Lieutenant Kurokawa returns highly decorated from the second Sino-Japanese war. He has lost both his arms and his legs during the conflict. Before long, the attentions of everyone in his village – neighbours, friends and relatives – are focussed on his wife, Shigeko. They all look to her to honour the Emperor, do her duty to her country and provide a shining example to others by devoting herself to caring for this war hero …
Koji Wakamatsu: “I had the idea for this new film while I was shooting UNITED RED ARMY. I felt that, in order to understand the youngsters of the sixties and seventies, you should first describe their parents’ era, the time of the Pacific War. Describing a war doesn’t just mean describing the shooting and the battles. The people who are most affected by war are the women and children, who don’t even fight. Those in power fooled the citizens into believing that this war was on behalf of their country, and they manipulated them into rushing into the war. They themselves stayed at a safe distance and were still alive after the war. I thought that the youngsters in United Red Army were born the way they were precisely because their parents had lived through such an era. So I’d already decided at the time of shooting to describe their parents’ era, the Pacific War, and the people of that time.”