-Devdutt Trivedi
Waga seishun ni kuinashi also known as No Regrets for Our Youth, was Kurosawa’s first film after completion of the war. Completed in 1946, it stands out as being the most important amongst Kurosawa’s five other shomin geki or ‘drama of the common people’ films of his early period, Most Beautiful (1943), No Regrets For Our Youth (1949), The Idiot (1950), The Silent Duel (1951) and Record of a Living Being (1953) which were made in between his jida geki films or ‘period drama ‘films which have now acquired cult status. It is the only Kurosawa film centered on a woman character, that of Yukie Yagihar played by Setsuko Hara. Hara would go on to become a regular in the productions of the great Yasujiro Ozu beginning in 1948 with Ozu’s masterful Late Spring.
The film is based on the controversy of the dismissal, in 1933, of a Kyoto University law professor, Takigawa Yukitoki, on grounds of his pro-Communist views by the education minister Ichiro Hatoyama. The character of Noge, Yukie’s lover, is modeled on Hotsumi Ozaki, who was arrested and executed as a spy during the war. The film was shot during a series of strikes at Toho studios in the immediate postwar period. This situation during the shooting of the film resonated with the ideological engagement which the material already had.
Following the Second World War, a heated topic amongst intellectuals who pondered the rise of militarism was the absence of individuals asserting themselves in a crowd. It was concluded that individuals should build stronger egos and be more assertive to oppose scales of violence that could only be possible in group formations subverting the importance of the individual. According to Tadao Sato, Kurosawa’s quote on the film had this undercurrent. Kurosawa said “I thought for a new Japan to come into being (after the War) women had to have a stronger ego, too, and that is why I made the main character a woman who had achieved the objectives she had set for herself.” *
Kurosawa made his early films and also a majority of his later films with Toho studios, where following the war, the labour union at Toho, had ceased power and no film could be made without their consent. Kurosawa was forced to co-operate with them and perhaps this is why the film sides with the Communist movement that lasted until 1945. Kurosawa was forced however, to change the second half of the film, which brought out the woman’s strong individualism, because a union leader at Toho wanted to make a similar film in 1946.
The film itself is about this similarity in extreme ideologies between both Right and Left, and the short sightedness in any ideology because of its inability to provide answers to questions of human suffering. This is a concern Kurosawa shares with his favourite Russian authors especially Fyodor Dosteovski, whose masterpiece The Idiot would be adapted by Kurosawa as Hakuchi in 1951.
Although Kurosawa was a part of the Communist Party movement in Japan in the ‘30s, his films subvert group ideologies for individuality. Perhaps this is what Gilles Deleuze was pointing out in his reading of Kurosawa’s cinema as being one where metaphysical questions are hidden beneath the veneer of situation. These metaphysical questions lead
to a commentary on the character instead of the ideology that the character or the situation conforms to or violates.
Sato builds on this with his reading of Kurosawa. According to him when the individual, in Kurosawa, takes on social evils alone as in the case of No Regrets for Our Youth, he/she invariable invites self-annihilation which in Sato’s words has a ‘certain beauty.’ The character of Yukie shows ‘an acute awareness of annihilation’ particularly in the last sequences after the rice paddy fields have been destroyed which makes her act more effectively for justice. Kurosawa ends the film on an optimistic note with a truck picking up the wandering Yukie to suggest her return after completing the process of emancipation followed by annihilation and terminated fruitfully with freedom.
Kurosawa’s films remain politically problematic, especially his jidai geki dramas where his siding with masculinity and skill over weakness suggests his support for the state. However this stand does remind one of the claim that all art tends to lean to the Right, and can only be understood within the confines of an interiority defined by the State and carried out by the aristocracy and for that matter even the bourgeoisie. In the militarist cinema during the War, the ideal father son relationship represents the home as ‘a microcosm of the emperor in the nation: as the emperor was an embodiment of virtue, so each father should be a model of virtue.’ This ideal which represented feudalistic thinking, changed swiftly after the war, so as to overthrow paternal authoritarianism, a constant concern in Ozu as early as 1933 with I was Born But. Yet Kurosawa continued to portray noble fathers even after the war, and No Regrets for Our Youth is an important example of this with Yukie being influenced by her father in her decision making until she eventually marries a leader of the antiwar movement. Sato analyses the film, along with Kozaburo Yoshimura’s important prewar film, Warm Current (1939) as being an important film that shows the transformation in class hierarchies with a higher class woman adopting a lower class lover. *
Kurosawa continues his film practice with his first film after Sugata Sanshiro Part II (1945) by bringing out certain techniques that would resonate with his contemporaries all over the world. With No Regrets for Our Youths, Kurosawa moves away from the Hollywood influenced editing of Sugata Sanshiro and the European influence of Most Beautiful, with a unique studio shooting technique. He combines calculated emotional development, emphasized with his reliance on close-ups beginning with this film (which would become a stronger and stronger part of his film-making armament and for which he would be criticized by Western critics) and his almost haiku-like editing including the remarkable opening sequence where the students’ hymn is transformed to sheer poetry through Kurosawa’s reliance on the elements: the mountains representing earth and the streams representing water.
Kurosawa, in these sequences builds on the Hollywood studio system practice of the two sided machine in the Deleuzean sense of location and narrative space whilst also creating different temporalities through varied editing rhythms and sound design. He also cleverly opposes the dissolve to show a transformation in character with an overlong duration of the close up, like the close-up fallen book in the scene where Nogi and Yuki reunite, to use a single light and image to convey tempo. These creative developments make No Regrets for Our Youth a curious entry in Kurosawa’s ouvre.
* Currents in Japanese Cinema by Tadao Satao; translated by Gregory Barrett, Library of Congress in Publication Data, 1982