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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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