This documentary from the peak of the Japanese New Wave is a well-structured and valuable resource for people looking to understand Japan in the years 1945-1970. Imamura progresses chronologically through the political highlights of those years, emphasizing the events that raised or frustrated the hopes of Japanese leftist and student groups. The timeline begins with the surrender in 1945 and progresses through 1952's Bloody May Day, the Ampo protests of 1960, and the troubling presence of American spy submarines and soldiers en route to the unpopular war in Vietnam.
Yet history without characters lacks a sense of reality, so at every stage Imamura lets his "Madam Onboro," a salt-of-the-earth woman named Emiko Takada, give her impression of historical landmarks and augment them with stories from her own life. Her recollections do not always intersect with the events that newsreels covered, but that is the point of this exercise: the rhythm of people's lives, the decisions and mistakes they make, are what history looks like on a human scale.
Imamura's approach covers the political and the personal, but it fails to capture the most significant "event" of the first postwar quarter-century: the "economic miracle" that transformed Japanese standards of living. Emiko's life does illustrate that transformation - she notes that the Korean War boosted her family's income, and she became a business owner after an inauspicious youth shaped by class and caste. Yet neither her interviews nor the newsreel footage that Imamura uses to bridge them addresses the country's economic transformation overtly.
I would love to know what became of Takada after 1970, where the movie ends at a major transition in her life. I have not found anything on the internet or in the digital archives of Japan's largest newspapers. I'm posting this review here and on Letterboxd in the hope that someday, somehow, somebody will find out the rest of her story, or parts of it anyway, and share it. It's just one person's story, but Imamura picked a good one to tell, and I'd love to know how it turns out.