There are some intriguing aspects to Mashiro Shinoda's 1984 film, MacArthur's Children. It is based on a novel by Yu Aku and calls to mind Keisuke Shinota's classic film Twenty-four Eyes in depicting how the war effected a small island community, Sodoshima, in the Inland Sea. In this film it is the island of Awashima, part of Hyogo prefecture, that is being examined. It addresses issues that are more controversial than just young men being sent off to die in war, such as postwar censorship of textbooks in schools, injured repatriated soldiers, war criminals, the uncertain future of as an occupied country among other things such as your typical coming of age film and things that are more removed such as being orphaned and seeing your older brother and sister kill themselves. The film focuses first on two boys Ryuta (Takaya Yamauchi) and Saburo (Yoshiyuki Omori) and their classmates. This causes some abrupt changes in their lives. Saburo announces that now since he can't be a naval admiral, now he will be a gangster. Ryuta organizes a group fo boy to watch out for an enemy invasion of the island. At school they have to censor their textbooks and excise imperialistic passages with black ink. The focus on boys in a rural environment at this time prefigures another Shindoa film, Childhood Days (1991).
The film also follows the lives of various adults on the island as well as those of the boys and their friends. In the classroom the boys' young demure teacher (Masako Natsume), whose husband has been declared missing in action, calmly instills pride in her pupils in the face of defeat. This would be one of the last roles for the doe-eyed actress, who also starred in Nagisa Oshima's The Catch, before succumbing to leukemia the age of 27. At home she must cope with increasing pressure from her in-laws to marry her wastrel brother-in-law, Testuo (Ken Watanabe's film debut). There's also a female barber, a war widow (Shindoa's wife, Shima Awashita) eager to cash in on the anticipated GIs by opening a little nightclub. Around this time a sweet, quiet girl (Shiori Sakura) arrives at the village with her father, an admiral (Juzo Itami), who is in danger of being arrested as a war criminal, has come "to cleanse his soul in natural surroundings."
The arriving GIs aren't portrayed as the hated conquerors but as ordinary people doing a job they were assigned to do. Incidentally, for all the compassion extended to the Itami character, there's no avoiding the fact that there are grounds for trying him as a war criminal. The film doesn't cling to a vanished past; it acknowledges that changes of the Occupation can be for the good. For example, the plight Natsume finds herself in with her in-laws would be insupportable in today's era of women's liberation. And what America represents is by no means all negative. The film deplores a crass copying of American fads and mores, but Natsume herself sees that baseball, played with homemade equipment, has its virtues for her pupils, who eventually take on a Yankee team. All in all, it is a thoughtful and entertaining look at Occupation Japan in a small rural island.
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