Four Seasons of Children / Kodomo no shiki (1939)

Village boys swimming

While the title implies a generalized, even idealized semi-documentary on children, what we actually have is a family drama as it is reflected over the course of one year in the lives of three boys who don’t understand what is going on around them.

As so often seen in Japanese movies, the family problems revolve around three issues: a loan, arranged marriage, and a trip to the hospital. Mother married against her father’s wishes, whereupon he disowned her. Her husband now has a dairy farm and they have two boys, Zenta and Sanpei. To help them get started, Shunichi, a partner in Grandfather’s textile mill, lent them some 3,000 yen. The third investor Rokai finds out about this and begins long maneuvering that eventually manages to give him control of the debt. When the boys’ father has to go to the hospital, Rokai calls in the debt, which he now claims that with interest is over 100,00 yen, and dispossesses them after Father dies. Fortunately, Grandfather has become reconciled to his daughter because of the grandchildren and they can live with him until Rokai manages to take over control of Grandfather’s personal property as well. But eventually Rokai makes a mistake and Grandfather is restored to fortune.

The boys don’t understand any of this, and to a certain extent neither do we, since Rokai’s motivation is never quite clear, the legal maneuverings are not clear to foreigners, and we never quite figure out what Shinichi’s relationship to the family really is. But that doesn’t really matter, in the sense that the movie is about how the boys in the family deal with all this.

Zenta is older, apparently more studious and about to finish his required education at the village school, while Sanpei is the unofficial leader of the village boys, up for any adventure. He reads an essay at school about how much he would like to have a grandfather and grandmother but doesn’t have one. But there is a strange old man (Ozu favorite Takeshi Sakamoto under a thick white beard) who regularly rides his horse down the road where the boys play. He is eventually revealed to be their grandfather who, under pressure from his wife and the urge to watch his grandchildren is gradually reconciled with his daughter. For the boys, this means primarily someone who brings them presents and gives them rides on a horse.

Zenta, it turns out, is smart, especially in math, and his teacher encourages him to go on to “middle school.” Zenta, however, knows that the family is broke and refuses to go, but is often secretly in tears because of his decision, until at last Grandfather hears about it and promises to find the money for his tuition fees.

Most of the movie, however, concentrates on the brothers just acting like little boys — though with no fights; every idea requires everyone to run, run, run to see the next new thing, to do the next fun thing. During the summer school break, Zenta and Sanpei help with milk deliveries and collections, but lose a calf and almost forget their money when they get distracted by the other boys swimming in the river.

When they move in with Grandfather in the town, Sanpei loses his position because the boys there don’t know him and are sort-of led by a boy named Kin. Eventually, however, with the lure of a swing built by Grandpa, Sanpei eventually draws in the other boys. To impress them again, Kin climbs a tree to shake out berries (subtitles call them sweet acorns), goes too far, and falls. The boys then have to play at Kin’s house while he recovers, where there are toys and mountains of food, and where Sanpei is not welcome because Kin is also Rokai’s son. When Sanpei finds Kin struggling to get home from school because of the cast still on his foot, Sanpei carries him home on his back. Kin breaks his father’s instructions and as he heals joins with all the group again.

It’s a Tom Sawyer world, but without Tom’s trickery or the organized games and adventures. Whenever they are not in class, the boys play, and play almost always means just activity and noise. The most common scenes are simply boys running, with tree climbing a close second. Hiroshi Shimizu was noted for his movies about little boys (little girls never appear in this movie and only rarely in the other Shimizu childhood movies I have seen), but he always avoided any sentimentalism. That is true here as well. Even when their father dies, we do not see their reactions or how their mother deals with it or explains it to them. The music is minimal to say the least. The movie simply cuts to a new season. Even at the end, when you would expect a nice swell of happy music, he simply cuts to black — there’s not even a “The End” statement on my DVD.

No Japanese movie maker in the pre-war sound era spent more time on location than Shimizu, and this proclivity is visible here, where exteriors are shot in a mountain valley. If the foliage can be trusted, it was also shot over the course of many months — we clearly start in spring* and the foliage and crops change until the end, when many trees have lost their leaves, though we don’t see actual snow in the winter section.  It appears to be a continuation of Children in the Wind, released in November 1937, with the same actors playing the family, but shot in the gaps between the six (!!) other movies he made in 1938.

Shimizu’s movies are tricky for a foreigner, for me even trickier than Ozu’s late films. The surface is so calm, almost documentary in nature, and the critical plot points so lightly touched, that it is easy to miss both the turmoil occurring in his movies and the skill with which they are made. Sometimes you don’t even realize what the true plot was until after you spend days thinking about what you saw.  Similarly, the cultural allusions and social organizations in them are so completely taken for granted that you don’t know if you are trying to read too much or too little into what you see. That holds true for this movie as well. Rokai, for example, is clearly a symbol of the “modern” way of business, always seen at the office in full three-piece suit and tie, but at home he is often silent, so we never understand whether he is modernizing the business or has a personal grudge of some kind. And what does it mean that he has eye problems? Over the course of the film he starts to use eye drops that lead to home water remedies, to long periods under a wet cloth, and eventually to dark glasses in the office in the middle of winter;

Rokai at home

nothing is explained, no doctors are called, but it must mean something, or why put it in? Why does Grandfather ride his horse in what looks like a military jacket? If Grandfather’s home has been seized by Rokai, why is Grandfather still living in it? None of these points may be significant, but then it did not initially seem significant that Mr. Arigato’s  love was wearing Korean dress.

Nevertheless, Kodomo no shiki is a remarkably sustained observation of the world of young boys and can be enjoyed simply on that level, even at 2½ hours  (originally shown as two separate movies).

* Although there is a long summer break, the Japanese school year officially starts in the spring rather than in the autumn as in America and most European countries. This may explain the structure of the film. Americans would take the same plot and place it so that the dark times for the family come in the winter and the eventual happy ending occurs in spring.