"Around the time he made such remarkably ambivalent war films as Mud and Soldiers and Five Scouts, Tasaka directed this 'home front' comedy-drama which is too bizarre to be serious propaganda. [The plot revolves around a public contribution campaign to buy airplanes.] The mayor's aviator son...
Tomotaka Tasaka's A Pebble by the Wayside (Robo no Ishi), made in 1938 and taken from a Yuzo Yamamoto novel, takes place around 1902, was about a young boy brought up entirely by his mother since his drunken father is never home. An intelligent teacher wants to send him to middle school, but...
An early example of the Japanese war film, closer to documentary realism than the kind of propaganda produced at the height of the Pacific War. "A company commander calls on five men. They are to reconnoiter, but on their way they are attacked. Only four of them return. While his companions mourn...