NO REGRETS FOR OUR YOUTH represents a fascinating reversal on the political spectrum for Kurosawa. Whereas his first few films had a very pro-national, pro-militaristic vibe (seen in both THE MOST BEAUTIFUL and SANSHIRO SUGUTA PART TWO), this film takes on a more daring perspective regarding those who opposed the war, fought for academic freedom, and protested the fascist idealism of Japan's government-sanctioned war propaganda. With such a bold, left-leaning, alter-paradigm in place, you might wonder if the film itself was a political, pent-up diatribe against the right, something that could've only been expressed after the regime had lost its oligarchic grip in 1945. To the contrary, the story is actually quite apolitical and non-partisan. It's more of a character-driven examination of how sequestered freedoms impacted normal, everyday people, and the lengths people would go to check privilege, seek change, and identity with the Other.

Based on a real-life political event (the "1933 Kyoto University Incident") when academic dissent over censorship led to riots, arrests and unjust death, Kurosawa uses the event to shape the overarching mood of the story, but the event itself plays second fiddle to Kurosawa's bigger interest –how suppressed thought of any kind affected real, everyday people. You won't see the riots, the protests, the outrage of the problem. The politics, as I've said, are largely invisible. What you will see are the astonishing choices a woman makes (played by the lovely Setsuko Hara) who’s caught in the political crossfire of it all. As Richtie contends: "[Kurosawa] is not at all interested in what forces have made people what they are; he is completely interested in what people make out of what the forces have made of them."

What will Yukie make out of those liberal and militaristic forces that surround her? Kurosawa characterizes her struggle on two fronts. First, he keeps her in blithe denial of the social forces that are affecting those closest to her (her father, for example, a university professor, is fired from his job for voicing contrary political opinions). This first characterization of Yukie works to critique the privilege of her well-born, aristocratic background. Second, it won't be till her lover is arrested for perceived yellow journalism (pointed at the regime) that her fall from privilege will take shape, transforming her from refined middle-class to enlightened, peasant activist. 

Why Yukie decides to go full-blown peasant in the second half, as if remodeling her faith in a worldview she never understood, is one of the more mysterious choices I've ever seen a character commit to. First off, why? Why renounce a world of privilege for a world of poverty? Kurosawa doesn't explain it. He actually confounds it. Just when we think Yukie's unhappy, genteel lifestyle is being saved by a humble, proletariat ideal, replete with grueling, backbreaking labor in the rice fields, he shows us how the poor people of this community are actually no better than the wealthy ones from which she escaped. Becoming a peasant hasn't made her life easier. Becoming a peasant has made her life hard as hell, introducing her to a petty, cruel group of incels who repeatedly call her "spy" and trample on the fruits of her labors. 

So here we have a character who's been abused by both the right and the left, reinforcing the apoliticism of what my friend David calls "not a political tragedy, but a social tragedy." Kurosawa isn't choosing sides. He's looking holistically at a social problem that neither the right nor the left have helped Yukie understand. Why is there so much distrust between these parties? Why did her lover get arrested? Why did he have to die in prison? The polar voices around her have failed her. Ritchie states: "The military, the heroes of the right, are monsters; the peasants, the heroes of the left, are monsters. The world and both extremes are not good enough… how can simple striving humanity exist in such a place?"

I don't pretend to fully understand why Yukie decides to make such a radical choice (a choice just as radical as Sugata jumping into the pond hoping to find enlightenment). I imagine it might have something to do with finding her responsibility in life, as her father instructed. "I want to find out what it is to live," she tells her father. Is becoming a peasant part of some empathy project, something to elevate her raging need for change? Is there a philosophy in farming work that only those who take ownership of their life get to learn? Is Yukie doing this, as David suggests, "to pay recompense for [her lover's] death?"

What better way to immerse in the outside world than by empathizing with a paradigm that led her lover, and so many others, to get arrested, accused, and in some instances killed. She literally steps into the shoes of the proletariat underdog, her body waist-deep in mud, her mind fighting for the idealism that her lover believed in during his youth. It's a powerful, bewildering choice, one saddled by perseverance and no regrets. 

Whatever freedom meant to the protestors hiding in the margins of this story, Yukie has found it in a trampled rice plant.

If freedom was ever lost or suppressed during prewar Japan, Yukie has now reclaimed it. 

She's uncovered her responsibility.

Kurosawa Ranked