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In the rubble left by the firebombing of Tokyo in WWII, a 12-year-old girl who once dreamed of a life in music learns to shine shoes, fall in with a band of orphaned boys sheltering under a local yakuza clan and, eventually,
erase every trace of the person she used to be.
That girl, Kotoko, is the center of Nishikawa Miwa’s “Children Untold,” a drama built from years of archival testimony about Japan’s war orphans that the director says forced her to ask how much of yourself a person can give up before survival stops meaning anything at all.
The film opens the Toronto Intl. Film Festival’s Platform competition and arrives in Japanese theaters Oct. 16.
The project grew out of Nishikawa’s research for “Under the Open Sky,” her 2021 drama starring Yakusho Koji as a man modeled on a real war orphan who drifted into crime and prison after growing up on the streets of postwar Japan. Yakusho returns for “Children Untold” as Jinpei. That earlier project left Nishikawa wanting to tell the broader story of the children who survived Japan’s defeat, and of the underworld that absorbed many of them.
Nishikawa began developing “Children Untold” in 2020, during pandemic lockdowns that had shut down theaters and cut off her usual route to an audience. Digging into archival testimony, she found a history that had gone largely unexamined. “The children who were orphaned were, of course, still children at the time. They had no means of making their voices heard or appealing for help,” Nishikawa says.
It was not until the 2000s, she notes, that researchers and former orphans themselves began documenting those experiences in earnest, and she learned through that research that lawsuits brought by air-raid victims had been rejected without any legislation passed to compensate them, leaving them, in her words, “to fend for themselves while [the government was] conveniently obscuring or evading its own responsibility.”
That reckoning extends to how the film treats its Japanese characters. Nishikawa resisted framing wartime civilians as purely innocent victims. “Japanese war orphans were not children from a country that had simply been victimized by an unprovoked invasion,” she says. “They innocently believed in Japan’s territorial expansion and victory, and were taught to willingly sacrifice their own lives for the country.”
She wanted the film to hold both truths at once: the suffering inflicted on Japanese children and the militarist indoctrination that shaped them before the war ever touched their own lives. As she puts it, “It is painful to look back at our country’s history as an aggressor, but I don’t think it is possible to make a film about Japan’s war in Asia and the Pacific without confronting that history.”
Kotoko, played by Koyae Ami, absorbs that tension in the film’s central act of erasure. Nishikawa describes children in that era abandoning their names, their beliefs, their sense of right and wrong just to stay alive, and says some war orphans and even some adults who lived through it eventually lost the will to go on living at all. “There is a difference between maintaining biological life and actually living a life,” she says.
Rather than draw from the boys who dominate the surviving photographs of the era, Nishikawa built the film around a girl forced to hide her gender to survive. “I portray Kotoko as a girl who rebels against the idea that, simply because she was born female, she could be treated according to the desires of others — her own thoughts disregarded, and even her identity as a human being denied,” Nishikawa says. Nikaido Fumi co-stars as Sone, Kotoko’s former teacher, who is pushed into prostitution after losing her fiance in the war and her job in its aftermath, and who sets out to find the student she once failed.
Nishikawa says the film’s relevance sharpened as she wrote it. She began the project believing audiences might see it as a story about a distant, resolved past. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed that. “I felt as though history was moving sharply backward,” she says of watching the war unfold alongside the intensifying conflict between Israel and Palestine. “Suddenly, the story of the children I was trying to portray felt much closer to the times we were living in.”
Born in Hiroshima with relatives who survived the atomic bombing, Nishikawa says she avoided war as a subject for most of her career, wary of the expectation that filmmakers from Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Okinawa carry the burden of passing down that history. She also worried, she says, that filmmakers from her hometown tend to see the war too narrowly, through the lens of the atomic bombing alone. Two decades into a career that includes the Cannes-selected “Sway” and “Dear Doctor,” which won a Japanese Academy prize for screenplay and supporting actress, she felt ready to take on the subject. She points to international war films including “1917,” “Land of Mine,” “The Zone of Interest” and “Oppenheimer” as proof that historical distance can open new angles on old atrocities rather than close them off.
Casting proved to be the production’s steepest climb. Nishikawa cast children with little knowledge of the war and, in most cases, no acting experience, running weekend rehearsals to build their understanding of the period alongside their performances. She credits the film’s veteran adult cast, including Yakusho, Okada Junichi and Tanaka Yuko, with mentoring the young actors rather than competing with them for screen time, adding that the production made it through without a single injury among the young cast.
Nishikawa hopes the film reaches viewers too young to have encountered this chapter of Japanese history elsewhere. “There are still relatively few war films that young audiences can readily encounter,” she says, adding that she would be glad if the film left viewers wanting to share it with the children around them. Asked what comes next after years spent inside that history, she says simply that she is exhausted and wants to rest.
