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Following Children of the Beehive, and Children of the Beehive What Happened Next, Hiroshi Shimizu completes the trilogy with Children of the Great Buddha (大仏さまと子供たち, Daibutsu-sama to Kodomotachi) this time taking place n Nara and focussing on war orphans who remained alone but are trying to make new lives for themselves as tour guides around the temples of the ancient capital. The existence of tour guides in itself implies a change in circumstances in a resurgent tourist industry while it’s also true that Nara is one of the few cities to have escaped the war largely unscathed and free from the destruction seen in industrial centres such as Tokyo or Osaka or that seen in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
There is indeed a particular contrast between the ragged children and the guests they escort who appear generally well dressed and seem to have employed them partly out of a sense of pity. The oldest of the boys, Ko, is later gifted some better clothing but doesn’t wear it explaining that he couldn’t get customers dressed like that so he’s put the nice clothes away in a box. The film never really makes it clear where the boys sleep though they can assumed be homeless or otherwise that the temples themselves are their home. Ko has been able to save up some vouchers and sent away for a pair of binoculars putting the Nio guardian statues down as the addressee. He takes his job very seriously and is slightly put out when he discovers part of his patter is inaccurate, made up by his mentor, Ichuin, who has since been adopted by a temple as a novice monk, to better entertain the customers.
Ichiuin tells a sculptor the boys collectively refer to as “Mr Failure” that his superiors at the temple are quite upset about this new trend in tourism, that they fear people only come to admire the statues as pieces of art rather than to worship Buddha. The fact that people now have money and time for travel signals that the age of post-war privation is coming to an end though those who arrive from outside Nara also talk of destruction and a sense of displacement. A demobbed soldier remarks that it’s only in Nara that he feels he’s come “home” hinting at a concept of Japaneseness that’s survived in the ancient capital but not elsewhere. Meanwhile, Ko is charged with escorting a Japanese-American woman travelling alone in a rented car having returned to visit her grandparents’ graves. The woman, who the boys refer to as “Miss Second Generation,” treats them warmly and includes them in her picnic which itself is quite elaborate and made with rare and expensive foodstuffs. Later her purse goes “missing,” leading Ko to assume some of the other boys have taken it. He’s right, they have. But they were too frightened to spend any of the money because there was such a lot of it expressing this new idea of America as a land of plenty in contrast to Japan at the end of the Occupation.
When Ko takes the money back to her she buys him new clothes, leading the other boys to incorrectly assume she’s going to adopt him and he’ll be leaving for a better life in America. Despite the sense of solidarity that’s arisen between the orphans, they continue to long for more conventional families or at least to be adopted as Ichiuin has been by the temple. Genji, Ko’s friend, has longing for a small statue of Buddha from a local shop only to end up heartbroken on learning it’s been sold. But the woman who buys it unexpectedly offers to adopt him, aligning Genji himself with the statue and explaining that she had a son his age but he died. Genji originally seems reluctant, saying he will stay with Ko perhaps partly out of guilt but is later persuaded though Ko declares that he will always be at the temple. Caught in a kind of limbo, he religiously listens to the missing person programmes for news of his father whose whereabouts, like many even so many years after the war, are still unknown.
This may be one reason behind the hope that the orphans of Japan could sleep in the lap of Buddha if in a more literal sense, that they maybe embraced by a more spiritual entity in a society that otherwise appears indifferent to their fate. In any case, Shimizu spends a lot of time with the statues capturing them in a documentary style as if we ourselves were receiving this tour and becoming acquainted with the picturesque environment of the ancient capital somehow free from the corruptions of the war itself or the post-war era and in its own way accepting of these orphaned children to whom it offers a home in Buddha’s palm if not quite so literally.
Children of the Great Buddha screens at Japan Society New York on 1st June as part of Hiroshi Shimizu Part 2: The Postwar and Independent Years.
Windows on Worlds 