We are taught when wars began and when they ended, who surrendered and who won, but rarely what happened to ordinary people the day after peace was declared. What happened to the children who had no parents to return to, no home, no money and, in many cases, nobody interested in whether they survived?

Set in the ruins of Tokyo in 1945, Miwa Nishikawa’s Children Untold looks towards a generation of children who were left to deal with the consequences. I knew, of course, that Japan had been devastated by the Second World War, but knowing that in a broad historical sense is very different from watching a twelve-year-old trying to work out where she will sleep, how she will eat and whom she can trust.

The protagonist here is Kotoko (Ami Koyae), the daughter of musicians who has lost her family to the war. With nowhere to go, she is introduced to an underground refuge and begins earning money by shining shoes. After witnessing something she should never have had to see, Kotoko cuts her hair and disguises herself as a boy, eventually joining a group of orphaned boys surviving under the protection of a local yakuza clan. They sell newspapers, steal supplies and trade on the black market because childhood, in their circumstances, has become something they can no longer afford.

Nishikawa’s film completely blew me away. At 150 minutes, it is a considerable commitment, yet I barely felt the running time. I was too caught up in Kotoko’s story and, perhaps even more than that, disturbed by what surrounded her – hunger, homelessness, exploitation and fear remained part of everyday life.

That last point is central to what makes Children Untold so difficult to shake off. Nishikawa is looking at children who survived the war and then discovered that peace did not necessarily mean safety. According to the director’s research, there were an estimated 120,000 war orphans in Japan, although the true number may have been considerably higher. Many had once lived perfectly ordinary lives: they went to school, had families, listened to music and expected adults to look after them. Then they were left to sleep rough, steal food and make decisions no child should have been forced to make.

What becomes increasingly difficult to watch is how quickly Kotoko has to understand the dangers around her and adjust to them, despite being only twelve years old. She watches what happens to other girls and realises that surviving on the streets will require more than finding food or somewhere to sleep. Cutting her hair and presenting herself as a boy becomes a way of protecting herself, and Nishikawa drew this part of the story from accounts of girls who did exactly that in post-war Japan. It is a frightening detail because it tells us how much these children understood about the world they had been thrown into. Kotoko is still a child, yet she is already making decisions about her body, her identity and her safety that no child her age should have to consider, while learning very quickly which parts of herself might make her more vulnerable.

Ami Koyae is superb as Kotoko, especially when she acts tough to convince everyone that she is a “boy”, while we can still see the child underneath the disguise. The other children are equally important; together, they create a strange little world within the wreckage, with its own loyalties, arguments, humour and rules; they behave like children even when their circumstances force them to grow up far too quickly.

Running alongside Kotoko’s story is that of her former teacher Sone, played by Fumi Nikaido. Sone is pregnant by her fiancé, who died in the war, and her own life is collapsing around her. She loses her job, falls into poverty and begins working at a dance hall serving members of the occupation forces before eventually being pushed into prostitution. Her physical and emotional deterioration forms a darker adult counterpart to Kotoko’s struggle, until guilt over the girl she failed to protect sends her searching for her former pupil. Nikaido has the difficult task of playing someone who is suffering and also carries the guilt of having failed Kotoko. Sone cannot simply be placed into the comfortable role of rescuer, as by the time she goes looking for her, too much has already happened.

One has to applaud Norimichi Kasamatsu’s cinematography and Keiko Mitsumatsu’s production design. Rubble, cramped spaces, dirt, makeshift markets and damaged streets simply become the environment in which these children live from one day to the next. And despite its subject, Children Untold is not relentlessly bleak; that would have been easier and probably less truthful.

The estimated 120,000 Japanese war orphans tell us the scale of what happened, but a number cannot tell us what it meant to be twelve years old and suddenly have nobody waiting for you at home. It cannot tell us what hunger does to a child’s sense of right and wrong, what fear can make a child do to protect herself. Nishikawa takes those enormous historical questions and places them inside the daily decisions of children.

What Nishikawa achieves so well is that Kotoko and the other children never feel as though they belong only to a distant chapter of Japanese history. Their lives belong to 1945, but the questions the film raises are difficult to separate from the world we live in now, especially when children are still the ones paying for decisions made by adults, losing their homes and families and being expected to adapt to circumstances they had no part in creating.

Children Untold is an exceptional film! I came away thinking about children whose history I knew far too little about, but also about the frightening reality of what happened after the war was officially over, when thousands were still trying to survive among its ruins. Ami Koyae gives that history an extraordinary human presence through Kotoko, while the other young actors make these children impossible to think of simply as numbers from the past.

For a film that runs for 150 minutes, Children Untold doesn’t feel unnecessarily long. Nishikawa uses that time well, allowing us to know these children beyond what happened to them, while bringing attention to a period of post-war Japanese history that is still not widely known.

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Written by Maggie Gogler

Featured image © 2026 K2 Pictures

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