A Classic War-time Cinema of Japan

A movie, still black and white, called "Rikugun", The Army, was made in Japan toward the end of 1944, when the decisive tide of the war had already been turned against Japan in the Second World War. This writer had a chance to see it on 15 June. The story was based on a provincial city of Kokura, now a part of Kita-kyushuu, on Kyushuu Island.
It had been made at the request of the Ministry of the Army(there was also the Ministry of the Navy, but the Air Force had been divided between the two services), to commemorate the third anniversary of the opening of the "Great East Asian War" against the US and Britain. One would naturally have expected to see a film full of chauvinism, or hatred of the enemy nations.
But that expectation could not be met. True, one-sided story was told throughout of Japan's overseas expansion without which the movie could not have survived censorship, but it was told in a moderate way by the young Director Kinoshita Keisuke. The proprietor of a prosperous pawnshop at Kokura got very excited, and got a heart attack, to hear that after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5 Japan had to return some of the spoils to China at the instance of three European countries. He told his son to be a good soldier to best serve the Emperor and the country. The son succeeded in entering the Military Academy, was appointed an army officer, but could not participate in actual fighting because of illness. This may have been a tactical device to avoid scenes of battles in the movie. He together with his wife abandoned the old pawnshop, opened a vegetable shop and began to bring up their son in such a way that he would be a good soldier.
Unable to go to the Military Academy because of the changed economic status of the family, the son joined the army under the obligatory military duty. But the father insisted that the son should strongly volunteer to be sent to whichever place where a battle was going on.
Finally that day has come. The son was not alone, but was among hundreds marching to the station in uniform and with a gun on the right shoulder. The mother, Tanaka Kinuyo by name, one of the unforgettable actresses in the cinema history of Japan, arrived rather late on the scene where thousands of citizens got assembled on both sides of the main street to see off the soldiers, soon found the son, and the son also saw the mother. The son had to move on in columns. But the mother, though a frail woman, taking notice of nothing except the marching son, kept walking, almost running, not always in tears but also smiling, because she must have been happy with the son like this, quite unexpectedly, both of them almost in full view of each other. The son's safety must have been her only concern at the time.
It is as if the son's orderly marching and the mother's hustling and jostling and colliding with others continued endlessly. So impressive, so moving. But actually it continued for a matter of just several minutes, and right there ended the 87-minute film itself.
Kinoshita lived a long and active life after the war, but he made no other film on war. He made this one probably with a determination that he would not make it a war-praising one.