Rail of the Star

aka Rail of the Star: A True Story of Children. 1993. Movie. 76 min. Drama. org Chitose Kobayashi (novel). dir Toshio Hirata. mus Koichi Sakata. des Yoshinori Kamemori. -bc

Another wartime tale told through the eyes of a child, like Grave of the Fireflies and Barefoot Gen, but this time set in Korea, where a Japanese family finds itself stranded at the end of World War II. Far less tragic than its predecessors, it is still a powerful account of a rarely told aspect of the Japanese war experience.

In northern Korea, in 1940, Chitose Kobaya­shi, or “Chiko,” as she is called, lives a comfortable life with her parents and younger sister amidst the Japanese community as she’s about to enter the first grade. Her father runs a coal plant and they live on its grounds with a live-in Korean maid, Ohana. With the onset of World War II, Mr. Kobayashi is drafted to serve in the army and leaves home for the duration of the war. As she attends school, Chiko begins to notice the mistreatment of the Korean population by the Japanese and the growing Korean resentment. Her sister, Miko, dies of typhoid fever. An accident involving a sewing pin sends Chiko to the hospital for emergency surgery. Blame for it falls on Ohana who is then abruptly fired by Chiko’s mother.

The war ends and Mr. Kobayashi comes home to an uncertain future for the Japanese living in Heijou, the city the family had moved to when the coal plant closed down. The Russians come in and begin confiscating Japanese property. By the spring of 1946, Kobayashi and the other Japanese realize that the only way they can guarantee their safety is to make their way south of the 38th Parallel, where the Americans are repatriating Japanese citizens from the area. They hide in a boxcar of a train traveling south, but when the train is stopped by the Russians, they are ordered off and made to wait. At night, they decide as a group to continue their way on foot away from the main thoroughfares. Eventually, lost and hungry, they are helped by Korean farmers who take pity on them. One farmer, whose son had been taken away by the Japanese during the war, volunteers to guide the group through a narrow, steep path, free of Russian scrutiny, that will take them to the safety of the 38th Parallel. . . .

Rail of the Star is done in the simplified TV style of such prestige productions of the 1980s as Animated Classics of Japanese Literature and offers extremely simple character designs set against elegantly rendered backgrounds. If there’s any serious flaw to this approach, it’s in the design of the central character, Chiko, whose round face, wide eyes and small frame look almost the same in the 1946 portion of the story as they did in the 1940 scenes, with no attempt to age her into adolescence. Aside from that, the adult characters are all distinct and the animators succeed in making the Korean characters look specifically Korean, in both facial features (e.g., higher cheekbones) and dress to differentiate them from the Japanese.

The backgrounds show us a Japanese-occupied industrial town in northern Korea in the 1940s, with streetcars, railroad lines, shops, bridges, simple, spacious homes, and the occasional factory, and long walks in picturesque settings. Later, when the characters are forced to flee en masse to the south, the settings change dramatically to dark, thick forests and farm fields at night, until the group gets to safety. Modern Tokyo is seen in a prologue and epilogue showing Chiko performing as an actress in a stage production.

Koichi Sakata’s lyrical, gentle, occasionally sweeping score, dominated by the string section, enhances the film’s subtle emotional content, counterbalancing the deliberate underplaying of the dramatic scenes.

Rail of the Star is one of four animated dramas made from 1983–93 depicting fact-based wartime experiences of young Japanese children, the others being Barefoot Gen (1983), Grave of the Fireflies (1988), and Kayoko’s Diary (1991). Rail has the distinction of being the least horrific and the least tragic, taking place far from the mass death and destruction visited on the peoples of Hiroshima and Tokyo during the final stages of the war preceding Japan’s surrender. Chiko’s younger sister dies of typhus, a sad enough experience in any event, but the hardships the family faces in fleeing to the safety of American-occupied southern Korea are relatively mild compared to those faced by the young protagonists in the earlier films.

Still, Rail does tell a story not often told on film, animated or otherwise. How often do we in the West (or even in Japan, for that matter) get exposed to stories of Japanese life during the war outside of Japan? The Korean setting of the film opens a window on a whole set of issues never raised in the other films cited here. For one, we finally get a glimpse of what life was like for those Asians colonized by the Japanese. The hints we get of Japanese brutality and oppression may be fleeting, but they’re unmistakable. The film makes no attempt to mitigate Japanese arrogance or smoldering Korean resentment. When the tables turn on the Japanese community in Heijou, non-Japanese viewers can easily be forgiven for gloating. While Chiko, a child, may be guiltless, her parents and their neighbors certainly are not. These people had it coming.

The film is told matter-of-factly from the point of view of a child, one who only reports what she saw, lacking the ethical apparatus to process the right or wrong of what she witnessed. Other than the occasional flashback to the charming antics of her little sister, Chiko doesn’t lay a gloss of reverie over her memoirs. There is no idyllic, storied past to stir up feelings of nostalgia. The Kobayashis’ life in Korea was always built on shaky ground. This remarkable refusal to sentimentalize is what most distinguishes this film stylistically from the others in this genre.

Director Toshio Hirata is an anime veteran who started out working for Osamu Tezuka as an animator on Alakazam the Great (Saiyuki), and artist on Kimba the White Lion and A Thousand and One Nights. He was later key animator on the Tezuka-based feature Metropolis, and director of the Tezuka-created Unico: Black Cloud, White Feather.

One moving scene shows the desperation of the Kobayashis as they prepare for the inevitable visit by the new occupiers—the Russians. In order to hide evidence of Mr. Kobayashi’s military service, the parents decide to burn all their photo albums, including the only photos of Miko, the sister who died as a small child. Chiko protests and cries, to no avail.

When Ohana, the Korean maid and nanny, is unceremoniously fired by Mrs. Kobayashi, she tearfully pleads to be allowed to stay, but her cries fall on deaf ears. When Chiko next sees Ohana a couple of years later, it is on the street outside a bar where Ohana, heavily made up, works as a bar girl and is with two drunken men showering her with compliments. As Ohana looks up and calls Chiko’s name, Mrs. Kobayashi pulls Chiko’s arm and walks hastily away.

The film is bookended by sequences taking place some twenty years later showing Chiko as a successful stage actress in Tokyo, whose performance is witnessed from the audience by someone from Korea who hasn’t seen her since childhood.

The original author of Rail of the Star is Chitose Kobayashi, who was born in Korea and based the book on her own experiences. Long before becoming a writer, she was an actress who was a star in the early days of Japanese television and later appeared in numerous TV dramas on NHK, as well as such action films as Akai Shuriken (Red Shuriken, 1965) and My Colt Is My Passport (1967). She died in Tokyo on November 26, 2003, at age 66.

advisory Small children might be upset at the anguish Chiko suffers after the death (off-camera) of Miko early on and the crying that results from the extreme pain felt by Chiko after sitting on the pin and undergoing an operation without anesthesia. Aside from that, there are no other elements requiring viewer discretion.