Broadcasters' Eye - Season 1 / Year 2011

Without the work of numerous subcontractors, the manufacturing of Toyota cars, Japan's top brand, would simply not be possible. This documentary takes an up-close and personal look at a tiny Toyota subcontractor, four steps down the supply chain. In a 7.5 square-meter factory, the owner, a lively woman, works with two other housewives who live nearby. Their work consists of gluing small parts together. All seems well in this cozy factory until one day in the fall of 2008, a global recession is triggered by the fall of Lehman Brothers. Suddenly, sales of Toyota cars dry up. How does the owner of this tiny factory deal with the crisis? By closing down. However, despite the grim reality, the factory is always filled with laughter. What can we learn from this upbeat story of business closure?

The Manchuria Pioneering Youth Voluntary Army sent Japanese youths in their teens to Manchuria during the Second World War. Impoverished farming children thus headed off to the Chinese mainland with dreams of becoming landowners.

Tondokoro Company was formed in the northern part of Japan's Nagano prefecture, central Japan, under educator Yoshifumi Tondokoro. Two hundred strong, it shipped out to Manchuria in June 1944. They were devoted to development and training, but when the Soviets invaded on 9 August 1945, they fled deep into the mountains, in desperation. With nothing to eat, many of them died. Those that were captured suffered even harsher conditions as POWs. By the time they were repatriated, only 82 of them-less than half-returned alive.

We follow a group of these surviving teenage "Pioneers," now in their 80s, as they visit China and the former Manchurian territories in the summer of 2009. In a final pilgrimage to console the spirits of fallen comrades, they travel from the border with Russia to Yanji, near the current border with North Korea. En route, they break decades of silence to reveal, for the first time, the story of their flight and imprisonment, and the incidents of appalling tragedy that they experienced. Company leader Yoshifumi Tondokoro's eldest daughter attempts to retrace her father's last steps: he went missing and was never found. She was only seven years old when she saw him last, and can barely remember him at all; but her longing for him, once dimmed with the passage of time, now revives.

The battlefield deprives us of friends and family. The horrible memories and heartbreak cannot be cured by anything. But this unforgettable legacy of war is almost entirely absent from our historical textbooks. It is this side of war that this documentary program endeavors to preserve and understand, by recording the eyewitness testimony not only of the Japanese "Pioneers" but of the local people, supplemented by archival film and other materials.

This documentary revisits the wartime experiences of teenage volunteers on the colonial front lines, largely through their own eyes as now-elderly visitors. From the personal accounts of survivors and other records, we hear a hitherto untold story, and confront some difficult questions. What do such experiences mean for them now, after 64 years? And what is the purpose of war?

Kosuke(Shigeru Izumiya) struggles to carry on a family tradition of lamprey eel fishing on the Ishikari River. But discouraged by dwindling catches, his constant quarrelling with his wife leads her to leave him. After their divorce, his only son Tsuyoshi(Ken Yasuda) grows to detest his father and also abandons him and their rapidly declining hometown. Ten years pass and Kosuke doesn't hear a word from his son.

Now over 60, Kosuke contemplates getting remarried. "Tsuyoshi will probably never return home- I should renovate this house so we can start life anew when we get married..." But just then, Tsuyoshi suddenly returns. Facing hard times, Tsuyoshi has lost his bearings and can't seem to find his way. He has hit rock bottom and has nowhere to turn but to a father and hometown he despises.

This program weaves a detailed tapestry of emotions as a father supports his son's struggle to find himself in a hometown to which he has unexpectedly returned.