• 二十四の瞳 (Twenty-Four Eyes), 1/16/11 (Sun), Tokyo

With the death of the great Takamine Hideko at year-end, I gathered friends to watch one of her most successful films. It is an unabashedly sentimental piece from 1953 about a new teacher and her 12 charges in a poor village in Shodoshima over a 20-year span from 1928-1948, i.e., before, during and after the war.

The teacher arrives at the village amidst much skepticism over her Western clothes and bicycle, but soon wins over the first graders with her devotion and good cheer. An injury forces her to transfer schools, and she does not take the class again until their sixth year. At that point, the war with China is in full swing. She raises hackles with lessons that are seen as insufficiently patriotic, inviting visits from the police, and it is clear that she is less than enthusiastic about the nation’s increasingly militaristic bent.

A number of her female students are forced to give up their classes and dreams because of poverty, while the males are sent off to war, mostly to die. The teacher herself suffers the loss of her husband and one of her sons, and ages considerably due to the resulting privations imposed by poverty and the war. A reunion after the war proves a bittersweet meeting among those who have made it somehow, climaxed by a truly touching moment in which a student who had been blinded in the war recalls in great detail the old photo taken on a class trip years earlier. In the end, the teacher returns to the classroom, which now includes children of some her old students.

The overt sentiment of the film, exasperating at first, gradually won us over thanks to the characterizations of the children, all distinctive and believable personalities, and the palpable sincerity of everyone involved. Takamine Hideko is radiant as the teacher, though the role doesn’t give her a lot to work with. I’m not sure what to think of her character’s strangely passive attitude in some scenes, like refusing to help out when one of the kids is unable to afford the school trip or watching as the school burns one of her textbooks as unacceptably “red”. It didn’t necessarily clash with her personality as presented here but made her less appealing as a character, perhaps a comment on the passivity among the Japanese public regarding the war and life in general. Her quiet distaste for the military was especially notable here given that the war was still a raw subject at the time. I don’t know if that was mere hindsight or reflecting a shared unspoken feeling among the wartime public, but it felt real. That said, it would be going too far to classify this as an anti-war film. The emphasis seems more on the characters’ determination to move on as best they could under generally adverse circumstances. I can see why it was such a hit in postwar Japan. The richness of the portrait ultimately justifies the film’s long running time; for example, the introduction of each child in the classroom at the beginning seems tedious, but it succeeds in bringing us closer to them in the end.

Director Keisuke Kinoshita has an interesting way of holding the camera still rather than following the movement of the scene, so that processions, say, move in from the left of the screen and out again from the right (or vice versa) against an unchanging background. He got fine performances all around (other then the stagy crying of the children, which was irritating) and had a great eye for detail, like the small signs in the post-war classroom with “Peace Japan” (へいわ日本) and trucks with English-language signs as a hint of the changes that the years have brought. He even found older actors that looked amazingly like grown-up versions of the children. Technically the film was beyond reproach.

The movie is unquestionably over-sentimental, and the reaction to the film will probably depend on the viewer’s tolerance for that sort of thing. I found out later that it actually beat out Sansho the Bailiff and The Seven Samurai for Best Japanese Film that year – what a year! – and while it’s nowhere near the level of those works, it’s a great portrait of a certain time and place and attitude that could never be remade today. A deserved classic.