Daibutsu sama to kodomotachi (Children of the Great Buddha) is the final film in Hiroshi Shimizu’s war orphan trilogy. It features the same cast of orphans from Shimizu’s orphanage, The Beehive, as tour guides in Nara. Other titles include Introspection Tower, Children of the Beehive, and Children of the Beehive: What Happened Next.Read More »
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Lost for 70 years until 2022, Shimizu’s second postwar film recalls Mr. Thank You as he frames the narrative in a familiar setting, tracking an autumnal bus ride from a hot spring town through a mountain pass. When the jaunty bus unceremoniously breaks down, a bittersweet sadness overcomes the passengers as unexpected reunions take place, but nothing can be what it was before the war.Read More »
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Michio Segawa, whose father is a water bus driver, lives with his father since his mother died, but he doesn’t feel lonely because he has a beloved carrier pigeon called Dede. Soon, Michio gets a new mother. His new mother brings along her younger sister, Emiko. The house suddenly becomes lively, and Michio’s mother is kind to him, but Michio feels strange. When Emiko is on his father’s lap, he can no longer go to his father to get his gloves fixed right away when they get torn, as he used to do. His father also scolds him strangely.Read More »
The movie focuses on the plight of ten war orphans hailing from different cities across Japan. With nowhere to go, they scavenge around train stations, scratching out an existence by means of black market work for a one-legged tramp whilst avoiding being picked up by the police for vagrancy. Soon however, they find a more inspiring role model in the figure of a nameless soldier just repatriated after the war. An orphan himself, the soldier also has no home to return to, and so sets out across the country with the kids in tow in search of work before settling on the goal of leading them to the orphanage where he himself grew up.Read More »
33-year-old poor writer Ogata was able to endure his miserable life cheerfully thanks to Yoshie, a 19-year-old innocent young wife. After graduating from a girls’ school in Hokuriku, she immediately moved to Tokyo to meet and marry Ogata. After neatly writing Ogata’s manuscript, he would buy dorayaki as a gratuity and devour it.Read More »
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In the heart of the Japanese Alps, in Kamikochi, Nagano Prefecture, botany professor Kazuhiko Onuma spends time with Tsuruko, his lover. One night, Kazuhiko’s wife Kazuyo comes to see them and confronts the professor about his extramarital affair, and Tsuruko, an inevitable witness to the confrontation, leaves the professor the following morning. Over the next decade, whenever he visits the mountain cabin every autumn equinox, the memory of Tsuruko will forever haunt Kazuhiko…Read More »
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In the sequel to Children of the Beehive, a journalist arrives in the secluded foothills of Shimizu’s cherished Izu in search of a hidden commune to ask, “What happened to the children of the Beehive?” Three years have passed and her question situates itself not only in the realm of Shimizu’s craft, but that of reality: What became of the war orphans Shimizu raised? Rewriting the past, Shimizu even renders one of the original’s most heartbreaking sequences into a work of fiction. Invoking meta-narrative elements, Shimizu reshapes the orphans’ narrative, which is quite well-known to visitors of the commune thanks to the popularity of the first Beehive film. A fascinating work of docudrama that treads between the realm of fact and fiction, Children of the Beehive: What Happened Next breathes the fresh air of Shimizu’s loose and reflexive approach, anticipating the works of Kiarostami.Read More »
Uta’s mother died when she was six years old; her father she never met. She was forced to adopt a traveller’s life when her grandmother died, and now she is a dancer and part of a family of actors who travel from town to town, setting up street performances. A way of escape from this marginal existence arises when she gets the chance to move to tea merchant Hiramatsu’s place, where she is asked to teach his daughter to dance.Read More »
