Senso To Seishin (1991)

Run Time - 110 min.  |   Countries - Japan  |  
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Synopsis by Clarke Fountain

The independent filmmaker Tadashi Imai raised a significant portion of the funds needed to make this movie by popular subscription. The story illuminates the Japanese view of World War II and its aftermath in ways which may be difficult for some outsiders to comprehend, for instance, by referring to Allied air raids on Tokyo as murder, and by downplaying some (but by no means all) of Japan's war crimes. In the story, a high-school girl in the 1980s has been given a school assignment to find out and report on her family's experience of the war. She has a paternal aunt who is voluntarily mute, and particularly hates to be reminded of the war, but her father eventually (and very reluctantly) tells her what her aunt's mutism is all about. It dates back to 1943, when the aunt was married to a pacifist who went to Hokkaido to protest Japanese ill treatment of Korean laborers and was killed. The aunt was pregnant at the time, and during an air raid on Tokyo, she gave birth to a daughter, who was lost in the confusion. These two traumatic events led to the aunt's silence. Soon after she finds out her aunt's story, her aunt dies. Not long after that, she tracks down the missing child, who was (in a karmically appropriate fashion) adopted by Koreans and was raised in Korea.