Morning for the Osone Family (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1946)

Haruko Sugimura, Mitsuko Miura, and Eitaro Ozawa in Morning for the Osone Family

Fusako Osone: Haruko Sugimura
Ichiro Osone: Toshinosuke Nagao
Taiji Osone: Shin Tokudaiji
Yuko Osone: Mitsuko Miura
Takashi Osone: Shiro Osaka
Issei Osone: Eitaro Ozawa
Sachiko Osone: Natsuko Kahara
Akira Minari: Junji Masuda
Heibei Tanji: Kinji Fujiwa
Ippei Yamaki: Eijiro Tono

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Eijiro Hisaita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Mikio Mori
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Takaaki Asai

One of the myths of war is that the enemy moves in lockstep, from the commander-in-chief down to the lowliest citizen. So those of us who are (just barely) old enough to remember something about living through World War II, the myth of Japan as a monolithic force lingers, even though 70 years of peace with the Japanese and a wholesale assimilation by the West of their culture, from sushi to anime, has effaced old hostilities. Morning for the Osone Family gives us a valuable sense of the way things were -- or at least may have been. Made in the year after the surrender of Japan, after ideological censorship had ceased (though the American occupation imposed its own censorship, which is why you'll find no mention of the atomic bomb in Japanese movies made just after the war), Morning for the Osone Family gives us a portrait of what a dissenting family went through during the war. How accurate the portrait may be is up to question -- just as we could question the accuracy of the "home front" movies made in the United States during and after the war. But Kinoshita and screenwriter Eijiro Hisaita give us a plausible account of what might have happened to a widow, Fusako, and her three sons, her daughter, and her brother-in-law in the waning years of the war. One son is imprisoned for writing against the war; the daughter is forced to break off her engagement to a young man because of the political implications of what her brother did; another son, a pacifist who wants to be an artist, is drafted and dies of pneumonia in a hospital; the youngest son, embracing the militarist propaganda, enlists and is killed. And then there is the domineering presence of the brother-in-law, a colonel who despises the way Fusako has raised her children to doubt the glory of the Japanese military. When his house is destroyed by bombing, he moves in with the Osone family and takes over the household. Devastated by the surrender, he begins to stockpile food in their house, even as starvation spreads across the land. The film takes place on a single set, which only emphasizes the sense of a world closing in on the family.