Ikari no umi

1944
1h 28m

IMDb RATING

YOUR RATING

It is 1921 and a town has a newspaper which prints urgent bulletins as required. The Washington-based CITES treaty, in which Japan participates, puts a limit on the number of warships any co... Read allIt is 1921 and a town has a newspaper which prints urgent bulletins as required. The Washington-based CITES treaty, in which Japan participates, puts a limit on the number of warships any country can possess. As a result, Japan has to decommission a ship to its makers' disappoint... Read allIt is 1921 and a town has a newspaper which prints urgent bulletins as required. The Washington-based CITES treaty, in which Japan participates, puts a limit on the number of warships any country can possess. As a result, Japan has to decommission a ship to its makers' disappointment. An institute of technology's laboratory designs a new ship. Due to less ships, sailo... Read all

Director
- Tadashi Imai
Writers
- Taketaka Yagisawa
- Yûsaku Yamagata
Stars

See production info at IMDbPro

IMDb RATING

5.0/10

YOUR RATING

Director
- Tadashi Imai
Writers
- Taketaka Yagisawa
- Yûsaku Yamagata
Stars

1User review

See production info at IMDbPro

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Storyline

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Soundtracks
Raindrop
Composed by Frédéric Chopin
Played on the piano by Setsuko Hara

User reviews1

Review

Featured review

6/10

Another Wartime Japanese Movie Whose Propaganda Content Overwhelms

It's 1922, and the Washington Naval Conference has just cut the number of capital ships each nation can put on the water. This is hard on the naval designer in Japan, who see their latest designs sunk. One of them, Jo Hiraga, played by Denjirô Ôkôchi, announces that the war has begun. If the number of ships and tonnage is limited, designs must improve to more than compensate. He is the man to design those ships.

It's a propaganda-heavy movie, of course, and Ôkôchi will wind up the movie exhorting his students to go into battle to die for Japan. It's late in the war, and Japan was already gearing up for kamikaze pilots and "one hundred million dead" when the US Army invaded. This movie by Tadashi Imai -- undoubtedly another of the films he made in this period that he later forgot about -- is not the first of its sort; in 1942, Leslie Howard directed and starred in THE FIRST OF THE FEW, a movie about the genius of R. J. Mitchell, the man behind the Spitfire war plane. Doubtless you can think of a few.

The propaganda sticks out and overwhelms any subtleties of performance. Still, it seems competently done for its type of movie.