General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

No Regrets for Our Youth (わが青春に悔なし)

No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga seishun ni kuinashi, わが青春に悔なし) is a 1946 Japanese drama directed by Akira Kurosawa and produced by Toho, telling the story of a professor's daughter who grows from a sheltered student into a resolute opponent of Japan's wartime militarism. It was Kurosawa's first film made after the end of World War II and his fifth as a director.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	29 October 1946, distributed by Toho; 110 minutes, black and white³^•¹
Director	Akira Kurosawa; his first postwar film and fifth film overall²
Screenplay	Eijiro Hisaita, a playwright central to proletarian theater¹
Historical basis	The 1933 Takigawa Incident at Kyoto University and the 1941 Sorge spy incident¹
Lead	Setsuko Hara as Yukie Yagihara, the only female protagonist in Kurosawa's body of work⁴
Critical standing	Second place in Kinema Junpo's Best Ten for 1946¹
Production context	Released during the second Toho labor dispute of 1946, opening in Nikatsu-affiliated theaters¹

Spoilers

Story and characters

The film opens in 1933, the eighth year of the Shōwa era, when militarism was tightening its grip on Japan. Yukie (八木原幸枝), the only daughter of a Kyoto University law professor, lives a comfortable life surrounded by her father's students. Two of them, Ryukichi Noge (野毛隆吉) and Itokawa (糸川), both love her, but they take opposite paths: Noge commits himself to the antiwar movement, while the cautious, convention-minded Itokawa becomes a public prosecutor on the side of the state.⁵^•⁶

When Professor Yagihara is persecuted for his liberal ideas and forced from his post, and Noge is imprisoned for left-wing activity, Yukie's world changes. Years later she refuses Itokawa's proposal, finds Noge, and begins living with him; they marry. Noge is then arrested on spy charges, tortured in prison, and dies there. Yukie carries his ashes to his home village and, in the film's celebrated final stretch, endures hardship working the land alongside Noge's parents while carrying on his convictions.⁵^•⁷

The story is loosely built on two real cases. In the Takigawa Incident of 1933, Kyoto University professor Yukitoki Takigawa was suspended and later dismissed over allegations of teaching Marxist philosophy, an event that caused a sensation among the nation's intellectuals. The film also draws on the fate of Hotsumi Ozaki, a journalist who spied for the Soviet Union and was the only person executed for treason by the Japanese wartime government; he is the model for Noge.⁸^•²

Production and historical context

Kurosawa had directed his earliest films during the war, most of them under government pressure, though he personally opposed the fascist government. Freed from wartime censorship, he made No Regrets for Our Youth as his first postwar picture.⁹ The film was produced under the encouragement of the Allied occupation's GHQ as one of the so-called democracy-enlightenment films, and the condemnation of fascism is one of its explicit themes.⁶

The screenplay was written by Eijiro Hisaita, a playwright who had been a central figure in proletarian theater; that same year, director Keisuke Kinoshita also released a well-regarded film on Hisaita's script, and Kurosawa's choice to work with him reflected the director's stance at the time.¹ The crew included cinematographer Asakazu Nakai and composer Tadashi Hattori.¹

A troubled production. In his memoir Something Like an Autobiography, Kurosawa wrote that although the title became a popular phrase, he had many regrets about the film because the script was rewritten against his will. After a union strike at Toho Studios, a scenario review committee rejected his original script, not for its content but because another script on the same subject had been submitted. He recalled that the revised story became somewhat distorted, and that he decided to gamble everything on the last twenty minutes, pouring a feverish energy into roughly two thousand feet of film and close to two hundred shots.⁹

The film's release was itself entangled with labor conflict. The Toho disputes had begun in March 1946, and the film opened during the second dispute, using theaters of the Nikatsu chain.¹

Setsuko Hara and the female protagonist

Setsuko Hara, later celebrated as a regular in Yasujiro Ozu's films, plays Yukie in her first postwar role, and the performance is widely treated as central to the film's standing. The Criterion Collection describes Yukie as the only female protagonist in Kurosawa's body of work and one of his strongest heroes, transforming from genteel bourgeois daughter to independent social activist across a tumultuous decade of Japanese history.⁴ The Turner Classic Movies essay likewise calls the film the only Kurosawa film with a woman protagonist, tracing Yukie's change over a dozen years into a strong woman determined to live by her own principles.⁹

Critics have noted how different this Hara is from her later Ozu persona of the calm, reserved woman in kimono. A Film Comment essay by the filmmaker and scholar Matías Piñeiro argues that the film shows a Hara who is not in equilibrium and not in control of herself, pointing to two sequences of repeated movement, Yukie's frantic playing at the piano and her methodical planting in the rice fields, through which her movements seem to sway her thinking.¹⁰

Reception and significance

Kinema Junpo ranked the film second in its Best Ten for the year.¹ A 2017 study of the film's audience by Kyōhei Kitamura of the University of Tokyo's graduate school found that its reception split by generation: released at a political-cultural turning point in Japanese society, the film was commended by the young wartime generation, who had sacrificed their adolescence to the war, and criticized by the prewar generation.¹¹

The film has remained in international circulation. It was released theatrically in the United States by Libra Films in 1980, re-released in France by Carlotta Films in 2016, and issued on DVD by the Criterion Collection in 2008 as part of its Postwar Kurosawa set and by the BFI in the United Kingdom in 2011.¹² Festival notes have highlighted its experimental side, with ambitious visuals complementing a fiercely antiwar narrative, and its place as a rare Kurosawa film pivoting on a woman's performance.⁸

References

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