At the preview, the director Mr. 池谷、greeted to the invited guests (about 100 or so). He seems about 40 years old, he had been long working in NHK, making many documentary films.

Last week, to my surprise, I came to know two women on the net(one blog, the other mailing list) who were VERY disgusted this movie. They are, I assume, 50′s and 60′s years old, respectively. They seem to me very intelligent women and have almost professional eyes on cinema. I also know some who disgusted this movie. They said; cinematic technics was poor, the rendering was also poor and anti-gramamtical. May be so. But this movie in my opinion is not a movie that is assessed by technics and rendering, but by what was actually taking place in WW2 and just after WW2 in China. The information itself is primary important; how it is told has no importancy. Viewers must be positively involved in what actually happened.

This movie in that sense multi-focused, whether or not the director intended.
One is the illegal deployment of troops after the surrender, which was ordered by a general, Sumida, who was not questioned.
Second is: after the residual soldiers returned to Japan, they found, and surprised, they were treated as “fugitive soldiers” so that soldier pension entitlement was deprived.
Third is: Okumura is not a victim of the war but also VICTIMIZER. (This was personally most important for me. My father, died the last year, was sent to China at that war as a voluntary soldier. Read my Blog article).