Masahiro Shinoda's MacArthur's Children｜The Occupation and the Time of the Seto Inland Sea

Could it be that war is shown most accurately not through the adults who fought it but through the eyes of the children who looked up at it? Whenever I think back on postwar Japanese cinema, this paradox comes to mind. Masahiro Shinoda, whom I introduced last week, seems to me to have grasped it beautifully. If I had to name the one film among Shinoda’s many fine works in which this sensibility shows most clearly, it would be MacArthur’s Children (1984).

Films with children at their center had been made here and there since before the war. Hiroshi Shimizu in particular was called a genius at working with children, and he left many such films, including Children in the Wind (1937). In Children of the Beehive (1948), which Shimizu made soon after the war, real war orphans ran across the screen. With defeat as the dividing line, films about children quietly changed their character, from films that captured innocence to films that captured the wounds of the age.

Children reveal war better than adults do. From this perspective, films using child actors gradually rose to prominence in the postwar film world. Yet these films did not simply use children. To convey to the audience the world as it appeared in their eyes, they surrounded the children with carefully chosen actors. The more a film places children at its center, the less the adults at its edges can afford to lie.

Nagisa Oshima, Shinoda’s close comrade, was no exception. Oshima made Diary of a Yunbogi Boy (1965), a short film based on the diary of a poor Korean boy, and went on to release the celebrated Boy (1969). Boy traces a real case in which a family used a child to stage traffic accidents for money, following them as they drift from one part of the country to another. In this film too, a man wounded in the war appears as the father.

It was Tsutomu Tamura who wrote the screenplay for Boy, and fifteen years later the same Tamura would write the screenplay for MacArthur’s Children. The same writer’s pen depicts, in one film, a family that keeps drifting across the Japanese archipelago, and in the other, children who stay on an island. I see the difference in the two directors’ natures engraved directly in this contrast, and I think it reveals, even more than their styles, how each of them expressed the experience of war. Oshima used children to confront us with the violence of society, while Shinoda used children to gather up the time of a place.

MacArthur’s Children is not mere entertainment. Behind it lies the shadow of defeat and occupation. Indeed, the very choice of its English title tells us plainly what that shadow is. In Japanese the film is called Setouchi Shonen Yakyudan, the Seto Inland Sea Boys’ Baseball Team, and in English it is MacArthur’s Children. It is an idea typical of the filmmakers of a defiant era, but more than that, the film is beautiful.

The story is set not in a great city like Tokyo or Osaka but in a remote corner of Awaji Island, which faces the Seto Inland Sea. It is based on a novel by Yu Aku, who spent his boyhood on the island, and it unfolds in September 1945 among people trying to live on the island after the war. The children who drag the shadow of war behind them, and the world around the heroine, whose father has been taken away as a war criminal, move forward amid the helplessness of a postwar time in which everything is being swept away.

To make this world hold together, Masako Natsume was cast as the teacher. She died young of leukemia, and in her presence there is the clear light that only things coming to an end possess. Now that we who watch know the fate that awaited her, that light looks all the more poignant.

And behind the camera was the master Kazuo Miyagawa. Miyagawa, who might be called the central figure in creating the visual grammar of Japanese cinema, here too captures superbly the invisible overlap of the Seto Inland Sea and the occupation.

In one scene, on orders from above, the schoolbooks are suddenly blacked out. With their own hands, the children bury under ink the words that until yesterday had been held to be right. Their generation learned with their bodies what it means for values to be turned inside out overnight. What vanished beneath the ink was not only the letters but the very footing of belief itself. As the film traces on screen the memories the children themselves lived through, the story at a certain moment turns abruptly to the motif of playing baseball.

Then baseball enters the picture. It shows clearly how Shinoda read the postwar condition at the time.

The island children turn baseball, the pastime of the occupiers, into a game of their own. MacArthur’s children, whose schoolbooks have been blacked out, now take hold of a new language, the white ball. I think the speed of that leap was the true feeling of the postwar era.

Reality flows on beyond any power to resist it, yet time on the Seto Inland Sea flows gently.

This contrast is the very essence of the film. Even as the great force of the occupation passes over the island, the sea lies calm as always, and the children chase the white ball. Shinoda layered the torrent of history and the time of the land, which goes on flowing with no regard for it, within the same frame. The nation was defeated and its words were rewritten, but no one could command the ebb and flow of the tide.

I myself have visited the Seto Inland Sea more times than I can count. The time that flows there has not changed, even now.