Kabei: Our Mother

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Movie: Kabei: Our Mother
Romaji: Kabei
Japanese: 母べえ
Director: Yoji Yamada
Writer: Teruyo Nogami, Yoji Yamada, Emiko Hiramatsu
Producer: Hiroshi Fukazawa, Chiaki Noji, Takashi Yajima
Cinematography: Mutsuo Naganuma
Release Date: Janary 26, 2008
Runtime: 132 min.
Production Company: Shochiku
Distribution Company: Shochiku
Language: Japanese
Country: Japan

Plot

Set in Tokyo in 1940, the peaceful life of the Nogami Family suddenly changes when the father, Shigeru, is arrested and accused of being a Communist. His wife Kayo works frantically from morning to night to maintain the household and bring up her two daughters with the support of Shigeru's sister Hisako and Shigeru's ex-student Yamazaki, but her husband does not return. WWII breaks out and casts dark shadows on the entire country, but Kayo still tries to keep her cheerful determination, and sustain the family with her love. This is an emotional drama of a mother and an eternal message for peace.

Cast

Trailer

Film Festivals

2008 (10th) Deauville Asian Film Festival - The Panorama - March 12th-16th
2008 (28th) Hawaii International Film Festival - October 9th-19th
2011 (14th) Shanghai International Film Festival - June 11-19, 2011 - Panorama - Global Village: Japanese Film Week

Comments

Flo Oy Wong Apr 30 2012 12:42 am I saw Kabei: Our Mother tonight. I am amazed at the narrative of this tender story, which depicts the human condition in Imperial Japan during the time that the country went to war in Manchuria in China and other parts of Asia, eventually ending with its defeat during World War II. The film, focusing on a mother raising two young daughters alone after her scholar husband was jailed as a radical scholar, offered me another perspective of the Sino-Japanese War. The performances from the ensemble cast were outstanding. Sayuri Yoshinaga as Kayo the mother and Tadanobu Asano as Yamazaki were stunning. What the actors portrayed - the human suffering - is universal. On the other side of the Pacific Ocean during World War II, Japanese Americans were interned. They also suffered because of Imperial Japan's decision to go to war.

T. James Kodera Jul 31 2011 4:56 pm Saw this drama on TV Japan in Boston in late July 2011. It was a repeat from a few years ago. The drama, so exquisitely directed and acted, recalled how ordinary Japanese lived, as the country sought zealously world power from 1940 through defeat in August 1945. Not at all ordinary is the courage of a young scholar of German literature who had opposed Japan's invasion of China. Branded a "Communist," "traitor" and worse, he was tortured in prison. All the while, his devoted wife, Kayo, remained faithful to him and raised their two daughters with unfailing devotion and affection. The wife, beautifully played by Sayuri Yoshinaga, once an "idol," never fails to support her husband in prison. Her husband returned home only after his death in prison, no cause of death identified. A former student of her husband supports Kayo and the daughters until drafted, in spite of his frail health, into the army in the waning years of the Pacific War. He perished in the South Pacific, as the ship was sunk by the US. In the wake of the war, an intimate friend of the student returned alive, and visited Kayo, relaying to her how in death the student would always protect Kayo and the daughters. In the last scene of the drama, Kayo on the verge of her death found no comfort in the empty promise of a hapy family reunited in death. She would rather see her loved one, alive, in real life.

The deeply moving drama was mesmerizing. It brought tears in my eyes, tears of sorrow but even more tears of gratitude for the drama's testimony to the triumph, not defeat, of the human will, strong enough to stand up against the cruelties of war. Anyone who lived through the war years and the years that followed in Japan would recall how Japan was devastated by the war, how wounded soldiers squatted on the streets, playing music while begging for anything at all. References, though oblique, to the atomic bomb dropped in Hiroshima to put an "end to all wars" ushered in the age in which we now face the possibility of an apocalypse of the wholel world. The nuclear plant disaster in March this year made this drama, made in 2008, come alive.

'Kahbei" is truly an extraordinary drama, which only NHK could produce.

Fraciatti Nov 19 2010 8:45 am A really-well-directed movie, dealing with a dramatic plot, it has the ability to be enjoyable and amazing without being too much tragic. The protagonist mother is a symbol of self-possessed japanese people from the old times, people who show all their human weakness even if with silence and decorum. The movie reaches the target to show how life was hard in those times and how a little woman could succeed with constancy, winning with her silent sacrifice upon stupid people who took away her husband. Great Yoshinaga Sayuri performance.

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