Twenty-Four Eyes (1954)

directed by Keisuke Kinoshita

Japan

156 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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Even before meeting her, Miss Ôishi's class have already given her a nickname ("Miss Koishi", or "little pebble", a play on her surname, which means "large stone"). The children love her just because she's there; a kind, friendly face; the only person who's willing to let them be children for a while in the middle of the harsh island life that requires them to grow up much too fast. This is shown by Miss Ôishi's reaction to a prank that trips her in the sand and causes her to tear her Achilles' tendon, taking her out of her job for several months: kids will be kids. She'd be within her rights to be frustrated with her class, but they had no way of knowing what would be the result of their innocent joke, and if she were to punish them simply for being children, the innocence they had such a tenuous hold on would be further damaged.

For the first part of this film, the focus is mainly on the children, and they're portrayed as a group. It's not that they don't have their individual lives, but they're united for a brief time by the experience of being children and facing the hardships that all young children face. The theme of unity is something that comes up very often in this film: not unity in a political or ideological sense, but in a sense of just being a human, being alive in a difficult world. When the children sing their school songs, which they remember throughout their lives, and which are a thread that continues to connect them well after leaving school, they're together not in motivation or outlook but as a family of individual souls connected by a shared humanity. One could watch the more lighthearted first act of this film forever, because the performances Kinoshita elicits from the children are so wonderfully authentic that it feels like watching real children go about their lives. One of the most endearing parts is when they learn where Miss Ôishi is staying while recuperating from her injury, and somehow, as a group, manage to catch a bus to her hospital, but they don't plan it very well, so by the time they arrive, they're just a band of miserable, dusty, crying, hungry children. The unwavering loyalty the kids show to their teacher remains constant throughout the timeline of the film, no matter the strife that they all endure.

This is a beautifully shot film, incredibly expansive in its scale but at the same time enclosed. It doesn't restrict itself to the school or the homes of the children, but instead involves what truly feels like the entire island. And that's because it literally is: the film was shot on Shôdoshima, the island that it depicts. I don't think any studio sets were used here, so the scenery is utterly breathtaking. It may have been deliberate that as the world of the children gets smaller and is defined more by societal pressures, there are less sweeping nature shots, and characters are more commonly shown in towns and houses. But for a little while, Twenty-Four Eyes reminds us like very few things do of what it's like to be a child in a vast and new world.

Eventually the war comes even to a small secluded island. Despite being beautiful, tender, and softspoken, this has to be one of the most brutally effective anti-war films I've ever seen. Even before the events that would lead to Japan's official entrance of the war, it rapidly becomes dangerous for Miss Ôishi to go on teaching the same way she had been before. One of the school's other teachers is arrested on suspicion of being a communist simply because another teacher he was friends with was reading a book rumored to have communistic or at least anti-war messages to his students. Miss Ôishi pipes up: she's taught the same book to her kids, and has it in her classroom at that moment. (The principal burns it upon this revelation.) Suddenly, practically overnight, Miss Ôishi can no longer teach her students material just because it's well-written and sounds good and talks about the value of life. Now, her job is as an extension of the Empire, to teach her students to become nothing more than soldiers whose only value lies in their ability to die for their country.

This is when the film takes its inevitable turn towards being completely devastating. Miss Ôishi is driven right out of her job by her newfound restriction from teaching her students anything that might lead them to appreciate being alive. With a new and growing family, her time is now taken up with caring for her own children, and the love of teaching is beaten out of her - but not her love of her students. Her class is decimated by the war. Her male students are drafted and only two of them come back, one permanently injured. Her husband dies in the war as well. Even before the war, life takes its toll on her children almost from the minute they can walk: several of her girls are required to stay at home and care for younger siblings, or to earn money doing jobs for their family. Again, Miss Ôishi's role as the one refuge for these children where they can learn about a world bigger than their island and experience wonder and care is crucial to their lives and hers. Despite narrowly escaping censure or worse for "communist sympathies" (the appreciation and protection of human life), Miss Ôishi remains staunchly anti-war. When it ends, she doesn't care that Japan lost, she's just happy it's over.

I believe that this film is something that needs to be paid attention to now because of the change in curriculum that comes when the government begins to intervene in Miss Ôishi's school. When the children were young and war wasn't on the horizon, being taught how to live in the world, how to appreciate just being alive in nature with your friends, seemed as or more important as being taught actual book knowledge. But that doesn't make for a good soldier. Indoctrination with a message espoused by the government or a miscellaneous ruling party, for ends that ultimately serve the larger structure at the cost of the lives of individuals, is occurring now, in the US, in what is occasionally referred to as "peacetime". Teachers aren't - and haven't been - free to teach children how to live. They can only teach them how to be citizens.

Despite the overwhelming amount of suffering the children and Miss Ôishi undergo, the end of the film remains - although bittersweet and emotionally raw - still lit up with hope. After 18 years, the children still haven't forgotten their teacher, although their number has been greatly reduced - by war, disease, circumstance, and the simple process of growing up. I think the end message of this movie is that the only real way to live a life is to be there for other people who are also trying to live their lives, no matter how much it might hurt when things separate you. Watching this just cements my feelings about cinema even further, that movies like this have to be seen and remembered, because even though it is fiction, it's still crucial to the human experience to tell stories that are a lot like real life, but a little more beautiful. Also, I knew I recognized Hideko Takamine from somewhere, and I realized that I first saw her in Naruse's A Wanderer's Notebook, in which she played a character who underwent changes in response to her circumstances over some span of time in a similar way to Miss Ôishi. Her performance as the lead (if one wants to define "the lead" as her, not the children) in this movie makes it what it is.

- "Are you against soldiers, Miss Ôishi?"

- "No, but I prefer fishermen and rice merchants."

- "So you're a coward?"

- "Yes, I'm a coward."