Why Nobody Knows--Family and Society in Modern Japan (Critical Essay‪)‬

In 2004, child actor Yagira Yuya, who had been twelve years old at the time that filming began, became the youngest person ever to win a Best Actor award at Cannes for his performance as Fukushima Akira in Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai, 2004). Although the film itself lost out on the Palme d'Or to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Yagira's award confirmed the remarkable esteem in which the film and its director, Kore-eda Hirokazu, were held in the West. With his work regularly receiving nominations and awards at international film festivals and obtaining commercial releases in Western countries, Kore-eda has become one of the few Japanese directors of recent years to become a canonical figure in international art house cinema. To an extent, the specifically Japanese context of his cinema, and of Nobody Knows in particular, has been obscured by this worldwide acclaim. In this essay, in addition to offering a general critical account of Kore-eda's film, I intend to relate Nobody Knows to the established canon of Japanese cinema and to pose the question of the extent to which the film's personal drama constitutes a social critique in the context of modern Japanese society. The story of Nobody Knows was based on a 1988 incident known as the "Affair of the Four Abandoned Children of Nishi-Sugamo" (Nishi-sugamo kodomo okizari jiken), in which a group of children were abandoned by their mother in a Tokyo apartment. Since the children (apart, it seems, from the eldest) had not been registered at birth, they had no legal existence, and the case came to light only when the corpse of one of the children, a baby, was found. It subsequently transpired that another child, too, had died, apparently killed by friends of the eldest son, who was himself arrested for his part in this death. Although the boy was eventually cleared, the mother was sentenced to three years in prison.