Jubilation Street

... who must relocate because the government will be demolishing it. The war is ever-present, but overt propaganda is rare until the bittersweet but patriotic final scene.

This film deals with the clash of the younger and older generations, and familiar tradition with the new, although in this case it's mostly the reluctance to leave home, career, and friends to start over in a new place with a new job. There's a romance threatened by parents refusing to give their blessing, as well as a subplot of a broken family whose patriarch deserted his wife and little boy a decade earlier and whose son is now a test pilot.

This film has some truly touching scenes of how neighbors care for each other in adversity and how everyday people are adversely affected by the war, to the point that the rousing finale may seem more ironic than uplifting, at least in retrospect.

The Government is taking over the neighborhood for its own purposes, so its inhabitants have to leave Jubilation Street. However, they're a neighborhood, so it's hard for everyone to pull up roots: the landowner thinks he'll go back to rice farming; the bath house owner is waiting until the last moment, because he wants to serve his customers; the young marrieds are waiting until their first child is born; the young lovers -- he's a test pilot, she's the landowner's daughter and her parents don't approve because his father disappeared ten years back; his mother wants to stay because her husband might come back. And so forth.

Yet they all know the day is coming, and it's the second half when events unfold that force people to make unwanted decisions. It's also in that second half when the propaganda kicks in, with the .sort of bow-your-head-to-the-wind and our-enemies-are-getting-closer paranoia, uttered in cheerful tones of vengeance that seems to have typified Homefront movies in Japan during the War. Keisuke Kinoshita directs this early movie well, and cameraman Hiroshi Kusuda keeps the camera moving well to disguise the Shochiku lot. Mostly, though, it's interesting to see how the Japanese handled this sort of subject in contrast to the American handling I am so much more familiar with.