Japan's painful post-World War II reconstruction period provided the nation's filmmakers with ample opportunities to confront and challenge long-standing customs and traditions, and to examine the ever-widening generation gap that was then spreading between New Japan and its honor-bound feudal past. Prolific (42 films in half as many years) writer-director Keisuke Kinoshita's Nihon no higeki (US: A Japanese Tragedy) stamps similar terra as Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952) and Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), telling as it does the tale of a self-sacrificing war widow (Yuko Mochizuki) who has struggled to provide for her two children only to have them reject her as they cross the threshold to adulthood. It was a dictum of the Allied occupational forces guiding Japan's reconstruction that its film studios tell more stories centered on strong female leads (Japanese women were first given the right to vote only in December 1945, only three months after the Empire's surrender) and Nihon no higeki is one of the best of this effort, a Hollywood-style "woman's picture" (comparable to Stella Dallas and Mildred Pierce) that also spoke to Nippon's crippling national identity crisis and of the terrible human cost of war. Visible in a small role as a street musician is actor Keiji Sada, a promising young talent whose career ascendency was cut tragically short with his death at age 37 in an automobile accident in August 1964.

By Richard Harland Smith