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zedz wrote:I'd love to stay and comment, but I've got to fit in my line-dancing class and a spot of karaoke before the fascist rally tonight.

You naughty boy!

Jun-Dai wrote:I'm pretty sure Kinoshita never had any intention of creating an anti-collectivist film, so arguing that his film isn't successfully anti-collectivist is a bit of a straw man.

No, that's wasn't his intention. That's part of the problem. I'm not arguing against his intention. I'm giving my reading of the quality and intellect of what actually ended up on the screen.

If I'm not, I'm not really sure there's any point to expanding it further, except to say that I'm a bit surprised that you'd sort of assume that I'd understand that (a) singing, marching, etc., are collectivist in nature and that (b) collectivist activities give rise to nationalism and militarism.

I certainly don't want it to be a black/white issue. You're boiling it down that the only thing linking the children marching and singing to the future totalitarian state is a collectivist undercurrent. Sure, if it was only the collectivist theme, then that wouldn't be enough to unify the children with the later militarism. As I stated, if children are singing or marching about an island in another film, I don't take it as an automatic signifier of later nationalism and militarism.

What I find in this film, though, is the repetition and ritualization of these collective actions. Marching and singing in unison are aesthetic hallmarks of militarism (as is even shown later in the film). Then, there's the screenplay's poor characterization of the children as individuals. Oishi's meaningful life events are glossed over in favor of a larger historical and "epic" worldview. I could even go further and say that the first representation of order is one that presents Oishi, the only character with any tangible personality, as The Leader who teaches the children to march in a straight line.

In political cinema, we're also looking at everything on screen, everything in the mise en scene, being a potential signifier or representation of the message. I didn't go into this film with the intention to read it as a political work, but the events in the narrative and their depiction mandates it. So to me, the aforementioned rituals being shown in the historical context of 1920's Japan as a sentimental subject strikes me as oversight, at best, or ignorance, at worst, on the part of Kinoshita.

I'm not just arguing against the undercurrent of collectivism. The other factors in the representation and mawkish execution are each a piece of the whole. A simplistic, black-and-white viewpoint would read my criticism as against all collective actions, but it's much more nuanced than that.

Again, if you can ignore what, to me, is an obvious aesthetic comparison (between the children and the later state), then that's cool. More power to you. But in my reading of the film, I find the imagery of children marching (the same children who grow up to be the soldiers of the Empire of Japan) to be a poorly-chosen subject of sentimentality, considering their future and the larger historical context.

There's no self-awareness that this reading of the film is even possible. And I refuse to see this lack of intellectual engagement with the films' own material as a sign of the times. In the same year as the release of Twenty-Four Eyes, a much smarter and wiser allegory of children, individuality, state, and groupthink was published in Lord of the Flies. The two works seem from different universes.

Michael Kerpan wrote:Yamada's Kaabee -- Our Mother is, in many ways, the polar opposite of 24 Eyes. Also sentimental, it grapples to some extent with the fact that ordinary people DID share responsibility with their leaders.

I'll check it out.

Grand Illusion wrote:

Jun-Dai wrote:I'm pretty sure Kinoshita never had any intention of creating an anti-collectivist film, so arguing that his film isn't successfully anti-collectivist is a bit of a straw man.

No, that's wasn't his intention. That's part of the problem. I'm not arguing against his intention. I'm giving my reading of the quality and intellect of what actually ended up on the screen.

No, I don't think you are. You're giving your reading of Kinoshita's ability to understand the nature of collectivism and individualism, and his ability to see your imagined relationship between these so-called collectivist rituals and the very points Kinoshita's fighting against. This has nothing to do with lack of "intellectual engagement" (as you claim); this has to do with the fact that Kinoshita (most likely) doesn't subscribe to this notion that these activities you refer to are "collectivist rituals" or any idea that "collectivist rituals" are the cause of nationalism or militarism. He's not lazy for not being a libertarian.

I'm not arguing that this is a black and white issue, or that you are trying to make it one, or that you see it as one. My point is simply that your whole argument about collectivism and collectivist rituals relies on an ideology that I don't share and I'm guessing Kinoshita doesn't share, and in that case it's not really a useful reading of the film unless the person you're sharing it with also happens to think of things in that duality.

If you were giving your reading of the quality and intellect of what ended up on the screen, I'd expect you to first start with trying to understand what it was he was trying to express rather than judging it based on your own notions of how fascism/nationalism arise. But perhaps you've done that already and didn't bother to include it in this thread.

I know you've pointed out that this was not a major issue for you in the film, and we're just working through a relatively minor concern you've had, but you've gone to some lengths to defend it and I truly am baffled how someone could see the film this way, at least without being a libertarian. I do consider your arguments quite radical, contrary to your claim that they're not.

Jun-Dai wrote:No, I don't think you are. You're giving your reading of Kinoshita's ability to understand the nature of collectivism and individualism, and his ability to see your imagined relationship between these so-called collectivist rituals and the very points Kinoshita's fighting against.

You're saying that the relationship is "imagined." I want you to honestly answer the following questions:

Do the children march throughout the island? Are they taught to march in an orderly line? Are marching soldiers later depicted in the film?

Do the children sing in unison? Do the soldiers sing in unison?

Are the singing motifs repeated ad nauseum with the scenes becoming ritualized? Was ritualization an important part of totalitarianism and nationalism?

Is there a correlation between the filmic representation of character and individuality? Is it true that the more we know about a character the more that they become individualized? Is this in contrast with a character that we don't learn much about, such as a Bressonian model?

Do you believe in Eisenstein's early theory of dialectics in film form (that is, when two images or sequences are put together, they create a new synthesis of interpretation)?

So far if you have answered "yes" to these questions, then we're on the same page.

You've at least acknowledged a relationship between the events depicted. You don't have to agree with me that the various groupthink rites actively provide fertile ground for nationalism and expansionism. But if you answered "yes" to the questions that I posited (and I please ask you to give honest answers), then I am not imagining a link between these events.

From that, I would argue that Kinoshita is being lazy by not even acknowledging such a reading. His gross sentimentality is anti-intellectual, and his choice of what to glorify is, at least to my eyes, in contrast with what he wishes to critique.

My point is simply that your whole argument about collectivism and collectivist rituals relies on an ideology that I don't share and I'm guessing Kinoshita doesn't share, and in that case it's not really a useful reading of the film unless the person you're sharing it with also happens to think of things in that duality.

There are no "useful" readings of film, except by providing others with new ways at looking at the same work. Otherwise, we're just creating a circle jerk. Plus, if you were to eliminate any politicized criticism, even that which you disagree with, you'd be putting a few film publications out of business.

Anyway, I don't think someone has to be a libertarian to, at least, answer "yes" to the questions I proposed. That's simply acknowledging that there is an aesthetic comparison to children marching and soldiers marching. And I don't think someone has to be a libertarian to see a causal relationship between the acts of children and their later culpability within The State. I doubt Michael Haneke is a libertarian, yet he did exactly what I'm describing in The White Ribbon.

If you were giving your reading of the quality and intellect of what ended up on the screen, I'd expect you to first start with trying to understand what it was he was trying to express rather than judging it based on your own notions of how fascism/nationalism arise. But perhaps you've done that already and didn't bother to include it in this thread.

I realize that Kinoshita is offering a leftist, anti-war critique, if a banal one. I'm expressing why I find his critique problematic. For example, Zack Snyder's goal for the film 300 was to make an action film for the ages. I'm not even certain that the man knows what "fascism" is. Nonetheless, that didn't and won't stop me from reading into the images on the screen and critiquing the film as a fascist spectacle. Authorial intent is low on my priorities of how I interpret film.

GI -- you are overinterpreting things that are simply customary aspects of Japanese school life (even today, to a considerable extent). I personally find the continuing emphasis on group singing a positive thing (and wish basic music training was not becoming extinct in America).

Assuming I've answered "yes" to these questions (I'd have to see the film again to be sure), they don't really add up to the points you've made before. For starters, there's a difference between:
* a suppressed individuality in the childrens' characters that has a commonality with suppressed individuality in a nationalistic society (which you are claiming, no?)
* a lack of individual context to the children because we are largely limited to their presence in the shared class environment (and there is an individuality to some of them there, as I recall), followed by a deepening of the characters (however well or poorly done) as we discover what has transpired in their individual lives outside of the class

There's also a difference between:
* using the secrecies, covert machinations, and mob mentality in a small village as a parallel to ideological society/ies as you see in White Ribbon (there is nothing normal about these behaviors).
* using common habits, rituals, and practices that are an essential part of Japanese childhood and showing some of those rituals in a different context in the same film without necessarily drawing a parallel or even less so suggesting a causal relationship.

It's possible that Kinoshita is drawing some sort of parallel—that the military uses the tools appropriate to elementary school education in order to maintain order or evoke a distorted sense of loyalty, but I'd have to see the film again (I didn't sense that emphasis when I saw it). I don't think the film is glorifying the rituals so much as glorifying the sense of camaraderie and shared experience that children have under a good, affectionate, and caring teacher. The rituals are an expression of that camaraderie.

In this context, where the singing is (as I recall) most frequently used to cheer up the kids (and the teacher) whenever they are at their saddest, Kinoshita is working an age-old tradition in Japanese film (and outside of it), where these activities are a part of education and a part of cheering up. How unusual would it be for a group of Americans to break into song when they say farewell to a teacher? Fairly, I'd think, yet you see it over and over again in Japanese film, and it would be no stranger in an anti-fascist film. It's no stranger for children in a Japanese film of that period to sing and march than it is for characters in an American film to hug one another. Yet would an American director be lazy for not seeing the connection between family members and spouses hugging one another and in a later scene fellow soldiers hugging one another?

These are the dangers of coming into a film like this from the perspective of a highly individualistic society where people rarely sing together in groups, outside of the military, and generally listen to music to cheer themselves up and hug to cheer others up, rather than sing. Kinoshita's not lazy for failing to see the connections the way you do.

That said, if it were an American film made now, set in a classroom in 2020 in a developing sci-fi American neo-fascism, and those same rituals were depicted in a similar fashion, your reading would be much more relevant. This is where context is important. In this imaginary film I just described, because this kind of singing and marching would be unusual for a filmic depiction of an American classroom, it would seem clear that there is a parallel and a likely implied causal relationship to the later depiction of the fascist society.

Grand Illusion wrote:There are no "useful" readings of film, except by providing others with new ways at looking at the same work. Otherwise, we're just creating a circle jerk. Plus, if you were to eliminate any politicized criticism, even that which you disagree with, you'd be putting a few film publications out of business.

It's true that you are providing me with a new way of looking at the film, but I think it tells me a lot less about the film and a lot more about the context you are coming from. A more useful reading of the film would, to me, provide more context around the film, such as why Kinoshita chose to shoot on location in Shodoshima (a very unusual choice that no doubt proved a logistical nightmare), what the importance of the watery landscape is to the film (likely connected to the previous item), what contrast Kinoshita is creating between the experience of a militaristic society is in such a remote place and the experience that the mostly urban viewers would have had, etc.

I'm not interested in eliminating politicized criticism, it's just that I'm not particularly interested in a libertarian perspective of the film (individualism vs. collectivism), and I'm even less interested in applying an ideological judgement on the director that pays no mind to the context in which he created the film or the points he was trying to make. Eisenstein speaks of the connection between shots, and that's a fundamental part of film language, but equally important are the connections between what is going on in the film and what is going on outside of the film. I doubt that Eisenstein would put authorial intent low on his list of priorities.

And besides, if you eliminate any circle-jerk criticism, you'd be putting a few film publications out of business.

Michael Kerpan wrote:GI -- you are overinterpreting things that are simply customary aspects of Japanese school life (even today, to a considerable extent). I personally find the continuing emphasis on group singing a positive thing (and wish basic music training was not becoming extinct in America).

First, I agree that the arts are an important part of education. Personally, I retained a lot more from my artistic classes than I ever did from mathematics.

Second, I'm not "overinterpreting." I'm interpreting. I don't want to digress too much, but I'm not willing to dismiss rituals as being "simply customary aspects." There's at the very least a debate on Japan having a uniquely monolithic society that excels in ethnocentrism and xenophobia. I'm not indicating a causal relationship, but these cultural aspects don't exist in a vacuum.

It's an issue they deal with (even today, to a considerable extent).

Jun Dai wrote:It's possible that Kinoshita is drawing some sort of parallel—that the military uses the tools appropriate to elementary school education in order to maintain order or evoke a distorted sense of loyalty, but I'd have to see the film again (I didn't sense that emphasis when I saw it). I don't think the film is glorifying the rituals so much as glorifying the sense of camaraderie and shared experience that children have under a good, affectionate, and caring teacher. The rituals are an expression of that camaraderie.

I respect your opinion, and I agree that the rituals are an expression of camaraderie. I'm just saying that this "camaraderie" is a dangerous tool, and Kinoshita isn't acknowledging that in the earlier scenes.

Anyway, I do feel like we're going on in circles, but I appreciate your replies, and it's definitely made me examine my own interpretation.

GI -- I would say that you are attributing "unique" aspects to Japan -- when close analogs can be found closer to (what I presume to be your) home. Ethnocentrism and extreme xenophobia are easy to find in many parts of the United States -- for instance.

Michael Kerpan wrote:GI -- I would say that you are attributing "unique" aspects to Japan -- when close analogs can be found closer to (what I presume to be your) home. Ethnocentrism and extreme xenophobia are easy to find in many parts of the United States -- for instance.

Well, as a whole, the US is very diverse and, taken as a totality, wouldn't have the same issues as Japan does, because of demographics. The US really can't be taken as a whole. Small town Kansas has nothing in common with Los Angeles.

Still, I'd argue in the places that xenophobia is most rampant (i.e. a small 50-person church on the outskirts of Gainesville Florida), the collective institutions, such as the church, reinforce an "us vs them" mentality. Nonetheless, I digress.

This is a three-year-old conversation. May I join in? I think GI and JD have engaged in a fascinating discussion with regard to this film's use of group singing as a form of solidarity. I am not terribly familiar with Japanese history or culture, but given that the singing in school preceded the militarization and imperial expansion of the 1930s, I'm guessing that this tradition was deeply embedded in Japanese culture prior to Hirohito's ascendancy. The film begins in 1928, the year of Hirohito's confirmation ceremony as emperor, although he had been emperor since 1926. These are truly children of the empire, while the protagonist is a member of the emperor's generation (probably 1908 or so to the emperor's 1901), a pointed parallel, providing a kind of "alternate" perspective to the fervent nationalism just beginning to take hold. The island itself, although the home of the novel's author and a natural setting for his story, also serves as a peripheral alternative to the illusion of total Japanese uniformity during the Showa era. And, of course, it seems to be pointedly a woman's perspective, and perhaps at that time, more of a woman's privilege to be pacifist with impunity (although she, too, is almost persecuted as a Communist for her ambivalence toward the jingoism infecting her students). The songs she taught her students were "corny folk songs," as her coworker put it, in dramatic contrast to the marches during the military parades. Choo-choo trains and a crow mother lamenting her lost children versus I-greet-death-with-a-smile-and-shed-blood-for-the-Emperor.

Group song took up such a great portion of the film, I couldn't help but be reminded of the group singing that threaded Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives, a film I originally saw in 1990 in a theater, my first Davies film. It bored the pants off me at the time, but I have since come to love its vision of working-class solidarity (some might say complacency) through popular music. If I'm understanding GI's argument correctly, should I take this musical pub culture as a predisposition toward nationalism and imperialism? It's easy to scoff at the comparison, but I think MK's tentative assumption that GI is American points out our cultural suspicion toward group activities and why "socialized" anything raises American hackles. (Much of which is hypocritical, of course, given our history of abiding by egregious government activity posed as consensus politics; we can be sheep like everyone else.) "Solidarity" is a word with a number of valences, but in America, it's mostly linked with communist sentiment. "Comrades!" inevitably follows the word in the American mind, and not in a sympathetic way. (Communists are boogeymen for ultra-nationalists as well as rugged individualists, apparently.)

But there are versions of solidarity that bind groups within a smaller radius, group comfort that can sometimes substitute for a lousy home life, as was often the case for the students in Twenty-Four Eyes. The island, of course, represents a geographically tighter area in order to emphasize this regional version of solidarity. And while I agree that some of the children's uniqueness as individuals was lost in the shuffle, it was nonetheless clear that the teacher was attempting to emphasize the individual desires of each student, even when that desire was threatened by poverty or war. If the film was simply this--a charismatic teacher against the state--I would likely recoil more from the excessive sentimentality, but what made the story unusual was the teacher's occasional admissions of helplessness and poor judgment. She made light of an islander's flooded home with the students and mumbled an apology to a village woman when confronted by the latter. She admitted her inability to help her student when the student's mother wanted her to discourage the girl from pursuing music school. She kept her distance from the girl with tuberculosis and could only cry at her distress.

Teacher dramas in the U.S. would rather have the teachers be virtual demagogues, inspiring their students to greatness, a narrative that has more equivalency in legend than in reality, and one that, to me, seems more of a breeding ground for cults of personality and groupthink, as GI puts it. While the crying got to be tedious by the second hour, I was charmed by the music, some of which was western, incidentally ("Auld Lang Syne," etc.). The thought of children and teacher forming a line, wending around the cherry trees with their fallen blossoms, and singing about trains--that this is somehow a recipe for indoctrination--seems peevish to me, but the role of song in America is different, and I can understand one of us scratching his head at the innocent joy discovered by other cultures in this group activity.

(My apologies if resurrecting this long-dormant thread with such a long-winded disquisition is not appropriate etiquette.)

Additional comments on films are _always_ welcome (and timely) in these threads. Thanks for your perspective.

Don't American children sing in unison music class? "Yankee Doodle Dandy" etc? It's not just a Japanese thing.
I never liked singing in class, but I learned about melody and timing more than the lyrical content.

But the song in the movie about the mother crow that appears in the movie is a traditional children's song that everyone learns, but in the 1980's the comedian Ken Shimura made a parody of the song, and quickly became the more recognizable version of the song these days....

This American child most definitely sang in unison with his early grade classmates, and I think the practice was quite common. Mind you, it was songs like "Polly-Woddle Doddle", which even a strict deconstructionist would find difficult to uncover in it traces of nationalism. On the other hand, this American child is now 68, so who knows what songs American children now practice in grade school; but my wife, who is involved in earlier education on a national level, tells me that younger children definitely still sing together in grade school. The unison is looser rather than stricter, if that makes a difference.

Not a song, but doesn't every American school day still kick of with the "Pledge of Allegiance?" And someone must have taught me the National Anthem along the way.

A popular Glasgow kids playground song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IG-u5vaEZc" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

My clearest memory of music class in elementary school was being told what to sing but not really having the interest or confidence to sing it, so I tried to sing softly enough that my voice would be drowned out. It was a whole program of military numbers: "The Air Force Song (Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder)," "The Marines' Hymn," "The Ballad of the Green Berets," etc. etc. The plan was for us to practice these for a few weeks and then be put on a stage at some school function to perform them. Finally, the teacher announced that we wouldn't be ready in time and, visibly weeping a little, told us that the performance was off, while most of the children, myself included, were greatly relieved to dodge this ordeal. We had more fun singing things like "Yellow Submarine" in the privacy of the classroom.
And yeah, we had to "pledge allegiance" every morning to make sure that our loyalty to the flag and all it stood for hadn't faltered since the previous school day.

I think music is one of those inessentials that have been eliminated from many (most?) American public schools -- in the quest to improve results of nationally (and state) mandated standardized testing.

Gregory wrote:And yeah, we had to "pledge allegiance" every morning to make sure that our loyalty to the flag and all it stood for hadn't faltered since the previous school day.

I always remember that at the end of every day at my primary school that the entire class had to stand, put out chairs tidily on the tables and then recite the Lord's Prayer (monotonous and not exactly musical but I guess it fits in an Allen Ginsberg-esque atonal drone-type way!) before we were allowed to go home!

(And this was a decade and a half before the Tony Blair 'faith school' fad of the late 90s!)

manicsounds wrote:Don't American children sing in unison music class?

Yes, they do, occasionally (although rarely, in my case; in fact, I can't recall one time as a child that we sang in class, although I suppose we must have at some point!). Certainly not as much as the kids in this film, though, who seem to fall into it so easily, marking every occasion with song; and then, of course, this is set in counterpoint to the military send-offs later in the film. The music seems to have more significance and emotional resonance for the school children as well as the adults. But perhaps this is just peculiar to the film; as I said, I'm not familiar with Japanese pedagogy at this period of time. And perhaps American children sang more frequently in the late '20s--I don't know. (They certainly chanted the pledge of allegiance every morning at that time! I never did the pledge growing up, but that was the SF Bay Area with all its competing political interests effacing all traditions.)

I was really responding to GI's earlier, perhaps western suspicion toward the prevalence of this activity, at least as it is depicted in the film. (And perhaps I single out the earlier comments unfairly, at this point, given the fact that GI last wrote on 9/23/10!) If there is any resistance toward group activities in this country, it is often on the basis of suspecting those activities cultivating mindless uniformity, a suspicion, of course, that is mostly unwarranted.

What are Ken Shimura's lyrics like? As a more well-known parody, they must have irreparably disfigured the sentiment of those scenes in the movie that used the song!

I've checked with some of the Japanese college students we've hosted, they still did lots of class singing in elementary school -- but not so much afterwards (unless they were in some sort of choral group).

gcgiles1dollarbin wrote: What are Ken Shimura's lyrics like? As a more well-known parody, they must have irreparably disfigured the sentiment of those scenes in the movie that used the song!

So the original lyrics is about a mother crow that's cawing, and the reason she's cawing is for her 7 young crows to hear her from the nest.
Ken Shimura's lyrics are very short, only 2 verses. (The first verse is the same, the second is changed)

Ken Shimura wrote:Mother crow, why are you cawing?
Because crows can do whatever they want...!

This became a problem for parents and schools in the 1980s as many children started copying his lyrics, and music classes all across Japan were being disrupted. PTAs around the country were all concerned. Apparently, the lyrics were NOT created by Shimura, but apparently by the comedian Tsuruko Shofukutei, but Shimura's singing of it on "The Drifters" TV show (which sometimes had an unheard of 50% in TV ratings at the time) made it widespread.

Thanks for sharing that. The parody would seem to be a call for non-conformity, right? That's interesting in the context of this discussion and the association of music with group activities/uniformity. It's funny that the switch was considered such an epidemic in 1980s Japan. When I was nine years old I recall my classmates strutting around the hallways of elementary school singing, "We don't need no education," the year The Wall came out, but it was more of a gesture of feeble defiance than full rebellion requiring special PTA meetings! In Twenty-four Eyes, the less educated teacher who worked with the protagonist substituted for the latter when she was injured, and he lamely attempted to teach the children scales that the students fully rejected--it was education by rote. He viewed music as a pedantic tool and as a skill to be learned (while remaining sympathetic), whereas Hisako Oshi was the "authentic" charismatic teacher who used music as a kind of ecstatic group activity, a chance to celebrate moments, lament misfortune, recognize unique abilities, and honor difficult changes. Perhaps it was something of this instinct that swept the music classes in the '80s! Sometimes it takes a group movement to underscore individual differences, one argument for the salutary effects of solidarity.

I really like your comparison with Distant Voices, Still Lives, gcgiles -- I've made that exact connection (in my head) before. It seems to me based on time spent in Japan with my wife's family and friends and the experience of raising our daughter that communal singing holds a different place in Japan than it does in school here, and that the songs heard in Twenty-four Eyes are still learned by Japanese children, with some differences; for instance, the song about the train is better known as "Chou, Chou" (butterfly). My daughter takes Suzuki violin lessons, and many of the songs at the beginning of book 1 are straight from the repertoire of songs that Japanese children learn growing up: "Lightly Row" ("Chou, Chou"), "Song of the Wind" ("Kogitsune konkon"), "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" ("Musunde hiraite"), etc. Many of these children's songs were written during the Meiji and early Taisho periods and the melodies were either borrowed from European sources (as in the above) or were written by song composers involved in "modernizing" Japanese folk song, or minyo, as in the case of the song about the crow, which is just about my favorite Japanese children's song. It's been a little while since I've researched this stuff, so forgive my possibly faulty memory on some points.

I'm not so sure that the songs (or communal singing itself) carry the sort of political baggage that you suggest they might. I think that for Japanese audiences the songs are nostalgic and simply provide a convenient shorthand for the bonding that happens at school. Plus, we see either group singing or people gathered in groups requesting a song from someone in countless Japanese films. I'm not sure that the communal/individualism duality plays out in quite the same way in Japan that it does here.

jguitar wrote:I'm not so sure that the songs (or communal singing itself) carry the sort of political baggage that you suggest they might. I think that for Japanese audiences the songs are nostalgic and simply provide a convenient shorthand for the bonding that happens at school. Plus, we see either group singing or people gathered in groups requesting a song from someone in countless Japanese films. I'm not sure that the communal/individualism duality plays out in quite the same way in Japan that it does here.

Judging solely from Japanese films, they seem to retain a much more sentimental attachment to schooldays than many other cultures, given the repeated focus in, say, Ozu films on class reunions, meeting up with former teachers and so forth. There seems to be a touch of this in American culture as well (year books, school reunions etc.) but it seems completely alien to me, and I get the sense that it's not a big part of British culture either. I guess there's the old school tie network if you went to public school, but that's not exactly misty-eyed and sentimental, and I doubt there are many people looking back with a warm sigh on their years at Scunthorpe Comprehensive.

With many Japanese public schools, your classmates don't change every year. If you are in 3rd grade class B, for example, next year you will be in 4th grade class B. They don't mix and match with class A or class C students, so for 6 years, you have the same friends. Also, there isn't a system of repeating a grade by failing.

It gets very emotional after the 6th grade graduation and after the last year of junior high graduation, as then many classmates get separated into new classes and new schools.

My mother is currently visiting my place to meet up with old class friends for reunions in Tokyo. It happens pretty much every year. It's a different thing than those 10 year reunions in the US where you wonder if someone got fat or not. Japanese see these old friends every year or even more often, so it's much closer personally.