Known for enthralling family themes embedded in her novels, award-winning screenwriter and director Miwa Nishikawa delivers anew a resolutely powerful drama in a singular voice of humanist expression. “Children Untold” is set in the war-torn landscape of Tokyo during the smouldering aftermath of the Second World War. Adapted from her novel of the same title, “Children Untold” is Nishikawa’s latest opus on screen which premiered at the 51st Toronto International Film Festival in September.
The story follows a 12-year old orphaned girl Kotoko who disguises herself as a boy to survive the underbelly of a ravished metropolis. Her former teacher Fumiko, played by critically acclaimed Fumi Nikaido, is struggling to survive herself with an infant in her care. She searches tirelessly for Kotoko’s whereabouts not knowing how she manages to cope with the harsh realities under a foreign military-occupied city.
Nishikawa has given voice to the voiceless and psychologically scarred orphans of war that resonates with how children of today’s unimaginable violence inflicted on civilian populations survive on their own.
Kotoko, played by Ami Koyae in her remarkable debut role, carries the onus of drawing viewers to her onerous journey until the end. Nishikawa has masterfully molded the protagonist’s character to be breathed into life by Ami’s captivating performance. And so are the ensemble of children drifters of war who each brought to life the reserved anguish and resilience that compliment with Ami’s sensitivity and portrayal of resolve against dangers lurking behind the ruins of war.
Kotoko’s passion for classical music provides a continuum from what was interrupted by B-29s’ onslaught of firebombing Tokyo to the time survivors are able to enjoy music again. Facing uncertainties of day to day struggle to free herself from harm during U.S. Forces’ military occupation, Kotoko navigates the remnants of a city where her idyllic home once stood.
Bereft of harrowing scenes that are commonplace in war and other post-war dramas depicting Japan as the centerpiece, the film is able to focus more on the ‘untold’ horrors that ruminate in the children’s disturbed emotions and ambivalence towards their future. Nishikawa’s soft power approach invites viewers to comprehend the precarity of abandoned and orphaned children’s condition who, despite having survived the war, lost a great deal of their innocence and desire to reintegrate during the dark period of reconstruction. Instead of a heavy-handed condemnation of what war machinery had led its people to suffer the consequences of an equally reprehensible belligerent reprisal, Nishikawa deviates from the didactic and perennial political dispute over the normalization of evil deeds attached to militarism. The victimization of civilians, particularly innocent children who lost their families and whose education and puerile dreams have been cut short by the wretchedness of war, is what the film reminds and prompts viewers to reflect on.
Warfares go on as if no lessons have been learned from cataclysmic global wars of the past. If anything, only the continued sophistication of technology has kept up with the dysfunctional demands of aggressors enforcing peace by consistently destroying civilian lives. To break the will to resist and subdue enemy combatants, battlefields go far beyond the parameters of the theatre of war. Since the most destructive bombs in all of history left its indelible hellhole of nuclear holocaust in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the world run by modern militarists and war mongers from hostile administrations continue to flirt with the prospect of global annihilation, just as current conflicts have inherited the monstrosity of the Second World War, blurring the line between military targets and civilian infrastructure.
Children bear the most devastating cost of war, facing record levels of violence, displacement, and rights violation globally. Their protection have always been neglected, as nations with long histories of getting involved in wars violate international laws that are meant to safeguard the welfare and future of children. It is the older generation that tip the scales, whereby justifications of invasions, aggressions and assaults on sovereignties garner public support, still brainwashed and blinded by the jingoist principle and worldview of ‘might makes right’.
Vanquished as a nation at the end of World War II, Japan with its lion’s share of culpability in the Pacific War of imperial aggression received the unprecedented blow as the first and only nation thus far to suffer a nuclear attack. The legitimacy and morality behind the authorization of using those apocalyptic bombs haunt all mankind to this day. Though Japan has never engaged in any war since 1945, other nations on the other hand have been beating the war drums in escalating manner promoting hostility and stoking nationalist fervour to rally support for another major conflict. It is as if humanity has been inured by over 280 distinct armed conflicts globally since the Second World War. The desensitized among us who by hyper-stimulation of video games, graphic novels and films that capitalize on intense gore wouldn’t budge at the rising tempo of using drone-operated killing machines which have evolved from popularized science fiction concepts.
This is where “Children Untold” sets the story apart from other period films that gravitate towards saturating drama with the predictable shock and horror scenes of war as a contextual element or backdrop. What Kotoko has experienced and witnessed with a hidden depth of ambiguity through her eyes is illuminated in her decision to cut her hair short disguising as a boy. The rest is her journey of survival among playfully resilient boys and other urchins lured into the underworld. Rising from the ashes of a war that made her an orphan, Kotoko’s complex interplay of vulnerability and determination emanates throughout this extraordinary cinematic work by writer-director Miwa Nishikawa. It is an appeal to a world that continues to create uninhabitable places of war zones and prolonged displacement crises – a world that sacrifices the innocents, breeds child soldiers, and gives rise to war orphans whose stories may never be told.####
