Waga Seishun Ni Kuinashi (1946) No Regrets For Our Youth - Eclipse Re-Issue

In Akira Kurosawa's first film after the end of World War II, future beloved Ozu regular Setsuko Hara gives an astonishing performance as Yukié, the only female protagonist in Kurosawa's body of work and one of his strongest heroes. Transforming herself from genteel bourgeois daughter to independent social activist, Yukié traverses a tumultuous decade in Japanese history. With Takashi Shimura.


Yukié Yagihara (Setsuko Hara), the privileged daughter of a liberal (in the traditional 'libertarian' sense) professor (Denjiro Okochi) has two student-suitors, the conformist Itokawa (Akitake Kono) and the activist Ruykichi Nogé (Susumu Fujita). Student and faculty protests against military rule are ruthlessly suppressed (off-screen), with the result that Professor Yagihara loses his job and Nogé is sent to jail. Itokawa plays it safe and becomes a prosecutor for the government's oppressive policies. These are expressed only in a scene in which Itokawa tells the politically censured professor that he must stop giving legal aid, even as an unpaid volunteer. Finally released from prison, Nogé goes to China to become an 'expert on the region,' although we're not told what kind of expert.


Yukié begins as an innocent teenager, cavorting with her boyfriends on a hike in the mountains. Yukié clearly prefers Nogé to the bland opportunist Itokawa. After years of separation, Nogé returns to work in Tokyo and Yukie joins him and declares herself. They marry and live together in the full knowledge that he could at any time be arrested. War with America has begun, and Nogé's quiet activities (we never know what they might be) are now considered espionage. Nogé is already being watched by a humorless secret policeman (Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura). Yukié must be grateful for every day she and Nogé can be together.


Kurosawa's visuals keep pace with Yukié's feelings, which she expresses in her piano playing and her changing attitude toward flower arranging. Montages depict student upheavals in the early 1930s and a radio announces the start of hostilities in WW2, but the only historical issue given attention is the suppression of academic freedom. Yukié is never fire bombed and her family doesn't outwardly suffer, despite the fact that her father is forbidden to work. In the darkest days of the war, Yukié chooses to work on the little farm of her husband's parents, harassed by 'patriotic' neighbors who brand them traitors and destroy their crops. Yukié's choice to leave her father's house for the hardships of the farm seems a deliberate ploy to present anti-militarist dissidents in a good light. Neither Yogé nor Yukié's father is identified as a socialist or a communist; the historical details are intentionally left vague. No doubt Japanese conservatives resented the film. Perhaps the frequent complaint that Kurosawa was too 'western' also had a political component?


Nogé told Yukié that his activities would eventually find public approval, perhaps in ten years. Surely enough, in the film's coda the professor returns to teaching, and gives a speech that honours Nogé as the university's most courageous graduate.


We're told that Kurosawa's values were very much in line with the pro-democratic MacArthur occupation. He was soon frustrated by censors that forbade honest looks at unpleasant postwar issues. As demonstrated in Criterion's DVD supplements to Drunken Angel, Kurosawa had to disguise his messages to sneak them past the American censors.


No Regrets for Our Youth also shows Kurosawa in the process of developing his style. The movie has a lyrical, feminine aspect. One particular moment, more interesting than successful, presents Yukié listening at a door. Dissolves join several static shots of her standing in different stylized poses. The odd editorial construction may be an attempt at a visual shorthand meant to communicate the girl's contradictory emotions.