The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

A Danish Journal of Film Studies 67
was most probably the first time in his life that he was confronted
with such a clear imperialistic stance in school. The waves may not
have reached the Japanese countryside by the beginning of the
1930s. The 1920s are known as the time when the ideas of free
school had arrived and just settled in Japan (Fukaya 1996: 137-145).
The turn to imperialism in the school curriculum was radical, but
still it took time to take root all over the country.
Imperialistic slogans started to be repeated and called out in a
chorus every day before teaching started. The government had just
managed to establish a fair amount of national schools. Until then it
had depended on private schools to realize six years of compulsory
education for every child. That was a great step forward toward the
implementation of an imperialistic ideology in the teaching (Honda
2000: 112-117). As my co-viewers see it, no child could have escaped
from this machinery of propaganda.
But the scenes of 1933 in Ohagi still show the comparatively soft
beginnings. Some years later the consequences of Tarô's answer to
the teacher's question would have been much more severe, not only
for himself, but most probably also for his parents for not educating
their son in the right spirit.
There is one scene that left us all tense with fear and expectation
for what might follow. It is the one where O-Yoshi offers Tarô a
kneeling cushion. To sit in the Japanese style as a form of
punishment should of course be done without any comfort. To give
him a cushion is to challenge the teacher's order, and thus one
expects consequences for both. But nothing happens, so we relax
when the two start spinning tops, which in reality is another offence
to the teacher's authority.