On This Earth

A young man’s political consciousness dawns in Kōzaburō Yoshimura’s moving drama, scripted by Kaneto Shindō and set during the Taisho period. Set in Kanazawa, On This Earth follows the trials and tribulations experienced by a family after circumstances force the matriarch to work in a local geisha house in order to cover her son’s school tuition fees. Again working in vivid color, Yoshimura and DP Yoshihisa Nakagawa imbue the proceedings with the gravity of a documentary, juxtaposing its politically tinged melodrama with a record of Kanazawa (which was mostly spared the widespread destruction other Japanese cities faced during WWII) as a city on the cusp of being properly modernized, with traces of the past lingering on. Print courtesy of the National Film Archive of Japan.