Twenty-four Eyes (二十四の瞳) Kinoshita Keisuke (1954)
This film tells the story of Ōishi Hisako, a young schoolteacher assigned to teach at a primary school on the island of Shodoshima, in Japan’s inland sea. Although it’s not far from the city of Hiroshima - perhaps close enough for the residents to have seen the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb in August 1945 - Shodoshima is a rural backwater. It’s portrayed here as a rustic idyll representing many of the best aspects of Japanese tradition. At the same time, as the story takes us from the late 1920s to the late 1940s, we’re shown how Japan’s experience of militarism, war and defeat affects this remote community.
Both the film and the novel on which it is based are infused with a strong anti-war message. The novel, by the female author Tsuboi Sakae, was published in 1952, just two years before the film appeared. It embodies the anti-militarism and pacifism that were powerful currents in a Japan profoundly traumatised by the Asia-Pacific War. The incredible destruction wreaked on Japan’s cities by American bombers in the early 1940s was perhaps the most visible and dramatic aspect of this trauma, but Twenty-four Eyes gives us a different perspective. It portrays a close-knit rural community that, despite its remoteness, cannot escape the suffering of war, but which stoically persists.
This story also presents a women’s perspective on war. The spotlight falls on the experience of those far from the actually fighting, on what the British called the ‘Home Front’. The central figure, Ōishi-sensei, is by no means a passive victim, but a woman with agency and opinions of her own. She also embodies a sadder and wiser Japan rebuilding itself out of the ashes of war. In place of the ruthless military machine that had devoured so many young Japanese, many educators and intellectuals in the 1950s aspired to remodel Japan as a pacifist democracy. And just as education had fuelled wartime militarism, a new form of education, infused with an ethos of care and compassion, would be needed to bring this new Japan into being.
The film can be viewed here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6uajez
Further reading:
John Dower (1999). Embracing Defeat. New York: W.W. Norton.
Ienaga Saburo (2000). Japan’s Past, Japan’s Future: One Historian’s Odyssey. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Audie Bock (2008). Twenty-four Eyes: Growing Pains. The Criterion Collection.
