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Criterion's offshoot label Eclipse groups 'lost, forgotten or overshadowed classics' in multi-disc packaging without extras.
Previous Eclipse series editions have championed early pictures by Sam Fuller and seldom-screened documentaries by Louis Malle.
The new Postwar Kurosawa collection gathers five of the Japanese director's features made between 1946 and 1955. All but
the last were made under the stringent censorship of the American occupation. This review looks at the first and the last films in the
set. No Regrets for Our Youth is an intriguing story of life under military rule before and during the war. The disturbing I
Live In Fear (also known as Record of a Living Being) would likely not have been approved under the occupation, for it
takes a critical attitude toward nuclear weapons. As can be expected of Akira Kurosawa, neither picture is a simple endorsement of a
particular point of view.
No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga seishun ni kuinashi) is Kurosawa's assured but cautious look back at fourteen years of
tumultuous Japanese history, as seen from the point of view of a young woman who marries a dissident opposed to the country's
military rule. Made in the first year of the American occupation, the storyline treads on tender wounds to envision the country's future
in pro-democratic terms. Little mention is made of the devastation of Japanese cities or the other appalling sacrifices of the war, and
the anti-militarist activities of the leading character's husband are never explained. Japanese culture of the time operated on
consensus and conformity, so No Regrets for Our Youth's anti-government activism must have been controversial subject
matter.
Yukie Yagihara (Setsuko Hara), the privileged daughter of a liberal professor (Denjiro Okochi) has two student-suitors, the conformist
Itokawa (Akitake Kono) and the activist Ruykichi Noge (Susumu Fujita). Student and faculty protests against military rule are
ruthlessly suppressed (off-screen), with the result that Professor Yagihara loses his job and Noge is sent to jail. Itokawa plays it safe
and becomes a prosecutor for the government's oppressive policies. These are expressed only in a scene in which Itokawa tells the
politically censured professor that he must stop giving legal aid, even as an unpaid volunteer. Finally released from prison, Noge goes
to China to become 'an expert on the region,' although we're not told what kind of expert.
The story avoids historical and political specifics to concentrate on the emotional experience of young Yukie. She begins as an
innocent teenager, cavorting with her boyfriends on a hike in the mountains. Yukie clearly prefers Noge to the bland opportunist
Itokawa. After years of separation, Noge returns to work in Tokyo and Yukie joins him and declares herself. They marry and live
together in the full knowledge that he could at any time be arrested. War with America has begun, and Noge's quiet activities (we
never know what they might be) are now considered espionage. Noge is already being watched by a humorless secret policeman
(Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura). Yukie must be grateful for every day she and Noge can be together.
Kurosawa's visuals keep pace with Yukie's feelings, which she expresses in her piano playing and her changing attitude toward flower
arranging. Montages depict student upheavals in the early 1930s and a radio announces the start of hostilities in WW2, but the only
historical issue given attention is the suppression of academic freedom. Yukie is never fire bombed and her family doesn't outwardly
suffer, despite the fact that her father is forbidden to work. In the darkest days of the war, Yukie chooses to work on the little farm of
her husband's parents, harassed by 'patriotic' neighbors who brand them traitors and destroy their crops. Yukie's choice to leave her
father's house for the hardships of the farm seems a deliberate ploy to present anti-militarist dissidents in a good light. Neither Yoge
nor Yukie's father is identified as a socialist or a communist; the historical details are intentionally left vague. No doubt Japanese
conservatives resented the film. Perhaps the frequent complaint that Kurosawa was too 'western' also had a political
component?
Noge told Yukie that his activities would eventually find public approval, perhaps in ten years. Surely enough, in the film's coda the
professor returns to teaching, and gives a speech that honors Noge as the university's most courageous graduate.
We're told that Kurosawa's values were very much in line with the pro-democratic MacArthur occupation. He was soon frustrated by
censors that forbade honest looks at unpleasant postwar issues. As demonstrated in Criterion's DVD supplements to Drunken
Angel, Kurosawa had to disguise his messages to sneak them past the American censors.
No Regrets for Our Youth also shows Kurosawa in the process of developing his style. The movie has a lyrical, feminine
aspect. One particular moment, more interesting than successful, presents Yukie listening at a door. Dissolves join several static
shots of her standing in different stylized poses. The odd editorial construction may be an attempt at a visual shorthand meant to
communicate the girl's contradictory emotions.
1955's I Live In Fear (Ikimono no kiroku) was released three years after the end of the official American occupation, in
the middle of the big nuclear arms buildup of the Cold War. At the time its subject matter was considered very controversial. The Toho
studios had just produced the popular Gojira, a film partially inspired by a terrible incident in which a Japanese fishing trawler
was exposed to fallout from the Bikini Atoll hydrogen bomb test. The crew was hospitalized and tons of fish were destroyed for fear of
contamination. Gojira expressed the atomic threat with a metaphorical monster, perhaps because Japanese culture tended to
suppress anything related to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As late as the 1970s, survivors affected by the bombings were subjected to
cruel forms of social discrimination.
In I Live In Fear, elderly Japanese foundry owner Kiichi Nakajima (Toshiro Mifune, in convincing old-age makeup) is certain
that an atomic attack is imminent. All of society, including his large family, ignores the possibility of more bombs falling on Japan, but
Kiichi is convinced that anyone who remains in Tokyo will perish. Kiichi's solution is to sell his foundry and emigrate with his
extended clan to the supposed safety of Brazil, but his relatives have no intention of leaving Tokyo or becoming farmers. They resist
by trying to have Kiichi declared mentally incompetent. The dilemma faced by the family dispute mediator (Takashi Shimura again) is
that Kiichi Nakajima's anxiety is not irrational. He may be entirely correct about the threat, in which case his is the sane viewpoint,
and everybody else is crazy.
Kiichi's sincerity is obvious. He hugs one of his grandchildren, pleading that he wants everyone to move not for himself, but to save
the children. Complicating the matter are Kiichi's three other mistresses and their families that depend on Kiichi for support. Kiichi
considers them greedy and disloyal but he wants them to come to Brazil as well. Kiichi's house is definitely not in order, which may
be Kurosawa and his co-writers Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni way of saying that postwar Japanese society has been
constructed on an unstable (radioactive?) foundation.
I Live In Fear is first a social drama, but it's also a political science fiction film. It addresses the effects of a new kind of
existential anguish borne of the knowledge that civilization could be wiped out at any time. When one of his sons explains that Brazil
would also be destroyed in a nuclear war, Kiichi refuses to listen and takes extreme measures to force his family's obedience.
The film has been resolutely naturalistic up to this point. The atomic threat has been remote and invisible, an abstraction. The final
moments of I Live In Fear express Kiichi's terrorized madness from within. In a situation with odd parallels to the conclusion
of 2001: A Space Odyssey, he becomes 'a prisoner on an alien planet'. For just one shot, Kurosawa poetically creates a
terrifying vision of the destruction of an entire world, a subjective apocalypse. The impact is entirely different than the similar planetary
fireballs seen in the American science fiction movies This Island Earth and Forbidden Planet. Kurosawa follows this
with a potent coda on a stairwell that may allude to the fate awaiting the children Kiichi wants so badly to save. It's an impressively
economical art-film ending.
Kurosawa's film was not an international success. It passed mostly unmentioned in America, just one year after the director's
celebrated Seven Samurai. Four years later, Stanley Kramer's On the Beach would dramatize the issue of nuclear
oblivion for the cinema mainstream: atom war is unsurvivable madness, and society's only option is to 'put its house in order.' But the
humanist Kurosawa was there first.
We immediately accept Toshiro Mifune as a stubborn, emotional senior citizen, and the rest of his clan do well in their supporting
roles. Takashi Shimura's family mediator watches in horror while Kiichi, mesmerized by the atomic fire of sunlight in a window,
describes a private world of cosmic doom. I Live In Fear is one of a series of bold science fiction movies that take the
premise that nuclear destruction is inevitable: Five, These Are the Damned, The Day the Earth Caught Fire.
Eclipse's transfers of No Regrets for Our Youth and I Live In Fear are in quite good shape, even without the added
digital cleanup enjoyed by more expensive Criterion releases. Subtitles are clear. No extras are included but each disc comes in a
Slim Case with a cast list, technical specs and brief but expert unattributed liner notes. The discs are not available separately.
For more information about No Regrets for Our Youth and I Live In Fear, visit Eclipse. To order No Regrets for Our Youth and I Live In Fear which
are only available as part of the Postwar Kurosawa set, go to
TCM Shopping.
by Glenn Erickson
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