Children of Japan - 1940
Several different views of children on their way to school are given.
The father is walking his two kids to school. One goes into the post office on an errand and the other waits with him outside watching the traffic.
The father works at a railroad station.
The children arrive at the school.
The teachers and students politely exchange greetings.
This shows the students going to their (small) lockers to exchange the shoes they wore to school for shoes they will wear at school.
The students have a reading lesson.
The mother doing ikebana (flower-arranging.)
The mother puts the flowers in front of the family's ancestral shrine and bows.
Older boys practicing "fencing" (kendo).
On another day the young girl is wearing a kimono.
People are going to a festival (matsuri)
The family goes to a shrine near where the festival is being held.
They then pray at the shrine.
A storyteller tells a story while showing drawings.
After they get back from the festival they have dinner.
The film shows one of the kids getting his bath and the mother and the family's maid preparing the beds.
Here's what's really fascinating about this film. There's no sign of racial prejudice. No disrespect. No stereotyping of the Japanese. It's just a film about a family going through a couple of days of their lives, the kids going to school, the family going to a festival, eating dinner, taking a bath, going to bed; everything absolutely normal.
Yet within a couple of years Americans were regarding the Japanese as brutal savages, a culture definitely inferior to their own. If the Japanese people themselves were so terrible, then this film must have been a complete hoax.
Or, the film showed the average Japanese family as being no different from the average American family except in minor details (like how they take a bath) and that was the reality.
It takes a very short time for understanding and tolerance to change to bigotry and hate; it takes a much longer time for things to go the other direction, and this film is a good example of that principle.
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