MacArthur's Children (Setouchi Shonen Yakyudan)

Jac 03/02/17

Released: 1984
Length: 124 minutes
Producer: You-No-Kai & Hara, Masato
Director: Shinoda, Mashiro
Original Novel: Aku, Yu
Screenplay: Tamura, Hajime
Cinematographer: Miyagawa, Kazuo
Music: Ikebe, Shinichiro

Cast:

Ashigara, Ryuta........................................Yamuchi, Takaya
Masaki, Saburo.........................................Omori, Yoshiyuki
Hatano, Mume...............................................Sakura, Shiori
Nakai, Komako........................................Natsume, Masako
Ashigara, Tadao................................................Otaki, Shuji
The Admiral (Mume's father)..............................Itami, Juzo

Awards: Japan's Biggest Box Office Success (1984)

General Description:

MacArthur's Children centers around the experiences of the people in a small village on Awaji Island on the Inland Sea at the start of the American occupation. The central characters are fifth-grade students, but the film is woven from many different threads: Their schoolteacher who believes her husband to have been killed in the war; her brother-in-law who seeks to take the place of her dead husband; the dead husband who returns minus a leg and is afraid to face his wife; a naval officer who comes to spend a short time on Awaji before being taken away to be tried as a war criminal; his daughter who is trying bravely to cope with losing her father; a female barber whose wandering sometime actor boyfriend returns; etc; etc; etc. It's all rather complex, but in essence the film revolves around coming to terms with defeat. Through the series of small stories, Shinoda examines how losing the war affected the Japanese in this small microcosm.

Commentaries:

The film's title in Japanese is not MacArthur's Children, but rather Setouchi Shonen Yakyudan, which translates as something to the effect of The Inland Sea Schoolboy's Baseball Team.

The politics of this film are somewhat ambiguous:

On the one hand, it presents Japan's Pacific War militarism as not so bad after all: We watch Ryuta-kun burn the childish pictures of Japanese planes and ships that are his only remaining link to his dead mother. We see Mune's father portrayed sympathetically, in spite of his apparent responsibility for the deaths of nearly two thousand Allied POWs. And, above all, we are led to wonder if all that "modernism" and remaking of Japan in America's image was really so good after all.
On the other hand, sentimental leftists like this film too because it shows the American army of occupation as sensitive to Japanese feelings and breaking down oppressive attitudes rooted in the past.

But rather than read me prattling on about this film, why don't you click on this link for an interview with director Masahiro Shinoda and Japanese actress Shima Iwashita???

Shinoda/Iwashita Interview