Live Today, Die Tomorrow!

The film starts from a real case. Michio Yamada is a young man just out of school. A government programme sends him to Tokyo. He is to pack fruit at a department store. He cannot get a footing in the city. He takes a gun from a house on an American base. With that gun he kills four people. The story then goes back. Yamada’s childhood is told. His family is scattered and there is poverty at home. As a boy he witnesses a sexual assault on his sister. The film does not go into that. Kaneto Shindō made it two years after the case. He spoke at length with the family, the teacher and the friends. The film’s argument is plain, that poverty and exclusion feed violence. In the real case the young man was arrested in 1969 and executed years later. Daijirō Harada and Nobuko Otowa appear in the hundred and twenty minute film, a Japanese production Kaneto Shindō finished in 1970.