Genbaku no ko (1952) watch online HD

Largely overlooked today, this was one of the first films made during the Allied occupation after WW2.

Very powerful in its content, it shows the devastation caused by the Atomic bomb, and by use of a fictional storyline, portrays the struggle of the ordinary Japanese people in dealing with the aftermath.

I last saw this film in 1976 and it is still vivid in my memory.

Nominated for the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953, which was the highest prize at the time; Children of Hiroshima is Kaneto Shindo's third film and he shows that he is a good director. The first thing that caught my attention was its excellent cinematography and its musical score.

Children of Hiroshima follows a kindergarten teacher Takako, as she returns to Hiroshima after its bombing and meets with her former pupils, six years after teaching them. Only a handful remain. The story does not follow some basic movie template. Children are the theme of the story, rather than indicators of major plot points, we really get to know the people Takako visits, as we learn the stories of their past and the life they live as a result of the bombing. There are many great scenes, one where a plane flies overhead, and although historically, we know that Hiroshima isn't attacked again, we get a feeling of how frightened the residents must feel.

It's amazing how prolific Kaneto Shindo has been, with a total of 43 directing credits, and many more writing credits. He even has a film in post-production right now, at the age of 95.

This movie has been released into the public domain, so it can be legally downloaded off of the web.

Six years after the atomic bombing of 06 August 1945, the school teacher Takako Ishikawa (Nobuko Otowa ) returns to Hiroshima in her vacation period to visit friends and to honor her parents that died in the bombing. Takako was raised by her uncle and aunt and while in her hometown; she stays with her friend Natsue Morikawa (Niwa Saito) that has become infertile as the side effect of the A-bomb. While walking along the destroyed city, she sees the former family friend Iwakichi (Osamu Takizawa) that worked with her father and is almost blind and has become a beggar. She pays a visit to his shanty in the slums and discovers that his grandson Taro is living in an orphanage since Iwakichi has no conditions to raise the child. When Morikawa tells her that three former pupils from the kindergarten have survived to the bombing, Takako pays a visit to each one of them and finds how the A- bomb and the radiation have affected their lives. Before returning home, Takako asks Iwakachi to let her bring Taro with her; but their bond is very strong.

"Gembaku no ko" a.k.a. "Children of Hiroshima" is a heartbreaking anti- war tribute to the survivors of Hiroshima, with a powerful fictional story that follows the characteristics of Italian Neo-Realism. The director Kaneto Shindô was born in Hiroshima and used real dramas to write this realistic and never corny film that shows how families have been destroyed with the bomb and its radiation. The conclusion, when the frightened Takako and Morikawa listen to an airplane on the sky defines another sort of trauma the population had to live with. It is amazing the number of movies about the Holocaust made by the cinema industry but there are very few about the coward, shameful and hideous massacres of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Lords of War. Actually I only recall "Kono ko wo nokoshite" about the bombing of Nagasaki. It is also impressive how the brave Japanese people rebuilt their country in a short time and how beautiful Hiroshima is on the present days. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Filhos de Hiroshima" ("Sons of Hiroshima")

Kaneto Shindo's movie is without any doubt one of the best ever made. It deals head-on with one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of mankind: the dropping for pure geopolitical reasons of a nuclear bomb on a city thereby killing thousands of innocents citizens in the twinkling of an eye and wreaking havoc for centuries to come on a country (and also very slightly on the whole living world) because the human genetic basic material has been damaged.

Kaneto Shindo's movie shows preeminently that the fate of the world and the human species depends solely on the responsible or irresponsible behavior of every single person on earth. In this movie, a teacher is looking for survivors among the children of her kindergarten class. There are only three. On her own initiative, she tries to secure a more hopeful future for one of those.

This impeccably played movie (also by the children) is simply unforgettable. A must see. For a geopolitical interpretation of the dropping of the atomic bomb I highly recommend the book 'The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb' by Gar Alperovitz.

How does a nation deal with a traumatic event as awful as the a-bomb? In a way the world is lucky Japan's ultimate reaction was to immediately drop their war-inducing nationalistic side and become pacifists, but it's not like they could take the beating without some major loss of strength and a little resentment. Shindo's Children of Hiroshima is not a documentary, and in places it's actually quite melodramatic, but what it paints is a portrait of post-war Japan slowly letting go of its recent past and just beginning to start looking forward to the future, as the final clinging threads of hatred, fear, and radiation sickness grasp on to the victims who managed to survive but only after losing everything.

The story is told through the perspective of Takako, a young kindergarten teacher from Hiroshima who managed to escape the bomb and returns to visit her parent's grave. While there, she finds a city being rebuilt and operating functionally, but still deeply scarred by the event, represented by two repeated motifs: the blasted out building that characters continue to linger on, and the burnt away face and eyes of Iwakichi, an old friend of hers turned begger after the bomb took his family and his vision and left him nothing but his grandson that he cannot support and a reliance on alms. Iwakichi's story about his grandson incites Takako to search out the three surviving children from her kindergarten class, each of them representing in some way the state of Japanese families in Hiroshima post-bomb: the first is losing his family to radiation sickness, the second is dying herself from radiation sickness, but the third is excited and proud that his sister is marrying. Families are still falling apart years after the bomb dropped, but families are starting to come together and a future is starting to take place, so Takako is inspired to return to Iwakichi and ask if she can adopt his grandson.

The problem is that resentment does still linger and scarred-Japan is not so willing to let go as fresh-faced Japan. Iwakichi initially refuses to let go of his grandson and his grandson refuses to let go of him, the point in the movie where the drama does get the most melodramatic. Shindo's use of children as a sort of looking-forward is a very good one, but he also uses them for emotional tugs in the audience which does at points tend towards the sappy, one thing that a movie about Hiroshima probably shouldn't be. Shindo's intentions are clear and his instincts are good, but at points he loses his soft touch. Possibly the worst feature of this movie is the score, which is unnecessarily manipulative--in some scenes, the performances are overburdened by emotional cues.

Otherwise this is a great movie, especially visually. Shindo's compositions are classic style filmmaking, and his blocking always tells the story without need for the dialog or score. There are some major unforgettable images here, such as the open sky over Hiroshima and the blasted shadow of a thinking man. He also is fond of these amazing wide shots as children run through the streets of Hiroshima, showing a budding and building community that nevertheless lives on despite the focus on the struggle of survival and healing in the main focus of the plot.

--PolarisDiB

Takako Ishikawa stars as a woman from Hiroshima who left it shortly after the bombing to live with her aunt and uncle on a nearby island. She lost the rest of her family in the disaster. Four years afterward, she returns to check up on old acquaintances. Ishikawa is basically an audience surrogate, as we see how the people of Hiroshima are doing. The answer: not that well, as you might expect. The city is still devastated, people are dying of radiation poisoning, many are horribly injured. But life goes on, represented by the children of the city, many of them orphans, but they live their lives as carefree as they can. Ishikawa feels guilty for leaving the city and not being able to help her townspeople, but she finds hope in a young boy, the grandson of one of her father's employees. Osamu Takizawa is now a blind beggar, and can't really take care of the boy himself (he lives in an orphanage). Ishikawa offers to adopt the boy, but he is understandably reluctant to leave his grandfather behind. This is a touching film, but it is pretty two dimensional. It kept reminding me of the far superior Grave of the Fireflies, and the only tears I shed during it came about because I was thinking of the Isao Takahata anime (a rare film which I just cannot recall without tearing up). Takizawa gives a pretty good performance. Ishikawa went on to star in Shindo's three most famous films, Onibaba, The Naked Island and Kuroneko. The very unsubtle score is by Akira Ifukube, who would go on to score Gojira and tons of other kaiju eiga.