The idea of youth differed significantly between the prewar generation andthe wartime generation, who sacrificed their adolescence in the Second WorldWar. The crucial gap in film reception—which was actualized in visual culturein the early stages of the U.S. occupation period—can be observed by comparingthe discourses from those generations with Kurosawa Akira's No Regretsfor Our Youth. The film was released at a political-cultural turning point inJapanese society; and while the young generation commended this film, the prewargeneration criticized it. This paper aims to analyze why their evaluationsconflicted with each other, and explore how the representation of youth—depicted by Kurosawa and embodied by star actress Hara Setsuko—functioned for the young audience.
The film's reception by the audience is conditioned by its reading position—here, a society living through a wartime experience. In addition, their socialattributes strongly influence the cultural meanings they receive from thescreen. In other words, there is a gap in film experience between those who areallowed to sensibly watch films as amateurs and critics who are required toanalytically watch them as experts. This paper reveals that the exaggeratedand dynamic cinematic expression of youth by Kurosawa—which was prohibitedduring the wartime period—is affectively connected to the young generation,for whom youth was an impalpable idea. The "lost youth," for them, wasvisually reconstructed as tangible and concrete through moving images and alively cinematic body.
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