General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Boy (少年) (1969 film)

Boy (少年, Shōnen) is a 1969 Japanese feature film directed by Nagisa Ōshima (大島渚), about a family of itinerant grifters who make their living by staging traffic accidents: the ten-year-old boy throws himself in front of cars, and the family extorts settlement money from the drivers. It was produced by Sozosha and the Art Theatre Guild, released in Japan on July 26, 1969, and runs 97 minutes in color and CinemaScope.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director / script	Nagisa Ōshima; screenplay by Tsutomu Tamura (田村孟)¹
Release	July 26, 1969, Japan; 97 minutes, color, CinemaScope (1:2.35)¹
Production	Sozosha (創造社) and the Art Theatre Guild (日本アート・シアター・ギルド)¹
Cast	Tetsuo Abe (the boy), Fumio Watanabe (the father), Akiko Koyama (the stepmother), Tsuyoshi Kinoshita (the little brother)¹
Basis	A real 1966 case, reported widely in Japanese newspapers, of a family that had its child deliberately injured by cars for money²
Japanese honors	3rd place, Kinema Junpo Best Ten; screenplay awards from Kinema Junpo and the Mainichi Film Concours³
International honors	Golden Spike, Valladolid International Film Festival, 1971; main slate of the 1969 New York Film Festival¹^•⁴

Spoilers

Story and subject

The film follows a four-person family traveling across Japan: a father (Fumio Watanabe) who was wounded in the war and cannot find a place in postwar Japanese society, his strong-willed second wife (Akiko Koyama), the ten-year-old boy of the title (Tetsuo Abe), and a toddler brother (Tsuyoshi Kinoshita). The man is the boy's biological father, while the woman is his stepmother and is unrelated to him.⁷ Their livelihood is the atariya (当たり屋) scam, deliberately colliding with cars and demanding compensation. The father, citing his status as a disabled veteran, pushes the dangerous role onto the son, who injures himself repeatedly while feeling guilt over the crime but unable to say so.⁵^•⁶

The family moves from Kyushu through Shikoku, Hokuriku, Tohoku, and Hokkaido, staying ahead of the police. The boy's only escape is his imagination: he tells fanciful tales of aliens and monsters to his toddler brother. A fatal accident in snowy Hokkaido, in which a girl in the other car dies, breaks the cycle; the family is eventually arrested, and the boy, like the real child in the case, refuses to confess.⁶^•⁷

The real case

The film is based on an actual incident discovered in 1966, in which a family from Kochi Prefecture had its ten-year-old son deliberately struck by cars for money, a scheme reported extensively in the Japanese press at the time. Ōshima and screenwriter Tsutomu Tamura researched the case closely; apart from changed names, the settings and story follow the facts. In the real case the family was arrested in Osaka in September 1966.²^•⁸ Ōshima said in an interview that what interested him most in the newspaper account was that the boy refused to say anything to police even though his parents had confessed: "the society he lived in had not permitted him any alternatives."⁷

Production

Unable to find a young actor for the title role, Ōshima and his crew searched streets and orphanages in Tokyo and found Tetsuo Abe, a nine-year-old orphan who had been abandoned by his stepmother. According to Ōshima, crew members offered to adopt Abe after the film was finished, but the boy refused and returned to the orphanage. During production the company moved from town to town in all kinds of weather, replicating the family's transient life; the entire film was shot on location across the country, tracing the route of the real family.⁷^•¹

The film was made as part of Ōshima's low-budget collaboration with the Art Theatre Guild, the "10-million-yen films" that began with Death by Hanging (1968) and continued through The Ceremony (1971).⁹ It was his fourteenth feature in a decade of directing.¹⁰

Reception and legacy

The film ranked third in Kinema Junpo's Best Ten of Japanese films for 1969 and won the screenplay award at both the Kinema Junpo Best Ten and the 24th Mainichi Film Concours, where Akiko Koyama also received the supporting actress award.³ It was screened at the Venice International Film Festival to high praise⁶ and selected for the main slate of the 1969 New York Film Festival, evidence that Ōshima's work circulated internationally before his more notorious 1970s films.⁴ It won the Golden Spike at the 1971 Valladolid International Film Festival.¹

Critics have often called it one of Ōshima's most accessible films, traditional in style compared with his more confrontational work. Tom Milne of London's Observer called it "Weird, beautiful, and terrifying," and Harold Clurman wrote in The Nation that it was "made from the stuff of life." In 2000, critic Derek Malcolm of The Guardian chose it as one of the top 100 films of all time, comparing its warmth to a Truffaut film.⁷ The British Board of Film Classification passed it for UK cinema release in 1970 as The Boy, distributed by Academy Cinema, and reclassified it in 2025 for a Radiance Films home-video and streaming release.¹¹

Within Ōshima's career, the film continues his long-standing concern with crime and children, a motif running from his debut Town of Love and Hope (1959); Ōshima's own production company describes it as the peak of that lineage. Its restrained, linear road-movie form contrasts with the Brechtian rupture of Death by Hanging, while asking the same political question: what responsibility does a child have inside a social arrangement that has never offered him a viable alternative?³^•⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026