抄録
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.
