject as are any of his characters. A long montage opens the film, introducing the island and its people. Long shots abound, reflecting the inextricable connection between the denizens of Shodoshima and their environment. People in this film do not live free of the influences of landscape – or of history.

Men work at a quarry; religious pilgrims travel on foot along the island’s one road, suggesting an inherent harmony with their physical setting. Fishermen mend nets as farmers trudge along, accompanied by their animals. Novelist Tsuboi writes: “It was a village where everyone had to work without a minute’s leisure.� Kinoshita conveys this theme entirely in images.

The very bleakness of the island and the shots of hardworking people convey Kinoshita’s theme of empathy for the lives of ordinary Japanese, soon to suffer the consequences of the Pacific War. The pace of Twenty-four Eyes is slow, reflecting the rhythmic steady progress of these people’s lives, soon to be disrupted by the Depression, and then repression by the militarists, who would submerge Japan in imperial adventure and the devastation of war.

Kinoshita’s focus is on working and lower middle-class people, his genre the ‘shomin-geki.’ Twenty-four Eyes is also, in part, a ‘haha mono,’ a film about the sacrifices demanded of mothers. Miss Oishi is more sympathetic to her pupils, kinder and more supportive than most of their own mothers, not least Matsue’s, who demands that she fill her carpenter father’s plate but not eat so much herself (a detail taken from Tsuboi’s novel).

Nowhere does Kinoshita express more clearly his affection for the lower classes than in the repetitions of the ‘Song of Gratitude’ (‘Aogeba Totoshi’) that Japanese students sing to their teachers at graduation (a major theme that does not appear in the novel). The Japanese have much to be proud of in their traditions, he suggests, celebrating a national cultural identity that is deeply ingrained. Not least is how gratitude and indebtedness are woven into the texture of everyday Japanese social life. When her pupils, exhausted and hungry, visit Miss Oishi and she feeds them, the parents send a basket of presents to her in appreciation, only one of the film’s many dramatizations of how interdependence suffuses the daily lives of the Japanese.

Twenty-four Eyes is suffused with lyricism, recovering the decency of Japanese life that has been violated. This lyricism is reflected in a transitional refrain indicating the passage of time. Several times, Kinoshita repeats that the colour of the sea and the shape of the mountains remain the same as ‘tomorrow became today.’ The novel contains the line, ‘both the colour of the sea and the shape of the hills were the same as before.’ Kinoshita added ‘tomorrow became today,’ rendering the passage far more poetic.

The texture of Kinoshita’s shots reflects his apprenticeship in a photography lab, and then as a camera assistant for Yasujiro Shimazu at the Shochiku Kamata studio. The elegant roof patterns and kimono designs worn by the villagers and the children convey his theme of the beauty of the everyday lives of the Japanese. Kinoshita’s camera offers a paean to the values of a culture that the war had undermined. That Japan is linked to the West is another manifestation of Kinoshita’s depiction of his country as one whose culture forms a confluence with that of the rest of the world, a harmony reflected in his additions of Western music.

The motif of ‘Annie Laurie’ is attached to Miss Oishi. ‘There’s No Place Like Home’ belongs to her young seaman husband, who appears in the novel only in flashback, after his death. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ commemorates her life-long connection to her pupils. Throughout the film, singing is deployed to connote the cooperation and mutual good will of the broader populace, the unity of people sharing a common fate, people who help each other as a matter of course. (In the novel, the pupils are far less unified, quarrel among themselves, back-bite and separate into cliques).

Kinoshita spends considerable time depicting Shodo Island before he introduces his protagonist and star. Miss Oishi finally appears, bicycling down the road, calling out ‘O-hayo!’ (Good morning!). She is dressed in a suit, not yet the norm for teachers on Shodo Island. “Like a man�, one male peasant observes. “Foreign (Western) clothes!� observes a child. “She’s awfully modern!� another comments. The children themselves wear country kimono. Miss Oishi is linked to the islanders, however, in her poverty. She is poor and can scarcely make payments on her bicycle. Her mother must take in sewing.

Like Kurosawa in so much of his work, Kinoshita situates his film at a transitional moment in Japanese history. Twenty-four Eyes opens at a moment when women were becoming independent and part of the work force. As novelist Tsuboi points out, universal suffrage had been won only in February of the same year Miss Oishi begins her career as a teacher. The film concludes with another transitional moment, when Japan had to confront the aftermath of the Pacific War.

Miss Oishi does not break entirely with the past. Her suit is made from an old kimono dyed black, as in Tsuboi’s novel. She teaches the students folk songs that link them to Japanese tradition and preserve it. Nonetheless, she stands for democratic values, a belief in the free exchange of ideas and a challenge to the cult of Emperor Worship and of the sanctity of the Emperor that renders her increasingly an enemy of the militarists in power.

In contrast is her timid fellow teacher (Chishu Ryu), who offers her no solidarity, and, as in Tsuboi’s novel, feels threatened by Miss Oishi’s more modern education and more effective teaching. In the novel, he leads the children in singing a war song.

When she calls the roll for the first time, Miss Oishi adopts what, in this social context, is the progressive step of recording the nickname of each child. Every child is singled out for a close-up in this scene, to emphasize his unique individual value – a post-war concept embraced by Kinoshita as it would be by Kurosawa in all his films. Among the themes the SCAP or Occupation authority had urged upon the Japanese film industry was that pictures introduce the theme of ‘democracy,’ and depict individual defiance of feudal ideas, both manifested by Kinoshita in Twenty-four Eyes.

At home, in a scene that is not in Tsuboi’s novel, Miss Oishi examines the students’ calligraphy. Kinoshita intercuts a close-up of each child as on the sound track each responds to his name. Kinoshita varies the compositions of these shots, reflecting again the uniqueness of each person. In his style he encapsulates the value of the individual, in direct defiance of the wartime ethos that the duty of the teacher was to inculcate a sense of duty to serve the state.

The children are, in the Japanese way, indulged in their exuberance, and Miss Oishi readily accepts the nickname they bestow upon her: ‘Miss Koishi.’ Although her name means ‘big stone’ (O-Ishi), she herself is small, more a ‘pebble’ (Ko-Ishi). ‘Oishi-Koishi!’ they call whenever they see her. Several shots place the children horizontally across the frame informing the shot composition with a sense of equality among the pupils.

As Kinoshita attempts to restore the Japanese to belief in the inherent values of their culture, which are not inconsistent with liberalism, Miss Oishi embodies that spirit. Not only does she value each student, but in her classroom, as long as she is permitted to do so, she speaks candidly. When one of her pupils, Nita, believes that the Emperor is in the cupboard because his picture is stored there, she corrects him gently. The Emperor’s ‘sacred’ persona does not extend to his image. The Emperor, Miss Oishi laughs, is not “hiding in the cupboard�. This scene, which appears only in perfunctory form in Tsuboi’s novel, is granted emphasis here.

The magnitude of Miss Oishi’s task is measured by the fact that she is only one voice. That during these repressive years it was impossible for a single individual, however brave, to overcome the power of Emperor Worship in the culture at large is reflected in Nita’s refusal to accept his teacher’s explanation. He goes home and sits in a closet, pretending that he’s the Emperor. Later in the film Nita will die in a war enacted in the name of the Emperor and his sacred authority.

Early in the film, Miss Oishi’s mother assumes the old-fashioned Japanese perspective, one that Kinoshita challenges, namely the ‘shikata ga nai’ philosophy that things can’t be helped, can’t be changed. The phrase is first spoken by the mother; Miss Oishi herself will utter the phrase later as troubles descend upon her pupils, and her own family.

Kinoshita distances himself from the charge that the Japanese people were themselves to blame, and bore responsibility for the atrocities of the war. He deploys extreme long shots in long takes throughout the film. These distancing shots place him at variance with the society under military rule that he is depicting. One high crane shot early in the film renders the children specks on the landscape; and as the film progresses, each fade-in begins on an extreme high overhead shot. One chronicles a war parade, with the camera remaining at a safe distance, observing.

The solidarity between the children is accompanied by parallel action in the scene where their parents search for them during their long trek to visit their teacher confined at home by an accident in which she tore her Achilles tendon. Graphic matches bind the shots. Later in the film, a pan left to right of the girls in the group photograph taken on that outing is followed by a reverse pan right to left of the boys.

Harmony is the common denominator. Meanwhile close-ups serve to focus on the beauty even in blighted lives, symbolized by the lily-painted lunch box that Miss Oishi brings Matsue, and that she is destined never to use. A close-up of Matsue’s tattered straw lunch box, of which she is ashamed, expresses the director’s sympathy for the limitations within which the population must subsist.

‘Annie Laurie’ involves a ‘promise true’ even as the plot of Twenty-four Eyes finds Miss Oishi unable to keep her promises to her students. She is unable to return to school, although she had assured them that she would. Teaching at the larger Consolidated School, she is unable to keep faith with her mission as a teacher as she conceives of it, which is to answer all questions and to promote open discussions of ideas. In this increasingly repressive society, where dissent is met with prison or death, Oishi’s bond with her pupils is broken by external force.

‘Annie Laurie’ is muted in the scene in which Miss Oishi’s students write an essay expressing their hopes for the future. One girl writes, “Women ought to have regular jobs. Without a job, a woman will have a hard time.� Kinoshita here addresses another of the themes proposed by the Occupation authorities, namely that films endorse the emancipation of women, along with the rejection of militarism. Although by the time he made Twenty-four Eyes the American Occupation had come to an end, Kinoshita dramatises several of its edicts. From the perspective of Miss Oishi, he reveals that despite the hold of authority, by some people ‘individual rights were respected’ even in the Thirties.

Kotoe has written that she is sorry not to have been born a boy, while the boys, rejecting the prospect of being fishermen or storekeepers, await eagerly the day they can become soldiers. When Miss Oishi objects, they call her a ‘coward,’ as her own son will do. The poverty of the Japanese people was exploited to serve the Imperial cause, Kinoshita makes clear. He highlights Miss Oishi’s regret that one of her female students must quit school to become a maid in Osaka. Later, she says, she will marry; her fate is to repeat the life of her mother.

Fujiko, daughter of a high-born family, bursts into tears because she already knows that they face bankruptcy, and that her future will be bleak. She is shortly to disappear from the film. ‘You’re not responsible for the hardships, nor are your parents,’ Miss Oishi says. Kinoshita assures the post-war Japanese population that they were victims, and not to blame for the cruelties of the war. Responsibility rested entirely with a power so pervasive that protest was dangerous – and futile.

In her classroom, Miss Oishi has used an anti-war pamphlet authored by an accused ‘Red.’ For this, she is reprimanded by the principal, who consigns its pages to the flames of a brazier, adding, “we teachers must be patriotic�.

“Some of the essays were very good�, Miss Oishi insists. In her novel Tsuboi makes much more of the author of the pamphlet and his fate. His name is Inagawa, and a newspaper denounces him in a headline: ‘Red Teacher Spoils Innocent Minds.’ In the novel, Inagawa is branded a ‘traitor.’ Released from prison, he is banned from teaching, and his letters are concealed from his pupils in keeping with the new policy that teachers can contact their pupils only in official classrooms, using ‘authorized textbooks’.

Tsuboi’s novel contains multiple historical references. Kinoshita does not include the mention of the ‘Universal Suffrage Law’ of February 1928 that accompanied a new emancipation of women. Other references he omits include those to the League of Nations, air raids, the Atomic bomb, and the black market.

In the film, as in the novel, Miss Oishi asks her pupils how many read newspapers. The reply is only three, as Kinoshita advocates an educated population as a requirement for a just state. “Who knows what a Communist is?� she asks. “How about a capitalist?�:

“They’re rich�, a girl says.

“What about labourers?� Miss Oishi continues.

Reprimanded again, accused of being a Communist herself, Miss Oishi insists that her students had asked questions she was compelled to answer. She is now forbidden to use such words as ‘proletariat’ and ‘capitalist’.

“Tell them you don’t know�, the principal says. “It’s foolish to be too outspoken.� In his final reprimand, Miss Oishi is told that “there are things you must not say to pupils�. She is forbidden to discuss whatever comes to mind: “Don’t see, hear or talk.� When she protests, “I don’t want my students to be killed�, the principal, her father’s friend and up to this point indulgent, lays down the law. “We teach citizens to serve the nation�, he says, adding that ‘Japan is surrounded by enemies.’

Miss Oishi’s days as a teacher come to an end once she is forbidden to exude the high-spirited, open-minded sensibility that has defined her up to this point in the film. Having donned kimono and an austere hair style upon her marriage, she is compelled to retreat, even as all dissenters were silenced during those years.

Japanese film critic Tadao Sato, calling for national culpability, took issue with Kinoshita for having made “a sweet simple swan song about how good, earnest people suffered on account of a bad, oppressive government�. In fact, Sato argued, “Japan had started the war – it was not a matter of us Japanese suffering at the hands of some unseen power.� Sato notes that Kinoshita ignores that Japan may well have been “indeed as brutal as our reputation, and that even those innocent children from the Inland Sea area were perhaps also brutal in battle.� In his discussion of Twenty-four Eyes in ‘Currents In Japanese Cinema,’ Sato passes over Kinoshita’s defence of the Japanese people as themselves victims of a military dictatorship.

Sato faults Kinoshita for allowing Miss Oishi to quit teaching in 1934, “an important year in the history of Japanese education when the government completely suppressed the education movement for being leftist as well as liberal�. Sato “wonders what would have happened if she had continued teaching�, instead, in 1941, of waving her flag as a housewife, along with members of the assembled Patriotic Women’s Association.

Rather than continuing to challenge the requirement that teachers indoctrinate their pupils with wartime ideology, Sato argues, Miss Oishi becomes a ‘weak’ character. A more authentic approach would have had her live out her fate as a person of conscience. Supporting Sato’s argument is that Kurosawa does present such a dissenting figure, Noge, in No Regrets For Our Youth (1946). Even Miss Oishi’s husband has to ask, when she decides to resign from teaching and open a candy store, “How can you end the war by starting a candy store?� (In the novel, the line is spoken by Miss Oishi’s mother).

In insisting upon a depiction in which Miss Oishi fails to carry through her dissent to its conclusion, Kinoshita, Sato maintains, has produced no more than “a sentimental pacifist film�, a “tear-jerker�. Yet Kinoshita’s intention seems, rather, to depict what actually happened to many decent people in Japan who succumbed to the power of the military dictatorship.

Viewed today, Twenty-four Eyes expresses the point that governments, usurpers of power, make war, while the people must bear its burdens. There was no way for Miss Oishi to survive as an honest teacher in those times. Kinoshita seeks nothing less than a national exorcism, and to absolve the people of responsibility for militarist rule. Twenty-four Eyes seeks as well to reconcile the Japanese audience to its unique and special identity.

Despite the sacrifices exacted by Japan’s subjugation into an Asian form of fascism, much of value remains, Kinoshita says. Not least is a stalwartness in enduring hardship and a spirit of cooperation that was shared by the poorest of Japan’s citizens. Point of view shots, notably in the excursion scene where Miss Oishi and her new husband wave to each other (a scene that does not appear in Tsuboi’s novel), foreshadow an abiding individual decency that will come into its own after the war, not least in the principle of marrying for love, as Miss Oishi has done. So too the shots of Matsue’s empty chair and desk convey Miss Oishi’s sympathy and support for this student beset by ill fortune.

None of Miss Oishi’s original twelve pupils escape the Depression and the War. In a marvel of casting, Kinoshita depicts the original class, amateur actors all, at three stages of life: as six year olds; as twelve year olds; and as young adults. The faces virtually match. Fujiko’s family must leave the island in disgrace, evicted from their home. Matsue is sold into indentured servitude against her will. Kotoe dies of tuberculosis in poverty, shunned by her parents. All Miss Oishi can offer by way of consolation is “such things can’t be helped�.

“There aren’t that many happy people�, Miss Oishi attempted to console Kotoe, “so you’re not alone�. Nor was Miss Oishi able to protest when the musical prodigy Masuno was forced by her mother to sacrifice her ambition to study at a conservatory so that she could learn to play the samisen and work in her parents’ restaurant. While Masuno hangs her head, Miss Oishi can say only, “It’s not proper for me to express an opinion�. Then she adds, “Your happiness means a lot to me. I want to help you realise your ambitions. I’m ashamed I can’t say any more now.�

Once the champion of her students, placing a high value on personal fulfillment, she has no choice now but to accept her mother’s ‘shikata ga nai’ resignation. It is left to director Kinoshita to oppose the selfishness of Masuno’s mother, Matsue’s father, and the general treatment of women in a society where young girls are exploited notoriously, while boys were used as fodder to carry out a senseless war.

Three of the five boys die in the Pacific War, and Sonki is blinded. Miss Oishi’s young husband perishes. Kinoshita dramatises the famine engulfing Japan after the war when Miss Oishi’s (now Mrs. Oishi since her family has adopted her new husband) daughter falls out of a persimmon tree she had climbed because she was so hungry. In the novel, she dies of eating unripe persimmons, but Kinoshita chooses a more dramatic evocation of the famine caused by the war. “There’s nothing that can be done�, Mrs. Oishi is told, once more the ‘shikata ga nai’ refrain.

Kinoshita’s shot compositions and his editing reveal the conflict between individual aspiration and an authoritarian culture. In the excursion scene, the ferry carrying Miss Oishi and the students moves oneway, the ship carrying her husband, the other. After he has intercut shots of the two, Kinoshita then creates conflict of motion within the shot itself by depicting together the boats going their separate way, reflecting the breaking of bonds of affection and the coming disharmony and suffering of the wartime years. The scene of Mrs. Oishi and her husband waving to each other is absent in the novel.

At other moments, Kinoshita returns to his focus on the enduring humanity of ordinary Japanese life, as at the singing of the ‘Song of Gratitude’ of her final class at the Consolidated School. It’s Kinoshita who embellishes the theme of appreciation and camaraderie – this song does not appear in the novel. With a dissolve Kinoshita moves to a traveling crane shot through blooming cherry blossoms that symbolize Japanese culture at its most authentic. Kinoshita’s frequent use of dissolves, at times to indicate a passage of time, at other times not, reflects his conviction that events bear consequences that continue to the end of life.

Like Kurosawa, who was fond of using wind and rain for key dramatic scenes, Kinoshita also uses weather with symbolic intent. Shodoshima, a vulnerable, mountainous place, is buffeted by storms. Some of the most dramatic moments occur in the rain: when Miss Oishi confides to her mother about how the people are unfriendly and consider her too ‘modern’; when the girls tell Mrs. Oishi of Matsue’s fate; and when Mrs. Oishi must tell her son that his father has died in the war, a scene that is not dramatised in the novel.

The scenes of Mrs. Oishi during the war are weaker than those depicting her as a teacher, as Sato suggests, because her approach is so entirely emotional. Gone is her questioning of authority or of the repression, even in the privacy of her home. Instead, her hatred of the war because it kills people is abstract, so that these scenes invoke all human suffering rather than the specific subjugation of the Japanese people.

Kinoshita is realistic in revealing that Miss Oishi’s personal example cannot withstand the weight of authority in the society at large, a society in which the human cost of resistance has become overwhelming. Her own son wishes he were old enough to enlist. If he died, he tells her, “you’d be the mother of a patriot�.

“All I want you to be is a human being. Just an ordinary person�, Mrs. Oishi replies, expressing a view Kinoshita shares. His teachers don’t talk like that, he says. “That’s why I quit�, she answers. Kinoshita avoids Tsuboi’s heavy-handed rhetoric. “Why was it forbidden to value human lives and prevent them from being hit by bullets and smashing into pieces?� she writes. “Did the ‘Maintenance of Public Peace’ mean restricting freedom of thought rather than valuing and protecting human lives?�

The sun shines on 15 August when the Emperor goes on the radio to announce that Japan has surrendered. “Listen respectfully�, the students are told, but Kinoshita is not respectful enough to include the Emperor’s speech, reflecting his sense that Emperor Worship was at the centre of Japan’s submission to the military. Through this brief scene Kinoshita remains in long shot, distant from the Emperor and his empty words.

Kinoshita’s point of view, rather, is reflected in Mrs. Oishi’s statement; “children can now be children again – it’s good the war is over�. Her older son, Daikichi, a victim of wartime propaganda, as were so many, regrets that he didn’t die for his country. Unable to convince him otherwise, Mrs. Oishi calls him a fool, and refuses to cry at the news that Japan has lost.

The sun is out, too, on the day in 1946 when, a prematurely aged (“a thin, short, elderly woman� in the novel), Mrs. Oishi returns to her first school as life begins anew for Japan. Scarcely in her forties, she seems like an old woman now, with an old woman’s gait. The Inland Sea is calm. It is as if Japan has been restored to itself, and the prevailing decency by which its people abide, reflected in the renewed strains of ‘Annie Laurie.’

Japan has suffered, Kinoshita reiterates, no less than the victims of Japanese militarism abroad. Mrs. Oishi can no more afford a bicycle now than she could sixteen years earlier as ‘Miss Oishi.’ Having more than paid the price of the war, the Japanese can now reclaim what is best in their culture.

On Mrs. Oishi’s post-war blackboard are the words “Peaceful Japan�. Yet this time when she calls the roll there are no nicknames. The students and Mrs. Oishi are subdued, her native cheerfulness bleached out by hard times. The children’s voices are stronger than they were in 1928, as if a renewed Japan is about to emerge.

That their spirits remain intact is reflected in Mrs. Oishi’s receiving a new nickname: ‘Crybaby sensei’ because she has wept to see the daughters of two of her former students in her class, and the sister of the now-dead Kotoe. No less does she weep at the graves of her fallen former pupils.

The film culminates in a reunion party of Mrs. Oishi with the seven surviving members of her first class, the ‘Twenty-four Eyes’ of the title. “We’re grateful�, they say. Gratitude for shared experience has become synonymous with being Japanese. Shame, a relic of the past, must be transcended. As Matsue says, “I had to forget my shame or I’d be left out in the future.�

In a film rich in subjective camera angles, reflecting Kinoshita’s abiding respect for the individual, Mrs. Oishi’s reaction precedes the shot of the gift her students have provided. Only after her weeping, grateful response does Kinoshita cut and begin a montage of three shots of the new bicycle that will allow her to continue to teach.

The gift of the bicycle does not appear in the novel. Tsuboi mentions the teacher’s need for a new bicycle in a conversation between Mrs. Oishi and Misako, but only to suggest that Misako’s new prosperity is connected to black market activities, which would include her ability to find a bicycle, a particular Kinoshita does not include. He omits as well that Fujiko has become a prostitute. Wisely, Kinoshita also leaves out the cloying detail of Matsue bringing to the reunion the lunch box with the lily painted on it. The bicycle, like the class photograph that reappears in the final scene, returns us again to the affection and harmony of this group of students and teacher.

Like the best of Japanese films, in the final, deeply moving scenes Twenty-four Eyes travels gracefully into allegory. The emotion evoked is not sentimental, in the sense of displaying a gratuitous excess of feeling. Rather, the emotions shared by characters and audience are the appropriate response to the endurance of good people that Twenty-four Eyes has sought to convey over its 155 minutes.

The final moments are extreme long shots of Mrs. Oishi riding her new bicycle. She begins in a hooded rain poncho under the ‘Song of Gratitude’ rendered by children. In the mist, she walks with the bicycle, a small, dark, lonely figure. Finally, as sun brightens the landscape, she rides out of the frame, accompanied by the same song this time rendered by adult voices. Kinoshita has consoled his audience for its wartime suffering, even as he applauds the positive and enduring value of what it means to be Japanese, a value that emerges intact in the aftermath of a dark period in Japan’s history.