Children of Hiroshima (1952)

9/10

graydons928 March 2008

Nominated for the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953, which was the highest prize at the time; Children of Hiroshima is Kaneto Shindo's third film and he shows that he is a good director. The first thing that caught my attention was its excellent cinematography and its musical score.

Children of Hiroshima follows a kindergarten teacher Takako, as she returns to Hiroshima after its bombing and meets with her former pupils, six years after teaching them. Only a handful remain. The story does not follow some basic movie template. Children are the theme of the story, rather than indicators of major plot points, we really get to know the people Takako visits, as we learn the stories of their past and the life they live as a result of the bombing. There are many great scenes, one where a plane flies overhead, and although historically, we know that Hiroshima isn't attacked again, we get a feeling of how frightened the residents must feel.

It's amazing how prolific Kaneto Shindo has been, with a total of 43 directing credits, and many more writing credits. He even has a film in post-production right now, at the age of 95.

This movie has been released into the public domain, so it can be legally downloaded off of the web.

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8/10

Moving

gbill-7487720 July 2020

As a narrative this film is not particularly strong, but its context is of course extraordinary. Made seven years after the war just after the American occupation had ended, it dramatizes, and more importantly humanizes, the horrible consequences of the bombing of Hiroshima. It has a kindergarten teacher returning to that city to see the three students of her old class who survived, and paying her respects to family members who perished. The scenes where she is standing in ruins, remembering bygone events of happier times, or looking up into the sky or down at the river, are particularly poignant. To see the city itself in 1952 is fascinating, to see the people (even dramatized by actors) heartbreaking. The film wisely steers clear of the complicated question of whether dropping the bomb was necessary, and I think that's how it ought to be viewed; it simply shows us that in war, innocent people suffer, and in the new atomic age, in unprecedented ways, far larger and more monstrous than ever before. It's stunning to me that this was not seen in America until 2011.

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7/10

Downfall

boblipton13 July 2020

Nobuko Otowa lives on a small, beautiful island in the house of her uncle, but she grew up in Hiroshima and taught kindergarten there. She returns to her home town to lay flowers on the graves of her parents in the blasted cemetery and see the children she taught. She encounters Osamu Takizawa. Once he was her father's employee. Now, scarred and blinded by the A-Bomb, he ekes out a living, caring only about his parentless grandson.

Confronted with a movie about the consequences of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, my urge is to write about Operation Downfall, its US armed forces casualties estimated at between half a million and a million dead, and two to four million wounded; Japan's Operation Ketsugo, its propaganda campaign of "One Hundred Million Deaths For The Emperor!"; and other factors that made dropping the Bomb not just a political necessity, but an issue of saving lives.

However, Kaneto Shindô's film isn't about the big picture. It's about the tragedy of a small boy who refuses to leave his grandfather. The A-bomb isn't a racist plot by Americans to kill Japanese. It, like war, are monsters that kill people for no reason whatsoever. Blinded old men, fatherless children, women rendered sterile are the lucky ones.

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10/10

An excellent, powerful movie

Bob-4068 March 1999

Largely overlooked today, this was one of the first films made during the Allied occupation after WW2.

Very powerful in its content, it shows the devastation caused by the Atomic bomb, and by use of a fictional storyline, portrays the struggle of the ordinary Japanese people in dealing with the aftermath.

I last saw this film in 1976 and it is still vivid in my memory.

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10/10

Poignant reminder of the consequences of nuclear war

jamesrupert201421 July 2020

Takako Ishikawa (Nobuko Otowa), a young kindergarten teacher, reconnects with pupils and friends in Hiroshima four years after the city was demolished by an atomic bomb*. The film is a moving commentary of the consequences of nuclear weapons, especially on children, and wisely that is where the emphasis lies - not on the moral and strategic debates pertaining to their use in 1945. There is a brief recreation of the detonation of the bomb, with searing images of people and animals dying, but most of the film is about the people Ishikawa visits as she wanders through the slowly rebuilding city, such as an scarred and blind beggar who was a former employee of her father, a former pupil dying of radiation-induced illness, a young woman crippled in the explosion, and another young woman sterilized by ionizing radiation. Directed by Kaneto Shindo (who would later direct the creepy 'Onibaba' (1964)) with music by Akira Ifukube (of 'Gojira' (1954) fame), the film is touching and tragic. Otowa is excellent as the sweet, soft-spoken young teacher who serves to connect the stories. 'Children of Hiroshima' was the first of two 'anti-war' films sponsored by The Japan Teachers Union. Apparently not satisfied with the product, the union commissioned the second film, simply entitled 'Hiroshima' (1953) and directed by Hideo Sekigawa, which is much more epic, with many scenes of crowds of badly burned survivors stumbling through devastated streets to the river and the final shots of tens of thousands of people congregating in The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. Shindo's film is much more low-key and personal, as the camera follows the young teacher as she vicariously experiences the suffering of the survivors. Both are excellent 'docu-dramas' but I found Shindo's film to be more affecting, perhaps because the interactions between Ishikawa and the piteous survivors were so well done. Like most films intended to deliver a message, 'Children of Hiroshima' is not subtle, but it is beautifully made, memorable, and well worth watching. Perhaps films like this contributed to the fact that, despite their proliferation, nuclear weapons have never again been used in a military conflict. *Comments pertain to the English-subtitled version shown on TCM in 2020 (the 75th anniversary of the bombing).

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7/10

Pretty good, but a tad two-dimensional

zetes29 May 2012

Takako Ishikawa stars as a woman from Hiroshima who left it shortly after the bombing to live with her aunt and uncle on a nearby island. She lost the rest of her family in the disaster. Four years afterward, she returns to check up on old acquaintances. Ishikawa is basically an audience surrogate, as we see how the people of Hiroshima are doing. The answer: not that well, as you might expect. The city is still devastated, people are dying of radiation poisoning, many are horribly injured. But life goes on, represented by the children of the city, many of them orphans, but they live their lives as carefree as they can. Ishikawa feels guilty for leaving the city and not being able to help her townspeople, but she finds hope in a young boy, the grandson of one of her father's employees. Osamu Takizawa is now a blind beggar, and can't really take care of the boy himself (he lives in an orphanage). Ishikawa offers to adopt the boy, but he is understandably reluctant to leave his grandfather behind. This is a touching film, but it is pretty two dimensional. It kept reminding me of the far superior Grave of the Fireflies, and the only tears I shed during it came about because I was thinking of the Isao Takahata anime (a rare film which I just cannot recall without tearing up). Takizawa gives a pretty good performance. Ishikawa went on to star in Shindo's three most famous films, Onibaba, The Naked Island and Kuroneko. The very unsubtle score is by Akira Ifukube, who would go on to score Gojira and tons of other kaiju eiga.

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10/10

Personal responsibility

lreynaert30 April 2014

Kaneto Shindo's movie is without any doubt one of the best ever made. It deals head-on with one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of mankind: the dropping for pure geopolitical reasons of a nuclear bomb on a city thereby killing thousands of innocents citizens in the twinkling of an eye and wreaking havoc for centuries to come on a country (and also very slightly on the whole living world) because the human genetic basic material has been damaged.

Kaneto Shindo's movie shows preeminently that the fate of the world and the human species depends solely on the responsible or irresponsible behavior of every single person on earth. In this movie, a teacher is looking for survivors among the children of her kindergarten class. There are only three. On her own initiative, she tries to secure a more hopeful future for one of those.

This impeccably played movie (also by the children) is simply unforgettable. A must see. For a geopolitical interpretation of the dropping of the atomic bomb I highly recommend the book 'The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb' by Gar Alperovitz.

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7/10

Healing and moving on despite lingering threads of resentment and pain

Polaris_DiB1 August 2010

Warning: Spoilers

How does a nation deal with a traumatic event as awful as the a-bomb? In a way the world is lucky Japan's ultimate reaction was to immediately drop their war-inducing nationalistic side and become pacifists, but it's not like they could take the beating without some major loss of strength and a little resentment. Shindo's Children of Hiroshima is not a documentary, and in places it's actually quite melodramatic, but what it paints is a portrait of post-war Japan slowly letting go of its recent past and just beginning to start looking forward to the future, as the final clinging threads of hatred, fear, and radiation sickness grasp on to the victims who managed to survive but only after losing everything.

The story is told through the perspective of Takako, a young kindergarten teacher from Hiroshima who managed to escape the bomb and returns to visit her parent's grave. While there, she finds a city being rebuilt and operating functionally, but still deeply scarred by the event, represented by two repeated motifs: the blasted out building that characters continue to linger on, and the burnt away face and eyes of Iwakichi, an old friend of hers turned begger after the bomb took his family and his vision and left him nothing but his grandson that he cannot support and a reliance on alms. Iwakichi's story about his grandson incites Takako to search out the three surviving children from her kindergarten class, each of them representing in some way the state of Japanese families in Hiroshima post-bomb: the first is losing his family to radiation sickness, the second is dying herself from radiation sickness, but the third is excited and proud that his sister is marrying. Families are still falling apart years after the bomb dropped, but families are starting to come together and a future is starting to take place, so Takako is inspired to return to Iwakichi and ask if she can adopt his grandson.

The problem is that resentment does still linger and scarred-Japan is not so willing to let go as fresh-faced Japan. Iwakichi initially refuses to let go of his grandson and his grandson refuses to let go of him, the point in the movie where the drama does get the most melodramatic. Shindo's use of children as a sort of looking-forward is a very good one, but he also uses them for emotional tugs in the audience which does at points tend towards the sappy, one thing that a movie about Hiroshima probably shouldn't be. Shindo's intentions are clear and his instincts are good, but at points he loses his soft touch. Possibly the worst feature of this movie is the score, which is unnecessarily manipulative--in some scenes, the performances are overburdened by emotional cues.

Otherwise this is a great movie, especially visually. Shindo's compositions are classic style filmmaking, and his blocking always tells the story without need for the dialog or score. There are some major unforgettable images here, such as the open sky over Hiroshima and the blasted shadow of a thinking man. He also is fond of these amazing wide shots as children run through the streets of Hiroshima, showing a budding and building community that nevertheless lives on despite the focus on the struggle of survival and healing in the main focus of the plot.

--PolarisDiB

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