Projected Youth on the Screen

The Audience of Kurosawa Akira’s No Regrets for Our Youth

Abstract

　The idea of youth differed significantly between the prewar generation and the wartime generation, who sacrificed their adolescence in the Second World War. The crucial gap in film reception—which was actualized in visual culture in the early stages of the U.S. occupation period—can be observed by comparing the discourses from those generations with Kurosawa Akira’s No Regrets for Our Youth. The film was released at a political-cultural turning point in Japanese society; and while the young generation commended this film, the prewar generation criticized it. This paper aims to analyze why their evaluations conflicted with each other, and explore how the representation of youth— depicted by Kurosawa and embodied by star actress Hara Setsuko—functioned for the young audience. 　　The film’s reception by the audience is conditioned by its reading position —here, a society living through a wartime experience. In addition, their social attributes strongly influence the cultural meanings they receive from the screen. In other words, there is a gap in film experience between those who are allowed to sensibly watch films as amateurs and critics who are required to analytically watch them as experts. This paper reveals that the exaggerated and dynamic cinematic expression of youth by Kurosawa—which was prohibited during the wartime period—is affectively connected to the young generation, for whom youth was an impalpable idea. The “lost youth,” for them, was visually reconstructed as tangible and concrete through moving images and a lively cinematic body.