Kinji Fujiwa

Wartime propaganda filmed by the Japanese in occupied China, Shirley Yamaguchi portrays an orphan rescued from the streets by a kindly Japanese merchant marine officer. Part spy thriller and part Shanghai travelogue, it was part of a popular series known as "Chinese Continental Friendship" made by the occupying Japanese in China.

This is the story of a woman who enters the world of sales. She works at a company in Ginza as a typist. She determines that she needs money for her family and herself and asks her co-worker, who is a salesman, for guidance on sales. Armed with the information he provides, she begins in sales and is successful. Her original guide eventually begins to feel strange about her...

A novice city-based teacher's first assignment is to a fishing village's grade school. The young teacher's first week with her new students is enjoyable, but she gradually notices that many of the students are skipping school. Visiting her students after class, she realizes that many of them are charged with work and tasks like making money, toiling on the farm, doing housework or tending to their younger siblings. Many of them live in unhygienic homes due to poverty or overwork. She not only reports and explains the situation to the school's principal, but also attempts to improve the conditions by making textbooks, teaching cleanliness, and making her classes relevant.

A Japanese family weathers much hardship after their military uncle comes to live with them during WWII.

The premature death of a young mother serves as inspiration for her husband and son.

Shochiku melodrama about the lives of the humble people living in the poor tenement called the Ryuheiso.

This film attempts to reconstruct the tension of the Battle of Shanghai through an episode in an understated way, introducting its story in a documentary mode. In the film story, Japan's marine regiment protects Japanese residents and Chinese refugees-women and young children-from rampant street fighting, Shanhai Rikusentai unsparingly uses its first eight minutes for an official-mannered self-justification of the war. From the viewpoint of explaining Japan's military operation,the narration refers to the city s spatial division in sync with maps on screen.

A large family scrapes by on the meager salaries of the father and three eldest sons, who left school in order to work and support the family. The fourth eldest is soon to graduate and follow in their footsteps, though he'd rather continue schooling. The eldest finally decides to break free and set out on his own against his parents' wishes, with the support and sympathy of his siblings.

A "slice-of life" film about a group of high school girls in 1940s Japan.

Part one of two.

In this semi-documentary, an older locomotive driver is tasked with training younger ones and is currently training two in particular. The old man is finding the task overwhelming as it is hard work with practical lessons and classroom components. His wife has died, but he has three daughters with the oldest taking care of her younger siblings.

An episodic film about life in and around a rural police station and the people it serves.

A Fond Face from the Past is also set in a rural community, specifically a village outside Kameoka, near Kyoto. In some ways this short, thirty-six-minute film is Naruse's most moving negotiation of the militarist restrictions of the time, perhaps because it is also his most direct engagement with the culture of war. When a newsreel comes to Kameoka featuring a local man named Yoichi, it causes some excitement in the community and, of course, in Yoichi's own family. First of all his mother makes the newsreel (Nippon News, no. 14), which begins with the same marching music that opens his own film, followed by a curious baby judging context in Los Angeles featuring two hundred Japanese babies. Released in January 1941, almost a year before the pacific war begins, this “found footage” is indicative of Japanese imperialist ambitions beyond Asia long before Pearl Harbor.

Part two of two.