Made towards the end of the American Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), Nippon senbotsu gakusei no shuki: Kike wadatsumi no koe is said to be the first postwar Japanese film to feature scenes of wartime combat. It was based on a bestselling collection of letters and diaries written by students who had been drafted and killed in the war. Little known today, director Hideo Sekigawa (1908-1977) served as a production manager at P.C.L. during the 1930s, and made his directorial debut at P.C.L.’s successor, Toho, in 1944 with a documentary about Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, then a leading contractor for the Imperial Japanese Navy. After the war, he took advantage of the freer climate of the early Occupation period to express his leftwing views. But against a backdrop of escalating Cold War tensions, a landmark strike at Toho was assertively suppressed by the American military. Sekigawa, like many leftwing filmmakers, was blacklisted. He moved to the fledgling Toyoko Eiga (later Toei) to make this film which proved a crucial box-office and critical success for the young company. The film was praised both for its technique and for its values. Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie admired its “vigorous use of contrapuntal montage”, the soldiers’ suffering being juxtaposed with flashbacks to peacetime. The film not only indicts the inhumanity of war but also tells the story of the spiritual liberation of young people whose thoughts were constrained by militaristic education. The film succeeds in portraying the tragedy of war through individual experiences, transcending the simple antiwar film genre. The conflict between military obligation and the individual conscience dramatised in the film symbolises the contradictions faced by Japanese society as a whole during the war, and Nippon senbotsu gakusei no shuki: Kike wadatsumi no koe does not merely depict a page from history but questions the postwar present. It raises the issue of how one can critically examine the militaristic ideology that was followed until so recently, and how to construct new values to replace it.

Johan Nordstrom