FILM: FROM SHINODA, 'MACARTHUR'S CHILDREN'

Reviwed By

VINCENT CANBY
Published: May 17, 1985

from: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9403E3DB123BF934A25756C0A963948260

 

MASAHIRO SHINODA'S ''MacArthur's Children,'' which opens today at the Cinema Studio, is an extremely peculiar film about the United States occupation of Japan, as reflected in the experiences of the citizens on one small, ideally pretty island in the Inland Sea. The people of Awaji haven't been fire-bombed into submission. The island hasn't been physically damaged, though everyone has suffered emotional losses.

In ''MacArthur's Children,'' Mr. Shinoda tells a story of almost gentle, cultural humiliation, but in terms that are themselves virtually a demonstration of that humiliation. More than anything else, ''MacArthur's Children'' looks like a Hollywood movie of the 1950's, photographed in rich, sunny colors, covering a wide range of fairly familiar characters, with everything treated rather superficially, neatly and sentimentally.

It's possible, though I doubt it, that Mr. Shinoda's intent was to underscore his point by making a culture-shock movie that looks as American as Hershey bars and chewing gum. Whatever the intent, the movie is no more or less successful than Mr. Shinoda's earlier films, including ''Double Suicide'' and ''The Ballad of Orin,'' each of which has a clearly developed sense of style that doesn't necessarily translate into content.

Seen mostly through the eyes of two precociously prankish, fifth-grade schoolboys, both of whom have lost their fathers, ''MacArthur's Children'' manages to squeeze at least a half-dozen different plot lines into one film. These include stories about a young war widow, a brave naval officer who is tried for Class B war crimes, a barber who cashes in on the occupation by turning her shop into a barroom and, of course, about the two boys who, each in his own positive way, come to terms with their country's defeat.

''MacArthur's Children'' is most interesting when it is remembering specific events identified with the early years of the occupation - the ways in which schoolbooks had to be changed to recognize the once-divine Emperor Hirohito's newly mortal identity, and the release of the first Japanese movie in which the lovers actually kissed on screen. Mr. Shinoda's fiction is of a far lesser order, concluding with a baseball game - a spunky team of Japanese kids against an American Army team - that could have come out of ''The Bad News Bears Go to Japan.''

''MacArthur's Children'' doesn't do particular honor to a complex subject. There is far more about the real ''children'' of General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the Allied occupation forces, in almost any postwar film by Yasujiro Ozu, including his great ''Tokyo Story,'' as well as in Wim Wenders's fine documentary ''Tokyo-Ga,'' recently shown at the Metro.

''MacArthur's Children,'' which has been rated PG (''Parental Guidance Suggested''), contains some mildly vulgar language in its English subtitles.

Culture Clash MacARTHUR'S CHILDREN, directed by Masahiro Shinoda; screenplay (Japanese with English subtitles) by Takeshi Tamura, based on the novel by Yu Aku; cinematography, Kazuo Miyagawa; edited by Sachiko Yamaji; music by Shinichiro Ikebe; produced by You-No-Kai and Masato Hara; an Orion Classics Release.

 

Running time: 115 minutes. This film is rated PG. Ryuta AshigaraTakaya Yamuchi Saburo MasakiYoshiyuki Omori Mume HatanoShiori Sakura Komako NakaiMasako Natsume Tadao AshigaraShuji Otaki

 

MacArthur’s Children / Setouchi shonen yakyu dan (1984)

05/13/2022 / JAPANONFILM

https://japanonfilm.wordpress.com/2022/05/13/macarthurs-children-setouchi-shonen-yakyu-dan-1984/

vlcsnap-2022-05-11-18h03m33s503Most of the movies made about the Occupation after the Occupation officially ended in 1952 have looked back through the eyes of the yakuza. MacArthur’s Children,however, views the early years of the Occupation through the experience of three fifth-graders on a tiny island in the Inland Sea. It is a view in which the Americans themselves are hardly visible, so insignificant is the island. A small unit lands to blow up the artillery battery left on the island, bearing in their wake chewing gum and Hershey bars and then are not seen again until a baseball game.

But that doesn’t mean things don’t change. We meet best friends Saburo and Ryuto as they are standing in the schoolyard listening to the Emperor’s address and complaining they can’t understand a word of his accent. Then we cut to the classroom where all the boys in Komako’s classroom are busy blacking out any of the sections of their textbook that refer to the Emperor as a god or to military prowess and patriotic feeling. At the end, of the movie, all the class is studying English, practicing saying “I am an American boy.”

Being in a fishing village, the people have food, though not much rice, so we do not see the dire subsistence of the stories set in Tokyo or other major cities. If it were not for the lost war, we would have a typical coming of age story, but the lost war always impinges on the life of the boys. First is the arrival of the mysterious Mume and her father, vlcsnap-2022-05-11-18h04m12s620a naval captain who has come home to patiently await his probable arrest for war crimes (When his ship carrying English POWs was torpedoed by the Americans, he rescued his crew first but not the POWs). One of his crewmen lives here and offers him a place to stay. The boys constantly argue, as best friends of that age do, and eventually Saburo quits going to school to be a gangster like his older brother and sister, who appear one day in flashy clothes scattering candy. What their gangsterism might be is never defined, and eventually the two are found hanging together in an alley.

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Two plotlines gradually emerge. Komako’s husband is thought dead and she is pursued and eventually raped by her step-brother (Ken Watanabe in his first big screen role). The husband does return, however, with only one leg, but she is so ashamed she sends him away. Eventually, the two boys find him and bring them back together, and the husband introduces the farmers to the idea of growing flowers in land that would not produce rice.

Shima Iwashita is the village barber, keeping tabs on everything through her mirror across from the window. Her husband also returns from his time as a troop entertainer.

Under his influence, the barber shop is turned into a bar, complete with two hostesses from out of town. They also put on a play that is a thinly disguised story of Komako’s situation, produced with ludicrous over-acting. But her husband eventually disappears, running off with one of the hostesses and the village “arts fund,” and the bar soon returns to the barbershop.

Unfortunately, a large chunk of the movie is devoted to the making of a baseball team for seven boys plus Komako and Mume.* This turns soppily sentimental when Komako’s husband, a former high school baseball star, comes down from his refuge to coach the team, and then absurd when they play a team of American soldiers to a tie after losing 74-0 to a neighboring school.vlcsnap-2022-05-11-18h08m56s685The last time we saw this kind of activity was in movies made during the Occupation itself.

The movie is based on an apparently autobiographical novel by the pop music lyricist Yu Aku, who would also provide a source for Shinoda’s Moonlight Serenade (1997), set in the same time period. The screenplay was by Tsutomu Tamura, long-time collaborator with Oshima in his experimental period, without any signs of the experimentalism or the cultural analysis of those earlier films. Like Shinoda’s previous Island of Evil Spirits, it is professional, slick, and commercial film-making, but it tells us very little about the Occupation years. It puts a glow of nostalgia around them that perhaps makes sense, in that it has been thirty years since the Occupation formally ended, about the time it usually takes for nostalgia to begin to overtake the reality of our memories, particularly when it involves memories of our youth. The movie was quite popular, winning the readers’ choice award of the Mainichi Concours, suggesting a society now eager to move on. The popularity led to a sequel, with which Shinoda was not associated, about the children as they moved to Tokyo in later years.

* The combination of my dictionaries and Google Translate suggest that the Japanese title was actually Setouchi’s boys team, or something along those lines. Thus, instead of a sideline to the story of the Occupation, the baseball game was intended to be central to the movie from the beginning. During the Occupation, the Americans believed in the healing power of baseball, not only encouraging its appearance in movies but also encouraging its development in schools, where rugby had been the most popular sport, and professionally.