Kanko no machi

The Government is taking over the neighborhood for its own purposes, so its inhabitants have to leave Jubilation Street. However, they're a neighborhood, so it's hard for everyone to pull up roots: the landowner thinks he'll go back to rice farming; the bath house owner is waiting until the last moment, because he wants to serve his customers; the young marrieds are waiting until their first child is born; the young lovers -- he's a test pilot, she's the landowner's daughter and her parents don't approve because his father disappeared ten years back; his mother wants to stay because her husband might come back. And so forth.

Yet they all know the day is coming, and it's the second half when events unfold that force people to make unwanted decisions. It's also in that second half when the propaganda kicks in, with the .sort of bow-your-head-to-the-wind and our-enemies-are-getting-closer paranoia, uttered in cheerful tones of vengeance that seems to have typified Homefront movies in Japan during the War. Keisuke Kinoshita directs this early movie well, and cameraman Hiroshi Kusuda keeps the camera moving well to disguise the Shochiku lot. Mostly, though, it's interesting to see how the Japanese handled this sort of subject in contrast to the American handling I am so much more familiar with.